Lulu’s Fashion Lounge Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:LVLU) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Mark Altschwager: Okay. And then I wanted to follow up on AOV. I was hoping you could give a bit more color on the trend you’re seeing there. It’s 1 of the bigger quarter-over-quarter changes that we’ve seen. I’m just curious how we should think about that for 2023. Is this – dish level a good way to be thinking about the trend as consumer behavior address?

Crystal Landsem: Yes. Good question. AOV is just generally speaking, year-over-year context, I would say think of Q1 being relatively flat with some single-digit year-over-year growth in the sequential quarters. Figure gains coming really in the back half as we start to comp the impacts of higher markdowns and discounts.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Jonna Kim with Cowen.

Jonna Kim: Just curious about your non strategy this year as you’re locking strong demand from addressed last year. And then as we think about return rates what are some key puts and takes that we should consider in our model as you’re all having a lot of demand for dresses from last year, that would be helpful.

Crystal Landsem: Yes. So we have seen great progress across a lot of our event and our non-event apparel. And what’s most interesting for us right now is our new customer conversions have been increasing over pre-pandemic years in our non-dress categories. So while we’re still doing a really great job with our events and our dress business in general, just the performance of our other categories and product classes specific to non-event apparel is reiterating our thesis that we can take more share for wallet barring the macro environment, we still believe that we have confidence that going forward, we’re making the right investments in the right area. I think the great thing about our buying model is our customer is driving the assortment.

So we’re able to flex and pivot wherever she’s wanting to drive us. And right now, we’re seeing success in many of our, I should say, non-bridal or non-wedding event-related product classes, specifically in dresses, rompers and jumpsuits, but also in our other nonevent classes.

Tiffany Smith: And I’ll jump in on the return rate question. And so I just want to point out, return rates are driven not only by product classes, but also the impact of promotions and markdowns can have meaningful impact on our return rates. And so we’ve modeled a modest decrease in return rates for the year, which is really driven by, I’d say, the first half of the year, year-over-year, lower — slightly lower return rates just due to increased expectations that we are being more promotional in half 1 relative to last year. I also want to just point out, very high level, we’re making some policy changes to be rolled out in the coming weeks. With regard to return rates, really aimed at preserving our customer-centric, free pending return period, which is really important to us because we want her to maintain her ability to have product coming into her at-home dressing room and be able to try out different sizes and styles but we do want to roll out some changes to help kind of curb the excessive return behavior.

We haven’t explicitly modeled in decreases in return rates as a result of those policy changes. But just trying to keep things conservative. We are expecting a slight decrease in our rates for the year..

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Noah Zatzkin with KeyBanc Capital Markets.

Noah Zatzkin: Just a couple. I was hoping you could speak to your test and reorder model and kind of the benefits of that model as you navigate an uncertain macro. And then second, just hoping you could provide some color on inventory composition, your level of comfortability there and just your approach to bringing that in line by Q2.