DXL POSTS SALES INCREASE IN FOURTH QUARTER

destination xl
by Brian Lipton

Destination XL DXLDestination XL Group, Inc., the Massachusetts-based specialty retailer of big and tall men’s apparel, today reported operating results for the fourth quarter and fiscal year 2015.

For the fourth quarter of fiscal 2015, total sales rose 3.8% to $124.0 million from $119.6 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014. An 8.9% increase from the 137 comparable DXL stores drove the overall comparable sales increase for the company of 3.1%. For fiscal 2015, total sales increased 6.8% to $442.2 million, compared with $414.0 million for fiscal 2014. The comparable DXL stores, with a 9.7% increase, drove an overall comparable sales increase for the company of 4.8% for fiscal 2015.

“Our excellent fourth-quarter and full-year financial results reflect the strength of the Destination XL model in an exceptionally challenging retail environment,” said president and CEO David Levin. “Our performance was consistent throughout 2015, on track with the expectations we laid out at the start of the year. While the quarter actually started out slowly with a very warm November, typical winter weather returned in December, as did strong demand in our cold-weather categories, and sales continued to accelerate through the end of January. In addition, brand awareness, Casual Male customer conversion and our share of end-of-rack customers all continued to increase, driving the total number of transactions and average sales per transaction.”

Looking ahead to fiscal 2016, Levin added: “Our outlook for 2016 is quite positive. For the year, we project sales in the range of $465 million to $472 million and EBITDA in the range of $31 million to $35 million. Fueling this year-over-year growth is our investment in new DXL stores. We have never taken our responsibility to invest capital lightly, and we have a rigorous process that subjects all new DXL stores to high ROIC hurdle rates.”