Gary Friedman
Analyst · Max Rakhlenko from Cowen & Company. Your line is open
Yes. Well - look, the - we've kind of said a 100 basis points to 200 basis points, we also kind of put some dots out for you, right? We said, hey, of that $150 million had shift this year. We would've been at 23 to start with. We're kind of 23. And so, then we - then we got another 100 basis points to get you to 24 which is 200 basis points higher than 2018, right, 2,200. So, you can get there pretty easily. It's not a lot of moves. And some of it will depend to just how much - where is the revenues really go here. We don't need a lot of revenues to kind of get to where we're pointing you. If for some reason these revenue trends continue - like, I mean it's really interesting. I've never - this is - I've never seen anything like this. I mean, I've been through the Great Recession and I've been through multiple recessions in my career. I've been in the home category now like how many years, 34 years. Just like Jack reminded me the other day it was my 20th year anniversary here, not to get to everybody that wished me happy anniversary, but I don't even know that. He goes, Oh, God I'm sorry. And I missed your anniversary. He didn't even know it's my anniversary. So, yes, I've been here 20 years, at Williams-Sonoma, 14 years. I've been 34 years in the home business. And I've seen a lot of cycles during that time. And I've never seen anything quite like this. I tend to - when there's really good news like this, I tend to be the pessimist in the company. I tend to be the one with just - whatever demand you think we're getting right now, it's not because of us. It's not going to stay. Don't architect the business for this. This is going to go away. And it hasn't gone away yet. And I've talked to some pretty smart people that have given me different insights into - look, Gary, what - like, here's one that I think is interesting for everyone to think about. And this is really smart. And it comes out of an - from analysis from a really credible deep thinking smart person that the move of America that you're seeing today, the pandemic shift of out of cities into suburbs or into second home markets, which - by the way, the suburbs thing is a great thing for us because 80% of our business is in the suburbs. And so the move to the suburbs is not just a move to the suburbs. It's a square footage expansion by - they believe it's two times or more square footage expansion for the consumer. And I hadn't thought about that before. And that was a really interesting point. And their map said, look, Gary, your customers that are moving from the cities maybe in a 3,000-square-foot apartment are moving to a 6,000-square-foot to 10,000-square-foot house in the suburbs. And they didn't have outdoor furniture in their apartment in the city. And now they all have outdoor furniture because they have big yards and lawns and pools and so on and so forth. And so I just like that done to me, right? I hadn't really thought about it like that. I didn't think of the square footage expansion of the consumer. And the other thing they said was that the issue with getting a contractor right now is a huge issue that you could go out and buy a house. But if you have to remodel it or do anything to it, you have to wait six months to get a contractor. So they believe six months or longer and some are - there's this real lag. And so this person believes that and they said this to me and I was like, I didn't even know how to respond. Like, they believe that our business was going to accelerate because of the lag, because of this massive shift, right, that the longer the pandemic went, the more people started moving permanently. I'm not talking about the people that kind of flew back to their place in the Hamptons. That's very different, right? Like think about New York. Everybody went to the Hamptons, they could. Anybody that had a house was at their Hamptons house, right? They relocated there for the year. Anybody that could rent a house in the Hamptons, rent, whatever, you could buy one like bought one. So, but a lot of them are coming back and let it in. And at first everybody was like a temporal thing. And then all of a sudden then there's this shift of a different perception of how people wanted to live and it could be a more permanent kind of thing. So I think this moving thing could be a much longer tale and a much bigger move. And then you say to yourself, well how long does it last? It all depends on how permanent the move is, right? Like, so if you think about our business and I'll give you some numbers that I've never really talked about before. But our business prior to the pandemic was 80% suburbs,10% second home markets and 10% urban market. So when I think urban market, I'm talking about the city, right? Like not Beverly Hills is not the city in Los Angeles, right. The city is the vertical part of Los Angeles, it's called Los Angeles City. So we have some vertical markets like Manhattan or Chicago, right? That really vertical that have a lot of high end homes and we have relatively big volume. But almost everywhere, our business is much more suburban driven and that makes sense. The homes are bigger, got backyards, you've got kids. You've got like more bedrooms, more spaces, more family rooms, etc, etc. And then the pandemic hit and it shifted things. And you have this explosion of second home markets. And all that happened to our numbers really is the second home markets went from 10% of our business to 20%. Now the group spent exponentially faster and this is the percentage shipped, right? So you're - and 12% - 10% to 12%, yes, 10% to 12%. And then and then suburbs basically stayed the same and cities just went down by two points to 8%. But if you think about our model of being 92% of our business and this is not where the demand generate, this is a shift to addresses. This is where the product was going, right? So if you think about 92% of our business is architected perfectly for whatever long-term change this pandemic has and there's another study about the kind of the big shifts in kind of moves when - I try to remember the data, sort of person was talking me about it. I mean how every so many years, there's a shift here and there's a shift, people are moving in here and there's a big move into the suburb of the 50s and 60s and 70s and that kind of move back into the cities over the last 10 to 15 years, right? ReGentrification and all this kind of redo of cities. But the shift that might be happening, might really stick. That's the logic that certain people here are kind of sharing with me and they think this is not temporal. They think there's going to be a lot less people that go rushing back to the city and they think that the rush back to the city is going to be at a much younger consumer going back. And that the consumers that are 40, 50, 60 years old that moved out of the cities are going to stay out of the cities. They don't think they're coming back. And then that becomes - when I think about it that becomes really good for a business long-term because that that also means even the moves within the place like not everybody. If you think about it you moved out to the suburbs, you scramble and got a second home during this pandemic rush there's kind of it's almost like a movie, right? Like everybody's got to leave the cities and all the cars are backed up and the kids get out and it's - the odds of you getting the house you really wanted in that moment is really low, right? And I got to believe there's a lot of people renting homes, I know we're doing a lot of quick design installs, people like need the furniture in two weeks, right? And luckily and one of the advantage, here's another advantage this is like kind of a little side point to this but I think it's worth saying and sharing with everybody as we all try to figure out where things are going and what's happening here is. Like I thought about this and I thought. Why is our demand really accelerating right now? What is happening? And I think that there is just back up, this pent up demand just like people couldn't get contractors. People are out now and finally come. But for all the people, that are moving out and they need new furniture and they needed in 30 days. So they need it in three weeks or two weeks, I think we're benefiting now because we actually stocked furniture. We were one of the few places that actually stocks the product and you can get it quickly. Not everything. We have a big special order business and we're in backwater now. But this is where times like this, is where I think our model is advantaged versus a Wayfair in Paragould, anybody else online. What I call our marketplace model where they did only the inventory, right? But that's - one of the beauties of a model like that, it's a low capital model and you should setup for high returns if you can get the earnings model to work right. But no one ever really thought about what's the inherent weakness of that model. If you go on Wayfair and like - and we mostly look at what they're doing on Paragould. We look at anybody who might be competing with us. And the amount of out of stocks and what you can buy there is unbelievable. Because they're - then - their weaknesses, you've got a lot of these small and capitalized businesses trying to just sell shit on a platform like that - in a marketplace. They'll take anybody by the way. It's not a big approval process. You want to go sell some on Wayfair. So, actually you don't get to that many vendors that quickly if you have really high standards of who's selling on your platform. Yes. You can't possibly talk to that many people. That means a lot of low level people are approving a lot of new vendors. But I look on there and I know some of the people and we know who the factories are all around the world. And again, those people don't have any money. They can't afford to have the inventory, right? So I think in sustained things like this, we actually, I'd never thought of it, but we actually have the inventory. Like we actually, if you needed your house furnished next week we could pull it off if you live in a major market. So that's a big, big opportunity for us. But I want to go just go to that point about the 25% operating margin and what are the opportunities beyond 2021. Just scale this thing, right? Like we have a lot of a lot of strategies and initiatives that we think are margin-enhancing strategies initiatives. I think well, RH in your home is initially an investment. I think it's going to have a great return on investment. And we just have a lot like that. We keep fine tuning our model on our new galleries. And I think they're going to be more productive and less productive. Our restaurant business is going to be massively better. Our waterworks business, we've got the - versus three years ago, I think we've got the EBITDA probably 12, 14 points better, 15 points better, something like that. So, and then you just scale this thing. Just - think about this like, we're $2.8 billion company. That could be so much bigger. And we've built a really smart and simple platform here that you can scale. And so the leverage as we scale, you think about like other - somebody brought up Sonoma to me last week as they obviously had great results and fantastic outcome. And I think they're doing a tremendous job. And - but they’re already at $6.5 billion or something. What is it, $6.5 billion, $7 billion? So, yes, $6.5 billion, right? Like, we’re not even half the size of Williams-Sonoma. And we have the operating margins that we have today, right? So just do scale now, pick up 20 basis points in, like, eight different places in the company. You get - it’s a real leverage, right? And so that's why we think we have a line of sight to 25% operating margin plus today, plus. And so far every margin target we've given you we've got there much faster, much sooner than later, right? So, yes - so we wouldn't be so confident and clear and tell you - like, if we couldn't see it and we couldn't draw the straight line to the numbers. So we just keep learning here. And we're kind of always unsatisfied, always on the move. Like, we rarely celebrate. Like, it's for moments - it's not that we don't at all. We get super excited. But constant students we learn. And so what - if you keep learning, keep seeing more, and if you can see more then you're just never satisfied with where you are. So - and that's kind of our culture, right? I think this team - and we've integrated, like, 10 new senior leaders into our leadership team. We've got - some people I can't talk about yet because we weren’t kind of public with the idea. But we've got leaders of international supply chain. We've got lots of new talent sitting around the room. And that also allows us to do more. We've made a lot of human capital investments here. So, anyway, long rambling answer. Sorry about that. But just some - I thought some of that stuff could be helpful. That was helpful to me to think about how to think through this pandemic just like the moves and the move to the suburbs and how that might affect us and the square footage growth. I think the square footage growth is really an issue because you could be selling two to three times more furniture just because - to the same consumer. And it's interesting because our tickets going way higher, average orders are going way up. Yes, so it's kind of actually playing out like that.