Lynn Powers
Analyst · George Kelly from Craig Hallum Capital Group
Thanks, Steve. Overall our third quarter results were in line with our expectations. As I discussed on prior calls, we began the year with the four-thronged growth strategy for the Gaiam brand. Expand our stores-within-stores placement, grow overall placement for our SPRI brand, invest in product innovation and refine and improve our ecommerce presence, as well as our corporate initiatives to invest in our subscription business Gaiam TV. On the call today, I am going to offer a brief review of the quarter followed by a deeper dive on a few of the major steps we took during the quarter that further our strategic execution. During the fourth quarter, we had many successes partially muted by continued slow sales at our largest customer. The difficulties at our largest customer began in first quarter after a widely publicized data breach and have continued through the year. Additionally, we made two strategic decisions to change our business model and our business segment. Our first decision was to move away from media aggregation to media distribution and our media category management role. This decision which we began implementing in late 2013 and continued to implement during early 2014 affected our revenue but not our margin and we had a positive impact on our working capital. Second, we determined it was in our long-term best interest to focus on our owned brands, so we dropped a third-party license in favor our SPRI brand. Together, these events had an approximate $2 million impact on revenue in the quarter and an approximate $5 million impact year-to-date. The structural decisions I just mentioned will have a positive impact on the P&L and working capital going forward. As I stated on the last call, we accelerated our repositioning of our direct business and will circulate over $1 million fewer catalogs in the fourth quarter than we did last year. We still anticipate a $5 million reduction in revenues in direct next year, which drives a $3 million improvement in the bottom-line. As a part of our repositioning and focus on our brands, we launched our redesigned SPRI.com a week ago and our hard work at the redesign for Gaiam.com. We invite you to view the new SPRI website to a get a preview of our vision. As we announced on the last call, we successfully launched a number of key retail partnerships this quarter. Over 300 doors at British retailer Tesco, 220 doors at Meyer added store-within-stores for SPRI and over 1100 doors at Kohl's, the leading US specialty department store. These launches brought on 1600 new branded stores-within-stores sets bringing our total stores-within-store presentations to over 16,000 and contributed to some strong product line revenue gains with Gaiam restore products up 33% and SPRI products up more than 100% in retail since Q3 of last year. The additional stores and store presentations create true destinations for our brands within the retail environment. I am also pleased to announce that excluding Kohl's and Target, our top-25 retail accounts are up over 20% year-to-date driven by strong sales at the Sports Authority and Amazon. Regarding our commitment to product innovation, I am happy to report that we secured placement for additional space for our Gaiam restore brand and our active sitting initiatives for fourth quarter. We are seeing more and more retailers want to be the health and wellness destination and are expanding their product mix in order to do so. We will continue to add to our product mix and restore and expect to be able to offer expansion from our current 4 feet to 8 feet of products by fall 2015. Categories currently being offered in restore are rehabilitated products, foot care, back care and hand care. We will be adding additional back care, active sitting, neck care and stress relief products in the coming year. Now I want to spend the remainder of the call discussing three key areas of our business, yoga apparel, digital and yoga for athletes and end with articulating some growth opportunities for 2015. Yoga apparels an opportunity we’ve been talking about for a while now because of some incredibly strong trends. A recent Wall Street Journal article announced that yoga apparel grew 43% last year. With those trends at our back and quantitative research showing strong brand recognition and permission for Gaiam to be apparel, we brought in a topnotch apparel team earlier this year with backgrounds from Spider, REI and Meyer. As you saw in the press release, this investment paid off with an incredible launch opportunity beginning in April 2015, Kohl's will be the exclusive retail provider of Gaiam branded yoga apparel in all of its 1100 doors. In 2015, we expect this to be a $15 million to $20 million business. At its recent Investor Day, Kohl’s announced its intention to lead in the active category and become a destination to the wellness lifestyle. With our yoga set in all doors and our exclusive yoga apparel launching next year, Gaiam could help Kohl’s achieve its goal with high-end design, technical fabric and outstanding performance, but an affordable price point, our yoga apparel will be the first of its kind available outside of company-owned stores. In case you can’t tell I am very excited about the apparel opportunity because it represents a scalable way to leverage our brand and achieve substantial growth. To that end, to lead our apparel design team we recently hired a Senior Director of Design of Athleta, Nancy Taylor Nancy’s experience and insight will be important as we plan our 2016 line-up that includes the launch of a higher-end line of Gaiam’s sole branded apparel and as we continue to develop our Gaiam retail line. Nancy was with for Athleta for nine years and helps lead their move to multi-channel distribution and their current design direction. She will also be a valuable asset as we transform our direct-to-consumer business. Digital is an area we’ve also been looking at for sometime and recent years; we’ve tried to offset the declines in the DVD market by digitizing our content and offering it for sale through third-party platforms like iTunes, as well as through our streaming service Gaiam TV. However, this was just the first step. During the third quarter, we acquired the Yoga Studio app, the most popular yoga app in the Apple store with a five star rating and recommended by Gizmodo, Fox and the Guardian to name a few. The Yoga Studio app has it all. Users can tailor their classes to fit their individual needs or choose from one of the many available classes divided by level and focus and then further divide into timeframes ranging from 15 minutes to over an hour. In addition, users can look at each pose and receive step-by-step instruction or how to get into that pose. This app takes all the guess work out of the yoga practice. This is a great entry point for beginners. We plan to grow our digital business by leveraging the unique technology of the Yoga Studio App to develop similar apps for a variety of other practices in addition to our 2015 plans for internationalization and an android version. We see digital technologies, particularly mobile apps as a way for us to expand on our solution-based strategy and to build a more internet and interactive relationship with our consumer that encompasses not only accessories and apparel, but individualized content and instruction as well. Finally, I want to turn the yoga for athletes. In the last quarter, I talked about our new line of yoga for athletes accessories. Now I am excited to announce that we are going to support this effort with two forthcoming video programs, one featuring Kevin Love, NBA All-Star, the Cleveland Cavaliers and the second featuring Eddie George, the former NFL All-Pro running back and the Heisman Trophy winner. Love and George appear in these videos with a professional coach in yoga instructor Kent Katich. These videos and the athletic yoga accessories will help us target the male consumers represents half of the 80 million people who want to practice yoga according to a yoga journal study. Our athletic yoga accessories will launch in first quarter with a 100 store test at DICK'S Sporting Goods. Gaiam TV continued to grow nicely during the quarter with a 107% growth and our travel business also posted strong quarterly increase due to both growth as well as the timing issue that shifted some trips into the quarter from Q2. Together these efforts reflect the progress we made on our strategies for the year including first , growing our customer base by adding new programs and products to appeal to a new yoga demographic as evidenced by athletic yoga launch as well as our upcoming yoga kids launch. Second, expanding our distribution by adding 1600 stores-within-stores this year and bringing on our first major new international account Tesco and third, adding new product categories, yoga apparel and wellness. So far this year, with not some good wins, but moreover, have built a solid foundation for growth next year and we take on further international expansion, segmenting our apparel growth and building new products and a new distribution base for wellness as well as engaging our direct customers through new and improved web experiences. We have a lot to be excited about and a lot of work yet ahead, but I am really looking forward to a great 2015 as we expect our comp growth to be approximately 20%. I’ll now turn the call back to the operator, so we can answer questions. Operator?