National Vision Holdings, Inc. (NASDAQ:EYE) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Can you remind us like how many weeks of safety stuff do you have now outside of the inventory per store? How much will you run the business with kind of on a more 12-month basis? And how are you thinking about unit inventory as you anniversary kind of the spring where you were starting to build the safety thought?

Reade Fahs: Good. Okay. Let me take the first part of that. I’m going to start with the trade down piece. In our last call, I’m pretty sure what we said was we’re seeing the gradual trade down, and we’re seeing that more so now. So the richer nicer cars — the richer people, nicer cars trading down to us. We said in the last call that we are seeing it emerge and now we’re saying, yes, it’s continuing to come through as we would have expected based on our historical recessionary experience. In terms of core demand, core demand in the optical industry is down, started around March and April, and it’s down. It is across the board. As we referenced, if you have richer customers, if you have insured customers, you’re a little better off, but the whole category is down and sort of went down in March and April and all indications and reference points reinforce that piece.

So there is a demand issue, and we have the double whammy of — there are places, there are stores where if we had more optometrist capacity, we would be able to serve more demand. But again, on the plus side, our retention of optometrist is higher than last year. Our recruiting has been strong year-to-date, and we believe remote medicine will help us even more so to create capacity, flexible capacity, that can help us as the historical cycle returns eventually. And then for the second part, Melissa, can you take the second part?

Melissa Rasmussen: Sure. Thank you. Regarding our inventory levels, we are happy with our inventory levels currently. They’re down 2% year-over-year, and the inventory per store is down 7% and but we don’t see our inventory levels as an issue as we continue to grow.

Reade Fahs: And kudos to our product team amidst supply chain issues you hear about in other places. I just love, we’ve got to such great experience in our product team. They planned ahead well, and this is the benefit of the sort of long-term partnerships with our supplier community that we’ve talked about since our IPO as being a real competitive advantage that we’ve been able to not have the supply chain disruptions and products that are affecting parts of our industry, but have not been impacting us, and they are definitely managing their inventory very intelligently.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Bob Drbul with Guggenheim Partners.

Bob Drbul: I was wondering if you could spend a little time on the legacy segment, how that’s going? Some of the new stores and new formats that you’re participating in with Walmart. If you could really give us an update on what you’re seeing there and any plans going forward that would be great?

Reade Fahs: Sure. Well, Walmart, 2 is affected by the demand, the related industry efforts that I talked about. Before Walmart, we’ve got a 32-year relationship with Walmart, and it’s a very strong relationship. And we — back in 2020, we extended our contract again, which was, I think, the second or third consecutive contract renewal. They gave us a few stores late in 2020 that are doing great, and it’s a great partnership. And I’d say that the trend is quite similar in that they are affected by the demand piece as is every other part. It’s a great relationship. We cherish that relationship with Walmart, and we have had — it’s in a great position.

Operator: Our next question comes from the line of Kate McShane of Goldman Sachs.

Kate McShane: I know you’ve mentioned that the overall industry is down. But we wondered if you have a sense of any market share that might be being lost just due to the exam capacity issue specific to National Vision?