Laura Alber: Okay. Oliver, it’s Laura. Remember, the 16.9% is the net comp, not demand comp. It’s driven by AUR and the resulting traffic fill from the previous sales. As we look at demand comps now, at retail, our traffic is better than our competition, better than the industry, which is really exciting. And you all know Christmas is the — holidays a time that people love to come into our stores — and I’ve said before, you salivate just thinking about walking into a Williams-Sonoma store. And so, we’re really focused on conversion, and we have the traffic. So, that’s why I tend to be quite optimistic that retail is going to be — the retail for us at least is going to continue to overdeliver in the short term as we’re comping the pandemic, not completely out of the house that we were in last year.
Oliver Wintermantel: Got it. And my second question was regarding B2B. If you just think about the macro environment and let’s say that there’s a slowdown, how do you think B2B is holding up versus the consumer business? Do you think there’s more headwinds, or could that hold up better than the consumer business?
Jeff Howie: That’s a great question, Oliver. I think that the B2B business will hold up stronger potentially in a soft macro environment than the consumer. If you think about the dynamics of the past couple of years, the consumer market took off during the pandemic as people were home and they started shopping. And now that’s possibly trailing off a little bit with the Fed’s monetary actions and the macroeconomic environment. B2B on the other hand, a lot of those verticals, they were shut down for several quarters and even over a year. And there was a big backlog of work and renovation work and projects that weren’t done. And all of that pipeline of those that pent-up demand and deferred projects is really coming on line now.
We’re seeing it in the RFPs we have out, talking to our customers in B2B. And when I attend trade shows, there’s just a general energy about the amount of projects that are out there, funded projects, a lot of renovations. There was a great article in the Wall Street Journal, I think it was last week or the week before, talking about the hotel experience and how there’s just a dearth of great hotels, a lot of them need to be updated and renovated. And that just speaks well to our opportunity with B2B. So, in sum, it can really be countercyclical if there is a macroeconomic downturn.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Steven Zaccone with Citi.
Steven Zaccone: I’ll send my congrats to you, Jeff, as well on the new role. First question I had was just how much do you think the competitive environment is factoring into the slowing demand trends that you’re seeing in your business? The macro is difficult, we understand, but the home furnishing industry has also gotten a little bit more promotional. And I guess, Laura, as you look across the industry, are you concerned inventory levels are getting high in the channel?
Laura Alber: The macro environment or — the competitive environment has always been promotional. When you really go back and you think about — even before all these new start-ups came about, there was Macy’s always in the home business and a lot of other big players and then Amazon came along and Wayfair, they’ve always been after price first. What we do versus them is very different and that we’re designing our own goods. And we’ve been doing it for a lot of years. And so, we tend to be first with new trends and able to bring out finishes that others can’t replicate even when they try to copy us, they can’t replicate. And so when you actually go and look at the difference between our furniture or even our tabletop or any of the categories versus theirs, you’re going to see a big difference in quality and the resulting price even with their markdowns, our value is better.
