Kohl’s has had a rough year—but it might be showing signs of a turnaround.
Kohl’s shares were trading up more than 3% Thursday morning, but its stock is still down more than 40% year-to-date.
“I do want to recognize that there has been a lot of change for Kohl’s this past year, especially the last few weeks,” Bender said during the company’s Q1 2025 earnings call on Thursday. “While change can be difficult, it also represents an opportunity to reassess and commit to a path forward.”
“We thought, ‘We can do more with a lot less,’ and that didn’t work out for us,” Kingsbury said during a December 2024 analysts call. He added it’s “up to us to fix it,” but Buchanan dropped the ball.
The company rolled out 200 jewelry shops at its stores in the fall, Timm added. Meanwhile, Kohl’s is also focused on improving its women’s clothing assortment and investing more in its Sephora shops, which reported a 6% net sales increase last quarter.
Another major focus for Kohl’s this year will be doubling down on value. Because tariffs have impacted consumer sentiment across the board, the company is trying to be mindful of meeting the customer where they are—especially since much of Kohl’s customer base are middle-income consumers.
“There are kitchen-table conversations going on across America every day. People are trying to figure out how to make sense of the dollars that they have to spend, and they’re prioritizing where they want to put it,” Bender said during the earnings call. “What’s important is making sure that we are as close to being inside their heads and understanding what their needs are and meeting those needs.”
To this end, Timm said Kohl’s is navigating tariffs by diversifying the countries they use for production.
“Although tariffs remain a fluid and uncertain situation, the teams continue to work to reduce our exposure to high-tariff countries … [and] adjusting orders based on pricing elasticity analysis,” Timm said.
But while Kohl’s makes its best efforts, executives still admitted it’s a time of massive transition for the retailer.
“We’re in the middle of a transformation, and in the early days—honestly—of it, and so it’s going to take some time for us to get back to that,” Bender said. “But the bottom line is that we’re trying to align the business to meet the needs of our customers.”
