Digging Into Urban Outfitters Segment Disclosures

Retail clothing operator Urban Outfitters ($URBN) filed its latest quarterly earnings release last week. This gives us an excellent opportunity to look at the brand- and channel-level disclosures that Urban makes, and how Calcbench can help you find and study those numbers. 

For those financial analysts not among the fashion-forward (which includes all the men on the Calcbench team), Urban Outfitters operates under five separate brands:


  • Its namesake Urban Outfitters, selling to both men and women;

  • Anthropologie, selling primarily to women;

  • Free People, selling to a younger female demographic;

  • Nuuly, a rent-to-wear subscription service;

  • Menus and Venues, a small restaurant and catering business. 


The important point for financial analysts is that Urban Outfitters reports quarterly sales by each brand. So when we saw Urban’s latest report on our Recent Filings page, we used the Calcbench Earnings Model feature to view those brand-level revenue numbers at a quick glance. See Figure 1, below.



Even better, we used that Earnings Model page to pull up prior quarters’ brand-level disclosures too. Within a few minutes we had charted out quarterly brand-level sales for the last two years. See Figure 2, below.



OK, that immediately lets us see that Anthropologie is the flagship brand for Urban Outfitters; but the rest of the brands are tough to distinguish at this high level of detail. Except, when you have the raw data — which is what Calcbench provides, in spades — you can always use Excel or some similar tool to reframe the data so that insights become more clear.


We did exactly that, using Excel to display all five brands as a percentage of each quarter’s total sales. That led us to Figure 3, below.



Now we can see one trend immediately: that Nuuly, Urban’s subscription clothing service (seen in green above), is small but growing rapidly. Sales in the most recent quarter were 9.3 percent of total revenue ($123.5 million against $1.33 billion), versus only 6.5 percent in the year-earlier period ($77.9 million against $1.2 billion). Moreover, that growth in Nuuly seems to be coming at the expense of the Urban Outfitters brand (seen in yellow above). 


We could keep going. Since Urban Outfitters also reports revenue by individual channel (wholesale, retail, and subscription), we can also chart out the mix of channels to total revenue, too. See Figure 4. 



Retail is king; no surprise there. But with a few more keystrokes, analysts who follow Urban Outfitters (and other fashion outlets) could also compare Urban’s revenue patterns against peers. For example, Ralph Lauren Corp. ($RL) filed its latest earnings report last week too, and discloses revenue by segment. The Gap ($GAP) reports revenue by store brand (Gap, Old Navy, Banana Republic, Atheleta). 


The exact segment-level disclosures will vary from one retailer to the next depending on each one’s business model, but in almost every instance you’ll be able to find some comparable metric in the earnings release somewhere. All you need is Calcbench to help you dig out the data quickly, easily, and precisely.

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