Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from the line of Betty Chen - Wedbush Morgan
Betty Chen - Wedbush Morgan
Congratulations, I was wondering if you could maybe give us a sense of how you feel about some of the new merchandise, obviously we’ve been in the stores and just want to at least give you a lot of [praise] for the major improvements we’ve seen at both Ann Taylor and the LOFT stores, and then also related to that if you can give us a little bit more color around the marketing campaign that we should expect to see to support the improved merchandise.
Kay Krill
I’ll start with Ann Taylor, while it’s still early I’m pleased that the comp performance has improved from the second quarter in this division and I think that’s important. And we’re seeing strong selling so far in any feminine tops with details, structured dresses, shoes is a surprising category that is ticking up versus last year, jewelry and select sportswear separates, particularly pencil skirts and outerwear.
Those are both very strong. Grey suiting is also particularly strong and it looks like grey is emerging as a strong color for the season in all categories. I just want to highlight that our inventory levels have been extremely light in this division and we’re building our full price levels from this point. This is our low point right now, with the addition of approximately 300 SKUs next week.
So we should have a much better read on the new product direction in September. This was a building month. So we are encouraged but its still early days for Ann Taylor. In the LOFT division we are definitely seeing particular strength in the casual area and that was definitely the right thing to do to focus the assortment purely on casual. Denim, casual tops, and other casual bottoms, lightweight outerwear and jackets are particularly strong and any top or specifically knit that are embellished are really great.
Our denim assortment and our denim positioning is very exciting for us because we gave denim a much stronger voice then its had in the past through inventory investment and in store positioning and marketing and we believe that our assortment is very competitive from a style and price point of view.
We have every leg shape and fit covered and we’re seeing success in this category and chasing into select styles. So we feel very good about that right now. In marketing we really focused on traffic driving, direct marketing, we increased our direct marketing to our client base as well as prospecting for the first time, and we have reentered the print media for the fall season because we had basically been out of that for the past year.
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