Rati Levesque
Analyst · Northland Capital Markets. Your line is open, please go ahead
Thank you, Caitlin. Good afternoon everyone and welcome to The RealReal fourth quarter and full year 2024 earnings conference call. Today, I am pleased to report strong Q4 and full year results. We accelerated growth through the year, culminating in 14% revenue growth in Q4. We reached important financial milestones in 2024. We delivered positive adjusted EBITDA and positive free cash flow for the full year. The RealReal is at the intersection of luxury and value. This position has never been stronger or more relevant. Customers come back to The RealReal again and again to find one of a kind pieces and to monetize their closet, confident that we are the experts in luxury resale. We built relationships with our buyers and consignors founded on trust. We exited 2024 from a position of strength, healthy supply trends, strong buyer engagement, and operational excellence enabled us to achieve GMV and adjusted EBITDA above our guidance range for Q4. We also delivered positive results on several customer KPIs, including conversion, retention and engagement. Ajay will provide more details on our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year later in the call. I would like to highlight a few notable achievements as 2024 marked an important inflection point for The RealReal. We delivered our first full year of profitable adjusted EBITDA as a business. Free cash flow improved $104 million versus last year, resulting in our first full year of positive free cash flow. 2024 also marked a return to profitable growth. GMV was $18 billion, up 6% year-over-year. Consignment revenue was up 14% for the year, with particular success in unlocking mid and high-value supply and active buyers on a trailing 12-month basis were up 5% year-over-year. These achievements are the result of foundational changes we've implemented. We've sharpened our focus on our core business and return to growth with improved unit economics. Today, I'll talk through the ways we're making progress on our three strategic pillars; unlocking supply through our growth playbook, driving operational efficiencies, and obsessing over service. Let's start with the growth playbook. The first component of our growth playbook is our sales team, which is a strategic differentiator. As a reminder, our sales team is made up of our luxury managers who work directly with our consignors to build trust and maximize supply. Over the course of 2024, we spent time optimizing our incentive structure and elevating our sales team's experience. We better aligned the team's compensation with our overall company goal of driving profitable supply, focusing the team on value rather than units. Better compensation alignment and elevating the employee experience have resulted in more supply value per luxury manager, lower attrition and higher sales team retention compared to last year. Today, more than half of our sales team has now been with The RealReal for over two years. We expect these changes to drive results through deeper relationships with sellers, higher approval rating and a better seller experience. Notably, the value generated per sales rep in 2024 was up roughly 15% compared to the prior year. In 2025, we will further improve our sales team's best-in-class service while using technology to drive efficiency. We are excited to expand our SmartSales AI initiatives. This initiative leverages customer data and external data to help luxury managers assess which clients are most likely to consign at any time. Tools like SmartSales allow our luxury managers to service more consignors and improve efficiency. Early results of this initiative have been very encouraging, and we are planning a broader rollout in 2025. The second piece of our growth playbook is marketing. Our marketing and brand teams unlock supply by driving brand heat and relevance that translates into customer acquisition and retention. We've refined our marketing channel investments to better target, engage with and acquire more high-value consigners. Our marketing technology team has adopted new tools that increase our precision in targeting. We have an attractive consignor demographic. It's a diverse group that skews younger, affluent, and fashion focused. About half of our consignors are millennials or Gen Z and they're loyal, selling with us multiple times per year. We're seeing strong early results in our evolved approach to acquisition, and we'll continue to optimize our targeting throughout the year. 2024, our brand marketing highlighted trust and authenticity. We continue to be active on social channels, generating buzz for our brands. For example, during the past holiday season, our journey of a bad video and engaging take on our authentication and fashion expertise drove increased followers, more traffic and elevated new member sign-ups. The third and final piece of our growth playbook is stores. As a part of our neighborhood store strategy, we position stores in affluent residential areas to create a frictionless experience for our consignors. Stores generate supply and drive awareness. In 2024, nearly 25% of new consignors were acquired through our retail locations. In Q4, we added two new stores to our fleet in Miami and Houston. We're off to a great start in both markets and are excited to be a part of these communities. We are seeing the benefits from our growth playbook showing up in strong supply metrics and momentum in the top line. Moving to our next strategic pillar, operational efficiency. As a reminder, our rich data and tech capabilities enable us to benefit from recent advancements in AI. We've used these capabilities to drive efficiency and accelerate our path to profitability. Cost leverage from improvements in automation took hold in 2024, helping our teams to process units quickly and efficiently, cutting over 1 full day of processing time. Through increased productivity, we kept head count steady while driving growth. In 2025, we are launching our Athena AI initiative, addressing the processes that happen when the time an item arrives in our authentication center to the time it's launched on our site. Athena leverages our data assets and AI capabilities to drive significant efficiencies. This enhancement aims to optimize our workflow and use sophisticated image recognition to authenticate and pre-populate key item attributes. More accurate item attribution results in improved search, higher customer satisfaction, lower returns, better pricing accuracy, and quicker time to launch and we are just getting started. By the end of the year, we expect Athena to touch almost half of the items coming into our authentication centers. Turning to our third strategic pillar, obsess over service. At The RealReal obsessing over service is a key part of our brand. From day one, we were clear that bringing a luxury experience to resale is important to this category. This focus has resulted in The RealReal's leadership is in luxury resale as a high trust, high NPS, high engagement platform. We are a modern luxury marketplace build on service, trust, and authenticity. We have done this by fostering a deep connection with our community of 38 million members listening to their feedback and evolving our platform to meet their needs. For our buyers, in Q4, we launched obsession sharing, a feature that gives our members the ability to share their favorite items with their family, friends, and followers. We are excited to see our members use this feature as a way to express their personal style, inspire others to engage with our brand, and deepen their connection with The RealReal. For our consignors, we obsess over service through reducing friction in the consignment process, balancing their needs on convenience, price, and speed. The RealReal is known for rapid sell-through. Nearly all of our items sell within 90 days. And we work to ensure that items for the highest price the market will bear. Our AI-driven pricing engine helps us do this. At the end of 2024, 85% of our total units were launched using our pricing algorithm. Its data-driven approach has been central to our efforts to improve pricing transparency, an important element in building further trust with our sellers. Obsessing over service will continue to be a key differentiator and shape the evolution of our business. In closing, our strategic pillars have aligned our company focus and our growth playbook is working. We are laser-focused on unlocking profitable supply. As resell continues to gain momentum, there is significant opportunity ahead and The RealReal is well-positioned as the market and thought leader in luxury resale. With that, I'll turn the call over to Ajay to discuss financial results and the outlook for 2025.