Stitch Fix, Inc. Class A Stock

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Stitch Fix Fourth Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the conference over to Cherryl Valenzuela, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for the Stitch Fix Fourth Quarter and Full Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. With me on the call are Matt Baer, Chief Executive Officer; and David Aufderhaar, Chief Financial Officer. We have posted complete fourth quarter and full fiscal year 2026 financial results in a press release on the Quarterly Results section of our website, investors.stitchfix.com. A link to the webcast of today's conference call can also be found on our site.

We'd like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call, which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements. Reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Please review our filings with the SEC for a discussion of the factors that could cause the results to differ, in particular, our press release issued and filed today as well as our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2026, which we expect to file later this week.

Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Please note that fiscal 2024 was a 53-week year due to an extra week in the fourth quarter. As such, references to consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth rates on this call are based on an adjusted 52-week basis, removing the impact of the extra week to provide a comparison that we believe more accurately reflects our performance.

During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial results are provided in the press release on our Investor Relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Finally, this call in its entirety is being webcast on our Investor Relations website, and a replay of this call will be available on the website shortly.

And now let me turn the call over to Matt.

Thank you, Cherryl, and good afternoon, everyone. Fiscal 2026 was a pivotal year for Stitch Fix. We advanced our strategy and closed the year as a stronger, healthier business with a more resilient operating foundation and a reimagined client experience. Full year revenue grew 6.4% to $1.35 billion. Active client trends continued to improve with Q4 marking our ninth consecutive quarter of year-over-year improvement in the growth rate. Contribution margin remained above 30% for the full year, while disciplined execution across the business drove adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EBITDA margin above our expectations.

Q4 revenue was $324.4 million, representing 4.2% year-over-year growth, our sixth consecutive quarter of positive revenue comps. Stitch Fix again outperformed the total U.S. apparel, footwear and accessories market, which, according to the latest Circana data, was approximately flat over the same period. Full year revenue also outperformed the total U.S. market with growth of 6.4% compared to 1% for the market.

Revenue per active client, or RPAC, set another record for the third consecutive quarter, reaching $592 in Q4. Q4 adjusted EBITDA was also better than expected at $10.8 million or a 3.3% margin. As a result of our transformation, we have significantly evolved our client experience with a focus on four pillars: creating new engagement opportunities, deepening client and stylist relationships, introducing enhanced fix flexibility and strengthening our assortment.

The enhanced flexibility, particularly the larger fixes we now offer and our broader, more relevant assortment were key drivers of the performance we have delivered over that period. Together, larger fixes and our improved assortment have supported 8 consecutive quarters of growth in both items per fix and average unit retail or AUR. Larger fixes enable clients to address more of their styling needs in a single fix, while our more trend-right assortment across market and private brands, including expanded categories, drove AUR growth through a favorable mix shift instead of broad-based price increases.

These sustained gains translated into strong fix AOV in Q4, which was the primary driver of revenue growth. Both our women's and men's fix businesses grew year-over-year during the quarter with men's delivering double-digit growth for the fifth consecutive quarter. Our multi-brand portfolio combines differentiated private brands with a curated selection of market brands. Together, they give us the ability to serve a broad range of wardrobe needs.

In Q4, our private brands continue to resonate with our clients. In women's, Market & Spruce, 41 Hawthorn and Montgomery Post were our top 3 brands by revenue for the second consecutive quarter. In men's, 3 of our top 5 brands in the quarter were private brands, specifically 01.Algo, Hawker Rye and Alesbury. We continue to invest in these brands and are regularly launching collections to meet individual client segment needs.

For example, in August, we launched a 41 Hawthorn capsule collection for teachers informed by the thousands of teaching-related requests we have received from clients. We are also focused on bringing clients a portfolio of brands that is best in the industry by offering market brands, clients covet and introducing others we believe they'll be excited to discover. Since the start of fiscal '26, we have added more than 80 new brands, including Rhone, Birkenstock, Outdoor Voices and Malbon Golf. More recent additions include FARM Rio, Baggu, Merrell, Jordan Brand, Nike Golf and Mitchell & Ness NFL licensed apparel.

Within our market brand assortment, we launched exclusive back-to-school collaborations with Favorite Daughter, Alex Mill and Z Supply in early August. The collections were designed for moms who have told us that they often feel overlooked during the season and early performance across all 3 launches has been encouraging.

Category expansion remains a significant opportunity for Stitch Fix, and we continue to build our assortment in areas where we have traditionally been underpenetrated, including activewear and athleisure, footwear and accessories. These categories support our ambition to meet all of our clients' wardrobe needs, and we're seeing strong growth. For example, across women's and men's, activewear and athleisure grew 21% year-over-year and footwear grew 14% in Q4.

Turning to active clients. We ended the quarter with 2.277 million active clients. New clients and men's active clients grew year-over-year in FY '26, while the trajectory of women's active clients also improved year-over-year. Client retention rate improved sequentially for the eighth consecutive quarter, and Q4 marked our third straight high in nearly 4 years. These trends reflect the strength and resilience of our current client base, our disciplined focus on acquiring higher LTV clients and organic growth through family accounts, which helps us serve the entire household.

Another element of our strategy is reaching client segments with highly specific styling needs that we are uniquely positioned to serve. One example is clients navigating the body and sizing changes associated with GLP-1 medications. All of our stylists are trained to support clients going through body transformation journeys, and we now offer a themed fix with styles for every stage of the transformation.

The opportunity is evident both in the broader market and in what we are hearing from new Stitch Fix clients. 20% of our new clients recently told us during onboarding that they are seeking styling guidance as their bodies change, nearly double the penetration of the U.S. population on GLP-1 medications according to a recent Gallup poll, which underscores the particular relevance of Stitch Fix for this need.

As always, technology remains at the core of our ability to serve our clients. AI is a powerful accelerator of our strategy and our 15 years of applying proprietary data and algorithms paired with the expertise of our stylists gives us a differentiated foundation for incorporating AI across both the client experience and our operations. Stitch Fix Vision is one client-facing example. We have integrated our style visualization platform more broadly throughout the client experience and are building toward a future where clients can see themselves reflected at every step of their shopping journey.

By combining AI with our deep understanding of each client's preferences, Vision provides personalized style inspiration. We continue to see a significant lift in 90-day freestyle spend from clients who engage with it. AI is also helping us operate more efficiently. In styling, we are using generative AI tools to support stylists in the item recommendations for fixes so they can focus more of their time on client service.

In our fulfillment centers, AI improves daily labor planning and real-time staff scheduling. And in customer service, AI agents handle more routine requests, helping us resolve inquiries more quickly and enabling our team to focus on outreach that needs a higher touch. As a result, we have more than doubled the share of chats resolved without requiring additional support. Together, these applications improve productivity and lower our cost to serve.

As we continue to advance our transformation strategy and efforts to deliver the most personalized and client-centric shopping experience, we recently welcomed Sree Sreedhararaj as our Chief Product and Technology Officer. Sree brings extensive product and technology leadership experience, including in AI integration across prominent retail and consumer brands. We're thrilled to have him on the team.

Looking ahead to fiscal 2027, our outlook reflects a more challenging consumer environment. David will speak in more detail to our outlook, including a reduction in fix volume that will only impact Q1. While these conditions affect our near-term outlook, they do not change our strategy or the opportunity ahead. When clients are more intentional about what they buy, the value of a personalized service that makes each purchase more relevant becomes even clearer.

Over the past 2 years, we have built the capabilities to deliver on that promise, a more flexible fix experience, more compelling assortment and personalization powered by proprietary client data, AI and the expertise of our stylists. We are actively addressing near-term headwinds through the levers within our control. While we are encouraged by the early performance of many of our recent innovations such as Stitch Fix Vision, family accounts and more flexible fix offerings, there's still ample runway to increase their impact as we continue to enhance these experiences, build awareness and drive penetration, we believe they can support stronger organic revenue and client growth. The financial progress we have made underpins our ability to invest behind these growth initiatives.

In closing, fiscal 2026 demonstrated the strength of the business we have built. We significantly improved our client experience and assortment, strengthened client economics and returned to year-over-year revenue growth, all while operating with discipline. The work now is to scale that stronger model, serving more existing and new clients and turning that foundation into sustainable, profitable long-term growth. A special thank you to our entire Stitch Fix Team for your continued dedication and execution.

Now I'll pass it to David for a discussion of our financial results and outlook.

Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. Fiscal '26 demonstrated significant improvement in our financial model. We expanded adjusted EBITDA margin, maintained contribution margins above 30% in each quarter, generated positive free cash flow and ended the year with a strong balance sheet. We also resumed our share repurchase program and returned capital to shareholders.

Net revenue for the year reached $1.35 billion, up 6.4% year-over-year. Gross margin was 43.7%, well within our target range of 43% to 44% as our teams did a great job navigating transportation carrier rate increases and tariffs. Overall, SG&A spend was 45.3% of revenue, over 220 basis points lower than last year. As a result, we exceeded our outlook for adjusted EBITDA and expanded our adjusted EBITDA margin year-over-year to 4%. Stock-based compensation was 3.4% of revenue compared with 4.5% last year.

Our net loss for the year narrowed to $12.6 million or a loss of $0.09 per share. We generated $19.8 million of free cash flow in fiscal 2026 and ended the year with $220.9 million in cash, cash equivalents and investments and no debt.

Turning to Q4. Revenue reached $324.4 million, up 4.2% year-over-year. Active clients were down 1.4%, both year-over-year and sequentially. In addition to seasonality, active clients were softer than expected due to higher client acquisition costs that were a headwind to acquiring and reengaging clients in the quarter. RPAC grew 7.8% to $592, while AOV grew 4.9% year-over-year.

Gross margin was 43.6%, flat year-over-year. We offset increases in transportation costs and investments in new merchandise categories with strong inventory management. Advertising was 9.9% of revenue in Q4. Q4 adjusted EBITDA was $10.8 million or a 3.3% margin, up 50 basis points year-over-year. It exceeded our guidance largely due to lower fixed operating expenses.

We continued our share repurchases in Q4, buying back 2.7 million shares for $11.3 million. For the year, we bought back 7.2 million shares for $26.4 million. This leaves $93.6 million remaining under our existing authorization.

Now turning to our outlook for Q1 and fiscal 2027. For full year FY '27, we expect total revenue to be between $1.31 billion and $1.36 billion. We expect total adjusted EBITDA for the year to be between $27 million and $42 million. And for Q1, we expect total revenue to be between $323 million and $328 million. We expect Q1 adjusted EBITDA to be between $3 million and $6 million. We expect full year gross margin to remain between 43% to 44%, and we expect to generate stronger positive free cash flow for FY '27 compared to last year.

As Matt noted, our revenue outlook reflects two factors associated with a more challenging consumer environment. First, as I called out earlier, we saw higher client acquisition costs in Q4, and that has continued into Q1. Those higher costs are a headwind to client growth in FY '27, which we expect will temper revenue growth. And second, existing clients are being more intentional about discretionary purchases outside of their recurring fixes.

For Q1 specifically, our outlook also reflects lower expected fix volume from two temporary factors. First, a decision to adjust the timing of some fix shipments in the fourth quarter, which shifted fix volume from the first quarter of fiscal 2027 into the fourth quarter of fiscal 2026. And second, an unintended change made to our post-checkout offer flow in August that limited the number of clients eligible to request another fix, which has been corrected and will not affect results beyond the first quarter.

Lastly, our adjusted EBITDA outlook for fiscal 2027 reflects planned investments in advertising and technology, including AI to support long-term growth. We will remain disciplined and judicious in how we make these investments. The stronger foundation we have built through our transformation gives us confidence in our ability to execute against our priorities and invest strategically behind our highest return opportunities. We are proud of our improved cost structure that gives us the optionality to make such investments while still delivering EBITDA profitability, maintaining a strong balance sheet and generating positive free cash flow.

With that, operator, we can open the line for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from the line of Dylan Carden with William Blair.

I'm just trying to square the comments on higher CAC and investments this year in advertising. Can you kind of unpack that a little bit? Is that it sounds like two separate things? Or is it just that you are still spending on higher CAC and it's more of a margin drag?

Yes. Thanks for the question, Dylan. With CAC, I think we called this out on the last call that we started seeing some headwinds in client acquisition costs in Q4, and that sort of continued throughout the quarter and into Q1. With regard to incremental advertising spend, even within that CAC LTVs with CACs going up, we still feel very comfortable that we're within sort of our guardrails from an advertising perspective.

And so with the headwinds that we're seeing from an overall market perspective, we feel pretty comfortable leaning in and still staying within our guardrails and still being able to get the right ROI and bring in healthy active clients.

Got it. And then any guidance you can give on kind of between the two drivers, how we should think about the shape of the year? And I guess, some pockets of growth within the active client number, but what's still sort of the lingering drag there?

For the two drivers for FY '27?

Yes.

Yes. There are a couple of factors there. First is what we called out that was specific around Q1. I think we touched on this in the prepared remarks, but just to give a little bit more color around what we saw in Q1, there were two main factors there. First, our decision to change shipping dates from some customers ended up increasing fix volume in Q4 '26 and decreased volume in Q1 '27. What that really is about is with the longer visibility into the lead times for our recurring fix business, we sometimes move shipments around between weeks for a variety of reasons. This time, though, the impact occurred across the 2 quarters and was just a little bit more significant than what we see on average. So we just wanted to call that out.

And then on the second factor, there was an unintended change that was made to the client experience during new feature testing and that disrupted an existing feature. And really, what that is, is some clients receive an offer for an immediate fix after they check out. The unintended change actually reduced the number of clients that received the offer, and that suppressed the number of fixes that were requested in August. Our team identified the issue, and we saw demand rebound, and we're confident that, that impact was isolated to Q1.

And we even see that in our monthly comps for Q1, and we expect October comps to be more in line with the implied guide for the rest of the year. And so those were the factors that were the drags on Q1. Adjusting for those factors, Q4 '26 revenue comps would have been roughly in the 2% to 3% range and our Q1 '27 revenue guide would have been a little bit more in line with the implied guide for the rest of the year. And so that's really the drag for Q1.

And then from an overall perspective, I think we called out in the prepared remarks, the other drag is sort of the full year is we have seen increased macro pressures on the consumer, increasing gas prices, higher overall inflation, mortgage rates increasing again and the incredibly low consumer sentiment all point to a challenged consumer with increased pressure on their discretionary spend, and we're definitely seeing some of those impacts as well. I think we called that out around active client headwinds that we saw in Q4 that we were just talking about around sort of that acquisition costs. We saw that continue in Q1. Those softer clients have a compounding effect on revenue for the full year.

And then we're also seeing some impacts to our existing client activity outside of the core recurring fix business, areas like Freestyle and manual fix demand. With that said, I think we've called this out before, and it's still very true. We do continue to see resilience in our core recurring fix business. We know when we get clients into the experience, they see the value, and you can see that in the RPAC metric, again, sort of at an all-time high.

And those are really all of the factors that are included in the guide. I know that was a lot, but I want to make sure we called out sort of what those assumptions were both for Q1 and the full year. And we're actively addressing these growth headwinds through initiatives and investments in technology, merchandising, marketing. We're going to continue to focus on driving healthy new clients, engaging our existing clients in new and creative ways and aggressively capture market share like especially in the challenging environment we're in.

Your next question comes from the line of Owen Rickert with Northland Capital Markets.

Firstly, on the RPAC durability, with active clients declining in the quarter, RPAC, I'm assuming carried the revenue story. I guess how much of this growth in RPAC is being driven by accessories and footwear penetration versus larger fix sizes? And do you see a ceiling on RPAC expansion if there are some headwinds in the active client base going forward?

Owen, I appreciate the question. It's Matt. As we initiated this transformation about 3 years ago, and we worked to really ensure that we're strengthening the foundation of our business and then rebuilding such that we could deliver profitable and sustainable growth, we saw a very real opportunity in order to increase the revenue per active client that we have or to acquire more wallet share with our existing clients. We had an opportunity to do a better job outfitting them head to toe to meet or exceed their expectations for all of the different use cases in which they came to us.

Larger fixes plays a critical role for us in meeting or exceeding our clients' expectations there. We also heard loud and clear from our clients that they wanted to be outfitted head to toe, which required us to really intentionally move into categories that were underpenetrated for us, namely athletic wear and athleisure, footwear and accessories. And if you looked at what our market share was in tops and bottoms at that time and applied that same market share across those other three categories, we saw $1 billion fair share opportunity.

And we do continue to drive outsized gains or outsized growth in those categories. As we shared in our prepared remarks, athletic wear and athleisure were up 21% for us in the quarter. Footwear was up 14% for us in the quarter. Accessories also outperformed the overall revenue comp for us in the quarter. Our merchants have done a phenomenal job assorting into those categories, adding leading brands as well as developing our private brands into them.

And we've done a great job both in terms of our algorithmic recommendations as well as our stylist training to make sure that we're delivering those items to clients' homes ultimately.

From a ceiling perspective, what gives us extreme confidence in our business overall is that opportunity remains a huge one for us. When you look at the Circana data that tells us our implied wallet share for our clients. We have roughly twice the amount of wallet share as the next retailer for our clients, but still an opportunity to increase that client spend with us up to 3 to 4x before we've capped out what that opportunity is. It's why we've been able to deliver -- it's one of the reasons why we've been able to deliver 6 consecutive quarters of revenue growth before we inflect to positive active client growth. And we remain confident in that as one of the perpetual growth drivers that we have at our disposal for years to come, and we intend to continue to lean into that meaningfully going forward.

Got it. Got it. Super helpful. And then secondly for me, Stitch Fix Vision was a big topic on the last call. It sounded like active users were spending 100% plus or more on Freestyle following their first use. I guess, can you just share since last -- like last quarter, how broadly Vision has been adopted across the active client base? Maybe what percentage of Freestyle revenue is now influenced by Vision interactions? And what's the road map? What's that looking like for further capability expansion throughout fiscal '27?

Vision remains a critical priority for us. When we launched Vision initially, we always intended not just for that to be the final client experience, but that to actually become a platform upon which we continue to build an end-to-end client journey, whereby the client can see themselves realize head-to-toe in Stitch Fix apparel and accessories all the way from onboarding to fix preview to when they're shopping within Freestyle into the post-purchase or checkout experience as well. And we continue to build more and more of these experiences and bring them to life.

Since we spoke most recently, we've launched what we call See It On Me, which is now an opportunity for clients as they're browsing our outfit inspirations to actually click on any of them and see those outfits come to life on their likeness. The adoption of Vision continues to be -- exceed our expectations, candidly. The launch of See It On Me helped considerably in terms of further expansion.

The increase in Freestyle spend that we are seeing from those clients that have interacted with Vision continues to remain consistent, which is really encouraging. And maybe I'll be -- I'll share with you at this point now since we've launched, we've shared over 22 million Vision images with our client base. So a lot more to come, a lot more development in the works, but we're really encouraged by what we've seen so far.

Your next question comes from the line of Dana Telsey with Telsey Advisory Group.

As you think about the current consumer landscape and the cadence shift from last quarter to this quarter, was it in categories? Was it in regions besides how you're thinking about the upcoming first quarter? And with the mix shifts that you talked about, can you expand on that and what that means? And just lastly, with the CAC costs, any different cadence throughout this upcoming fiscal year in terms of how you're thinking about the CAC?

Dana, I'll take a stab at the first question and keep me honest if I understood the thesis of the question correctly. In terms of what we saw in the 2 factors that David walked us through, those 2 factors are time-bound, and both of those 2 factors are behind us. And what we see is building on the success of the transformation that we had and the strong results that we were able to deliver in our fiscal '26 with over 6% revenue growth and capping the year with 6 consecutive quarters of revenue growth, improved profitability through our business, the reimagined client experience, and an overhauled assortment of both our private brands and market brand portfolios that we believe will position us to be best-in-class in the industry overall.

And all of those factors is ultimately what has enabled us to deliver a record revenue per active client for a third consecutive quarter at nearly $600 with an opportunity to drive that even further. And as we're operating within our -- the last quarter of Q4 and our current quarter of Q1, our focus is returning to that revenue growth. And we remain confident in our ability to deliver revenue growth over the balance of the year and into the future. So that's where the focus remains and how we're thinking about the business overall.

From a CAC perspective and the cadence in which we're seeing that, just to reiterate what David answered previously, as we were operating in real time in Q4 and into the first quarter of fiscal '27, as we saw elevated media impression and customer acquisition costs that we believe to be impacting the industry in aggregate, a macro effect of a tougher consumer environment, we continued with our methodical approach to customer acquisition.

But what we've also realized to be true is that because of the success of the clients that we bring into the experience, the high revenue per active client, the high customer lifetime value that we continue to deliver, and because of the improvements in the experience and the improvements in the assortment, that gives us the license to go out and be a little bit more aggressive in terms of our advertising spend and to ensure that we're capturing, kind of, that fair share of consumer demand to bring them into our experience.

And tangentially, something that has continued to work exceptionally well for us, as an example, is our focus on consumers on a GLP-1 medication. We've -- I believe that we were early to market in terms of seeing what that opportunity was. We leaned into it from a marketing and customer acquisition perspective. We leaned into it in terms of building dedicated experiences for them. And now we have a little bit more proof points to back that up as our onboarding more definitively is able to identify when a client comes in, in the midst of a body transformation, and it's an optional component of onboarding. But even though it's optional, we're still seeing about 20% of all new clients likely on a GLP-1 medication.

That's nearly double what we understand to be the overall U.S. population of people on the GLP-1 medication. So we believe that's another great opportunity for us to continue to lean into to continue to invest because of the superiority of our service and our ability to uniquely serve those clients as their bodies are changing.

And I think related to that spend, Dana, I think because of that, what just Matt called out, and I think we called this out in some of our prepared remarks as well, that we are leaning in a little bit to marketing. Just from a size perspective, if we're thinking about FY '27, we're probably going to be spending a little bit more in the 10% to 11% range versus the 9% to 10% range that we had in FY '26. And from a quarterly spend perspective, we will have similar seasonality where Q1 and Q3 tend to be stronger acquisition quarters for us, and we lean into marketing spend then. But we're definitely going to be more opportunistic of leaning in, in sort of the positive times that we see it and pulling back when we might see headwinds.

Your next question comes from the line of Jay Sole with UBS.

Can you just help us with the first quarter revenue bridge? You called out 2 discrete impacts to Q1, the Fix volume shifting to Q4 due to shipment timing and the August post-checkout issue that limited repeat Fix requests. Can you quantify the revenue impact from each and clarify the underlying Q1 growth rate, excluding both?

Yes. Thanks, Jay. For the 2 different items, when we had talked about a little bit earlier, when you adjust for those factors, Q4 '26 revenue comp would have been roughly in the 2% to 3% range. And the Q1 '27 revenue guide would have been a little bit more in line with the implied guide for the rest of the year. And so that should really help you back into specific numbers there.

Got it. Okay. And then maybe just to elaborate a little bit on the fiscal '27 EBITDA guidance. The forecast is sort of stepping down from where you were in '26. How much of that reflects deliberate investment versus some of the underlying cost pressures that you're talking about?

Yes. Thanks. It really is about the conscious decision to reinvest in the business. I think we called out the 2 things. The larger of the 2 is the advertising spend that we just talked about. If you think about sort of the midpoint of that 10% to 11% range, that's still almost 100 basis points more than we spent this year. And that is absolutely something that we feel very comfortable leaning into. And then we also called out that there are some incremental AI investments to help drive growth. And so those were 2 conscious decisions we made to invest some of our EBITDA in growth. If you exclude those additional investments, the EBITDA margin guide would have been much more consistent with last year's margin at the 4% range.

Your next question comes from the line of Jessica Chenyi Tian with AB Bernstein.

I have 2. So first one is, last quarter, you reiterated your goal of returning to year-over-year active client growth in fiscal 2027. Today, you've described higher acquisition costs as a headwind to client growth and referenced a lower active client starting point in the 2027 outlook. Has your confidence in returning to year-over-year active client growth during the year changed at all? And what would need to happen for you to achieve that objective?

Yes. Chenyi, I appreciate the question. As David shared previously, one of the things that we have called out is that the macroeconomic pressures that our consumers are facing, I spoke to that as well in the Q&A. And for us, one of the primary influences of that is actually in our ability to acquire new clients. And we actually believe that had those consumer headwinds not continued to elevate over the course of the last 6 months, we would have already returned to active client growth. So we remain equally convicted in terms of our ability to return to active client growth. We're going to continue to stay focused on everything within our control in order to ensure that we're most cost-effectively acquiring as many new clients as we can.

And we are continuing to -- as David just noted as well, we're continuing to invest because of the high LTVs that we're able to see from those clients that we bring in. As we also shared in our prepared remarks, our existing client retention continues to perform exceptionally well for us. So we feel really good about the overall health of our active clients, and we remain confident in terms of our ability to return to active client growth in the future.

And then one more for me. Can you walk us through how underlying demand progressed through the quarter and also the exit rate coming out of the quarter, excluding the shipment timing shift and also post-checkout offer issue? Q1 to date revenues currently tracking in line with the 2027 sales guide? Or is there some conservatism baked into the outlook?

I think -- Chenyi, maybe to answer that with brevity, the easiest way to think about Q1 performance, as David noted, is that if you look at the quarter, we anticipate our October revenue comp being much more closely aligned to what the implied revenue comp is in Q2 to Q4. And as noted as well, the 2 factors that David walked through, those are time-bound and they're behind us. So they are no longer impacting performance in the quarter.

Your next question comes from the line of David Bellinger with Mizuho.

I want to unpack the more challenged consumer commentary a little bit more. It seems a bit more pronounced than the last few quarters. Could you just tell us when you started to see that turn happen, sort of that role in consumer spending? And even going forward, if you pull out some of these transitory timing issues, can you talk about the underlying engagement from the active client base, whether that's in terms of the website, the app? Just anything that could help us for any type of rebound into Q1 and the rest of the year?

Yes. I can start with the first part of that, Dave, and then I'm sure Matt can jump in as well. We definitely started to see this in Q4. It's actually something that we called out on the earnings call last time that we had started to see some headwinds from a client acquisition standpoint, and that was impacting new client acquisition and reengagement. And we really saw that through Q4 and then continuing into Q1. And then late in Q4, we started to see some of the other impacts that I had called out that are in those areas that are a little bit more susceptible to macro like Freestyle or someone asking for a Fix outside of the recurring Fix cycle. And so those are some of the headwinds we started to see at the end of the quarter, and they continued into Q1. And both of those are sort of included in our full year FY '27 outlook.

What I'd add to that, too, and we've talked about this previously, is the Stitch Fix service is one that positions us really well to outperform when the consumer environment gets tough. At the same time, we're not immune when the consumer environment gets exceptionally tough. The reason why our service performed so well is because of the deep and enduring relationship that our clients have with their Stylists. It gives them the opportunity to have frank discussions about what changes there might be in their budget. They have the ability to change the cadence of their Fix shipments, and we're able to meet them where they are at any given time.

We obviously stay exceptionally close to our clients. And we hear loud and clear from them that times are getting tougher. But encouragingly, they're actually signaling a desire to spend even more of their wallets with us going forward. It's why we see that resilience. It's why our core client does remain exceptionally resilient. It's why our core sales channel does remain resilient. And encouragingly, that resilience remains for all household income segments that we're able to track within our business. It's also the reason why for 6 consecutive quarters, we've outperformed the overall market and continue to gain market share. And we're confident that going forward, we'll continue to serve those clients exceptionally well and gain market share along the way.

Got it. And then a second question, mainly on a longer-term horizon. I know you've talked about some of these artificial intelligence investments, talking about Stitch Fix Vision. How should we think about the positioning of the business with things like the rise of Meta's Muse app and just a different consumer discoverability going forward? How do we think about Stitch Fix's positioning, whether that's good, bad or neutral, just with things like Meta's Muse coming out?

Yes, David. We believe that we're really well positioned to continue to lead within this environment. In the DNA of Stitch Fix is innovation, is our ability to lean into AI, is the quality, depth, and breadth of the data that we have. At the end of the day, an AI experience, generative or agentic, the quality of that output is premised on the quality of the data that you put into it. What we know about our clients and what we know about the overall market continues to be a competitive advantage for us. So as we're building our proprietary experiences, we're able to uniquely serve clients and serve them in ways that's superior to what others are able to because of how well we know them. Stitch Fix Vision and as we continue to expand it are great examples of that.

We're also confident in our ability to play -- to participate appropriately with the rise of agentic shoppers as well. We'll have the ability, whether it's a human client or an agentic shopper, in order to serve them equally well. That being said, we also continue to believe that there are certain categories where agentic shopping are probably better served. If I want to ensure my pantry is perpetually replenished with paper towels, that's something I would happily outsource to my agentic shopper. If I want to ensure that I'm dressing style and trend appropriate with clothes that fit me that align to my budget and that will give me confidence when I walk out the door, there's a lot more nuance in that. And that's where our human Stylists give us a competitive advantage.

That's where the ability to build those deep and enduring relationships, we think, will continue to be a competitive moat for us going forward. And as more and more interactions for all consumers generally are taking place by AI, it is actually human connection becomes the scarce resource. And we are the only retailer out there that has continued to invest in this human connection in a meaningful way such that we can serve our clients uniquely, and we believe that will become an even greater competitive advantage for us in the future.

There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Matthew Baer for closing remarks.

Thank you all for taking the time to join us today. As we look back on fiscal '26, I just want to reiterate how proud I am of what the team has accomplished. Growing revenue each quarter and revenue up 6.4% for the entirety of the year, expanding our adjusted EBITDA margin and generating positive free cash flow while also continuing to outperform the broader U.S. apparel, footwear, and accessories market.

The structural improvements that we've made through our transformation have created a more resilient business model than we had 2 years ago. And as we discussed and while our FY '27 guidance reflects a more challenging consumer backdrop, our strategy and our conviction in the opportunity ahead remains unchanged. As I mentioned earlier, our focus for the year ahead is clear. It's to strengthen our position in the market by growing our active clients, it's to capture a greater share of our clients' spend, and it's to invest in the long-term growth with our continued financial discipline, and we remain confident in our ability to navigate near-term headwinds and build on the capabilities that we've established to deliver sustainable, profitable growth over the long term. And we look forward to updating you on our progress next quarter. Thank you so much.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending. You may now disconnect.

Thank you. Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us and welcome to Stitch Fix Third Quarter 2026 Earning Results Conference Call. After today's prepared remarks, we will host a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. now hand the conference over to Cheryl Valenzuela, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon and thank you for joining us today for the Stitch Fix third quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call. With me on the call are Matt Baer, Chief Executive Officer, and David Alterhart, Chief Financial Officer. We have posted complete third quarter 2026 financial results in a press release on the quarterly results section of our website. investors.stitchfix.com. We would like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call, which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements. Reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Please review our filings with the SEC for an update or discussion of the factors that could cause the results to differ.

In particular, our press release issued and filed today, as well as our quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the second quarter of fiscal 2026 and subsequent periodic reports filed with the SEC. Also, note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements except as required by law. Please also note that fiscal 2024 was a 53-week year due to an extra week in the fourth quarter. As such, references to consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth rates on this call are based on an adjusted 52-week basis, removing the impact of the extra week to provide a comparison that we believe more accurately reflects our performance. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the press release on our investor relations website.

These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results. Finally, this call in its entirety is being webcast on our Investor Relations website, and a replay of this call will be available on the website shortly. And now let me turn the call over to Matt.

Thanks Cheryl, and good afternoon everyone. Revenue in the quarter grew 4.7% to $340.3 million, marking our fifth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth. Our active clients were 2.3 million and increased 21,000 sequentially, a significant milestone in our transformation journey. Revenue Proactive Client, or RPAC, reached $578 in Q3. the highest level we have reported, slightly exceeding the record we set just last quarter. These results demonstrate how we are strengthening our position as our client's retailer of choice for apparel, footwear, and accessories. As we scale, we maintain our focus on operating with financial discipline. in healthy profit margins. Gross margin in Q3 was 43.7% and contribution margin remained above 30% for the ninth consecutive quarter.

Our adjusted EBITDA was $13.2 million, and our adjusted EBITDA margin was 3.9%, both also better than expected. Our revenue outperformance in Q3 was driven by strength in our fixed channel. Fixed average order value, or AOV, increased year over year for the 11th straight quarter. primarily due to higher items per fix as a result of expanded adoption of our larger fix offering. Growth in average unit retail, or AUR, also contributed meaningfully to the overall AOV upside, reflecting the benefits of our ongoing assortment improvements. Over the last several years, we have significantly enhanced the breadth and depth of our assortment to more fully meet client needs and capture more wallet share. Our strategy has been anchored on optimizing our portfolio of market brands, investing in our own private brands, and expanding into new categories to better offer head-to-toe outfitting. We are seeing the results of this work.

Both our women's and men's businesses saw top line gains in Q3. Within our women's business, we saw robust domain for activewear and athleisure, which grew a combined 50% year over year. We also had a successful seasonal transition with strengthened sandals, skirts, and sneakers. Some of the brands that posted the strongest growth were our private brands, namely Montgomery Post, 41 Hawthorne, and Market & Spruce. Men's grew double digits year over year for the fourth straight quarter. with standout performance in warm weather categories, such as shorts, short sleeve woven tops, and casual shoes, which each grew more than 30%. Some of the brands that posted the strongest growth were our private brand Aylesbury, as well as Travis Matthew, Viore and Bonobos. With regards to expanding into new categories, we've previously shared our belief that growing our relevance in activewear and athleisure, footwear and accessories can unlock approximately $1 billion in incremental revenue if we achieve our fair share with our existing client base, and we are pursuing this opportunity by expanding our offerings in these key categories.

As an example, we recently launched women's sunglasses, introducing brands like La Specs, Air, and Keep, and we are strengthening our footwear assortment with new brands like Frye, while seeing growth in established brands such as Adidas and New Balance. We are also building on our momentum in active wear and athleisure. We recently added Outdoor Voices, Mob & Golf, Spiritual Gangster, and Cotopaxi, as well as deepened our penetration with client favorites like Varley, Roan, and our private label brand, We Wander. We are also seeing strength in men's and kids' swimwear with the addition of brands like Fair Harbor. The improvements to our assortment are bolstering our position in the market and translating into further market share gains. According to the latest Arcana data, Stitch Fix again meaningfully outperformed the total U.S. apparel, footwear, and accessories market in the most recent quarter. with our year-over-year revenue growth rate more than four times the growth of the total market. We also remain focused on the quality and durability of our client base. central focus of our transformation has been acquiring and retaining high lifetime value, or LTV, clients who value our service and whom we are uniquely positioned to serve exceptionally well.

As I noted earlier, we reached an important milestone in this work as we successfully grew our client base. We also hit our eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth rate improvement in active clients and remain encouraged by this steady progress. Starting with new clients, they grew for the third consecutive quarter, up more than 10% year over year in Q3. As our marketing becomes more targeted and precise, we are seeing that rigor show up in the quality of new client cohorts. new client LTVs increased year over year for the 11th consecutive quarter and were nearly double what they were three years ago. reinforcing our belief that we are building a healthier and more durable client base. That momentum is being reinforced by the sustained adoption of family accounts, which is creating an additional organic pathway for client acquisition. As more clients adopt the feature, family accounts have become an efficient way for us to add high intent clients while also expanding family wallet share. We are also focused on reengaging former clients.

Our targeted campaigns are bringing clients back to Stitch Fix, and as they return, we are focused on deepening engagement through a more personalized and flexible experience. At the same time, retention rates continue to strengthen, with steady improvement over seven straight quarters. Q3 surpassed the mark we set last quarter for our highest retention rate in four years. Engagement also remains healthy. Total active clients on recurring shipments continue to grow year over year. new clients on recurring shipments grew even faster. This is an important signal of the value clients are seeing in their fixes and the strength of the ongoing relationship we are building with them. Taken together, these trends reinforce that we are methodically building a stronger client base, and our goal remains to return to year-over-year active client growth in fiscal 27. We attribute both our progress and active clients, as well as our revenue growth, in large part to the advancements we've made to our client experience over the past two years.

These improvements have been grounded in delivering on our core promise to offer the most client-centric and personalized shopping experience. We're best positioned to do this because of the uniqueness of our model, which starts with the power of our data. We know more about our clients before their first transaction with us than most retailers know over a lifetime relationship. We have billions of data points on their fit, style, and budget preferences, as well as nuanced insights on our merchandise assortment. It is the interplay of that data, our innovative and AI driven technology platform, and the human connections that our stylists build with clients every day that enable us to deliver what we believe is a superior way to shop for apparel, footwear, and accessories. Our AI-powered style visualization platform, Stitch Fix Vision, plays a plays an important role in offering this better way to shop. As a reminder, Vision provides clients with personalized imagery of their likeness in an array of shoppable outfits tailored to their style profiles and current trends.

Since launching it in October, we've been pleased with our clients' response. Notably, we continue to see over a 100% lift in freestyle spend over a 90-day period for clients who use Division. Now, we are integrating vision further within the client experience and are beginning to give clients more control over how they discover and visualize styles by enabling them to generate their own vision images around a look of their choosing. This is exactly the type of innovation we believe can deepen client engagement over time and reflects the broader strides we are taking to strengthen the Stitch Fix experience and the business overall. Beyond embedding AI into the client experience through features like vision, we are We are applying AI across the enterprise. We are increasingly using these capabilities to optimize efficiency and sharpen our retail advantage in areas including inventory management, intelligent pricing, and creative marketing execution. In private brand product development, we're using AI to fundamentally transform the process, and we can now design a full assortment for an individual private brand in about one week. compared to the traditional multi-month design cycle.

To close, Q3 was another clear step forward for Stitch Fix. We delivered revenue and adjusted EBITDA above our outlook, achieving sequential active client growth and continue to execute with the discipline that has been central to our transformation. This is increasingly showing up in our bottom line as we drive towards net income profitability. Importantly, this performance reflects the deliberate choices we have made over the last several years to strengthen the foundation of the business. enhance how we serve clients, sharpen our focus on higher quality growth, and fully deliver the client-centric, highly personalized shopping experience that sets Stitch Fix apart. Technology and innovation has been at the core of Citrix's business since day one, and as we look ahead, we will continue to capitalize on this leadership. will enable us to build on our progress, even in a more challenging retail environment. Our model is resilient, differentiated, and uniquely equipped to navigate macroeconomic uncertainty and a more dynamic consumer backdrop. We are confident in our ability to capture further market share and wallet share and to keep building steadily toward long-term, sustainable, profitable growth.

I want to thank the entire Stitch Fix team, the The results we are seeing are a direct reflection of your focus, dedication, and commitment to our clients. Thank you for the work you do every day. With that, I'll turn it over to David to discuss our financial results and outlook.

Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. As Matt highlighted, our strategic initiatives are driving clear momentum across our top line and client metrics. From a financial perspective, I'm equally pleased with how those gains translated to our bottom line. Our third quarter results demonstrate our ongoing commitment to operational efficiency, which allowed us to exceed our adjusted EBITDA outlook and generate positive cash flow. We are maintaining strong financial discipline to ensure our transformation scales profitably. Now let's turn to the numbers. Revenue was $340.3 million, 4.7% year-over-year, exceeding our outlook.

Its AOV grew 6.4%, better than expected, and was the primary reason for the outperformance. This was driven by more items per fix and higher AUR, reflecting strong demand for larger fixes and our improved assortment. We ended Q3 with 2.3 million active clients, up 21,000 or nearly 1% sequentially. Both women's and men's active clients were up sequentially, and men's active clients were up year over year for the second consecutive quarter. Net revenue per active client, or RPAC, was $578, up 6.6% year over year, marking the ninth consecutive quarter of year over year growth. We view the continued growth in RPAC as an important indicator of improving engagement and spend among our clients. It reflects the impact of the work we are doing across assortment, personalization, fixed flexibility, and the overall client experience, and reinforces the opportunity we see to grow share of wallet over time as we build the active client.

We continue to deliver strong margins. Gross margin was 43.7%, again, above the midpoint of our FY26 range of 43 to 44%, while contribution margins remain robust and north of 30% for the ninth straight quarter. Advertising was 10.2% of revenue in Q3, in line with our expectations. Q3 adjusted EBITDA came in at $13.2 million, or 3.9% margin. We have ceded our guidance due to stronger than expected revenue and disciplined expense management. We ended Q3 with $229.4 million in cash and investments and no debt, and we generated $6.5 million of free cash flow in the quarter. Strong balance sheet and stable cash flows give us the flexibility to sustain our investments in the growth of the business, while also returning capital to shareholders when we believe it represents an attractive use of cash.

During the quarter, we bought back 4.5 million shares for $15.1 million under our previously authorized share repurchase program, which leaves $104.9 million in that program. Our decision to repurchase shares reflects our confidence in the progress we are making, the durability of our financial position, and our commitment to strategic capital allocation. Inventory at the end of Q3 was $132.2 million, up 15.6% year over year, reflecting investments in our client experience and increased demand for larger fixes. Turning to our outlook for Q4 and FY26. For Q4, we expect total revenue to be between $322,000 and $222 and $327 million. We expect Q4 adjusted EBITDA to be between $7 and $10 million. As a result, for full year FY26, we are tightening our ranges and raising the midpoints for both revenue and adjusted EBITDA to reflect the resilience we're seeing in existing client engagement despite an increasingly challenged consumer environment.

We now expect total revenue to be between 1.346 and 1.351 billion dollars. We now expect total adjusted EBITDA for the year to be between 49 and 52 million dollars. And we continue to expect to be free cash flow positive for the full year. We still expect full year gross margin to be between 43 to 44% and full year advertising costs to be between 9 to 10% of revenue. As we close out FY26, we are encouraged by the meaningful progress we are making across the business. Active client trends are improving, AOV growth remains healthy, and we expect continued market share gains. Our financial model continues to demonstrate strong margins, disciplined expense management, positive free cash flow, and progress towards net income profitability.

That performance gives us the flexibility to keep investing in the areas we believe can drive durable growth, such as strengthening the client experience, thoughtfully rebuilding our active client base, and advancing the innovation that differentiates Stitch Fix. confident in the path ahead, encouraged by the traction we are building, and committed to delivering further progress in the quarters to come. With that, operator, we can open the line for Q&A.

Thank you. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 to raise your hand. To withdraw your question, press star 1 again. ask that you pick up your handset when asking a question to allow for optimum sound quality. And if you're muted locally, please remember to unmute your device. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Jay Soul from UBS.

Your line is open. Please go ahead. Great. I hope you can hear me. So very interesting on the AOV trends. Can you double click on those a little bit? I mean, you mentioned what's driving it, but it seems like it really outperformed in the quarter. You know, tell us maybe some of the strategies that are really the key to getting, you know, the more units perfected from some of the other drivers of AOV that you mentioned. Thank you. Thank you.

Hey, Jay, it's Matt here. So appreciate the recognition. We're really proud of the work that we've done to reimagine the client experience. And through those efforts, we've been able to drive 11 consecutive quarters of average order value gains. There's a few key contributing factors to that. One, is the success that we've seen with larger fixes. As we've enabled our clients to have fixes, six, seven, or eight items, we've seen many clients self-select into those larger fixes, helping us capture additional wallet share, better provide head to toe outfitting, and ensure that we're able to meet or exceed needs for several additional use cases. We also see the success and average order value of those larger fixes nearly double that of a traditional fix. of the other factors of the reimagination, the client experience is the investments that we've made to improve our portfolio of assortment.

That's true in both the market brands that we carry as well as the private brands that we develop. Within the market brands, we've brought on several new brands, which we've highlighted on prior calls as well as noted in today's prepared remarks. And that's helped us improve our AURs across the board, which we're up, I believe, for a seventh consecutive quarter. We've also been investing heavily into our private brands, delivering exceptional value and quality across the board. clients have continued to take notice there, which has helped us again capture higher average unit retails within our private brand portfolio while not directly or not impacting average order value. Worth noting that our private brands are also delivering about 500 basis points of higher gross margin than the market brands.

Got it. It may be a matter if I can ask you about just the active client, the momentum you've gotten sequentially. I think the trend in active client growth improved for the eighth quarter in a row. I guess looking ahead to the fourth quarter, how are client acquisition and retention trends shaping up? And what's your level of confidence in being able to maintain the positive sequential momentum?.

Yes, Jay, this is David. I can take that. Thanks for the question. First, to your point, we're really encouraged with the results we saw this quarter. It's just one more proof point that that methodical approach that we've been taking to grow active clients is working. As for Q4, just a reminder that Q1 and Q3 tend to be seasonally stronger quarters for active clients. Q4 tends to be a seasonally less strong around client acquisition. And that's what we're seeing as we go into Q4. And so because of that, we actually expect Q4 to be down slightly sequentially, somewhere between about a half a percent to a percent down sequentially.

With that said, to your point, we We still do expect to improve in Q4 as they have the last eight quarters. And because of that work, we continue to be really encouraged by the overall trends that Matt highlighted in the remarks earlier around new, re-engaged, and client retention. And that methodical approach is the one that we will continue to use to make sure building a healthy and profitable client base. And that continues to be our focus in Q4. And our goal remains to return to that year over year client growth in FY27. And, you know, these results and our guide sort of show clear progress towards that.

Got it. If I can squeeze in one more and then I'll pass it on. You know, if you can maybe just put your finger on exactly what it was to allow you to raise the adjusted EBITDA guide, you know, especially the lower end of the guide as much as you did. You know, what's happening that's allowing you to do that of all the different things that you mentioned?.

Yes, certainly Jay. On the adjusted EBITDA side, I think we've talked about this quite a bit over the last few quarters. Like we continue to be very, very focused on expense discipline and leverage in the business. And it's something that we continue to focus on this quarter. It's something that we'll continue to focus on in coming quarters. a couple of data points like SG&A spend in Q3 was down over 220 basis points from last year. And it was down, I think over 800 basis points from two years ago. And part of that is also SBC expense, which I know is below EBITDA, but another area that we continue to focus on. And so I think we just continue to make sure that we are driving financial discipline while still certainly investing in growth.

And that's really where we felt comfortable putting EBITDA where it is from a guide perspective.

Yes, maybe one additional build on that, Jay. And it was noted in the prepared remarks, we continue to lean in and capitalize on infusing both AI and additional initiatives in terms of the efficiencies of our operations. We continue to drive leverage throughout our fulfillment network and supply chain. We continue to drive efficiency. and leverage throughout our styling network as well. And all of those improvements are helping us continue to improve our bottom line performance.

Got it. Okay. Thank you so much. Your next question comes from the line of Owen Rickard from Northland Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thanks for taking my questions here. First for me, household accounts were called out as a growth initiative. How much penetration have you seen there and what is the RPAC list associated with clients who do adopt that feature?.

So, hey Owen, it's Matt. So we've been extremely pleased with the adoption of household accounts since we rolled that out. That household account feature came through the client insights that we gathered a couple of years ago, whereby our clients spoke loud and clear that we were offering a superior service. that they absolutely loved, but how could we bring that not just for the primary account owner, but such that it could be used for the entire household? So when we launched that feature, we saw some pretty quick organic adoption that adoption accelerated and has sustained since we launched. And it has made a material impact to the overall improvement in our active client count. And it's something that we're going to continue to lean into, creating awareness and consideration for the feature across the board. It's something that is now part of our core messaging throughout both our onsite experiences as well as through our CRM. In terms of how we're thinking about it, Our goal is to ensure that we're using household accounts to capture additional wallet share from that entire family. That continues to be a focus for us to ensure that we are the retailer for any and all apparel accessories and footwear needs for the entire household, such that they never have a reason to waste a day, you know, walking the cavern in a store or scrolling endlessly online.

They can just use the superior service offering unparalleled convenience to have all of their needs met.

Okay, got it. That makes sense. Super helpful. And then lastly for me, maybe how are you thinking about the balance between the fixed and freestyle as the primary growth drivers going forward? And maybe does the mix shift between the two have any meaningful margin implications?.

So, yes, Owen, it's Matt again. In terms of fix and freestyle, one of the important things for us is to show up for the client in the best way possible. However, we can best meet their needs, whether that is through a fixed experience or a freestyle experience. We've continued to lean into and invest in both of. of those channels. And also what we've started to do over the last several quarters is actually break down the barriers between those channels such that a client, for example, could be initiating their shopping journey within freestyle, but then while while in freestyle, actually use the item that they're shopping for to become the anchor for their next fix and work with their stylist to build an outfit around that item or to provide a few variations of that similar item. So when we're thinking about where that growth is coming from at the end of the day, we're bit indifferent. What we're looking for is how can we ensure that we continue to drive engagement and capture that wallet share overall for us.

David, if there's anything to add in terms of the relative profitability of both, I think at the end of the day, they're pretty similar, and we're very comfortable just meeting the client where they are.

Great, super helpful guys. Thanks for taking my questions here. Of course, Owen.

Your next question comes from the line of Dana Telsey from Telsey Advisory Group.

Please go ahead. The revenue proactive client in terms of what you're seeing. Where do you see that going, difference between brands and private label in terms of what you're seeing and what's the category trends and how do you feel about the state of consumer? And then lastly on advertising, which was flat at, I believe 10.2%, how do you manage that? you think of the trajectory of advertising spend moving forward? Thank you.

Hey Dana, I captured a few questions there. The first is in terms of our revenue proactive client success and where we see that trending. The second is in terms of the performance of private brands versus market brands, which categories we're seeing success with, how we're viewing the consumer and the current trends in our advertising expense. If I start at the top, We are very encouraged given what we're seeing in the total market today for our revenue proactive client to continue to set new highs for us from a reporting perspective. It is a really strong signal to us that we are delivering an exceptional service. And our goal is to continue to drive that metric as much as we can by meeting the client where they are. We feel really confident that the service that we offer is one that can meet our client's needs for nearly all of their use cases for apparel, accessories, and footwear.

And our goal is to continue to drive towards that part of that is by the category expansion that we continue to talk to for us to continue to grow in for us to continue to gro us to continue to grow in of those growing outsize business, all of them nor in the last quarter, we f that we're going to conti expanding the different use cases that we can serve them, which gives us a line of sight to future revenue proactive client growth and future wallet share gains. In terms of market brands and private brands, we're seeing success in both. As we've talked about previously, we're going to be very client-led in this pursuit. For us, it's really important to have the market brands that our clients covet. It's very important for us to have market brands to fill a white space where our private brands don't have assortment today. It's very important for us to have the leading brands for certain categories and certain use cases where market brands is a reason to purchase for our clients. And it's also a really critical signal for us to ensure that our clients understand that we are the leader when it comes to style and trend.

From a private brand perspective, the team has done a phenomenal job over the last couple of years, increasing the quality and value of the private brands that we offer. And our clients have absolutely taken notice. The awareness, the consideration, and the demand for those brands continues to increase. And that's why we were excited to highlight just the success. success that we're having with our private brands, some of which are growing now over 100% year over year, something that we take a tremendous amount of pride in. In terms of where we see the consumer today, we're really encouraged about the resilience of the Stitch Fix client. The Stitch Fix client continues to show up and in a really encouraging fashion, the Stitch Fix client at every single income cohort that we track continues to show up equally. We see the same levels nearly the same levels of revenue growth, no matter the household income of our clients.

And we believe that's because of our ability to personalize the experience to each client, no matter what is going on with their budget in any given time. Our assortment allows us to serve a significant breadth of different price points such that if there is a budget constraint at any given time, we're able to meet that client where they are. And we also have the resilience of our business model that is something based on the recurring nature of that business model, our product and the relationship that we have with our clients continues to show up for them and is top of mind for them. So that even if they are say reducing a shopping trip or a shopping journey, the relationship that they have with us and that deep and enduring relationship that they've built with their stylists is one that transcends whatever macro impact that client might be having. And we are able to capture the remaining wallet share that they have.

David, I'll let you touch on the advertising. Yes, Dana, on the advertising, I think we've talked about this before of just strength from a seasonality perspective. And certainly this quarter is one of those quarters. And we were really comfortable with spending at the high end of the range. I think we'd actually said that in our last call that we expected to spend sort of at the high end of our range. And certainly, we're seeing strength across each area of active clients. New client acquisition was up again.

Certainly quarter over quarter, but also year over year. Re-engaged clients are still incredibly healthy and a great avenue for us to bring clients back into the experience. And client retention continues to look better. And so because of that, certainly marketing plays a big part in that. And we're really comfortable with those levels of investments and continuing to spend, you know, right now, you know, our expectations to still spend within that 9 to 10 percent range.

Thank you. Your next question comes from the line of David Bellinger from Mizuho Securities USA. Please go ahead.

Hey everyone, thanks for the question. I want to go back to the consumer comments you were just making. You mentioned a few times in the prepared remarks some of this increasingly dynamic spending backdrop. Can you walk us through the cadence of this quarter and anything on quarter to date that's changed or this has shown up in the business and does this have to do anything with this sequential contraction that we're looking for in fiscal Q4?.

Yes, David, a couple of things. A couple of things there. In Q3, certainly, really happy with the performance. If you're talking about the progression through the quarter, it was definitely interesting. We probably had a little bit of a slower start to the quarter, and that was around average order value that we were talking about earlier in the call. And then it really rebounded mid quarter. And so really saw some strength as we exited the quarter. And we expect that strength to continue in Q4. we had already had an assumption, I think we had talked about this four to 6% increase in AOV in the back half of the year.

We had expected Q3 to be at the lower end of that range and Q4 to be at the higher end of that range. And so because of that, You know, that's why our guide stayed consistent for Q4, because we already had baked in a higher AOV for Q4. And so just really encouraged with those trends. And going into Q4, you know, we continue to see resilience with our existing clients. You know, if there's any macro headwind, we're maybe seeing a little bit of an increase in client acquisition. costs from a marketing standpoint. We're seeing that across the industry. But what's really interesting, and I think it goes back to what Matt was saying, is our existing clients remain incredibly resilient.

And that's true across all of our income cohorts. And so really encouraged by that, and we see that continuing in Q4. And all of that is included in our guide.

Understood. Thanks for all that. And then going forward, think about it. about SG&A dollars. The last few quarters have been in this $150 million or so range. As the business gets back to growth mode, is there anything we should think about that should come into that base or some type of incremental uplift in SG&A dollars as the business returns to growth? Thank you.

Yes, David, thanks for the question. You know, for SG&A, I think it goes back, I think we touched on this a little bit earlier, but, you know, we have been really focused on driving, you know, leverage actually across the entire P&L, certainly in gross margin, but then below gross margin, to your point, SG&A, you know, a part, a big part of that is our variable labor teams. our warehouse teams, our stylist teams, and driven a lot of leverage there. And so even over the last year. SG&A spend has come down to 120 basis points. And so, we continue to really make sure that we are driving that leverage. And SBC, I think is something we've called out in the past as well. That's a big part of the total SG&A spend and SBC was at 3.3% of revenue this quarter, that's down 100 basis points.

And so just across each one of the areas of SG&A, we wanna make sure that we are investing appropriately for growth, but that we continue to drive leverage. And we don't see any significant investment needs to turn that in the other direction. We just wanna make sure we're still driving so leverage in the P&L.

Your next question comes from the line of Anisha Sherman from Bernstein. Please go ahead.

Thank you and congrats on a great quarter. So David, I want to follow up on your comments on the prior question. It sounds like you're saying that you ended Q3 at a high point in terms of revenue growth relative to the first half of Q3. So I would imagine above the quarter's average of kind What does that imply for the current trend? Are you running ahead of the kind of Q4 guide or at the top of the Q4 guidance range at the moment? And do you expect it to decelerate a little bit through the quarter to get through to that 3.5% to 5% guidance range? And then related to that, AOV, your compares get a little tougher in Q4. Are you seeing or expecting any moderation or flattening out of the AOV growth in Q4 as those compares get a bit tougher?.

Yes, thanks for the question, Anisha. On the trends, definitely what we called out holds in Q3, we were definitely a little bit slow at the beginning of the quarter and then rebounded. For Q4, I think we see something similar where there's a little bit of a slower start to the quarter from an AOV perspective. and then it's already starting to come back. And so we see a little bit of the same. For AOV and Q4, though, we had already assumed that it was going to be 6% year over year. And so still really comfortable with the AOV compares in Q4. It was just in Q3 we got there faster than we had expected. in being able to rebound to be able to land just above 6% for the quarter in Q3.

And that's one of the reasons why we didn't necessarily play forward the beat is because we already had the strength included in our guide for Q4 last quarter.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense. And then if I can ask one follow up on your new client LTVs, beyond the family accounts that are obviously helping there, is there any particular other mixed shift in terms of demographics amongst those new clients that's driving higher LTVs.

that you're seeing in your mix? Hey, Nisha. It's Matt. I'll take that question. First, just a point of clarification. Within our household accounts, we treat each of those accounts separately. So from an LTV perspective, while we're really encouraged by the results we're seeing in household accounts. The growth we've seen in new client LTVs is actually independent of that. So for us to have effectively doubled our new client LTVs from where they were just three years ago, that's really the aggregate impact of everything that we have done to improve both the experience and our assortment.

Part of that is the larger fixes that we offer. Part of that is the continued improvements in our assortment. Part of that is all of the continued investments that we're making into our engagement mechanisms from Stitch Fix Vision to our AI Style Assistant to our Stylist Connect platform. And as we continue to create more opportunities for us to engage our clients, as we continue to create services that uplevel the experience for our clients, we're continuing to see that increase in spend for each of the new clients that we acquire. In terms of who's coming into this service, our marketing team continues to do a really good job getting more and more focused and methodical in terms of who we're targeting. such that we are bringing in clients that have a clear resonance for the service that we offer, and also finding very specific client segments like we've discussed before that we believe will be able to serve at an exceptional level. A great example of that is the success that we've had targeting clients that are low-income. likely on a GLP-1 medication and going through a body transformation. We're able to follow them all the way through the funnel from prospect marketing that explains to them why this service is one that will help them ensure they have all of their apparel needs met as their body is transforming.

They come into a landing page that really helps. explain again why this service is right for them. And then their stylist can work for them to meet their needs at each stage of the body transformation journey that they're going through. And we have lots of different segments that we're able to focus on similar to that, as well as ensuring that, you know, the clients that we bring in, we just continue to to serve at a really high level overall. Thank you.

Of course. At this time, there are no further questions. I would now like to turn the call back to Matt Baer for closing remarks.

Okay, thank you. So to close, I just want to reiterate how proud I am of the team overall, the progress that we've delivered this quarter and the success that we've been able to drive throughout the entirety of this transformation. We're building a healthier and more durable client base. We continue to strengthen our assortment. We're deepening the engagement levels with our clients. And we continue to prove that Stitch Fix can deliver a more personal, a more convenient, and a more inspiring way to shop. I'm excited the progress continues to show up across multiple dimensions of the business. We're growing our revenue. We're improving our active client trends.

We're gaining market share. And we're doing all of this while maintaining the financial discipline that has been central to the transformation. That includes the robust margins that we're delivering, our positive free cash flow, the strategic capital allocation that David discussed, and the progress towards net income profitability. At Stitch Fix, we're operating from a position of strength and I'm confident in our ability to continue to do so. I appreciate your interest in our business and I look forward to sharing our continued progress in the future. Thank you.

This concludes today's call. Thank you all for attending. You may now disconnect.

[Call has ended.]

Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Stitch Fix Second Quarter Fiscal Year 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I will now hand the call over to Cherryl Valenzuela, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for the Stitch Fix Second Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. With me on the call are Matt Baer, Chief Executive Officer; and David Aufderhaar, Chief Financial Officer. We have posted complete second quarter 2026 financial results in a press release on the Quarterly Results section of our website, investors.stitchfix.com.

We would like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call, which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements. Reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Please review our filings with the SEC for a discussion of the factors that could cause the results to differ, in particular, our press release issued and filed today as well as our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 and subsequent periodic reports filed with the SEC. Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law.

Please note that fiscal 2024 was a 53-week year due to an extra week in the fourth quarter. As such, references to consecutive quarters of year-over-year revenue growth rates on this call are based on an adjusted 52-week basis, removing the impact of the extra week to provide a comparison that we believe more accurately reflects our performance. During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the press release on our Investor Relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Finally, this call in its entirety is being webcast on our Investor Relations website, and a replay of the call will be available on the website shortly. And now let me turn the call over to Matt.

Thanks, Cherryl, and good afternoon, everyone. Q2 was another strong quarter marked by our fourth consecutive quarter of year-over-year revenue growth. We continue to successfully execute our transformation strategy and are seeing the cumulative impact of those efforts to both strengthen the foundation of our business and reimagine our client experience.

The enhancements we've rolled out over the past 18 months, including greater flexibility, meaningful improvements we've made to the quality and breadth of our assortment and new AI features are driving increased client engagement and durable revenue growth. As a result, we are solidifying our position in the market and our role as our clients' retailer of choice for apparel, footwear and accessories. Getting into the specific numbers, revenue exceeded our outlook and grew 9.4% year-over-year to $341.3 million, supported by broad-based demand that remained resilient across all income cohorts. Revenue per active client reached $577 in Q2, our highest revenue per active client as a public company. We achieved this growth while driving leverage in our business. Q2 was our eighth consecutive quarter with a contribution margin greater than 30%.

Adjusted EBITDA also exceeded our outlook and was $15.9 million or 4.7% of revenue. We also continued to gain market share and significantly outperform the broader U.S. apparel and accessories market during the quarter, highlighting the strength of our value proposition. Our 9.4% year-over-year revenue growth in Q2 contrasts with the 0.5% contraction the total U.S. apparel, footwear and accessories market sustained in the same period according to the latest Circana data. Our growth this quarter was anchored by the fix channel. By leveraging our unique curation capabilities and expert stylists, we've leaned into head-to-toe outfitting and strategic category expansion.

This high-touch approach is resonating deeply. Both our women's and men's fix businesses grew double digits, contributing to a nearly 10% year-over-year increase in fix average order value, our 10th consecutive quarter of growth. A key driver of this performance is the increased flexibility we've integrated into our service. Adoption of our larger fixes, which offer up to 8 items in a fix versus the original 5 continues to grow. We are also seeing high resonance with other newer formats such as themed fixes and fixes built around a specific freestyle item of a client's choosing. The average order value for these fixes are, in aggregate, nearly double that of a traditional 5-item fix.

We have also fundamentally improved the selection of items within each Fix. The growth in fixed average order value was driven by higher average unit retail, which grew 7.7% year-over-year, our sixth consecutive quarter of growth. The increase was largely fueled by a more compelling assortment and favorable mix. External pricing factors, including tariffs, were not a significant driver of the change. In Q2, we successfully captured seasonal winter demand for warm layers with outerwear, a top growth category in both our women's and men's businesses, up 26% combined. We also saw strong demand for denim, up 17%.

In addition, activewear and athleisure were strong contributors to our performance in the quarter, growing 37% year-over-year combined. We also saw strong demand for special occasion and social events or night out styles, which grew 46% this quarter. Of note, we have also been expanding our assortment in strategic categories where we are seeing increased demand such as footwear and accessories. Footwear grew 33% year-over-year across our men's and women's businesses with sneakers alone up 46%. Accessories grew 51% year-over-year across both lines of businesses. As we mentioned last quarter, we believe expanding our relevance in activewear, athleisure, footwear and accessories can unlock a significant wallet share opportunity. We estimate our fair share within our existing client base in these categories represents approximately $1 billion in incremental revenue.

We also continue to optimize our brand mix. We're pairing more of the brands clients already know and love with private brands that are purpose-built from our data to offer exceptional quality and value. Within our private brands, we saw strong performance from Market & Spruce, Montgomery Post, 41 Hawthorn and We Wonder with revenue from each up more than 35% year-over-year. The work we've done to optimize our assortment and brand mix set the stage for a strong holiday performance. This achievement was fueled by a deeper selection of seasonally relevant merchandise and a strategic promotional cadence, which delivered record Freestyle sales during the Black Friday, Cyber Monday period and sustained broader momentum through the end of the calendar year.

Importantly, we achieved this growth while maintaining strict discipline within our fixed business, driven primarily by our enhanced Freestyle exclusive promotional capabilities. We continue to be encouraged by our active client trends. This quarter marked our seventh consecutive quarter of improvement in year-over-year active client growth rates, reflecting the disciplined and methodical progress we're making to build a healthier client base. Of note, our men's business after returning to sequential growth in active clients last quarter, returned to year-over-year growth in Q2.

We're also excited by the early results we're seeing from family accounts, which enable a client to manage multiple accounts within a single household. This feature is emerging as a lower-cost way to grow family wallet share while unlocking new ways for clients to shop for others and supporting gifting behavior. Our holiday results reinforce our confidence in its potential as an efficient acquisition lever in future key gifting moments. Taking a broader view of our performance, we ended Q2 with active clients of 2.3 million, in line with our expectations. Here are a few highlights.

New clients grew year-over-year for the second consecutive quarter. 3-month LTVs for new clients have now grown year-over-year for 10 consecutive quarters and remain at 3-year highs. Reengaged clients also grew for the second consecutive quarter, and the number of clients on recurring shipments continued to grow year-over-year. And we also just completed a quarter in which we had the highest retention rate in nearly 4 years. We are encouraged by the early signals from Stylist Connect, our new platform for near real-time client stylist collaboration. While still a recent addition, it is already helping us strengthen relationships between our clients and our stylists.

Clients who engage in the feature are significantly more likely to request the same stylist for their next Fix. We believe these positive trends confirm the improved quality of our new and returning client cohorts and will lead to greater client retention, higher revenue predictability and improved profitability over the long term. We remain on track to deliver positive sequential net adds in Q3. A key driver of our performance is how we are leveraging technology and innovation and AI specifically. Technology and innovation has been at the core of Stitch Fix's business since day 1. Since our founding, Stitch Fix has capitalized on the latest technology advancements as well as data science and proprietary algorithms to provide a superior retail experience.

Our proprietary data and algorithms remain a competitive advantage. We know more about our clients, their fit, their budget and their style preferences prior to them ever receiving a fix. We also have a continuous loop of both direct and indirect data from our clients as well as nuanced insight on our merchandise assortment on how specific items fit. We have billions of data points to leverage because we know our clients so well, we are able to leverage AI to deliver incomparable client experiences. One way we are putting this data to work is through our AI style assistant, which empowers our stylists by helping clients better articulate what they're looking for. This tool captures richer signals that enable our stylists to curate fixes that better meet each client's specific needs.

We are also leveraging AI to inspire clients and help them discover the styles they will love. A clear example is Stitch Fix Vision, our AI-powered styling platform that provides clients with personalized imagery of them and a wide array of shoppable head-to-toe outfit recommendations based on their own style profile and the latest fashion trends. Clients who have engaged with Vision use it on a consistent basis with 75% returning to use it again in subsequent months. And that engagement has translated into increased sales. We saw an over 100% lift in Freestyle spend over a 90-day period for clients who used the feature. As we further execute our strategy, we're confident in our ability to maintain a balance between growth and profitability.

Our unique data-driven model, which combines personalized styling expertise, AI-powered recommendations and a compelling assortment across Fix and Freestyle enable us to meet clients where they are while driving both engagement and spend. This integrated approach creates a powerful feedback loop between human insight and technology, strengthening client relationships and improving unit economics over time. The investments we're making in our client experience, AI capabilities and merchandise mix are designed to drive durable revenue growth while preserving margin integrity. These strategic drivers are performing in line with our expectations, supporting our improved full year revenue guidance as we remain focused on finishing the year strong. As the business continues to scale, we believe we will be able to generate increasing leverage and deliver consistent, sustainable profitability over time. I want to thank our team for their focus and execution and our clients, partners and shareholders for their support.

With that, I'll turn it over to David to discuss our financial results and outlook in more detail.

Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. Our second quarter results reflect continued progress against our strategy and the momentum we're building across the business. We delivered strong revenue growth and disciplined expense management while continuing to invest in the client experience and innovation.

These results underscore the benefits of our methodical approach to strengthening the business and positioning Stitch Fix for consistent and sustainable performance over time. Now let's turn to the numbers. Revenue was $341.3 million, up 9.4% year-over-year, exceeding our outlook. Fix average order value rose 9.8%, driven by more items per Fix and higher AUR, reflecting strong demand for larger Fixes and our improved assortment. We ended Q2 with 2.3 million active clients, in line with our expectations. Revenue per active client was $577, up 7.4% year-over-year, marking the eighth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth and the highest RPAC we've reported as a public company. The growth in RPAC confirms that our strategy is effectively leading to increased client engagement and spend, ultimately driving a higher share of wallet from our clients.

Gross margin was 43.6%, slightly above the midpoint of our FY '26 range of 43% to 44%, with contribution margins remaining strong above 30% for the eighth straight quarter. Advertising was 8.5% of revenue in Q2, slightly below our expected range of 9% to 10%. As we've discussed, we are being deliberate in how we invest, prioritizing efficiency and long-term client quality over near-term volume. Q2 adjusted EBITDA came in at $15.9 million or 4.7% margin, outperforming expectations on strong revenue and disciplined expense management. We ended Q2 with $240.5 million in cash and investments and no debt. Inventory was $122.1 million, up 11.4% year-over-year, reflecting investments in our client experience and increased demand.

Turning to our outlook for Q3 and FY '26. For full year FY '26, we expect total revenue to be between $1.33 billion and $1.35 billion. We expect total adjusted EBITDA for the year to be between $42 million and $50 million, and we continue to expect to be free cash flow positive for the full year. For Q3, we expect total revenue to be between $330 million and $335 million. We expect Q3 adjusted EBITDA to be between $7 million and $10 million. For the second half of the year, we're tightening our revenue guidance range, reflecting greater confidence in the underlying momentum we're seeing while continuing to be thoughtful and realistic about the environment ahead.

While we expect growth rates to moderate as we lap a strong 2-year AOV stack, we believe there remains opportunity to continue driving steady AOV improvement. Ongoing enhancements to our client experience, including a stronger, more relevant assortment, continued category expansion, increased fixed flexibility and the use of AI to support more dynamic client engagement provide a durable foundation for that progress. At the same time, we believe our methodical approach to rebuilding our active client base is working. We're encouraged by continued improvement in active client trends and remain confident that sequential net active client adds will be positive in Q3.

Over time, as both AOV and active clients improve, we believe this positions the business for compounding growth. We continue to expect full year gross margin to be approximately 43% to 44% and full year advertising costs to be between 9% and 10% of revenue. In closing, we're encouraged by the progress we're making across the business. Our focus on delivering a strong client experience, rebuilding our active client base with discipline and maintaining financial rigor is driving improved performance and positioning us well for the remainder of the year.

With that, operator, we can open up the line for Q&A.

Your first question comes from the line of Dana Telsey from Telsey Advisory Group.

Nice to see the progress. I wanted to get some more color on what you're seeing from the current consumer. It sounds like the AURs are being well accepted. Is that existing brands, new brands? You've brought on new brands over the past couple of months? How has that gone? And then would love to know more about active client growth and sequentially, how you're thinking about it going forward?

Dana, it's Matt. I appreciate the recognition on the progress that we've made. The team has done a phenomenal job driving this really continued outperformance from a revenue growth standpoint. So I appreciate that. I heard about 3 questions there, just kind of a check in terms of how we're seeing the consumer and how that has impacted our AUR performance. The impact between private brands and national brands and then kind of an update on our active client count.

I'll answer the first 2, and David can jump in with additional color as well as answer the third on the active client count piece. In terms of the consumer, one of the things that gives us additional confidence in our ability to continue to perform and sustain this momentum is that we're seeing really equally positive performance across all different income cohorts within our client base. We're seeing that strength really across the board. And the increase in AUR that we've been able to deliver is really reflective of continuing to improve the quality of our assortment overall. Within our private brand portfolio, we've really been investing to deliver an even higher quality product, but maintaining exceptional value for the end consumer. And our clients have really resonated with that. That's why we were excited to share the outsized growth that we're seeing within many of our private brands within our portfolio. We also continue to strategically add market and national brands in order to meet the needs of our clients and fill white space.

In addition to the brand piece, something else that we've talked about on prior calls that's part of our merchandise focused transformation is investing in newness and making sure that we stand for style and trend. In the second quarter, sales from new styles was up roughly 50% year-over-year. So that investment that we're making into new product is also resonating extremely well with our clients. As you know, having the best assortment is critical for delivering outperformance and revenue growth. So we really do feel good about the work that we've done there and the way that it's helping to drive that performance across the board.

And then, Dana, on active clients, first, the results we saw this quarter were definitely in line with our expectations. Sort of as a reminder, we have seasonality really in our active clients, where Q2 and Q4 tend to be a little bit seasonally softer quarters for us around active client growth. And certainly encouraged by being able to continue to commit to seeing sequential client growth in Q3, and we're confident we remain on track to do that. Size and shape, we're just returning to quarter-over-quarter growth. So we probably anticipate that Q3 client growth to be a little less than 1% quarter-over-quarter.

But again, encouraged with those results. And taking a step back, we continue to be encouraged with the overall trends that Matt called out earlier in his remarks around new client acquisition, reengaged clients and client retention. And that really goes back to that methodical approach that we've been talking about the last few quarters where we're really focused on rebuilding a healthy client base, and that continues to be our focus. One of the metrics I know we've been calling out a lot lately is that 90-day LTV, and that was up 5% year-over-year. It was the 10th quarter in a row that we've seen year-over-year growth. And so just really confirming that we're bringing healthy clients into the mix. And from a go-forward perspective, we'll provide more detail on specific numbers around Q4 next quarter, but our focus continues to be around sustainable, profitable client growth and using that methodical approach, we absolutely expect year-over-year comps to continue to improve. And our goal is to return to year-over-year active client growth in FY '27. So definitely encouraged with the results we're seeing.

Your next question comes from the line of Dylan Carden from William Blair.

The comments around revenue per decelerating as you lap harder comparisons, I mean you already kind of started to lap some of those comparisons. So can you give a sense sort of what's behind that? Or is that just sort of general caution? And I have some follow-ups.

Yes. Dylan, are you talking about sort of the back half revenue comps?

Correct.

Yes, got it. Yes. So over the last couple of quarters, I think we've consistently guided to a deceleration in the back half of the year. And actually, this back half guide is an improvement from last quarter's guide. But there are a couple of factors that I'd call out. First is what we have been discussing in the last couple of quarters. There are just more challenging AOV comps in the back half of this year, we've had 10 consecutive quarters of AOV growth. And Q3 and Q4 last year had AOV growth of 10% and then 12%. And our guidance in the back half of this fiscal year still assumes healthy AOV growth, but it's probably in the 4% to 6% range. So that's the first factor.

The second, when you think about sort of Q2 to Q3, we had a really strong holiday season compared to last year in Q2. And that doesn't necessarily play forward into future quarters. Like one data point there, December was our highest revenue comp in the quarter at around 12% year-over-year growth. And that's also -- the holiday period also created probably a little bit of a pull-forward activity from Q3 into Q2. And then lastly, considering the macro environment and current trends in consumer sentiment and some of the volatility that we're thinking, we still think it's prudent to assume some headwinds in spending in the coming quarters. And so all of that's factored into our guide for the year. But again, we're really encouraged with what we're seeing, and we're really encouraged with the guide that we've been able to provide where we raised the low end of the full year of the revenue guide.

And after significantly increasing our full year guide last quarter, as a reminder, sort of if you take the last 2 quarters and add them together, we raised the midpoint of our revenue guide by about $35 million over those 2 quarters and our EBITDA by almost $9 million. So still really encouraged with what we're seeing with those trends.

Very good. And then I'm curious on the assortment, Matt, maybe. Do you kind of have it where you want it now, particularly as you start thinking about maybe the women's business that, that inflects?

Dylan, I appreciate the question. Ensuring that we have best-in-class assortment, that's a perpetual area of focus for us. We're always going to challenge ourselves to make sure that we have the right brands, the right mix, the right breadth and depth within that. And we're always going to continue to drive an improvement there. As we've talked about previously, the initial focus as part of our transformation was more heavily weighted towards our men's business. We feel really good about where we are there. And we also feel great about the progress that we've made across the board within our women's business.

As I noted, our women's fix business was up double digits from a revenue perspective last quarter, which is really a strong signal in terms of the strength there, but also recognition that we still have opportunity to improve that assortment even further, which gives us even greater confidence in our ability to sustain the gains that we're seeing across the board.

In addition to that, I would just point us back to something that was in the prepared remarks and that we've talked about previously around this $1 billion wallet share opportunity that we have with our existing client base across footwear, accessories, activewear and athleisure. We're delivering outsized growth in those categories. But because of the relatively smaller base that they started at, we still have an exceptional opportunity to continue to lean in there. And that's part of, again, what enables us to increase engagement with clients, deliver success with larger fixes, increase our wallet share and ultimately continue to deliver these outsized market share gains that we've delivered.

Excellent. And then just last one on the repeat customers that are some of the higher that you've seen. Is that proven out to be greater wallet share across use cases? Is that just sort of spending more on existing categories? How should we think about kind of how people are coming to you more and more?

So if I understand the question correctly, Dylan, the work that we do is to ensure that we are able to serve clients across a variety of use cases. And whatever use case that a client comes to us for, for example, if they're starting a new job and we need to update their wardrobe with the appropriate workwear, through that client stylist relationship, we're also able to navigate them to other use cases. It's why we're excited to share in the prepared remarks, the success that we've seen, for example, in social occasion dressing and night outs. And that's also why we're seeing that outsized growth in activewear and athleisure as well. Because we have such great assortment across the board for all of these different use cases, that expansion of use cases with our clients continues to be one of the drivers that's helping propel the revenue growth. We're going to continue to lean into that as well as continue to lean into head-to-toe outfitting across footwear and accessories.

Your next question comes from the line of Jessica Tian from Bernstein.

Congrats on the quarter. I had a 2-part question on the guide. So first, on the H2 guide, it looks like the Q2 be on adjusted EBITDA didn't fully flow through to the full year outlook. Should we read that primarily as conservatism on your part? Or is there anything in the underlying margin trend that caused you to hold back some of that upside?

And then second, on the Q3 active client inflection, sequential inflection with new clients growing year-over-year for the second consecutive quarter and 5-year low dormancies last quarter. Can you talk about what's driving the expected sequential increase in net adds? Should we think about that improvement as coming more from reduced dormancy? Or is it coming more from new clients?

Yes. Thanks, Jessica. On the EBITDA guide, I think we're really encouraged with increasing even the full year guide. If you look at the full year guide, I think we increased the low end of the guide by around $4 million and the high end of the guide by $2 million. And so definitely still feel like we've got a very healthy flow-through of EBITDA for the year. On the active clients on sort of the sequential, I think Matt might have called out in some of his prepared remarks as well, but we're really seeing strength across all 3 of those cohorts that we tend to call out.

New acquisition was up year-over-year for the second quarter in a row. Reengaging clients was up for the second quarter as well from a year-over-year perspective. And client retention is definitely looking healthier than it's been in quite a long time. And I think that is a big part of our focus is that client retention side. And it almost comes back to that full loop of making sure that we are bringing in those high LTV clients that engage with the service. And also for our existing client base, all of the new client features, the improved assortment that Matt called out as well, all of those things just create stickier relationships from a client perspective as well. And so all 3 of those things are sort of trending in the right direction, and that's why we felt comfortable really calling out that sequential improvement in the sequential quarter-over-quarter increase in Q3.

We will now move on to the next question from David Bellinger from Mizuho.

I want to ask on the Q3 guidance, revenue growth up something above 2% at the midpoint. And I think if I'm hearing you correctly, a lot of that deceleration from this quarter has to do with lapping positive revenue growth last year, some of the AOV uptick. Is there anything else that explains the deceleration? Any other context around the external pressures that you've started to factor into the guidance? You got gas prices moving up. Is any of that starting to show up in the business? And if you just remind us how gas prices moving higher has historically affected Stitch Fix?

Yes, David, I think outside of -- we called out the AOV comps earlier, and that is certainly probably the bigger factor around sort of the change quarter-to-quarter. I think the second call out was really the holiday period. We had a really strong holiday period this Q2. And so I think that's a big part of sort of when you just think about the sequentials where that's not necessarily something that plays forward. And then on the macro side, definitely, when you see the consumer sentiment where it is, the February jobs report, gas prices certainly going up and gas prices for us, that's not discretionary spend. And so if someone is having to spend more on gas, that just means less in their wallet for discretionary spend like apparel. And so certainly, those things we've taken into account in that back half guide.

The other thing that you can see, though, is that because the point in time where we are this year, you can sort of back into a Q4 guide as well. And we're really encouraged that between Q3 and Q4, you still see an acceleration in that revenue growth as well at the midpoint, where the midpoint in Q4 calculates to something closer to 4%. And so definitely really encouraged with that as we close out the year.

David, what I'll add as well is while not to minimize the impact of gas or challenges on the consumer and the broader macro environment, something that we've talked about previously is just how we're uniquely situated to perform really well if and when the overall wallet for our clients shrink. Our clients and stylists have a very deep and enduring relationship. That allows them to have a real conversation around how budgets might be shifting month-to-month, week-to-week, quarter-to-quarter. And we have the breadth and depth of assortment across all different price points so we can meet our clients where they are at any given time. And we continue to see us perform relatively well in those periods where the consumer is potentially challenged. And that's what gives us so much confidence that wherever the overall market goes, we'll continue to be a market share gainer.

Very helpful. My second question, I want to ask about GLP-1 usage. That seems to be a relatively new and positive customer driver. Can you help frame up any exposure to the business? Are these customers more sticky, more engaged? And can you simply get more of them as GLP-1 usage becomes increasingly popular?

Yes, David, I appreciate that question as well. Again, the uniqueness of our service and that superior level of service that we provide each of our clients positions us extremely well to serve clients going through a body transformation. And we've made it a real point of emphasis to market that capability of our service.

So we're out in market and have been for a while, explaining to consumers that are potentially on a GLP-1 medication that as their body transforms, they have the ability to work with a personal stylist to help ensure that they have everything that they need so that they can dress in clothing that fits at each stage of that weight loss journey that they're on. We've seen really positive results in terms of how that's helping them improve their confidence, how that's helping them improve their ability to get dressed and outfit themselves on a daily basis. And we've seen that also show up in our data as well.

Client mentions of weight loss in their fixed request notes, as an example, has tripled over the last 2 years, and it's actually surged 75% year-over-year just this past quarter. And what that tells me is that the work that we've been doing to improve the segmentation and targeting within our marketing capabilities is working extremely well and that the quality and superiority of our service is really resonating with those clients. We'll continue to lean in, and we'll continue to serve that demographic at a really high level.

Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back to Matt Baer, CEO, for closing remarks.

Thanks. To wrap up, as I said, we're incredibly pleased with the strong results we delivered this quarter and the improved guidance that we shared for the back half of the year. We believe we're uniquely positioned to lead in this moment of AI innovation, and that's because of just how seamlessly data science and AI are integrated into our business, how deeply and personally we know our clients and how holistically we've integrated our expert stylists.

Due to the significant improvements we've made to our experience and assortment through our transformation, we're capturing increased market share and outperforming the broader apparel retail market. We're also building a stronger client base. That's with 7 consecutive quarters of improving year-over-year active client trends. And also, as we noted, the expected sequential growth in active client count in the third quarter. We're confident the growth in our business will continue and that this growth will be sustainable.

Important to note that since the start of our transformation, we've improved our contribution margins more than 500 basis points, and we've maintained contribution margins above 30% for the last 2 years. So I appreciate everyone's interest in our business and look forward to sharing future updates with each of you in the future.

This concludes today's call. Thank you for attending, and you may now disconnect.

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Dedra, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the Stitch Fix First Quarter 2026 Earnings Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Cherryl Valenzuela, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin. PAUSE

Good afternoon. Thank you for joining us today for the Stitch Fix First Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Call. With me on the call are Matt Baer, Chief Executive Officer; and David Aufderhaar , Chief Financial Officer. We have posted complete first quarter 2026 financial results in a press release on the quarterly results section of our website, investors.stitchfix.com. We would like to remind everyone that we will be making forward-looking statements on this call, which involve risks and uncertainties. Actual results could differ materially from those contemplated by our forward-looking statements.

Reported results should not be considered as an indication of future performance. Please review our filings with the SEC for a discussion of the factors that could cause the results to differ. In particular, our press release issued and filed today as well as our annual report on Form 10-K for fiscal 2025 and subsequent periodic reports filed with the SEC.

Also note that the forward-looking statements on this call are based on information available to us as of today's date. We disclaim any obligation to update any forward-looking statements, except as required by law. Please note that fiscal 2024 was a 53-week year due to an extra week in the fourth quarter. As such, references to our year-over-year revenue growth rates and consecutive quarters of revenue growth in our women's and men's businesses on this call are based on an adjusted 52-week basis, removing the impact of the extra week to combine a comparison that we believe more accurately reflect our performance.

During this call, we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in the press release on our Investor Relations website. These non-GAAP measures are not intended to be a substitute for our GAAP results.

Finally, call in its entirety is being webcast on our Investor Relations website, and a replay of this call will be available on the website shortly. And now let me turn the call over to Matt.

Thank you, Cherryl, and good afternoon, everyone. Q1 was a strong start to the year. Revenue exceeded our outlook and accelerated 7.3% year-over-year to $342.1 million. Adjusted EBITDA also exceeded our outlook and was nearly 4% of revenue at $13.4 million. We are increasingly becoming the retailer of choice for more of our clients' apparel and accessories needs. We are doing this by leveraging the latest in generative AI technology, the expertise of our human stylists and our assortment of leading brands, in service of our aim to deliver the most client-centric and personalized shopping experience.

Given our Q1 performance, combined with the robust demand we've seen so far this quarter, we are guiding to a third quarter of accelerating growth in Q2 and raising our full year guidance. The outperformance is the direct result of the compounding benefits we're seeing from the disciplined execution of our transformation strategy. We've strengthened the foundation of our business by embedding retail best practices and building significantly more leverage into our operating model.

We have fundamentally reimagined our client experience. We zeroed in on 4 areas to deliver a more modern and dynamic Stitch fix. First, delivering enhanced client engagement features; second, cultivating deeper client stylist relationships; third, offering a best-in-class assortment; and fourth, increasing the flexibility of our business model.

For example, our increased flexibility now includes dynamic larger fixes, the ability to turn a Freestyle shopping journey into a style fix curated them fixes for specific occasions and use cases and family accounts, which unlock the Stitch Fix experience for the extended family. This comprehensive and customer-driven approach is clearly resonating with clients. Our fixed AOV was up nearly 10% in Q1. The ninth consecutive quarter, AOV has increased year-over-year, as our larger fixed offerings and our improved assortment continued to resonate with our clients and better meet their outfitting needs.

We are strengthening our competitive position and gaining market share in our core apparel business. Our strategic expansion into non-apparel categories is further accelerating this growth. By helping clients complete their outfits and dress them from head to toe, we are capturing a greater share of their wallet from other retailers. Our 7.3% year-over-year revenue growth in Q1 meaningfully outpaced [ sarcoma's ] estimated 1% growth for the broader U.S. apparel, accessories and footwear market.

Our growth is broad-based with both our women's and men's businesses continuing to accelerate. In women's, we saw a strong start to fall sales across key seasonal categories such as sweaters, coats, jackets and vests, which combined grew 19% year-over-year. Sneakers, which were up 63% year-over-year, driven by New Balance, Gola and Adidas and wide-leg denim, was up 217% driven by outsized performance in [ days ] denim, Pistola and Madewell. We've also seen great client responses to new brands especially within activewear and footwear such as Varley, Birkenstock and Ron.

And we're excited to continue to add new brands to our assortment in the coming months. Our men's business delivered a second consecutive quarter of double-digit revenue growth by leaning more into the elevated everyday and athleisure styles our clients are looking for. Seasonal categories such as fleece, sweaters and outerwear grew 57% combined, while denim grew 30% and Sneakers grew 24% year-over-year. Brands like TravisMathew and Viori delivered outsized growth and remain trusted client favorites for style, versatility and quality, while new brands such as Kate in, Industry and NNO7 have introduced more style and trend into our assortment.

We believe that our expanded relevance in activewear and athleisure, footwear and accessories, in particular, could unlock a significant wallet share opportunity and that our fair share with our existing client base in these categories is approximately $1 billion of incremental revenue. We are confident in our ability to capture increased market share in the future.

Just as importantly, we're focused on achieving profitable active client growth. We ended the quarter with 2.3 million active clients at the high end of our expectations. Q1 marked the sixth consecutive quarter of improvement in active client year-over-year growth rates and a return to sequential active client growth in our men's business. We continue to expect a sequential increase in net adds in Q3 of our current fiscal year.

Our methodical approach to rebuilding our client base around long-term fit with our service and higher lifetime value paired with a continuously improving client experience is working. With respect to new clients, Three-month LTVs have grown year-over-year for 9 consecutive quarters and remain at 3-year highs. We also have had more new clients on recurring fixed shipments at the end of Q1 than in any of the prior 6 quarters. Q1 also benefited from higher reengagements with a significantly higher percentage of reengaged clients enrolling in recurring shipments compared to last year. We believe these positive trends confirm the improved quality of our new and returning client cohorts and will lead to greater client retention, higher revenue predictability and improved profitability over the long term.

To build on this momentum and ensure we sustain this improved client quality, we are also focused on delivering growth by leveraging our competitive differentiation in data science and AI. AI is not new to Stitch Fix. When we launched nearly 15 years ago, we disrupted retail with a proprietary data-driven approach. Over time, we've amassed billions of insights on our clients' fit, style and budget preferences. That, combined with the human judgment of our stylists, enable us to uniquely deliver ultra personalization at scale. We're capitalizing on this competitive advantage through a suite of AI-powered innovations that aim to drive greater client engagement and retention.

For example, Vision, our generative AI-powered style visualization experience provides our clients with an entirely new and inspiring approach to style discovery, offering personalized, shoppable images of each client based on the unique style profile and the latest trends. Another great example is our AI style assistant, which leverages Gen AI to engage in a dialogue with clients and is helping our clients better articulate their individual requests to their stylists.

This stylist then draws on each client's style file and the extensive data we already know about them and the more it's used the smarter it gets, helping ensure each fix delivers on the client's individual needs. The scope of our Gen AI strategy goes beyond client-facing features, we are taking an enterprise-wide approach, incorporating these capabilities across every area of the business to drive further efficiencies and deepen our competitive advantage as a leading innovator in retail.

For example, our merchandising team is using Gen AI to fundamentally transform private brand product development and inventory management. Our Gen AI-assisted design process leverages our proprietary data to develop complete fashion lines, which will enable us to respond to trends more quickly and bring products to market faster. Beyond design, AI provides predictive intelligence for trend forecasting, optimizing inventory and setting intelligent pricing, ensuring every piece of merchandise we sell is calibrated for both profitability and client satisfaction.

The innovations we've introduced across our business will enable us to better serve clients this holiday season. We entered this critical period with our most seasonally relevant assortment and competitive pricing and promotions. Enhanced by new and inspiring shopping experiences, including vision, theme fixes and fixes built around the Freestyle items. We also launched Stylist Connect, a platform for near real-time client stylist collaboration and introduced family accounts to better support gifting during the season.

Holiday performance has been strong with record Freestyle sales for the Black Friday to Cyber Monday period. In closing, we have strong momentum in our business, remain focused on exceeding our clients' expectations and will continue to play offense in order to deliver increased market share gains.

Now I'll turn the call over to David to share more details of our financial results and future outlook.

Thanks, Matt, and good afternoon, everyone. We delivered a strong first quarter that underscores the success of our strategy and the momentum Matt outlined. We're accelerating growth and gaining market share while maintaining financial discipline to ensure that growth is profitable and sustainable. FY '26 is about leaning into innovation and the client experience to strengthen our competitive advantage, while continuing to identify savings that fuel reinvestment.

Now let's turn to the numbers. Revenue was $342.1 million, up 7.3% year-over-year, exceeding our outlook. Average order value rose 9.6% driven by more items per fix and higher AUR, reflecting strong demand for larger fixes and our improved assortment. We ended Q1 with 2.3 million active clients at the high end of our expectations.

Revenue per active client reached $559 up 5.3% year-over-year, marking the seventh consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. The growth in RPAC confirms that our strategy is effectively leading to increased client engagement and spend ultimately driving a higher share of wallet from our clients. Gross margin was 43.6%, in line with our FY '26 range of 43% to 44%. And with contribution margins remaining strong, above 30% for the seventh straight quarter. Advertising was

9.9% of revenue in Q1, up 50 basis points year-over-year. Q1 adjusted EBITDA came in at $13.4 million or 3.9% margin, outperforming expectations on strong revenue. We ended Q1 with $244.2 million in cash and short-term investments and no debt, giving us flexibility to invest in growth. Inventory was $141.5 million, up 18.8% year-over-year, reflecting investments in our larger fix offerings.

Turning to our outlook for Q2 and FY '26. We are increasing our full year guide to take into account the positive trends we are seeing in the business. For full year FY '26, we expect total revenue to be between $1.32 billion and $1.35 billion. We expect total adjusted EBITDA for the year to be between $38 million and $48 million. And we expect to be free cash flow positive for the full year. And for Q2, we expect total revenue to be between $335 million and $340 million. We expect Q2 adjusted EBITDA to be between $10 million and $13 million.

With respect to revenue, we are really encouraged with the trends we have seen in our business so far this year. The resilience in client demand that we saw in Q1 and through the first part of Q2 gives us confidence to guide to another quarter of growth acceleration in Q2 and to raise our guidance for the full year in FY '26. Given the current trends and consumer confidence and the impact of inflation on discretionary spending, we think it's prudent to assume some headwinds in the back half of this year.

As a reminder, we will also face tougher AOV comps as we begin to lap the double-digit growth we saw in the second half of FY '25. Both of these considerations have been included within our outlook. For active clients, we believe our methodical approach to rebuilding our active client base is working. We expect active client year-over-year growth rates to continue to improve in Q2. Additionally, we remain on track to deliver a sequential increase in net adds in Q3 FY '26.

We continue to expect full year gross margin to be approximately 43% to 44% and full year advertising costs to be between 9% and 10% of revenue. We're investing thoughtfully in AI and innovation, which we expect to drive stronger client engagement and retention over time. These investments are already included in our outlook and we'll scale them judiciously. Our strong first quarter demonstrates the health of our business. The commitment to client engagement and operational discipline drove revenue and market share gains.

Looking ahead, we remain confident in our strategy, which prioritizes sustainable profitable growth. With that, operator, we can open the line for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And our first question comes from the line of Dylan Carden with William Blair.

This is Marcus Belanger on for Dylan Carden. I was just curious, could you provide a little bit more color on new customer behavior and just your general view under stickiness. What metrics are you tracking that inform this view outside of the 30-day LTV that you mentioned?

Marcus, I appreciate the question. I'll share some insights and David, feel free to add anything additional. When we look at the client behavior that we're seeing across the board, we're extremely enthusiastic in terms of what we've been seeing PAUSE -- we shared in the prepared remarks that we've seen 9 consecutive quarters of improving LTV for new client acquisition. New clients have also been -- were also up last quarter for both year-over-year and quarter-over-quarter, which gives us a lot of confidence that we're going to continue to see more health in our overall client base moving forward. We're also seeing strength

within our reengagement with our reengaged clients or formerly dormant clients they continue as they rejoin the service to stay longer and spend more, which again, is really encouraging to continue to improve the overall health of our client base. And then finally, when we're looking at our clients that might otherwise go dormant, we just completed a quarter in which we had the lowest number of dormant clients in 5 years. some additional signals that show the strength overall in our client base, as we shared in our prepared remarks, is that our men's business has returned to sequential increases in our overall active clients.

And that is one of many things that give us further confidence that we will return to overall sequential active client growth in PAUSE -- so those clients that we have. They're staying longer. They're spending more. The new features that we've launched are driving incremental engagement, and we're also seeing. And then those new clients that have joined, we're also seeing them stay longer and spend more. So we're really proud of the overall widespread and holistic impact with everything that we've done.

Our next question comes from the line of Aneesha Sherman with Bernstein.

Congratulations on the quarter. Matt, you talked about gaining share and you said some pretty strong numbers about share gains versus the total apparel accessories and footwear sector. Can you talk about where do you think that market share is coming from? I mean is it from other multi-brand retailers -- is it from trade down? I mean what are you hearing from the brands that you talked to about where those share gains are coming from?

And then on gifting, now I was surprised to hear you say that gifting was so strong. It's typically not a very strong use case for you. Do you think that's changing? And especially as you move more into Freestyle, is gifting becoming -- gifting or maybe even holiday is becoming more of an occasion for you?

And if I could throw in 1 more quick follow-up for David around advertising. 9% to 10%, it sounds like the sales numbers are working, the client numbers are working. How do you think about maybe leaning in on that more to drive more of the top line if needed?

Yes. Aneesha, it's Matt. I'll answer the first 2 on market share and holiday performance. And as you noted, David can chime in on the advertising and any additional commentary. First, appreciation for the recognition, the team deserves it. They're doing a phenomenal job in order to deliver these incredibly impressive results and market share gains. Speaking of those market share gains, it's a great question. And the work that the team has done to improve the client experience is clearly resonating.

The work that we've done to continue to improve the trends overall in our active client growth rates continue to demonstrate that as well. And with regards to who we're taking market share from, what we're doing is we're focused on delivering the most client-centric and personalized shopping experience. And in doing so, we're picking up share from where other retailers aren't delivering. And we're taking that share from a wide range of retailers who don't and cannot offer the personalization consumers want and expect, which is so core to our business.

And as you noted, we're hearing loud and clear from the brands that we work with, that we are delivering outsized growth relative to others that they might be working with. In terms of our holiday performance, as I noted in the prepared remarks, we really entered this holiday season with the most seasonally relevant assortment, competitive pricing, really compelling promotions and a lot of new ways for our consumers to engage with us and to shop.

For example, themed fixes or fixes built around the freestyle item. Also a significant improvement in terms of the engagement experiences like Stitch Fix Vision and Stylist Connect. Specifically in terms of gifting, the more recent launch of family accounts has delivered results that have exceeded our expectations. With family accounts, we heard loud and clear from our clients that they were looking to bring the Stitch Fix experience to their entire family. They love the service that we provided and they wanted to make sure that they were able to use it for spouse partners, children and any other loved ones as well.

In fact, 92% of our women's clients shop on behalf of a spouse partner. So when we created the ability to launch family accounts. We saw phenomenal engagement right out of the gate, and that was really the entry way for us in order to start to deliver a gifting business over the holiday season. In addition to the gifting though, as you well know, a lot of the purchases that happened over this time period are just gifts for others, their gifts for self. And that's where we have really led the way, and that's what helped us deliver record-breaking sales over the Black Friday to Cyber Monday time period.

And then Aneesha, on the advertising, this quarter, we did lean in a little bit on advertising. We ended up at the high end of that 9% to 10% range at 9.9%. And I think it goes back to what we've talked about in the past about that methodical approach to advertising and really holding ourselves accountable to those CAC to LTV ratios. And because of that, we tend to see some seasonality in our marketing spend. And so we leaned in, in Q1. Q1 and Q3 tend to be our stronger quarters.

So you'll probably see us spending more at the lower end of that range in Q2. And all of that is just to make sure that we are really focused on not just adding clients to add clients but really making sure to Matt's point that we're bringing in really healthy clients and sort of what he highlighted earlier, that new client LTV is something that we really keep an eye on. And this last quarter, it was up almost 17% year-over-year.

And that's really just a very clear indication that the marketing efforts are working and we're bringing in clients that truly engage with the service and see value in the service. And we'll continue with that methodical approach and where we do find opportunity like we're very comfortable leaning in.

Next question comes from the line of David Bellinger with Mizuho.

I want to ask about the consumer facing AI and visualization tools. PAUSE Any read on the early adoption there? Any numbers you could share with us? Or in what ways are consumers using and engaging these tools early on?

Yes. Great question. And we're really excited about this truly innovative feature that we've created a Stitch Fix Vision, where clients can upload a couple of pictures in the sell generative AI image visualization of themselves of their likeness dressed head to toe in Stitch Fix apparel. That experience is completely shoppable and fully shareable across all social media platforms.

And we're seeing engagement from our clients that far exceeded our expectations when we rolled out the beta just a couple of months ago. And we're seeing clients use it in many different ways. We're seeing clients that are using their Stitch Fix vision images and sharing it back with their stylists to help inform what they're looking for in their next fix. We're seeing clients purchase directly from the Tic VIX vision image itself.

And we're also seeing a lot of what we call Citrix vision in the wild, where clients are actually sharing it across their social platforms, they're sharing it with friends and family. PAUSE -- and it's creating a bit of a virality and organic growth for us from a client acquisition standpoint as well. So we're really encouraged by the early adoption that we're seeing across the board, and we're even more excited about how we'll lean into it into the future with additional applications.

If I can just get 1 other 1 in. So a question on the gross margin performance for David. I know it was down 180 basis points versus last year, still within your full year range or so. But could you just help us bridge that decline? And anything we should expect for the Q2 period?

Yes, David, I can give you more color on that. I think we might have highlighted this a little bit on the last earnings call, but the decline from a year-over-year perspective is 3 factors: First is transportation expenses. Our transportation team have done a great job over the last 3 or 4 years of really driving leverage in our transportation costs through carrier diversification, negotiations, even last mile carriers. And in FY '25, it was probably the lowest percent of revenue we've seen in a very, very long time.

And this year, it's more around those general rate increases that you're seeing. USPS is a big part of that and seeing those general rate increases. And so that's part of the gross margin decline. And then the second part is really investing in different categories from a merchandising perspective, which we really consider a great investment and a great ROI, really leaning into some of those categories that we feel like we have market share opportunity like footwear is a great example where they just have lower margins. But we're able to outfit a client entirely. And I think that will really drive a higher LTV from a full client perspective. And so we're really happy with that investment as well. And then the third and honestly, the smallest of the 3 is tariffs. There was a small impact to tariffs. But again, our teams have done a very good job negotiating and really minimizing that impact from tariffs. So I'd say that was probably the smallest of the 3.

And the other thing I'd highlight is it's another reason why we've been calling out contribution margins over the past few quarters is we've done a lot of work in making sure that we're driving efficiency within our warehouse and stylist teams. And because of that, having contribution margins that are still well over 30%, they were 32.5% this last quarter. we feel really confident that we can continue to drive leverage in the business. And for Q2, I would expect margins to be in a similar place than they were this quarter, pretty much right in the middle of where our guidance -- our full year guidance range is.

Next question comes from the line of Jay Sole with UBS.

I have a couple of questions. Matt, can you just first of all, break down just for us, the opportunity with different brands because you mentioned you're bringing in some great brands, you're having success -- is it -- what is it that's attracting brands? Or is it really you just going on reaching for more brands now that you can sell them? Just explain to us how the quality of the third-party brand profile is improving. Could you talk about how the the private label is improving.

And then just on net revenue per active client, I think it was up 5% year-over-year. I think that's the seventh quarter in a row you've had growth. Can you just kind of break down the drivers of it?

And then just on active clients, you did touch on this. I think it was down 5%, but it continues to improve. I guess, what are the drivers there? Can you just give us any color on some of the demographics and some of the newer customers that you bring in, what the demographics of those newer customers are

Yes, absolutely. Happy to answer that. I'll start with the brand question. David, if you want to start with RPAC and then active clients, and I'll add some additional insight probably after that as well. The Stitch Fix service is an incredibly attractive value proposition for third-party brands to work with. We create a phenomenal experience for our clients, and in turn, that creates a really positive experience for the brands themselves as a closed ecosystem, brands that work with us, they don't have to worry about seeing their product fully visible to the entire market and all consumers. They don't have to worry about the adjacency of seeing their product hanging on racks or on digital shelves next to products of inferior quality.

Everything that we do is personalized to the individual. So when their product shows up either on our site or delivered to their home in a Fix, it's with other brands that they'd be proud to see from an adjacency standpoint and we treat the brands with respect throughout the process. We also do a phenomenal job in terms of -- based on everything that we know about our clients to ensure that we're getting price, style and budget right. So when we deliver product to a client -- it's a product that they're going to have a high level of resonance with. It's a product that they're going to be excited to get and that they're going to keep at a really high rate.

And that experience that we provide for brands becomes really attractive and is part of the reason why they're so eager to work with us. And then when they do, why they have such an exceptional experience as a partner of ours. It's also why so many coveted brands. We are the largest or one of the largest retail partners that they have and also why some of the brands, we are their exclusive retail partner other than their direct-to-consumer platform.

As we continue to expand that brand portfolio, our clients are absolutely recognizing it and it's part of the reason that they continue to engage more and it's part of what's continued to drive up our average order values as well as our overall client LTVs. So it's just a really great experience we provide and a really good partnership that we offer each of them.

And then, Jay, on the RPC side, really definitely encouraged with what we're seeing there. It was up 5% year-over-year this last quarter, and I think we highlighted that it was the seventh quarter in a row that we improved from a year-over-year perspective. A big part of that is what we are calling out with those new client LTVs that when you see that, it's really a big part of what you're seeing because as those new clients become a larger share of the base, that's really starting to impact RPAC.

And I think the other thing that highlights that really well is average order value is average order value was up almost 10% year-over-year, and it was the ninth consecutive quarter that it's been up. So definitely something that is driving a lot of strength. And within average order value, there are probably 2 things I'd call out. One of those is just a higher average number of items sent in fixes where that larger fixed offering is really resonating with our clients, and we're seeing a lot of adoption there.

And then we're also seeing some upside in AUR as well. That was up 3% year-over-year. And that was really more about that mix shift into some of these newer categories that we've been leaning into. And so definitely seeing encouraging signs across all of those metrics that are coming through in that revenue per active clients.

On the active client side, we were really encouraged with what we saw this last quarter. We ended at the high end of our expectations, really just slightly down for the quarter. And what we are seeing, I think, Matt highlighted a little bit of this earlier, but really across all 3 of the views of active clients, where new client acquisition was up year-over-year, and we continue to see strength there. Reengaged clients is an area where we've really seen some great strength. Reengage clients were up 8% year-over-year this last quarter.

And so definitely an area that we're leaning into and really bringing some of those clients back into a really new experience and experience with a very different level of assortment. And so seeing strength there. And then dormancy, our client retention continues to get better. And so just playing forward those 3 lines is really how we have the confidence in being able to continue to say that in Q3, we expect a quarter-over-quarter inflection. And there is definitely seasonality to our active clients. There's also seasonality to our marketing spend as well.

And so in Q2, it tends to be a seasonally slower quarter for us from a client acquisition perspective. And so we'll probably expect active clients to be slightly down from a quarter-over-quarter perspective. But then still very confident that in Q3, we expect a quarter-over-quarter increase.

A couple of other points that I think are relevant. I'll call out here that impact both -- relevant for both RPAC and active clients overall. First, we're just incredibly encouraged that we are seeing strength across all income segments from our client base additional confidence in terms of that increased guide within both Q2 and our full year as the service that we offer is one that serves well clients no matter what the macroeconomic environment is. because of the deep and enduring relationship that clients have with their stylists and the ability for us to tailor each of those experiences to their budget at any given time.

And then the second is that the growth that we have, that's being driven by both increased client engagement as well as increased unit sales. It's not being driven by inflation. So the growth that we're delivering is that healthy growth that's going to lead to sustainable and profitable overall enterprise growth.

[Operator Instructions] There are no further questions at this time. I would like to turn the call back over to our CEO, Matt Baer. Thanks. PAUSE

To close, I'd like to recognize the entire Stitch Fix team for their exceptional execution this quarter. I'm proud of how we're increasingly establishing Stitch Fix as our clients' retailer of choice for more of their apparel and accessories needs and that's evidenced by the revenue growth in the quarter and the considerable market share gains we captured, which we discussed. Our results this quarter, they are a testament to the superior retail experience we provide. We believe we offer a higher level of convenience personalization, service, inspiration and innovation than anyone else in the market.

I appreciate your interest in our business. and we believe the continued execution of our strategy will further fuel the momentum we have in our business and drive long-term sustainable profitable growth, and I look forward to sharing...