My new teammate Eric Levine is feeding me the deets live from the JCP analyst meeting. There will be dozens of datapoints coming out of his thing. These are the two most important so far.
1) Costs out of China are down 2-3% for spring and 5-7% for fall. Check out my 3/31 post titled "Retail Narratives Don't Get More Powerful Than This." We believe that there are some companies - especially on the footwear side of retail (which is overexposed to China) that are benefitting from this disproportionately. This will start to show in margins around Oct/Nov.
2) All categories are seeing stabilizing trends - including JCP's Home business. We're not making a housing call by any means, but we've been positive on BBBY for the past 2 months, and have recently started the real deep dive on Williams Sonoma - which could be shaping up to be another big idea here. More to come on that front...
