Marni Shapiro: But I always think that shoppers don’t like to do math when they’re in the store. So if you can make it a little bit easier for them, it always helps. And then I’m just curious, because I too was looking at the numbers between online and in-store. And I’m curious if you guys have — is there a difference in what they’re buying? Because I find when I’m on your site, your fashion content on the women’s side, even in women’s tops, which you had referenced, is really kind of good. And then you have things like the crop puffer vest and things like that, which online is — all this stuff is really easy to get to and find and I find in your stores. And I’m probably alluding to some of the issues going on in the stores, it’s not always so easy to find those items and she has to do a little bit of work to find them.
So I’m curious if you’re seeing more fashion go out the door online than in stores or if that might be driving more of what’s going on online versus in stores?
Ed Thomas: No. Actually, it’s been — in the women’s side, the stores have been consistently better than online for us. But it’s improved because we’ve made some very targeted changes to improving how we merchandise online. We’re not done yet. But certainly, we’ve made — and we’ve seen positive results as a result of that. But I really think it was just a matter of where the customer chose to shop as opposed to the particular visual merchandising or the assortment.
Michael Henry: It’s just been in the month of November that we’ve seen this divergence. When you look back at the third quarter, stores and e-com comps were within 1% of each other. So we have very consistent performance between stores and e-com throughout the third quarter. And then suddenly, we get to November and this divergence emerged and it was a little surprising to us, honestly.
Marni Shapiro: Yes, that’s definitely a little strange. And then I’m just also curious. Some of the pressure that you’ve seen, especially on the junior side, but even just overall because the junior side has had some good sell-throughs. Are you seeing better sales coming out of your own brand versus other brands? Because you’re — especially on the junior side, I think your fashion on your own brands has been pretty good, like really good. And so I’m just curious if you’re able — are there kind of gaps in the market with branded goods that you’re able to make up with your own brand and is that outpacing what your — what the market goods are doing?
Ed Thomas: Well, our best brand continues to be RSQ, our own brand. And it crosses over in multiple categories, it’s good. And it’s intentionally developed and designed to fill in where we think there are voids from what the brands have offered us or what we’re able to secure from outside our brands. So it’s always a balancing act. And there’s never any one point in time where it stays the same forever, it’s just doesn’t and it changes. And I think we have a pretty experienced team in the women’s side that they’ve been around for a while, they know the market well and they adjust accordingly.
Operator: The next question comes from Mitch Kummetz with Seaport Research.
Mitch Kummetz: Ed, on the assortment, you mentioned women’s fashion tops doing well, but you don’t have enough graphic tees being weak. Like how quickly can you adjust? And if so like is that potentially a benefit to comp once you get that sorted out?
Ed Thomas: We can adjust pretty quickly in almost every category. I mean, bottoms and shoes, lead times are a lot longer than apparel. And so — but where we saw the opportunity was really again in tops where we did adjust on the fly and we think we’ve made a lot of changes that will positively impact the business in the categories where we felt we were maybe underrepresented.
Mitch Kummetz: Any concerns on graphic tees in terms of that inventory if it’s been weak that, that might require some more markdowns or any issues there?
Ed Thomas: Not really. I mean I think that we shifted our focus on some of the types of licenses that we went after in all these categories, like music and sports. And we didn’t — probably didn’t move quick enough to get into some of these fresh categories, because the graphics business has been so positive for us for so long. We were somewhat surprised at some of the changes. But we can adjust and we will adjust. And I don’t — there’s no real markdown liability there.
Mitch Kummetz: And then on footwear, positive comp in the quarter. What’s driving that? Is there just a better trend in footwear now or is it more about product availability? I know that some of the vendors there had issues, supply chain issues, I know that’s been kind of cleared up. So it’s just that you have better inventory or are you seeing better trend there as well?
Ed Thomas: I think it’s more availability of certain brands like Nike…
Michael Henry: And Converse and Reebok.
Ed Thomas: Yes, we’ve seen New Balance. We’ve seen — we brought in a couple of new brands, which is not a major part of the assortment, but certainly new to us, recently new to us. And then brands that we’ve carried for a long time, like Nike, we saw improvement in the inventory availability.
Mitch Kummetz: And then lastly, Mike, just on the product margin. I think you said it was down 50 bps in the quarter. How are you thinking about that for Q4?
Michael Henry: If we’re at the better end of our outlook, we would actually expect our product margins to be slightly up. If we’re at the bottom end of our range, we might be slightly down, not much different than what we just saw in the third quarter at this time based on what we currently know.
Operator: This will conclude our question-and-answer session. I’ll turn the conference back over to Ed Thomas for any closing remarks.
Ed Thomas: Thank you all for joining us on the call today. We look forward to sharing our fourth quarter results with you in mid-March 2024. Have a good evening, everyone.
Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.
