Lumber Liquidators' CEO Presents At Goldman Sachs 2012 Global Retailing Conference (Transcript)

Question-and-Answer Session

Matt Fassler - Goldman Sachs

Great. We have a nice full room, I am sure we will have many from the audience. I am going to start with a question about your assortments. So you have historically been a hard wood flooring business, very focused mandate. You recently introduced some tools into the assortment. You are called Lumber Liquidators, you could sell many things presumably, if you chose to. How the tools look so far and how do you think about potential product extensions for the business?

Robert Lynch

Yeah, I think it’s very exciting. You mentioned some of the changes we made to the team. We brought a new chief merchant into the company last year, a couple of months after I joined Lumber, by the name of Bill Schlegel. And he has, in the last 12 months has significantly upgraded and turned over our merchant staff. We currently have -- you know I have been in retail a while. I started at Wal-Mart, I was at Home Depot. For a company of our size, we have probably one of the best high class merchant teams I have ever seen in my career. And they are really doing a phenomenal job. I am very proud of them.

So, yeah, I think Matt that we have significant opportunity across all of our categories. In fact I have got a catalog in front of me. If I don’t mind sharing, we have some for everybody out there. We are introducing a new catalog right now with 51 new items. 51 new floors. So to your point about tools, Matt, now we are bringing in all the items that you need to complete your project tools, but we are also looking at -- and as we do our line reviews, we are looking strategically in terms of revenue generation. Is our assortment optimized? What can we expand within our core flooring categories? We have expanded to other flooring categories. We have added vinyl. In here we have added some new vinyl floors. We are expanding our laminate category. And then across accessories and moldings we are definitely looking there as well on [new mason] tools which, that’s been a very good test. It’s something that we started with 30 or 40 sale items a few months ago. Based on that performance it’s doing well and we are actually increasing it and we are going to up that probably 2x or 3x in terms of the tool assortment as we go forward.

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