Wolverine World Wide, Inc. (NYSE:WWW) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Jim Duffy: Great. Thanks so much.

Mike Stornant: Thanks Jim.

Operator: Our next question comes from Jonathan Komp with Baird.

Jonathan Komp: Hi, good morning. Thank you. I wanted to just ask, can you give any more color on the D2C and wholesale assumptions that you’re embedding for the year? And then maybe just ask directly, if I go back to August, you were back then still projecting 2022 to be above $2 a share in earnings and operating margin above 9%. So could you maybe just address more directly. What’s changed today that’s giving you more visibility than maybe you had six months ago? And how you’re thinking about overall visibility for both 2023 and then the comps on 2024 margin?

Brendan Hoffman: Yes. Well, I’ll start with that second part first. I think because we’ve really taking control of the — through the profit improvement office of taking out costs and improving our margin through the input costs. I feel like the team over the last 4 months has made so much progress on this, that we do have line of sight and more confidence in those being real and attainable. I think the 100-day action plan I talked about in December has really galvanized the organization to really move together and row in the same direction, understanding what needs to get done. And so the progress we’ve made in such a short period of time gives us tremendous confidence that we’ll be able to achieve that. And we need to for the long-term health of the business and to be able to not only provide a more profitable business, but also to free up investments to be able to expand our reach.

Mike Stornant: On your D2C question, Jon, or channel question, I guess, we would expect D2C to be a positive contributor to growth this year, probably in the low single-digit range. We are on a comp basis. We are adding some store for Sweaty Betty in 2023 in their home markets. So that will also help drive a little bit of growth in the D2C channels. Wholesale is planned low single digits as well. Probably the area of pressure on the channel standpoint is in our distributor business, which was up, as you know, was up tremendously in 2022. We caught up on some timing of sell-in the first part of 2022. And that helped drive some outpaced growth for that channel. Overall, that’s going to kind of correct itself. And even though our own businesses in Europe and Canada, are expected to grow nicely, the third-party distributor business will be down a little bit on a year-over-year basis.

Jonathan Komp: Okay. I appreciate that color. And maybe just one follow-up, looking at the lifestyle brands. Could you just comment Sperry and Sweaty Betty. Are you expecting both to deliver positive operating profit this year? And just given the actions you took for Keds and Leathers, what are the criteria you’re using for all of the brands looking across the portfolio? Thanks again.

Brendan Hoffman: Yes. Well, I mean, just to be clear, Sperry is in the Lifestyle Group. Sweaty Betty is in the Active Group. I mentioned before some of the thoughts around Sperry will be positive in terms of operating profit. It won’t be as positive as it has been in the past, and that’s part of the recovery we need to do. In terms of Sweaty Betty, a lot of their headwinds are market related in the U.K. So they’re working hard to utilize different tools and levers to combat that. As I mentioned in my remarks, they acquired new customers for the first time in Q4 all year. So that was showing that some of the things we’re doing are paying off. The nice thing for them is the stores, which is a big part of their business are all four-wall positive.