Express 2011 Annual Report Download - page 19

We empower our managers and associates to deliver a superior shopping experience through training, fostering a
culture of accountability, and providing them with sales data that helps them to optimize their own store. While
general guidelines for our merchandise assortments, store layouts, and in-store visuals are provided by our home
office, we give our store managers and district managers substantial discretion to tailor their stores to the
individual market and empower them to make store-level business decisions. Our comprehensive training
programs are offered at the store, regional, and national levels. Our programs allow managers from all
geographic locations to interact with each other and exchange ideas to better operate stores. Our district and store
managers are compensated, in part, based on the sales volume of the store or stores they manage. Through our
training, evaluation, and incentive programs, we seek to enhance the productivity of our store associates. Our
store associates receive extensive training from their managers to improve their product expertise and selling
skills. We evaluate our store associates on measures such as sales per associate hour, items per transaction, and
dollars per transaction to ensure consistent productivity, to reward top performers, and to identify potential
training opportunities. We bring our top managers to a conference each year in order to reward them for their
performance and provide them with additional management training.
Marketing and Brand Building
We use a variety of marketing vehicles to increase customer traffic and build brand loyalty. These include direct
mail offers, e-mail communications, magazine and in-store promotions, web-based banner and search
advertising, and social networking sites, such as Facebook and Twitter. We use our proprietary database to tailor
our marketing efforts to our customers. In 2011, we began using other media channels, including television and
national print advertising campaigns, to increase our exposure to customers in order to increase our brand
recognition and value.
The success of our products also results in frequent placement and promotion of our products and brand in the
mainstream media, including editorial print and television credits. We have an in-house public relations team that
actively works to expose our products by encouraging celebrities to wear our fashions and regularly receive press
coverage of our products as a result of celebrities who wear Express clothing. In 2011, Express was referenced in
a number of editorial and television credits through outlets such as Lucky,Cosmopolitan,Glamour,Elle,Marie
Claire,InStyle,GQ, and Vogue. We believe such references reinforce our brand image.
We offer a private-label credit card through an agreement with World Financial Network National Bank
(“WFNNB”) under which WFNNB owns the credit card accounts and Alliance Data Systems Corporation
provides services to our private-label credit card customers. All of our proprietary credit cards carry the Express
logo. During 2011, we piloted a new tender agnostic loyalty program, Express NEXT, in approximately 90 stores
across the United States. We plan to roll this program out to the remainder of the chain in the first quarter of
2012. We believe that our rewards program encourages frequent store and website visits and promotes multiple-
item purchases, thereby cultivating customer loyalty to the Express brand, resulting in a potential for increased
sales.
Management Information Systems
Our management information systems provide a full range of business process support and information to our
store, merchandising, financial, and real estate business teams. We believe the combination of our business
processes and systems provides us with improved operational efficiencies, scalability, increased management
control, and timely reporting that allow us to identify and respond to trends in our business. We utilize a
combination of customized and industry standard software systems to provide various functions related to:
• point-of-sale;
• inventory management;
• design;
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