Article Excerpt:
TWST: We'd like to begin with a brief historical sketch of Deb and a picture of the things you are doing at the present time.Mr. Susson: The company was founded as Joy Hosiery in the 1930s and for about 30 or 40 years, remained in that end of the women's apparel marketplace. From the 1970s forward, we've principally been a junior apparel operator, offering products to females principally between the ages of 13 and 18 out of mall-based and some strip center stores, averaging approximately 6,000 square feet, and our offerings cover the gamut of casual tops and bottoms. We sell dresses ' a lot at homecoming and at prom time ' all the various accessories, shoes and what have you. Our success over the last year or so has been broad based, but a lot of it has come from increases in sales volumes that we've experienced in the dress and shoe business.
TWST: What would account for the difference between the last year and
everything before?
Mr. Susson: We've had a very long and successful history. We
periodically do run through cycles, like most apparel retailers do,
where business in a given year is not as good as it might have been in
the year prior to it. Through the tail end of 2003 and all of 2004, we
were in one of those downward cycles that pretty much wound its way to
the bottom and started to turn positive as the year ended at 1/31/04. So
January 2004 was a decent month and so was all of fiscal 2005, which is
the year ending 1/31/05. We started to stabilize the business. Sales
were relatively flat with the prior year, but we generated that sales
volume with fewer markdowns, our margins improved and our profitability
improved. In the year that we just ended, our comparable store sales
increased by approximately 7%, markdowns continued to decline, and
profitability increased commensurately to the point where we earned
$1.78 a share in the year we just ended as compared to a $1.30 in the
prior year.
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