Stitch Fix, Inc. (SFIX) October 8, 2026 Conference Transcript

Good morning, everyone, and thank you very much for joining us today. I'm thrilled to be here with our next conversation. When you think about new, when you think about new ways of transacting, finding out, researching brands, buying clothing for yourself in an environment where there's a lot of change going on, whether it's the GLP ones or anything else, Stitch Fix is at the forefront. We have Matt Baer, the CEO with us today, who's been there since June of 2023. And before we get started with our conversation, in very fast pace, just got to read these little things. As a reminder, Stitch Fix expects this discussion to include forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risk and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially. Descriptions of these risks and other factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from these statements are discussed in Stitch Fix filings of the SEC, including its Form 10-K for Fiscal 26 and subsequent periodic reports. Statements made today are based on information available to the company as of today and will not be updated to reflect subsequent events or circumstances that may arise, except as required by law during this discussion. Stitch Fix expects to discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are providing the press release on Stitch Fix's investor relations website or its Form 10-K for fiscal 26 filed with the SEC. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for its GAAP results. Done. Let's move on.

You know, Dana, if this career path doesn't work out for you, you could be an auctioneer or something.

Keep moving. very impressive thank you thank you i'm about fast but speaking about fast one of the things to talk about is transformation and proof matt you describe the transformation at stitch fix as reimagining the client experience around four pillars creating new engagement opportunities deepening client stylist relationships adding flexibility the fix and strengthening the assortment and before we talk a little bit about most of you should know matt is a stylist himself So he doesn't just talk the talk or walk the walk, whatever that phrase is. He does both of it. So what are you seeing? Have the instructional improvements from the transformation made you a more resilient business? And your stylist expertise.

Yeah, well, first, Dana, thank you for having us here today. And always excited to chat retail and consumer with you. And as Dana noted, we have been on this transformation journey at Stitch Fix. Our last fiscal year just ended on August 1st. And in that year, our revenue grew 6.4%. That fourth quarter also capped our sixth consecutive quarter of revenue growth. And in that quarter, we also had the highest client retention in the last four years and the highest revenue proactive client in the history of the company, as well as our 12th consecutive quarter of average order value growth. And all of that is because of the transformational work that we did and that clear articulation of the four pillars that you just laid out for us we made sure that we had the best in class assortment for our clients we made sure that we had the leading technology and innovation working to create a differentiated and superior experience for our clients and we also made sure that we were driving additional leverage and efficiency through our business we had 10 consecutive quarters of a contribution profit above 30 we improved our ebitda margin we made sure that we had positive free cash flow. And at the end of the day, we had a really healthy balance sheet with no debt and over $220 million in cash. And now that allows us to invest in the next phase of our transformation into more active client growth, as well as to continue to improve our technology and leading innovation with further AI experiences.

That's exciting. And so you've been outperforming the U.S. apparel, footwear, and accessories market. Where are the share gains coming from?

As I noted, we grew 6.4% revenue last year. According to Surkana, the broader US apparel, footwear, and accessories market only grew 1%. So we're putting significant gap between us and the market overall. And when you think about why we're gaining share, who we're gaining share from, it's really the fact that other retailers are disappointing consumers or not meeting their expectations. In the overall retail industry over the last couple of decades, they really looked at human connection and service as a cost center and continued to cost that out. For us, that's where we lean in. When a client onboards into Stitch Fix, we learn everything about their style preferences, everything about their budget, everything about their fit parameters, so we can tailor a personalized experience just for them. And then we pair them with a human stylist to create connection, to create a real relationship, to make sure that they have a reason to come back and someone to talk to. I walked the Lenox Square Mall department store recently for an hour. No one approached me. No one said good morning. No one asked how I was doing or why I came into the store that day. And if they did, they wouldn't have known anything about me. They wouldn't have known my style preferences or my budget. Maybe they could have eyeballed me for a fit, but they wouldn't have really been able to serve me as intimately or individually as Stitch Fix does. And it's the superiority of our service that helps us continue to gain market share.

And revenue per active client hit a record level in the fiscal fourth quarter. What is driving the results? How do you think about the durability of the opportunity to grow client value over time?

Yeah, I love talking about the revenue per active client. I think it's a really important metric that just underscores all of the improvements that we've made. The record high, $592, up almost 8% year over year, and the 10th consecutive quarter that Revenue Per Active Client grew on a year-over-year basis. And the real focus here as part of our transformation was born out of a client focus group that we did, I think it was my first or second month on the job in Dallas. And these were ostensibly our best or our most loyal clients. And when I got into the room, I expected them to talk about all the things they loved about Stitch Fix. But what I actually heard the most was that they were frustrated because they wanted to spend more with Stitch Fix. They loved the service as it existed, but wanted it to be a service that enabled them to be the only retailer where they got all apparel, accessories, and footwear needs met. And previously, the rigidity in our service, it didn't allow that. And the tight curation of our assortment didn't allow that. So as you noted, a couple of the pillars of the transformation was to create more flexibility in our service, and also part of it was to broaden the depth and the breadth of the different categories and the different use cases that we sell. And when you think about where that revenue per active client is now, we actually see an opportunity to triple that over the long term, which gives us such a high level of conviction in the future growth opportunity of the business that we can grow revenue considerably, even without active client growth, which we're also focused on delivering as well.

Got it. Triple is a nice word.

And when you think about some of the newer flexible fix offerings, whether it's the larger fixes, the theme fixes, other formats, what are you seeing deepening client engagement and expanding the ways that the clients use it? yeah yeah it's a it's a great call out on all those different services that we now offer those are the things that underpin the additional flexibility that we've added to the service those are the things that uh help us make sure that whether a client is starting a new job or moving to a new geography or going through a body transformation while they're on a glp1 medication we're able to meet them where they are we can ensure that uh you know if they need head-to-toe outfits, we've got them with a larger fix. If they want to update their athleisure, we got them with a theme fix. If they find this perfect item when they're shopping our freestyle channel and they want us to build an outfit around it, we can do that for them now too. So all of this additional flexibility is what's helped us continue to grow our wallet share with these clients and helped us increase our market share overall as well.

Got it. One of the things we've been talking about in the sessions is about brands. And you sell both private brands, your own brands, and market brands. How is the broader assortment improving the client proposition and drive growth in categories, whether it's footwear or others?

Yeah, it's a great question, and that was something that is also critical to our transformation. When I joined, we had leading technology and innovation that was powering our experience, but that alone was not going to make us a successful apparel retailer. We also needed to have best-in-class assortment in order to meet and exceed our client needs. So we got to work. The first year of our transformation, we rationalized our assortment. We exited lots of brands. We exited a lot of items. We even sunset some of our private brands and we challenged the teams. We have to be so proud of every single private brand item that we bring to market that it stands for exceptional value and exceptional quality. We launched some new private brands in the process and now we're getting exceptional results from our private brand portfolio overall. and it's delivering 500 basis points higher margin than our market brands but the market brands play a really important role too they help us fill white space they help us you know ensure that we're meeting the needs of our clients that want specific brands and after we you know really rationalize our brands we got to work adding back the brands that our clients covet as well as the ones we think that they would be really excited about learning about in just the last year we added over 80 new brands. As part of this transformation, we added brands like Roan, Varley, Favorite Daughter, Merrill, Jordan Brand, Nike Golf, Michelin Nest, NFL Licensed Apparel, Birkenstock, Bagu, Farm Rio. And my opinion is that we have the best in class multi-brand assortment of any other retailer in our class.

And the white space opportunities ahead, it seems like there's a bunch of them. What are you most excited about with them?

Yeah. So one that I'm really focused on, in addition to our opportunity to up-level our assortment, we also over-indexed in just tops and bottoms. And that over-index was so strong that if you took our market share in tops and bottoms and just applied that same market share to activewear, athleisure, footwear, and accessories, there was a billion-dollar fair share opportunity in those categories. our merchant team, our client experience team really leaned in and found opportunities to assort into those categories and then to style them for our clients. In the last quarter, activewear and athleisure was up 21% year over year and footwear was up 14% year over year.

And you also have the goal to capture and service more of a client's wardrobe. So wallet share opportunity, what does that look like to you? How do you capture it?

Yeah. So a lot of what we've been talking about is exactly what enables us to build into that wallet share. When I talked about being able to kind of triple that wallet share that we have, that comes from Serkana data as well. We feel really good. We're really proud of the fact that within our clients right now, we have doubled the wallet share of our next competitor. But more importantly, that same wallet share data shows that there's headroom to triple their spend with us before we've saturated their overall spend on apparel, accessories, and footwear. So one way of doing it is to continue to invest in these categories that were underpenetrated. Another is to add more use cases that are new to our experience, like special occasion dressing is a great example there. And then also the launch of family accounts enables us to continue to gain more wallet share from the whole household. You go back to that same focus group in Dallas. Our clients were really clear. They loved the service, but so many of them were shopping on behalf of others in their household. And the experience at Stitch Fix was, it was individual between client and stylist. You weren't able to create profiles on behalf of others in your household. And now that we've unlocked that, we're capturing an even greater share of the entire household's wallet.

Got it. And another topic that you're very plugged into for Stitch Fix is AI. Very important for you. How are your stylists and technology working together today in a way that perhaps differentiates Stitch Fix from others?

Yeah, at the core of the differentiation is our leadership in both. You know, we have leading technology and innovation, which is enabling us to create bespoke and leading generative AI experiences. We are also using AI with great efficiency and effectiveness on the back end that enables our stylists to perform their job even better. And then you also look at the history of us as a business, where we capture so much data about a client up front. That's more data of a higher quality than most retailers get from their clients over their entire lifetime relationship. And as everyone knows, the quality of an AI experience is only as good as the data that goes into it. So when you look at our experiences, we're taking that real first-party customer data to power the AI recommendations and experiences that ultimately our stylists are able to use to serve clients and that our clients can now experience themselves.

So speaking of that experience, you have something called Stitch Fix Vision with See It On May. What are you seeing from clients who engage with the AI tools? What makes it so important?

Yeah, so for us, you know, when we looked at our opportunity with generative AI from an image visualization standpoint, we wanted to make sure that we were creating something that's unique and something that adds real value for our customers. We had this kind of motto internally, it's help, not hype. We're not doing something because someone on the left or right or a competitor is doing it. We're doing it because we know that this experience will create an elevated customer experience. And when we launched Vision last year, clients are now able to see themselves dressed head to toe in Stitch Fix apparel, accessories, and footwear. Unlike other experiences, this is all based on that first party data that we have on that individual. So everything in your image will match your style preference. It will align to your budget. And when you bring it home, it will also fit you. That experience is fully shoppable, fully shareable across social media. But we always envisioned creating this as a platform. And the next iteration of that platform is the see it on me experience, whereby now clients are in control and can actually create outfits and turn those outfits into those generative AI images to see themselves dressed in anything that they'd like to help give them confidence in what they purchase. And it is driving significantly more purchases, and we see that in the freestyle channel, and we see the increased engagement from our clients as well. We've now generated over 22 million vision images, and we see clients continue to come back and continue to give us high satisfaction scores for this experience.

Got it. And when you think about AI, I always think about how is it a revenue opportunity? you mentioned that, but also an expense reducer. What are you seeing? Are there any meaningful benefits from the efficiency standpoint of AI?

Yeah, there absolutely are. I'm really proud of how the team has embraced this technology and this opportunity to really go deep in every single function in the business. We didn't let any function not participate, but even more importantly, everyone raised their hand and at one point we had over 400 different use cases across the organization that was digging in to see where ai could create efficiencies where ai could make us more effective where ai could save us more money and you see that manifest across the board whether that's in terms of which inventory we buy how we price our products online how we staff in our fulfillment centers how we serve clients in our customer service it's really ubiquitous across the company. And I would go back to the fact that we've now delivered 10 consecutive quarters of a contribution profit greater than 30%. A lot of that is because of these efficiencies that we've created throughout the system. We also worked hard to get creative and think about really bespoke opportunities for us. A great example of that is in our private brand physical product development process. We have this proprietary experience now where we actually use AI to help design our lines. And it's taken a process that would have taken months for a private brand team of many employees, is now done by AI because we have access to all of our internal data on our brands, on our customers, on size, fit, and style. And that enables us to create holistic lines that all work really well together and then drill it down to the item level. And then someone from our team can come in and put the finishing touches on it. And that has allowed us to take a process that used to take months into a couple of days and is one of the many things that's helping to deliver the great results in our private brands.

That's impressive. So the consumer environment, we know it's definitely become a little bit murky in some of it. How is that showing up in client behavior? How is it? And how is the core stitch fix customer relationship remain so resilient?

Yeah. So in our core business, we're seeing notable resilience. Our core business is a recurring fixed model, and that continues to be strong for us. And the reason there, again, is in the uniqueness of our service. Our clients and stylists built these deep and enduring relationships. They have open dialogue. If someone's budget changes week to week, month to month, quarter to quarter, they can tell their stylist, and we can then make adjustments in in terms of what we sell them or send them. And then also there's a recurrence to that business too. When the macro environment is tough, consumers might say, well, I'm not driving to the mall this weekend, but for us, the fixes are delivered to your home, they're set on a recurring basis, and we see our clients getting more and more of their needs met through this process. We are seeing a little bit of softness though in our more discretionary corners of our business, that's in our freestyle channel and our more manual or ad hoc experiences. And then the last point I'll say, too, that really gives us a lot of confidence is we're seeing the same strength across all household income segments at our business. So all different household incomes are continuing to perform just as well within our core business.

And one thing that we all want to see improve a little bit is active client growth. It was a little bit softer than expected coming out of the fiscal year. What needs to improve to put you back on a path toward growth?

Yeah, there's a couple of things worth mentioning there. The first is just what we're seeing in the market overall. I was reading a report just yesterday where CPMs are up 43% year over year for the total market. It's becoming a more competitive and a more costly market in order to bring new clients in. And that's the market that we're playing in. What we also shared previously is that if it wasn't for those increased CACs, we would have already returned to active client growth. So I do believe the team is focused on the right things. They're working at meeting, they're working at marketing to the right different demographics and sections within our consumers. And then I'll point to what I mentioned at the top of our conversation too, is that our client retention is the best that it's been in four years. So those that are coming into our service are staying longer than they're spending more. And we're confident that we'll get back to bringing in enough new clients for active client growth in the future.

Got it. And then you just finished your fiscal year. So you gave out updated forward fiscal year guidance. How much of it is, just unpack it, how much of it is due to the more challenging consumer environment versus internal adjustments being made at Stitch Fix?

Yeah, the vast majority of that is a reflection of the macro environment. You know, the two things that I've called out already, one is that relative drawdown in the more discretionary areas of our business. And then the second is the elevated expense within the marketing environment as well. That being said, what we're focused on internally is executing against what's within our control. And we feel really good and have a high level of conviction around our core business model. And we have a high level of conviction around our strategy and the initiatives that we're resourcing in order to get that revenue growth and active client growth when the macro environment improves. And the way we think about it more simply is that despite any macroeconomic headwind, we're going to continue to play offense.

Got it. And then it's a new fiscal year. So what areas of growth or margin opportunities are you most excited about this year?

So for me, if I'm thinking about the original mission or vision of Stitch Fix, it was always that we could create this elevated alternative to traditional shopping. And I think we've done done a really great job in that already. And what is that next iteration is around creating a personalization of the entirety of the experience to really like in the same manner in which we personalize recommendations at the onset of the business. You can see the earliest manifestations of that with Stitch Fix Vision and now with See It On Me. And we'll eventually work to a state where a client can see themselves in the entirety of the experience all the way from onboarding through shopping and inspiration and engagement moments all the way through checkout and post-purchase that gets us really excited we're really have a high level of conviction that will continue to add value for our clients continue to create engagement opportunities continue to create opportunities to grow that wallet share further the other piece that gets me really excited too is the success that we've had with clients going through a body transformation um i think as everyone knows glp1 use just continues to grow in this country the last data point i saw was that 11 of the u.s population was on a glp1 medication i believe that we were early if not the first to really recognize this opportunity and we went to market and we and we communicated to people that either were likely were on a glp1 medication and going through a body transformation because the Stitch Fix service was built for this moment. Our ability to know so much about you and then have a one-to-one relationship with a human stylist for each individual client gives us this unique competitive advantage. So we had targeted marketing, dedicated landing page. We've now trained every single stylist how to serve at the highest level someone going through a body transformation. And the results are really encouraging right now we created this optional onboarding question now to indicate if someone's going through a body transformation our new clients are expressing at 20 on this optional question that they are so that's nearly double the rate of glp1 use in the country and an even more interesting stat also from circana is that 23 of all sales and apparel are from glp1 users and that's only 11 of the population so our ability to win with this client gives us that much more confidence in terms of our ability to grow revenue and client base going forward.

That's a new wardrobe wallet share opportunity.

Absolutely.

So, and moving the needle, as you think about when we're sitting here a year from now, what will you have said that, you know what, that moved the needle last year?

Yeah, look, I think part of it is really just the continued execution on the strategy as a whole. You know, we've got the right strategy. We continue to elevate our client experience. We continue to target the right consumers with a high level of resonance and we do believe that with this strategy we'll continue to grow our active we'll grow our active client base in the future we'll continue to be able to deliver revenue growth and market share gains in the future and eventually what you'll see is clients only need stitch fix for all apparel accessories and footwear needs and that's what we'd be excited to share and walk everyone through here next year and is your stylist count going up in terms of the customers that you have. Dana loves this. I love the fact that he's a stylist. Yeah, I styled a fix this morning and it helps me get really close to the customer. It helps me know our tools and systems intimately, be familiar with the assortment that we offer.

And that you train on GLP1s.

And I'm fully trained to support someone going through a body transformation as well. And it is really important because that's a very emotional experience. And for people that are going through this they need help and there's nowhere else that they can get a level of service like we're able to provide and we provide that emotional support that right level of empathy we know the right questions to ask and we also have physical assortment that actually helps with people that are in the midst of a body transformation and all of those things continue to give us a competitive advantage terrific matt i want to thank you very much we look forward to continuing to the path of progress of Stitch Fix.

Thank you. Thank you for joining.