Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Your first question comes from Greer Martinson of Georgia Bank.
Greer Martinson - Georgia Bank
Good Morning. In terms of the retail space everyone has talked about and consumer pressure, higher energy costs, I was wondering what you’re seeing there for the impact on your target consumers and the outlook going forward?
Gary Winterhalter
Greer, this is Gary. Historically we have not followed retail patterns very closely, we’ve said that many times. Having said that, in our first quarter, which is the holiday season, we do see some seasonality in the electrical category, which is hair dryers and curlers and things like that that are used for gifts. We expect that if overall retail gets very soft this holiday season we could see a little pressure on that particular category.
But our experience and as you see here in our fourth quarter, our comps were pretty good even in a quarter where general retail was starting a down trend. We did see some choppiness in the quarter. We see that often times. We have to keep in mind too, that we’re not on a retail calendar. When we have for example five Sundays in a month, it affects us in a negative way in comps. It’s a little confusing because we generally bounce back the next month, just because the calendar works in our favor.
We haven’t yet seen any significant impact, but as I said, our first quarter, as we’ve said many times in the past, the holiday selling season is the only part of our year that you can say is a little bit seasonal, and it’s primarily driven by that one category.
Greer Martinson - Georgia Bank
Okay. In terms of gross margin’s very strong numbers this quarter, is that kind of the run rate that we should be thinking of? Or was there something else that contributed to that upside?
Gary Winterhalter
As we mentioned here in the script, that we did see a continued slight shift in our customer mix. We saw some nice increase in particular categories that in this particular quarter were hair extensions which are a very strong category for us right now, with very strong margins. We also saw an increase in our control-label brands, which David mentioned, which also helps our margins. It’s kind of across the board, and I think that’s what I’ve been saying all along is that we kind of have three or four things going for us that have a natural enhancement to our margins just because of the nature of the growth of our business.
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