David Maura
Analyst · Bob Labick with CJS securities
Yes, in the last 12 months we've made some key hires in the digital space, not just digital marketing, but we've got some key talent on board right now that really understands algorithms, that understands how to - again I think in the early days, we were very much focused on how do we fix our search, how do we get good content and I think we have done a pretty good job there. I don't think we've done a really good job of getting a return on digital spend, and so, right now we're in the midst of kind of optimizing that digital spend, but we are doing it with people that actually speak the language of the Amazons of the world and our other e-com partners and we're partnering with them, and quite frankly, we're getting better returns on the capital we allocate there. So, I think, part of my new role is - we spent kind of ten years-- I was doing a lot of external capital allocation. Right now we want to get internal capital allocation to a much - to a much higher rate of return and we are doing that on the digital side. Clearly on your first question, I mean Appliances continues to migrate online pretty rapidly. We are definitely seeing a meaningful increase in e-com and on our PET business as well. Home & Garden is small, but the growth rates are strong; HHI is - that's a smaller component. Any time you get liquid in a bottle like on our Home & Garden side, you've got heavy products like hardware and locks. You typically doing less online, but we continue to step up investment there, particularly on the digital lock side. We were one of the first to market with our Kevo products, and I see just a very low penetration rate there, with massive white space and I see very strong end market growth. And we see adoption rate low at the moment, but the growth rate is exponential. And so I think, you've heard, Doug talk about it. I was recently in Lake Forest with our HHI team and I've just - we're revamping some of the merchandise, we've put out, we want to do not only a better job, explaining our smart key technology to our customer. But also trying to bring clarity at point-of-sale and increase the customers confidence at the point of purchase. Because, we think digital locks they're here to stay, they've got a great tailwind behind them and we want to continue to be the market leader there and quite frankly, we think that'll grow whether we're in expansionary times, recessionary times given the tailwind here in the adoption rate. We really want to maintain our leadership position. So you'll see a lot more of that and you'll probably see a lot of news release in this summer and new products that were coming out with to further that activity.