Childresn’s Place (PLCE): Email Intelligence captures return to extreme promotions

   17 Aug 2022

Children’s Place has long relied on aggressive discounting language to drive traffic and online sales.  This summer our email intelligence captured a return to record breaking all-time high promotional volumes.  In July, heading into Back to School season our systems detected an increase in both significant and steep discounts.  Among the discounts unseen in prior periods were campaigns featuring “$10 off for Back to school”, “the entire store almost everything 75% off”, “up to 70% off NOW for back to school”.  This language implied a steeper average discount than both a year ago, as well as dating back past 2019.  Our investor partners were alerted to this indicator of slack demand, and soon after PLCE reported a staggering loss, provided a worse than expected outlook and mentioned increased promotions 19 times in their earnings conf call.