Good morning. My name is Marcus Lemonis, I'm the Executive Chairman of Beyond. Thank you for coming today. Today is going to be broken up into 2 distinct sections. First, we're going to spend some time, a material amount of time on the third quarter results as well as get into the strategic vision of where we're going. Before we jump into the details and Alexis reads the safe harbor, I want to be clear that as we review things today, what you're not going to hear us talk about is the macro environment, interest rates at a 20-year high, consumer demand and inflation. We're going to stay away from all of that because in our honest opinion, what we truly believe is fixable in our own business, is absent the macro issues. And as the macro repairs itself and comes back, I think everybody will be a benefactor of all of that.

Thank you, Marcus. My name is Alexis Callahan. As most of you know, I head up Investor Relations for Beyond. We're excited about today's presentation and your interest with us today. You'll be hearing from several members of management today, including Executive Chairman, Marcus Lemonis; Chief Financial and Administrative Officer, Adrianne Lee; President, Dave Nielsen; Chief Digital Information Officer, Guncha Mehta; Chief Brand Marketing Officer, Jennifer Evans; SVP of Finance and Corporate Development, Alex Thomas; and VP of Loyalty and Partnerships, Tim Ryan. We'll also have a few special guests to be introduced later. During our time today, we will discuss the quarter, how we are restoring our core businesses, as well as walk you through our strategic vision and where we are going. Before we dive in, a few cautionary statements. Today's discussion and our responses to your questions reflect management's views as of today, October 24, 2024, and may include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from such statements. Additional information about risks, uncertainties and other important factors that could potentially impact our financial results is included in our Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2023, and our Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2024, and in our subsequent filings with the SEC. During this call, we'll discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. The slides accompanying this webcast, those published this morning on our IR site and our filings with the SEC contain additional disclosures regarding these non-GAAP measures, including reconciliations of these measures to the most comparable GAAP measures. You can find a copy of both of these presentations today on our Investor Relations website. We would encourage you to review the forward-looking statements disclosure on Slide 2 of each. As a reminder, this webcast is being recorded and will be available for replay on our Investor Relations website following the conclusion of today's live event. Finally, as Marcus mentioned, our intention with this event is to be highly interactive. So we'd invite you to ask questions as they arise. We'd like this to be as conversational as possible. Just one housekeeping item, we will be taking several breaks throughout this session. So with that, let me turn it back to you, Marcus.

Great. Thank you, Alexis. As Alexis mentioned, we're looking for more of a fireside environment today as opposed to us just talking at everybody. As we get into the Q3 financials, we're going to spend a significant amount of time going through each of these boxes because, obviously, the results on the bottom line are unacceptable to us as a management team. As we look back at the last 12 months, we're going to show you several slides that show you the sequential improvement. But these 6 boxes are going to get distilled down to essentially 3 problems: conversion, margin and SG&A. And throughout the day, we're going to keep coming back to conversion, margin and SG&A and what we're going to do about those things. I'll have Adrianne take us through the financial results for the quarter.

Thank you Marcus, and thank you. I'll just go through these boxes. I think this is a standard slide that we present every quarter, but wanted to share, obviously, our revenue results are down year-over-year. That is in part a decision in -- mainly driven by our decision and commitment to become profitable. So if you look at the next box, gross margin came in at 21.2%. This is a 110 basis point improvement versus Q2. And again, something that was by design. I do want to make a note on gross margin versus last year. If you look at the comparable periods where we were Bed Bath, so if we think back to Q3 last year, we were 1 month Overstock, and we were 2 months Bed Bath & Beyond. So if I look at August and September, last year versus August, September this year, we're actually a 50 basis point increase year-over-year due to less promotional discounting, again, by design and on our path to profitability. You'll see our SG&A came in at $45 million (sic) [ $45.2 million ] for the quarter. We did announce a reduction this week in force in part to help us continue to drive this cost down. We expect this number to be kind of low 40s going forward, but happy with the progress quarter-over-quarter $1 million improvement. All in, adjusted EBITDA, a loss of $32 million. This is an improvement versus Q2, which is what we had committed to doing, a 10% commitment, and it is. If you recall, we had a loss of $36 million in the second quarter. So pleased with the progress we're making, but obviously, a lot more work to be done.

As we go into the most important thing that gets everybody's attention, it's revenue. And when I come back to those 3 principal points of conversion, margin and SG&A, this slide is optically the most troubling. But we're actually encouraged by what we're seeing. If you take a look back and you eliminate these COVID years and you start to really study what happened in Q3 of '23, really, what we believe happened ultimately, and we're not going to spend a lot of time on it, is that when Bed Bath & Beyond and Overstock merged together into a general marketplace, the assortment that got created was not the assortment that the consumer wanted. They were used to coming to Overstock for furniture, for rugs, for patio, and they had a great success, generating over $1.5 billion and conversion in the range of 1.7% to 2.2%. Now we don't disclose that number. So I'm saying it just because I want you to understand the context. As we look through the following quarters after the merger of the two, you can see that revenue hung in there, and then all of a sudden revenue dropped off. And what we wanted to do, and we said it in the previous quarter, is to get a very acute focus on profitable transactions. Prior to the 2 brands merging together, at 1.7% or 1.8% conversion, that's a significant difference from where we are operating today, which is closer to 1.3%. I think the thing that we're most pleased with is that site traffic continues to be very robust, very robust. Principally, our fundamental problem comes down to conversion. When you look at the gross margin, you can see where Overstock historically was, anywhere from 23.6% to 26%. But if I eliminate these periods in here during COVID, even at 23.6% or 26.6% at the third quarter of last year, you can see that there is a significant distance between even the improvement we're at today versus where we were. When we started to mix things together and create this marketplace, while traffic remained robust and conversion started to drop, everybody understands that the only way you're actually going to generate sales is by overpromoting and overdiscounting, which is what took us to 19.2% in Q4, 19.5% and where we started to commit that we would have sequential improvement. Early indications in Q4 is that we should have another 500 basis points of improvement -- excuse me, 50 basis points of improvement. So we're expecting to get pretty close to 22% in Q4. As you look at G&A and tech expense, this is a real goal of ours to get this number down into the low 40s. Keep in mind that in the previous years, we were operating 1 nameplate. We're now operating 3 nameplates. There's a little bit of an anomaly here in Q3 of '22.

Yes. And that was driven by -- we had kind of a onetime accrual in that. So I would say a normalized Q3 is around $50 million, $51 million.

So we know that this number needs to live down in the low 40s. Again, back to conversion, margin and SG&A. The adjusted EBITDA is an awful story. Prior to the merger of these 2 brands in Q3 of '23, the company was able to maintain some level of profitability. Obviously, the COVID years inflated that, but even prior to COVID, right, there was a normal level of profitability and a decent level of revenue. As we look at what happened in these following quarters, quarter after quarter, we can see that margin, conversion, conversion, margin, all these things continue to come back over and over again. Here's the odd thing to us. Customers still love the business. Site traffic and site orders continue to be very robust. And even after we got far less promotional rising -- raising prices and dropping promotions, we're still able to main a significant amount. If you go back to even the COVID peaks and you look at '19, you look at '22 and even the beginning of '23, we're still outperforming in those categories. Orders and average order have been a roller coaster for the company. Prior to the merger, you can see what was happening, all the way up to $243 is the high. But if you go back and you look at the historical averages, $163 (sic) [ $167 ], $173, $214. We've been doing a pretty nice job of being in that $204 to $199 range. Again, the problem with that is we got to promotional on furniture on Bed Bath & Beyond. You never want to look back, but as you look at taking the marketplace of Overstock and then merging it with soft goods, top of bed, small appliances at Bed Bath, the customer arrived at the party,…

Okay. So let's talk about gross margin for a moment. When you think about the 25% gross margin, as Marcus said, when you think about historicals, fluctuated between 25% and 27%. So pegging at a 25%, not unrealistic and not on the top end by any means. Trying to be realistic. When you connect the dots between the 21.2%, which was what we experienced in Q3 of '24, to get to that 25%, there are some significant improvements that we know we can make. And Marcus talked about them, and it started in August of 2023 when we layered 2 brands on top of each other. The assortment of 1 brand and the coloration shell and identity of another. As customers came to the website, they were confused. They didn't understand. They didn't -- why furniture? Why case goods furniture, why upholstered furniture? So as we address gross margin, one of the significant components of gross margin is the amount of discounting we had to do to make it appealing enough to convince that customer that we were a legitimate place to purchase, but it had to be that kind of a deal. When you go to sales and marketing, along those same lines...

Can we double-click on the margin a little bit?

Yes.

So it is stunning, and in some cases, hard to believe that you can go from 21.2% to 25%. And the reason we want to spend some time on that is when you go back and you look at the historical averages and you take COVID out of the equation, because we know that COVID had margins at 28%, 29% in some months. And you take that away, it really is very simple for us. It's taking the SKU assortment and the marketing allocation of dollars on those SKUs and appropriately putting them back into the 2 brands where they respectively belong. Over the last 5 months, we have worked hard to peel and duplicate SKUs that were on Bed Bath that used to historically be at Overstock and put them back on Overstock. We have not eliminated any SKUs over at BedBathandBeyond.com to any great extent other than certain marketplace items that we didn't think were competitive, certain vendors that we didn't think were compliant. But other than that, we have not taken that away. As those SKUs move over, we've seen material improvement.

[ Let's go ] ahead and get started. Just as a reminder, if you have a question, if you could raise your hand, folks on the video end of things cannot hear the question, so the answer feels a little truncated for them. Before we jump into the balance of the investor presentation, which we'll talk about where we're going and deal with some of the investment theses that are out there, we wanted to remind people that the company over a series of years made multiple investments in technology and technology bitcoin-type assets outside of the core business. Several years ago, the company entered into a transaction with Pelion Ventures to manage that portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, we invited Pelion to come here today as a paid agent of the company. They receive a fee, just as a reminder, and they declined to come. David Goone from tZERO and Luis from GrainChain were kind enough to come talk about their businesses, which are really the 2 larger pieces of the Medici portfolio. As it relates to both tZERO and GrainChain, we have both a direct investment in both of them as well as our investment through the Medici assets. So with that, David, we'll have you come on up. Thank you for coming.

Sure. Thanks. Thanks for having me, Marcus. Hello, everybody. I don't know how much you know. I'll give you a quick background. My name is David Goone. I'm the CEO of tZERO. I think from -- I talk loud, so this will make a difference. I came from a company called Intercontinental Exchange. I was actually retiring at Intercontinental Exchange and got approached at that time, would I like to be CEO of tZERO, and I thought there were some interesting things that tZERO had in its portfolio and assets of what it could do. So with that, when I came over, tZERO was actually in need of working capital, cash. And I talked it over with the CEO of ICE, who was one of the original management team of. He and I actually were the last 2 left, last men standing, I guess. He's the last man standing from the origination of ICE. And they made a significant investment, which gave us the working capital, and then through some other, let's call it, friends and family. I didn't ask for any money, but some people I knew in the business gave us some more capital, and that's where we kind of sat. Been here about 2.5 years. When I got there, tZERO is still primarily a secondary trading market. It's what they call an ATS, automated trading system, in a broker-dealer. And it primarily focused, as Marcus said, on digital or digitally enhanced assets. And its original foundings was they believed in blockchain. I felt that I had some ideas on what to do. And I decided one of the things we would have to do is actually also do primary offerings, not just secondary. So you have to do capital raise and secondary. Just coming to get secondary…

David, thank you. Any questions for David?

Okay. Great. Thank you. Thank you, David. Appreciate everybody. We're going to add Luis from GrainChain. He'll be audio only. Is that right? We have him in video as well. Great.

Good afternoon or morning for some. Can you hear me?

Yes. Can you turn his volume up a little? Great. Luis, can we get a test just so we can make sure we hear you?

Good morning. How is everyone?

We're great. Thank you. I know it's a little awkward, and I appreciate you taking time to be on the call. We're obviously very excited about your business. If you could give this room a very brief quick synopsis of what your business is and then maybe talk a little bit about it. And then we're going to have a few questions and then let you get back to your conference.

Absolutely. And thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure. Just to give you guys kind of a reference of what GrainChain is, GrainChain is something unique. We started it quite a few years ago in the sense that we knew that there was an issue. We knew that we had problems in not only understanding where a lot of our food is coming from, but we also had issues in the ability to get liquidity for farmers. And this is something that has taken quite a few years to build, but we're in a very interesting place today. Our company consists of various amount of products, and it's something unique to the industry, where a lot of companies out there provide traceability products, a lot of companies out there provide logistics products, inventory management and settlement products. We're a company that combines all of those products into an offering for a variety of places in the agricultural market. So when you start talking about a grain such as corn, sorghum, coffee, we do about 24 different products around the world. There is a significant issue that comes to not only understanding where your food is coming from but understanding how to pay and value that food in an efficient manner. And GrainChain has taken on a very interesting path. We started this project with trying to understand what the product is, knowing how much product there is so that we can actually do a transaction and pay for it adequately. And as we got into the market, we realized that we need to understand more. And not only is our consumer asking more for the product -- more information about the product, but all the steps along the supply chain require a lot of this information to be either…

Luis, we want to give -- thank you for that great summary. And for those, we are super fans of the work that they're doing not only because of the impact, but we like to oversimplify how we think this business works. And much like Moody's provides ratings to the debt market, authenticating the results of the business and the risk attached to it, they really are providing that level of information between farmers and the lenders themselves. And as we know, liquidity has always been a hard thing to figure out in this particular market because crop yield and predictability are not as fluid -- they were not as fluid back then as they are today. So the work that they are doing is phenomenal. I want to open it up for some questions.

We can just go back to the slide presentation. Okay. Discussing the third quarter results, as you would imagine, were not easy to do. Identifying where we see the fixes was a lot easier to do. We want to be clear about our expectations going forward. And while our company does not provide guidance, we expect material improvement on the bottom line in Q4 versus Q4 of last year, and we expect improvement on the bottom line in Q4 versus Q3. The geopolitical macro environment, we are continuing to assume, is going to continue to be soft and struggle. So any assumptions or any hypothesis that we may have isn't accounting for any tailwinds that we may experience when the general macro market starts to return to some level of normalcy. This particular part of the day is what we have been building towards. And while we understand that the results of what is behind us are unacceptable and the results in the short term, at least from our standards, are not going to be as good as we want them to be, we are excited about where we're going. If you look at the original logo of the property that was established, it was really all under the premise, if you think back to an earlier call where we said we believed that we can create the AAA of homes. And coming off of the quarter that we just had, it's hard to cleanse your mind of some of those negative numbers and to move into this future state, but we would ask you to do your best to try to do that. We are very optimistic about not only the viability of what we're going to show you but the viability of our core business. The icons itself…

That's correct. Yes.

Okay. So we can adjust this, and we'll be happy to do that by taking this and even applying it to this metric as well. Dave?

So we spent a lot of time on this. Tim, why don't you come up and join us? We spent a lot of time on these areas of key focus and how we're going to restore the core business to where it needs to be and where it was before. And I'm not going to get into these on this particular page other than to kind of tee that up earlier for you. But these are the 4 areas: marketing efficiency; sales growth, which is really conversion that we're focusing on; margin; and then expense management that Adrianne spoke with you about. Next slide. So what I'd like to do is get into showing you some historical data. So these are the previous quarters, starting with the most recent here, 17%, the third quarter of 2024. And you can see from a sales and marketing as a percent of revenue standpoint exactly where in the partial quarter, sales and marketing expense rose to 15% and then to 18% and has been up in that high level. Now we've talked about all the specifics about what happened with the brands and how we're unwinding that, but there are also some marketing efficiencies that we find really exciting in this partnership. So we want to spend some time on that bar column of optimization. Bed Bath & Beyond was known for advertising its moments, capitalizing on the moments: when the baby is born and the shower, the wedding and the gift registry, back to college with your student. And I would guess, in fact, if we asked how many of you were a part of Bed Bath & Beyond in your life, in you're going back to college scenario, I think many of you would raise your hand on that. As you…

This idea around the omnichannel presence is very simple. It's a combination of the conversion and/or growth of small box stores through the Kirkland's brand, meaning that existing Kirkland's stores would convert not to just putting Bed Bath products on the shelf but name off the building, new product inside, looking like a hyper focused, highly curated model of what Bed Bath used to be. Bed Bath used to be 25,000 to 35,000 square feet, and 90% of the revenue came from 40% of the assortment. And when you really study what that 40% of the assortment was, it becomes a supply chain game at that point. Marketing efficiency is always driven when there's an omnichannel experience, and people can see and touch and be reminded that the business exists. Unfortunately, today, the only reminder are old signs on old buildings that are sitting empty today. And many customers who we e-mail often contact the call center and say, is this a scam? Is this spam? We thought the company went out of business. So part of the strategy of bringing Bed Bath & Beyond, the brand and the offering back to life in an omnichannel way, in an asset-light way, in a risk-free way for our company is to remind people that the company is back. There has been a lot of press in the last 7 days about Bed Bath & Beyond opening stores again. We always see a bump in traffic to the website any time that happens. Over time, it is our expectation that a combination of reminding customers that the business exists, getting and capturing their information at a 0 cost basis because they're giving us their information in the register, we're not having to induce them into a transaction and allowing them to enjoy…

Free to ask questions?

Please.

Maybe on that point, when you think about the optimization of discounting, other potential drivers of the improvement in gross margin, I would imagine are sort of first cost improvements, mix changes right from the business. So can we get some contextualization around the various -- certain components of the bridge, right? Like, how much is sort of visible -- sort of first cost benefit that get negotiated already? And then just sort of working through the inventory lots, mix, discounting, anything I'm missing?

Yes. No. I don't believe that the gap from 21.2% to 25% has anything to do with adjusting first cost, 0. We're giving no credit to that. We're giving no credit to mix shift either. We're giving 100% of the attribution from 21.2% to 25% of selling the product at the right place at the right time. Bed Bath & Beyond cannot effectively and profitably sell large ticket furniture rugs and patio on its site profitably. Overstock.com has historically and will continue to sell large ticket items at a double or triple contribution margin from what Bed Bath can do. In a very short period of time, Overstock is already ramped up to be approximately a $200 million run rate business. As we move things over, we think that's going to continue to accelerate. But not until several weeks ago, and I want to spend some time on this, did we actually start spending specific dollars on specific SKUs at Overstock? We had not done that until about 3, 4 weeks ago.

Couple of weeks ago, yes. In fact, that takes us to the sales.

But let's stay on the margin for just a second.

So here's what we saw. We took a chunk of SKUs. We took 10% of the spend that we were spending on Bed Bath & Beyond, and we moved it over to Overstock. And on those products, leaving the SKUs in both places, when we move that spend over to Overstock, for that category, we saw a 90% increase in sales in the first week -- or 90% of the sales that we've experienced in the first week on 50% of the dollar spend that was required on Bed Bath. Now...

Yes, may be on that you're talking about profitable orders for the goal. So I don't know if you can maybe give an example on how that sort of changed. Maybe, one, define how you define profitable order? And then two, how did that change sort of improved mix of profitable orders versus non-profitable orders?

So that contribution margin is how we defined a profitable transaction, which includes multiple layers. You may want to go into that.

Multiple frictionals that play into the contribution margin, whether it's discounting, freight, ad spend, different components that we put in there, sponsored marketing that goes into it from the partner. But the one that you got to think about is it didn't require the same amount of discounting. And that's what improves the bottom line. But -- and that's why I was just kind of holding out, Marcus, that the sales and marketing, that particular example has more to do with how we go from 16.7% to 12.0%. And that is -- and this is a really important point. In the first week of transitioning, 10% of our ad spend to a campaign on a different website and getting 90% of the sales and only requiring 50% of the spend to do that is significant. It's even more significant when you realize that's the first week. And it typically takes up to 4 weeks for Google algorithm PLA spending to burn in. It will get better. Our anticipation, I'm not going to guess what it will be, but we're already seeing the 90% become 92% and 94%. We expect it to get over 100% and still be at significantly less dollars required on Google to get that same amount of sales.

So how that correlates to margin is there's less site sale. Because when conversion starts to rise and I'm not having to induce people with an extra [ 10 ] an extra [ 20 ], we see them not moving around in their cart and walking away from it, and we send them another e-mail. That margin from 27% down to 21.2% is not mix. And I don't want anybody to try to convince anybody that it's a mix issue. It's an overpromotion issue, trying to generate revenue off of a terrible conversion.

So if we were to get segment level P&L today, based on the $200 million run rate of sales in Overstock.com...

Which you don't get, but so we're going to have to be careful. Yes.

But we're sort of already operating at these levels.

You should anticipate that the contribution margin on an Overstock transaction is materially more profitable on those SKUs than it ever has been from the merger to now on Bed Bath. Materially more profitable.

Yes, materially. And it has been.

To be candid, more than the number that's in the column.

Yes. And has been from launch. And as we apply ad spend, as we apply promotions holds. Because the customer understands it, the customer knows it. The customer comes to Overstock with those power categories in mind. That's what it was known -- that's what the brand was known for.

So one challenge is improving the margin on the Bed Bath transactions?

No. It's improving the margin on all transactions.

Okay. So the recent news is adding physical component to essentially sales for all the brand. How about adding Container Store sales? How about adding Kirkland sales to improve the margin on all brands.

So when -- and he asked about negotiating first cost down. This idea that Beyond has an influence with vendors in an asset like no risk-taking model to get people to lower their prices is just -- it's nonsense. It's not possible. Because when you think about the compression that the vendors have taken on inflation, on freight and everything else, their willingness to hold all of the goods on their books, have all the 3PL issues on their books and then us to be able to press -- put a website up and drop ship product, our inability to move that needle has been obvious for probably 4 or 5 months. . Yes, are there certain vendors where we've gotten improvements? Absolutely. Is it material enough to get us to our goal of 27%? Not possible. So the idea behind the transaction with Container Store -- the potential transaction with Container Store and the completed transaction with Kirkland's is to put Bed Bath & Beyond back into an omnichannel experience. It's going to have nothing to do with the consumer. But when we look at that cooperative negotiation between a said vendor and we can offer them more distribution, shelf presence and the ability to buy product and put it in the warehouse, we believe that the wholesale prices that typical retailers enjoy from those vendors will then be passed on to its asset-light partner. Our ability to find incremental return on investment from those potential transactions is far greater than the surface economics that you see. It is our belief, and we've validated that already that if you sit with [indiscernible] or any vendor that you can think of that was historically part of the Bed Bath assortment and you can bring them retail assortment back again, you…

On that topic of customer acquisition costs and partnerships, can you just talk about kind of bridging that 16.7% for sales and marketing to at 11% for mid-cycle or later? There's a lot of talk about this unified loyalty program and you're going to be able to take the e-mail addresses you have, along with Kirkland and Container Store. So like, maybe just give us some more meat there in terms of knowing the customer more and how that's going to help you shape up those couple of hundred basis points in terms of better [indiscernible].

So before we get to the optimized state, I want to stay into what we know the pro forma should have looked like, had we not merged these 2 sites together. And I hate to keep coming back to that. But this column here is what we believe the performance would have been if Bed Bath and Overstock always operated as 2 sites, and we never destroyed the optimization that Overstock had. And rather than having revision this history, it's taking us way too much time and way too much money to get back to that state. But we believe it. And if you go back and you look at the average order improvement, holding the active order and customer frequency, the G&A and tech expense and the gross margin sequential improvement, that's what gives us confidence, a lot of confidence to make this a more idealistic state for us without any macro improvements and without any optimization of the transactions. We just want to make sure that we don't leave this column without you understanding that it is our belief that if all the SKUs are back at Overstock the way they're supposed to be and the Bed Bath & Beyond current site is curated to what the customer knows it should be and the PLA spend is appropriately allocated to the SKUs on the appropriate sites and conversion just gets back to the lowest number in the band of average that Overstock enjoyed before -- the lowest number, I think, in that input, is it [ 16% ], Alex? That is below the company's lowest level of conversion ever, ever. And I hate to oversimplify it. It is literally wrong -- right SKUs, wrong place.

Product transition [indiscernible] follow-up question will be when will you look at Bed Bath in terms of growth, sort of maybe cannibalize sales as a transition?

Can I -- let me answer the last part first. Bed Bath will continue to drop as you move the hyper focus of furniture, rugs and patio away from there, and we expect that shift to start to show up over at Overstock. The contribution margin of selling furniture at Bed Bath is candidly negative to 0 on a good day. The contribution margin historically at Overstock was...

10%.

In our thesis, we only have it at 7%. So we're not -- we don't want to fill this room with anything other than the lowest possible performance. I want to talk about the SKUs.

So on the SKUs. When you think about moving these SKUs, I got to take you back to something Marcus just said about the domain authority that we lost with Overstock. If we were to pick up the SKUs that are the most important SKUs for Overstock that are currently on Bed Bath and move them all at once, catastrophe. We would see sales plummet. This would be...

$100 million.

$100 million. We would be in big trouble. And so we have to -- we have SEO strategies that we're working on. Overstock is moving through that. We pulled that website up 6 months earlier than we had intended to launch it. The team busted it. They wanted to make this happen. But we launched it without some experiences that in hindsight, we probably should have waited a little bit longer, maybe not the full 6 months, but maybe taking another couple of months to get it right. As we have begun pulling SKUs off, we are seeing SEO rebound. We're up to about 8-ish percent of Overstock being that SEO portion of the traffic, that organic traffic coming in. We've got a long ways to go with that. We're going to continue in a very methodical approach to move those SKUs over. But on the 1st of August, when the site went from being red to blue, and the redirect and we lose all domain authority for Overstock, that is all with Bed Bath, all the buying guides, all the history, all the deep links. All that is on Bed Bath & Beyond. So we're building that site from scratch, and it's going to take a few months to even the end of the year, end of 2025 to get there.

A lot of the SKUs are already there. It's really where are we spending the marketing dollars. And in an effort to really prove out our thesis in anticipation of today when we started to move $1 million, $0.5 million on very specific categories that were endemic to Overstock going back to the file, telling people things were back. We not only noticed the conversion has doubled since Overstock launched, has doubled. It's still below the Overstock standard, but it has doubled. What we saw that was more glaring to us is how conversion started to go up, how discounting started to go down and how margin performance started to go up. A good contributor, a big contributor to the margin improvement here has been the sequential rollout of Overstock. Every single quarter, we went from like $100 million run rate to a $200 million run rate with no real ad spend. That incremental margin improvement and the one that we're telling you we believe is on track to happen in Q4, another 50 basis points, is coming from moving it from one pocket to the other. We just can't move it fast enough. And I don't say that to be tongue in cheek. We can't move it fast enough because we're tired of losing money. And because we know exactly what would fix the problem, we have this urge to rip the Band-Aid off and just move everything tomorrow. What the smartest people in the room outside of our company and inside of our company has said, if you want to kill everything, go do it. So you got to just figure out how to spend less, pull things back and contract and have everybody understand in the market that for a short period of time, what you're trying…

Can you talk about how many quarters it will take to get to these kind of medium-term targets? And kind of -- Adrianne, how much cash do you think it will require between now and then?

So we're not going to make the mistake that I made once before by giving you a solid date on when it's going to happen. But what I am going to tell you is that we believe it's a couple to a few quarters. And we also believe that you're going to, for the first time, not see 10% improvement in EBITDA quarter-over-quarter, but you're going to see a material improvement in EBITDA year-over-year. This fourth quarter will be the first quarter that there is no noise in the numbers, because Q3 of last year had about 36 days of just Overstock at the high levels of conversion, the high levels of margin, and then the balance was a train wreck from there. It was a difficult situation. As we move forward and you see Q4, we're expecting to be up in revenue from Q3 to Q4. We're expecting to be up in margin from Q3 to Q4. We're expecting to be adjusted EBITDA, because we have some RIF costs in there, up materially from Q4 of last year and an improvement to Q3 of this year. And there's no magic to it. It's conversion improving and margin improving and SG&A reducing. I truly believe that we will start to accelerate some of those changes as we get into January because we don't want to risk our Q4 revenue when things are very active. I would expect that Dave will start to accelerate more than just 10% movement at a time. But we still want to be really scientific about it. On the cash side, do you want to address that?

Sure. Just a couple of things. I think on the onset, we talked about did enter into a contract to sell our headquarters. So we'll expect a cash inflow here in the fourth quarter for that, which will be helpful. We obviously continue to have things on our balance sheet that we want to monetize. We have some direct investments in some blockchain companies as well as an indirect interest, what I think everybody in this room is aware of. So we'll continue to monetize our assets. And then as we improve our profitability and begin our journey to kind of a cash flow neutral, we think we'll be able to do that journey with the things I just mentioned.

So that's pricing perspective historically we've seen really consistent as Overstock demand and competition. How do you think about -- what have you guys learned I guess, in the last 6 to 12 months about how to more effectively price? And I mean, in theory, that's both a sales opportunity and also a margin opportunity just given how wide some of those gaps have been historically. So I think it ties in, I would just love to hear some feedback on that.

You can imagine. When you do what we did to Overstock by layering over Bed Bath & Beyond, the shock to the algorithm, the pricing algorithms, in that instance. When -- what those price algorithms are optimizing to, is product margin. And when we start looking at these SKUs and the performance of them and the conversion, it sends things into a bit of a tailspin. And what we've seen is with our pricing that -- and I'll go back to the example we talked about with gross margin. The exact same SKU with the exact same price and cost on Bed Bath versus Overstock, 1 sales, one requires discounting. And so our pricing has been a little bit shaky, partially because on Bed Bath to try and make up some of this loss of discounting that we've had to do. We've been testing price elasticity wherever we could to find a little bit of room here and there. While on Overstock, we just keep the price the exact same right now. To the point earlier with SEO transition and moving products over, it's going to take us a little bit of time to really bifurcate the assortment so that one's on one. Others, the right products are on Bed Bath, the right products are on Overstock. But it's going to take us some time to do that. And the algorithms will find their way back to competitive targets. We scrape the market. So we know somebody had produced a report in here on our competitive pricing, and they were dead on with what we understood as well. But in trying to accomplish this -- meaning that we had raised prices. And so as we looked at our margin improvement, that was a part of it. Now it was done through price elasticity testing and only leaving it if we could get there.

Yes, sir?

Can you talk about that cash flow structure for a moment. There's question cash and cash run rate [indiscernible] does it make sense to use leverage on debt. Does it make sense to use your ATM and the other question is was the ATM tapped this past quarter.

The ATM was not tapped this past quarter. We did secure a $25 million revolver from BMO as a bridge to the sale of the building, and we want to keep that flexibility out there. I'm not a fan of leverage in a business like this. I would prefer not to. When we made the very difficult decision to lay off 20% of our workforce, that's an acknowledgment that the overall cost structure needs to be restructured. When I look at the balance sheet and I look at some of the assets that are on there -- and by the way, David Goone is expected to be here right after the first break to talk about tZERO, and we're attempting to get a hold of Luis from GrainChain, who's at a conference. It is something that we look at, how do we explore different options with the blockchain Medici assets? We invited Pelion to come today. They declined for whatever reason. But we will be filling you in on some of those things a little later and exploring those assets and other IP that we have inside the company is also an option. For those of you who don't remember, we sold Wamsutta for $10 million. And we have some other things that we think we can monetize here. I would prefer to manage with what we have right now. That would be my preference. And to keep a very tight, rigorous focus because as we look at how we're all incentivized, anything that we do to put us further away from that optionality is not a good thing. We don't want to do bad things for the business. And so we want to make sure we're making the right decisions about how we're allocating capital and how we're thinking about using cash. Right now, it's about fixing the core business, getting the SKUs back to the right sites, improving conversion, which ultimately improves margin. And we think, had some of those things just been average, today's conversation would be very different. There is no increase in any site traffic at all, no increase in demand in that number. There is just the adjustment on a hypothetical basis of going from just under [ 13% ] in conversion to below the company's lowest historical conversion average ever. And that's what that would have resulted in. We feel confident in putting that up there because we see the early results of doing that piece by piece, and we see the sequential margin improvement. Are we worried about cash? I'll just ask that question for myself. Yes. We think about it every day. That's a finite thing. We also like the fact that we don't have interest payments to make and covenants to deal with. We think that's even a better thing, to be honest. Yes, sir?

[indiscernible] on allocating capital by investing in Container Store and Kirkland. So if you're monitoring cash why invest in those?

Well, the Kirkland's transaction is nothing more than a swap of cash out of a debt asset that cost us $8 million to keep into an active asset where we're going to be getting an interest rate, a collaboration fee, a licensing fee and bringing Bed Bath & Beyond stores back in an omnichannel way without us taking an ounce of risk, other than the loan and the investment. . So that's taking a debt asset and turning it into a working asset that we ultimately believe, and we'll get to it a little later, will increase traffic, will increase gross margin, will increase a lot of things. And we'll own 40% of a business that we think has a very bright future because pre-COVID that business was profitable. Pre-COVID, Kirkland's was profitable.

Marcus, just to take a step back, I'm kind of curious what Overstock will be when it grows up?

The website?

Yes. Because it seems like it's gone through a couple of different iterations over the last 6 to 12 months. I mean, my impression was it was a home furnishings website, then you went to make it a closeout website, get back to its roots but very focused on closeout. And now I think you're going back to a more of a broader home furnishings, like everyday low price offering. But, I guess, I'm confused what Overstock will be a year from now?

What it is today that you see on the site is what we hope it's going to be years from now, which is a combination of things that it did a decade ago -- 5 years ago before it decided to become a home retailer and it got rid of $400 million of revenue or...

$200 million. Roughly $200 million.

[indiscernible] million revenue from apparel and jewelry. We want to put that back. If you could flash back time to when Overstock sold furniture and rugs and patio and jewelry and footwear and apparel, and it did so with the closeout mentality, which is what the brand is, that is the business that we are building towards again.

And what you'll find interesting about the Overstock of old, that is why we're launching jewelry, why we're launching beauty, why apparel. They are high frequency visit categories. You get a lot of traffic. And the Overstock customer is at her core, at his core, they are a treasure hunter. They love the thrill of the hunt. They're smart. They're smart, value-driven buyers. And you need those product categories. We almost -- we call them traffic bait. They are the traffic drivers to get you to the website. When we set out a decade ago, 2 decades ago, we didn't set out on Overstock to make home goods the core of our business. Home goods evolved into the core of our business from all of the other categories. People are comfortable buying area rugs. They're comfortable buying furniture, case goods, upholstered furniture, and they're comfortable buying 7-piece patio sets for $1,800. They'll buy diamond rings for $8,000. That's the Overstock customer. It's not about a cheap price point. It is a very unique customer base that is very loyal. And as we bring back those things that they loved, we'll see the continued acquisition cost reduction because of those product categories that drive the high frequency visit to our site. People don't frequently come and check out, hey, I wonder what sofa they have this week. But they do come and check out, I wonder what apparel closeouts they have or what liquidation buys are taking advantage of.

Overstock is built on the value proposition, unlike Big Lots, that was built on how much junk can you put in the giant box. What consumers want is they want a heck of a deal, and that's what Overstock was known for. And when they started to narrow it down to just the home, it subjected itself to an unexpected macro environment where rates took off to 20-year highs, housing starts dropped, housing sales dropped and home improvement dropped at the same time, and it had nothing else to lean on. That whole value category even around luxury jewelry had been taken away from it, and it became singularly too dependent on 1 silo that has some cyclicality to it. We don't believe that the apparel, jewelry, beauty piece has as much cyclicality. And we went back and looked at the evidence from years past, yes, the average order was a little lower, but the profitability in the margin was exceptionally higher. In fact, I think there were some quarters that was over 28%, high-27s, low-28s when the jewelry and the apparel was selling.

And in the [ 2.2, 2.3 ] conversion levels.

Which we're not predicting, we're going to get back to anytime soon.

Last one on this. I've studied close out for a long time. So most closeout retailers, they're not 100% closeout. Big Lots, Ollies, others. There's a branded closeout element, and there's an engineered closeout where it's just everyday low price. Where will Overstock land or where was that in 2019, just so we can help frame this?

Those 2 places that you just described, a pure markup markdown retailer understands how to value engineer certain closeouts by buying bulks or big lots of things. I want to remind everybody that Overstock is still an asset-light environment. So when you talk about Big Lots and they buy hundreds of millions of couches in an engineered program, that still is capital that's out there, that's still warehousing, there's still a lot of fixed costs. We don't get to enjoy that at the same level that a Big Lots would, but we don't get to take on all the fixed costs that a Big Lots would. In our belief, Overstock is a perfect combination of both value-engineered sourcing and closeouts. In the last 24 months prior to today, it abandoned the whole closeout environment. And it just became who's willing, what marketplace vendor is willing to sell Overstock product under a construct of as much as 40% or 50% off. That was really what happened. I think as we go forward today, we need to convince people by showing them products that are true values. So part of the Kirkland's transaction and part of the Container Store transaction and part of any other affiliate transaction that may not require an investment is to require those companies to list their aged inventory on Overstock. That is an absolute mandate, not because we think they're about inventory managers because they need to get better returns and Overstock needs to continue to find value in a way that isn't always something they have to take on to their balance sheet. So to dig into [ Amy's ] warehouse or into Amy's stores or into Container Stores warehouse and have access at a predetermined contribution margin that will sit on the site with name brands and other things that are very familiar to people, we believe gives Overstock another competitive advantage. And in a future state, many, many years from now, it wouldn't surprise me if either Kirkland's or Container Store decided to open up a collective outlet because we still have to deal with returns. We still have to deal with open box. We still have to deal with damaged goods. So we look at improving margin, part of optimizing margin is improving returns. Part of optimizing margin is making sure that we don't have to sell it all the jobbers ourselves at $0.10 on the dollar. We need to try to keep that all inside the ecosystem to the best of our ability. And Overstock is the one thing that gives Kirkland's and Container Store a competitive advantage that they did not have before. And it's not a choice. What else on this slide? Yes, sir?

Just because it's recent for the tech and G&A, the 20% reduction in force, any more color there? I mean, it feels like it was partially some of the tech staff?

No.

Okay. So any more color in terms of who is impacted and any thoughts in terms of potential business disruption?

Yes. The tech stack, the true tech stack -- and Guncha, do you want to come speak to this? We'll hand you a mic.

All right. Thank you. So the recent reduction that we did a couple of days ago, that wasn't -- that did not impact the technology team at all. So that doesn't mean that we're not looking at the full outsourcing model and finding cost optimization efficiencies on the technology team side. We are actively working on it and doing it in a very phased manner. So we have selected outsourcing partner, and we are working very closely to do it in a phased manner so we don't interrupt the business or add any risk, but the most recent reduction in force did not have any technology team.

It had -- you're probably referring to the named officer on the product side. And for -- to be as direct as I can and as respectful as I can, I function in a meritocracy, hard stop. And when things don't perform the way they're supposed to perform, we function in a meritocracy. We took out more than 150 people, which was an awful day for us. We believe that our business will be faster and smarter and leaner and quicker. And our ability to influence change wasn't moving fast enough. And our ability to show growth in conversion wasn't moving fast enough. And our ability to work with vendors to find ways to improve margin wasn't working fast enough. We have brought back a lot of people that had been previously let go by the previous regime that are key components to the Overstock business. And so as we sell that building and we move to a much smaller B-class space, that building is going to be filled with a lot of old and familiar faces to the Overstock brand.

So one of the structures that we're really excited about, we have 2 leaders from the old Overstock and 1 of the best home furnishings merchants that I know in the industry. We have them leading as general managers, full P&L management of the Bed Bath & Beyond brand and the Overstock brand. And they are singularly tasked with the responsibility of executing on each of these line items. And we'll get into more details later today of some of the tactical strategies and surgical strategies that we have in place that they are executing against. But no more is it a chief over all these different brands. It is dedicated at the business -- the book of business at the P&L.

And taking specific responsibility for each one of these things. When you have an app in the third quarter not functioning with the level of efficiency that you need it to, it impacts conversion. When you have product on the wrong site or the site experience isn't good, you have problems with conversion. And problems with conversion lead to site sale, which leads to margin compression. So as that conversion fixes itself, it not only fixes revenue, but it dramatically improves margin. And we've seen that really quickly here. The other 2 columns here are nothing more than illustrative that if the general macro environment started to get better, what would it look like? 10%, 20%. These are hypotheticals, and all they're doing is just laying on top of these 3 key metrics getting resolved. This particular column here is what we're going to save for after the break as we take you through how we're transforming the business from an asset-light model to even a more asset-light model. Any other questions? Yes, sir?

Two-part question. Sorry if I missed this, but what in the illustrative environment columns is like the final split of the business between Overstock and Bed Bath? And then second part, great to hear about the 10% of the SKUs that you kind of migrated over. I guess, maybe the devil's advocate argument would be, well, maybe that was the lowest hanging fruit. You guys kind of targeted the SKUs that made the most sense. So can -- what can you say to kind of give investors confidence that this will apply across the board as you fully transition the entire business?

I'll take the first one, you take the second one? Okay. We don't report the brand separately at this time. It is our hope in the future as Overstock gains more scale, that in a perfect world, we would break out all of the different banners that we own.

So the makeup of that first move involves a particular product category and then all of the low sellers because what we wanted to do -- low sellers on Bed Bath & Beyond. What we wanted to do was make sure we didn't pull the best sellers on Overstock or on Bed Bath & Beyond over to Overstock and hurt Bed Bath and not gain on Overstock. So 1 product category, and the rest are the low sellers on Bed Bath & Beyond that we moved over. Now you could argue that that's cherry picking. I would argue, the best is yet to come. Because when I take the patio sets that are working on Bed Bath & Beyond. But that I know when I don't have to mark them down quite as much, don't have to play as much marketing spend and discounting. And I moved them over to Overstock and I've got the traffic coming, I believe, we have a better result than what I told you was the first result. I don't think it's cherry picked.

Any other questions before the break? We're going to take a quick 5-minute break, and then we'll jump back in. We'll start with an update on the Medici assets, and then we'll move into the strategy.

How are you monitoring, I guess, your progress? What would be like the KPIs for tZERO to see how you're doing? I think it's amazing you've got 1 of the 2 [ definitions ].

Yes. So it's a good question. So I think there are several aspects to that question. So the first thing I would say in my KPIs was getting the technology right, securing the right -- so internally, I look at things like do we get the primary built, did we integrate primary into secondary, special-purpose broker-dealer, all these types of things there. Other KPIs are reducing cash spend and number of clients we can bring on and then goals within different areas. So one of the things we're working on, for example, and things take time, but we provide white-label solutions for entities for both primary and secondary markets. And one of my focuses have been, let's call it, alternative nontraditional assets. So whether it's in sports entertainment. We did one with the hotel business with St. Regis Aspen, which was the first hotel to digitize its shares. So those types of things. We look at the number of goals that we are getting the pipeline where we're at. I should add one more thing we have is another company called Verify. We own, I think, 81% of it, which is the leading accreditation software or firm that does particularly Reg D offerings. So 506(c). So 506(b), that's when people come to me or you or private equity offerings and they know you. When it's 506(c), they're doing general solicitation after you have a third-party verify it. Quote/unquote, the name Verify. They're the largest person. So on that one, those are easy KPIs. We meet every week, what's your monthly revenue. That's a cash positive business that's doing quite well. I think that's it. I don't know if I answered all your questions. I mean obviously, we have revenue goals and things like that internally on a variety of the projects we're working in.

David, Dan Weiskopf here. So bring us up to speed in the context of balance sheet risk, where you are in that, meaning you need capital immediately. And then also speak a little bit about how your business model works. When do you get revenues?

Sure. Right. So in terms of balancing -- I was just talking to Adrianne. We just took a little longer than I'd like, but finishing our audit. No issues for 18 months. You have to make sure you're around for 18 months. We're around for 18 months. No problem. And I have plans of certain things we can do should we need more capital. So I would say I don't have any concerns in that area. In regards to, I'm sorry, your second part of the question, which was -- oh, yes, business model. So how we generate revenue, it's pretty straightforward. We generate it in several ways. We generate it in primary or secondary. There's initial upfront fees. Then there's transaction fees. And then when we're getting into some of these white-label deals, what I decided to do is also try and get a percentage of the business. So we have several of these. I won't tell you the percentage, but for example, in the hotel one, we're going to own a percentage -- a decent percent of the business. So if it works and even if the technology evolves outside of the world of tZERO, we're going to own a percentage of the business. So I think those are kind of the pillars of what I'm trying to do, is get a percentage of some businesses where we have true partners and we're all aligned. Transaction revenue, and then usually, what I'll call consulting and revenue upfront. Now as we add the digital assets piece, we're also going to have custodial fees and things like that, which get more into asset under management type percentages. I hope that answers your question.

David. So with tZERO, there's been a couple of different theories out there that this could be a huge business, and it could also be a niche business. Maybe just help frame it up. Do you think it's going to be focused on the tokenization of assets? The other pitch is that Wall Street has an outdated settlement system with T+2. Inherent in your name is tZERO. So there's a capability here that could be more broadly used across Wall Street. You have a great background, a lot of connections. So help us understand the real opportunity.

So in the -- I would say we're not even in the first inning in the digital asset. You see lots of people spending a lot of money on the digital asset or digital security, real-world assets, getting in there. So there's definitely opportunity for us as that business grows. I don't know that in the securities world, which is now going to [ T+1 ], I think. So I used to be on the Board of the DTCC, which is the settlement for all securities. I think technology-wise, I think -- I'm sure they could do tZERO. Today, it's not that. It's the infrastructure of all the banks, all the broker-dealers and how they intermesh in their systems. So I think in public securities, that's not really where we sit. We sit more in the market prior to it. And with ICE's investment, we're kind of, hopefully, the conveyor belt as people get into the public securities. But I do believe we are in the very first innings of real-world asset digitization. And if you look at all the large companies getting into that space and putting a lot of money into it, I think we're situated very well to capitalize on that infrastructure, if that answers your question. But I really -- just to be clear, I don't think on the public security thing that's just going to be a big consortium. Maybe we have some things and some IP that might work in that way, but I wouldn't -- I don't see them all running to somewhere else. They already have their consortium.

So first off, Luis, congratulations on your success. I'm very impressed by how you're empowering farmers. The exponential growth is also very impressive. I wanted to know if you could give a high-level explanation of your business model. Do you have a SaaS revenue model with elements of onetime revenue, recurring revenue? And are there examples where you get a percent of the volume?

So thank you for your question. So you kind of hit it on the nail. We are a SaaS platform where we receive monthly fees for the implementation of the infrastructure. So a lot of our farming institutions are paying us on a monthly basis to be able to use the software. But we do. We get a percentage of all of the transactions that they conduct. So our revenue model is based off of a monthly SaaS, which covers all of the 5 suite of products that they're using on a monthly basis. But we are also getting a percentage of the buy and the sale of every one of these. But we are also getting a percentage of all the liquidity that we're deploying. So when a bank -- when a financial institution works with us, when they deploy the funds, we get a percentage of that deployment. And when they receive the funds back, we get a percentage of that deployment. On products like our logistics right -- similar to the ride-sharing apps, we get a percentage of every truck that comes and leaves that gets paid for from every farm that gets deposited to every port. So we do have multiple revenue streams, and all of those revenue streams are growing at an accelerated rate.

Any other questions? In the Q that is going to be filed shortly, there are disclosures around what our stake is both in tZERO and GrainChain directly and indirectly as well. So we're very pleased, and we're excited by both of these assets, and we think they provide a lot of upside for the company. And we also appreciate our relationship directly with both of you. So if there are no more questions, Luis, thank you very much for all you do and keep hustling. We appreciate it. Thank you.

Thank you very much.

David, thank you as well.

Maybe just a follow-up on that. As we think about timing of the 5 stores that Kirkland's is testing next year, I mean, where are we in sort of the phase of development of the store model? I don't know if you could speak to capital cost of the stores or of the conversions, the timing, right? Are we sort of in the process of identifying what locations we want to test. And maybe if you could speak to sort of the demographic profile and the setting of those 5 stores. Are you testing urban, college sort of campus markets? What are we sort of targeting in the test and looking to identify?

So we are on week 1 of sort of kicking off our collaboration. And Jen here is going to be my key partner within the Beyond organization. Jen has a ton of legacy Bed Bath experience. And so it is our goal to bring back the iconic legacy exactly what she expects from it. From a timing and real estate perspective, if you ask Marcus, the store would open tomorrow. If you ask me, it's probably early 2025. We want to look at the real estate strategy from our vantage point of where does Kirkland's do really well and where does Kirkland's have good brand recognition. But we have a lot of areas where we don't. And so if I think of the East Coast, Jersey. That's sort of where we're looking for those first few stores. We obviously want to get it right the first time because everything you heard today about sort of the confusion of the brand and how we need to make sure that the brand comes back holistically for both of our companies, it's important that we get it right during that pilot. And then we'll do a fast follow from there.

Other questions about that particular topic? Okay. As it relates to The Container Store -- oh, yes, sorry.

The 5 stores is a nice start. I mean I know it's early 1 week in, but what's the vision here? And it seems like it has to be 100-plus stores to become a reasonable licensing fee to Beyond.

Before we get into how many stores get open and what the licensing fee is, it is in our best interest to drive the overall revenue of Kirkland's because we enjoy a 0.25% just on that, absent the Bed Bath & Beyond stores. So before one Bed Bath & Beyond store opens, we will be getting 0.25% on $500 million. Our motivation to drive that and to do it prudently and wisely is to also make sure that Kirkland's balance sheet doesn't get out of whack again. So we also see the opportunity, Peter, to be able to grow that online. We think that Kirkland's online experience doing $117 million -- we see a ton of opportunity there. They also have great traffic, also struggle with conversion like we all do. And we see an opportunity to widen the assortment not to furniture and other crazy things out of the gates but to certain things that we believe their design team and that particular customer is going to enjoy.

And I would say if you look at the historic Bed Bath numbers and think about it in a neighborhood format, it should do multiples of what the average Kirkland's store does. So we would be very aggressive in a store growth format. You also think about the potential Container Store opportunity and how do we strategize the 2 of those together to make sure that the real estate strategy has looked at holistically from the brand. We spend a lot of time talking about that. With multiple partners in the mix, the brand has to be consistent. The brand standards have to be consistent, and we have to look at it as one customer experience.

I think the thing that was also surprising to us is that more than 90% of the Kirkland's stores are 4-wall positive. That number is much higher than that, but it's more than 90%. And so this isn't about taking underperforming Kirkland's locations and thinking that the Band-Aid is Bed Bath & beyond. It's understanding where did Bed Bath & Beyond perform really, really well and what sort of store concentration does Kirkland's have today, can that store concentration in said market be bifurcated and can an average of $1.2 million to $1.5 million become $2.5 million to $3.5 million to $5 million. So we get the bump on the 3% royalty growth that happens there, but we also get that extra 0.25 points. I think from my perspective, and I know she was kidding that I would want it tomorrow, I don't want it tomorrow. The reason that I don't want it tomorrow is that I want everybody to take their time and make sure that, that first store, that first set of 5 stores is reminiscent of the days when Bed Bath & Beyond was at its best execution, where we weren't trying to create private label to solve everything in the box, where we're recognizing that the top-tier national brands need a place to be sold on a daily basis. And whether that's the SharkNinjas or whether that's -- whatever it may be, we know that those vendors are excited to get back in front of customers. We also know that a customer doesn't want a new slick, modern day experience. And so you should expect these stores to physically look, aesthetically feel like they did 15 years ago, very simple, very stark in terms of its assortment with the white Formica shelves and bins. We believe…

Marcus, I'd love to chime in on that actually. That Bed Bath & Beyond store that's right across the street was the top-performing college store because of its proximity to the NYU campus. So when we start to look at the proximity, to your question before, in college markets and re-unlock pack and hold, there's a ton of upside.

Yes. The Container Store was also attractive for one simple reason. I love durable goods, but I don't love durable goods as I love services businesses. And if you unpack the Container Store, about 1/3 of its revenue comes from its custom spaces business, and the margins are in excess of 70%. It reminds me of an automobile repair shop, which I have some familiarity with, and understanding that you need to have transactions to build the moat and the database around driving those services business. What has been restrictive for Container Store is its inability to distribute that alpha product, its inability to communicate that custom spaces businesses outside of its core 100-store footprint. It is my expectation that as Amy opens up small neighborhood stores, that in the corner of the store, will also be a custom spaces consultant. And if anybody has ever been in there, they design it for you, you give them the space, they give you the quote and we'll talk about how we're going to help them pay for that as well. So the Container Store is a really different animal than Kirkland's. And just for clarity's sake, Amy and her team will be driving 100% of the in-store vision for any place that Bed Bath & Beyond exists in the world. So Container Store will be participating in complying with -- that's a too strong of a word, but I don't know what other word to use, the assortment the look, the feel, the messaging, the signage, the promotional cadence, they will be the exact same to avoid a customer walking in and having a different experience. We're already working with a list of premier vendors. If you take yourself back to the old days, whether it's Calphalon or Cuisinart or whatever…

Just going back to Container Store. Let's say the deal is done, financing is done...

Well, there's more than just the deal getting done, like a lot of stuff is going to have to be done.

Exactly. So I guess the question is, how do you see it launching within the Container Store with Bed, Bath & Beyond model? And does it go in lockstep with what you're doing Kirkland's. So if you're saying a pilot store and then 5 stores by the end of the year, is that the same as what's going to happen for the most part, at the Container Store, it will be different?

Same brand standard, this is how I would answer that question. Their real estate strategy, yet to be determined at this point. But the expectation would be that it is a good, better best, a small-medium-large strategy for the store format and for the assortment, and that direction would come from the Kirkland's team alongside Jen and the Container Store would implement that in appropriately sized spaces within their stores.

It is our expectation, from a timing standpoint, that it happened probably a little faster than what's happening at Kirkland's for one simple reason. It's easy to distill down the assortment inside of the Container Store that you know is not go-forward inventory. And if you visit the one on Sixth Avenue and you walked in there and you knew nothing about this business at all, you would do what a lot of people do, including people that work there. You look at things and you scratch your head and you wonder why they're there. A lot of companies get in trouble because they try to merchandise to fill space, not merchandise to fill terms. And in that particular case, we think they got taken down a path to merchandise in categories that were not their core competency. As we work hard and mandate through this process, that the liquidation of inventory that is not go-forward inventory, either in-store or on Overstock.com, it will be accelerated either before or when that deal is consummated as a condition. Because we want that cash back on the balance sheet and we want that cash redeployed into reassorting it. There isn't millions of dollars of CapEx that it takes to do it, because I'm not looking to change the configuration of the store. I'm looking to change the planogram of the store that clearly acknowledges hard goods from Container Store. The services business has the most valuable asset in that building at 70% margin and then the Bed, Bath assortment as a complement to that, not as a 1,000-square-foot corner of that. So I would expect that if we're lucky and Amy pushes as hard as she pushes me, that the Container Store will probably convert a little quicker because the Kirkland's stores are doing well. The Container Stores have 20% negative quarter after quarter after quarter after quarter, negative same-store sales, we think that this helps reverse that. But we're having to be slightly more assertive like we normally are outside of this environment. We're having to be very assertive about what our expectations are. And then the construct of the economics, I'm sorry, are similar to what they are at Kirkland's. They're similar. They're not exact, but they're similar. Yes, sir.

So big picture on the data lake and the customer database, pointing out sort of what's critical is the cross-selling with all the customer data. I think these presentations always sound really attractive, but I've come across too many experiences where companies have a big data lake and they can't sell brands across the portfolio. Do you have any proof points that this works? If -- where others have failed, do you know why they have failed and why you might be different?

Well, I'm going to break that up into 2 things because you made it about cross-selling products along the top. Is that what I heard?

I think there's both, selling across the top and then bringing the top down at the bottom.

Okay. Great. So I want to separate those 2, and I'm going to answer the second one first. I believe that I understand the bottom section better than most, because I do it today in my other life. And this particular business looks eerily familiar to the other business that has $100 million of EBITDA and $180 million of revenue. So understanding how to do that is not the hard part. The hard part is understanding how to properly augment and segment and enrich this data so that you're delivering the customer information that is specifically relevant to them. And without knowing a lot of details about that consumer, you're going to do nothing but just spray them with information that you hope sticks. If driving conversion, which I started this meeting off with, and driving margin are the quintessential drivers of profitability for this company, the only way you'll ultimately do that is by understanding who that customer is down to what their preferences are and then marketing to them in a way that speaks to them. We know that the conversion is infinitely higher under that model. All I ask you to do is buy off on Bed Bath and Overstock converting back to the bottom end of what their previous, previous model was when they had no CRM, no data segmentation and didn't think about it at all like that. So I'm not concerned about this part. And whether it's signing up for media and advertising with firms like Carter, or selling extended warranties, which we do today through Extend, or developing a global loyalty program, which Bed Bath, Overstock, Kirkland's, Container Store are obligated to use, including the credit card. In the Kirkland's stores and in the Container Store stores, the credit card, when the term…

Yes. Just a quick one on Zulily. Time line expectations, how does it fit into the whole scheme of things here?

So the reason that Zulily was attractive for me is when I think about the 4 corners of the property or the 4 walls of the house, I'm looking for consumer information, and Zulily, which we were shut down in December -- on December 22, 2023, shut down, everybody fired, all the vendors burned and literally, the site went away. We picked it up in the spring. We've relaunched it on a soft launch recently. But the reason we did it is because I like that particular customer, because it was built on 2 principles: A working mom and her buying for herself and for her kids. And the predictive logic that can be accumulated through seeing moms and working moms and kids products be sold tells me a lot about who they are, what they buy, what their aesthetic look is. And now and I don't even know if we have it up here, when we launched Baby & Beyond in the future, we use things like what happens in the Bed Bath stores, what happens on Zulily to launch that business more profitably. There is a team of 4 people today running Zulily. The team was 800, and we laugh about that, but the reason that's not that hard to believe is because those 4 people are sitting on top of Guncha's tech organization and Dave's merchandising the organization. So we start to get real scale there. The true launch, the hard launch of Zulily will probably be in the beginning part of November. I think we'll have most of the vendors up there by then. And we expect it to be a positive contributor from the jump, top and bottom. We don't expect it to be a drag. Any questions about this particular...

What do define as a [ win ]?

Very simple question for me. In all of these cases, we have historical KPIs and around margin conversion and profitability of those respective businesses. Anything short of getting back to that average is a loss, period, hard stop. I believe that Overstock ends up being the real winner in this process because it had a legacy brand that has not been disrupted. It didn't go bankrupt. Bad things didn't happen up to it. It wasn't written everywhere. And the customer only visited Overstock, how many times a year?

1.5.

So there are certain customers that don't even know that it went through this significant trouble. Winning for me is growing the active database getting conversion back to historical levels, getting margin back to the bottom point of what that range was before and building that file and seeing recurring revenue happen. I don't really want a one-and-done. I'm not going to buy the PLA ad, win the ad for the day, and then they go buy everything else somewhere else and I never see them again. We need to create stickiness and I think that is what is going to be our biggest challenge in the short term is what products and services and information and expertise and ideas do we have to create stickiness. In the short term, right, we're still very transactional. In the long term, we got to use other things, and we think offering a brick-and-mortar experience, offering instant gratification experiences could help that, but we know it's going to take a lot more than that. It's our expectation that every single thing across the top, starting with primarily this business, these businesses gets back to profitability in a very quick period of time. In my world, my hope and my dream and my absolute utopia, this is not a forecast, this is not a prediction of a date, would be by third quarter, we're feeling a heck of a lot better about the positive cash flow and the positive contribution that business gets us to. And the only thing we need to do is just fix conversion. And that is it. As it relates to Kirkland's, I'm expecting stock appreciation, revenue growth and earnings power. That's what I'm expecting from it. We didn't do it just to get a 3% fee. That's -- I…

Saw sponsored product advertising as an opportunity, I'm just curious kind of what inning you're in for sponsored ads and...

Sponsored? Shobhit, they asked a question that maybe you could help answer. Come on up. I know you didn't expect to have to talk. Could you ask that question again?

Yes. Just saw sponsored product advertising as an opportunity. So just curious what inning you're in there and where you see it going?

Tell them who you are so they know.

Hi, everyone. This is Shobhit . I'm founder and CEO of Carter. We were a retail media platform bases out of Toronto. We're working actively with Tim and Marcus here to launch, [ data ], I mean, platform again within the Beyond network. As you talked about, like, sponsored products, yes, just that's an opportunity in figuring it out across all the brands, because right now, a lot of these brands are going back to Google or Facebook and Meta to buy the same exact customer. So how do you ensure that Marcus is shopping on Bed Bath & Beyond, and he's already done the shopping? You show the right ad from Zulily or Backyard or from a Container Store or Kirkland's in the future, that's going to be the key. And at the same time, getting more money, in the [ Adamant ] business from the sponsored product ads coming and sponsored by the vendors are already spending money within the ecosystem.

So it is our belief that rather than us trying to figure this out on our own, we go to a world-class partner that understands this landscape far better than we do. We avoid taking on the fixed cost of adding layers of staff and the bumps in the road that happen, and we engage with a company like Carter and they're given full stop to do what they do best across the portfolio. So this isn't just about adding that leverage and scale just for us. And whether that's Salesforce or whether that's [ Resell ] or whether that's Axiom or whether that's Carter or Allstate or anything else, the way we've structured these deals, both with Kirkland's and Container Store is that if you are part of this consortium, any arrangement that we have to enhance technology to refine the PIM, to go on to a common web platform so that we have easy interchangeability of both products and websites is an absolute. You can't be part of the group unless you understand that these are the synergies and these are the scalable things that we're going to do. And Shobhit is an example of that.

Yes. I would just add to that as well. So from a Bed Bath & Beyond perspective, so we're doing that today with [ Spa ]. We've seen some good success. What Shobhit and the team at Carter will help us is scale that across other brands, which we're really excited about and then also expand our capabilities to nonendemic ads, which we believe is a really big opportunity to evolve the Beyond services.

Can you talk a little bit more about Zulily where you expect to be year 3 years out and now? It's quite an organization at onetime and started from scratch. So -- and just leaning in [ never ] invest short-term ROI, is it applicable, too?

From a technical standpoint, the guardrails that Adrianne put around Dave and I is that you can test everything you want with Zulily in the world as long as I don't see anything with the red. So you can test into it, yes, as much as you want. The reason that, that team makes sense for us is as we stand up apparel and footwear at Overstock...

Yes. Sorry. I'm sharing my...

You can just talk out loud. Yes, we can hear.

So as we take these product categories to different brands and different websites, we'll have the opportunity to also sell the capabilities that go along with that, if we -- as Zulily takes off.

So Dave, as an example, right, if we think about apparel and footwear and beauty at Zulily, which is primarily what it was based on, our ability to enter the Overstock apparel and beauty space that historically had been a multi-hundred million dollar footwear-apparel...

$100 million business.

Business now gets actually capitalized with 1 merchandising organization. So when we're going to vendor -- when they went to vendors historically, they would be negotiating with set vendor for Overstock. Zulily would be negotiating with said vendor for a different flash site experience from our perspective, we'll use Perry Ellis as an example.

Yes. We'll negotiate for all 3 at the same time. And as more growth happens, the bigger the consortium becomes and the better value for everyone involved.

Zulily in a -- on a trailing 12 basis, to the best of our knowledge because we never actually got audited financials when they closed, was at a TTM of $900 million in December of 2023. We don't believe, candidly, that, that is possible in the short term without losing a bunch of money, which we're not willing to do. So for us, it's about what is the contribution from that business. And if we can make $5 million or $10 million doing $100 million, and that's it in the short term, do not put it at risk, I think our path is gain customers, pick up free cash flow and grow profitably over time. I think that for us is the recipe that we want to go with. Do we think that business can build over time? Of course, we do. In the short term, I mean, we're not going to build it to a point, doing anything other than having to be profitable. What else? You go back to these slides, and we provided this slide deck in the -- on the Investor Relations page. And we've talked about marketing efficiency and how all that works. We've talked about sales growth and what we think happens. I do want to just get back to this margin piece again, because margin solves, not everything, but pretty much everything. And so when we look at the Kirkland's and the Container Store deal, and I talked about this earlier, one of the hidden returns on investment for those 2 transactions on top of all the other economic principles we told you about is our ability to influence the vendor community in this home space by giving them multiple outlets in the way that they traditionally are used to. And so while…

Marcus, while you're on the point on gross margins, could you flip forward to that gross margin page that showed all the trailing quarters. I just want to point out the number of quarters, historically, for the Overstock brand that we're at the 27% that is to be fully optimized far right side of the chart. I think that's really important to highlight. When we say 25%, it's not an unrealistic target for us, and that's without the opportunistic wholesale buys that we're going to have access to.

You can see the absolute inflection point that happened. I don't even have to tell you when this was. This was Q3 of '22 with the partial Overstock quarter and a partial [ merger ] one. And then this was Q4, where it was just a marketplace of mush. And you can see that it's starting to climb out. In some cases, and some of you have commented, it's because we just started raising prices just to see where the elasticity was. None of this as your question earlier, is a function of us going back and grinding people for a better first cost. We don't think that, that's the right way to do business. We think we come hat-in-hand, "Here's what we have to offer. Here's the doors that we can open you up in. Here's the preferred status you can have. This is the arrangement that we would ask for you to consider." And when you do it that way, most people say, yes. Nobody wants to have their arm twisted and told, "If you don't do this, I'm not going to do this." This is -- that's not our style.

However, respectfully for all those partners that are listening on the call, we are grinding down costs every day. Sorry, I had to.

Yes, I know. To take us through, this is kind of how we're focused on our KPIs here.

I think we already...

Touched this?

I think so, yes.

This is our moat, right? Yes? Do you want to take this one ahead?

Yes, happy to jump in here. So we had talked about kind of the beyond services ecosystem. I think just a couple of things to clarify for the team. So many of these things are already actively in place today, right? So I'll use an example, partnering with [ Angi ] for assembly and installation services. And the idea of this is twofold. So one, to drive conversion at checkout across the site, right? So if I'm browsing a bookshelf, right, this gives the customer the ability to actually have someone come to their home, install or assemble a book shelf and get that service seamlessly through Beyond, and then second of all, also drive a meaningful supplemental revenue stream to the business. And so I think that's a really important point as we're kind of building out these services. In addition to that, today, we have a paid loyalty program. That has a ton of opportunity. It's just on Bed Bath & Beyond. And so as we evolve this ecosystem, we'll scale that across all of the brands, including Kirkland's and Container Store. And so I think this just gives you an idea of some of the different ways in which we're building and kind of evolving the platform here. And again, all of this is really driven on leveraging the relationships with their customers that we have to the sites to offer these services in a really seamless and convenient way.

You're done there?

Yes.

So as you go around this flywheel, a perfect utopian state, and we took the vendor names off of here, but a perfect utopian state, is that ultimately, all these products and services get integrated. The reason we're not spending a ton of time on it today is because we don't want people to walk out of the room without you having a clear understanding of our acknowledgment of fixing the core. These things are going to be built over a series of 6 to 8 to 12 to 15 months, some of them are already in place. We launched the warranty. Maybe we give everybody a little update on the warranty that we launched not to a long ago.

Just this spring, we launched warranties with Extend, our partner, product warranties, and we also launched shipping insurance with them. Both have been at terrific take rates, exactly as we expected, exactly as we're -- presented to us as well and are already accretive to our business and bottom line.

Any questions around this flywheel?

Yes. The other thing I would just kind of add to that last piece. So as you can imagine, we have hundreds of millions of customers, records in terms of transactional data. And we've been doing a lot of work to enrich the customer profiles. As you can imagine, when we think about these different types of businesses and prospective partnerships, right, we're getting a ton of outreach of partners that want to work with us to be a part of this ecosystem. right? When we think about these other brands that we'd be working with, there's a high customer acquisition cost that comes from running those businesses. And through our partnership, right, we can really drive and build these programs.

Yes, question this all has been terrific. Thanks for laying all this out. I guess maybe just, kind of at the highest level, from the customer perspective, right, you've you're doing all these things to get -- to know the customer, understand when they might need a product or a service at a certain time. But in this day and age, where I can see a reminder, in 60 seconds, I could be checking out this item on Temu or Amazon on my app on my phone. Like what is, in your view, going to drive the customer to transact with you guys? Is it the idea that there'll be price leadership? Is it the loyalty program? Just kind of help me bring it over the line in terms of what actually seals the deal from the consumer's point of view.

I'll take that, yes. So for us, price does matter. Competitive price matters. You don't have to be the lowest price, but you have to be priced very competitively. I believe that brands matter particularly in the day of age where there's a lot of knockoffs. I believe that brands matter. But I don't think that over time, brands are everything, but they do matter. And I think lastly, the customer experience to get ideas, information and expertise have to matter. When you say you go on to Temu, have you ever bought anything from there? Have you bought any clothes? No? What have you bought from there?

Really cheap toolsets [indiscernible]...

Right. So when we think about gifting and registry and life events in your first home and going to college, we think that while those marketplaces are always going to exist and they're going to be very disruptive, there are certain things that people won't do that with. I don't know that, over time, that doesn't change, but in our belief, the brands do matter. And so when you're selling small appliances or you're selling furniture, you're selling a variety of other things or you're walking into a store and getting expertise, information, training, knowledge of what you need, the customer still does like that. We should become a solution-oriented business. Customer has a problem, what's the solution. And when you go on to those other websites you sometimes don't know what you're trying to solve for or you think that what you're going to buy is going to solve for it. Now the argument against it is, well, I can go on and I can buy a toolset and the tools work. But you may still want to buy a Craftsman tool, I don't know. We're not selling those things. We're selling things that we believe do matter to put inside of people's homes, in their bedroom, in their kitchen, in their bathroom, in the middle of their family room.

So I actually got the mic first. So Marcus, I think you did a really good job explaining why you're devoting capital to Kirkland's, potentially to Container Store, things of that nature. At what point -- given that you have potentially $20 million coming from the sale of the headquarters, at what point do you envision having free cash flow to support the stock?

Back to where do we think we're going to get to profitability?

And when would you start prioritizing, like, buybacks as compared to making these other investments?

Which one do you want me to answer, the buyback question first?

Whatever supports the stock.

Yes. Well, I don't believe that buybacks are something that we should even be discussing right now. I think generating free cash flow is something that should be very front and center right now, improving conversion, improving margins, improving the customer experience and actually making sure that all these ideas that we have on the top of that funnel come to life. As I said earlier, we're not going to predict when we think that free cash flow or profitability is going to happen. But in my hopeful wish, in my mind, it would happen, as I said, in 2025, in the middle of 2025. So I think that if we start to get this kind of scenario, if it turns into this, are we going to use $8 million of that free cash flow to go buy stock back? No. I don't think anybody would want to do that until we get consistency in delivering those metrics, until we build the coffers up so that we can have optionality in the business.

I would just like to go back to also the question about why do we think a customer would buy in our brands earlier versus buy off of Temu. And I think for me, the #1 reason, and it will be burned into my brain for the rest of my career, when you change the brand from Overstock to Bed Bath & Beyond, overnight, same cost, same merchandise, same price point, look at what happened. There is a reality that brand matters to customers. And it's a real value that we each value in today's world of merchandising. It's not everything, but it matters. And I believe that standing behind those brands and getting back to the blocking and tackling of great customer service, customer loyalty, providing the products, curating the products that -- off of the site that are high return rate categories, that's what's going to drive each of those brands, and that's where the merchandising piece of this comes in. There is still an element of the human nature to manage your brand that has to exist in today's world.

Marcus, up on the slide was HELOCs. And when I think about a HELOC, maybe I'm missing something, it surprises me that you would be involved in that area of the business. Is it speed that you would lead with? It isn't going to be price. And if it's speed, I know figure can do a HELOC in 5 hours.

And Better can do it in 1 hour.

Is that how you're going to compete?

It's access to capital to increase the conversion of the transaction. And when you say that price isn't it, you mean because the HELOC is priced higher than a first mortgage?

Yes.

Because it's a second mortgage? Yes, it's not about -- but it's still cheaper than a credit card.

It's cheaper, but it's -- if you do it in 1 hour or 5 hours, you're going to land that business much better and frequently than 5 weeks.

So the goal behind it, and I keep coming back to conversion, and I take myself to large purchases of big format furniture at Overstock or I take myself to a custom space that's being presented in a Container Store, when you look at the amount of leads that they get and the amount of quotes that they write up and you look at the conversion, we know that one of the stumbling blocks is, well, you can put it on the Container Store credit card. And if people have to apply and the credit card feels scary and I have a lot of credit cards in my wallet. So the ability to give people lots of different tools in their toolbox is meant to do nothing more than increase conversion and make some extra money doing it. But when you say you're surprised that I'm into a HELOC, is it because it's not an inexpensive rate?

No, you explained it. I get it. Yes.

Okay. If you go on to Better.com and you look at the speed in which you can apply for a mortgage or apply for a refi or apply for a HELOC, it's pretty spectacular, and I've tested it myself and it's pretty spectacular.

Just going back to the data side of that, too. I think it's an important call just to make the connection here. So if you think about this in terms of the traditional model, right, that a customer maybe changes their address, they move to a new home -- and that's when retailers typically flag and identify to that customer may be in the market to buy these types of products. And so if you think about it in the context of this, right, having visibility into consumers who are shopping mortgages accelerates all of that to bring our products and services to that customer before, right, they even make -- before they even buy the home or move to that address. And so that's a huge advantage if you think about the data and creating the right personalized experience that we're working to build.

Just kind of a big picture question for Marcus and the team. Marcus, I know you've talked in the past about how the company could operate virtually. So you've sold the headquarters. I'm not sure if you're going to sublease space in there now. But I guess, as more and more companies are bringing people back in the office, and you guys are kind of building something new out of a couple of different parts. It seems like a virtual setup would be very challenging, so maybe I'm wrong on that, but that's not your view.

We don't want -- while we appreciate the talent that we have in the company today that is remote and value their contribution, we are a Salt Lake based business with the necessity to be physically together. And unfortunately, as part of the reduction in force a lot of it was driven by the remoteness of some of that staff. I really enjoy people being together, being able to argue and collaborate and put stuff on a whiteboard and bring samples in and think about stuff. We are subleasing space starting this -- once the sale of the building is done, that instead of being 200,000 square feet -- no, instead of being 200,000...

35,000.

It's just over 30,000 square feet, including the tech rooms and all the staff. We were successful in negotiating with the buyer of the building.

We were -- data center?

Data center, yes.

Yes. So one of the things in our corporate headquarters, pre- our time though is we have a very state-of-the-art data center. Now we know Guncha will share that we have some opportunity to leverage kind of a hybrid model. But for now, we were able to successfully negotiate a 5-year lease with our buyer at a really under market rate. So we feel great about getting that opportunity and then also allowing Guncha the time to manifest the strategy that she needs to when the cost -- or the P&L becomes available to also handle that.

I wouldn't say that we'll have a mandate to come back to work, but it would be...

We will -- Salt Lake City employees...

We want to be in Salt Lake City, first week of December, second week of December, third week of December, we'll be...

In the office.

In the office.

That's right.

Okay. Great. I just -- apologies. I have one very short-term question, but everyone is trying to understand what's going on with the consumer. When you look at Q3, I know there are a lot of company-specific things happening, but did you notice anything in the consumer backdrop getting better or getting worse?

I'll give it to you, from my perspective, in the world. The third quarter was one of the toughest quarters that I can remember in general commerce period. It was a lot of noise. I think the interest rate had fake and the 10-year moving the other direction gave people a lot of confusion and then we started to see -- wait and see. We saw more -- I would say more friction in Q3 than we had originally anticipated. And I don't know if it has much to do with heading into the election, where rates are. As I mentioned earlier, we we're sort of putting all of the responsibility and accountability on us for our performance. The macro backdrop was definitely not a helper. We believe that had we had better macro backdrop, that conversion probably would have been higher, that site traffic would have been higher, that margins potentially would have been $22 million instead of $21.2 million. And when you're inducing people just to try to do something, it was expensive for the quarter. I don't think we're unique in that situation from the research that I've done. I don't know how the home space is doing in Q3, but the data that I have access to doesn't look great for anybody.

As we look at our competitive intel each week and look at the promotions being offered by others in the home industry, it's as aggressive as it's ever in terms of the promotional and discounting and the way that people are going about -- brands are going about messaging in their e-mails and on their home page. They're being incredibly, incredibly aggressive. And then you see the big lots of the world and what's happening with them, some of these stalwarts that have been around forever, and it's tough out there.

Yes. I would just add, if you think about the brick-and-mortar perspective, and we've shared this quarter after quarter recently, there is definitely a bit of return to store and a return into positive store traffic. But I would definitely agree that it's requiring discount at a heavier level, but we've definitely been pleased in Kirkland's, and we have a brick-and-mortar growth strategy, and that's why, I think, it really matters here, too. But the traffic has been better than we would expect.

Just a lot going on here. You're in position to control your destiny a little bit more. But when you think about challenges you face this quarter and the risk that next year doesn't stabilize, doesn't look better, maybe is actually worse, how do you think about prioritizing all of the different things that you have going on here? How do you think about maybe opportunities to dig a little bit deeper on the cost side just to sort of manage through that environment?

So we are going to dig deeper on the cost side regardless of how good the market gets. We have to become a more efficient organization, and we have to outsource more and look for that efficiency even if the market's up 20 points. So I don't want to connect the necessity to be -- continue to be draconian on one sense based on what the market is doing. I find it interesting that you think that 25% could be worse. That's not on our bingo card. We're not expecting it to be mid-cycle. But absent all of those things, we believe this column is in our control. And if you look at the web traffic that was used in this column and the web traffic that was used in this column, they're identical. The only thing that changed is that we improved the efficiency of what we're doing. We improved the margins marginally in what we're doing with the expectation that this has to be a goal for us. These on this side, I don't -- like we put them on here so people understand what mid-cycle looks like, but we think this is what we would define as success at this point. I do think the consumer is going to continue to be sluggish for a little bit. And this idea that rate cuts are sparking demand is, in my opinion, not accurate to really have. And I don't think we've put enough on this. I know our stock is getting beat up today. I know people are disappointed with the results. I want to end on a couple of things. The consensus in the room was that our EBITDA would be where it landed. So I just want to frame that up. The disappointment was the top…

900-ish.

And today, there are?

650-ish.

Yes, a lot lower.

A lot lower.

Yes, a lot lower. And so it's not a great thing, but unfortunately, necessary steps. So conversion, SG&A and margin improvement, you should expect sequential improvement. And for those -- I want to get to -- we want you to have confidence in this. Merger, Q4, 1, 2, 3. We want you to have confidence that, sequentially, it's moving in the right direction. And the toggle is measuring elasticity without breaking the entire business. Any other questions before we close? Thank you for being supportive of the business, and we expect to deliver better results going forward. So thank you.