Urban Outfitters, Inc. (NASDAQ:URBN) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

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Janet Kloppenburg: My question is a little bit different than Adrienne. She worried about cannibalization from the high end for UO, and sometimes, Dick and Sheila, I worry about it from the low end like from SHEIN and some of these other players out there. So I wanted your thoughts there. I don’t know what direction the Urban Outfitters’ price points are going, but I’d love a view on that. And then for Melanie and/or Frank. I know you said gross profit up about 50 to 100, and some SG&A leverage. So are we talking about operating margins up 30% to 40%, or something higher than that for fiscal 2025?

Richard Hayne: Okay, Janet, I’ll talk about SHEIN and — versus Anthropologie as a direction for UO. As I said, I think that while there is a little bit of bleed from the UO customer into Anthropologie, I don’t think it’s great. I do think there’s bleed from the Urban Outfitters customer into Free People, and Free People price points are reasonably in line with Anthropologie. So from a price point perspective, yes, I think some of our customers are trading up or, let me say, are spending a reasonable amount of money. But they’re also buying on places like SHEIN and other lower price-point companies. To that end, we are beginning an initiative just to test, very small test, how we can perhaps rearrange some of our concept to design to production to a customer, not direct to customer, but how we can speed that up and even though we think that we are one of the fastest production to customer in our space.

We think that we can be faster and faster, I always, as I say, time equals money. So we think we can be more efficient and bring down at least the costs. Now having said that, we don’t know exactly where the retail costs are going to go. And that’s part of our — the study that we have undertaken to determine where we want to be with Urban. But I think that you’re right to point out that the lower-cost people are taking some market share. And I think some of the higher-priced people are taking market share. So I think that we have to just decide what we want to be and fix that, and then deliver the product and the marketing that will keep our market share intact.

Frank Conforti: Janet, on the gross profit margin, we think our — excuse me, overall operating profit margin. So we think gross profit could be about 50 to 100 basis points for the year, with a slight deleverage in SG&A that would eat into that number just a little bit. I think what Melanie had said was, right now, we’re — based on how our plans are built, SG&A could be about 1% above what our sales plans are for the year. So still just a little bit of deleverage eating into that 50 to 100 basis points, where that all shakes out will depend on where the 50 to 100 shake out for the year.

Richard Hayne: Okay. I think that, that completes the call. I thank you all very much for joining, and I look forward to talking to you in a few months.

Operator: This concludes today’s program. Thank you all for participating. You may now disconnect.

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