Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Jeff Klinefelter - Piper Jaffray.
Jeff Klinefelter - Piper Jaffray
Rick, I know you don't like to get into a lot of brand discussions, but given the ongoing weakness in the apparel business can you talk directionally or generally about where you see opportunities? I think you've mentioned before that overdistributed brands or multi-point distributed brands in malls tend to underperform versus your more exclusive type or smaller niche brands. Can you give us any more color on where you see your opportunities to go after share in a shrinking market?
Richard M. Brooks
A couple of areas I think I can give you some flavor around just in general product, Jeff. The first thing is I think one of our objectives, as we said throughout the commentary, is to continue to differentiate our model and small brands do that for us. So I think you are going to see us continue to focus on developing the small brands. We're working very closely with them. So that is one area we think we have an opportunity is to continue to work with those small brands and help them develop their business.
I'd also say one of the things we're doing generally as it relates to product is we're really trying to work with all of our brands very closely. We're trying to give them more information about how we're thinking about planning the year further out so they can plan their business as effectively as possible also.
So those would be a couple of things, Jeff. We're also looking at, relative to product, how we're thinking about, again, that multi-tiered price structure, how brands fit into it, where it makes most sense based upon literally a brand-by-category combination. I think you're going to see us do things like really try to clearly delineate what product goes at what price points and what the value proposition is at each of those multi-tier price points. And with that I think it's fair to assume that we're going to try to push for a higher initial markup at each of those tiers of prices.
So, I mean, we're doing a number of things with our brands to try to foster the partnership we have with them, help them build their business while we achieve our objective, too, in this process, both in terms of sales and margin.
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