Stores were especially showing especially strong growth, a little bit of a retreat in the digital penetration — and then we’re — to your point, we’re lapping some of the decisions that we made last year that have suppressed our digital growth, but are helping us be more profitable. So, we remain a 40% digital business. We continue to see it as a meaningful part of our overall business. And I think once we’re past some of those timing impacts, we should see growth normalized. Erik, anything you want to add on that?
Erik Nordstrom: Yes. I think in digital, one piece of context, we made some decisions last year to focus on profitable growth, which hurt some of our top line digitally, in particular, stopping store foot film on a rack.com order. So about 500 basis points on our digital performance. But we do see Nordstrom.com, in particular, as a growth vehicle for us. And our focus there isn’t so much about pure digital growth. It is about engagement with customers as we continue to see the customer want omnichannel capabilities, things like only buy online, pick up in store. But for us, — it’s been very successful and we opened up our Rack stores to the pickup point for Nordstrom.com orders. So not only having cross-channel capabilities but leveraging the two brands that we have there.
The other piece I’d call out, which is a big general area for us to work on is around discovery. Our strength is around newness and inspiring our customers to try something new and introduce new brands to them. We’ve had a lot of success over the years. And it’s not necessarily exclusive product, but it’s brands that aren’t up and aren’t widely distributed. And digital is a real important part of that, of the discovery experience as more and more customers start their journeys online, even if they end up being in store. So, discovery is something that we have a lot of initiatives around this year.
Ed Yruma: Thank you.
Operator: Next is Chuck Grom with Gordon Haskett.
UnidentifiedAnalyst: This is Eric on for Chuck. You talked about the consumer being under pressure, particularly more of the Rack customer — so I guess trying to understand the acceleration in the Rack openings this year. So why doing it now and comps have been under pressure, maybe not wait until the business is a little more on steady footing?
Erik Nordstrom: It’s a great question. First and foremost, our Iraq stores are a great return on investment, full stop. We have a real strong track record of the return on these stores. It is a great use of capital — it’s low capital investments, low-risk investment on a proven model, and our most recent proof point to share would be recent store openings in Rack. All three of them are beating plan. All three of them are outperforming our fleet average and sales productivity and EBIT margin. And part of that, if you step back a little bit, off-price in particular, is a real requirement around convenience. And the discovery process and off-price for a lot of customers lends to sell to stores. So, having more stores provides a lot more convenience.
And sure, seems clear to us that our fleet is underpenetrated. You look at our store count compared to others out there we see a lot of room for growth there. The other piece I just would call out is what Rector do to our ecosystem. Rack stores remain the largest source of new customer acquisition for us. It’s more than 40% of our new customer acquisition occurred in Rack stores. So, there’s just a lot of goodness all around for us open Rack stores.
