Kevin Jacobsen
Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer at Clorox
Yeah. Yeah, Robert, happy to take those questions. And gross margin, particularly around Q2. We do have a seasonal element to our business. Typically in normalized years, Q2 would be our lowest gross margin quarter of the year and it's really driven by two primary factors. The first is we're now out of the Kingsford charcoal season. So Kingsford is a nice profitable business that we do about 50% of the business in Q4 and Q1. And Q2 then it's a low season for Kingsford as well as it tends to be the period of time in our birds business where we're doing quite a bit of holiday merchandising, which comes at a bit lower-margin.
So historically, that's always been a lower-margin quarter for us and this reflects that as well, plus the added impact of the deleveraging with the top-line declining, as we said, double-digits. And then on EPS, while we don't disclose our internal forecast, this came in stronger than our internal forecast. There's a couple of things we are thinking about as we set the outlook for the year. And certainly, the first one is, and I think you can appreciate this. We're only one quarter into the year. And so we want to be thoughtful and not get ahead of ourselves for the full year. And having said that, that's I think always good counsel, but particularly this year, as we've talked about a couple of areas we're watching pretty closely, which is the health of the US consumer as well as the promotional environment.
Now as Linda just said, Q1 played out very much like we expected, but that doesn't mean that that's going to continue. So that's something we're going to watch very closely. And then we had some timing elements. So some had over-delivery in Q1, as we mentioned, was based on pulling some shipments forward from Q2. So that won't have a full-year impact. And then maybe just the last perspective I'll give you is what I like is I think it gives us some financial flexibility. And I think that's important. This is still a volatile macroeconomic environment. And if the environment changes and it's different than what we think, we've got some financial flexibility to address that.
So I think that just builds our confidence in being able to deliver the year. But it's really how we approach the full-year. And as you know, we modestly took up the full-year, but I think we're in a -- we've got the right plan for where we sit this early in the year.