Haverty Furniture Companies, Inc. (HVT) Q1 2026 Earnings Call

Investor webinar replay

Replay transcript excerpt

During the quarter, we saw traffic down low single digits despite the disruptions that we experienced with weather in January over a 10-day period in the beginning of Operation Epic Fury. Special order business rose 10.1% to 34.5% of our upholstered business, driven by our continued success in design. Having the ability to offer a customer a choice of over a thousand fabrics with different styles, patterns, and colors creates opportunities for our sales and design teams to ensure our customers are getting their desired selection. Our merchandising and supply teams continue to focus on bringing in the latest trends to meet customer demand. The Merchandising team has become more nimble in assortment planning, enabling us to get newer products to the floors faster. We are in the fashion business, so updating our products with fresh new looks creates excitement not only for our sales and design teams, but for our customers. From a category perspective for the quarter, occasional was up double digits, Upholstery and dining room were up mid single digits. Mattresses were up low single digits. Bedrooms were flat and accessories were down slightly. Inventories increased 10.7 million to 106.9 million during the quarter. This increase was planned and driven by three factors. The introduction of new products across our lineups, our continued focus on having best sellers in stock, and the pull forward of orders ahead of Chinese New Year to ensure continuous product availability. We expect to see our inventory drop below 100 million by the end of Q2, putting us at the level we feel is needed to meet our customers' delivery expectations. We will start to see the effects of the administration's new reduced Section 122 tariffs implemented in February during Q2. However, we expect fu...