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In March 2018, we announced our multi-year Path to Brilliance transformation plan built around three key strategic priorities: Customer First, OmniChannel, and Building a Culture of Agility and Efficiency.

Year One of this transformation was focused on establishing a solid foundation on which to grow, and we made important progress in stabilizing same store sales, strengthening eCommerce, reducing costs, and creating new capabilities in design, marketing, and data analytics. However, amid a highly competitive promotional environment, we fell short in the critical holiday period. Combined with continuing consumer weakness in the U.K. and larger than expected impact from state sales tax collection in James Allen, this led to under-delivery of our expectations for Fiscal 2019 financial performance.

Over the last few months, we have performed a detailed review of our Fiscal 2019 performance and the new foundational capabilities developed in Year 1 of Path to Brilliance. Moving from a legacy mall retailer to a modern OmniChannel category leader is a significant and challenging journey, and we are embracing our learnings and seizing this opportunity to take bolder actions and retool Signet’s unique and competitive positioning to lead the retail jewelry category. We have restructured parts of the organization and made leadership changes aimed to position us for success. We are accelerating numerous growth initiatives to further develop the seamless and personalized OmniChannel jewelry experience that Signet can uniquely provide. This includes reinvigorating our product assortment in store and online with more exclusive merchandise and customization, increasing targeted messaging and promotional effectiveness, enhancing full-service offerings like service, repairs, and piercings, and improving our eCommerce and mobile technology. Higher levels of investment in these growth initiatives are expected to be funded by aggressively addressing our cost structure and more efficiently managing our inventory. We expect our plans to improve the trajectory of our same store sales, operating margins, and cash flow generation and bolster our balance sheet over the course of our multi-year transformation journey.