David Loretta
Analyst · Baird
Thanks, Steve, and good morning, everyone. I'll begin today with a brief overview of our fiscal year results. Then I'll cover our fourth quarter performance and conclude with commentary on our outlook and guidance for 2021. As Steve mentioned in his comments, the Duluth team rose to the challenge and demonstrated agility and resourcefulness throughout a difficult year, the strength of our omnichannel model shining through as many customers shifted to online, while retail stores were closed for up to 10 weeks during the early stages of the pandemic. We delivered net sales of $638.8 million, an increase of 3.8% over the prior year. Our direct fulfillment network, including the role our stores played in shipping orders and expediting BOPIS orders, handled the surge in online sales with minimal disruption as the direct business overall grew to represent 72% of full year sales compared to 57% in 2019. We entered fiscal year 2020 with plans that reflected an emphasis on growing our brand in new and existing markets, leveraging expenses, and expanding bottom line results faster than top line sales. While the pandemic altered our approach, the actions we took coming out of our first quarter to increase financial flexibility enabled us to generate cash flow from operations of roughly $84 million over the 3 quarters. In addition, we grew pretax earnings by close to 12% compared to net sales growth of just over 5% over that same 9-month period. In 2020, we opened only 4 new stores versus an annual pace of 15 store openings in prior years. While new stores have been an effective way to attract new customers, we were very successful in growing brand awareness and reaching new customers through digital channels. In fact, 2020 delivered our largest gain in customer acquisition in recent history, with a 17% increase in the number of new buyers. And we did this without losing sight of our existing customers, where we've seen improving rates of retention and reactivation all year long. Another year-long initiative was to rightsize our inventory levels and free up more open to buy for newness in the assortment. A year ago, we were sitting on inventory that was over 50% higher than the prior year. This expanded by the end of the first quarter to 68% higher over the comparable period. By adjusting our future order flow and being more aggressive in our clearance strategy throughout the year, we ended 2020 with inventories over roughly flat to last year. Our gross margins were impacted by these aggressive actions, but sequential improvement each quarter and realizing a 20 basis point year-over-year improvement in Q4 gives us the confidence that we've now turned the corner on our inventory position. That being said, we are realizing some delays today in inventory receipts due to the current challenged state of inbound shipping channels and congestion caused by record-high imports and COVID-related labor shortages. I'll address the impact this is likely to have on our first and second quarter sales trends shortly. Overall for fiscal 2020, we delivered $55.5 million in adjusted EBITDA, an increase of 6.8% over the prior year. This reflects greater operational efficiencies and a focus on optimizing the investments we've made over the last 3 years in technology and infrastructure. These investments are boosting our capabilities to increase delivery speed, customer spend and inventory efficiency; and we expect this will continue in 2021 and over the coming years. Finally, in 2020, we generated positive free cash flow of $38.5 million compared with a cash burn of $22.4 million in 2019. As a result, we ended 2020 with a much stronger balance sheet and cash flow to fund our next phase of growth initiatives. Turning now to the fourth quarter. We reported net sales of $256 million, down 1.4% compared to the prior year. As we mentioned on our Q3 call in December, the holiday season began earlier this year. Peak sales volumes were pulled forward several weeks as many retailers encouraged early holiday shopping to avoid the strain on delivery networks. Our direct business continued its positive growth trend, up 15% in the fourth quarter, although down sequentially from third quarter's plus 40% growth rate. This reflected the early holiday shopping and the shifting of key sale event from November into October to avoid the elections. As we progressed through the peak holiday period, customer traffic to our stores was impacted by reemerging concerns with COVID lockdowns. For the quarter, our retail store sales were down 29% and reversed the improving trend we saw from the third quarter. Our omnichannel initiatives helped to offset the soft traffic, with our stores fulfilling 22% of all direct demand in Q4. Also evident of the shifting buying patterns, our direct sales in store markets increased 20% compared to an increase of 13% in non-store markets in Q4. Store traffic trends improved in January and continued into February, giving us confidence that 2021 will see a significant rebound in the store sales channels, as the vaccines rollout continues and more customers return to stores. With industry-wide constraints on shipping deliveries in the fourth quarter, pulling some peak holiday sales forward did help alleviate delivery delays. However, competitive pricing and free shipping offers weighed on our shipping fee revenues, which were down $1.9 million in the fourth quarter. Additionally, as mentioned last quarter, we expected higher costs associated with strains on the last mile network and heavier staffing needed to fulfill direct orders. Overall roughly $2 million of incremental costs related to UPS shipping surcharges and COVID pay premiums were incurred in Q4. Turning to our product update for the fourth quarter. Overall our men's apparel was down 2% compared to last year, and women's apparel was down 3.5%. Softness in our button down woven tops and core men's outerwear were below last year. However, in both men's and women's, our core bottoms, outdoor active and workwear collections had strong performance. Comfortable basics continue to be in high demand, underwear, No-Yanks and the NoGA collection. In men's, holiday-themed underwear, DuluthFlex, Fire Hose pants and flannels contributed to men's volume. A bright spot was Alaskan Hardgear products, which increased 9% to last year. In women's, we had a strong response to seasonal goods like outerwear and sweaters and flannel. The plus business is holding strong at 11% of the total apparel business and is responding well to the outerwear and the bottoms. Additionally, we added 2 new collections to our brand lineup in the fourth quarter, 40 Grit and Best Made. 40 Grit saw increased momentum in the fourth quarter, representing our latest introduction for entry-level workwear at an everyday low price. Best Made launched on our platform in October as our new digitally native premium men's brand, and we quickly sold out our best-selling colors and styles within the first few months. We are excited about the potential of these 2 brands under the Duluth Trading umbrella. We believe the new brand structure, including Alaskan Hardgear and our core men's and women's Duluth brands, establishes Duluth as a destination for like-minded outdoor and workwear stops, lifestyles. These emerging high-growth brands speak more directly to targeted customers based on their needs and wants and will benefit from our scale and infrastructure platform in a way they couldn't achieve on their own. Turning to expenses. SG&A for the fourth quarter increased 1% to $105 million compared to $104 million last year. This included increases of $4.4 million in general and administrative expenses and $4 million in selling expenses, offset by a $7.2 million decrease in advertising and marketing expenses. As a percentage of sales, SG&A expense increased 110 basis points to 41.1% compared to 40% last year. This increase was largely due to the incremental costs incurred to meet customer expectations in a unique holiday shopping environment and the higher mix of direct sales as a percentage of the total. Selling expenses as a percentage of net sales increased 170 basis points to 16.7% compared to 15% last year. The carrier surcharges and heavier use of stores for direct order fulfillment pressured our cost per unit metrics and increased delivery expenses. On the advertising front, our continued investment in digital prospecting drove growth in mobile traffic, conversion and sales rates, although at a slower pace than the third quarter. Planned cuts to TV ads mainly during live sports in October, November impacted site traffic and brand search in subsequent months. Our brand search and website traffic were up 9% compared with 30% in Q3 and 2% in the fourth quarter of last year. Despite the slowdown in holiday traffic, we realized significant advertising leverage in Q4. Advertising and marketing costs as a percentage of net sales decreased 260 basis points to 10.6% compared to 13.2% last year, primarily due to reduced catalog and TV advertising spend as well as cutting billboards in local store markets, partially offset by higher digital advertising. General and administrative expenses as a percentage of net sales increased 200 basis points to 13.8% compared to 11.8% last year, largely due to higher depreciation and amortization on new technology investments. Our store count remains stable at 65 stores during the fourth quarter. We are on hold at this time for adding new stores while we observe customer shopping behavior and the economy begins to return to normal. Adjusted EBITDA for the fourth quarter was $38.7 million, a decrease of $1.3 million versus the comparable period. We reported net income of $21.8 million or $0.67 per diluted share compared to $24.4 million or $0.75 per diluted share reported in the fourth quarter last year. Moving on to the balance sheet. We ended the quarter with net working capital of $115 million, including $47 million in cash and $48.3 million outstanding on our term line of credit. Clearing through the elevated inventory levels from earlier in the year and reduced capital spend relative to prior years helped generate positive free cash flow of $38.5 million in 2020. Cash flow will fund future growth, will lessen our reliance on the credit facility, and support the exploration of new third-party distribution channels, as Steve articulated before. As we begin the new year, we're focused on improving profitability through increased sales in the stores, cleaner inventory management, and greater automation in our distribution center network. In addition, the initiatives to support our emerging brand platform are on track. And our new customer data warehouse and analytic tools are ramping up to enable deeper customer segmentation and personalization. All together, we are very optimistic for what the future holds at Duluth. That being said, given the continued uncertainty with respect to COVID-19, we remain prepared for a range of scenarios to ensure we can sustain growth and continue to accelerate our operating efficiencies. Based on the assumption that our stores will remain open over the course of the year and vaccination rates will continue to improve, we expect to deliver sales growth in the range of 6% to 10% overall for the business. This includes one new store opening in Cherry Hills, New Jersey currently slated for a November 2021 opening, and the closure of our Mall of America test concept store next month. The quarterly mix of sales by channel will shift dramatically in 2021 given the easing effects of the pandemic. We do expect some near-term pressure in the first half of the year due to the delays in inventory receipts. Our best estimate at this time is that sales growth will be at the lower end of that sales range in the first half of the year and at the higher end of the range in the second half of the year. With cleaner inventory levels, we expect to realize gross profit percent improvement of 50 to 100 basis points. This will drive operating margin improvement of at least 100 basis points for the full year as we realize leverage in selling expenses and stores contribute up to 35% of company sales. We are entering the year with a number of key investments in place that have added to our overall depreciation and amortization estimate of $31 million to $32 million for 2021. The adjusted EBITDA is expected to be $66 million to $70 million this year, which represents growth of roughly 25% over 2020. In addition to this healthy growth in earnings, with only one new store in the pipeline, capital expenditures including software hosting implementation costs will be down slightly year-over-year to about $15 million. As a result, we are expecting to generate positive free cash flow of at least $20 million in 2021. And with that, I'll open the call for questions.