Carter's Beats Q3 Estimates as International Sales Pick Up the Slack From a Soft US Wholesale Business
The children's apparel company nearly doubled its operating income for the quarter, even as US wholesale sales kept sliding.
Carter's posted third-quarter net sales of $752.5 million, down a slight 0.7% from a year earlier, but profitability told a better story: operating income nearly doubled to $55.8 million, and diluted earnings per share more than tripled to $1.00, up from $0.32. Adjusted operating margin climbed to 7.6%, a 44.6% jump from the prior year.
The results were uneven across channels. US retail comparable sales rose just 0.4%, and US wholesale fell 3.8%, continuing a slide that has dogged the business for several quarters. International sales, meanwhile, grew 4.5% and did much of the heavy lifting on the bottom line. The company paid out $9.1 million in dividends, or $0.25 a share, during the quarter.
It is a quieter quarter than Carter's has had lately. The children's apparel company spent earlier parts of 2026 working through a rebrand and a reshaped store footprint; this report reads like the follow-through, proof that the hard part of a turnaround is less the announcement than the several boring quarters after it where the numbers either back it up or do not.
Source: Carter's Inc.
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
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