Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, at this time we will be opening up the call for question-and-answer sessions. (OPERATOR INSTRUCTIONS). Our first question is coming from Neely Tamminga with Piper Jaffray.
Neely Tamminga - Piper Jaffray
Great, good morning and thanks for the thorough presentation. Just wondering here on Jill specifically if we can get a little more color. It seems the direct business is doing better, retail is not quite there. To the lay person that would certainly suggest that the merchandise is right, but maybe the execution in-store isn’t right. I am just wondering is it the balance of the assortment, is it totally different product or you cannot further differentiated the direct versus the retail product and I am just wondering kind of what’s really going on in store that isn’t meeting your expectation?
Trudy Sullivan
Neely, as I said, we really completed the complete strategic review of both brands. The interesting find in the J. Jill brand is that the direct business, which is its heritage channel, is really quite consistent and doing well, and we found that that we've opened a number of stores and there are some key markets where the brand awareness is lagging the actual opening of a store. And the challenge for us there that we've identified is to go back and to certain really targeted markets and invest in additional prospecting and direct mail business to build the awareness of the total brand. Where we have good awareness in our retail markets, where we have good direct business, our retail stores performed better. So that’s the key ? key initiative for us for 2008. We’ve identified the target markets. We are well underway of putting together a test of our prospecting approach which we will do in relatively shortly, I believe we have that test lines up for May. So, we are, you know, we are ? we have some significant learning in that regard. As Paula said, we do have work to do on the product and it’s interesting to us when we evaluate the same product in the direct channel versus retail it tends to perform more strongly in direct, which gives us an indication, you know, we’re on the right track. But the real challenge here is to invest in building brand awareness for the retail stores.
Operator
Thank you. Our next question is coming from Lauren Levitan with Cowen & Company.
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