Express is a leading fashion brand for women and men. The company operates more than 600 retail and factory outlet stores in the United States and Puerto Rico, as well as an online destination.
As part of the cost optimization and rationalization, Express announced to close 17% of their stores by 2022. This includes nine stores that have already closed in 2019, 31 by the end of January 2020, and an additional 35 by the end of January 2021. The company expects the net impact to sales to be a reduction of $90 million by 2022. This reduction is offset by the elimination of the fixed operating costs of the closed stores and leveraging the remaining stores’ and online infrastructure for additional sales, which it expects to result in a $15 million annualized increase in EBITDA by 2022.
It also announced a new corporate strategy named “Express way forward” which essentially revolves around building a new customer experience, retaining their existing customer and gaining more customers.
