Macy’s, Inc. (NYSE:M) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

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Operator: We’ll take our final question for today from Paul Lejuez from Citigroup. Your line is open. Please go ahead.

Tracy Kogan: Tracy Kogan filling in for Paul. We’re seeing in your Market by Macy’s stores, and maybe give us a little bit more detail about the assortments there and what percent of your full assortment is in those stores. And then so you talked about maybe relocating some Macy’s stores to this off-mall formats. How many markets do you have maybe a weaker performing full-line Macy’s store where you think there’s an opportunity to relocate off-mall in a Market by Macy’s format?

Jeff Gennette: So let me start with we’re pleased so far with how Market by Macy’s is performing. And so just to reemphasize what our strategy here. It really has 3 buckets and 3 purposes. The first one is just record as the overall comment is that about 60% of business in our categories that’s done in brick-and-mortar is done off-mall. And so when looking at the majority of our portfolio being on-mall, that really served up an opportunity for us. Clearly, omnichannel sales is what we’re really focused on. And when you look at wherever we have a sale or wherever we have a store, you have higher concentration of digital sales being done in those ZIP codes. So it really is this kind of irrefutable loop that goes on with customer activity.

So we had 3 objectives with respect to Market by Macy’s. The first one was to what is a fill-in location wherein we already have a presence in that particular market, but we have ZIP codes that are underserved, and we’re seeing that in our digital signals. That’s where we put a number of our locations from Atlanta, Washington, D.C., Dallas Fort Worth. Then we have this replacement location that’s part of your question. That was one that we did last week. Really proud of the — this is the first one that we’ve done. This was our Chesterfield Mall that was in St. Louis. And we found a very vital strip center that was a mile away from the Chesterfield Mall. In the Chesterfield Mall, it used to be a thriving center. Macy’s was really all that was left.

The balance of the mall was a head either closed or was no longer there. So we have this handoff when we opened the Market by Macy’s in St. Louis in the Chesterfield Strip Center, then we closed the store. We worked on the handoff of customers, we picked all the great colleagues. We moved them over. That’s had a very nice start. The third area that we’re looking at, which gets to the other part of your question is how we’re thinking about new markets, either where Macy’s brand used to be or Bloomingdale’s brand has not been or where it’s a brand-new market for us. So I know that we are in 49 of the top 50 markets in the nation on the Macy’s side. But I think we’re only in 13 of the Bloomingdale side. So really getting the Bloomie’s brand into some of those markets is quite interesting to us.

And then starting to do that on the Macy’s side is something that you’re going to see from us in 2023. To the comment about curation, so you think about Market by Macy’s is let’s call it, 30,000 square feet and we have a full line store that’s like 180 thereabouts. So we’re making lots of decisions based on the localized environment about what brands we put in there, what turnover we expect, how quickly we’re able to bring things in and get them out. And so and it’s a very open palate. So we have lots of flexibility in those environments, lots of opportunities for us to make adjustments. So we’re very dogged about sell-throughs and conversion. That’s what the team is very focused on. I think the format and the locations we’re picking is quite strong.

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