On the five-year anniversary of its IPO, Vitamin Shoppe CEO Anthony Truesdale said Tuesday that the company is evolving toward a lifestyle brand to retain long-term 
customers while earning their loyalty.
During the company’s fourth-quarter financial results conference call, Truesdale said ecommerce sales were 10.5% higher than the same period last year, but profits were expectations.
“We mentioned last quarter that we were increasing our advertising spend during the period with the objective of driving sales and profitability,” Truesdale said, according to a Seeking Alpha transcript. “The early results were positive, but the longer-term results through the third quarter were below expectations, and we have dialed back our digital advertising spend. Second, when compared with prior periods, we increased email frequency, but did not get the desired response. Going forward, we are returning to our historical marketing cadence. With respect to the Virginia DC, we are seeing quarter-over-quarter productivity improvements as the DC continues to ramp. We expect to be servicing 300 stores out of Virginia by year-end and expect to see continued productivity improvements in 2015.”
In the past five years, Truesdale said Vitamin Shoppe has accomplished much.
“Our store count has increased from 434 to over 700 today,” he explained. “We have delivered positive comparable store sales every quarter. Revenue has grown from around $600 million to over $1 billion. And over the past two years, we’ve made significant investments to support our growth with additional financial benefits to accrue over the coming years. With these investments behind us, we see a path to improved EBIT margin beginning in the second half of 2015. We will continue to evolve from a pure play VMS 
retailer to a lifestyle brand to satisfy more of our customers’ health and well-being needs, and we remain committed to being our customers’ first choice for those needs.”
Truesdale said the company wants to expand its digital footprint.
“So we took a bigger gamble based on some test results,” Truesdale explained during the Q&A session. “We didn’t get the sales results, so we’ve dialed that back. We're trying to learn some more. We’re trying to figure out what works best for this category and which dollars are best spent, but I would say we overspent a little bit in the quarter on the direct business. We had reasonably good sales at 10.5, given what I’ve seen in the marketplace, but still think there’s opportunity to improve that spend.”