Williams-Sonoma, Inc. (NYSE:WSM) Q2 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And we’re building on those wins, of course, and then, reducing inventory on things that are not working. But it’s in total, the furniture business I said earlier, this pullback and it’s, I think, a real function of people not moving as much right now and being scared of the high ticket and we still continue to see the opposite in high-end electrics. So there’s a lot of mixed messages out there for the consumer, that the consumer is giving us and what we’re doing is really, without giving away the farm competitively on this call, focusing on what they’re telling us and the good news is, is that when we go to the back half of the year, the comps get easier and we have our strength in the categories that they seem to be responding to at this point anyway.

Operator: Our next question comes from Oliver Wintermantel from Evercore ISI. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Oliver Wintermantel: Yeah, thank you. I had a question just regarding your online penetration, if that was still about mid-60%, or if that has shifted and then longer term, how you think about the store base? I know there were like some store closures and what do you think your online penetration should be going forward with store closures? Thank you.

Jeff Howie: Good morning, Oli. I think we’re seeing consistent performance and my answer would be consistent with what we’ve been saying. From a long-term standpoint, we see the industry continuing to transition from retail to online and with our penetration around 66%, we see it going to 70% over time. That’s Williams-Sonoma Inc.’s penetration of e-commerce. From a retail optimisation standpoint, our strategy remains unchanged. We have about 50% of our leases come due over the next 3-years. We will very carefully go through those and look to optimise the fleet. Some of that is closing underperforming stores that don’t meet our profitability thresholds. Others are repositioning stores to better locations where we see a very quick return on investment and really pick up some nice market share and good results.

A good example of that is the Pottery Barn store in Westport, Connecticut, which we moved from one location where we were underperforming both on the top and bottom line and the new location not only looks fantastic, I invite everybody to go join it, but it’s way outperforming the prior location and giving us a very good return on the investment there. So we do continue to see that we’ll continue to cull the fleet and optimise that, but overall, I think this is part of our key strategy and part of our key things that are going to make us really come out ahead over the long run. The fundamental dynamics in the home furnishing industry haven’t really changed. It’s a very fragmented market with no one player commanding sizable share. Our key differentiators, which include our in-house design, our digital first but not digital only channel strategy, our strong portfolio of brands, our growth initiatives, and our fortress balance sheet position us well to take market share in any environment.

Operator: Our next question comes from Brad Thomas from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Brad Thomas: Hi, thanks for taking my question. Good execution here. I wanted to follow up on B2B, still a ton of opportunity there. I’m hoping you can just give us a little more sense of maybe where you’re thinking the revenues come in on B2B for the year and your updated guidance and maybe any updated thoughts on what gets that business growing again. Thanks.