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Text: Molly Langenstein, our CEO and president, also joins me today.
Although 2020 and pandemic uncertainty created a sales environment that was challenging as reflected in our results, we successfully navigated this extraordinary landscape while also creating a solid foundation that we believe positions us for our return to growth in 2021 and the years ahead.
We rapidly accelerated our transformation to a digital-first company, fast-tracking numerous innovation and technology investments, which drove higher consumer engagement and year-over-year digital sales increase of nearly 20%, led by Soma's digital sales increase of 72%.
As a brand, Soma generated comparable sales growth for the last seven months in fiscal 2020.
And according to the NPD Group, for the 12 months ended January 2021, Soma's growth exceeded that of the U.S. apparel market and the market leader for nonsport bras and panties and was in the top five brands overall in the sleepwear market.
I am also pleased to report that Soma sales for the back half of fiscal 2020 were the highest in the history of the brand.
We believe this is compelling evidence Soma is well positioned to accelerate recent market share gains.
Our enhanced marketing efforts drove traffic as well as new customers to our brands, and newly acquired customers were retained at a meaningfully higher rate than fiscal 2019.
The average age of our new customers dropped 10 years for Chico's and eight years for Soma.
And the average age for the new White House black market customers complemented the current target customer, reinforcing the runway for all three brands.
Our new apparel selections resonated with customers.
We relaunched Zenergy in Chico's with new fabrication, styling and marketing and also increased our gifting assortment in key item depth, which showed positive results.
At White House black market, we pivoted to casualization and launched Lux Weekend, new runway leggings and a focus on denim that customers love.
We significantly enhanced our liquidity and financial flexibility by amending and extending our credit facility to $300 million and ended the year with a solid cash position.
We obtained landlord commitments of $65 million in rent abatements and reductions and further rationalized our real estate position by permanently closing 40 underperforming locations over the last year.
And we substantially streamlined our organization and permanently reduced our cost structure to more efficiently support our business.
These efforts resulted in approximately $235 million of annual savings in fiscal 2020 or 23% greater than our original plan.
Chico's FAS is a company of three unique brands, and we believe we are poised to take market share in each of these businesses when the pandemic-related consumer pause lifts.
We are optimistic about store traffic rebounding as vaccines become more widely available and have, in fact, seen this correlation prove out.
We believe Soma, in particular, has the opportunity for significant growth.
Today, the intimate apparel and loungewear market is a nearly $7 billion business in the U.S. and is forecasted to reach over $11 billion by 2025.
Soma's compelling position in intimates and a seven month of comparable sales growth, give us confidence that Soma is on track to take a meaningful piece of this market and become one of the largest intimate apparel brands in the country.
At the same time, we believe there is opportunity to optimize and strengthen both Chico's and White House black market.
The disruption in the competitive set has left white space that we can strategically take.
At Chico's, we expect to reinvigorate growth through loyalty, community and design.
At White House black market, we expect to drive consumer enthusiasm for the brand by a focus on fabric, fit and fashion that meets our customer where she is in her lifestyle today.
In order to maximize the opportunities in each of our brands, we are targeting five key focus areas for 2021.
First, continuing our ongoing digital transformation.
Second, further refining product through fit, quality, fabric and innovation.
Third, driving increased customer engagement through marketing.
Number four, maintaining our operating and cost discipline and finally, further enhancing the productivity of our real estate portfolio.
Allow me to elaborate on each of these.
Number one, continuing our ongoing digital transformation.
Over the last year and a half, we prioritized digital as the primary sales channel for all three of our brands, making major strategic investments in talent and technology to pivot up to a digital-first company.
We are enabling her to shop how she chooses in a way that is personalized and simplified across every touch point of her shopping experience.
Innovative launches that we consider meaningful competitive advantage includes Style Connect, our digital styling tool; My Closet, a personal closet feature; and social proofing.
Each of these tools have gained traction and driven engagement and conversion.
In the fourth quarter, Style Connect orders nearly doubled from last year.
We have successfully enrolled 42% of our active customer file in Style Connect, representing almost three million customers.
Our prioritization to digital also incorporates mobile POS, AI search engine optimization and enhanced navigation touch points across all brands.
We have also accelerated the launch of new leading edge digital selling and fulfillment tools to drive greater online customer demand.
We will be rolling out more innovations in 2021, including an optimized mobile-first experience.
We continue to leverage our digital investments, converting single channel customers to the omnichannel customers as the average omnichannel customer spend is nearly three and a half times more than a single channel customer.
Number two, further refining products through fit, quality, fabric and innovation.
At each of our brands, we are laser-focused on our customer, continually elevating our products so we can capture the greatest market share.
At Soma, innovation is at our core, while beautiful solutions that extend to wellness and comfort are synonymous with our brand.
Our products serve our customers' lifestyle and promote health, including a great night sleep and loungewear to live in.
We fuel our bra and panty franchises and are positioned to further expand our market share and drive results.
We have a growing customer base with the most meaningful growth in our under 34 age group, as a result of more inclusive branding and evolved product assortment.
To continue capturing a broader audience, we will integrate our digitally native and younger TellTale brand onto the Soma site, which we successfully tested in the fourth quarter.
At our apparel brand, as the world shifts toward comfort and work from home, we see increased interest in our core franchises of effortless chic pants and tops at Chico's and denim with plenty of stretch, legging and feminine tops at White House black market.
As women emerge from their homes and continue to reinvent their wardrobe, we have developed improved fabrics and integrated new technology and comfort features to adapt to her needs.
Number three, driving increased customer engagement through marketing.
Our goal is to increase brand awareness, drive engagement, generate traffic and acquire new customers through continuous marketing improvement.
We are especially excited about our partnership with Salesforce, which enables us to better leverage the unified view of our millions of customers and act on our robust customer data that has been collected for more than three decades.
We can track every omnichannel customer journey and interaction, connect every commerce channel, create more engaging personalized and targeted marketing and messaging using predictive intelligence and adjust marketing in real-time based on trends or customer actions.
The Salesforce relationship also creates a data foundation to support the rollout of our enhanced loyalty program in the second half of this year.
And our loyalty program already has some of the highest participation rates in retail at over 90%.
We also have some of the most loyal and long-tenured customers in retail.
Our Chico's customers averaged well over 12 years with us.
White House black market customers average nine and Soma customers average over six, demonstrating we have the ability to retain new customers for a very long period of time.
We will continue to elevate our marketing efforts with more digital storytelling, the use of social influencers and to build upon our organic social efforts and wider-by communication.
Number four, maintaining our operating and cost discipline.
We will continue to improve our sourcing, logistics and operational processes to drive efficiencies and speed and lower cost.
We have teams focusing on a wider range of areas from further diversifying the supply chain, lowering dependence on agents, increasing the use of 3D design, and streamlining outbound shipping and ship from store processes, just to name a few.
Over the last year, we have reduced our supplier base by 20%, and agents currently represent 32% of the business, and we expect to lower that to about 18% by 2022.
And finally, number five, further enhancing the productivity of our real estate portfolio.
Stores continue to be an important part of our omnichannel strategy, and digital sales are higher in markets where we have our retail presence.
Soma is certainly a great example of that.
While Soma is now a digital-first business, it is supported by 259 boutiques.
In alignment with driving Soma to be one of the largest intimate apparel brands in the country, we are excited about opening Soma shop-in-shops in a number of Chico's boutiques.
We have opened 10 so far this year, and we will open 40 more by early May.
Our marketing data indicates that Soma and Chico's in-store cross-shop opportunities are abundant.
And we believe the shop-in-shop format will deliver meaningful brand awareness and generate both store and digital sales in markets where we are underpenetrated.
In addition, we plan to convert eight White House black market locations into Soma Boutiques.
We will also continue rationalizing and tightening our real estate portfolio, reflecting our emphasis on digital and our priority or higher profitability standards.
We are currently driving store sales with less inventory and increased productivity.
We've closed 40 underperforming locations since the beginning of fiscal 2020 and ended the fiscal year with 1,302 boutiques.
We will continue to shrink our store base to align with these standards, primarily as leases come due, lease kick-outs are available or buyouts make economic sense.
We have strong lease flexibility with nearly 60% of our leases coming up for renewals or kick-outs available over the next three years.
To further improve store productivity, we anticipate closing 13% to 16% of our remaining store fleet over the next three years, with 40 to 45 of those closures occurring in fiscal 2021.
The vast majority are expected to be mall-based Chico's and White House black market stores.
This means from the beginning of fiscal 2019 through the end of fiscal 2023, we will close up to a total of 330 stores, well ahead of our original multiyear closure target of 250 stores.
Our balance sheet remains solid.
We ended the fiscal year with $109 million of cash and cash equivalents after paying $38 million in fourth-quarter rent settlements.
And we navigated the fourth quarter without increasing debt levels on our newly amended credit facility, which matures in October 2025.
As you recall, last year, we renegotiated over 90% of our store leases, resulting in commitments of $65 million in rent abatements and reductions.
On a cash basis, approximately $44 million of these savings were realized in fiscal 2020, with the majority of the balance expected to be realized in fiscal 2021.
This $65 million represented about 25% of our annual rent expense, which we felt was a reasonable request at the time.
However, with the effect of the pandemic now extending well beyond original expectations this month we are launching Phase 2 of our lease renegotiation process, going back to our landlords for additional reductions.
Phase 2 will focus on the continuing COVID impact on our stores.
We will again work with A&G Real Estate Partners to obtain what we expect will be meaningful rent concessions.
We will provide an update on this initiative during our first-quarter earnings call.
In the fourth quarter, we permanently closed eight stores, bringing our net year-to-date closures to 39.
As of fiscal year-end, we have closed 123 stores since the beginning of fiscal '19.
Turning to fourth-quarter performance.
Net sales totaled $386.2 million compared to $527.1 million last year.
This 26.7% decrease reflects a comparable sales decline of 24.9% as well as the impact of 39 net store closures in the year, partially offset by a double-digit growth in digital sales.
For the fourth quarter, we reported a net loss of $79.1 million or $0.68 per diluted share, which included $35.9 million or $0.32 per diluted share and significant after-tax noncash charges outlined in today's release.
The majority of these charges related to a $32.1 million or $0.28 per share deferred tax asset valuation allowance.
Gross margin in the fourth quarter was 19% of net sales compared to 32.5% last year.
The rate decline primarily reflected lower maintained margin in our apparel brands and deleverage of fixed occupancy cost.
Lower apparel maintained margin rates primarily reflected the impact of declines in average unit retails, with higher sales driving promotional activity and increased markdowns mix versus last year.
Also keep in mind that fourth-quarter occupancy cost, a component of gross margin, does not reflect the meaningful savings from rent reductions as these reductions are being recognized pro rata over remaining lease terms.
I'm pleased with how swiftly our team pivoted at our assortment and managed inventory.
We believe our inventory is current and properly balanced with the influx of new seasonally appropriate receipts.
We ended the year with inventories down over 17% from the prior fiscal year-end.
And weeks of supply are substantially less than last year.
More importantly, our inventory is appropriately targeted.
Our apparel inventories are down over 20%, and some inventories are up 2% year over year.
As we look ahead to the first half of fiscal '21, we are planning year-over-year apparel inventories down more than 30%, and Soma inventories up over 30% as we continue to cannibalize on the momentum in this rapidly growing business.
SG&A expenses for the fourth quarter totaled $136.2 million, an improvement of $40.8 million from last year, reflecting our ongoing expense reduction initiatives to align our cost structure with sales.
The effective fourth-quarter tax rate was a provision of 20.4% compared to a benefit of 21.6% from last year's fourth quarter.
The current year effective tax rate primarily reflects the deferred tax asset valuation allowance charge, partially offset by the favorable rate differential due to the benefits provided under the CARES Act.
The fourth-quarter valuation allowance is a noncash charge as a result of ongoing pandemic-related uncertainty, surrounding future realizability of the related deferred tax assets.
Our financial position liquidity are being bolstered by strong digital performance across all brands.
Retail store sales and a significantly leaner expense structure that better aligns cost with sales.
In addition, our fiscal year-end balance sheet reflects a federal income tax receivable of approximately $35 million that we expect to realize in the second quarter of fiscal '21.
Turning to our outlook.
However, we believe it would be helpful to have a view into our planning for the coming year and are providing color.
At this time, we expect to benefit from the COVID-19 vaccine rollout, particularly given our customer base and are planning for consolidated sales trends to improve in the back half of the year.
As Molly noted, we are seeing traffic trends in proven areas where vaccines are becoming more widely available.
For planning purposes, consolidated sales trends for the first half of the year are expected to be largely in line with our reported fiscal 2020 results.
Looking at each brand, we expect continued strong performance at Soma, with performance at Chico's and White House, consistent with market expectations.
In addition, we expect our ongoing investment in the digital channel to deliver continued sales growth.
We expect cost savings realized in fiscal 2020 to be maintained in fiscal '21.
We are continuing to implement supply chain efficiencies and intend to maintain stringent inventory controls, with fiscal 2021 first half inventories planned down roughly 30% to last year.
These actions are expected to deliver significant improvement in current margin levels.
We believe the actions we have taken, combined with our solid financial position, increased flexibility under our credit facility and our competitively positioned brands, enable us to emerge as a stronger company in 2021 and beyond.

user
compname reports q4 loss per share $0.68.
q4 loss per share $0.68.
q4 sales $386.2 million versus $527.1 million.
fiscal year-end total inventories down over 17% and store inventories down 25%.
not providing specific fiscal 2021 first-quarter or full-year financial guidance at this time.
qtrly comparable sales was a decline of 24.9%.

assistant