Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc.

Good morning, everyone, and welcome to Sally Beauty Holdings' conference call to discuss the company's third quarter fiscal 2025 results. All participants have been placed in a listen-only mode. After management's prepared remarks, there will be a -and-answer session. Additional instructions will be given at that time. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Jeff Harkins, Vice President of Investor Relations and Treasurer for Sally Beauty Holdings.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us. With me on the call today are Denise Polonis, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Marlo Cormier, Chief Financial Officer. Before we begin, I'd like to remind everyone that management's remarks on this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors, including those discussed in the risk factors section of our most recent report and report on Form 10-K and other files with the SEC. Any forward-looking statements made in this call represent our views only as of today, and we undertake no obligation to update them. The company has provided a detailed explanation and reconciliations of its adjusting items and non-GAAP financial measures and its earnings press release and audits website. Now I'd like to turn the call over to Denise to begin the full remarks.

Thank you, Jeff, and good morning, everyone. The resilience, educational excellence, and customer-first mindset of our team was on display in the third quarter. In turn, we delivered 13% earnings per share growth amidst a complex macro backdrop. Comparable sales were approximately flat, near the high end of our guidance range, and adjusted operating margin of .2% exceeded the high end of our expectations. In fact, our healthy gross margin profile and prudent cost control, coupled with benefits from our Fuel for Growth initiative, drove a fourth consecutive quarter of operating margin expansion. Additionally, our strong cash flow generation allowed us to strengthen the balance sheet through $21 million of debt repayment and also return value to shareholders via $13 million of share repurchases. In our Sally segment, our color category delivered continued standout performance, growing 4% with color customer count up, supported by strengths in our performance marketing results, particularly our -it-yourself value messaging, expansion of our personalization journeys, and consultation growth from our licensed colorist on-demand digital experience. Additionally, momentum continued in our digital marketplace expansion. Continuing the more cautious spending behavior we saw last quarter, our Sally customers were more choiceful in hair care and other ancillary categories, with some trade down in price and a focus on value. We are digging in deeper into our customers' needs in these areas and are refining our tactics from personalization and performance marketing to promotions to better serve them. Looking at BSG, sales returned to positive territory as the external factors that impacted stylist appointment books and purchasing behavior in Q2 receded. Of note, BSG has now delivered sales growth in six of the last seven quarters. Key drivers of Q3's top-line strengths include expanded distribution and robust product innovation across categories and brands. While navigating today's dynamic landscape, we're laser-focused on profitability and driving operating efficiencies through our Fuel for Growth program, which is currently in year two. This work encompasses merchandising, sourcing, supply chain, best cost locations, and non-trade spend, where we've carried out deep dives in our extracting value. We remain on track to generate cumulative gross margin and SG&A benefits of approximately $70 million by the end of this fiscal year and expect to capture cumulative run rate savings of $120 million by the end of fiscal 2026. Marla will provide a more granular look at the program in her remarks. Now I'll move to an update of some of the key initiatives under our strategic pillars of enhancing our customer centricity, growing our high-margin own brands and amplifying innovation, and increasing the efficiency of our operations. Starting with our marketplace strategy, we are pleased to see strong momentum across our portfolio partners, which includes DoorDash, Instacart, UberEats, Amazon, and Walmart. Our marketplace growth continues to be a key driver of e-commerce sales at Sallie US in Canada, which increased 21% over the prior year in fiscal Q3 and comprised 8% of total sales. Our presence on high visibility platforms is attracting new customers to the brand and enabling us to meet them where they shop while driving more profitable sales. We're pleased with how quickly this initiative is scaling and believe there is more growth to come. Turning now to our Licensed Colorist on Demand initiative, we're continuing to see broad-based strengths across the platform with consistent increases in key metrics including traffic, consultation, average transaction value, and purchasing frequency. In Q3, we had more than 90 licensed colorists averaging over 4,700 consultations per week. Additionally, our LCOD customers had an average transaction value of $35, which is 25% higher than what we see for non-LCOD customers, and LCOD customers are averaging one more trip on an annual basis compared to non-LCOD customers. Customer feedback has been overwhelmingly positive, and retention rates are significantly higher than non-LCOD customers. When we initially launched this platform, it gained traction quickly and has proven to be a powerful tool for broadening our reach, attracting new customers to Sally, and deepening our strategic mode and professional color for home use. Moving to innovation, which remains a cornerstone of our operating and growth strategies. In both segments of our business, we are proud to have built a reputation for bringing our customers a consistent pipeline of on-trend innovation, relevant brands, and exclusive launches. In the Sally segment, we saw strong performance from many of our own brands in Q3, including Ion, Bonbar, Inspired by Nature, and Strawberry Leopard. In June, we doubled down on the nail category with a significantly expanded assortment focused on trend-driven innovation, including brands like Nailboo, KISS, and Dashing Diva. We view nails as an important growth category for Sally, one that has become a leading discovery channel for new Sally customers and furthers our position as a leading destination for shoppers seeking trends, value, and convenience. At VSG, recent launches continue to perform well across color and care. This includes the successful and much anticipated April launch of K18, as well as Goddess Maintenance, a brand rooted in biotech. Additionally, our stylists embraced newness and expanded distribution from ColorWow, Image, Moroccan Oil, Schwarzkopf, and Wella. Innovation continued as we entered Q4 with the launch of the cruelty-free brand Unite in 800 Cosmoprof stores, our full service channel, and e-commerce. Unite includes hair masks, styling, and detangler products. I'm pleased to note that our core strategic pillars are continuing to drive sales and engagement. The combination of marketplaces, licensed colors on demand, and innovation, as well as personalization and enhanced performance marketing, contributed approximately 290 base points of comp sales growth in the third quarter and 250 points -to-date. Now I'll turn to our longer-term initiatives, starting with our Sally brand Refresh, which is designed to pivot Sally Beauty from a beauty supply house to a modernized specialty beauty retailer. As of July 31st, we have completed the Refresh in a total of 20 locations, which are one in Minnesota and one in New York. We expect to complete another 15 stores across the U.S. during our fourth quarter, resulting in approximately 35 stores updated by the end of our fiscal year. In these Refresh locations, we're prioritizing the customer journey and operational execution to deliver a superior in-store experience, one that encourages discovery, inspires, and engages. We're also testing expanded categories such as nail and cosmetics, along with adjacencies such as fragrance, by creating additional space through skew count rationalization. To date, we see customers spending more time in store and cross-shopping categories at an increased rate, as evidenced by basket growths coming from sales, cosmetics, and skin care. Additionally, we're seeing key indicators, including units per transaction, average unit retail, and average transaction value, all trending above the rest of the fleet. In short, the new look, feel, navigation, and merchandising strategies are driving the desired results. Importantly, in mid-July, we kicked off our Orlando marketing initiative, which includes billboards, paid social, paid search, YouTube, and CRM. This is a planned incremental marketing investment, spreading the word on our transformed Sallie experience to drive traffic and new customer acquisition. For a look at how the store refreshes are taking shape, please visit our IR website, where we've posted a short video. Looking ahead to fiscal 2026, we expect to complete another 50 refreshes, all occurring in stores that were previously slated for update or relocation. Therefore, we don't anticipate a material deviation to our historical capex level. We're moving forward at the measured pace to ensure we're positioned to generate meaningful returns and continue to have conviction in the future. We believe the opportunity to refresh up to 1,500 stores or approximately two-thirds of the Sallie U.S. fleet. We believe the refresh has the potential to be an important contributor to driving consistent top-line growth and look forward to advancing this strategy over the coming quarters. Shifting now to our happy beauty initiative, we continue to see some nice trends in our happy beauty stores, especially in our mall stores where there's natural traffic. We're still testing and learning on this concept and are leaning into happy beauty as an indie brand headquarters with a focus on key trends such as Korean beauty and fragrance stories. Additionally, our marketing message is focused on highlighting on-trend brands, offering tests before you buy, and utilizing influencer partnerships and social media to drive traffic and conversion. We're pleased to be entering the final stretch of our fiscal year on a strong note. We're raising our full-year adjusted operating margin guidance to reflect the strength of Q3 and our confidence in the company's strong market positioning, durable operating model, and long-term growth potential as we continue to advance our strategic pillars. We appreciate the support of our shareholders and remain committed to building long-term value for all of our stakeholders. Now, I'll turn the call over to Marlo to discuss the financials.

Thank you, Denise. And good morning, everyone. Our third quarter financial results are a testament to the actions we have undertaken through our Fuel for Growth program. While comparable sales came in roughly flat but improved from our second quarter, our Fuel for Growth initiative drove strong growth margins and enabled us to hold SGMA expenses relatively flat for the prior year for both our third quarter and fiscal year to date. These positive benefits were instrumental in delivering bottom-line performance above our guidance range, which drove continued strong cash flow generation. Turning to the numbers, third quarter consolidated net sales of $933 million represented a decrease of 1% while operating 35 fewer stores compared to the prior year. Consolidated comparable sales declined less than half a point. While macro uncertainty continued to impact spending among our Sally Beattie customers, this was partially offset by strong growth in hair color and digital marketplaces. We were pleased to see a strengthening top-line trend and return to positive comparable sales at DSG driven by expanded distribution and new brand innovation. Global e-commerce sales increased 8% to $99 million and represented 11% of total net sales. We continued to deliver a strong growth margin profile in Q3 with adjusted growth margin expanding 100 basis points to 52%. The -over-year improvement is primarily attributable to our Sally Beattie segment, which delivered higher product margins driven by our Fuel for Growth initiative and also benefited from lower distribution and break-off versus a year ago, as well as reduced shrinkage expense. As we communicated last quarter, we expect to maintain our healthy growth margin profile amidst the changing tariff landscape, especially given our limited exposure. We expect to largely offset potential cost of goods impacts through cost sharing with consumers, modest price increases on select products, and sourcing optimization. Looking at expenses, Q3 adjusted SG&A totaled $399 million. That's up just $2 million to last year reflecting higher labor and IT costs, partially offset by $6 million in Fuel for Growth benefits and lower depreciation expense. In total, we captured an incremental $12 million of pre-taxed Fuel for Growth benefits to both gross margin and SG&A in Q3, enabling us to deliver $31 million in pre-tax benefits to your state. This leaves us on pace to capture $40 to $45 million of savings in full year fiscal 2025 after generating $28 million in savings in fiscal 2024. This keeps us on track to deliver cumulative savings of approximately $70 million since we initiated the program in fiscal 2025 and 2024. To summarize the program details, the $70 million in cumulative savings over 2024 and 2025 is comprised of two buckets, gross margin and SG&A. Gross margin benefits totaled about $30 million coming from the optimization of our supply chain, vendor partnerships, and promotional efficiencies. SG&A benefits totaled about $40 million coming from transportation efficiencies, outsourcing, and reductions in non-trade spend. Of the $70 million in cumulative benefits over fiscal years 2024 and 2025, approximately $30 million will have been reinvested in the business to support our strategic initiatives, including marketplaces, licensed colors on demand, our Sally brand refresh, and Happy Beauty Company, as well as advertising and IT capabilities. The remaining $40 million will flow to the bottom line as profit or to offset inflation. We anticipate delivering an additional $50 million in run rate savings in fiscal 2026 with about two-thirds coming from gross margin and one-third from SG&A. By the end of fiscal 2026, we expect that our cumulative run rate savings will be approximately $120 million. Returning to the P&L, we're pleased to report that bottom line results exceeded our expectations, driven by both gross margin expansion and cost reduction. Additionally, we delivered an increase in both adjusted operating income dollars and adjusted operating margin rates over the prior year. Adjusted operating margins were 9.2%, representing an increase of 30 basis points over the prior year. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was 51 cents, a 13% increase over the prior year, with debt reduction and share repurchases complementing the positive impact of our operating results. With these Q3 results, -to-date, our adjusted operating profit is up 6%, with 60 basis points of margin expansion and 13% earnings per share growth. Moving to segment results, Sally Beauty net sales decreased by .8% to $527 million on 32 fewer stores versus a year ago, with comparable sales down 1.1%. Comparable transactions declined 1%, while average ticket was approximately flat. For the global Sally segment, color increased 4%, while care declined 7% compared to the prior year. Sally e-commerce sales grew 15% to $43 million and represented 8% of segment net sales for the quarter. In addition, e-commerce sales for Sally US and Canada grew by 21%, primarily driven by the strength of our digital marketplace strategy. Growth margin in our Sally segment increased 110 basis points to 60.9%. The -over-year improvement primarily reflects -for-growth benefits, lower distribution and freight costs, and segment operating margin came in at 15.8%, down 40 basis points to last year. Looking at the BSG segment, net sales were approximately flat at $407 million, and comparable sales increased by half a point. Comparable transactions were up 6%, while average ticket was down 5%. From a category perspective, color was up 3% and care was approximately flat. BSG e-commerce sales were $56 million, representing 14% of segment net sales for the quarter. Growth margin at BSG was 39.4%, flat compared to prior year, primarily reflecting lower distribution and freight costs offset by product margins due to brand mix. Segment operating margin was strong, coming in at .5% up 100 basis points to the prior year. Turning to the balance sheet and cash flow, we ended the quarter in strong financial conditions with $113 million of cash and cash equivalents and no outstanding borrowings under our asset-based revolving line of credit. Inventory levels were approximately $1 billion, down 2% to last year, with units down 5%, equating to a half-week of reduction in weeks of supply. As we continue to focus on driving efficiency across the business, on top of the great work our teams have already done, we believe there is additional opportunity for process improvement around inventory terms. This includes a deeper dive at the skill level aimed at enhancing inventory productivity, which we believe will create incremental cash flow on top of our existing strong free cash flow profile. More to come on that as we enter fiscal 2026. The business continues to be a strong and steady cash flow generator, providing us with the ability to consistently return value to shareholders. Third quarter cash flow from operations totaled $69 million, while operating free cash flow totaled $49 million. We utilize excess cash to repay $21 million of term loan debt, bringing our net debt leverage ratio down to 1.7 times. We also deployed $13 million of cash to repurchase 1.5 million shares of stock under our existing share repurchase program. Entering the final quarter of the year, we remain on track to generate $180 to $200 million of free cash flow for the full year. Additionally, we expect to repurchase approximately $20 million of our stock and repay approximately $20 million of debt during our fourth quarter. Turning now to guidance. We are pleased with the consistent profit growth our business has generated over the last four quarters and believe there are additional opportunities ahead. As we continue to focus on our core strategic pillars of enhancing our customer's electricity, growing our high margin- efficiency and amplifying innovation and increasing the efficiency of our operations. Based on our current business trends, we are adjusting our full year comparable sales outlook to the high end of our previous range and raising our full year adjusted operating margin guidance as follows. Comparable sales are expected to be approximately flat compared to our prior range of flat to down 1%. Consolidated net sales are expected to be approximately 75 basis points lower than comparable sales. This reflects the expected unfavorable impact from foreign exchange rates on full year net sales and approximately 30 fewer stores in operation compared to the prior year. Adjusted operating margin is expected to be in the range of .6% to .7% compared to our prior expectation of 8 to 8.5%. This implies that our Q4 adjusted operating margin will be down modestly versus prior year, which reflects a planned step up in marketing investment to support our Sally brand refresh in Orlando. We appreciate your time this morning. Now I'll ask the operator to open the call for Q&A.

Thank you. As a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 1-1 on your telephone and wait for your Q&A to be announced. To withdraw your question, please press star 1-1 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Oliver Chen with TD Cowan. Your line is now open.

Hi, Denise and Marlo. Would love your thoughts on macros and how they may be impacting the Sally beauty division differently from BSG. You had a really nice transition momentum at BSG, but it was a little softer at Sally. Would love thoughts there. The store refreshes and renovations sound quite compelling. What's stopping you from going faster in that discipline as well? Thank you.

Good morning, Oliver. We were really pleased with our results in the quarter. As you mentioned, macro is certainly a factor, but we think it wasn't as big of a factor as it could have been as we were thinking about the business as we exited Q2. So the strength in Sally really came in the color side of the business, which was up 4% in the quarter. Where we saw a bit more softness in that business was in the care space. So consistent with Q2 where we have the macro weighing in is this is an area where a customer can do a modest trade down, look a bit more for value than they might do in the distinctiveness of our pro color for home use side of the business. So that's where we saw a bit of the softness. We're very focused on the Sally side of the house in terms of understanding what the consumer is looking for in that space and navigating what we can do to improve that business, whether that be through our marketing messaging, our promotional activity, things that can compel the customer to come back in that space. On the BSG front, we were very pleased to see the rebound to positive comps, driven by color but with nice business in care as well. The transactions were up. We continue to see our stylists shopping closer to need. So while transactions were up, ticket was down a bit as they kept getting what they needed when they needed it. But we were pleased to hear from the customers that they're feeling overall optimistic about their businesses. The only point of softness to them is the actual trend right now is to a bit more natural lower maintenance hair color, which perhaps stretches the time between services a bit more than something that might be a high maintenance color. But seeing the stylist rebound after the flu and weather impact in Q2 was great for us to see. So overall, pleased with the performance of both businesses in the quarter and looking forward to that momentum continuing. Your second question was on brand refresh. Why aren't we moving faster? What I would say is we are still in the early days. We need, with Orlando and 18 stores now working, we need more time to really understand the list because all those stores went through some form of transformation. So the traffic patterns and overall transactions is a piece that is a bit disrupted. But we really like what we're seeing behind that with the initial tranche of the stores being .P.T., .U.R., .T.V. all in the direction that we want with a mix in the basket that includes more things like nail, fragrance, cosmetics, skincare, the things that we're really trying to test into as we mature the work that we're doing. So what we are pleased about is moving forward with a plan for another 50 stores in FY26. Great news is that would have already been built into our capex to be touching about that many stores. So that's not an incremental cost. But will let us keep understanding the performance trends and being able to watch traffic and transactions. I feel great that by the end of FY26 we'll have close to 100 stores out there that will be working in our new model and then be able to adjust from there. And the final piece that we're working on in this quarter, as I spoke about in my prepared remarks, is we are really amping up the marketing efforts in Orlando to be sure that for a market that has been fully redone, the customer knows we're out there, and we're really excited to be able to share with you about the new Sally and what you can expect to experience and why you should come back in to visit us. So all in all, pleased with the progress, looking forward to doing more in 26 and we'll continue at a good measured pace as we understand the return on the investment.

Thank you. Just a follow up on color. What do you think key catalysts are for color going forward? What would you expect that momentum to continue? And it's impressive that the marketplace has been kicking in as well. And then finally on the Sally Division, you had nice gross margins on fuel for growth as well as freight and other. How are you balancing that gross margin profile relative to trying to drive consistent positive traffic at Sally Division? Thanks a lot.

Sure. On the color front, at Sally, we're seeing strength in gray coverage. We're also seeing strength in vivid. It's ticked up a bit over the last couple months as a bit of a resurgence into that bright side of the world. But we're also seeing great support from our brand partners. So if it's in the vivid world, Manic Panic and Eero Eero are all nice performers on that Sally side in addition to our own brands with Bonbar and Ion and Inspired by Nature being big contributors. With marketplaces, we're also seeing nice growth on the Sally side, which is supporting color as well. Licensed colors on demand combined with marketplaces are bringing new customers in and our color customer count is up. And so that performance marketing working combined with multiple channels for the customer to be able to shop, we feel good about. And on the BSG side, we think we just have a great portfolio of brands that our customers are really responding well to in the world of color. And we expect that that trend will continue. So we feel really strong and great about that as well. I'll let Marla comment a bit on the Sally gross margin and how we're feeling about that side of the house.

Yeah, on the gross margin front in terms of Sally, very pleased with the performance there. I'm getting the plan and track benefits from our field for growth effort in terms of how we're redeploying that to drive that traffic. It's really our marketing efforts, our CRM, our personalization and bringing innovation. So I feel very good about continuing to maintain that profile as well as the traffic driving activities that we have that we're deploying going forward.

Thank you. Best regards.

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Susan Anderson with Canaccord Genuity. Your line is now open. Susan Anderson, your line is open. Please check your mute button.

Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was curious just on the Sally Beauty store that looks like there is an acceleration of store closures in the quarter. So I'm wondering, how should we think about the store plans going forward and how are recently renovated stores performing as well versus the rest of the fleet?

Thanks. Yeah, good morning, Susan. On the Sally storefront, the Sally Beauty segment includes our businesses in Mexico and Europe in addition to our US and Canada businesses. The slight uptick in store closures in the quarter was actually tied to our European business where we actually exited our store base in Spain. So there were 19 closures tied to that exit. We actually sold that business to a competitor as we look to focus where we think we can drive the most growth in our European operations. So you're pretty immaterial to the total set of Sally financials, whether that be sales and operating profit, but an important strategic move as we as we look to strengthen Europe and drive growth. So that's what really drove the store closures there. No outside trends in the US. And we think about how stores are performing overall as we are doing refreshes and relocations. They really are about targeting the customers where we want to be. So we've seen nice performance. And as I mentioned earlier, for the stores that we're doing as part of the brand refresh program, we're still in the early days. So love what we're seeing in the in-store metrics and more to come as those things mature and we can read the sales longer term.

OK, great. Thanks. And then maybe if you could just talk about, I guess, the consumer behavior you've seen between, I guess, the two formats. Are you seeing any pullback or does it feel like consumers are maybe doing their hair a little bit more at home, which is helping Sally Beauty? Just given some fears, I guess, around higher prices and tariffs. I guess just curious if you've seen any pullback there. Thanks.

Yeah, overall, what I would say is compared to where we thought the economy could have gone in Q2, I think we ended up in a better position than where that evolved. But where we think about consumers are on the Sally front in particular, we are seeing our consumers continue to be choiceful. You know, not a further step down in consumer confidence and spending, but continued frugality. And so with that, we have customer research that does show more more customers thinking about how DIY can serve as an in-between and going to the salon or more curiosity and Google searches and things about how do you color your hair. So we know that's on folks' minds. Right now, what we see that way is that's a nice positive to our business with a bit of an offset in where a customer can pull back, which is a bit more in the care and the ancillary businesses. But in terms of what we have as a business overall, we think there's a lot of our business model that performs well in this type of economy. So value offering lets us navigate macro better than a lot. And what we bring around innovation, education, engagement really allows our DIY customers to succeed on the Sally side of the front. So that combined with our strategic initiatives, we think we're well positioned for the quarters ahead.

OK, great. And one last one, I guess, just on that online kind of education or how to tool. Is there I guess, is there any way to quantify, you know, are consumers typically buy after using that? Is there any way to show, you know, I guess, if that's driving sales or not?

Thanks. Yeah, absolutely. So License Color Sun Demand is our online real real time platform to get education and support from a licensed stylist. To be able to go on to that platform, you register yourself as you're coming on. So we can we can track absolutely whether you purchase immediately online or you later come to a store because we've identified you. We can track you through that progress that process. I wish you see a great purchase rate. What is fascinating to us is fewer customers will immediately press the buy button to the list that they've gotten online. But most of them print it out or bring it on their phone into a store and come and shop those products in stores. So we've gotten a great redemption rate from doing that with with forty seven hundred consultations on average every week on an annual basis. That adds up to quite a bit of sales. And when we look at those customers, they're actually coming in one time more often a year than our non LCOD customers. And their transaction value is about twenty five percent higher than a customer not engaged with LCOD. So absolutely part of the sales driving improvements that we're seeing is one of our strategic initiatives.

OK, great. That's amazing. Thanks for all the details here. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Olivia Tong with Raymond James. Hi,

thanks. Good morning. I want to follow up a little bit on that and see if you could compare and contrast the performance in SPS versus BSG. Clearly a very nice rebound in BSG after a tough winter. How much of that do you think was the pent up demand? Perhaps if you could talk about performance, you know, start of quarter versus end of quarter to start and then I'd follow up.

Absolutely. We're pleased to see the performance rebound in BSG as we had anticipated. The challenges in the second quarter were really transitory in nature with the flu and weather throughout the third quarter. The business was quite consistent. So once we got past those one timers, as we got past March, business really evened out. As you saw, really nice performance on the color side of the house, continued growth there with the right assortment of brands and care. The next thing we're rebounding to about flat is what we anticipated that it would do. We still think that's great response from our stylists and engagement behind new innovation like K-18 as well as expansions and areas like ColorWow. But what we also know is we still have two down to trending brands in our business portfolio on that side of the house. And so we'll continue to work through that. But seeing Care Flat and the response to innovation, we were really pleased with. So overall, that stylist seems to be in a healthy space. As I mentioned earlier, just continuing to buy close to need out of the concern that something might change. So they will watch the macro just like we do, but their current books of business are nice. And it wouldn't have been necessarily from a rebound of services. As I said, Q3 was pretty consistent across the business.

Great. That's super helpful. And then a number of your competitors have started to expand into wellness. And you've done great things with respect to some of the newer concepts in terms of the pilot stores and what have you. Is there potential for new categories within the Sally Beauty store? You've got a fantastic loyal customer realized, of course, that there are some near term pressures, but just thinking bigger picture about the opportunity to expand into new categories in SPS while still keeping the core and obviously not potentially confusing the consumer as well. Thank you.

Absolutely. And we think about new categories. There's a nice role that we are trying to better understand in that regard when we're looking at our brand refresh stores. So in our brand refresh stores, which by the end of the year, we'll have 35 and another 50 next year, we are doing very targeted skew rationalization across our core categories to be able to free up space for newness around cosmetics, skincare, additional nail participation and fragrance would be the largest ones that are out there that we're working on. So definitely some trend right categories that we think could be a great offering to our Sally customers. As I said, the unlock here is that with the brand refresh and the new sorting process in the stores and the new fixtures, we believe we have the opportunity to bring those new categories to life and have our customers see them and participate and recognize them. So we'll be understanding how that is progressing over the course of the next few quarters and with the eyes to the potential to be able to continue to expand that brand refresh, which would include category mix updates as well.

Understood. Best of luck. Thank

you. Our next question comes from the line of Simeon Goodman with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Lauren Ingham for Simeon. Thanks for taking our question. Our first one is on the care category. You know, it continues to trend softer versus color. Just curious how you're maybe thinking about driving more engagement in this category despite the softer macro. Could this be for more like promotions, awareness, just how you're thinking about raising that care category?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, we realize that two quarters in at Sally, we're seeing that care be softer than we would like to see and really related to consumer spending and a place where they'll pull back a little bit more on care and not pull back on color, just given the opportunity for a broader product assortment or an NUR change. You know, when we've been working through the past quarter, we've been working hard to look at the tactics that we have, whether that be in personalization, performance marketing, promotions where customers are eyeing more single item promotion rather than quantity discounts to be sure that we can refine our offering and serve those customers the best way that we can in this macro environment. A couple of examples, you know, we're using a lot more taglines on our Sally side of the business about skip the salon or why drop $100 every two weeks, you know, create salon quality nail looks at home. So across the whole portfolio, not just care, but in nail and other categories, really leaning into what that DIY equation can be from a value perspective and how to continue to advance that. So more to come, but performance marketing and promotion and promotion design more than promotion depth are really the areas that we're focused on to work on a rebound.

OK, great. That's helpful. And our follow up is just on the implied Q4 comp, which should be maybe flattish to slightly positive given your guide. Can you break this out between SDS and BSG? Maybe what are your expectations for both heading into the quarter and any early reads for quarter today? Thank you.

Yeah, so I would say everything is built into our expectations because we have about eight weeks left in our quarter and eight weeks left in our fiscal year. So all that's included in the guidance underneath that. We expect a sequential improvement in the top line in both businesses, assuming a consistent macro environment to what we've been living in to date. So with that, it's Sally, the momentum we have in hair color is fueled by innovation, performance marketing, all the things we've been discussing. We think that will continue. And we're also working, as I just mentioned, to deliver stronger performance in other categories, specifically care, where we're adjusting some of the tactics to to drive that improvement. And then at BSG, we think innovation will be the continued fuel behind the growth in that business with K-18 continuing the recent launch of Unite being another good example of how we're winning in that space. So overall sequential improvement in both businesses as we finish out the year.

Great. Thank you.

Thank you. As a reminder to ask a question at this time, please press star 1-1 on your touchtone telephone. Our next question comes from the line of Ashley Huygens with Jeffries. Your line is now open.

Hi, this is Sydney on for Ashley. Thanks for taking our question. So you discussed seeing some trade down and price and value sensitivity from the consumer. How are you kind of balancing that with some of these planned price increases? And then can you just talk about traffic pacing throughout the quarter and then what you're seeing quarter to date and maybe any changes of trends from exit rate lock quarter into now? Thank you.

Yeah. So overall, in terms of traffic and transactions, we're seeing a business directionally in line with what we saw in Q2. So we are using with Q3 as we're entering Q4. So we saw a nice rebound from Q2 as we recovered from some of the weather macro related trends that were persisting there. And then I think when we think about the business overall in care and what we're working on, you know, as I just mentioned, there's a lot of things that we're working to have that customer respond well to us in terms of performance marketing, promotion activity. But in terms of price increases, we aren't planning any material changes in prices in the near term. I'm wondering, Marlo, if you might want to talk about just where we sit with tariffs, if that's a driver of the question. Yeah.

So as we're thinking about tariffs, we've talked about it last quarter as well. Our exposure is somewhat less than most or others, we would say. We're limited to 20 percent of our COGS is coming out of either China or Western Europe. And that's split pretty evenly between both of those. So as we look forward, you know, we'll look beyond the fiscal year. We talked about this year. It's not too impactful, given our inventory position only eight weeks to go. We really haven't seen a lot of vendors pass through cost increases to us. But as we look towards next year, we are carefully watching our vendors and we would work to to cost share with our vendors. We may have modest pricing actions and we also look for sourcing optimization. But we believe there is there is an incremental opportunity from the work that we're doing on our ski rationally rationalization as well. So we feel confident that we can maintain both our healthy gross margins and that we'll be able to pass through any of those pricing adjustments we may need to make. Great. Thank you.

Thank you. And I'm currently showing no further questions at this time. I'd like to hand the call back over to Denise Polonis for closing remarks.

Thank you for joining us today. I appreciate all the interest in Sally Deedy. And as always, a big thank you to our associates around the world who work hard to serve our customers every day. And we look forward to providing an update the end of our fiscal year in just a few months.

This concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.