Brian McNamara : I think a lot of my questions have already been answered. But Rob, I think you’ve mentioned a lack of visibility for the last couple of quarters. Now I’m just curious, you’ve been in the business a long time. Is this kind of unprecedented? Like what typical data points, mileposts do you typically look out to kind of inform your view for market growth moving forward? And why is this time different?
Robert Kay: Well, it’s just the general macro environment, and there’s a lot of inputs and what’s going to happen. Trade wars, will that accelerate, which is something we’ve fought over the last couple of years. For that matter, we can’t predict the weather, but it’s a very cold winter, that’s going to particularly impact negatively Europe because of the tremendous impact of fuel costs. So there’s a variety of factors. I think it’s fairly unprecedented. There are certain things that we’ve seen over the years. So when Linda asked the question in terms of basically reaction by the sophisticated retailers in terms of paring back inventory levels. That’s standard. So Walmart, Target, they’re very sophisticated, their financial departments are very sophisticated and very powerful within the organization.
So we’ve seen — it’s a leading indicator of tough economic times because before really it makes the press, we see those guys really tighten up on safety stocks, shift the burden to us because they don’t care if we over inventory in our warehouses, right, and put our side of business. Let us take the risk, right? So — but that shift started occurring in 2022, and we saw a lot of that. So some of these trends are normal to us, normal over the long term, right? Paring back on inventory at recessionary times is not normal. But the general market is just very choppy. There’s really no visibility. There is firmness in terms of looking what channels are winning and the like. But there’s no firm data, and we look at POS data historically. We — the best metric for us is order flow, right, in order to flow by channel and understanding why.
As I mentioned, in off-price, good channel, there was no open to buy, right? It’s not planogram, so you need open to buy. They had no money to buy, which is a frightening situation in 2022. It did rectify this year. And frankly, we’ve grown nicely, it’s been 1 of the things driving our growth at the moment.
Brian McNamara : Great. And then on International, I mean, you guys have done a ton of work there, restructuring and everything, but I think investors are looking for growth there. So like — I think your 8 consecutive quarters are pretty hefty double-digit declines, and you mentioned new business wins in Q3. I’m just curious like what would growth have been without those new business wins? And kind of when can investors kind of expect a return to growth there?
Robert Kay: Yes. So year-over-year, the improvement in profitability is meaningful. The wins that I’m talking about and the changes we made in Australia and New Zealand and all that have yet to flow through the income statement. We’ve gotten those wins, but we haven’t started shipping.
Brian McNamara : Got it. And then just, I mean, I think we touched on 2024 before — myself and my peers’ consensus expects about 5% revenue growth, or at least that’s the current estimates lie relative to the midpoint of your revised guidance. Is that aggressive?
Robert Kay: We have not issued our guidance on 2024 yet.
