The other I’d call out for you and — so that’s a big driver definitely for men’s too. The other one I’d call out for here, I think that’s important is — and I think exciting for us is the emerging brands. And, we feel very encouraged about our pipeline in emerging brands here in 2023, and we have seen sequential improvement month-over-month in terms of brands launched in ’22 and ’23, gaining share within our total sales mix. And that continued on into the back-to-school season. So that’s the other aspect that turned our printables business positive in back-to-school. So that — if you want to look at the real driver behind men’s, it’s though getting positive for the back-to-school season, it’s those two things: the quality of our on-trend private label product; the quality of our sales teams in selling multiple units; and combine that with newness on the brand side and improved — dramatic improvement in our screenables business.
And so, I’m really — I think that’s another that’s exciting for us as we think about this internally is we’re hoping, of course, we can continue to see that month-over-month sequential growth and that these brands launched in ’22 and ’23 can continue to be growth drivers within the printable — screenables areas of our business.
Corey Tarlowe : Great. That’s very helpful. And just on product margins, you gave some helpful color as to how they’ve trended over the last couple of quarters, could you maybe unpack for us how you’re thinking about promotions ahead and how you think about product margins into the back half and how that might unfold as we head into holiday?
Chris Work: Sure. Yes, just as we think about product margin, we mentioned in our prepared comments, we were down 70 basis points year-to-date. And what I would just add to that is, obviously, the mix component that we talked about is pretty significant. When you have an international business comping up and growing sales and obviously, our domestic business is more challenged. And given that the international margin is quite substantially lower than our domestic margins. So when — even when we say down 70 basis points, the lion’s share of that is really a mix challenge versus actually product margin decline. So, as we look forward, part of what we knew coming into this year is that we would have some product margin challenges.
We had some inventory to clear out as of the end of last year, and we saw some of that even added into that 70 basis points down as we move through inventory in the first half. Now as we transition into the back half, we do think we have some opportunity in product margin. Now I think it’ll be down slightly in the third quarter, again, tied to just mix and also tied to some clearing that we’re doing specifically in the area of footwear. If I look at the inventory overall, we feel really good about where our aging sits with the exception of footwear. And I don’t think that’s a surprise to anyone. It’s been pretty well talked about out there of some of the challenges in footwear across the market. And so, we’re not immune to that. But I think our teams have done a good job kind of working through it and clearing it.
And so that will be one thing that we continue to have planned into the model. It’s planned into the Q3 guidance. And obviously, any thoughts we’ve given for the year, that being said, you’ve also seen private label increase as a percentage of sales, that’s a benefit to us. We think we have the ability to continue to drive margin here domestically as well as internationally. And most of our initiatives on the product side are built around trying to do that in addition to sales. So, I think as we move forward, we are hoping that we’ll have some more opportunity against prior-year product margin versus what we saw in the front half, even with the mix shift that we’ve seen from where our sales are coming from.
