Oxford Industries Inc (OXM) Q2 2027 Earnings Call Transcript

of the year. We will remain strategic and disciplined using targeted promotional activity to support customer engagement and inventory sell-through while protecting the long-term integrity of the brand. Promotions are one lever, but lasting improvement will also require stronger product relevance, marketing effectiveness, and execution. We are laser-focused on delivering these requirements. For spring 2027, our work is centered on four areas. Our pricing architecture strategy, balance of print pattern and color, mix of intended use occasions between social and casual, and the proportion of new versus continuing styles. These assortment changes will not drive a positive trends change in fiscal 2026, but we believe they will create a more balanced and compelling assortment and better position Lily Pellitzer for improved performance beginning with the spring 2027 season. We remain confident in Lily Pellitzer's long-term potential. The brand has a clear point of view, a strong emotional connection with its customer, and meaningful opportunities for improvement. That confidence does not lessen the urgency of the current situation. We are focused on addressing the issues directly and returning Lilly Pulitzer to the level of performance we expect from the brand. At JohnnyWiz, we continue to make progress on the turnaround plan. The brand significantly increased EBITDA during the second quarter, driven by higher gross margin resulting from tighter inventory management and fewer promotions, together with disciplined SG&A cost management. There is still work to do, but we are encouraged by the improvement in profitability. Stepping back, weaker consumer sentiment has added pressure to discretionary demand. Our customers, particularly at Tommy Bahama and Lily Pulitzer, tend to be active travelers, and although they continue to travel, higher airfare, lodging, and other travel costs may be leaving less room in their discretionary budgets for apparel. Even so, the steady performance at Tommy Bahama reinforces the compelling product and consistent execution can still produce solid results in this environment. Our responsibility is to deliver that level of product relevance and execution more consistently across the portfolio. The continued softness at Lilly Pulitzer, including the impact of a more promotional posture for the balance of the year, together with softer demand and certain other parts of the portfolio, led us to lower our top and bottom line guidance for the remainder of the year. At Lilly Pulitzer, the issues are primarily assortment and marketing related, while the pressure elsewhere in the business is more closely tied to a more cautious, discerning consumer. We believe the updated guidance represents a prudent assessment of current business trends, the macro environment, and the actions we expect to take. Scott will provide more detail on our revised outlook and the assumptions underlying it. Against this backdrop, our priorities are clear. Sustain the positive momentum at Tommy Bahama, address the assortment and marketing issues at Lilly Pulitzer, and build on the profitability improvement at Johnny Woods. We are managing inventory expenses and capital carefully while maintaining our focus on cash generation, debt reduction, and a strong balance sheet. After Scott's comments, I will turn briefly to discuss several broader actions underway across Oxford. As always, I want to thank our teams across Oxford. Their resilience, creativity, and commitment to our customers are the foundation of everything we do. With that, I'll turn the call over to Scott for more detailed commentary on our financial performance and outlook.

Thank you, Tom. Consolidate net sales for $394 million in the second quarter of fiscal 26 compared to $403 million in the second quarter of fiscal 25. off, and near the high end of our guidance range of $380 million to $400 million. The company comparable sales were down slightly at 1%, including a 3% decrease in retail sales and flat e-commerce sales. The decline in retail comp sales was partially offset by sales from non-comp stores open primarily in the prior year. Notably, food and beverage sales increased 11%, driven primarily by non-comp locations. Wholesale sales decreased 14% compared to the prior year, but was primarily driven by lower sales of residual inventory through off-price channels. By brand, sales growth at Time Bahama helped to partially offset decreases in their other businesses. Sales decreases at Lilly Pulitzer and Johnny Was were driven by a mid-single-digit negative comp and lower off-price wholesale sales, while the sales decline at emerging brands was driven primarily by lower wholesale sales. Depositive sales growth at Tommy Bahama was driven by a low single-digit positive comp and or DTC channels, partially offset by a decline in wholesale sales, driven primarily by lower all-price clearance sales. Adjusted gross margin expanded 140 basis points to 63.1%, driven primarily by updated assortment, sourcing, and pricing strategies across our portfolio that resulted in higher IMUs, along with a change in sales mix with off-price wholesale sales representing a lower proportion of net sales. These factors were partially offset by a higher proportion of net sales in our DTC channels occurring during promotional events at Tommy Bahama, Lily Pulitzer, and emerging brands. Tariff costs included in inventory sold during the year were materially consistent with the prior year. As Tom mentioned, we recorded and received significant tariff refunds during the quarter. We recorded a reduction to cost of goods sold of $42 million of tariffs previously paid and received substantially the entire balance during the second quarter or shortly thereafter. The impact of these refunds was excluded from our adjusted results. Adjusted SG&A expenses increased slightly to $210 million compared to $209 million last year, impacted primarily by new brick-and-mortar retail and food and beverage locations, as well as increases in software and consulting costs and costs associated with the transition of our Alliance Georgia Distribution Center operations. These increases were partially offset by lower incentive compensation and cuts in more discretionary categories like travel. The result of this yielded adjusted EBITDA of $45 million, or an 11.4% adjusted EBITDA margin, compared to adjusted EBITDA of $43 million, or 10.7% in the prior year. Moving beyond EBITDA, adjusted depreciation amortization increased by approximately $1 million compared to the prior year, primarily due to increases in depreciation related to our new Lions facility. Interest dispense was relatively flat compared to the prior years. Our average debt levels declined during the year. Our effective tax rate of 27.5% was lower than the prior year of 29.6% due to certain discrete items that were more significant in the prior year. With all this, we ended up with $1.34 of adjusted EPS. Moving to the balance sheet, inventory decreased $20 million to 12% on a LIFO basis. that included a $10 million increase to the LIFO reserve. On a FIFO basis, inventory decreased $9 million, or 4%, compared to the second quarter of 2025, with decreases in emerging brands, Lou Poulter and Johnny was. We ended the quarter with long-term debt of $73 million, which is down $70 million compared to $143 million at the end of the first quarter, and compared to long-term debt of $81 million at the end of the second quarter of fiscal 25 and $116 million at the end of fiscal 2025. Cash flow from operations provided $97 million in the first half of 2026, which includes $29 million received related to tariff refunds compared to $80 million in the first half of 2025. We also had lower capital expenditures of $32 million in the first half of 2026 compared to the first half of fiscal 25 of $55 million. The decrease, which primarily related to the addition of fewer new bricks and mortar locations and lower expenditures on the Lions Georgia Distribution Center project as that project comes to a close, also allow for further reduction of our long-term debt. We're also paying dividends of $22 million. I'll spend some time on our updated outlook for 2026. As Tom mentioned, the ongoing challenges in the Lilly Pulitzer business, along with our generally conservative view of consumer sentiment, led us to reduce our top and bottom line outlook for the remainder of the year. For the full year, we now expect a low single-digit negative comp for the total company, which is lower than our previous range of slightly negative to slightly positive. As a result of the change in our comp assumptions, we are revising our guidance range for the full year and now expect sales to be between $1.43 billion and $1.47 billion, or a decline of 3% to relatively flat, compared to sales of $1.478 billion in fiscal 2025. Our revised sales plan for the full year of 26 includes a sales decrease in Lily Pulitzer and Johnny Woz, partially offset by a sales increase in Tommy Bahama, and growth in the emerging brands. By distribution channel, the full-year sales plan consists of low single-digit decreases in our direct-to-consumer channels and a high single-digit decrease in wholesale, partially offset by a low double-digit increase in our food and beverage channel that is benefiting from the addition of new locations. Moving on to gross margin, our outlook assumes that the tariff rates reflecting the recent Section 301, changes will remain in effect for the balance of fiscal 2026. Because those rates are only modestly higher than the rates applicable to most of our first half inventory receipts, we do not expect the changes to materially affect fiscal 2026 results. Any additional tariff increases implemented during the balance of the year would be expected to affect primarily future periods due to the timing of inventory receipts and sales. When removing any tariff refund related impact, we now expect an approximate 50 basis points increase in gross margin for the year with improved IMUs and a continuation of the shift to a higher proportion of direct consumer sales to be partially offset by higher promotional activity, particularly at Lilly Pulitzer. As a result of these factors, we expect gross margins to improve approximately 100 basis points in both Q3 and Q4 fiscal 26 compared to the prior year. In addition to lower sales and higher gross margins, we expect SG&A to grow in the low single-digit range, primarily due to the annualization of incremental SG&A from new stores added primarily in fiscal 2025, additional costs related to transition to the Lions-Georgia Distribution Center, and increased software-related cost. Also within the EBITDA, we expect higher royalties and other income of approximately $2 million in Fiscal 26, largely due to the normalization of sales from our licensing partners that were heavily impacted by the implementation of tariffs in Fiscal 25. Outside of EBITDA, we expect an increase in depreciation due to significantly all of the incremental costs to operate the new Lions DC in Fiscal 26 being depreciation related. We also expect interest expense of $6 million, which is lower than our previous estimate due to our recent significant reduction in debt. Considering all these items and a tax rate between 27% and 28%, we're revising our 2026 adjusted EPS guidance to $1.60 to $2 versus adjusted EPS of $2.11 last year. In the third quarter of 26, we expect sales of 280 to 300 million compared to sales of 307 million in the third quarter of 25. This primarily reflects a mid-single-digit negative to low-single-digit negative comp assumption in relatively flat wholesale sales. By brand, we expect lower sales at Lilly Pulitzer and Johnny Wuzz to be partially offset by a sales increase at Tommy Palma and growth at emerging brands. We also expect gross margins to span approximately 100 basis points, SGA to grow in the low single-digit range, royalty income of approximately $3 million, an interest expense of $1 million, and an effective tax rate of approximately 24%. We expect this to result in third quarter adjusted loss per share between $1.40 and $1.20, compared to a loss per share of $0.92 last year. Our fourth quarter sales plan includes the benefits of some additional promotional activity, primarily at Lilly Pulitzer, along with most of our groups benefiting from the correction of tariff-related merchandising issues that significantly impacted our holiday season and fourth quarter results last year. As a result, our fourth quarter plan includes a comp assumption of relatively flat to slightly positive. Moving to our CapEx outlook for the remainder of the year, we expect capital expenditures for the year to be approximately $60 million, including the $32 million spent in the first half of Fiscal 26, compared to a total of $108 million in Fiscal 25. The remaining capital expenditures relate primarily to new brick-and-mortar locations and the remaining capital expenditures from the new distribution center in Lyons, Georgia. I will now turn it back to Tom for some closing comments.

Thank you, Scott. Before we open the call for questions, I want to briefly discuss a broader review we recently initiated across the enterprise aimed at meaningfully enhancing operating margins in the next few years. The review is focused on opportunities to simplify the business, improve efficiency, and sharpen how we allocate resources across Oxford in order to become less dependent on historical rates of growth to fuel higher profitability. We are still developing our plans and expect to share more as they are finalized, but we believe it is important to highlight several actions already underway. First, we have made significant progress ramping up the Lions, Georgia Distribution Center. As the facility matures, we'll look to take full advantage of our investment and move more product into the building, including from a legacy 3PL, to operate more efficiently across our increasingly automated footprint. With a major investment phase nearing completion, we also expect capital expenditures to normalize after several years of elevated spending on Lions, which will increase the cash available for further debt reduction. With impending retirements within our technology leadership, we have transitions underway that will support a reassessment of our IT infrastructure with an eye towards simplifying our tech stack and advancing our data analytics and AI capabilities across the enterprise. We are also optimizing our store fleet, including converting selected Southern Tide and Johnny Woz locations to Lilly Pellitzer, where we believe the market and location are better suited to that brand. We will continue to evaluate the fleet market by market and location by location and make changes where we believe they will create the greatest long-term value. We have a new brand leader at Southern Tide, and also within our emerging brands group, we consolidated oversight of the group's finance, planning, and operations functions to improve consistency and efficiency. These are a few examples of the actions underway. Alongside the work at Tommy Bahama, Lily Pellitzer, and Johnny was, we believe these actions will simplify the business, strengthen execution, and position Oxford for more consistent performance and stronger returns over time. We'll have more to say about all of this in December. With that, we're happy to take your questions. Paul?

Thank you. We'll now be conducting a question and answer session. If you'd like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is on the question queue. You may press star 2 if you'd like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Thank you. Our first question is from Ashley Owens with KeyBank Capital Marks.

Hey, great. Thanks, and good afternoon. Maybe just to start, I wanted to focus in on Tommy Bahama because I thought the point about you calling out the return to positive constant in Florida was very important, just given the size of that market. Could you unpack what helped drive that improvement in the quarter and, you know, whether you're seeing similar strength across both the men's and women's categories?

Yeah. Thank you, Ashley. Great questions. And we were And I'm glad you called it out because we really were thrilled to see Florida turn positive. As you know, for a number of quarters now, it's been negative for the most part in Tommy Bahama. And that is such a big and important part of our business that, you know, when it's negative, it's tough. When it's positive, it makes the whole world seem better. So very glad to see that. But men's versus women's overall in Tommy this year, men's has been up. Women's has actually been up more than men's, which we're happy to see. As you know, we've believed for a long, long time that women's is a huge opportunity in Tommy Bahama. We've made steady progress in growing that business, and what we've seen this year has been really encouraging.

And then maybe just quickly on Lillia as well. So I think you were very explicit that spring 27 is that first season where you can and are working to reshape the assortment and that the changes, you know, we're not going to see that positive trend change until fiscal within this year. I guess, should we now think about Lillia as being a spring 27 recovery story? Could there be improvements in the comp with some of that planned promotionality through the back half of the year? And then just any proof points to kind of watch out for that would tell you that the recess working ahead of the launch, then maybe just one on the modeling side of things with the gross margin guidance. I think it was 100 bits improvement in both Q3 and Q4, despite those elevated promotions at Lilly. Just anything you can say. as to what's giving you the confidence in that outlook, particularly if that consumer demand does remain a little bit pressured?

Yeah, so I think you understand this, Ashley, but, you know, the length of the product pipeline is really the issue. So you get into spring 26, you realize that you've got a, you know, really pretty significant assortment issue, But you've got the rest of the year's product already in the pipeline, and you can do limited things to adjust for it. So spring 27 is the first season where we were able to really incorporate, you know, what we realized was wrong about the assortment in spring 26. The rest of the seasons for 26, you know, we're already fundamentally in the pipeline. There are some other reasons to think that there might be some fourth quarter upside in Lilly. And that's just because last year they were struggling through the tariff-related gaps in the product assortment. and they overall had a weak fourth quarter last year. So you might see some upside because of those things in the fourth quarter. And then the other thing is the resort product line, I think, which will look more like the spring 27 line, I think could give us some early reads, but you're not really going to know until very late in the quarter when you've got some spring stuff. And then on the gross margin question, certainly a good question, and I'll let Scott walk you through that and why we feel good about what we're projecting.

Yeah, we are starting with higher IMUs. Also, wholesale will be a little bit lower percent of the total mix, So that will help neutralize or more than all set the higher promotional cadence that we do expect out of Lilly this year.

For helpful color. Thank you.

Thank you, Ashley.

They're ticking the box on their turnaround plan. And then within the emerging brands, it's really a southern tide issue. You know, we don't, they're too small for it to make sense for us to get into breaking out a lot of granularity, but Southern Tide's the laggard there. Everything else looks quite good, and as we talked about, we've brought in a new leader at Southern Tide, very excited about him. I think this is his sixth week, maybe, on the job, and we're kind of rebooting Southern Tide. He's already seeing some good opportunities of things that we can improve, you know, closer in and then obviously beyond. So I don't think there's as much of a divergence as it might seem like on the surface.

Got it. That's a really helpful color and kind of answered my next question, which is going to be on emerging brands. So I'll pass it on. Thank you, Ethan.

Our next question is from Mauricio Serna with UBS.

Yes, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Maybe could you talk about, you know, quarter to date, what kind of comps you're seeing, you know, overall? And, you know, how should we think about the comps specifically for Tommy Bahama? How are you thinking about, like, the sustainability of the kind of comps that you delivered into, too? And then after that, I have a follow-up on Lily Pulitzer.

Yeah, the comps quarter date, a little cloudy because you have some promotion timing. You also have Labor Day being late, so it's a little cloudy. They're down slightly, but there's a lot of noise in them this early in the quarter that we'll normalize more as the quarter goes on.

And then specifically on Tommy?

We're not going to get into comps group this early. It's just one month is not with some of the time.

No, I wasn't asking about, like, comps for Tommy. More like how are you thinking about the comps for, like, that brand in the year? Yeah, for the year, Tommy, I mean, we expect them to be slightly positive for the year. and so yeah slightly positive comps for the got it got it and then just on on Liri Pulitzer I guess just what's one we're wondering how are you the assortment strategy like you know like on a go forward I guess like I recall like last year in 25 you know one of the things that had been successful was to move that, you know, bring more assortment that was higher AUR. And now it sounds like, you know, like it seems like it went too far. So like is the right strategy being like more like more towards the historical type of AURs or you're trying to figure out like from that perspective, how should we think about the assortment strategy? And then I think you also mentioned on the prepared remarks that you were converting some, I think it was Johnny Walsh and Southern Tide Stores into Lily Pulitzer. Like, what's the rationality behind that, considering that that brand seems to be still, you know, obviously struggling, you know, and you expect that to continue throughout the rest of the year?

Yeah, good questions, Mauricio. And we have, over the last several years, been able to grow the higher-priced business at Lily Pulitzer. And even this year, you know, we continue to have success in those higher price points. But think of your pricing strategy as like a pyramid where that top tier, which for us in dresses is $400 and up. It's the little tiny triangle at the top of the pyramid. And then you go down, you know, the pyramid, the pieces get bigger and bigger. That's, I think, the way almost any brand in the world is, you know, set up from a price architecture standpoint. And so what we did this year, you captured it, is I think we just went too far too fast in, you know, shifting up the pricing tiers. And so last year, in our entry price point bucket, and for us, that's dresses, which are a big category, under $200. Last year, that would have been about half of the styles that we offered would have been in that price bucket. This year, it was down to almost down to a third. I think it was like 35%.

I think it was like 35%.