Lorraine Hutchinson
Analyst · Bank of America. Your line is open.
Thank you, good morning. Michael, your off-price peers have talked about increasing their mix of brand as a way to drive comps. In March, you said this might be an opportunity for you as well. Do you have any update on this, and also I’m curious if you see any risks to this strategy.
Michael O’Sullivan: Good morning Lorraine, good to hear from you. Yes, we do see an opportunity to increase our mix of brands, and actually more generally, we see an opportunity to elevate our assortments. In fact, we’re already seeing some success with that approach in businesses like sportswear, but we plan to lean into that opportunity more, I would say in the back half of the year. But let me spend a minute just sort of talking about the role that brands play in our business, and also addressing the last part of your question about the risks or the limits of that strategy. In off-price, brands are important, but the most critical thing by far is value. Brands are just one component of value. Fashion, quality, and of course price also drive the customer’s perception of value. You can have a great brand, but if the fashion, the quality or the price are wrong, the customer isn’t going to buy it, it’s going to end up in the clearance run. The second point to make is that the role that the brand plays in defining value depends on the category and also depends on the customer and their price sensitivity. That’s why our merchants spend a lot of time planning and styling out the whole rack and then executing our good-better-best strategy. Again, brands are important, but they’re just one piece of that. I should add that calculus may be different for other retailers, depending upon their own customer profile. Okay, so with all of that as context, let me talk about where we see opportunity. As I said earlier, in this economy we believe that all shoppers are now focused on value. We know that we do--I think we do an excellent job when it comes to the low income, need a deal shopper, and let me emphasize we continue--we intend to continue to do an excellent job with those very important customers, but we think we can also do more to drive sales with trade-down or slightly higher income shoppers. When those shoppers walk in our store, they’re more likely to be drawn to great deals on better brands, so as we get further into the year, you’ll see more of those brands in our runs. Now as you’d expect, we’ll do that selectively in businesses where it works and where brands really matter, but let me maybe finish up by maybe reinforcing the point. We see this as an ‘and’ strategy - you know, we’ll go after this trade-down opportunity and we’re going to continue to deliver for our core need a deal shoppers as well.