Hanesbrands – Margin Expansion Opportunities Across
Innerwear & Activewear – 28 October 2021
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Specialist:
Title:
Moderator: Nyree Hinton (NH), Third Bridge Sector Analyst
April Whittington (AW)
Former Senior Manager, Digital Initiatives & E-commerce at Hanesbrands Inc
Agenda:
1. Hanesbrands (NYSE: HBI) post-coronavirus operational update
2. Branded activewear innovation
3. Hanesbrand’s portfolio overview and Champion’s success
4. Margin pressure across inner and activewear
5. Distribution footprint – channel strategy
Contents
Q: Can you give us an overview of the innerwear or activewear industry as a whole, as it relates to the key
categories that Hanesbrands is competing in?
Q: The two key categories that Hanesbrands plays in are on trend and have exploded during the
pandemic. Why do you think it wasn’t able to really capture this opportunity?
Q: It seems as if Hanesbrands is more up to speed on Champion. Why do you think that really drops off in
innerwear?
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Q: How did Champion’s success start to come through and how did Hanesbrands consider trying to replicate
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this success across its portfolio?
Q: Could you give us an overview of some of the other brands across Hanesbrands’ portfolio?
Q: Could you discuss the brand management of Hanesbrands’ innerwear portfolio? How has it really
managed those brands within innerwear or intimate apparel?
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Q: What is the benefit of letting a brand stay stagnant? How often are some of these brands actively reviewed
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as it relates to innovation and strategy?
Q: How many brands are competing with each other in innerwear?
Q: Could you give us an idea of Hanesbrands’ dependence on private label as a percentage?
Q: Could you discuss the distribution footprint and what building out this e-commerce presence entails?
Q: You discussed this re-innovation of the Champion brand in activewear and athleisure that caught
consumers back, or directed them back to the brand. What did Hanesbrands actually do to improve the
quality of the brand, instead of just releasing new styles with very significant change in the texture or the
yarn, or was it just, “Let’s print some new ways to save our channel”?
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Q: When I think of Champion, it doesn’t really strike me as athleisure of the actual trend of athleisure, where
you have Lululemon’s athletics. Even associates are able to tell you the purpose of this material. How has
Champion performed on that front, where you’ve got not even just pure functional performance, or Nike is
running the game, but when you do have that actual athleisure that you can wear to multiple functions?
8
Q: When assessing some of these restrictions on scaling a Hanes brand in a much higher-quality way, what
is the opportunity to go out and purchase a player such as Gymshark that does the whole athleisure
approach, and scale it by entering as many channels as you can? Does that make sense across Hanes, since it
is not as savvy on innovation? You have USD 6bn in capital each year. Does it make sense to go buy a brand
such as VF and Supreme?
9
Q: How has e-commerce impacted the in-store category vs online presence? With more data, did it change
how you presented to wholesalers?
9
Q: What is it like to work with Walmart as a partner vs going through Amazon? There’s always the risk of
Amazon assessing the sales data, saying it can do better and then put its product at a cheaper price, putting it
ahead of you in the search list. What is the dynamic between this retailer approach, or big accounts, and then
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trying to properly scale on Amazon without this being pushed to the side?
Q: Were there any conversations to have control of that streamline of data? Obviously, Amazon will have the
data as a compromise of a player selling on its platform. It seems like Amazon is very, very heavily into just
athleisure and intimate apparel.
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Q: How much control did Hanesbrands have on the pricing in those Amazon channels?
Q: It seems like Hanes has done a big portion of PPE [personal protective equipment]. Could you point to
that manufacturing capacity and discuss some of those advantages vs a player such as Gildan?
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Q: You mentioned an interesting point in our Amazon discussion where revenue grew to almost USD 500m.
Did that take away revenue from other channels? Was there more of a shift in revenue from channel to
channel, or was this actual new money?
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Q: Were there ever any discussions around pulling the brand from Amazon? Many other brands do that for
other retailers. Canada Goose is more premium, but it is no longer going to allow to be sold through
Nordstrom, just to preserve the brand, preserve pricing and more control over the brand. Was there ever any
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thought about that, or is Hanesbrands just a volume play and it will get volume wherever it can?
Q: How is the channel dynamic playing out internationally? It seems like a big portion of the business does
come from overseas, about 32% of sales.
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Q: Could you discuss the margin profile of the big partnership with Amazon? Were you able to get better
margins in Amazon, or was it too reactive in pricing and willing to go as far as it could?
Q: In the digital e-commerce strategy, how much of an effort was there to get your customer off those
channels and go D2C? How much of an effort was put on customer acquisition?
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Q: When you have data to prove that these are the actual consumer trends vs the inclination of a buyer, how
much of it was a shift to be more of a data-driven decision vs relying on buyers who make those decisions?
Was there a lot of inventory left over where product was over-subscribed to?
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Q: Was there a creative director at many of these brands?
Q: Was there a collective SKU count across all of the brands, or was there a cap people stood by between
brands?
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Hanesbrands – Margin Expansion Opportunities Across
Innerwear & Activewear
Transcription begins at 00:00:05 of the recorded material
NH: Welcome to Third Bridge Forum’s Interview entitled Hanesbrands – Margin Expansion Opportunities
Across Innerwear & Activewear. I’m Nyree Hinton, and I’ll be facilitating today’s Interview with Mrs April
Whittington, former Senior Manager, Digital Initiatives and E-commerce at Hanesbrands Inc.
April, before we get started with today’s Interview, please state I agree or I disagree to the following statement:
You understand the definition of material non-public information and agree not to disclose any such
information, or any other information which is confidential, during this Interview.
AW: I agree.
NH: If you start by giving an introduction of your background, the various roles you’ve held in the industry?
AW: Pertaining to my Hanesbrands experience, I worked for about seven years at Hanesbrands. Started out
on the retail side of the business, managing the clubs channel, and then became the first person to sit in an e-
commerce-facing seat for the organisation. From there, we built the entire digital and e-commerce orb that
exists today. Worked across all kinds of businesses between our owned websites, managing the entire intimate
apparel group for e-commerce, worked with our retailers, worked with standing up the Amazon business.
Then ultimately leaving to reporting to the CEO on a monthly basis, and for investor day calls and things like
that, to make sure that he was prepped and up to speed on everything e-com business-related across all of the
different e-commerce platforms that we had.
[00:01:50]
Q: Can you give us an overview of the innerwear or activewear industry as a whole, as it relates to the key
categories that Hanesbrands is competing in?
AW: The innerwear category, both categories really, innerwear and activewear, are highly segmented.
Especially on the innerwear side. You’ve seen a lot of emergence from smaller, pure-play type players that
have their own websites, have their own brands. That’s also started a little more on the activewear with
athleisure that came out while I was still at Hanes. We saw a major uptick in our activewear categories, as
people started shifting to wearing more leggings and workout apparel really everywhere they went. Both sides
of the business are really pretty fragmented from a brand standpoint. You’ve got a lot of pressure from private
labels, specifically around Amazon, and some of the Chinese direct-ship players that are all over Amazon,
you’re seeing a lot of that on the activewear side in particular.
[00:03:09]
Q: The two key categories that Hanesbrands plays in are on trend and have exploded during the
pandemic. Why do you think it wasn’t able to really capture this opportunity?
AW: The Chinese direct-ship, low-cost players have, I think, taken a hit out of both sides of the category, but
specifically more for activewear. Hanes is a pretty solid brand, so the problem, I’d say, on the innerwear side is
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you don’t have a ton of purchase occasions. The data that we had showed that consumers might purchase
something innerwear-related four times a year. If you’re just isolating the time frame to COVID, then you
probably didn’t see a lot of shift on the innerwear side. You probably saw more of a shift on the activewear
side, because people were staying at home, they were working from home, they could wear whatever they
wanted to. On the innerwear side, if you’ve got enough socks and underwear and under t-shirts, and you
potentially lost your job during COVID, you’re probably not going and purchasing more of that stuff.
Especially if you’re not having to go into an office and you’re hanging out at home.
NH: How does that really compare to other types of intimate apparel? You have brands like Skin that are
doing really well. Is there opportunity for Hanes in this group as well?
AW: It’s going to take a pretty foundational change. One of the biggest concerns that we had when I was there
and I was managing the intimate apparel business was the players like ThirdLove and True, all of these bra
companies and pantie companies started coming out of the woodwork. Hanes has a portfolio that, to be quite
honest, is pretty dated. It plays to an older consumer, and these new companies play to more of the millennial,
and even the generations after that. It’s more body-friendly, they include more colours. Hanes does not think
that way, and so it’s going to take an organisational shift for them to begin to capture some of the audience
that they’ve lost to the new players in the field.
[00:06:17]
Q: It seems as if Hanesbrands is more up to speed on Champion. Why do you think that really drops off in
innerwear?
AW: I know why. I’d say five or six years ago, there was an upheaval in Champion, where they had been a
trusted, cheaper, not-as-athletic or performance-driven brand. In that upheaval, they realised, “We’ve got to
put a lot of effort behind Champion to make it cool again.” What they did is they went out and they actually
contracted with someone that called himself the muse for Champion. What this person really does is, he’s very
in the scene in strategic markets, like LA and Chicago and New York. He was able to connect them with
influencers, he was able to connect them with things that we would never have seen from the headquarters in
Winston-Salem, and give them the cool new trends, and where they needed to play to capture the new
audience. Champion is the only brand that they did that with, so I think you’re seeing now the results of work
that was done five or six years ago to reinvigorate the brand.
[00:07:53]
Q: How did Champion’s success start to come through and how did Hanesbrands consider trying to replicate
this success across its portfolio?
AW: I’d say, the up-fling was pretty quick, mostly because the Kardashians started wearing Champion. They
had a streetwear division that they really put a lot. I’d say within 12 months of bringing that person in,
thinking back, probably 2016 was when we started to see things really pick up on the Champion side. The hard
thing is, with innerwear, it’s not something you wear outside of your clothes. It’s not something that you can
be a trendsetter with. There’s not as much help, I’d say, for the innerwear categories from bringing somebody
in that really is on the ground and understanding what is cool. Underwear was underwear at Hanes. It’s under
your clothes, they weren’t trying to go after a certain consumer or have audiences that had different personas.
I don’t know if it will work as well with innerwear as it did with activewear. There was, by the way, no push to
do the same thing for the innerwear brands that they had done for the outerwear brands.
[00:09:47]
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Q: Could you give us an overview of some of the other brands across Hanesbrands’ portfolio?
AW: Hanes was, in a lot of categories, the market share leader. In socks and underwear, for instance, they
were the market share leader. Fruit of the Loom was always very close behind, but again, that’s more of a
commodity. Hanes is kind of a commodity, but Fruit of the Loom was even more so a commodity. We started
to see Tommy John pop up on our reports when we were tracking, we started to see Mack Weldon pop up on
reports that we were tracking, but from a market share standpoint, those guys were not even close. Really, it’s
Hanes, Gildan, Fruit of the Loom, and that’s about it from a chunk of market share. At least on the underwear
side. On the intimate side of the business, collectively I think they were probably somewhere in the 40-48%
market share range in intimate apparel. At that time when I was there, Victoria’s Secret was still a major
player. We started to see them fall off. Then you started to see some of the emerging players, like the
ThirdLoves, pop onto the scene, but again, those smaller, emerging players did not have a ton of market share.
Your market share was basically Victoria’s Secret, and then the Hanes portfolio is Playtex, Maidenform, Bali
and Hanes. When you added all of those up, they had a pretty hefty market share in intimate apparel even, but
just made up of multiple different brands.
On activewear, Champion, they’re not a market share leader. Nike is obviously the big guy there, but then
Under Armour had risen pretty quickly while I was there, and they had taken a considerable amount of market
share, and took a lot of it directly from Champion. Then you had some smaller players that still churned out a
ton of volume, like Russell, which is a Fruit of the Loom brand, but Russell churned out a ton of volume
because it was cheap and it was durable. They had a decent amount of market share, but nowhere close to your
Nikes, your Under Armours, your Adidas, even Puma. Those were the major players on the activewear side.
[00:12:58]
Q: Could you discuss the brand management of Hanesbrands’ innerwear portfolio? How has it really managed
those brands within innerwear or intimate apparel?
AW: The Hanes brand itself, so Hanes innerwear, for a long time, they were very stable, very conservative,
didn’t speak a lot to being an influence or brand. You’ve seen over the past 4-5 years, I’d say, that they’ve
started to look for partnerships with influencers. They’ve looked to do cooler things, they even had a
partnership with Supreme at one point. The Hanes brand itself has tried to move more toward where, I’d say,
Champion has moved to, as far as being a really popular up-to-date brand. Maidenform, in the intimate
apparel space, is probably better-positioned for a younger consumer and for millennials. Playtex and Bali, they
haven’t really managed the brands. It was always a joke that Playtex was going to die with its consumers. I
think they’re making some conscious decisions on which brands are going to move forward and which ones
aren’t. For the ones that aren’t, they’re not going to manage the brand as heavily, they’re not going to look into
personas, they’re not going to try to strengthen the brand. They’re just going to let it roll as it has been.
[00:14:49]
Q: What is the benefit of letting a brand stay stagnant? How often are some of these brands actively reviewed
as it relates to innovation and strategy?
AW: They’re reviewed on an annual basis, but it has a lot to do with consumer sentiment. If you say Playtex to
any female intimate apparel shopper, she automatically says, “That’s my grandma’s bra.” There’s not much
you can do from an innovation standpoint to reinvigorate the feelings around that particular brand. I think
that’s why they’ve chosen to let it just ride out. They put their innovation into the brands that they feel have
the longest legs, like your Maidenforms. They’ve put a little bit into Bali, but not much. In my opinion, there’s
not much benefit to just letting a brand die out. I think, if you have enough budget, you can reinvigorate
anything. You can change the consumer perception of a brand, but also, I’ll say this from a manufacturing
standpoint, it’s expensive to have all of those brands. At some point, you’ve got to begin rationalising your
portfolio. I think that’s really where they are right now, is they’re choosing the winners, because to be quite
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frank, they make the same bra in Bali that they make in Maidenform. When you’re making multiple versions
of the same garment under different labels, it gets to be prohibitively expensive. I think they’re taking a look at
that and trying to right-size the brands along the way.
[00:16:58]
Q: How many brands are competing with each other in innerwear?
AW: I’d say Bali and Playtex definitely compete against each other. To some extent, Maidenform and Bali
compete against each other, and Hanes, just the general Hanes label of intimate apparel, kind of competes
against all of them. There is very much crossover between the brands they’ve got in their portfolio right now.
NH: Were some of these brands through acquisitions? I’m just trying to understand how this came to light.
AW: Yes. Maidenform was an acquisition. I think it was a smart acquisition, because it got to that younger
consumer. Bali was a household brand, Playtex was a household brand and Hanes was a household brand.
Just My Size is their plus-size brand. It started out actually as a partnership between Walmart and Hanes, and
it was private label for Walmart for a long time. Once that contract sunsetted, they made the conscious
decision to move forward with that for the plus-size consumer, because they didn’t really have a place to play
there.
[00:18:25]
Q: Could you give us an idea of Hanesbrands’ dependence on private label as a percentage?
AW: I would say probably 10 to 15 years ago, there was a very heavy dependence on private label. I know
when I was working on the club business, we had the Kirkland private label business. We had Wonderbra,
which has gone away now, but we had Wonderbra, we had C9 with Champion, which was a Target private
label. They were very heavily dependent on that. What you started to see is that the retailers that you had a
private label with started to move away from renewing those contracts. It was a risk to the business. From a
strategy standpoint, leadership said, “We’ve got to break our dependence on private label. We’ve got to just
strengthen up our brand and pick the brands that are winners, and move forward.”
[00:19:33]
Q: Could you discuss the distribution footprint and what building out this e-commerce presence entails?
AW: It was completely different. It was a complete evolution for the organisation. Let’s start with regular
brick-and-mortar sales. When you’re looking at the imagery you’re creating, and the assets, and even the bras
that you’re creating, you are relying on a consumer being in the store, touching and feeling the product. Your
imagery on your POS or on your actual hang tags is very utilitarian, because the customer is there and they can
touch it and they can feel it, and they can try it on most importantly, and they can figure out, “Is this for me or
is this not?” When you move to e-commerce, especially for things like bras and underwear and panties, you
lose a lot of that ability for the customer to touch and feel. You have to take completely new imagery than
you’re used to. You have to show the clasp of the bra, because the consumer can’t see it in person. You have to
show the straps, you have to show a front view, a back view. You have to put new information that you’ve never
had to put on hang tags or in the stores, because you’re missing that consumer presence.
One thing that I did while I was there, we actually stood up a best-practices imagery and best-practices
information for whenever we went to a retailer with our portfolio. It would have completely different
information than what we would normally tell the retailer. It shifted the focus of KPIs and objectives, because
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in e-commerce, you’re looking at what’s your bounce rate from your pages, what’s your click-through rate, how
long do people stay on this page reading through the information, or how many pictures did they look at?
Hanes had never looked at anything like that. It was all measured by what’s your linear square feet, and what’s
your productivity against your linear square feet? E-commerce, when I stood it up, it took a lot of education,
and it took a lot of buy-in from people who had been in the organisation and lived this brick-and-mortar
lifestyle forever. It’s very, very different. I hope that covered it. That doesn’t even include all the things you
have to consider, but hopefully that touched on it.
NH: It does. How much of its business was through e-commerce that it just didn’t know about? Say, selling
through Target, Target has Hanesbrands on its website.
AW: We had between NPD data and actual sales data from the different companies. Walmart has Retail Link,
Costco had IRI. They began to break out e-commerce sales vs brick-and-mortar sales. I’d say, in 2015, you
started to see some people break it out, but it wasn’t clean data. By 2017, most of our retail partners were
telling us, “This is what you’re getting from e-com and this what you’re getting from stores,” but that was more
of a recent trend. From a market share online standpoint, intimate apparel was actually the highest. Intimate
apparel was about 18-20% of the total intimate apparel business was done online. Innerwear was more, when
you’re talking underwear and socks, innerwear was closer to 10%. Activewear saw a huge, huge, I’m talking
triple-digit increases with their online business, especially when the athleisure trend started. It still did not
surpass the intimate apparel category at that 18-20%. I want to say activewear, probably it went from 2-3% to
14% in a year’s time. It saw significant growth online.
[00:24:29]
Q: You discussed this re-innovation of the Champion brand in activewear and athleisure that caught
consumers back, or directed them back to the brand. What did Hanesbrands actually do to improve the quality
of the brand, instead of just releasing new styles with very significant change in the texture or the yarn, or was
it just, “Let’s print some new ways to save our channel”?
AW: No, there was definitely a change. I think that came from competitive pressures. You could pick up, back
in the day, a Champion sweatshirt, you could pick up a Nike sweatshirt, and it was night and day. There was a
lot of competitive activity, and understanding how the competitors were making their garments. That
completely changed how Champion went to market. They moved from a very cotton-, polyester-type brand to
more of, we had brushed fleece, we had tech fleece. They focused more on performance-type materials than
they ever had before, where really, if you go back to, I think it was 1901 when Champion was started, it was
very much just a cotton sweatshirt, sweatpant kind of brand. With the competitive pressures, they had to
evolve that, or else Champion would not be where it is today. They focused more on performance fabric and
breathability and wicking and things like that.
NH: Do you think it still uses a significant amount of that cotton legacy style?
AW: Do they still use cotton in legacy? Yes.
[00:26:33]
Q: When I think of Champion, it doesn’t really strike me as athleisure of the actual trend of athleisure, where
you have Lululemon’s athletics. Even associates are able to tell you the purpose of this material. How has
Champion performed on that front, where you’ve got not even just pure functional performance, or Nike is
running the game, but when you do have that actual athleisure that you can wear to multiple functions?
AW: Yes. You saw the biggest athleisure play with Champion in the streetwear. I remember DJ Khalid was
wearing a lot of Champion. I think he still is. The athleisure stuff was more on the streetwear side of
Champion, not as much in the basic core Champion. I think, when you look at the Lululemon vs Champion,
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the Champion garments can be just as durable, but might not have the same feel and the same hand. That’s
really driven by price point. You know when you buy a pair of Lululemon yoga pants, for instance, they’re
going to be USD 100. Champion does not have that consumer perception, where they can really take their
legging costs up to USD 100. That’s where you start to see some of the breakdown of, this has a different hand,
it has a different stretch, because they’ve got to still be able to manufacture it and make profitability goals with
the Champion brand. You just can’t do that if you’re making everything like Lululemon. It’s expensive to make
Lululemon.
[00:28:34]
Q: When assessing some of these restrictions on scaling a Hanes brand in a much higher-quality way, what is
the opportunity to go out and purchase a player such as Gymshark that does the whole athleisure approach,
and scale it by entering as many channels as you can? Does that make sense across Hanes, since it is not as
savvy on innovation? You have USD 6bn in capital each year. Does it make sense to go buy a brand such as VF
and Supreme?
AW: I think it was always a conversation, but, and I don’t necessarily agree with this, and probably because of
the price point to be totally honest, but they chose to purchase companies that were smaller, that were lesser-
known, and had more of a focus on sustainability. At least when I was there. They purchased Alternative
Apparel while I was there, and nobody really understood that acquisition. I think it came at a good price, and
so that’s why they made the acquisition, but it didn’t really do anything for the organisation as a whole,
because it was very little-known. Given the amount of capital that they have, it probably would be a good move
for them to purchase one of the up-and-coming players, but I don’t know that they ever will, by the way.
[00:30:25]
Q: How has e-commerce impacted the in-store category vs online presence? With more data, did it change
how you presented to wholesalers?
AW: Yes, it totally did. We were able to even stand up some online focus groups. We finally got the
organisation to a point where they understood you can get live data to inform your product portfolio.
Especially in the pantie and bra category in particular, we started doing these online focus groups where
people would choose which pattern they liked more. Hanes is not known for having awesome patterns, by the
way, but that really was a step change for the organisation, because we were able to get really quick, live
feedback on, “Choose this stripe,” or, “Choose this paisley.” They had never done anything like that before.
Before, if you were trying to choose your patterns, it was a 6-12 month process, but they were able to do things
much more quickly. I think they were able to make some smarter decisions on pattern and assortment because
they were leveraging some of those instant-feedback-type feedback loops, really.
[00:32:04]
Q: What is it like to work with Walmart as a partner vs going through Amazon? There’s always the risk of
Amazon assessing the sales data, saying it can do better and then put its product at a cheaper price, putting it
ahead of you in the search list. What is the dynamic between this retailer approach, or big accounts, and then
trying to properly scale on Amazon without this being pushed to the side?
AW: There are a couple of things in there that I’ll touch on. Channel conflict is growing every day. The
channel conflict piece of it, mostly centred around Amazon, is having repercussions on your tried-and-true
long-lasting retailer relationships. There was never a Walmart meeting where Walmart buyers weren’t pulling
up Amazon and saying, “They have the same thing we do, you need to make me something special because we
need each other,” pretty much. I would say, with the retailers, it’s more of a symbiotic relationship, because
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consumers expect certain brands in the stores. With Amazon, it is not. Amazon can be very contentious. They
do manipulate page space and page ranking pretty frequently, and there’s less of a concern to have big brands
on Amazon. That is a major shift from where we started when we started the Amazon business. When we first
started the Amazon business, Amazon was actively coming for us to say, “We need big, trusted brands on
Amazon,” because at the time, they didn’t have as many big, trusted brands, mostly because of the channel
conflict that I mentioned earlier. Amazon, at first, bent over backward to make sure that we had a good
relationship, that we had good placement, but you saw it shift over the next few years. If Hanes said, “We’re
cutting back our marketing budget for Amazon and we’re not going to as much AMS, we’re not going to do as
many ads, we’re not going do as many brand stores,” you started to see that tide shift a little bit to where
Amazon said, “You know what? We used you for what we needed, we got exposure that we have big brands
online. If you’re not going to partner with us and you’re not going to do marketing with us, then we don’t really
need you anymore.” That dynamic shifted pretty quickly, I’d say over a period of 3-5 years, the dynamic shifted
on the Amazon side.
The channel conflict is probably one of the biggest pieces. You piss off your retailers on a daily basis by putting
things on Amazon. It got to a point where Amazon could have certain pack sizes. Walmart needed to have
different pack sizes. Amazon could have certain fashion colours, or a certain assortment, and you would need
to have a different assortment for your brick-and-mortar partners. Online, for the retail partners, they wanted
everything. Walmart would say, “If it’s going on Amazon, we want it.” Then we just had to be really careful to
not piss Amazon off, because the Amazon business grew to over USD 500m in the timespan of about three
years. Where it initially was not a big focus, it became a big focus really quickly.
[00:36:09]
Q: Were there any conversations to have control of that streamline of data? Obviously, Amazon will have the
data as a compromise of a player selling on its platform. It seems like Amazon is very, very heavily into just
athleisure and intimate apparel.
AW: Yes. At one point, I know there were conversations around sole supplier. This was early on, but early in
the days of Amazon and Hanes’ relationship, we pushed to be a sole supplier for certain categories. Basically,
we got laughed out of the room. Amazon knew where they were going and what they were doing. Amazon does
this thing, and I’m probably preaching to the choir here and you probably already know this, where they take
your data and then they just knock it off and put it under one of their own private labels. They knew that was
their strategy all along, so when you would push them for an exclusivity or a sole supplier-type relationship,
they would never agree to it, even if we asked 100 times, and we did.
NH: What do you really have to combat this dynamic? What do you really have to get around this? Are you
better off just giving Amazon basic styles, and then give that exclusivity to Walmart, maybe from a styling
perspective, quality, premium-ness, and then just have people just buy their regular basics on Amazon?
AW: I’m going to say with your other retailers. Not with Walmart. Walmart and Amazon, that’s part of their
issue. They go head-to-head with their price point, they go head-to-head with their product quality for the
most part. When you look at somebody like a Macy’s or a Kohl’s, to some extent a Target, there was very much
a segmentation strategy that we underwent to say, “We’re not going to give our most innovative top-of-the-line
newest product to Amazon. We’re going to launch it, give a first-to-market exclusive with Kohl’s,” for instance,
and then after it had been in the marketplace for 12 to 18 months, then you would offer it up to Amazon. That
was our way of fighting them knocking off whatever we were doing.
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[00:39:02]
Q: How much control did Hanesbrands have on the pricing in those Amazon channels?
AW: Almost none, unfortunately. I wish there was another answer. I remember, not at Hanes, but in my last
position, we tried to take commodity price increases to Amazon, and they just ignored it. They just ignored
your emails to say, “We’re taking this price increase.” If they then started ordering it at the wrong price, we
would kick out their orders and just not allow them to order, but they are very good at not acknowledging
when you need to take a price increase, or even when you’re seeing the market price go up, you can say
something to Amazon, but they’re not going to do anything about it. They’ve got their own algorithms, and
their algorithms set their pricing.
NH: Are there no clauses or contracts to allow for some of these price increases, or did Hanes have a bad deal,
and just have to roll with the punches?
AW: There’s not really. Thinking back to all of the different Amazon contracts I’ve seen, there’s not anything
that at least large corporations can do to fight the pricing. There’s nothing in their contracts that say, “You can
have a price increase.” It’s nowhere. Sometimes they’ll work with you. When I first started at Hanes, cotton
went through the roof, and then fell through the floor. Back then, there would be some acknowledgement of a
commodity increase, a raw materials increase, but if it’s just, “We need to take the price up because our
margins are getting thin,” that’s not really tolerated.
[00:41:15]
Q: It seems like Hanes has done a big portion of PPE [personal protective equipment]. Could you point to that
manufacturing capacity and discuss some of those advantages vs a player such as Gildan?
AW: All of the basic apparel companies, you saw Fruit go into PPE. Hanes, I think, went a little heavier into
the PPE, but it’s basic manufacturing. Anybody who’s got manufacturing dealing with cotton can churn out
this PPE stuff. I think Hanes was smart to go after that angle, but it wasn’t anything special is what I’m trying
to say. Everybody did it. Especially in the beginning of COVID. Everybody made masks, everybody made PPE
that had cotton manufacturing lines. I don’t know that they did anything better or more right. They probably
just did more of it, because they have a very, very smart supply chain, where they are focused in different areas
of the world so that, if you have a catastrophe in one part of the area or one part of the world, you can then
shift everything to another. They’ve got an impressive supply chain, and so they were probably able to do it
more at scale than your Gildans or even your Fruits, because they have a competitive advantage from a supply
chain and manufacturing standpoint.
[00:43:03]
Q: You mentioned an interesting point in our Amazon discussion where revenue grew to almost USD 500m.
Did that take away revenue from other channels? Was there more of a shift in revenue from channel to
channel, or was this actual new money?
AW: Some of it was new money, but it was hard to ever get to what was the actual incrementality. You saw a
major shift. I presented out every month how was each retailer doing from a brick-and-mortar standpoint vs
how were they doing from an e-com standpoint. You could see direct correlations to certain retailers, where
one month they would go down 10% and Amazon would go up 10%. It was striking to see how correlated that
was. I would say, not all of the Amazon business, by any means, was incremental. A majority of it came from
places that we were already doing business at.
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[00:44:23]
Q: Were there ever any discussions around pulling the brand from Amazon? Many other brands do that for
other retailers. Canada Goose is more premium, but it is no longer going to allow to be sold through
Nordstrom, just to preserve the brand, preserve pricing and more control over the brand. Was there ever any
thought about that, or is Hanesbrands just a volume play and it will get volume wherever it can?
AW: It’s a volume play. They will get volume wherever they can. There were conversations at times of not
letting certain assortments or certain parts of the portfolio go over to Amazon, but when you looked at the
volume you would potentially miss out on, the conversation ended there. It was always just a conversation,
there was never any meat behind the conversation. We threatened. We were one of the bigger players, so we
would threaten, “We’re going to pull this down, we’re going to take it off of your website unless you do this and
this and this,” and Amazon is big enough where they said, “Go ahead, sure,” and they could, because it was like
a game of chicken. They called our bluff, and then we would back down.
[00:46:00]
Q: How is the channel dynamic playing out internationally? It seems like a big portion of the business does
come from overseas, about 32% of sales.
AW: Yes. That’s one of the things I was working on when I left, was standing up Souq, which was the Middle
Eastern version of Amazon. It was Amazon, but that’s what it’s called there. We had just started to stand up
and work with the different in-markets within Amazon. My last assignment was really working on building out
Amazon Global. That was really our first time when we had started to look at Amazon’s different end markets.
There was a huge push for the Chinese market, there was a huge push for the Middle Eastern market. We had
just started doing that when I was leaving, and I was standing some of that stuff up.
[00:48:21]
Q: Could you discuss the margin profile of the big partnership with Amazon? Were you able to get better
margins in Amazon, or was it too reactive in pricing and willing to go as far as it could?
AW: They were very reactive. You took what you could get. There was a saying with the Amazon business
team that we could make up for the percentage points lost in margin with the actual margin dollars, with
volume. That was how we approached it, “We’re not getting a 27% margin, but we’re going to get the
equivalent in margin dollars because of the amount of volume that Amazon can push out the door.”
[00:49:24]
Q: In the digital e-commerce strategy, how much of an effort was there to get your customer off those
channels and go D2C? How much of an effort was put on customer acquisition?
AW: Unfortunately, not as much as I think they should have focused on, to be totally honest. The sites are
there, but when you add up all of mid-tier and department store, and you look at their total in-store volume
and their e-commerce volume on top of it, our owned websites and our D2C websites, it wasn’t even in the
same ballpark. That dictated the prioritisation to some extent. They still don’t do a ton of promoting their
D2C. On that note, they don’t do a great job. We had a tonne of data when I was on the D2C side that could
have informed product assortment. It could have informed maybe what a Kohl’s consumer would purchase,
because we had that data. We owned it. The two groups, when you’re looking at the retail side vs the D2C side,
they don’t really do a good job talking to each other. It was always a struggle, because I felt like we had more
data on the D2C side that we could have been making smarter choices with our retailers, but you’re dealing
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with a little bit of a different dynamic, too. You’ve got buyers over on retail that have their own opinions, and
you can put data in front of them and they might or might not listen to it.
[00:51:29]
Q: When you have data to prove that these are the actual consumer trends vs the inclination of a buyer, how
much of it was a shift to be more of a data-driven decision vs relying on buyers who make those decisions?
Was there a lot of inventory left over where product was over-subscribed to?
AW: Yes. I think it’s biting them a little bit on the Amazon side by the way, but there was always a huge
amount of returns on fashion colours that didn’t sell well, or products that had just launched that didn’t sell
well. The way that Hanes deals with that is they put it out into job lots and jobbers to take the excess goods
that are left over. The problem with that is then they’re giving it away for darn near free, and then that stuff
pops up on Amazon not too much longer. There was a huge issue with how accurate can we be when we’re
selling in these styles to the retailers so that we don’t have too much left over, and that then will just ultimately
end up on Amazon, and undercut our own sales, because then when it goes to a jobber or a third party, they’re
selling a similar bra in a different colour for, I don’t know, USD 8, and our bras are selling for USD 20. You’re
taking away your own sales because you gave that excess product to jobbers who are then just undercutting
you yet again. You’ve already lost money, and then you’re losing money again. Does that make sense?
NH: It sure does. It’s a very, very strange thing to do, or dynamic. What about just holding on to the inventory
and moving it the next season?
AW: That didn’t happen all that often. When you’re talking about excess inventory, let me be clear, you’re not
ending up with tons of excess inventory in navy blue boxer briefs, right? Navy blue boxer briefs will last from
now until the end of time, and people will buy them. Where you got in trouble is when you have some crazy
fashion colour of a bra. You had a purple bra. That was mostly the stuff that would be left over. If that colour of
purple, if jewel tones are completely out in the next season, there’s no reason to hold on to it because you’re
still not going to sell it, and you’re just going to be stuck with it.
[00:54:22]
Q: Was there a creative director at many of these brands?
AW: It was a team. There are merchandisers, is what they’re called over there. There’s a merchandiser for
intimate apparel, there’s a merchandiser for Champion, there’s a merchandiser for innerwear. You’ll see a lot
of patterns or fabrics carry over between the brands, which I think actually hurts more than it does any good,
because then, I mentioned it earlier, you’re selling the same product with a different brand name and a
different SKU and a different UPC, and it creates a lot of complexity.
[00:55:15]
Q: Was there a collective SKU count across all of the brands, or was there a cap people stood by between
brands?
AW: Yes. SKU rationalisation was always an active project. I know one project I worked on, I think we had
over 60,000 SKUs just for Walmart. They tried to rationalise where they could, but different retailer
requirements dictate for other SKUs and other specific fashion colours. It was a difficult battle to fight.
Private and confidential 13
NH: 60,000 SKUs, that’s a lot for any type of brand. Was there an average across many of the different brands
you’re aware of, or no?
AW: No, there really wasn’t, because if you’re looking at the brand level, Hanes has athletic apparel. Nobody
buys it, but it is there. They have athletic apparel, they have bras, they have socks, they have underwear and
they have panties. They have just regular, I wouldn’t even call it athletic apparel, just regular fashion
sweatshirts, t-shirts and things like that. Depending on how many categories the brand played in, you really
saw a direct correlation to the amount of SKUs, whereas Maidenform just has bras and panties and shapewear
so they had a much smaller SKU count than Hanes did. Then, with Champion, they had a huge SKU count
mostly because you have different fabrications and you have different levels of your activewear, so Champion
also had a heavy SKU count, but Hanes held honestly most of the SKUs. They also create complexity for
themselves, because they’ll have different pack sizes for different customers. JCPenney would have an eight-
pack, but Macy’s would only have a four-pack, and Kohl’s would have a six-pack. That’s literally the same
garment packed in different packaging that requires a different SKU. That’s where a lot of your SKU
proliferation happened.
[00:57:55]
NH: It sounds like a very complicated process. I think, with that in mind, it’s a good place to end the
Interview. Let me just close by saying thank you, April, we covered an extensive amount. I really appreciate
that. Thank you, clients, for joining Third Bridge Forum’s Interview. Have a good one.
AW: Awesome. Thank you.
Transcription ends at 00:58:14 of the recorded material
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