Late last week Elizabeth Arden announced its quarterly results and broadcast an earnings call.
Strategy
The company’s key initiatives are basic: focus on advancing the Elizabeth Arden brand, grow fragrance, improve market execution, and create efficiencies.
In the doing-more-with-less category, the company reports that adjusted gross margins for Q3 were up 260 basis points to 44.2% (which is a year-to-date increase of 110 basis points). Elizabeth Arden executives expect cost savings for the year to come in at $50m, a figure that’s higher than the company’s earlier estimates.
For the fragrance business, designer scents were up 20% in net sales in large part because of the Juicy Couture and John Varvatos brands.
Americas
Notable figures for this region come from a look back over the past nine months of the North American segment, which sees net sales in the segment down by 3.8% (that, in contrast to the international segment, where net sales were up by 6.0%).
Looking at only Q3, the numbers are a bit better. Net sales were up by 1.0% for the North American segment. While, for the international segment net sales were up 7.5%
And, the company’s press release about the quarterly results highlighted that Elizabeth Arden “recently hired a senior executive for the Latin American market.”
Emphasis on fragrance
Not long ago as part of the Elizabeth Arden strategy to grow the fragrance business, the company brought in George Cleary as head of global fragrance.
“The Company’s impressive fragrance portfolio has tremendous untapped potential to build market share in existing markets as well as expand into the larger global beauty market,” Cleary told the press last month, underlining that aspect of the company’s approach to revenue growth.