Arturo Rodriguez
Analyst · Alliance Global Partners
Thank you, Devin, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. On today's call, I'll be covering: one, a brief overview of our Q2 results; two, a discussion of the tariff impact on our business and an update on the proactive moves we continue to make to navigate this environment; three, an update on our improved 2025 outlook in light of these developments. Following my remarks, our CFO, Josh will walk through our second quarter financial results in greater detail. Generally speaking, tariffs and trade policy beginning earlier this year significantly impacted our business, our industry and consumer decision-making. The ambiguity uncertainty of the rates and their implementation dictated our decision-making process with respect to pricing, sourcing and spending and accelerated our plans to reshape the business for the long term. While the tariff environment created significant headwinds in Q2, we believe that the worst is behind us. We believe the actions we have taken mitigated the impact that tariffs produce and most importantly, put us back on the path of stabilizing our business. As a result, we expect to generate improved performance results in the second half of 2025 compared to the first half of 2025. Let us take a look at what transpired in Q2. Net revenue was $19.5 million compared to $28 million in Q2 2024. This decline was driven by 3 main factors: first, strategic price increases to offset anticipated tariff costs and reduced run rates and navigation inventory impacts on the tariffs. Second, a delayed start to the summer season in the Northeast, which primarily impacted sales of our dehumidifiers versus prior year. And third, general softness in the consumer spending, which we attribute to at least partially to the uncertainty surrounding tariffs and trade policy. Adjusted EBITDA was a loss of $2.2 million compared to a gain of $0.2 million in the prior year. This change was driven by lower revenue, increased marketing spend, inventory reserve impacts, partially offset by savings from our fixed cost reduction plan. A key operational dynamic of the Amazon Marketplace is that its algorithm rewards price stability. In Q2, we proactively adjusted our pricing to offset significant cost pressures. While these actions were essential to preserve our margins, they triggered a pronounced decline in our sales velocity through May and the first half of June. This algorithmic response, while understood, was particularly acute this quarter and was the primary headwind to our revenue. To this, our primary competition, specifically in our dehumidifier space and steam op space is Amazon 1P, meaning Amazon buys brands -- products from brands directly and sells it as an online retailer. And in those segments, we saw Amazon did not raise prices significantly, if at all. As such, this made our products to higher- priced offering for the most part during May and June. Further, in certain dehumidifier listings, we were already the highest price offering and had little room to move up on pricing. We believe we'll continue to see our products being the highest priced offering through 2025 before pricing becomes more competitive in 2026. I'll speak a bit more about the pricing dynamic in just a moment. To help offset our drops in daily run rates, our team ran various promotions through the period, which led to an increase of advertising spend in the period above our usual targeted amounts. This led to inefficiencies, especially with our higher-priced offerings in our spend and conversions leading to an additional onetime spend of advertising of $0.9 million. The resulting forecast reduction required us to take an inventory reserve of $0.7 million. Regardless, our inventory levels are healthy, but we are holding approximately $3 million more than desired. This is due to our strategic decision to go long on inventory to navigate tariffs along with some of the sales slowdown, which we believe will unwind over the coming few quarters. Finally, beyond the late start of our seasonal business, we observed broader consumer softness. For example, in several categories, our products maintained the best seller rank indicating we held market share. However, the total sales volume at the rank was down year- over-year, pointing to what we believe is a weaker consumer demand overall. Now to the actions we announced previously in May, as our initial responses to tariffs, we believe we are still -- these are still the right decisions. Here is the update on those 6 key points of that plan. Number one, fixed cost reduction plan. As part of our immediate response to tariffs, we announced the fixed cost reduction initiative targeting $5 million to $6 million in annualized savings. To date, we believe we have secured approximately $5.5 million of those savings, of which $3.8 million is primarily coming from head count reductions we implemented in May this year, and the remaining $1.7 million we expect to see from vendor savings taking effect throughout the rest of 2025. We expect to see the full vendor savings impact starting sometime in Q1 of 2026. We continue to search for the remaining savings, which we believe can be identified and secured over the coming 6 months. In parallel, our team is actively leveraging AI to enhance productivity. Our focus for AI today is on creating operating leverage and scale for future growth rather than immediate head count reduction. For example, we successfully implemented AI in our customer service operations, which has improved service quality metrics even with a smaller team. We expect to make a separate announcement in September around our AI improvements in customer servicing leveraging AI. Finally, we continue to see how AI deployed in our data platform along with some other third-party tools can unlock efficiencies and insights to our operations. We see this as a continued area of opportunity for Aterian in finding ways to create savings and efficiencies. Number two, accelerated resourcing. We are making progress on our resourcing initiatives. While the financial incentive to move manufacturing out of China is less pronounced at the incremental 30% tariff rate versus the peak incremental rate of 145%, significant opportunities remain, particularly for those products subject to multiple tariff layers. That said, we did manufacture a portion of our dehumidifiers from Indonesia this year, which avoided the peak incremental Chinese tariffs. So in that respect for 2025, we have shifted down from 100% Chinese manufactured dehumidifiers in 2024 to approximately 65% in 2025. As such, we still see opportunities to source from outside China in categories, which not only see the effects from the 2025 tariffs of 30%, but also see the effects from the 2017 Section 301 tariffs, of which on average are an incremental 25% for certain of our products. For example, beverage refrigerators from China would be subject to approximately 58% tariffs. As such, we think opportunities to find better costing for products with both 2017 301 tariffs and 2025 tariffs still exists outside of China. Number three, pausing on launches in certain new categories. We paused new category launches from China in Q2, particularly hard electronic goods. However, now the reciprocal tariffs have, for the most part, stabilized for now, we are restarting new product launches in the hard electronic goods space, but a much more focused approach. We expect the launches to take place in the second half of 2026. Number four, inventory and supply chain optimization. We were able to navigate through peak tariffs in May and June and brought in most of our goods avoiding the peak 2025 incremental tariffs of 145%, predominantly landing at approximately 30% for the incremental tariffs. We did this by working with both our manufacturers and supply chain partners, including the use of our [ bonded ] warehouses. As we look forward, we continue to look at diversification as a long-term goal to allow for not only savings but optionality, but this will take time now that the tariffs have landed at this level. Number five, strategic pricing adjustments. As we said earlier, we implemented price increases to navigate the volatility of a shifting cost structure related to tariffs and related impacts to supply chain to conserve margins based on our new expected costs and to reduce our run rates to allow for inventory management as part of tariff mitigation. Further, our primary competition, specifically in our dehumidifier space and steam op space is Amazon 1P. And in those segments, we saw that Amazon did not raise prices significantly, if at all. However, we believe this is transitory. Even though we have raised prices first in many categories, we believe the market will eventually increase prices, including Amazon 1P, and we will be priced more competitively in 2026. As such, we believe run rates will improve in 2026 and beyond, assuming no material changes to consumer purchasing habits. Number six, new product launches in low tariff regions. We believe our push into consumables is still a great strategic objective. Many of the items we're exploring can be sourced in the U.S. and carry better contribution margins than our current hard electronic goods. Further, the U.S. sourced nature of these goods will limit our exposure to continued risks around tariffs. In particular, we are seeing opportunities for consumables in the health and beauty space, and we expect to announce launches around Healing Solutions brand in that space in October 2025. With that, we are very proud to announce the launch of the Squatty Potty flushable wipes. In less than a year, we have been able to source and bring to the market one of the best flushable wipes in the space. Our wipes are flushable and septic safe but always remember to follow the flushing guidelines. They're safe for sensitive skin, safe for eczema-prone skin, they are 100% plant-based fibers, 99% water and plant-based formulas, hypoallergenic and dermatologically tested, cruelty free, no animal testing on these, pH balanced, alcohol-free, formulated without harsh chemicals, oils, parabens and sulfates, they meet the IWSFG and GD4 product guidelines for flushability and they are FSC certified, which is the Forest Sustainability Council. These wipes are a great premium product designed for everyone in your family and not just for dudes, plus they look great in your bathroom. These wipes will be live for sale in the United Kingdom on amazon.co.uk next week and will be live for sale in the United States on both Amazon.com and our Squatty Potty website shortly after Labor Day. We will start various marketing campaigns in September to spread the word about how these wipes are the #1 way to feel fresh after #2. I would like to congratulate the team on a very impressive achievement. While Q2 was a challenging quarter, the swift and decisive actions we've taken are expected to yield results and put us back to track on stabilizing the business. Josh will provide details on the guidance, but in short, on slightly better H2 net revenues versus H1, we are expecting to be between breakeven to a slight loss of $1 million on adjusted EBITDA, a big improvement versus H1, but still more work to do. We have also remained focused on preserving our balance sheet as we work our way through this period. We believe our current liquidity position will be sufficient to support the current business through its evolving tariff environment and broader macroeconomic backdrop. In closing, the recent tariff volatility has been a significant market disruption. However, the work we've done over the past years to improve our operations and strengthen our financial position has given us the resilience to navigate this environment. We believe that won't be the same for many smaller companies. Even with today's uncertainty for us, we believe Aterian's future remains strong and bright. The actions we've detailed today are already fostering stability and has set the stage for a stronger second half. While near-term growth plans were impacted, our strategic pivot to consumables, beginning with this exciting Squatty Potty launch, will build a more resilient and profitable Aterian over the long term. Our fundamental goal is still unchanged to build a growing profitable company. We thank our team for their dedication and tenacity and to our shareholders, thank you for your continued support and patience. We believe the best is yet to come for Aterian. And with that, I'll turn it over to Josh.