Ralph Lauren Q3 2025 Earnings Call Transcript

AlphaStreet
Provided by AlphaStreet
February 6, 2025
Skip to Questions & Answers
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Ralph Lauren Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2025 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Instructions on how to ask a question will be given at that time. If you should require assistance during the call, please press star than zero. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I'd now like to turn over the conference to our host, Ms. Corey Van der Ghinst. Please go ahead.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

Good morning, and thank you for joining Ralph Lauren's Third Quarter Fiscal 2025 Conference Call. With me today are Patrice Louvet, the company's President and Chief Executive Officer; and Justin Picicci, Chief Financial Officer. After prepared remarks, we will open up the call for your questions, which we ask that you limit to one per caller. During today's call, our financial performance will be discussed on a constant currency adjusted basis. Our reported results, including foreign currency can be found in this morning's press release. We will also be making some forward-looking statements within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including our financial outlook. Forward-looking statements are not guarantees, and our actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Our expectations contain many risks and uncertainties. Principal risks and uncertainties that could cause our results to differ materially from our current expectations are detailed in our SEC filings. To find disclosures and reconciliations of non-GAAP measures that we use when discussing our financial results, you should refer to this morning's earnings release and to our SEC filings that can be found on our Investor Relations website. With that, I will turn the call over to Patrice.

Patrice Louvet
President and Chief Executive Officer at Ralph Lauren

Thank you, Corey. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining today's call. We entered this important holiday quarter with a clear game plan, along with strong brand and product momentum, and our teams around the world delivered particularly well, executing our long-term strategy across geographies, channels and categories to outperform our financial commitments. This quarter's results underscore the powerful combination of our iconic timeless brand and products, our durable and diversified levers of growth, and our ability to connect authentically with consumers across genders, generations and markets through our proven key city ecosystem model. Third quarter results, with revenue up double digits, exceeded our expectations in every geography across the top and bottom line. Our strong first half brand momentum and strategic investments carried into the fall holiday season, driving better-than-expected consumer demand in each channel, and the agility of our global supply chain enabled us to meet the upside to demand during the quarter. Our retail business led our performance again, delivering double-digit comp growth, along with improving trends in digital. DTC continues to be a leading indicator of our growing brand desirability and the power of our ecosystem model. We are encouraged that this momentum is now also delivering accelerated growth in wholesale as we continue to elevate and reposition the channel. Building on our high-impact summer of sports and Hamptons fashion event, we invested in innovative marketing campaigns to engage and inspire consumers around the world. This is translating to high-quality new customer acquisition and full price selling in the marketplace. Third quarter retail AUR grew another double digits on higher full price penetration and lower-than-planned promotions. At the same time, we continue to operate with discipline to improve our expense management across the organization and strengthen our balance sheet. This enables us to invest behind our strategic priorities, all while delivering double-digit growth in profitability and returning cash to our shareholders. Let me take you through a few highlights from the quarter, where we drove continued progress across our three strategic pillars. As a reminder, these include: first, Elevate and Energize Our Lifestyle Brand; second, Drive the Core and Expand for More; and third, Win In Key Cities With Our Consumer Ecosystem. First, on our Efforts to Elevate and Energize Our Lifestyle Brand. Across generations and geographies, we continue to harness the power of our iconic brand, cutting through culture across key moments in fashion, celebrity, sports, gaming and music. Some highlights from the third quarter included: first, our global holiday campaigns, which translated the magic and timeless elegance of Ralph Lauren around the world. In New York City, you may have interacted with our AI-powered Polo Bear blowing kisses from our Madison Avenue flagship windows, or our immersive holiday pop-up shop at Saks Fifth Avenue, featuring our handbags in Ralph's Coffee Shop. At our Gangnam store in Seoul, Stars J. Y. Park and Isaac Hong lit up the night with special performances at our Ralphs New York event. And in Europe, we drove top city activations in London, Milan, Munich and Paris, staying top of mind following our powerful Olympics presence this past summer. Second, our Very Ralph documentary launch in Shanghai, complete with a spectacular drone show over the historic Bund waterfront and star studded gala with friends of the brand like Crystal Yum and Zhu Zhu. Highlighting Ralph's journey and unique position in fashion, the campaign was a special opportunity to share our brand values with Chinese consumers, generating more than 30 million live stream views and 67 billion impressions. Finally, we outfitted an incredible roster of celebrities including Demi Moore, Selena Gomez, Eva Longoria and Mikey Madison at the Elle Women in Hollywood event. Ariana Grande and Jonathan Bailey selected Ralph Lauren for the Wicked Movie Premier in London, as did Nicole Kidman for the cover of W Magazine. Together, these activities are driving strong, sustainable growth in new customer acquisition and engagement. In the third quarter, we added a record 1.9 million new consumers to our DTC businesses, a low double-digit increase to last year. This continued to be led by younger, higher value and less price-sensitive cohorts. Our brand further strengthened across key consumer metrics with increases across brand consideration, purchase intent and Net Promoter Scores globally. And we grew both our value perception and luxury equity scores, particularly with next-gen consumers. We continue to increase our social media followers by low double digits to last year, surpassing 64 million, led by Instagram, Threads, Line, TikTok and Douyin. We plan to continue building on this brand strength with powerful new engagements into fiscal year '26 and beyond. Moving to our second key initiative, Drive the Core and Expand for More. Since our company's inception, Ralph and our design teams have focused on creating timeless products that endure. This holds especially true in the current environment where we continue to see consumers turn to brands they know and trust that consistently deliver quality and value. At Ralph Lauren, this starts with our core products, which represent more than 70% of our business and includes some of our best-known styles from our iconic Mesh Polo shirts to cable-knit sweaters and Polo caps. Sales of our core products increased low teens, ahead of our total company growth in the third quarter. Our high potential categories, including women's apparel, outerwear and handbags, together increased 20%. Women's and outerwear highlights this quarter included quilted mid-weight and puffer jackets, cotton cable-knit and wool cashmere sweaters, our coveted Polo Bear sweaters and shirt dresses. Handbags also exceeded our expectations, with sales up strong double digits to last year, supported this holiday by an exclusive collaboration with Mr. Bags in China and pop-ups in New York City and Paris. Polo Women's led this performance once again, supported by our Polo ID bag with new seasonal colors and fabrications like chocolate and suede. Other special releases this quarter included our RRL Capsule with Navajo artist Zephyrin M. This represents the second collaboration in our groundbreaking Artist in Residence program focused on empowering and celebrating artisans within the communities that have historically inspired our designs. And our annual Pink Pony collection supporting Ralph Lauren's long-standing commitment to cancer care and research. Turning to our third key initiative, Win in Key Cities with our Consumer Ecosystem. We continue to focus on developing our key city ecosystems around the world. These ecosystems support the long-term elevation of our brand by inviting consumers to step into the world of Ralph Lauren with consistency across each of our consumer channels and touch points. Within DTC, which comprises 2/3 of our business, we drove accelerated comp growth this quarter. Comps increased 12%, above our expectations, led by double-digit growth in brick-and-mortar stores, while our own digital sites also performed ahead of plan. Globally, we opened 34 new own and partner stores focused on our top cities, largely in Asia. Store opening highlights during the period included Polo boutiques in Hong Kong Pacific Place and Beijing's China World Mall, both featuring Ralph's Coffee, our stunning new Ralph Lauren Collection shop for women at Harrods in London, one of our most elevated spaces to date, and our vibrant Candy Store Polo Shop in Edinburgh St. James Quarter. As we continue to test and learn with new store formats, the candy store represents a new smaller format concept for us with fun highly flexible spaces. The dual-gender shops are curated with our most iconic Polo products that play on our Love of Color, from sweaters and rugby shirts to a rainbow of Pony caps and Mesh Polos. Each of our three regions outperformed our expectations this holiday. We were particularly encouraged by mid-teens growth in Europe, supported by broad-based strength across our markets, including a return to growth in the U.K. Asia also continued to perform well, with mid-teens growth including China sales up more than 20%. And North America accelerated to high single-digit growth this quarter on ongoing strength in DTC and a meaningful improvement in wholesale trends. And finally, touching on our enablers. In addition to our strategic priorities, our business continued to be supported by our five key enablers. Sharing a few highlights. Ralph and I are incredibly proud of our teams. Their engagement and love for what we do is evidenced not only in their excellent execution, but in how they show up for one another and the communities we serve. Whether that's our corporate teams volunteering hundreds of hours to support our retail teams during the peak holiday season, or teams across every region working directly in our communities to support those in need. Their commitment to our business, our brand and our values is unmatched. And just a few weeks ago, Ralph became the first fashion designer ever to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, America's highest civilian honor. The award recognized Ralph's extraordinary contributions to culture and society as a visionary designer, trailblazing entrepreneur, innovative business leader and dedicated philanthropist. His vision continues to inspire us here at the company every day. Congratulations to Ralph. In closing, we are strongly encouraged by our team's progress through the first three quarters of this fiscal year, including the important holiday season. At the same time, we remain sharply focused on what's ahead for Ralph Lauren leveraging the incredible power of our brand and durable diversified drivers of growth to stay on offense into the next year and beyond. And with that, I'll turn it over to Justin, and I'll join him at the end to answer your questions.

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

Thanks, Patrice, and good morning, everyone. Our strong third quarter performance reinforce the confidence we have in our diversified growth drivers and premium position in the marketplace. As our teams continue to deliver with excellence on our near-term commitments, we remain focused on investing in the strategic priorities that will enable us to better serve our customers and sustain our growth into the future. These include our brand, the continued elevation of our products, our digital capabilities and technology and our top city ecosystems around the world. Third quarter results meaningfully exceeded our expectations across revenues and gross and operating margins, delivering one of our most successful holidays to date. All 3 regions contributed to operating margin expansion as planned, with North America reporting its highest third quarter adjusted operating margin since we began our elevation journey more than seven years ago. And we achieved all of this while continuing to strengthen our balance sheet and cash flows, with approximately $980 million in free cash flows and $500 million in returns to shareholders year-to-date. This continued progress gives us confidence in raising our full year outlook once again. But first, let me walk you through our financial highlights from the third quarter, which, as a reminder, are provided on a constant currency basis. Total company third quarter revenue growth of 11% was above our outlook with better-than-expected performance in both our direct-to-consumer and wholesale channels. Total company retail comps grew 12% as our holiday product offering and marketing campaigns resonated with consumers across regions. Total digital ecosystem sales, including our own sites and wholesale digital accounts, increased mid-teens, accelerating from prior quarter trends. Total company adjusted gross margin expanded 190 basis points to 68.3%. This strong performance was driven by AUR growth, reduced promotions and favorable mix shift towards our full-price businesses and lower cotton costs, partially offset by higher freight expense to mitigate East Coast port disruptions. AUR increased 12% in the third quarter. This exceeded our mid-single-digit outlook as demand for our core and seasonal products drove better-than-expected full price selling trends. Our ability to drive strong sales early in the quarter through Black Friday week also enabled us to pull back on planned promotions through the remainder of the period. As a result, we reduced our global discount rate by more than 500 basis points, meaningfully greater than expected. In the fourth quarter, we are planning for high single-digit AUR growth as we pull back further on end-of-season discounting across all regions following our strong holiday sell-throughs in Q3. Adjusted operating expenses grew 10% to 49.7% of sales, down 30 basis points to last year. The improvement was driven by higher-than-expected sales and the planned cadence of marketing investments, which represented 7.1% of third quarter sales compared to 7.5% last year. We continue to expect full year marketing at about 7% of sales. Excluding marketing, adjusted operating expense rate was flat to last year as ongoing cost savings offset continued reinvestment in our business. Our adjusted operating margin expanded 230 basis points to 18.7%, and operating profit increased 27%, both ahead of plan. Moving to segment performance, and starting with North America, third quarter revenue increased 7%, exceeding our expectations. While momentum continued in our retail channels, we were especially encouraged by our return to growth in wholesale this quarter. In North America retail, third quarter comps increased 8%. Brick-and-mortar comps were up 10%, with strong growth in both full price and outlet stores. Digital comps increased 3%, improving sequentially as we invested in more targeted marketing, merchandising and site enhancements under our new digital leadership. And our digital wholesale business accelerated to low teen sellout in the quarter. Total North America wholesale revenues increased 6%, above our expectations. Our wholesale AUR increased mid-single digits on well-positioned inventories in the channel. Full price sellout was in line with our sell-in this quarter, supported by a strong fall product offering and growth in core replenishment. We expect our wholesale sell-in to be up slightly in Q4 and continue to be generally aligned with our sellout trends. Our outlook now includes the planned exit of 60 departmental store doors this fiscal year. While the ongoing exits are not material to our financial results, we continue to proactively evaluate and refine our brand presence on a door-by-door basis. Moving to Europe, third quarter revenue increased 16%, driven by strong performance across our retail and wholesale channels. Growth was supported by brand momentum from this year's highly impactful marketing activations. All of our key markets delivered growth in the quarter, led by double-digit revenue growth in Germany, France, Italy and Spain. And encouragingly, sales grew in the U.K. this holiday as our underlying trends in the market continue to improve. In Europe retail, comps increased 17% to last year, above our expectations. Growth was balanced across our brick-and-mortar and digital channels. Europe AUR continued to grow strongly on top of last year's low double-digit increase, driven by our brand elevation. Similar to recent quarterly trends, our discount rates declined meaningfully to last year despite a competitive promotional environment. Europe wholesale increased 14% to last year, also above our plan, supported by strong reorder trends in the previously discussed timing shift of receipts from the second quarter. Excluding the shifts, wholesale would have increased roughly low double digits to last year. Our digital wholesale sales increased strong double digits, driven by continued brand momentum at digital pure-play accounts. This performance was especially notable given challenging compares from last year's restocking in the channel. We continue to expect stronger Europe wholesale growth in the second half of fiscal '25, including Q4, based on solid underlying trends and the receipt shifts from Q2 into Q3 and Q4. Looking ahead, we remain encouraged by our team's strong execution and our elevated positioning across channels in Europe, and we are focused on delivering powerful new connections with customers in the year ahead as we build on the momentum from our recent brand initiatives. Turning to Asia. Revenue increased 15%, reflecting growth in all markets. Retail comps were up 14% on top of a similar 14% increase last year, with strong growth in both digital and brick-and-mortar stores. Asia results exceeded our outlook led by continued outperformance in China. Our China market grew more than 20% to last year, above our plan and driven by comp growth, high-quality new customer recruitment and key marketing moments, including our Very Ralph event in Shanghai and Singles Day live streaming activations. Sales in Japan were also strong, growing low double digits to last year, supported by accelerated domestic consumer trends, driven by key brand activations, VIC engagement and luxury events, along with continued tailwinds from inbound tourism. Partnerships with key talent, including Mark Lee, Winter and Sana and growth on Takao also helped deliver solid growth in Korea and the broader Asia region this quarter. Moving to the balance sheet. Our strong balance sheet and cash flows continue to be key enablers of our Fortress Foundation, allowing us to make strategic growth investments in our business while returning cash to shareholders. We ended the quarter with $2.1 billion in cash and short-term investments and $1.1 billion in total debt. Our teams continue to leverage our agile and diversified supply chain to manage through global industry disruptions. With regards to the recently announced U.S. tariffs on goods from China, Mexico and Canada, we currently anticipate a minimal annual impact. Third quarter net inventory decreased 5% to last year even as we improved our in-stock rates of popular core and seasonal products to fulfill stronger-than-expected consumer demand this quarter. Inventories in each of our regions are well positioned as we exit holiday and enter the spring season, and we still expect to end fiscal '25 with inventories generally aligned to revenue growth. Weeks of supply continue to decline as we improve our inventory efficiency through initiatives like our predictive buying model, which is designed to put our core top-selling styles in the right channels at the right time. This new buying framework is just one element of our upcoming next-generation transformation strategy, which will bring together our new global ERP system with integrated business planning tools and more productive, agile logistics to align with our increasingly global DTC-oriented business going forward. Looking ahead, our outlook remains based on our best assessment of the current geopolitical backdrop as well as the macroeconomic environment. This includes inflationary pressures, tariffs and other consumer spending related headwinds, supply chain disruptions and foreign currency volatility, among other considerations. For fiscal '25, we now expect constant currency revenues to increase approximately 6% to 7%, up from 3% to 4% growth previously, reflecting our strong year-to-date performance. Foreign currency is now expected to negatively impact full year revenue growth by about 100 to 150 basis points due to a stronger U.S. dollar. We now expect operating margin to expand about 120 to 160 basis points, up slightly from our prior outlook, driven by gross margin expansion of about 130 to 170 basis points. In constant currency, relative to our fiscal '22 Investor Day base period, this puts us on track to exceed our 15% operating margin target this year. Foreign currency is expected to negatively impact both our gross and operating margins by about 30 to 50 basis points. For the fourth quarter, we also expect constant currency revenues to increase in a range of approximately 6% to 7%. Foreign currency is expected to negatively impact revenue by approximately 300 basis points. Wholesale is expected to remain on its positive trajectory as North America sell-in more closely aligns to sellout and Europe wholesale receipts continue shifting to the back half of the fiscal year from Q2. Our outlook still includes approximately 1 point of negative impact in the fourth quarter from the timing of Easter, which shifts into Q1 of fiscal '26. We expect fourth quarter operating margin to expand approximately 120 to 140 basis points in constant currency, driven by roughly 80 to 120 basis points of gross margin expansion and modest operating expense leverage. Marketing as a percent of sales is expected to be about flat to last year in the fourth quarter as we concentrated a higher share of this year's marketing dollars on our Summer of Sports and Holiday campaigns. Foreign currency is expected to negatively impact gross and operating margins by approximately 60 to 80 basis points in the fourth quarter. We still expect our fiscal '25 tax rate to be in the range of 22% to 23% for the full year, while the fourth quarter rate is expected to be around 24% to 25%. And lastly, our outlook includes CapEx in the range of $200 million to $250 million. In closing, guided by Ralph's creative vision, our teams captured the magic of the holidays and delivered on our purpose of inspiring the dream of a better life. Our strong performance this quarter further underscores Ralph Lauren's unique emotional connection with consumers around the world. This, combined with our diversified growth drivers and organizational agility, reinforces our confidence in delivering against both our financial and strategic commitments to ensure sustainable value creation into the future. With that, let's open up the call for your questions.

Skip to Participants
Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, if you wish to ask a question, please press star than one on your touch home phone. You will hear a tone indicating you have been placed into queue. You may remove yourself from queue at any time by pressing start to. If you're using a speaker phone, please pick-up the handset before pressing the numbers, we ask that you limit yourself to one question per caller. Once again, if you have a question, please press star one at this time. One moment please for the first question. The first question comes from Jay Sole with UBS.

Jay Sole
Analyst at UBS Group

Great. Thank you so much. But just have one question, it's kind of in two-parts. The first part is as you look across your brand momentum, product assortment, growth markets and more, what would you consider the biggest drivers of your outperformance this holiday? And how much of the beat would you attribute to near-term factors versus more sustainable drivers looking ahead? Then the second part of my question is, if you could just elaborate a little bit more on what's really driving the growth in women's and handbags, thosethe newer categories, the growth categories that you've been talking about for a while?

Patrice Louvet
President and Chief Executive Officer at Ralph Lauren

Sure. Well, good morning, Jay, thanks for your question. Look, we just delivered a high-quality quarter, right? And I think what you're seeing is the cumulative effect of our multi-lever strategy in action. Our brand is resonating with consumers around the world in every single market. Our teams are executing with excellence across the key facets of our business, whether that's product, stores, merchandising, marketing, logistics, and this is happening, you can't lose sight of that, in what remains a pretty volatile environment. We've been building this over the years, right, as I think many of you know. So this is not the result of one marketing program or one activity in the market or one specific engagement with the consumer group, it's the combination of the cumulative effect of what we've been doing for many quarters now in many years and the drivers are durable. Just as a quick reminder, three things that I would highlight. First, brand strength, which is really fueled by our rolling thunder of marketing activations, right? And if you look back not just last quarter, but from several quarters now, the combination of the Olympics, our Immersive Hamptons Fashion show, our Very Ralph Premier in China, our innovative holiday campaigns, all that is contributing to this brand strength across a wide group of consumer cohorts. The second piece is the breadth of our lifestyle portfolio, which we continue to believe is a key competitive advantage in our space, right? And this is both the combination of a strong core that's resonating with consumers around the world. So strong core are cable-knit sweaters, our Polo shirts, our Oxford shirts, our Polo caps, our blazers and then high potential categories and you touched on them. So I'll come back to that, like women's handbags, like women's apparel and like outerwear, which are performing particularly well and have significant runway, not just for one quarter or two quarters, but actually for many, many years. And then the third durable driver in our mind is the power of our key city ecosystem go-to-market model. right, with our focus on top 30 cities around the world and making sure that we are centered on the consumer we want to serve and continuously elevating across every channel and every touch point so we give the consumer he or she an incredible experience wherever they want to shop at any point in time within these city clusters. I would add to these three durable drivers the fact that we have built an agility muscle inside the company. And that's been serving us particularly well to navigate what has been, it goes back to COVID and the logistics issue with the Red Sea and the East Ports strike concerns and so on and so forth, enabling us to just navigate a volatile environment and seize on opportunities as we see them. I think what's pretty telling in this past quarter is our top line is up 11%, our inventory is down 5%. It indicates how well our teams have been reactive, nimble and smart with the use of our inventory across the countries. So stepping back, listen, we're pleased with the way the quarter came through. We feel good about the strategic framework that we have and that we're executing against with the global drivers, and we're actually excited about the magnitude of the opportunities ahead of us across products, across geographies and across channels. And we remain confident that the key elements of our strategies will continue to deliver on these opportunities in the fourth quarter and beyond as we remain; one, on offense; and two, focus on what we can control. Now when it comes to our high-potential categories, women's apparel and handbags, and I would add outerwear to that, you saw the numbers this quarter, they were up 20%, very strong performance. And listen, this all starts by making sure we have a strong foundational core from a product standpoint. And our teams, both our Polo Women's team, our handbag team, has done a really nice job defining where we should play, defining how we should show up at which price points with products that are distinctive, recognizable and quintessentially Ralph Lauren. And I think that's resonating very well, and we're going to continue to build on the core. The second piece is we changed our marketing significantly across these businesses, right? And we now have much more dedicated activations on women's apparel, much more dedicated activations on our handbags. We're integrating our handbags much better into the overall proposition. So for those of you who were counting at our recent fashion show, most of the models who walked the runway wore a handbag that would not have been the case 5 years ago. And then the third area has been very thoughtful on distribution, right? And we really improved distribution, both in DTC and in wholesale, a combination of the footprint and also the presentation, right? And that includes experimentation we're doing in some of our stores. So those of you who get a chance to go to Tokyo, you will see we've transformed our Cat Street store actually into a women's only store as part of a learning and experimentation exercise. And we've been super excited with the response that we've seen from consumers because as you all know on this call, women and men don't shop the same way. And we want to make sure that we're setting the products, the consumer experience in a way that really is going to resonate with these individual consumers. So early days on this journey. The foundation of our strategy for the company is what we're applying here. It's not that different, right? It's how do we engage in the right way, how do we have the right core offering with exciting fashion sprinkled in, and then how do we really show up across points of distribution in a way that resonates? When I look at the total addressable market, and we'll have this conversation in more detail when we get together for Investor Day later this year, the size of the women's apparel market is humongous in our price points. And we are stillwhile we have scale, right, because it's a multibillion dollar business for us, women's apparel, we still have a very, very small market share. The same is true for handbags, right? Depending on the numbers $80 billion to $90 billion segment. We are far from those numbers. So significant runway there and same thing for outerwear. So we're excited about the how our core is resonating and obviously, that will always be priority one of Ralph Lauren, but we will continue to lean into the selective high potential categories where the brand is resonating, our teams are in touch with the consumer, and we've got significant runway.

Jay Sole
Analyst at UBS Group

Thank you.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

Thank you. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Laurent with BNP Paribas.

Laurent Vasilescu
Analyst at BNP Paribas

Good morning. Thank you very much for taking my question. Patrice, Justin, I appreciate you're not guiding for the next fiscal year for your full Investor Day. But just yet, but with North America inflecting back to growth this year, how should we think about the trajectory of the North American business from here?

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

So just taking a step back. So when we started our next great chapter, strategic journey several years ago, we made a number of very deliberate choices, right, to elevate our brand, to elevate our distribution. And this was especially true in North America, I think lessening our exposure to lower-tier department stores and reducing our off-price business by 50%, while at the same time, strengthening our full price proposition and penetration and expanding margins. So we set out to elevate our brand in the marketplace and establish that healthier foundation for long-term consistent. And we're now seeing the impact of these efforts come through in our improved North America results. The multiple drivers of growth that Patrice just talked, they're as relevant for North America as they are for other two regions. And we're really encouraged by how each of our North America channels is contributing to our growth. On the DTC side, we've delivered now 6 consecutive quarters of solid comp growth, led by our full price stores with meaningfully less discounting. And we believe this is a pretty good bellwether of how our brand and our product is resonating with consumers. And notably, within the DTC, our own digital business is now back on growth trajectory. On the wholesale side, as we mentioned in the prepared remarks, we've been working to stabilize our business season over season. And we've seen a return to growth in the channel a little faster and a little stronger than we anticipated, even as we continue to scale back and prune our lowest-tier doors. But clearly, the progress we're seeing in DTC is coming over and starting to translate to wholesale. And this is evident by the positive response we're seeing from top-tier luxury accounts where we're admittedly still in the early stages of our expansion. So listen, while we're not going to guide for next year or the years beyond just yet, stabilizing that North America wholesale business, it's an important milestone on our long-term strategic journey. And put together with the momentum we have in DTC, we've established a solid foundation to deliver sustainable revenue growth and operating margin expansion for both our largest region, North America and for the company overall.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

Thank you. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Matthew Boss with JPMorgan.

Matthew Boss
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

Thanks, and congrats on a great quarter.

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

Thanks, Matt.

Patrice Louvet
President and Chief Executive Officer at Ralph Lauren

Thanks, Matt.

Matthew Boss
Analyst at J.P. Morgan

So Patrice, could you speak to the foundational investments that are now in place that are really driving the double-digit growth in Europe and China. Maybe just elaborate on continued market share opportunity abroad and white space you see for further store growth? And then Justin, just maybe could you talk to the balance that you're striking between reinvestment in the business, notably with marketing, which is obviously delivering clear returns relative to continued margin expansion multi year?

Patrice Louvet
President and Chief Executive Officer at Ralph Lauren

Sure. So foundational investments for us are really across marketing, right? And you know because you follow us closely that we've increased our marketing spend as a percent of revenue quite meaningfully over the past few years. We're around 7% now. As we've said in prior conversations, this is not the ceiling. The message to the marketing teams is you have no limit on marketing investment. The only constraint is ROI. So we expect to continue to increase marketing spend here as we expand margin over time. The key elements of the marketing activations have really evolved over time. So we now have a very broad portfolio of marketing activation that range from fashion moments, I wouldn't call them shows because they are much more than shows or cultural moments, to obviously all the sports activations, the work we're doing with influencers on social media platforms, gaming, etc. The second area where we're investing is obviously store openings, right? And here, on the one hand, I'm actually really pleased with the work the teams are doing on comp performance because look at our comp performance, across the regions, right, plus 8% in the U.S., plus 17% in EMEA, plus 14% in APAC. So the foundation store footprint is delivering, and this is true both across our full price stores, our outlets and our own digital. Now we also know we have continued opportunities to expand our footprint across key cities. So we expect this year to open around 85 new stores. This is consistent with the three-year target we gave out during Investor Day two and half years ago, of 250 new stores. This is true in the U.S., Matt, I know you talked EMEA and APAC. But obviously, we have store opening opportunities in the U.S. We're opening next month in March on Jackson Street in San Francisco as we look to expand on the West Coast, where we have significant white space. We also have significant opportunities in Europe through both our own and partner stores, and the teams have done an excellent job expanding our footprint, and with the new store openings really delivering nicely relative to our expectations. And of course, in Asia, we'll continue to expand. We've got key opportunities first and foremost, in China with a really nice momentum there. But we also have opportunities in Korea, where our footprint is still quite limited. We have opportunities in Japan. So that will continue. Then the last thing I would say from a market share standpoint is, I come from a business where on Gillette, we had 95% market share. So it's hard to grow market share. The good news in this business is it's highly fragmented, right? And no one really has any meaningful market share. So the market is very large, the business isthe category is very fragmented. While we have good positions of leadership in a number of categories, we're still relatively small from a market share standpoint. And what we've seen this past quarter is continued market share expansion across men's, across children's and meaningful share expansion obviously across women's and handbags as we were talking earlier with Jay. So I think the combination of continued to drive marketing spend and lean into high ROI activities with a broad range of activations and this rolling thunder approach of always on, with strong new customer recruiting, which will drive market share growth and continued selective choiceful footprint expansion in our top 30 key cities is a bit of a flywheel for us. And so we expect that to continue to deliver, again, being very targeted and focused on how and where we show up because we know one of the risks is to dilute ourselves by being overextended and overexposed.

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

And in terms of the balance between investment and flow-through, our philosophy really remains unchanged, right. The balanced reinvestment in the longer term growth of our branded business, with delivering on or in the case of this quarter, exceeding our near-term operating margin commitments, and you saw this in Q3. So we balanced growth with investing back into the business, including in marketing, where we continue to meaningfully increase our spend year-over-year. And for Q3, our OpEx rate came in line with our expectations. We delivered SG&A leverage and that importantly, came along with really high-quality revenue growth. So we feel like we're striking that right balance. We continue to see us do that as we move forward.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

Thank you. Next please.

Operator

Thank you. Next question comes from Dana Telsey with Telsey Advisory Group.

Dana Telsey
Analyst at Telsey Advisory Group

Hi, good morning and congratulations on the very nice progress. As you talked about brick-and-mortar and what you're seeing given the acceleration you've seen around the world, particularly in North America, what changed? And how is the outlook performance? And is that an area of growth in terms of new stores? And then can you expand on what you're doing in AI, the impact and the opportunity?

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

Sure. So I'll talk a little bit about sort of thewhat we're seeing in brick-and-mortar. We did see continued strong performance in both our full price and our outlet stores really across all regions in Q3 and very consistent with sort of the Q2 trends. Our full-price stores continue to lead our growth, Dana. And then our Q3 outlet comps actually accelerated on really strong responses to our product offering and enhancements we've made around the world in staffing and experience. And taking a step back, really importantly, we delivered in this brick-and-mortar channel, really strong quality of sales, really strong AUR growth on extremely positive traffic trends and increased basket. So really feeling good about that performance and it's consistent really across or regions. In North America, specifically, similar trends. And again, I would say our Ralph Lauren stores full prices continue to lead our performance, and that's consistent with what we've been seeing over the past couple of years, really driven by traffic and AUR.

Patrice Louvet
President and Chief Executive Officer at Ralph Lauren

And then AI is a big opportunity for us. So we're leaning into it. I'd say, from a headline standpoint, Dana, we look at AI both through kind of a creativity lens and a productivity lens, right? That's how we really want to be leveraging these new capabilities. On the creativity lens, what you see isit's not our stores, it's our website, but we're leveraging actually generative AI to help with search and consumer navigation. We're obviously leveraging AI with our contact center and the way we engage with consumers. And the philosophy is really the contact center should be much more than a problem resolution center, it should be one of our biggest stores, right? And how do we use that for consumer engagement and introduction of the broader range? And obviously, generative AI, very helpful here. Our creative teams are using it for mood boards, for example. So on the number of application areas on the creativity side and consumer engagement front. And then on the operational productivity front, we've started to leverage it in the context of predictive buying you heard in our prepared remarks. Justin talked about predictive buying, which has really been an accelerator of our performance this past quarter actually around the world to be a lot smarter in what we buy. We're also leveraging this in our allocation tools to be a lot smarter about how our products show up in the individual stores. And we're in experimentation mode. The new terminology in this space is Gentec AI, I followed things correctly. And so we are working with our partners to make sure that we continue to learn and leverage the best capability out there with, obviously, continued focus on authenticity and human leadership with AI thought out as a copilot as opposed to replacing how we operate. But we're excited about the initial impact we're seeing in the different fields of application across the business.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

Thank you. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Michael Binetti with Evercore ISI.

Michael Binetti
Analyst at Evercore ISI

Thanks for taking my question here and let me add my congrats on a great holiday, obviously. Maybe just a short term one for Justin first and then a follow-up. The 300 basis point increase to the revenue outlook, ex currency, but only 20 basis points or so of operating margin. Maybe just a thought on what's changing on the flow-through and how much of that might be specific to fourth quarter versus what kind of new costs we should be thinking about that could roll over into early 2026 that we should read from that? And then I guess, a jump all the question, but we've seen small hints of the U.S. turning back to positive on a wholesale basis. But it's been hard to sustain, obviously, with what's going on in the end markets there. Is there a reason you think we're in a period of more durable growth in positive North America wholesale? You mentioned some new distribution and luxury doors. We know the category expansion efforts. I'm just curious how you look out and see how your confidence is that, that can stay positive in North America?

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

Sure. Thanks, Michael. So as we think about Q4, a couple of things. One, we know we're going into ait's a smaller quarter. It's also a quarter that we have our indices in sales in the quarter as well. So that is a part of the profitability shift. We know, in Q3, we had a very strong full price selling, and that's reflected in our AUR and in our gross margin numbers there. So I would say that's probably the biggest difference between Q3 and Q4. In terms of when you think about North America wholesale and sort of where we're at, we're encouraged by the underlying trends of that business coming out of Q3. We've stabilized the business, right? This was an important milestone and important step for our North America growth trajectory and for our operating margin contribution for North America, right? We feel good about. We got selling now aligned with sell-out for a few consecutive quarters, and we're taking share, right, even though the overall channel remains soft in a pretty volatile environment, right, while still pruning our footprint. So we're definitely encouraged by the underlying trends. We're happy with the direction of travel. We feel good about how we're positioned in the channel, and how we're thinking about it on a go-forward basis.

Patrice Louvet
President and Chief Executive Officer at Ralph Lauren

I think when you look at our wholesale business and wholesale in general, it's really important, to Justin's earlier comments, to segment it, right? Because not all wholesale is built the same way. And so the way we think about it is luxury players, the Neimans, the Saks, the Bloomingdale's, the Nordstroms of this world, the Bergdorfs where we've got significant momentum. Then we have wholesale.com, thinkmacy's.com, in particular, where we also have very healthy momentum. Then you've got the top 50 doors of the key players where our partners are investing with us in people, in capital, in the way the product is being presented, and we're seeing that resonate. And then there's the balance of the channel that continues to be challenged and that we're working through. And we're working through two lenses here, which is in those doors where we want to stay how do we ensure that with our partners, there's investment, there's activation, there's customer service. And then we'll continue to prune. And you heard Justin talk about the fact we're going to eliminate another 60 doors within that group this year. And we're going to continuously prune to make sure we're showing up in the right place relative to how we want to project the brand and from a profitability standpoint. So I think, Michael, it continues to be a pretty volatile environment. It's really important to look at it in subparts. But obviously, we're pleased that we're now stabilizing a business that's been a drag for this company for many years.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

Thank you. Next question, please.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from John Kernan with TD Cowen.

John Kernan
Analyst at TD Cowen

Thanks for taking my question and congrats on a phenomenal holiday. So Justin, I think you said you reduced the global discount rate by 500 basis points in the quarter, obviously, strong performance in wholesale and DTC. Just curious, how much more room do you have here to reduce discount rates? I know it's been part of the AUR story. AUR, I think you said in DTC, it was up double digits again. When you look at where you are from a full price sell-through, how much more space you have to reduce the global discount rate?

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

Yeah. No, it's definitely something we think about. If you think about what's driven our AUR and our margin expansion over the past seven years, right, there's been a couple of things, right? There's been sort of a favorable channel geo mix, there's been product mix elevation. There's been like-for-like price. And there's also been, to your point, brand repositioning, disciplined inventory management and that promotional kind of pullback. And they've probably been about equal parts over the last five, six, seven years. As we look forward, we believe that those drivers are all durable with the one caveat being like-for-like is going to be a targeted driver that we're really going to lean into to offset cost inflation when we see there are structural changes in costs like what we're seeing in Japan with foreign currency. But if you think about the drivers there, the promotional pullback driver, in this quarter, we pulled back promotions in all of our regions and all of our channels. We saw a really strong full price selling driven by our marketing and our product. And really, what happened was we were able to step change our promotions really across our entire ecosystem. And that's something that it was done in North America, where we probably have a bit more runway in some of our channels like our outlet channel, but it was also done in China, where we're very, very elevated, highest in the world, and we still were able to pull back and to get some AUR growth and margin expansion from that promotional lever. So we feel really good about proof of concept in terms of this lever going forward. And our new consumer acquisition muscle that we've built up really focused on bringing in more full-price customers into the fray, really gives us confidence that, that flywheel can continue and that this particular lever of AUR growth and gross margin expansion has a lot of runway as we look forward.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

Thank you. Next.

Operator

Thank you. The next question comes from Ike with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Irwin Boruchow
Analyst at Wells Fargo & Company

Hey, good morning, everyone. Let me add my congrats. I think Justin two for you. Can you justclearly, your business is very idiosyncratic and you're doing a fantastic job on the markdowns globally. Just curious, the U.S. market, the U.S. wholesale market, do you notice any changes with inventory, with pricing cadence just across your competition? Or are we still kind of steady as she goes? And then just a follow-up on the demand creation questions you've gotten. I think you're at 7%. You guys have kind of entered you'd love to take that up with momentum. I mean should we expect that you continue to reinvest in that line item to keep the flywheel going on demand going forward?

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

Yeah. So thanks for the question, Ike. I mean taking the second one first. On the marketing, 7% is not a ceiling. Patrice said, and I say it's a mantra. And we're certainly seeing very encouraging proof of concept in terms of the ROI behind our marketing investments, and you can look no further in the past couple of quarters. So I think that that's something that absolutely when you think about priorities for our capital and cash, marketing tops the list and we're building really strong proof points to be able to continue to push that 7% as we move forward. I think when it comes to wholesale, look, we're very well positioned from an inventory perspective in that channel. That's always been an important facet of our sort of repositioning is pivot from sell-in to sellout, and really stay focused and keep our inventory lean and rely on our agile and flexible supply chain. And by the way, as we ramp up our predictive volume process, it's certainly kind of adds fuel to that fire to be able to chase into incremental demand as we see it, particularly in our core styles. So we've kept our inventory aligned with that sort of end consumer sellout. We're not seeing, in our business, promotions like we saw in our DTC space. They're going down in Q3. We were able to kind of pull back because we saw some pretty favorable full price traction in the wholesale channel as well as what we saw in DTC translated over. So we feel really good about how we're positioned from a stock perspective in that channel.

Corey Van der Ghinst
Head of Investor Relations at Ralph Lauren

We will take the last question, please, Angela.

Operator

Thank you. Our final question comes from Chris Nardone with Bank of America.

Christopher Nardone
Analyst at Bank of America

Thank you. Thanks. Good morning. What is the time line of implementing your next-gen transformation project? And then how should we think about the specific capabilities that you'll be adding to help drive continued sustainable growth?

Justin Picicci
Chief Financial Officer at Ralph Lauren

Yeah. So thanks, Chris. So on the NGT project, as you know, we're in the preliminary planning phase of this project this fiscal year. And project, it's moving to a single global ERP also a predictive buying and allocation tool to enable kind of strategic inventory management as well as upgrading our warehouse management systems to allow for sort of seamless inventory movements across channels within regions. So we've disclosed some of our preliminary costs in our 10-Q beginning, I think, in Q1 of this year, which are not significant. We're going to provide more updates as we kind of wrap the planning phase this year as we get to finalize our related kind of solutions and contracts. We've landed on a solution now we're working on landing the SI. And so we'll give a better sense of the total project costthat are going to be expected over the next kind of three to five years in the next quarter, or so. But I think when you think about just broad time frame, we're talking staged implementations likely starting in the fiscal '27 range.

Patrice Louvet
President and Chief Executive Officer at Ralph Lauren

All right. Well, thanks, everyone, for joining us today. We look forward to speaking with you on our fourth quarter and fiscal year-end earnings call in late May, and then we'll get together towards the end of the year for our next Investor Day. And until then, take care, and have a great day.

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude your conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

Corporate Executives
  • Corey Van der Ghinst
    Head of Investor Relations
  • Patrice Louvet
    President and Chief Executive Officer
  • Justin Picicci
    Chief Financial Officer
Analysts

Alpha Street Logo

Transcript Sections