Casual Male Retail Group Inc. generated fourth-quarter sales of $123.1 million, down from $133.9 million a year ago. The company’s net loss for the quarter was $108 million, compared with $638,000 in net income a year ago.
For the entirety of 2008, Casual Male pulled in $444.2 million, down from $464.1 million during 2007. The company’s net loss for the year was $109.3 million, compared with $414,000 in net income during 2007. The quarter and the year ended on Jan. 31.
During both the fourth quarter and the year, the company took an impairment charge of $71.4 million.
During an earnings teleconference, Casual Male’s president and CEO David A. Levin noted his company was making “major reductions in our planned catalog circulation. Most of these cuts come from the prospecting side of our mailings. While prospecting does bring new customers to our business, we do lose money when we prospect.”
Levin added “We have additional savings in our catalog costs this year through a combination of reduced page counts, resizing of existing catalogs to save on postage, and reformatting a direct mail piece to our Internet shoppers in lieu of a full-fledged catalog. Even with the anticipated cost reductions in marketing, we believe our market share will not deteriorate.”
Separately, CFO Dennis R. Hernreich noted “…[W]e still have a very robust marketing plan for 2009, which includes more than 200 million e-mails going out to our databases, as well as fairly regular direct mail campaigns to not only our catalog Web shoppers but also to our retail shoppers…”
The Entrepreneur’s Take: The long and short? This company is going big time into defensive mode. Customer relationship management consultancies may have an opportunity here: List firms probably won’t… unless they can demonstrate the value of appends beyond what Casual Male already uses.
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