1 800 Flowers Com Inc Q3 FY2022 Earnings Call

Good morning and welcome to the 1-800-Flowers.com, Inc. Fiscal Year 2022 Third Quarter conference call. All participants will be in listen-only mode. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Joseph Pititto, SVP Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and thank you for joining us today to discuss 1-800-Flowers.com financial results for our fiscal 2022 on the call. For those of you who have not received a copy of our press release issued earlier this morning, the release can be accessed at the Investor Relations section of our corporate website. Our call today will begin with brief, formal remarks. And then we will open the call to your questions. Presenting today will be Chris McCann, CEO, Tom Hartnett, President, and Bill Shea, CFO. Before we begin, I need to remind everyone that some of the statements that we've taken today may be forward-looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the applicable statements. For a detailed description of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our press release issued earlier this morning, as well as our SEC filings. In addition, this morning we will discuss certain supplemental financial measures that were not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the tables accompanying the company's press release issued this morning. The company expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements made in today's call, in recordings of today's call, the press release issued earlier today, or any of its SEC filings, except as may be otherwise stated by the company. Now I'll turn the call over to Chris McCann.

Thank you, everyone, for joining our call this morning. Before we jump into the results for the third quarter, I'd like to take a moment to level set our view of the significant changes or stages that our company has seen over the past several years. Essentially, we see our business and the macro economy in four stages: pre-COVID, during COVID, the current environment which I will optimistically call late COVID, and our outlook for the future. Prior to COVID, our company had set a goal to accelerate revenue growth while continuing to grow EBITDA and free cash flow. For the second half of fiscal 2018 through the first three quarters of fiscal '20, we significantly accelerated our growth rate from low single digits to high single digits with our forward-looking guidance at the time calling for double-digit growth. We did this by leveraging the strength of our all-star family of brands and evolving our business platform into a highly scalable and leverageable e-commerce platform that is built for growth. The world has changed dramatically in the spring of 2020 with the advent of the COVID pandemic. And we all had to adapt to lockdowns, work-from-home, social distancing, masks, and so much more than we've all had to live through. From a business standpoint, we had to pivot quickly to address dramatically increasing demand from consumers stuck at home while being sure to protect our associates across the company. Once again, the resourcefulness and dedication of our team helped our customers stay connected with the important people in their lives, and we saw our revenues, our bottom-line results, and our customer file accelerate significantly. Today, as we are entering what we hope are the late, last stages of the pandemic, our world and the macro economy have changed dramatically once again. Disruptions in the global supply chain, geopolitical turmoil, and an unprecedented rapid rise in price inflation have combined to deliver a broad range of challenges to the macroeconomic environment from rising costs to slowing consumer demand. As we look ahead to the future, we know that we need to address the challenges we face in the near term while continuing to invest in our business in the long term. That has been our business philosophy from day one and it has enabled us, with the talented team and experienced team that we've assembled and the unique business platform that we've built, to weather the challenging periods in the past and emerge as a bigger, stronger, and better company. With that said, let's turn our attention to the most recent quarter's results, which, as we stated in this morning's press release, were below our expectations. During the quarter, we saw solid growth for the Valentine's Day holiday and our 1-800-FLOWERS brand. And based on the industry data that we've seen, we continue to extend our market-leading position in the floral category. However, the holiday period strength was offset during the quarter by the slower consumer demand across all categories for everyday gifting occasions, reflecting growing consumer concerns with rapidly rising inflation and geopolitical unrest. In terms of the bottom line, our results for the quarter reflected a continuation, and in some areas such as fuel prices, an escalation of the inflationary pressures that we discussed back in January. While we expect these challenges to persist in the near term, we're beginning to see early improvements in certain areas, including some softening in ocean freight rates, and port disruption, and improved outbound shipping efficiency, trends that we certainly hope will continue. More importantly, we're taking proactive steps to address these issues. And we are well positioned because of the scale of our business and the strength of our unique business platform to weather the current macroeconomic environment and, as we emerge, as we have in the past, as a bigger, stronger, and better company. To provide some perspective on our scale, our revenue in the third quarter, while essentially flat with the prior-year period, was up more than 68% compared with our fiscal 2020, third quarter. In fact, over the past three years, we have essentially doubled the size of our company with revenues now exceeding $2 billion. While macro market conditions have slowed consumer demand in the near term, we anticipate driving growth on top of last year's more than 42% increase for our full fiscal '22 year. We'll continue to leverage the unique assets that we've assembled on our platform, including our all-star lineup of market-leading brands in floral, gourmet food, and personalized gifts and we continue to expand our product offerings through accretive acquisitions that our customers are embracing such as Shari's Berries, Personalization Mall, and our most recent acquisition, Vital Choice. Our large customer base, which also has more than doubled in size over the past few years, includes extensive and increasingly valuable first-party data. Here, we are combining behavioral and demographic data with machine learning technology to create highly personalized campaigns and experiences for our customers on our sites and throughout our communications touchpoints. Our Celebrations Passport loyalty program continues to grow at a strong pace with membership up more than 40% year-over-year. Importantly, as we always point out, the behavior of our Passport customers continues to be strong in terms of frequency retention, and average spending, all well above non-Passport customers. The Passport program continues to feed our very best customer cohort, those who purchase from multiple product categories or brands, and those that have our highest frequency, retention, and average spend. We've also been improving the user experience on the new Celebrations Passport app that we launched in January. Some of the new features we've added include the ability to search for any product across our family of brands on the app, including wine. And we've deployed new ways to connect with our customers directly through the app. We provided help finding gifts and advice on how to celebrate. We present custom app-specific promotions and events, and we push tailored notifications based on past experiences. Along with the Passport app, we continue to view the overall Celebrations Passport loyalty program as a key element in our strategic focus on customer engagement and enhancing the total customer experience. Along that line, we also continue to expand our initiatives to create a true community through a broad range of non-transactional engagement experiences and content. Through the third quarter, we reached more than 80 million consumer engagements driven by our content and social campaigns and a growing number of influencer campaigns. We are now fast approaching our target of more than 120 million consumer engagements for the full fiscal '22 year. Now these engagements really help us to build relationships with our customers beyond the transaction and give us the opportunity to really deepen that relationship. We believe the combination of these unique assets and initiatives position us well to manage our business and drive long-term revenue growth. In terms of bottom-line results, while we anticipate facing continued cost headwinds in the near term, our strong balance sheet enables us to invest in our operating platform to address these issues and build for the future. These investments include initiatives to automate our warehouse and distribution facilities, which reduces our exposure on the labor front, to utilize our strong balance sheet to build and bring in inventory early to get ahead of the ongoing global supply chain issues, and to optimize programs to enhance our outbound shipping operations and manage rising third-party shipping costs. Over the long term, we anticipate these initiatives will enable us to improve our gross margins and drive enhanced bottom line performance. Now, I'd like to turn the call over to Bill for his review of some of the key metrics from the third quarter.

Thank you, Chris. Our results for the fiscal third quarter, both top and bottom line, were below our expectations. Revenue in the quarter was down 1% compared with the prior-year period reflecting solid growth of about 5% for the Valentine's Day holiday in our consumer floral business and contributions from Vital Choice, which we acquired back in October. These positives were offset by the shift of Easter to later in our fiscal fourth quarter this year, compared with last year when most of the holiday sales fell in our third quarter. But with deferred revenues coming into the quarter compared with the prior year when customers, particularly in our Harry and David brand, were willing to accept delivery of holiday season gifts well into January, we also faced slow e-commerce demand for everyday occasions throughout the quarter, reflecting growing consumer concerns with rising inflation and geopolitical unrest. As a reminder, Q3 revenues were up 68% over Q3 of fiscal 2020, the final quarter before the pandemic, and up 52% on an organic basis if we exclude Personalization Mall and Vital Choice revenues. In terms of our bottom line results, gross margins in the quarter were impacted by several factors, including the continued disruptions in the global supply chain, the escalation of commodity costs, increased costs for inbound and outbound shipping, including an acceleration in fuel surcharges related to rising oil prices, increased year-over-year labor rates across the company, and the write-off of certain inventories of expired perishable products, reflecting softer than anticipated demand levels. In addition, during the quarter, we continued to see digital marketing rates rise by more than 30% compared with the prior-year period levels, which impacted effectiveness in driving traffic to our sites. As Chris noted, we do not expect these headwinds to go away in the near term. However, as we enter our fiscal fourth quarter, we do see some opportunities for improved performance, including the benefits of the Easter shift into the period, our strong inventory position, and the spring season's key holidays, including Mother's Day, Father's Day, graduations, and wedding season, where we anticipate stronger consumer demand as we saw in the past two quarters for key holiday occasions. In addition, we are continuing to work diligently to mitigate higher costs through investments in our business platform that Chris described, as well as through our strategic pricing initiatives. Now breaking down some key metrics from our third quarter. As we have already noted, total consolidated revenues were $469.6 million, down 1% compared with $474.2 million in the prior-year period. Validated gross profit margin for the period was 32.8%, a decline of 610 basis points compared with the prior-year period, reflecting the aforementioned cost headwinds. Operating expenses as a percent of total revenues improved 60 basis points to 38.4% of total sales compared with 39% in the prior-year period. Operating expenses excluding stock-based compensation, the cost associated with the one-time employee class-action legal settlement, and the appreciation and depreciation of investments in the company's non-qualified compensation plan improved by 10 basis points to 38.1% of total sales compared with 38.2% in the prior-year period. The combination of these factors resulted in a net loss for the quarter of $23.4 million or $0.36 per share compared with net income of $1.4 million or $0.02 per diluted share in the prior-year period. Adjusted net loss for the quarter was $21 million or $0.32 per share compared with adjusted net income of $1.5 million or $0.02 per diluted share in the prior-year period. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was a loss of $12 million compared with adjusted EBITDA of $15.4 million in the prior-year period. Regarding our segment results, in our Gourmet Food and Gift Baskets segment, revenues for the quarter were $167.4 million, down 4.5% compared with $175.2 million in the prior-year period. This primarily reflected softer consumer demand throughout the quarter, combined with the shift of the Easter holiday and low deferred revenue entering the quarter compared with the prior-year period. This was partially offset by higher year-over-year wholesale revenues and revenues associated with Vital Choice. Gross profit margin was 25.3%, a decline of 1,410 basis points compared with 39.4% in the prior-year period. This primarily reflected increased costs of labor, inbound and outbound shipping, fuel, and charges associated with the write-off of expiring inventories. Segment contribution margin was a loss of $17.1 million compared with segment contribution margin of $12.1 million in the prior-year period, reflecting the reduced revenues and gross margin, as well as the higher year-over-year digital marketing costs. Adjusted segment contribution margin for the quarter was a loss of $14.2 million, excluding one-time costs associated with the settlement of an employee class-action legal suit compared with segment contribution margin of $12.1 million in the prior-year period. In Consumer Floral and Gifts, total revenues were $264.2 million, an increase of 1.5% compared with $260.4 million in the prior-year period primarily reflecting solid growth for the Valentine's Day holiday, partly offset by softer everyday gifting sales. Gross profit margin was 36.7%, down 110 basis points compared with 37.8% in the prior-year period, primarily reflecting increased shipping costs. The segment contribution margin was $20.5 million, down 8.9% compared with $22.5 million in the prior-year period, primarily reflecting reduced gross margin and higher year-over-year digital marketing costs. In our BloomNet business, revenues for the quarter were $38.4 million, down 1% compared with $38.8 million in the prior-year period. The profit margin was 38.7%, down 560 basis points compared with 44.3% in the prior-year period, primarily reflecting product mix and higher inbound shipping costs. As a result, the segment contribution margin was $9.8 million, down 18.8% compared with $12 million in the prior-year period. Turning to our balance sheet, our cash and investment position was $93 million at the end of the third quarter compared with $173.6 million at the end of fiscal 2021. Lower cash balances primarily reflect our investments in inventory to help offset the headwinds associated with supply chain and labor, combined with a higher capital expenditures spend, primarily related to automation efforts and our investments in our orchards, an increase in our stock repurchases amounting to $35 million year-to-date, and repayment of term debt. Inventory was $214.4 million, up $60 million compared with the end of fiscal 2021, primarily reflecting our decision to use our strong balance sheet to invest in inventory and help mitigate the continuing challenges in the supply chain. In terms of debt, we had $167.2 million in term debt, and zero borrowings under our revolving credit facility. Regarding guidance, we're updating our guidance for fiscal 2022 full year based on the results we have reported for the first three quarters of the year as well as our outlook for our current fiscal fourth quarter. We anticipate achieving total revenue growth in a range of 3% to 5% compared with the prior year. Adjusted EBITDA in the range of $110 million to $115 million and adjusted EPS in the range of $0.55 to $0.60 per diluted share. We anticipate that free cash flow for the year will be down significantly compared with the prior year based on our updated guidance and our efforts to use our strong balance sheet to invest in inventory, support our growth plans, and to address the continuing headwinds we see in the macro economy. I will now turn the call back to Chris.

Thanks, Bill. To sum up, our results for the fiscal third quarter were below our expectations, despite the solid growth that we saw for the Valentine's Day holiday. We continue to see significant cost increases as well as softer consumer demand for everyday occasions, reflecting the macroeconomic conditions. We are proactively addressing these challenges by using our strong balance sheet to invest in initiatives that will help us mitigate rising costs and implementing innovative marketing and merchandising programs designed to engage and build deeper relationships with our customers to help drive improved growth. During the quarter, we attracted nearly 1.5 million new customers and added more than 225,000 new members to our Celebrations Passport loyalty program. And we continue to expand our cross-category and cross-branded merchandise programs, fully integrating our new Vital Choice brand onto our platform. As we enter our fiscal fourth quarter, we have several innovative marketing and merchandising initiatives that we are very excited about, including our new partnership with global superstar Dolly Parton, which we kicked off to celebrate International Women's Day in April. Dolly collaborated with our team to curate several exclusive floral arrangements. She also promoted her collaboration with us on her social channels, reaching millions of her loyal fans. And we have a new partnership with famed Iron Chef Geoffrey Zakarian, who is now serving as our culinary ambassador for Harry & David. Zakarian worked with our team to create a special collection of Harry & David products, including items from our Wolferman’s Bakery and new Vital Choice brands. And just in time for Mother's Day, staying at the forefront of innovation, we've launched two exclusive collections of NFTs featuring unique artwork that celebrate moms. Looking ahead, the current macro economy is highly unpredictable. With that said, it's important to note that we have faced challenging macro market conditions in the past. And because of the strength of our unique business platform combined with our talent and experienced team, we have emerged as a bigger, better, and stronger company. As a company, we are continuously evolving through compelling messaging and unique gift offerings for every emotion. We are dedicated to helping inspire our community of customers to give more, connect more, and build more and better relationships. We are confident that we will continue to grow our company and build shareholder value over the long term. In closing, as in my past calls, I'd like to give a shout-out to all of our associates across the company. We have a tremendously talented team that continues to work diligently to address the challenges that we are seeing in the macro environment and drive long-term growth. I thank them for their hard work, their innovative thinking, and their laser focus on our community of customers. Now, I'd like to introduce you to Tom Hartnett. Tom was promoted to President of the company earlier this week having previously served as Group President for our Consumer Floral and Gifts segment. Since joining our company in 1991, Tom has held a number of positions of increasing responsibility and made many significant contributions to our business, not the least of which has been tremendous growth and expanded market leadership in our 1-800-Flowers brand, which he has overseen. Tom has also been instrumental in building our company's digital marketing expertise, championing cross-brand, and cross-category product innovation to provide more gifting solutions for our customers and driving initiatives that further our commitment to customer service excellence. Tom and I have worked very closely over the years and I look forward to many, many more years of partnership as he takes on this new role. I am confident that his appointment will serve our stakeholders well as we further integrate our brands and our operating platforms. Jade, we can now open the call for questions, please. Thank you.

We will now begin the question-and-answer session. Our first question comes from Anthony Lebiedzinski of Sidoti. Please go ahead.

Yes. Good morning. And thank you for taking the questions. I guess, first, just a quick housekeeping item. Can you give us a sense as to pricing versus volume just for the quarter if you have that available?

Sure, good morning, Anthony. Thanks for your question. Bill, you want to take that?

Sure. Anthony, average order value was up ten plus percent offset by a decline in units. It's a combination of both the strategic pricing initiatives that were put in place, but also product mix, as we're selling more and more bundled products and kind of featuring more higher-priced items on the site.

I think it's important to note that we always look, you think you're familiar, Anthony, to make sure we have a broad range of products at all price points. So as Bill points out, when we see the higher price point items growing we push those a little bit more. But especially in this macro environment that we're working in, it's important to have a good selection of entry-level price points as well.

Thanks for that. And then just in terms of the gross margin pressure that you guys saw in the quarter, quite a bit more than what we had expected, I think it's the first time you guys called out specifically write-off of expiring inventories. What was the magnitude of that?

There were a number of factors that impacted gross margins. We mentioned them in our formal remarks, both inbound and outbound shipping being influenced by fuel surcharges, certainly labor, commodity cost increases with inflation, as well as just availability of some supply such as wheat and eggs with the shortage of hens. Additionally, the write-off of some perishable inventory. The large majority of investments we've made in inventory is in non-perishable items. However, coming out of the holiday season, we did expect stronger consumer demand. We maintained some of the seasonal labor that we had at the holiday time, as once you let go of that labor, you don't get it back. And we built some inventory with some perishable products expecting higher demand. When that did not come, we did have some write-offs, probably amounted to about $5 to $6 million during the quarter, which is probably 130 basis points of the 600 or so points that we're down in margin.

Got it. Okay. And then you guys talked about the Easter shift. Just wondering how significant that was and then, as far as the lower deferred revenue, just wanted to get a sense of what the impact of that was. And I have one more question after that.

Yeah. Bill will cover that, and that's important to hit that lower deferred income point as well.

So we went into the quarter with about $10 million of lower deferred revenue. Again, from Harry & David a year ago, customers were willing to accept orders in December, but accept in January when we were light on inventory. That's one of the reasons we've been making investments in inventory. So we went into the quarter about $10 million less in deferred revenue. The Easter shift on the other side was probably about $6 million or so, $6 million plus moving out of Q3 into Q4. Overall, the Easter holiday was up slightly year-over-year between March and April; the combination was about $6 million moving into the month of the fourth quarter.

Got you. As for the bigger picture, Chris, you mentioned some initiatives aimed at addressing cost issues, including automation and other strategies. Can you share the expected timeline for these initiatives and when we might start seeing tangible improvements in your costs? I understand you can't predict the future with certainty, but could you provide an estimate of when we might actually experience some benefits from these efforts to help counter the cost challenges you're facing?

Sure, Anthony. Thank you. As we evaluate the situation, the primary challenge we've been facing is the impact on gross margins, but we've seen improvements in our operating expense ratio. One example of our investments is the automation of our warehouse and distribution centers, which we previously discussed regarding its benefits. For instance, during last year's Christmas holiday, our largest distribution center in Ohio shipped 80,000 packages on peak day. This year, we managed to exceed 100,000 packages on several days—about six days—with 30% fewer staff. We're experiencing the positive effects of this investment, and it continues to progress. We're enhancing automation in our facilities in Medford, Atlanta, and others. Recently, we also saw benefits from Valentine's Day, where we managed 30,000 customer interactions completely through automation, thanks to our AI engine that supports our IVR and chatbot capabilities. Without these automation investments, we would have needed an additional thousand employees for that single day. The progress is ongoing, but it's difficult to specify a timeline since it's an iterative process that evolves daily.

I think, Anthony, if we analyze the sources of cost and margin pressures, inbound ocean freight has increased significantly compared to 12 to 18 months ago. Experts believe that this situation will eventually stabilize, although it might not be resolved by the upcoming holiday season. In the long run, we expect rates to decrease significantly, though perhaps not to the levels seen 18 months ago. In terms of outbound freight, those rates will remain elevated, influenced largely by fuel costs, which surged during the quarter. If we are paying 15% more per package than last year, approximately 40% of that increase is due to fuel. Since fuel prices are cyclical, they will also stabilize over time. We need to adjust for the write-off of perishable products, which is something we can manage internally. Labor rates are likely to stay high, and we don't anticipate relief in that area. However, as Chris mentioned, we are investing in automation projects in both warehouse distribution and service centers. For outbound rates, despite the higher costs, we are collaborating with FedEx and our logistics team to enhance operations, enabling us to ship products more quickly. We aim to position our inventory closer to consumers so that we can reduce service levels with FedEx. This means we can shift from overnight to ground delivery, and from standard ground to ground economy delivery, providing a cheaper service while still satisfying customer expectations. Therefore, while labor and outbound shipping are not likely to self-correct, we have strategies in place to help mitigate those costs moving forward.

Bill on that last point that you just worked with FedEx as an example to optimize our capabilities. We've seen good results recently on-time delivery rates with FedEx, which then improves the customer experience, cuts down on customer service contacts, etc., so it really improves the whole operating capability and our operating costs.

It's a good point, Chris. What we used to see prior to the pandemic was 98% on-time delivery. Throughout the pandemic, we were seeing deliveries that were in the mid-80s and, in some cases, low 80s. We've seen a rebound back over 90% on-time deliveries and we continue to work with FedEx and Fresh FedEx to continue to get those on-time deliveries back up to historical levels.

It's an important factor.

Got it. Thank you. That's definitely very helpful color and thanks a lot. And best of luck going forward.

Thanks, Anthony.

The next question is from Alex Fuhrman of Craig-Hallum. Please go ahead.

Great. Thanks very much for taking my question here. It sounds like Valentine's Day was pretty strong, whereas everyday gifting is really where the company struggled in the quarter. Can you unpack that a little bit more for us? Can we interpret that as January, early February were a little bit stronger before some of these macroeconomic headwinds really started to weigh on consumer demand, or is it really more the story of consumers continuing to spend around key events like Valentine's Day and Mother's Day and really just pulling back on self-consumption in everyday occasions?

Thank you, Alex. I think, first off, if we just step back and look at the quarter, to your point, and what we've seen during the quarter is rising inflation, geopolitical unrest, and all of that has certainly impacted the consumer. With all of that said and the points that you made; we continue to see us growing market share in this environment. Tom, why don't you speak a little bit to what we saw for Valentine's Day and what that portends for us as we go forward into the spring holiday season of Mother's Day, etc.?

Yes. Hi, Alex. As mentioned in our formal remarks, we grew Valentine's by 5% and we are continuing to think and see from our data that we're taking market share in the category. As we've said, it does look like the everyday occasions are getting a little softer for us, but we have seen, as Bill mentioned, good response for Easter and we're expecting a solid Mother's Day.

Yeah. And I think also as we look at everyday motions, Alex, keep in mind last year when we were comping against those everyday occasions last year, we're seeing significant growth. And that's why it's important, as Bill pointed out, that during the quarter we grew 68% over two years ago, the Flowers brand grew over 50% compared to two years ago. And Harry & David grew at about 75% compared to two years ago. Most of that growth that we've seen last year was really the majority of the accelerated growth in those everyday occasions. So we're seeing that come back to more pre-COVID levels, I would say.

I think Harry & David was a proxy for the entire food group. It was also up around 75% over two years ago.

Okay. That's really helpful. Thanks. And then it sounds like the Passport program continues to show nice growth year-to-date. The slowdown you've seen in demand over the past couple of weeks and months, has that been seen more or less equally amongst your Passport members and your multi-brand customers, as well as your maybe just kind of once and twice a year type customer?

Go ahead, Tom. Why don't you cover some of that?

We are very pleased with our Passport results and the growth we have achieved. We reported a membership increase of over 40% for the quarter, adding 225,000 Passport members. We continue to see strong engagement and have improved our checkout process and marketing efforts to raise awareness among both existing and new customers. We are also experiencing solid growth in converting new customers to the Passport program, which is encouraging. This performance is promising for us, as these customers tend to engage in multi-brand purchases, which is our most valuable segment.

As we review our customer data, we're noticing that our multi-brand, multi-category customers are outpacing single-category customers. While there are some year-over-year challenges, I want to emphasize that these are primarily related to new customer acquisition rather than a decline in our existing customer base. Even with a 30% increase in digital advertising rates, we still managed to acquire 1.5 million new customers in the quarter, which is significant. Furthermore, I've confirmed recently that the new customers gained since the pandemic are performing better than those acquired before it, exhibiting higher retention rates. This insight contributes to our confidence as we anticipate a return to normal growth rates. Our customer file has doubled in size over the past couple of years due to our business expansion, and the metrics we are tracking support our optimistic outlook moving forward.

Great. Thank you very much.

The next question is from Linda Bolton Weiser of D.A. Davidson. Please go ahead.

Hi. Thank you. I was wondering about the future. I understand you aren't ready to provide guidance for the next fiscal year yet, but analysts may have initially expected you to see some relief in costs in the upcoming December 2022 quarter after facing significant challenges this past year. However, I'm starting to think that even if fuel and labor costs remain stable, you might still face negative comparisons regarding costs and surcharges during the holiday season. Could you comment on whether this assumption is accurate? Thanks.

Linda, our policy is not to provide guidance for fiscal 23 at this time. We will address that in the August call. Generally speaking, during this holiday season, we have initiatives in place to help alleviate some of these costs, and we will continue to invest in those efforts. As I mentioned earlier, some of the cost pressures we are experiencing will eventually resolve on their own. However, predicting the timing of this is challenging, and not all of these issues will be resolved by the holiday season. Nonetheless, we have several initiatives underway that we will maintain to help mitigate these cost increases, and we are also testing strategic pricing initiatives to assist with offsetting some of these expenses.

I believe that assumption isn't entirely accurate, because I think we are seeing significant benefits from our efforts to control costs. If external pressures remain constant, our internal mitigation strategies will lead to improvements. Looking ahead, we anticipate benefits as we start seeing better comparisons, and the growth from our customer file is boosting our confidence. This success is supplemented by our platform expansion and acquisitions such as Shari's Berries, Personalization Mall, and our latest acquisition, Vital Choice, which we have integrated into our platform. All these efforts have proven successful and will continue to yield positive results as we manage our cost structure.

Just your comment about using the strength of your balance sheet to continue to build inventory, to me that seems odd because at the same time you're making a statement about consumers being pinched more because of price inflation. So I'm just wondering, like are you building inventory in the team all pipe items which you need to have ready for the holiday or what is it specifically that you feel like you need to build more inventory in?

Well, a lot of it is addressing the supply chain issues to make sure we have the inventory. What we faced during the holiday plus ago was a lack of inventory. This past year, the timing of inventory with all the supply chain challenges that we had was disrupted. So having the inventory in play so that we can build and plan our operations is clearly a benefit in the upcoming year versus the past.

Bill, to plan the operations and manage the inventory and the labor appropriately.

Okay. And then finally, I was just curious in terms of Tom Hartnett's experience within the company; has he spent all of his years pretty much on the Floral side or has he ever had a stint kind of working or managing within the GFGB business?

Tom has been involved in just about every area of the business in the 30 years he's been with the company. So he has been involved in the food businesses to Shari's Berries business most recently, he quarterbacked that acquisition. And obviously, the Shari's Berries business, the fruit bouquet business deal, he oversees Personalization Mall as he moved to the non-food category. This is a guy who started in finance for us and has basically had every role you could conceive in the company over time. And what this change does really for us, it really brings all the operating business units under one leader. It really helps us drive the enterprise growth in the cross-brand capabilities that we've been looking at moving forward on and allows some dynamic P&L management, being able to quickly adjust on the fly where we're putting investments, and where we're seeing opportunities. For me, it allows me more time to spend more focused on innovation, customer centricity, our strategy work, our M&A development capabilities, and overall growth focus within the company. So Tom is extremely deserving of this position. I couldn't think of anyone better suited for it.

Sounds good. Thank you very much.

Excellent.

The next question is from Michael Kupinski of Noble Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Hello, Michael. Your line is open. We'll move on to Dan Kurnos of The Benchmark Company. Please go ahead.

Thanks. Good morning. Two short-term questions. Chris, can we go back to your comments around marketing? We know that performance marketing, digital channels, and social in particular are A. Converting less, B. The rates are extremely high right now. Yes, you added a lot of new customers. You did talk about a little bit more challenge coming from those new customers rather than from your existing base. So how do we think about, is there any contemplation in the near term on either a pullback in spend or how are you thinking in terms of LTV given this environment? I know you're trying to think several years out, but just maybe help us think through the way that you're assessing your marketing or customer acquisition strategy right now.

Thank you for the question. As we evaluate the current environment from a long-term customer lifetime value perspective, it informs our daily decisions. In our last quarter, we highlighted that during the challenging consumer period in December, along with rising advertising costs, we decided to reduce some customer acquisition efforts since it became too costly. In this quarter, although gaining 1.5 million new customers is a positive outcome, it's less than what we achieved last year when we identified more opportunities. Therefore, we adjusted our approach based on effective customer acquisition costs aligned with our long-term LTV goals. We recognize that our competitors are struggling to compete at our current customer acquisition cost levels. This success is largely due to our platform and brands, which enhances our ability to drive long-term value as we enhance our Passport capability and our multi-brand strategy. We're focused on determining the customer acquisition costs we are willing to invest in, considering our long-term outlook as we continue to develop our data file and customer cohorts.

Yeah, Dan, the only other thing I'd add is as you mentioned, we continue to see performance marketing costs rise. We're aware of that. It's forced us just to be better marketers around better targeting opportunities. So we're doing better in targeting those new customers that we believe have the right LTV or CLV for the future, and that allows us to spend our dollars more effectively.

Got it. That's helpful. I'll get back to the tangential question to that in a second and just ask the side one here on Personalization Mall. Obviously, this is not really a great environment for P Mall. I know you guys have been looking to potentially beef up your personalization vertical. Perhaps this market, if it continues to be messy, will offer some more opportunities out there for multiple compression in your competitors. But just curious: A. How that process is going, and B. How you're evaluating P Mall under the current environment or landscape?

I'll ask Tom. He has been closely involved with Personalization Mall, and I believe we are still very satisfied with how Personalization Mall has integrated into the platform and its expected performance moving forward.

Again, it's similar to what we're seeing for the rest of the organization. We are seeing a little softness on the everyday occasions, but good performance on the major holidays. We are focused on the Personalization Mall customer. It's a little bit lower household income, generally speaking, so we're taking a lot of steps to attract a higher household demographic and add to our product assortment there as well as look at other potential targets in the marketplace.

Since Personalization Mall's upcoming holidays, wedding season, and Father's Day mean June is Personalization Mall's strongest month. We see a good opportunity there as we look forward. To your point on potential M&A targets, whether in the Personalization category. Dan, actually we look at it as across the board in any of our categories or adjacencies. We do think we're in a strong position as a company right now to watch what happens during the market and what happens to valuations. We do think that the M&A market could present opportunities for us as we go through the sloppiness that we're seeing in the market today.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just lastly, for me, we've seen this before, you guys have been through this before. It's always difficult to predict how the economy is going to react. You've seen lots of wide-ranging recession calls, what have you, even though we're at record low unemployment, and there's still two years’ worth of savings out there. But regardless, not to ask about specifically '23, but just in general, you guys are going to post the more modest although still really strong two-year stack growth, so you'll have technically easier comps as you go into next year. I'm just wondering if you have any altered views on the longer-term sustainable growth outlook for the business based on what you're seeing now?

I think in a long-term outlook it stays consistent. We're extremely proud of what we've built with the capabilities we have. We have high confidence in our abilities to return to the growth rates that we want as we move forward here. We have the right products, we have the right brands, we have an expanded customer file. We have a great experienced team in place. As you pointed out, we've done this before. We've been in business for 46 years now. We've been through some ups and downs. One of the key things about our category; it never really participates in the high highs of a robust economy, but nor do we participate in the very lows of a recessionary economy either. And then as we've expanded our product categories, food generally tends to do better in a tougher economy as consumers put more value on something you can need. But with all the things that we look at, the platform, the customer file, the brands that we have, the improvements in customer experience that we've made, our outlook and our confidence in the future has not diminished at all. Dan, just go back to two years ago or even four years ago. We started to initiate a higher growth rate from the second half of fiscal 2018 through the start of the pandemic. We were increasing our organic growth rate. We had gotten it up to high single digits. We had guided prior to the pandemic to double-digit growth in the third quarter of our fiscal 2020, and for the second half of fiscal 2020. For the fourth quarter, we achieved that in the March quarter of fiscal 2020 where we posted a 12% growth rate. And we're again guided for the fourth quarter to be double-digit. We are a bigger, better, stronger company today, based on a lot of the initiatives that Chris has outlined. So we view this as the consumer certainly has pulled back due to the geopolitical unrest and some of the macro economic issues that have happened. But we're there to take advantage of the opportunities going forward.

And in this current year, over we're still growing over the last year, which was a 42% growth rate.

I tend to agree with all of that, especially what you said Bill. Is Chris going to be our next chief brand officer? Thanks, everyone. Appreciate the insights.

Thank you, Dan.

The next question comes from Michael Kupinski of Noble Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Thank you. And I got dropped right when you introduced me. Sorry about that. Just a couple of clarifications. One is, did you say that you shifted accounted for roughly $6 million in revenue in the quarter? I just wanted to clarify that.

The question was, did you say $6 million shifted quarter to quarter?

Yeah. For the Easter impact. Yes. From Q3 to Q4.

Yes. And is there any way to quantify for us the amount of savings that you might be able to get from the heightened CapEx that you planned through automation and reduced cost and so forth? Is there any way to quantify that?

Michael, this is a long-term investment for us. We've automated the Hopewell facility and have previously mentioned that we achieved over 30 percent more volume from that facility on peak days while using 30 to 40 percent less labor. However, this gain is currently being countered by rising labor costs, making it difficult to assign a specific dollar figure to this. We are also investing in our Atlanta facility to implement similar automation initiatives to significantly boost our capacity with reduced labor. Additionally, we have multiple initiatives with our service center platforms. Although it's challenging to quantify the impact at this moment, all these initiatives aim to help mitigate the rising labor costs we are experiencing, which we do not expect to decrease significantly.

I wonder if there were any notable performances among your brands, such as popcorn, that exceeded your expectations despite the usual seasonal variations.

I think most importantly, because of the quarter and because of the holiday, the Valentine's Day Flowers brand was really the standout brand during the quarter. Again, because it was stimulated by the Valentine's holiday. And that's why, again, it really has us very optimistic as we now move into the middle of Mother's Day currently and the spring holiday season, and then moving into Father's Day capabilities that we have for Personalization Mall, the wedding season, etc. So for this quarter it was really the floral business during Valentine's Day, and that's really encouraging us, as well as now, as we look to the future for some of the other product lines coming into play.

The only one I would add to that would be Shari's Berries. That aligned itself with the floral holidays as well. The chocolate-covered strawberries are a good product for Valentine's Day and Mother’s Day. In both the last year and this year, the date placement of Valentine's was not exactly great. Being on a Monday doesn't help things and we're looking forward to better date placement help in the next four to five years.

Got you. And it sounded like Dan may have asked a portion of this question and I apologize if I am asking you the same question. But the company has been opportunistic in making acquisitions, and typically during periods where you had to be a lot of looking forward. Obviously. And so is it too early at this point for you to be making acquisitions, given that maybe some of the sellers aren't inclined to sell currently just because they haven't received enough pain, so to speak, of pressure and headwinds like you might be seeing, or do you think that you would still look at acquisitions even in this environment, given that you're maybe more focused on managing the business and offsetting some of the headwinds you're seeing yourself?

Thank you, Michael. We're continually assessing the market for the right opportunities in mergers and acquisitions. Historically, we have been diligent and thoughtful in our decision-making processes. We're starting to observe that sellers are beginning to understand that they won’t be able to leverage the post-COVID market for sales, and valuations might be shifting a bit. While we may need a bit more time, we are witnessing the initial signs of this shift. It's also crucial to reflect on our past M&A activities. For instance, with Shari's Berries, we acquired a struggling business, resized it, and fully integrated it into our platform, using primarily the URL and customer database as our main assets, which has resulted in significant growth. We expect to apply the same approach with our recent acquisition of Vital Choice, which we've just integrated onto our platform; we are now poised to enhance that business similarly to Shari's Berries. Additionally, we acquired Personalization Mall to expand our capabilities in the personalization sector, allowing us to grow through both organic development and M&A. We believe we are a strong company and will continue to emerge even stronger, as we have in the past, with M&A being a key part of our strategy moving forward.

Your timing on acquisitions has been great, going back to even Harry & David. So that's all I have. Thank you.

Thanks, Michael.

The next question is from Doug Lane of Lane Research. Please go ahead.

Hi. Good morning, everybody. I think we've talked about a lot here, so I'd just like to focus on the gross margin in the Gourmet Food and Gift Baskets segment. The 25% gross margin is well below anything I've seen quarterly going back at least five years. So there's something going on there. So I want to try drill down on is this reset of the gross margin in Gourmet Food and Gift Baskets permanent, or are there cross currents going on here that will go away in the next quarter or two?

Yeah, Doug, this is clearly the lowest margin we've seen. Most of the items that we talked about with regard to the overall gross margins impact the food brands far greater than it does on the floral side of the business. So again, inbound shipping is high and it's not going to go away in the next quarter or two, but I think eventually it will self-correct to some degree. It's not going to go back to $3,000 of container, but it's not going to be a $25,000 a container. We're seeing a little bit of relief on that right now in the offseason and we hope that continues. It's hard to predict what the spot market will be and whether the carriers will honor contractual rates, but right now we are seeing a little softness on where we spent and what we incurred last year. Outbound shipping rates are up and there are a lot of surcharges associated. The biggest surcharge right now is fuel. So as I mentioned, probably 40% of our increase in outbound shipping rates is related to fuel. Eventually that will self-correct. Fuel is not going to always be at $5 a gallon, so that will self-correct, but the timing of which is tough to predict. But those will self-correct, and again back to even the outbound shipping. And I mentioned this earlier. While rates will be higher on a same level of service, we are working with FedEx, we are working internally on our operations so that we can utilize less expensive services from FedEx to still meet customer expectations, but lower our rates. So there are correctable actions. Clearly, our focus is on the ones that with outbound rates and with labor rates that we don't think will self-correct by themselves, so that we need initiatives in play to mitigate those costs. Other ones will self-correct; it's just a matter of the timing.

Okay. That's very helpful. Thank you. And lastly, on inventories, they're up 75% year-over-year, and your sales are down 1%. So where are you building inventories, and what is the risk of future inventory write-offs because you have such a big perishable component of your business?

We are currently investing significantly in our inventory, approximately $60 million more than our year-end figure. Last June, our inventory was around $150 million, and it has now increased to about $214 million. The majority of these investments are focused on hard goods and non-perishable items. We experienced a write-off in our perishable inventory because we anticipated stronger demand during the holiday season than what actually occurred. We retained some seasonal labor due to concerns about a potential loss of labor that would be difficult to recover. We also produced some items using the perishable inventory we had, but the demand did not meet our expectations, which we believe can be adjusted moving forward. Our inventory investment is aimed at addressing ongoing supply chain challenges and market disruptions that many companies, including ourselves, faced last year. Our goal is to have sufficient inventory to effectively manage our operations and labor.

Our inventory strategy, along with many others, has moved from a just-in-time inventory to kind of a just-in-case inventory.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you, guys.

Thanks, Doug.

Okay, Doug.

This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Christopher G. McCann for closing remarks.

Thank you, Jane, and thank you everyone for joining us today. As you can see, we have a lot of opportunity and a lot of optimism for the future of our business. Right now, our focus is on the Mother's Day holiday, as all of our focus should be, moms rule the world. And I urge you to place your Mother's Day orders early. Thank you.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.