Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
(Operator Instructions) Your first question comes from Christopher Kim - J.P. Morgan.
Christopher Kim - J.P. Morgan
You guys talked about being moderately more aggressive in terms of the marketing spend for the back half of the year. Is that exclusive to the Lane Bryant business and how will that affect overall SG&A?
James P. Fogarty
I don't think we said we would be aggressive on what we would spend. I think we talked about how we would have a mind-set of approaching marketing and being integrated to drive customers via either Internet or in the store or online.
We did say in Lane Bryant that we would look at some initiatives to use our marketing books, our magalogs, to try to drive traffic when it gets to the store, sort of walk-in traffic, to make sure we could utilize that marketing vehicle.
But there's sort of combined answer, wherein we're also being very aggressive on how we manage our direct marketing spend to make sure that we're getting appropriate incremental sales and ROI at the end of the day on how we execute our marketing spend.
So I don't think I would read into that that somehow we're going to, when the dust settles, at least as we think about the back half of this year, that we're going to somehow see some increase in overall marketing spend.
Christopher Kim - J.P. Morgan
And also regarding this sort of platform that you're starting to build in terms of being able to be better at direct sourcing, perhaps also enhancing your in-house design efforts, can you kind of give us a timeframe around that and when you'd be better able to capitalize on that structure?
James P. Fogarty
Sure. Maybe I'll break it into two pieces. On the design front, the design talent is - let's just focus on Lane Bryant and Fashion Bug - the design talent is in place and has been in place. As you know, in retail apparel there's sort of a lead time before the work one does actually ends up in a store. So based on when those folks came onboard at Lane Bryant and Fashion Bug, what we've called out is the new product leadership through our design organizations underneath our brand presidents will really start affecting the product on the floor in a more complete way in this holiday of 2009, so the holiday period this year. So design is sort of in place.
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