Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc.
Q4 2020 Earnings Call Transcript

Published: 10 Mar 2021

[Operator:]

Greetings, and welcome to the Build-A-Bear Workshop Fourth Quarter 2020 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Allison Malkin of ICR.

[Allison Malkin:]

Good morning. Thank you for joining us. With me today are Sharon Price John, CEO; and Voin Todorovic, CFO. For today’s call, Sharon will begin with a discussion of our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020 performance and highlight our priorities as we begin fiscal 2021. After, Voin will review the financials and our outlook in more detail. We will then open the call to take your questions. We ask that you limit your questions to one question and one follow-up. This way, we can get to everyone’s questions during this one-hour call. Feel free to re-queue if you have further questions.

[Sharon Price John:]

Thank you, Allison and good morning everyone. Thanks for joining us today as we share our results for our fourth quarter and fiscal year 2020. In reviewing the year, I think it's accurate to see it as a tale of two half. In the first half of the year, we rapidly responded to the onset of a global pandemic that forced a governmental mandated closure of all of our corporately operated stores, as well as many third party and franchise locations. We took immediate action to maintain the financial well-being of the company, including aggressive expense management and cash preservation, while pivoting to drive e-commerce demand, even as our headquarters shifted to full virtual mode. As we moved into the second half and stores reopened on a staggered basis as guidelines transitioned, our focus turned to accelerating key initiatives to drive digital transformation and evolve retail. I’m proud of the resilience shown by this organization with a headquarter staff that continues to work virtually, and its ability to rapidly adapt to lead the change that drove us to deliver profitable second half, a stronger year in cash position, compared to the prior year-end and no borrowings on our credit facility. Looking in more detail at our fourth quarter, we exceeded our previously issued guidance across a number of key metrics, even with the ongoing negative impact of COVID-19 on retail store operations. This included an 18% reduction in store operating days, driven largely by the of all stores in Europe for most of the quarter, as well as restrictions on operating hours, and the number of be in stores with achievable sales on key days during the holiday season.

[Voin Todorovic:]

Thanks Sharon and good morning, everyone. As Sharon noted, the year was a tale of two halves. The actions taken to navigate the pandemic in the first half of the year combined with the reopening of stores, acceleration of key initiatives to transform digitally, and rapidly evolving our retail channels in the back half of the year, allowed us to deliver profitability growth in both our third and fourth quarters. We ended the year with improved momentum and a solid balance sheet, reporting fourth quarter sales and earnings ahead of the guidance we shared in January. This was accomplished even with ongoing restrictions negatively impacting all of our reporting segments. We finished the year with about $35 million in total cash, a 30% increase over the prior year and no borrowings in our credit facility. Turning to our fourth quarter results, which were negatively impacted by the pandemic and in particular temporary store closures, total revenues were compared to the prior year. This includes an 8.7% decrease in net retail sales, primarily driven by an 18% reduction in store operating days, about 25% fewer operating hours, and an impact from capacity restrictions. Consolidated e-commerce demand rose 104% over the prior year, which reflects online generated orders, including those fulfilled through our stores. Commercial and international franchise revenues were $1.8 million, compared to $3.9 million in the 2019 fiscal fourth quarter. Gross profit margin was 50.1%, down 30 basis points from the prior year's fourth quarter. This included the negative impact from non-cash asset impairment costs, and the rent recorded for our European stores for the full-quarter, despite the locations being closed for two-thirds of the period. Partially offsetting this were positive benefits from gift card breakage that flows through revenue with no associated costs, and reduced occupancy expenses due to our rigorous efforts to renegotiate lease terms earlier in the year. On the expense side, SG&A was down $7.3 million or 16.3% from the fourth quarter of 2019 driven by decrease payroll expenses as a result of reduced operating hours, and lower corporate expenses as part of our cost containment initiatives.

[Operator:]

Thank you. And our first question is from Eric Beder with SCC Research. Please proceed.

[Eric Beder:]

Good morning and congratulations on Q4.

[Voin Todorovic:]

Good morning, Eric. Thank you.

[Eric Beder:]

Could you fill us in a little bit on the international markets in the UK? Are you basically closed until April? How should we be thinking about that market and the chance for just start to revive after what has been a very crazy and somewhat sloppy year in terms of lockdowns?

[Sharon Price John:]

Thank you, Eric. Hi. Right now the governmental mandate is in place until the middle of April foreclosures for non-essential businesses so to speak. And we, you know, are preparing and expect to open when as soon as we are allowed to. Our store associates therefore are still on furlough, but we do have a very robust e-commerce business in the UK that has picked up since those closures. You are right that it has been choppy. We were closed in November, we were open in December, and then we were closed down again in the beginning of January, and just recently it was announced that we will remain closed through the mid-April time period. But the good news of that is we have a sense of how consumers respond, posts being closed and opened. When we reopened in December, people did come back out and they didn't want to come to build there and experience, you know our special retailtainment, and so we're quite hopeful that they will want to do that again once we start to reopen and things start to stabilize.

[Voin Todorovic:]

And just to add one more point, Eric, as you know, this may help. As we think about Q1 for UK, we expect to have 13 weeks of rent expense that's going to be impacted on our P&L with basically revenue only coming for the last couple of weeks of the quarter. So, definitely that's going to be a big headwind for the organization, but some of the government assistance programs that our team in UK has been applying for will help offset partially some of those losses, but still we expect to be a challenging quarter in UK this time around.

[Eric Beder:]

Okay. In the U.S., are you starting to see, and we saw pieces of this in our store visits, people starting to come back to the mall and wanting to shop with their kids? Are you starting to see that momentum coming through? Is that part of the reasons why January was stronger? And when you look out for the year, are you kind of seeing that ?

[Sharon Price John:]

And yes, Eric, we are. And we are seeing that people are coming back out, they want to, you know, do something, you know, a little more normalized, they want to spend time with their children, they want to have, you know, some – an experience together. But that does also beg the comments that both Voin and I alluded to in our prepared remarks that as people do start to come back out, we are under restrictions beyond those things, that – of having a store closure. We're under restrictions of how many people can be in our store at any given time, for example. So, we have to be very cognizant of that. And in fact, we're already seeing it, particularly during some higher traffic periods, like the weekend where we have limited throughput capacity at the store itself. So, you know, we have to be conscious of that. We have to be cognizant of crowds and management of crowds, maintain the six foot rule, and things still do vary by state and jurisdictions. So, we're very aware of that. But there is – it does cause limitations even though the stores are open. Voin?

[Voin Todorovic:]

I think you covered.

[Eric Beder:]

Great. And last question, you guys have done, you know last year basically was no movies. You've done a lot of on nostalgic driven products. And I think a lot of products driven by TikTok out of the pieces, how do you see, kind of the new world here where you have streaming services, which obviously was part of the child, but I'm assuming that there'll be other, kind of characters in those streaming services that you can leverage your TikTok with, , you know, how do you look at? How do you look at the opportunities, I guess, going forward? I guess it's somewhat movies – somewhat normalized, and these other different packets of potential for refrained character driven customers or pieces can move forward here?

[Sharon Price John:]

Right. The entertainment model had been evolving already for quite some time. And it you know, clearly the pandemic, like with so many other things that touch our life, it just accelerated certain aspects of it, and things being available on, you know, video on demand or anything like that, you know, now it's even more prevalent. And, you know, many studios and films are launching first and only in that forum. But things are moving around, you know, minions were supposed to be out, for example, I think many of you know, in 2020, that was delayed, I think the announcement is now that it will be 2022. We do have a Disney film that just recently launched Raya and the Last Dragon, but the key pieces of entertainment for us right now are more related to the big news. The Animal Crossing products that I mentioned, and the continuation, as we noted, I believe on the last call, we think there's a long tail on things like the child from the Mandalorian, which has, you know, it's like have a new season. And things like Harry Potter, which is just evergreen. So those are also – those types of products, and those types of properties are also more stable for us. When you think about it, there's not this spiky demand, but that also leans into why we have been in this long process of creating our own intellectual property to have some control over when things are launched and how they're launched, such as of course, is a property that's been in our line for quite some time, one of our best selling assortments and, you know we will be launching the film in conjunction with Sony, Sony and worldwide acquisitions. And we expect that will be, you know, one of our biggest entertainment properties, if you will, of the year in later in the fall. So, and then that's, you know more in our control. And we, you know, our objective obviously, is to sell more associated with that film. So, it is a changing environment. And we will expect to use all of the ways that people engage with content, whether it's TikTok to feature film. So, and we have a lot of opportunities in the pipeline. So, but that's great question.

[Eric Beder:]

Right. Thank you and good luck to the rest of the year.

[Voin Todorovic:]

Thank you.

[Operator:]

And our next question is from David Cannon with Cannon Wealth Management.

[David Cannon:]

Good morning. Congratulations. Great job.

[Voin Todorovic:]

Good morning. Thank you.

[Sharon Price John:]

Thanks.

[David Cannon:]

So, two questions. The first one is on your e-com 2.0 strategy alluded to in the , you talk about launching a 3D experience, although there aren't a lot of details on it, could you give us an update on how that's tracking and the cadence of how it's going to be rolled out, if you can give us a timeline? And then also, some, if any color, you can give on the augmentation of the experience, and if there's an expectation of turbo boosting or changing e-com from this experience?

[Sharon Price John:]

On Bear builder 3D, which we did share during the ICR Conference, as well as a bit of a video of where we're headed, we have beta tested it with some external users. We've learned quite a bit from the beta test, and we are taking those learnings into consideration continuing to build toward a launch later this year. So, it’s very exciting, lot of positive feedback from the beta. And so, you know, tracking for the timetable, which was a loose timetable, of course, technology, you have to be, particularly when you're launching something in a brand new space, a brand new fresh experience that completely engaging interactive space for us that we've never done before. But we're still on track for this year, as we noted. On the – I'm not quite sure, I know what the turbo boosting is, so, but if you're referring to our accelerated digital transformation as it reflects our efforts to drive e-com, indeed, we are continuing to build on our combination of driving demand through the relationship primarily with all the support systems and all the capabilities and all the clouds that we have access to with Salesforce and building out all the new CRM capabilities, as well as guests, guests journeys to drive that extended consumer lifetime value, as well as attracting and retaining new guests. So, we feel like we can drive our consumer base, but also building on more occasions for our existing guests. So, and actually with your original question the bear builder 3D, because we want to give guests not only many ways to engage with us digitally, whether it's our traditional format of e-com, what we call our bear configurator, which is kind of a bear builder , whether it's our mobile first approach, where you can just get a quick bundle, or now this completely engaging interactive bear builder 3D. And then on the other side of the equation, we want to give them many ways to receive the product, whether it's shipped directly to their home, they come into our store and pick it up, they – or they can get it delivered same day through our shipped relationship. So, it's a consumer first strategy. And that, you know, hopefully engages with a broader customer base, but from the first engagement to the last engagement and that's our plan.

[David Cannon:]

Okay. Appreciate that. Year, what I meant by Turbo Boost is, you know right now, essentially, it is a very traditional, kind of dead experience, whereas the Build-A-Bear, the differentiator from my standpoint is, you know, it's an experiential retail purchase where, you know, magic occurs in the store, so to speak between the sales associate and the child, porting that over to the digital experience. You know, I believe in my opinion, it would really Turbo Boost where now people are having an interactive, you know, almost like a real life experience in the digital interface as opposed to right now for lack of a better word, you know it's sort of a dead, lifeless experience. So that's really what I was referring to. And of course, connecting, making it more effective by using some of the tools that you have with Salesforce and marketing and so forth. So, that's what I meant. The other question is in regards to what I call a remote retail or live streaming experience, which sort of fits between there's the traditional, you know, brick and mortar in person, physical experience, there's, we all know about the digital one, this is somewhere in between, I see that during the year. You did that? Could you comment on it? You know, was it successful? And then, how that's going to be incorporated into your standard operating procedures for this year? You know, did it yield results? And, you know, what does the roadmap look like going forward?

[Sharon Price John:]

Yes, we, as they noted in the comments, we hosted a number of online streaming events and added new ways for consumers to interact with our brand, as well as, you know, new capabilities to transact with the new in-app purchase options. So, we are continuing to work towards expanding those opportunities. We're using new launches to make those breakthroughs to the consumer. They proved successful, as I noted in the comments, and we are expanding it into this year, we're actually launching a new forum, if you will, that we're calling the premier stuffing events that are associated with these where we have brand new products. We just did it with peeps, which was one of our leading Easter products today, where we had a stuffing event, live streaming stuffing event for people to watch them participate in. So, it's, I think that it's both a good marketing tool, as well as a sales tool as we start to master that part of the equation on the in-app purchase. We have a long way to go on that to make that credibly, you know it’s effective as I think it can be. But the marketing side is definitely clicking people over to our e-commerce site, which as you know has been triple digit increase this year.

[David Cannon:]

Okay. Thanks for the update. And again, great job in navigating through an extremely challenging environment last year. You guys really did an incredible job. And please pass that commentary on to your team.

[Sharon Price John:]

Thank you so much David.

[Voin Todorovic:]

We will. Thank you.

[David Cannon:]

You’re welcome.

[Operator:]

And ladies and gentlemen, we've reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would now like to turn the call back over to Sharon John for closing remarks.

[Sharon Price John:]

Thank you, and thanks for joining us today. We hope everyone stays safe and well and we look forward to actually seeing some of you tomorrow on Zoom during our meetings at the DA Davidson Conference additionally. We look forward to seeing you in our first quarter results.

[Operator:]

This concludes today's conference. You may disconnect at this time. Thank you for your participation. Have a great morning, everyone.