Bernie McCracken: Well, just I’ll throw in, Dana, that the cadence that you asked for on how the quarter progressed. Our business improved sequentially each month and got better each month and through July. And that has continued into August.
Andrew McLean: And I think just to pick up on that for you, Dana, is that we’re seeing a natural transition going on as swim begins to ebb, we come towards the end of the season. And it’s like what we’ve really seen is the outerwear categories start to pick up the pace, that pick up the ownership. And we’ve changed our assortment for the back half of the year. I talked about this in the last calls. But we’re really — we would traditionally focus on heavier outerwear pieces. And I think as we look at climate change, we look at the fact that we’re probably going to have an El Nino winter, we think it’s going to be about layering, we think it’s going to be of a rainwear, and we really wanted to get behind those and we’ve implemented new fabrications.
Our Wanderweight fabrication and our packables, they’re absolutely fantastic products. I can’t wait to show them to you. I wish we were on video right now. But I think they are really going to help us carry through Q3 and build it into a strong Q4.
Dana Telsey: Got it. Thank you. And then two other quick things. On the gross margin, drivers of sustainability to see the continued improvement. And then on the piece with Kohl’s, what steps are being taken to improve that business? And how do you see that unfolding? Thank you.
Andrew McLean: Okay. I’ll take Kohl’s, and I’ll let Bernie take gross margin. We like our relationship with Kohl’s. It’s another Wisconsin company. We’ve been together for a long time. We really introduced this new journey with them in our sort of digital ecosphere. And it’s been very powerful and it’s grown well. We find ourselves in the quarter faced with a dilemma, that as we continue to improve our margins and our pricing and our quality and our newness in our core business, Kohl’s was still at a point where they really wanted to be focused on an older strategy which involved more discounts. And we made a decision that we wanted to put our business and our customers first, saying, let’s put the customer at the center of everything.
We like the product strategy that we have, we like the pricing architecture that we’re building and we’re going to do whatever it takes to protect that. With Kohl’s, we see a long-term opportunity here with Kohl’s. This isn’t something that is going to be on the wane forever. They are at an inflection point, we are at an inflection point. We wish them really well, they are a great group of people, for the future. And we will find a way to continue our partnership, evolve it, and build it. Clearly, as we put Q3 and Q4 together, you can see it in the guidance, which we feel good about, we’ve got other routes to building the EBITDA number and to our profitability, to building shareholder value. And we’ll continue to layer those in. Specifically to marketplace, we feel really good about where we are with the growth in Target, the growth in Amazon and the growth in Macy’s.
And I think it’s only a matter of time before we really start to see that growth come back because I do think the strategy that Kohl’s is going to go after will support and need the brands like Land’s End.
