Vera Bradley, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRA) Q2 2023 Earnings Conference Call August 31, 2022 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Mark Dely - Chief Administrative Officer

Rob Wallstrom - Chief Executive Officer

John Enwright - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Oliver Chen - Cowen and Company

Joe Gomes - Noble Capital

Eric Beder - SCC Research

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Vera Bradley Second Quarter Fiscal 2023 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Mr. Mark Dely, Chief Administrative Officer. Please go ahead sir.

Mark Dely

Good morning, and welcome, everyone. We'd like to thank you for joining us for today's call. Some of the statements made during our prepared remarks and in response to your questions may constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to and within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 as amended.

Such forward-looking statements are subject to both known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those that we expect. Please refer to today's press release in the company's most recent Form 10-K filed with the SEC for a discussion of known risks and uncertainties. Investors should not assume that the statements made during the call will remain operative at a later time. We undertake no obligation to update any information discussed on today's call.

I will now turn the call over to Vera Bradley's CEO, Rob Wallstrom. Rob?

Rob Wallstrom

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's call. John Enwright, our CFO, also joins me today. While total company's second quarter revenues of $130.4 million were modestly below our expectations. And we continue to experience gross margin pressures due to logistics costs. We drove product innovation at both Vera Bradley and Pura Vida initiated meaningful cost reduction actions, and completed 6 million of share repurchases, while maintaining a solid debt free balance sheet.

We are continuing to see bifurcation in the spending of our customer base. At Vera Bradley direct full price channel comparable revenues were nearly flat to last year and up double digits to fiscal 2020. Additionally, our Vera Bradley indirect channel continued to experience a healthy year-over-year rebound. However, inflationary pressures especially higher gas prices continue to negatively impact the traffic and spending in our Vera Bradley factory stores.