Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
Certainly. (Operator's Instructions) Our first question comes from Brad Thomas. Your question, please?
Brad Thomas - Unidentified Company
Good morning, Farooq. Good morning, Dave. Farooq, wanted to follow up on some of the comments in the press release talking about the July results getting better. Could you just share a little bit more color of what it is that you're seeing and maybe quantify the improvement that you’ve seen?
M. Farooq Kathwari
Well, as you know we have sort of had an unprecedented decline. It's almost sort of an amazing — what has taken place in the last six months. And as you know, we decided that for us to counter the liquidations of big discounting, and the fact that we are already on an everyday best pricing, gave us some limited opportunities to counter the major discounting in advertising that was taking place so we left it. We went through this period and had some sharp declines.
Now in July, a number of things that we have seen. One is that overall we're starting to see some improvement in confidence. Secondly, we have a stronger marketing program, even offering up some special values, all tied to these new initiatives. And the third factor is that we are comparing also somewhat to a lower volumes that were taking place last year. We've got to keep that in mind also.
We were running at a rate of 30 — our declines, as you see are approximately 30%-40%. We had half that decline in July — still a decline, but half of what it was running in the earlier months.
Brad Thomas - Unidentified Company
Okay. So if you were to sort of adjust for the easier comparison and think about the seasonality of your business do you feel like you've seen a little bit of a pickup sequentially?
M. Farooq Kathwari
Yes, absolutely.
Brad Thomas - Unidentified Company
Okay, great. And then just a follow-up on — you alluded to promotions. I know that during the last quarter you've offered some discounts through your rewards program on your website, could you talk a little bit more about how successful this program was and would you think about repeating it in the future?
M. Farooq Kathwari
The program was successful because this is a time when most people were coming in and talking to our folks and asking what we are doing at Ethan Allen. And for us, just to say that we have everyday best price was not enough, so the rewards program gave an opportunity for our design associates to talk to their clients and to say yes, we are doing something. So it was successful. It was relatively a small amount. It was by becoming a reward member they would get a 5% lower price.
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