I am the Managing Director at Small Cap Consumer Research. It is our pleasure to introduce Vera Bradley. We have with us CEO Jackie Ardrey and CFO Michael Schwindle. Vera Bradley trades under the ticker VRA, market cap of approximately $200 million, and it is a leading accessories and related items player. Jackie. She joined Vera in November 2022. Before that she was president for five years at Grandin Road which was part of Qurate Group. She's also been the CEO of Trading Company Holdings and held leading management positions at Harry & David, Hanna Andersson and The May Department Stores Company. Michael Schwindle, the CFO joined Vera Bradley in May 2023. Before that he was the CFO at Claire's for three years and he's been the CFO at Fleet Farm, Payless, Harry & David and Musician's Friend.
What we're going to do here, as you see the safe harbor start and please take a gander at it, we're going to do this in three pieces. The first piece we're going to talk about Project Restoration which is Jackie and her teams changing the entire thought process for Vera Bradley. And this is really an exciting new thing. It's going to start basically next month, in the middle of next month and it's really a complete changeover here at Vera Bradley and I'm going to let them talk about it. It's very exciting. The other piece, then we'll talk about Q1 which was announced on Wednesday. Just a quick overview of that and then we will throw it out for questions. So with that, thank you Michael. I'm going to put it in your hands here to talk about project, excuse me, Project Restoration.
Thanks Eric. Good morning and we appreciate giving us the opportunity to tell our story today. Any successful turnaround starts with an amazing team and this is the team that I'm so proud of that we've been able to assemble here over the last 18 months. Eric kind of gave some notes already. I've been a merchant leader, merchant retail CEO. I have over 30 years experience in specialty retail growth and turnarounds and just was so excited to take this position and bring these talented people along with me. Michael, starting with Michael first. He has over 15 years as a consumer retail CFO. He and I were partners at Harry & David as well. Besides Claire's and Fleet Farm, he's also been at Musician's Friend, Home Depot and Limited Brands.
Alison Hiatt joined us as CMO after an impressive full funnel marketing career at leading retailers such as Amazon, Starbucks, REI, Banfield Pet Hospital and most recently the ice cream brand Salt & Straw. Then finally Mark Dely is our CAO and he's been with the company since 2016. He has an extensive career in both law and retail including Fred's and ServiceMaster. So as Eric said, we're really going to talk about Project Restoration today, but I want to give you a few minutes about Vera Bradley Inc. and who we are. We're two leading consumer brands serving women of all ages. Vera Bradley and Pura Vida, those are the two brands in our portfolio. We're omnichannel direct marketers and wholesalers with robust e-commerce sites, over 125 full- line and outlet stores across the country and Amazon distribution.
Our portfolio mission is to empower people to be bold in their pursuits and brilliant in their self-expression. There's a lot of focus on product in these two brands. We create, design, create, source, and deliver all of our product in-house. We have a debt-free balance sheet and strong cash generation, which has allowed us to pursue this plan to get back to consistent growth. Our enterprise is really based in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Pura Vida is based in La Jolla, California. But we, again, the four leaders who I just talked about, we oversee both of these brands, and we're excited about the opportunity here.
Both brands again leading consumer brands serving women of all ages just very emotionally and we believe that Project Restoration is the right way to address the turnaround needs for both of these brands to return us to top line growth. We're going to talk mostly about Vera Bradley today, but I'm going to first give you some background about Project Restoration and what this is. So it's Project Restoration is simply the deep attention to analysis of and forward execution of the front end of our business.
If you look at the pillars of brand, consumer, product and channel, these are really the four things and they're all about, not all completely about, but mostly about the front end of the business, about who we're targeting, what we're offering her, what our brand positions are and then ultimately where we sell. This is really where we've spent the majority of our time over the last 18 months. For Vera Bradley we're just so close. We're days away from launching this out to the world. We're just excited to tell you more about these pillars today.
Jackie's going to talk a lot about these pillars here in a few moments, but I think it's important to punctuate that these pillars, while they're very forward-facing and outward-facing in nature. They do sit on top, top of a foundation within the organization. If you think about all the different work streams that we have had, we'll talk a lot about that over the course of the next half hour. There's been an undertone and some things running in the background. I think the first of which was bringing and instilling strong business discipline across everything that we do. This is one of the things that Jackie and I gave early attention to last year. It was a key tenet of the improvement in the profitability year-over-year last year and the sustainability of that improvement as well over time.
So that was one of the first things we gave attention to. Secondly, making sure we have a highly engaged team. I will say I have been very impressed. I think Jackie has been as well about how attentive the organization has been through this work process. And you think about it, it's almost akin to kind of trying to change the tires on a car while you're going down the road. Because there's all this incremental work about the turnaround and changing all these changes that we're building, how we express our brand and how we go to our go to market with our customers, how we've designed our product and how we operate our various channels. All that work and all that change work is sitting on top of running the business every day.
So this is a lot of heavy lifting that has had to be done by the organization. And the team has, top to bottom, left to right, has been highly engaged through the entire thing. The third kind of foundational element that I think is worth highlighting here is a strong balance sheet. I'll probably hit this several times in the course of this. We are unabashedly conservative about our balance sheet. I think all of us, everyone who's watching this can recall retailers who got aggressive with their balance sheets and paid varying degrees of price. A few of them the ultimate price for a retail organization.
We are determined that having a strong and conservative balance sheet is important not only to the turnaround efforts and ensuring that we have the maneuverability necessary to make changes and pivot when we need to, but also to just long term viability of a strong retail brand. Lastly, the organization has actually invested over a number of years quite a bit in a strong and robust technology platform. We have been having to give some attention to how we deploy that technology platform a little bit differently than in the past. That's been part of the work that's been running behind the scenes, but there is a very strong technology platform already in place. As you think about the journey itself, and Jack will hit elements of the journey in a second.
I think it's good to understand this has been a journey that is by the time we launch the new products in less than 30 days, we're super excited about that. But it's been a year and a half journey so far. Even though from a customer facing, from a stakeholder facing perspective, there's not been a lot to see yet. And the reason is there's so much running behind the scenes. Let me give you an example of this. You think about product and one of the things that Jackie had to do early on was assess the product design team and the standards, the brand expressions through the product. What does that mean in aggregate and in detail? And when you think about that, that process begins with assessing the teams, the leadership and the team members and how they are doing their work.
Once that's completed, then you can design new products and then new product designs lead into sourcing cycles and sourcing cycles lead into merchandise planning and inventory planning cycles and buying cycles which then lead into delivery cycles which then finally culminate into delivery of product at stores and online. That's a very sequential process and there's a lot of elements there. And when you stack those up, end to end, you do end up with a cycle from a transformation perspective, that is a 12-18 month cycle, which is not surprisingly about exactly where we're landing here. In the midst of this, we were doing a whole bunch of other things, as I hinted at a moment ago, like reassessing how we deploy technology.
As an example of that, our online outlet previously, you know, through kind of the third quarter last year, our online outlet site was on, off, it was a flash site. So we would light it up, we put new products out there and then we turn it off and it would be up and down, up and down. Well, that's not really how we want to operate our channels as we think forward. We want to have, just like everyone expects to have an omnichannel kind of experience with, with branded products and branded sites. We want to do the same thing with our outlet. So we had to redesign how that site operates. We had to redesign actually not just the technology side, but the business process side of how operate that.
A lot of work that we kind of ran, that's one of the many work streams that was running in the background. Meanwhile, we're also reassessing how we do merchandising and how we do merchandise planning and buying activities. There's a lot of changes happening there that will start to affect the business on a go forward basis. I've actually been pretty close to that and I'm really excited with the new frameworks that the organization is using and how we're approaching inventory and the size and deployment of inventory across our various channels. Lastly, the last thing kind of worth calling out here is a remodel process. We are looking at remodeling in varying degrees, almost all of our stores across the fleet for both outlets and branded stores.
This will not all land exactly at the same time, but that's a process that is already underway now. Many of those will deliver by the time we have new products arriving in stores in less than 30 days again. Those will complete in the fall. As we approach July and all this starts to light up, we're going to have lots of new marketing running. We're going to have lots of new exciting events running in the fall of this year. That then leads to what's beyond that. We'll talk a little bit about that towards the end. This has been a very long journey. There has been a lot of ducks paddling furiously underneath the water, if you will. We're super, super excited about this entering a launch phase.
We can actually pull back the curtain and everyone else can see the things that we've been super excited about. There's been a few people we've allowed behind the curtain to kind of see things and they've been super excited when they've seen it too. This is a super exciting phase for us and we're really looking forward to taking it outward and opening that curtain. I think we'll pivot here and let Jackie kind of talk about what are these four pillars and what do they really mean?
Thanks, Michael. So, first of all, I hope that anyone listening today has a Vera Bradley memory, either for about themselves or their mom or their daughter. Because that is something again, with an emotionally connected brand like we have that is so unique and distinctive. And that is what I know we hear all the time, that it's the memories of. And that's not a common experience in other brands that people attach memories and good feelings to this brand. Women know us and our brand awareness is high for the size of the company we are, and we're really taking advantage of that. We have a unique position in the market. We've been part of the travel and bag landscape here for 40 years. All we're doing now is we're taking all that advantage and we're enhancing and modernizing the position to attract new customers.
So as we did our research and data mining to determine where we could play, it was clear that we're recognizable for our color and pattern. But over time we've become less distinctive. So our women carry solid bags as well as print bags. And when we looked at our mix of assortment, although pattern is really distinctive and part of our DNA, it's not necessarily what everyone is carrying and it doesn't have to follow fashion cycles, but we didn't pay attention to what women were actually wearing and wanting. And so that is, that's an opportunity for us for sure. Our designs are beloved by our customers. So we really are just modernizing, not changing who we are. And that's.
If you study brand transformations, the mistake that people make and the things that are not successful is when a brand tries to change who they are. And that is not what we've done here. One of the things I'm most proud of, and I'll talk about it in the product section in a minute, is that when we hire the team to do this work, they understood the assignment and had delivered a product line that when people see it, they get it. It's instantly recognizable as Vera Bradley. But it is also much more modern and attractive for today's consumer. So we're not changing the brand, we're enhancing the brand and we're tuning it up so it's applicable for modern consumers.
But what we are changing is our customer facing images and our investments in our stores and a new website to really meet her where she is and improve the experience. We also have some surprises coming with a celebrity influencer, some new wholesale partners and media investments. So really, like Michael said, when we have shown this work to other partners, obviously our wholesale cycle is much earlier than the consumer cycle. So this has been out there for a while with wholesale partners and we've had really good reception. This is, people are excited about what we're doing. And as you can see, you know, anyone who's studying Q1 results and really just the results of the past year, what's working in retail now is value and newness.
We think we have both of these incorporated in our new brand expression, where we have a really nice value component in our outlet channels that are now online as well, as Michael mentioned. And we have all this newness and excitement and buzz and the transformation part of this well-recognized brand. Going on to the customer, we're really fortunate that we have a multigenerational customer. Our customer base is well balanced from 18 to over 65. And it's important for us to keep that healthy balance because it's just healthy to have the distribution that we have in different age ranges. But one of our most active and desirable segments is women between 35-54. It's already a big group for us, but we can do a better job talking to her and understanding where we can serve her better.
So when we talk about this group and plan to market to her both from a digital perspective and top of funnel, we're going to be using magazines, catalogs, print. We're segmenting her in many ways and have developed product and marketing plans based on what's important to her. So this slide just demonstrates that a little bit. I'm very proud of the team's approach to this and saying if we're targeting women 35-54, there's a big group that we've narrowed down and said that hey, there's maybe 42 million people in this group. But when we apply some additional psychographic and demographic filters, we have 20 million that we want to target.
And then that 20 million can fall on a continuum between a premium and value. And then there's sub segments within there that we can read based on h er p ast purchasing behavior or other cues and target her in a very specific, precise way. So this is not just we're kind of, you know, fishing in the ocean to see who we can, we can get in this age range. It's a very modeled approach. What's also important is that we essentially will now have two assortments for the customer. So if a premium line and a value line. So and you can say that we, we kind of have that today, but our products over time have become very similar. So this effort in Project Restoration is to differentiate those lines even more. So you'll see much more, much more of a difference.
Even though the prices are the same, we're not really changing our pricing structure, but the look and the fabrics and the brand expression will be a little bit different in our full line stores than outlet. So we really are taking the same amount of SKUs, but we'll have the ability to reach more people because we have different, you know, different products that are distinctive, much more distinctive than they are today. So this is a really, from a customer perspective, it's a really sophisticated approach that's fully supported by the customer data platform we invested in a few years ago. As Michael said, we have great underlying technology here, and we were able to leverage all of that, all those insights, to be able to target this customer.
So onto the product, we've really carefully redesigned our products for a modern customer while retaining classic Vera Bradley elements. What I'm most proud of, actually, there's several things I'm proud of, but I probably tied for two. So one of them is the elevation of materials without price increases. Our pricing is very competitive. It's certainly really important to keep that position, especially now for the consumer. But we've improved our fabrics and our quality without retail price increases. So our fabrics are softer, they're better. They perform better, they look better. And we've been able to keep our prices the same even though we've done all of this upgrading. So I'm very proud of that. I'm also proud of the fact that, as I said earlier, that this still is Vera Bradley. This is not a different brand. We are not trying to.
We are not trying to fire our Vera Bradley customers. Far from it. We want to invite her in and get her to buy more, more often and more items. So this is really just. It's very tough to do that. It's very tough to update a brand and still stay relevant. We have hit this right on the head. So I'm very excited about that. You'll see prints and color and styling that's recognizable, but with improved shapes, better fabrics that are softer, and a new product pyramid that has really special offerings at the very top that we've never offered before. Leather in particular is a big expansion for us. We had a big leather business back in 2017. We were testing a reintroduction that's performed very well.
We delivered it back in fall, and it has consistently outperformed not only our buys, but our percentage of assortment. So we're expecting some pretty big growth in this program. And then again, a fundamental issue in our product assortment was that our premium and our value lines became too similar. So the only thing we were really trading on was price. So we've differentiated them, and the result is going to be much more choice without a SKU increase, which will help us attract new customers. So finally then to channels. We started as a wholesale business, and we've migrated over time to become a true omnichannel retailer. And we're continuing to build a balanced multichannel structure for the future.
So we see growth in e-commerce for sure, starting with our outlet site that has proven to be really strong in terms of both revenue and generating new customers. But we also believe when our VB.com site relaunches next month with new features that we're going to be driving more traffic to it as well that we see long-term growth here in e-commerce. We're also looking for growth in stores and we improved in the last year. We've improved our operating discipline in the stores and we'll begin to open some full-line stores again later this year. Anybody who's following the brand knows that we've been closing stores and this is, we have demonstrated an ability to return our stores to profitability. And so that is going to allow us to start opening later this year.
And then we've got further growth plans for full line stores which we'll execute on after we've proven out. So our existing wholesale partners as well have finally been really excited, as Michael said. You know, they've seen our products, they've placed their buys, extremely positive response. And then we're looking outside of our current wholesale partner community to find other brand-right wholesale partners who we haven't been able to attract. So that's been going well. But with all of that said, we're just getting started. This is the first step that's going to drive growth for the future and we want to balance these channels so as to lay the right foundation for growth.
All right, so to kind of hit some financial highlights and some, some history here for, for those who are less familiar. This is a business as Jackie said, over the last five years or so kind of had peaked out especially from a brick and mortar retail perspective and started closing a number of stores. That created top line pressure which also created bottom line pressure for those who were highly attuned to retail models. Brick and mortar stores are fixed cost models and once you've kind of covered that fixed cost, the up flex of profitability is rather sizable. It also works in reverse as you're, as you're downscaling works in reverse as well. So that's been one of the challenges that the business has been facing for the last five to seven years.
So this attention to branding along with refocusing on consumers and increasing our focus, not just refocusing, but also increasing that focus through new design, new products and marketing as well as managing our channels much better, this is the means to achieving stable sales and margin growth and profitability growth in the intermediate and the long term. Also, what has also happened in the meantime is we've continued to drive better cash flow generation for the business. That will also continue an improved trajectory in the future as well. It will not so much in fiscal 2025 because we're making a lot of incremental investments. As we mentioned before. There's a lot of remodel activity, there's some other background and back of office capital investments to enable everything.
But outside of those kind of one-time investments, we will continue to maintain strong cash flow of the business. And a lot of this goes back to what I said earlier, really readdressing kind of how we do things. This goes back to strong business discipline. And as Jackie said a moment ago, one of the things that we have done is we've worked hard this last 18 months of restoring some of our channels to profitability that had not been profit drivers of the business. And it's an important unlock for the current business. It's an equally important unlock, if not to even more important unlock for the future growth potential of a business. As I'll say in a second, I promised early on that I was going to hit this more than once. Strong balance sheet.
We are unabashedly conservative on this as said again, and I'm probably trying not to say it a third time, but this is about really having the stability in that foundation so that when things happen and you have opportunities to pivot, that you are able to do so. That is one of the challenges that many retailers I've been in, a number of these retail sellers and I've seen them from afar as well. When you don't have that ability to pivot and you don't have the strength on your balance sheet to enable to pivot, to address an issue or to chase an opportunity, it's very, very limiting. It is shackles around the legs of a retailer and it impedes their ability to grow and progress. So we are unabashedly conservative on this and intend to stay this way.
Lastly, this then leads into the long-term growth potential as we modernize the assortment and increase its relevance, its modern relevance. We combine this with business discipline. We also have a footprint that we were previously successful in and this creates enormous opportunities just to go back and restore the business to growth and to a larger presence in the consumer's mind and in the marketplace. So all that being kind of background and queue up for where we are and where we're headed for fiscal 2025, we just had our earnings call a couple days ago. In that call we did reaffirm our guidance. However, I think it's fair for investors and the stakeholder community to understand that fiscal 2025 is going to be a tale of two halves.
I will give Eric credit for actually having articulated it so succinctly in a prior report or conversation, but it is, it is absolutely true. This is a tale of two halves. We are, we have been and expect to continue to see anticipated economic and pre-transformation headwinds that will create a drag effect in Q1 and Q2 of this year followed by some business acceleration in Q3 and Q4. That means that we expect for the year to have earnings per share between $0.54 and $0.62. That is against last year's number while we post on a GAAP basis $0.55 of earnings per share. That last year was a 53-week year. So if you adjust for that 53rd week, it's actually $0.54. So we're flat at the bottom end of the range.
We do expect an elevated level of capital spend which will create a depressed level of net cash flow generation for the year. But that all turnaround and intra-year related efforts to Project Restoration. So we are super excited about this. We are, as I said, we reaffirmed our guidance after the first quarter's earnings call and we are looking forward to the turn that is almost literally right around the corner n ow.
To leave you with a few thoughts. We're an authentic lifestyle company and you know that, I know that. You know, if you look at the performance of lifestyle retailers just lately it's not been strong and we understand that. We think everything we talked about though today the ones again who are successful are either on the value side or on the innovation side. And we think we've addressed both of these with our new product and our turnaround efforts.
So this is, you know, this is a, it's a brand that's been around for a very long time and led by a turnaround team that's committed to its long-term success. We've got a Project Restoration, the right focus across the organization to deliver top line and bottom line growth. And then finally, the strong balance sheet that we talk about that's really been a highlight of our company for many years. So I think at this point, Eric, we're gonna. You have some questions perhaps for us.
Yeah, thank you for this. It's very expansive. Actually one thing I have on Project Restoration is you've talked a lot of what's going to be in the stores, what is going to be taken out of the stores. So difference in the store now to what we're going to see in basically a month, it's going to be a lot of newness, a lot of excitement. What is going to be gone from the stores that when you look at it, really wasn't core to this model.
What we did, Eric, was we talked about this publicly for several years now where we believe that. And the SKU reduction was a key part of what we needed to do to improve the performance in our stores and help really the stores to be easier to shop. We've spent a lot of time in the last year and a half really validating that and saying, where's our cutoff point? Where? And we've used test stores and taken product out of those stores to say, what happens when we do this? And so I would say to more succinctly answer your question, it's the tail end of things that were just a lot of choice and a lot of noise in stores that when we talked to customers, both customers and non customers, they said there's too much.
Even though we cut a couple of times, we still, throughout the last year, when we did intercept surveys, people would just say there's too much in here and we can't focus. What we've really cut is the tail, the very long tail of product performance that we analysed carefully and said these are not SKUs that we need in the stores. Our resulting efforts really help as we walk through our mock stores. It just shows you how much a focused assortment can help deliver a better experience.
Great. And for the last few years, you've done a lot of very exciting collaborations with Disney, Hello Kitty, the NFL. How do those collaborations fit into Project Restoration?
They definitely fit into Project Restoration, and we're going to continue them. The one thing that's new is going to be we're expanding them to outlet. So we don't typically have a lot of IP and outlet. We won't have all of our IP and outlet. I want to be clear about that. But we still will have differentiated product in outlet and in our full line. So that's one thing that throughout Project Restoration that we will remain committed to, so that there will be product differentiation. Even if we have very similar properties, they may not be in each channel at the same time. But we know that this customer loves IP as well, so we're going to offer it to her.
Okay, let's talk a little bit about Q1. As you said, it's a tale of two halves. So in effect, Q1 and Q2 are just not going to be as important as the back half. The stock reacted kind of strongly to the Q1 numbers here. On the negative side, I think it provides a great buying opportunity. But how did you view Q1 from what you expected it to be and what after that quarter? And I think you probably answered this, but I'd love to hear it again. You reiterated the guidance. What gives you that confidence? Thank you.
Let me take that first. And Jackie, if you want to jump in with any other color, do so. Listen, we don't provide quarterly guidance that is related to a number of factors. But regardless, we aren't providing quarterly guidance. And you're right, the market was very disappointed. Obviously the first quarter performance was below last year. However, as we talked about on the earnings call, there are really three things that are really affecting that. First of all was the performance of Pura Vida. And we've not talked much about Pura Vida here because the big story right now, the big turn at the moment is Vera Bradley. But Pura Vida is in a profit optimizing mode. And we've been very candid and very clear with the street and with other stakeholders that that is the mode that we're in.
There's a number of reasons for that, but that is, that's the place that Pura Vida is at. Secondly, we saw a big drop off in first quarter, our wholesale business. By the way, back to my first point on Pura Vida, not the least bit surprised at all. Actually, Pura Vida's performance was almost exactly where we expected it to be. Secondly, on the wholesale side, our wholesale business was down substantially. Not the least bit surprising either because we've been telling our wholesale partners, hey, we've got this great new assortment coming and we want you to be really excited about that. Well, not surprisingly, they want to sell down through their existing assortment before they buy into the new. This is exactly how this world works. And to that point, not the least bit surprised by that either.
The third thing that happened in the quarter was we had some timing issues that just spread across the quarter. Some Q1 to Q2 shifts, some other things. They were timing related and again, nothing surprising about that. So I think given those reasons, it makes complete sense why we'd reaffirm the guidance. We weren't surprised by these issues. So the path ahead is, candidly, it's unchanged from where it was three months earlier.
Okay, why don't you give us. Actually, you did buy back some shares. Why don't you give us a quick update on how you want to use. How are you using your capital for that?
You know, we recognize that we carry a high cash balance and we have been working with our board on what we think the right balance of risk and reward is. As I mentioned earlier and Jackie said as well, like we, we are determined to maintain a strong balance sheet because we, we believe that preserves our ability to maneuver and react to the marketplace to opportunities and risks as they present themselves. So we continue to maintain that stance. However, we do have at the beginning of the year about a $25 million remaining authorization for stock buyback.
As we were looking at the value and the price of the stock, we thought there was a great opportunity there that's accretive to the business and the near term and the long term. We made the decision in concert with the board to execute a part of that remaining authorization over the quarter. There'll be a little bit that we'll spread forward. We're, we're continuing to be diligent about that and we'll make decisions as the market presents opportunities to do so.
Okay, I think we have a few minutes. Any questions here?
Yeah, actually I had one, Eric, and it was really more for Jackie on the stores. And so you talked about opening new store locations coming up. Can you talk a little bit about those? Will those be full line stores? Will some be like buy online pickup distribution locations? Smaller square footage? Just any color would be great.
Sure. So for right now, the stores that we're opening this year are really the quick hit opportunities. They're not new formats. They really are just places that we believe that we may have closed in a mall too early. So we have pretty good confidence that we can perform in those locations. And again, stores are expensive. So we want to be very thoughtful about how and where we're opening. And then as we look forward to the future, absolutely. We're looking at different formats and how we can serve the customer better. We will also open some new outlet locations and that's really just about. I talked about earlier, it's not about expanding our outlet fleet. It's about really looking at our performance across the fleet and saying just having good kind of hygiene, if you will, around our locations.
There are locations that have been underperforming, so we'll close those and we're going to open new ones in better locations. And the overlap may be that we have some stores that open before the others are closed, but really it's just about maintaining and improving the health of the fleet that we have while we're looking for new locations.
I had a question. You talked about the prior mistakes, I guess, that you've made between the premium line and the value line blurring too much. But can you also just kind of characterize what you think the biggest misses were? It looks like, you know, you've obviously put a lot of things in place in terms of process and operations and merchandising. All very impressive. But can you kind of help us understand what the biggest misses were before and what is different now that you wouldn't make those same mistakes?
Yeah, thanks for the question. I think if I had to characterize just the one thing that I think over time we missed for the brand is that. But. We were not doing a great job of maintaining our customer file and really diagnosing what was happening to the customer and why she wasn't buying. I think that's probably one of the hardest things to do.
Over time, as we were becoming more challenged and the revenue was decreasing, in my opinion, we were cutting marketing spend too much in order to make our numbers. So there's, you know, there's a whole. Like last year, if anybody's been following the brand, you know, we had a huge cost saving effort that produced some really nice results. Those results are continuing into this year and helping us fund the increase. Self fund the increase in marketing that we need to drive the business. So it's about awareness.
Like, if you actually look at the numbers, our brand awareness has been declining a little bit every year. So, you know, this whole big effort right now is about getting the brand in front, back in front of people and ensuring that when we get it in front of people, they're seeing something that's modern and attractive and they're going into our stores and they're having a great experience. And it's not the same Vera Bradley store they saw 10 years ago. So it's all of those things together.
But it's most importantly getting the brand in front of people again and having them consider us in a different way. And I think that's the one thing over time that the numbers certainly show we weren't doing. The brand was not front and center anymore. And I think we were also fortunate. Right now there's a lot of interest in quote unquote, vintage brands. And so we are at a really great time to reintroduce ourselves and delight a whole new generation of people .
Great. Thank you.
I think we are out of time. Thank you.
Appreciate it.