Skechers U.S.A., Inc. (NYSE:SKX) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Alex Straton: Maybe just 1 more quick one. Can you just help me understand — I want to make sure I’m understanding your wholesale order book commentary and how it relates to the guide because it feels like you’re building in this ramp in the back half. So does that mean you’ve seen kind of the order book improve in the back half? Or is there still maybe some caution you’re observing similar to the first half? I just want to make sure I have that right.

John Vandemore: I would say that relative to last year and probably the year before, we see — quite frankly, we’ve solicited less long-term bookings. I think that’s part of the reason, quite frankly, we got into the situation as an industry, we did with the shipments all coming in the last couple of quarters. with the normalization of kind of the production cycle and the transit cycle, we’ve been able to pull booking windows back to a more normalized sense. So as we sit here today, we have really good visibility into the first couple of quarters, but just because of the order cycles haven’t yet triggered, we’re not at a point where we have a ton of bookings for Q3 or Q4, which is entirely normal — so there, obviously, we’re giving our best guess.

I would say we certainly didn’t feel the need to be overly aggressive relative to those expectations. We think they’re measured, we think they’re appropriate. But I wouldn’t tell you today that we’re sitting on this back half hockey stick on the domestic wholesale side because we want to see some of that evidenced in the bookings, and that’s what will come over the next quarter or 1.5 quarters. So we’re still waiting for a lot of that activity to come through. The indications we have had, particularly for the product that will populate those order windows has been very strong. And so that’s one of the evidentiary points we take and when we build that back half expectation. But ultimately, we’ll have to wait and see how the bookings unfold. And as a result of that, we don’t think, from our perspective, we’ve been overly aggressive in in setting kind of those early indications of where we think, in particular, the domestic wholesale market going to come.

Operator: There are no further questions at this time. This does conclude today’s teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.