Dive Brief:

• RTW Retailwinds on Thursday announced that the company’s President and Chief Marketing and Customer Officer, Traci Inglis, will become its chief executive officer and a board member, effective April 17.

• She succeeds Gregory Scott, who, the company said in a press release, “has directed the Company’s strategy for almost a decade” and will step down from those roles following a transition period. He is moving to California “for personal reasons,” the company said.

• Inglis arrived last June from TechStyle Fashion Group. Before that she “spent nearly two years as the Director of Digital Marketing and CRM at Hot Topic,” the company said.

Dive Insight:

Inglis is set to take the chief executive reins at RTW (formerly New York & Co.) at a time when the world will most likely still be grappling with a pandemic, leaving consumers more worried about health, safety and economic stability than acquiring new apparel.

Apparel sales were already under pressure, well before the global outbreak of COVID-19. And things at RTW, in particular, haven’t been all that rosy, even apart from that. Last month, S&P Market Intelligence, in its February retail outlook report tracking the one-year probability of default scores among 15 U.S. department stores and apparel retailers, said that RTW Retailwinds held its number two place on that list and that its probability of default was 9.9%.

At the end of last year, the retailer announced the imminent closure of 30 stores, after shuttering 14 the previous year, and said it was looking to unload some of its lease obligations for its New York City headquarters. That announcement came along with another set of dim results in the third quarter: a 5% net sales decline to $200.1 million; 4% store comp decrease; a gross profit decline of 460 basis points to 27.8% of sales (from 32.4% the previous year); and a net loss of $11.6 million, down from $1.7 million in net income the previous year.