Gary Friedman
Analyst · UBS. Your line is open
Well, the --look, the models are going to continue to evolve, right? When -- look, if you just take a simple move in our model and say, hey, we went from a legacy gallery to design gallery. And that design gallery will essentially double the business, right, over in one year to three years. So we are not going to mail any more sourcebooks into that market. We generally don’t. We maybe do a little splash, because we are opening a new gallery so people are aware of it. But our ad cost at a -- at that level, right, the leverage is massively. And I think people sometimes miss that in a model like ours, right, because they see this big gallery and they go, oh, it must cost a lot of money. It’s much more expensive and they don’t think about the dynamics of what happens, because no one -- like no one’s ever taken a really productive kind of a legacy store like we have. And then been able to just change the footprint and basically double their business. I have never seen it before. Consistently, across the entire country, we can do that. And so, when you think about ad cost, that gives you big leverage. When you have a temporal situation like this with the pandemic and you make a decision to not mail a book, are there things we can learn there? Yeah, but it’s really -- it’s a little tricky, like, as we go to reinvest and mail the books, we mail as much as last year. We do e-mail more. Do we mail less? Do we -- what do we test? I mean, we are going to look at a lot of data. We are going to run the models. We are always looking for opportunities to be more efficient to optimize. You also don’t want to under invest in the business certain times. So -- but our model -- again, all the way through, you think about doubling your revenue at retail which is the biggest part of our business in a market and what that does to the cost structure at corporate? What that does to cost structure against all the other operating areas, our distribution centers and so on and so forth? You are going to have leverage. When you think about kind of climbing the luxury mountain as we are and taking quality up and desirability up and prices up, that’s going to give you leverage, right? And then you think about just kind of being consistently unsatisfied with whatever today’s performance is which is our culture you are always looking at how to do things better. And so we are going to have the cost structure and where we have got all kinds of initiatives going, all kinds of investments we are making that we think will have really good returns that will make the model more efficient, more profitable. So whether it’s labor savings, it’s not so much labor savings, it’s leverage on -- in the business and strategies that we are doing that are making the business just more profitable, right? So -- and we have a lot of things happening that we believe will do that and our history, right, over the last several years. I mean, I remember when we said we were going kind of be 10% operating margin, everybody was like, oh, you can’t be 10% operating margin. So like I just want to say and then we hit 11.4%, right? And look, I remember reading reports on the company 11.4% no one is, like, it’s higher than whoever and it’s unsustainable, right? They only have half the revenues of this other company that their high was 10% or whatnot and 11.4% is unsustainable and then we hit 14.1% operating margin and it’s like everybody was like it’s unsustainable. Now we are going to be at 21% and 21% on call it 7% revenue growth, like really the way to stand back and think about the pandemic is like smoosh the year altogether. We are only going to have revenues up 7% and operating margins are going to be 21%. Does it really matter how those revenues came over the course of the year or does it matter that on 7% revenue growth they hit 21%. So I don’t know if we didn’t have a pandemic, would we have hit 20% or we would have hit 22%? It’s not like the pandemic from a revenue point of view has enabled our operating margin this year. It really hasn’t. If anything it’s deleveraged our operating margin this year. It made us less efficient when you look at how things are happening. Like think about this. We are generating like roughly $80 million to a $100 million of future revenue. We spent all the money engaging like all the customers, helping all the customers, doing all the design work and we are getting no revenues this year, that $80 million to $100 million. Put that $80 million to $100 million in your model this year and what would the operating margin for RH be? Because there wouldn’t really be much more cost, right? Like most of the cost is already behind us. We would had shipping and stuff like that. But you look at the flow through on that, you go operating margins would be higher than 21%, right? Like that’s what I focus on. Wait a minute. I am 7% operating margin. They hit 21%, right? I mean, they were -- we thought they were high at 14% and we thought they were really high at 11%, yeah. And then it starts to help you think about like, oh, where are they going next? Like we -- when we said we had a clear line of sight at 2020, it just came sooner than you expected, right? We say we have a clear line of sight at 25%. We have a clear line of sight. We think it’s over the next several years, all depends what’s going to happen. If -- look, if we don’t go into a recession, if we go into a recession, we will stop right there. It will be reset. It will take a little longer. But if we don’t and if the economy continues to just perform, like if we just grow it 8% to 12% a year, we are going to do pretty good. If we accelerate, like we think next year it’s going to be double digits, right? So that’s 10% or over. And so we wouldn’t tell you double digits if we didn’t really think it looked pretty certain, even like not expecting the trends in the second half of next year, we think when we anniversary those numbers, it’s not going to look like this. But we can look ahead and say, here’s all the things we are doing that will create upside. Here’s what’s going to cycle forward. Here’s the pluses and minuses. I mean, if you just take the lost revenues in our New York restaurant and add those back, it’s not a little, like that was -- it’s a very high-volume restaurant. And once the vaccines get out to there, people are going to start going back to restaurants. By the way, if you think about all the traffic we lost in restaurants, you think we run the restaurants just for the restaurant business? Of course, not. All that traffic drives business in our galleries to our brand. And so when you go, oh, the restaurant business, I don’t know, the last few months were down like 70%, right, to our plan. When that comes back, there’s going to be a whole lot of people in RH Galleries, a whole lot of people discovering a lot of new products, a whole lot of people hopefully be inspired by our environment and there’s going to be kind of tailwinds here. But the real point is don’t get lost in the pandemic, right? Like, it’s a crazy year, right, down in the first quarter, stores closed. Stores closed part of the second quarter. Things all of a sudden swing back. I kind of watch it all way go. Revenues up 7%, looks like, okay, we are a little behind our 8% to 12% growth, but operating margins are going to be 21%. I really like this model. This is a really good model. I wouldn’t bet against this team. We have done what we said we were going to do very consistently and we have exceeded people’s expectations massively over the last few years since we have transformed the entire company on so many levels and now we have got kind of a brand with no peer. And we have a DNA that’s just massively unsatisfied. We get super excited for like a few minutes and then we are really intense around here about like what’s next and making things great. So I just -- I like the path we are on. And as a big shareholder here, I really like the next 10 years and I wouldn’t have told you that if it really wasn’t on the whiteboard behind me. My team’s all not even smiling, right? We look at this. We are big thinkers. We look at a long-term view. I know you have a lot of customers that are real short-term focused. That’s okay. Like, don’t buy our stock. Like, if they want it -- if they want to own one stock with a long-term view, it’s a good place.