Laura Alber: Thanks, Anthony. The margin profile is the same as the rest of our products. So, it’s not that they’re lower at all. In fact, they’re great margins. And we’ve done the same thing also in West Elm. And you’re going to see us West Elm, which I’m really excited about, continue to have more and more newness sequentially. So for fall, you might have heard in my prepared remarks that we had some just superb winners in the furniture assortment. And in some cases, they were also at the higher price points. So, we’re building upon those. Many of them are sold out right now. And we’re thrilled, but we are also chasing those products, and we’ll be getting back in stock in Q1 in those. And that gives us confidence about where we want to take the brand aesthetically, not just from a price point, but where we think the modern customer wants to be now and where that evolution is going.
And so, as we go into Q1 and Q2, I’m just really excited about the product line that you’re going to see in West Elm. And based on the wins that we have currently, I think it’s going to be a big change and the next really big step in the evolution, the next chapter, if you will, for West Elm’s winning strategy.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jason Haas with Bank of America. Please go ahead.
Jason Haas: So, I wanted to also ask about how you’re thinking about the trade-off between comps and margins. I’m curious if you think that you could have driven gross profit dollars higher this year if you had used more promotions, or do you think that that would have actually driven the gross profit dollars higher? My question is, obviously, if you — you could, but didn’t. The reason would be because you don’t want to destroy the pricing power over the long term. You don’t want to harm the brand image. So, I’m curious if you feel like that’s the dynamic where you’re basically sacrificing in the short term to hopefully have better results once the industry turns in your favor?
Laura Alber: Yes. Jeff and I are fighting over your question. I would say it’s both, short term and long term. It’s not clear that reducing prices drives more. If you have less people buying furniture, you just reduce the price 20%, you get a 20% more people buy it, just to be even, right? So you may think you’re doing something, it’s what retailers do. They mark stuff down when they want more sales, and it’s not necessarily the case. In fact, we’ve done a lot of testing up and down to see where that sensitivity is. So that’s one. Secondly, for sure, it’s not good for the long term. And you can see the race to the bottom with promotions, if you look at the history of retailers who’ve done that. It’s bad idea.
And we are not a low-price provider. We are quality, high-service, high-design retailer. And so pricing is not usually why you come to us. You want the price to be great for the value and the design. But our quality is so much higher, we’re not willing to sacrifice in the short term or long term to sustain a promotional strategy?
Jason Haas: Thank you. That makes sense. And then as a follow-up, I was curious to ask about the West Elm performance in particular. It’s good to see Pottery Barn and Williams Sonoma performing well, both on a year-over-year basis and then also versus 2019. That used to not be the case, where previously you’ve seen West Elm was the stronger performer. I’m curious to know how much you think of that is external, given West Elm, I believe, tends to serve a younger, maybe less-affluent customer than those other brands versus how much of it is internal. You’ve talked about some of them. Can you talk about what changes are being made at West Elm and when we should expect to see improvement from those?
Laura Alber: Sure. There’s no doubt that the metrics, the makeup of the West Elm business makes it more vulnerable to the external, right? You mentioned it. The younger customer, the less affluent customer, the higher furniture, the less developed seasonal business or less developed decorative and textile business, those are all factors in the West Elm underperformance. That said, we do not think about not being able to do anything about anything. We are focused on what we can do being served this set of circumstances. So, we have been working very diligently to give the customer other options other than just furniture, and to make sure our stores have those things ready to go versus having them only online. It’s a big change for us to push that business into the stores to drive repeat traffic, not just when you come to buy furniture.
