Richard Magnusen: All right, thank you very much. That helps. I’ll get back into queue.
Chris Work: Okay.
Operator: [Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from the line of Mantero Moreno-Cheek from Jefferies. Your line is open.
Mantero Moreno-Cheek: Hello. Thanks for taking my call today. I just wanted to know if you could provide more color about what trends are working for men’s and how are they – how are they differing internationally versus the U.S. And then any early reads on holiday trends that were very strong during the Black Friday season? Thank you.
Rick Brooks: All right. Let me start. And again, we’re not going to typically talk about brands, in particular or specific trends for a lot of reasons, competitive things. I think we have some things that are clearly to our advantage. But I think what I’d like to just comment a bit on is the – and why – and particularly your question why men’s is so much better. I think what you’re really seeing is it reflects the strength of our core consumer. And we are disproportionately a men’s retailer. And I think through these challenging times when people are stressed with high inflation, have less discretionary income or wallet share shifting towards services and experiences, it makes our business really tough. And one of the things I think that – we think a lot about is our core consumer intact.
And I have to tell you, I think we – a lot of our sales loss over the last two years is tied to trend consumers and to declining brands that reach broadly into the trend market and outside of our core market. So when we look at our core consumer, which is predominantly male, this is why the men’s business is better. And we can see this in a number of different ways in the business. One is the strength of our business in the emerging brands launched in ’22 and ’23. We’re seeing really good – we’re seeing those brands work well resonate with these consumers on the men’s side. And it’s encouraging for us, I think, to see that, and they’re running ahead of pace for where we think they would be in a normal brand maturation cycle for these classes of emerging brands.
So that also reflects what our core customer wants, that uniqueness newness in the marketplace that you can only get at Zumiez. The other thing I’d tell you that shows again being a predominantly male consumer that our core consumer is intact and why our men’s business is doing better is, again, our dollars per trans are at all-time highs. And it’s not just because AUR is higher is because UPTs are driving it, too. So for me, this is another sign that the core consumer, that young male is really engaged with us in our business. And they’re looking for those – again, looking for the unique brands, they’re also looking for us leading on trends. And I think we are definitely doing this in a lot in the men’s area, both – and this is where our private label brands are really doing well outperforming well.
I might ask Chris to comment on that in a moment. And again, we are not massively discounting, we – much for these trend-driven categories in men’s, we’re higher priced than a lot of competitors on these trend categories. So it reflects the strength of our core consumer value and what we do for valuing the spin we bring to these trends and be willing to pay the value that we’re offering in these areas. So – all these things for me drive up why our men’s business is better, it’s because that’s where the majority of our core consumers are. And what we’re doing is really starting to resonate with them. Chris, do you want to talk a little bit about private label?
Chris Work: Yes. I’ll talk a little bit about private label and then just catch on the holiday trends. Part of your question. I mean, from an overall private label perspective, as Rick mentioned, that value message has been extremely positive. We have seen private label increase about 500 basis points as a percent of sales. Looking at this year, year-to-date through nine months as compared to nine months last year. So really seeing that business do well. And I think it resonates with what the consumer wants. And it’s one of the interesting pieces, as Rick mentioned, just between how brands and private label have moved across the years here. I mean we’ve seen private label reach into the 20% before in the middle part of the last decade.
We saw a drop as low as about 11% or 12% at the end of the decade, and we’re back in that 20% range. So it’s really interesting to see how it’s moved, but been pretty popular with our consumer thus far. From an overall holiday trends perspective, what’s interesting about November and what we continue to see in the business is it’s very similar to what we saw on back-to-school, where we saw the real strength of the business around the peaks, and we were not alone. I think other retailers were talking about how it got a little slower after back-to-school. So we saw that as we move past and out of the back-to-school season. And then as we moved into this quarter, weeks one and two November, were our tougher week. We definitely saw softer volumes there, getting a little bit better moving into the Thanksgiving week and then that week four of November was our strongest week we were roughly flat in total sales.
So I think that’s a good sign in regards to what we should expect over the next few weeks as you would imagine, as we lay this out by week and maybe more importantly, by day, those days and week, that week ahead of Christmas will be very strong with Christmas hitting on a Monday. So our forecast, our guidance is obviously pretty in line with what our trend rate is if you exclude the 53rd week, and we would expect that week before Christmas and even a week after Christmas to be the strongest weeks of the remaining weeks left for us.
Mantero Moreno-Cheek: Thank you. And best of luck with the holiday season.
Chris Work: Appreciate it. Thanks.
Operator: Thank you. One moment please. We have a follow-up question from Mitch Kummetz. Your line is open.
Mitch Kummetz: Yes, thanks for taking our follow-up. Rick, I just wanted to ask you about skate hardgoods, maybe kind of philosophical question, I don’t know. But when I reflect on that business over the last 10-plus years, most recently, we had COVID that kind of drove a lot of demand before that. It was maybe penny board before that, it was long boards. At this point, it looks like that business is probably going to be at its lowest level of penetration in a long time, if not the last 20 years. Have we gotten down to kind of just the core kids that skate that are buying components. And is that a pretty consistent business? Like is that where you think skate is right now? And like if that’s the case, does that mean like we could be getting close to a bottom there?
