Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator's Instructions) Our first question comes from the line of Eric Beder.
Eric Beder - Brean Murray, Carret & Co
Hello, good afternoon. Could you talk a little bit about how do you look at the shift owing to the more direct selling model, what were the drivers behind that in terms of what you felt it could add to the company, and are there going to be additional costs associated with that shifting over here or are the savings on commissions going to kind of outweigh that?
Jeffrey Lubell
Are you talking about going to direct selling as opposed to L'Atelier?
Eric Beder - Brean Murray, Carret & Co
Yes.
Jeffrey Lubell
Well, I mean I think ultimately we think we can have a lot better control over the business if we can run it in a corporate way where there's a lot closer contact with the corporate office, as well as we're going to make a larger investment with more sales people and more people traveling out there and really driving the business and working closely with all the major accounts as well. And I believe you can talk, Peter, to the —
Peter F. Collins
From the budget perspective, Eric, we're still working through that. We talked on the call in our prepared remarks how we're recruiting for a vice president of sales. We're still in the process of establishing what our total team is going to look at. We've told the sales people that work for L'Atelier today that at the end of the year will offer them positions to join our team. We're going to take over their showrooms. So there are still a fair number of moving pieces, but I think at the end of the day we look at it like we were spending roughly 6% of those sales on commissions and that's a pretty significant chunk of costs that we have to work with to move into next year.
So it's still a little premature to know exactly what the impact's going to be for next year, but there was a significant cost that we’re incurring to have that (inaudible). But at the end of the day like Michael prescribed, this isn't really about cost. It's really more about the opportunity to be closer to our customers and drive the sales in a manner that we think is best for our brand, having the whole collection presented to our customers and really being more of a partner with our customers.
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