Brown Shoe Company, Inc. has announced it will close 80 underperforming stores in a series of restructuring moves expected to realise $5 million in annual pretax operating earnings and strengthen its flagship Naturalizer brand.

Closures, expected to be completed by April 2006, will affect 60 stores in the USA and 20 in Canada and will follow 10 closures that already took place in the first quarter of 2005. This will result in a Specialty Retail division with approximately 300 stores, 275 of which are Naturalizer stores. 30 new outlet stores in the United States and Canada are also to be added over the next two to three years.

The company will consolidate all buying, merchandise planning and allocation functions for US and Canadian stores into its St. Louis headquarters. Over the past three months new leadership talent has been added into the sales, marketing and product development areas.

In addition, Brown Shoe said it will test customer reactions to a new store prototype in fiscal 2005. Additional growth and remodelling will hinge on the outcome of these tests. All these actions are expected to be approximately cash neutral as the costs to exit the stores will be substantially offset by the cash generated from liquidating inventories carried in the stores.

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