Earnings Labs

Lands' End, Inc. (LE)

Q4 2021 Earnings Call· Wed, Mar 16, 2022

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day, and welcome to the Land's End Fourth Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Bernard McCracken, Chief Accounting Officer. You may begin.

Bernard McCracken

Operator

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Land's End Earnings Call for a discussion of our fourth quarter and fiscal 2021 results, which we released this morning, and can be found on our website, Lands’ End.com. On the call today, you will hear from Jerome Griffith, our Chief Executive Officer, and Jim Gooch, our President and Chief Financial Officer. After the Company's prepared remarks, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. Please also note that the information we're about to discuss, includes forward-looking statements. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties. The Company's actual results could differ materially from those discussed on this call. Factors that could contribute to such differences include, but are not limited, to those items noted and included in the Company's SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking information that is provided by the Company on this call, represents the Company's outlook as of today, and we do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements made by us. Subsequent events and developments may cause the Company's outlook to change. During this call, we'll be referring to non-GAAP measures. These non-GAAP measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures, can be found in our earnings release issued earlier today, a copy of which is posted in the Investor Relations section of our website at Lands’ End.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Jerome Griffith.

Jerome Griffith

Analyst

Thank you, Bernie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you all for joining us today for a discussion of our fourth quarter and full year performance. Looking back at 2021, I'm incredibly proud of our performance, particularly in light of the industrywide challenges we faced. We delivered 15% revenue growth, and 39% adjusted EBITDA growth for the year, despite global supply chain headwinds. We also generated the highest revenue the company has seen since 2011, and the highest adjusted EBITDA since 2014, which was the first year as a public company after our spinoff from Sears. This performance demonstrates the strength of our business model, and the strong execution and resiliency of our teams, as we continued to advance our strategic growth pillars. As I shared in the past, we believe the size of our total addressable market has grown, and we have the opportunity to gain long-term. Beyond strong sales growth, we hit a record high number of customers in the US, approximately 5.8 million, representing 5% growth versus prior year. The US e-commerce also delivered strong results, as average unit retail and revenue both achieved growth of over 6% versus 2020. I'd like to thank our team for their commitment and dedication, as they continue to perform at a superior level throughout this challenging operating environment. Now, I will provide some brief highlights from the fourth quarter. While our year was outstanding, our fourth quarter performance was impacted by supply chain challenges that we, along with the rest of the industry, continue to navigate. As a result, Q4 performance was slightly below our expectations, with revenue up 3% and adjusted EBITDA of $27 million. We continue to make steps to mitigate these impacts, while maintaining our focus on our four strategic growth pillars. Starting with product, our successful let's…

Jim Gooch

Analyst

Thank you, and good morning. We're proud of our performance this year. Our total revenue increased15% to $1.6 billion, our highest revenue since 2011. We delivered record US e-commerce revenue, with growth of 7% in 2021, on top of 6% growth in 2020. We also grew our adjusted EBITDA by 39% to $121 million, and expanded our adjusted EBITDA margin by approximately 130 basis points to 7.4% for the year. Our ongoing focus on profitable growth enabled us to deliver our best adjusted EBITDA since 2014. Despite strong demand in the fourth quarter, supply chain challenges continued to create headwinds for our business, resulting in fourth quarter performance slightly below our outlook. I would like to reiterate Jerome’s comments on how proud we are of our team's efforts to navigate these challenges, and allow us to deliver continued topline growth, despite meaningful supply chain challenges that resulted in inventory constraints. For the fourth quarter, as compared to last year, total revenue increased 3.2% to $555 million. Following a strong Cyber Week, we experienced intermittent shipping delays through the remainder of the quarter, which impacted our in-stock position and certain key items. These delays have extended into the first quarter, and I'll speak to that shortly. Our global e-commerce sales decreased 4.4% from 2020. Within that, our US e-commerce business decreased 2.2% from 2020. And while our international business did decrease 14.6% in the quarter, it still showed a 10.8% increase versus 2019. Revenue for our third-party business continues to be very strong, increasing to $36 million, a $15 million or 70% improvement compared to last year. This increase was driven by strong performance at Kohl's and Amazon, particularly as we expanded our entire store assortment to an additional 150 Kohl's stores during the third quarter, while continuing to offer our…

Jerome Griffith

Analyst

Thanks, Jim. Given the strength we're seeing in our customer file, we remain highly confident in the long-term outlook we provided to you in January that Jim has just highlighted. Looking forward to 2022, we will continue to leverage our digitally-led business model to advance our four strategic pillars of growth, which include product, digital, unit channel distribution, and infrastructure. Starting with product, we will emphasize our let's get comfy messaging with our one closet focus and consistent fit capabilities, as we introduce seasonal colors and knits and transitional outerwear this spring. We will continue to leverage our use of data analytics to inform product assortments, as we adapt to consumer needs. We believe our customers will continue to favor comfort as they return to more normal activities and emerge from the pandemic, and we will consistently deliver on that need. Our marketing initiatives will remain focused on driving long term customer growth. Building off our for successes, we plan to invest more deeply into new customer acquisition, and recently engaged Gary Vaynerchuk's VaynerMedia agency, to accelerate that initiative. As part of this effort, a brand campaign exploration is underway, with the goal of creating a top-of-funnel marketing campaign to further differentiate our brand from our competitors. We're also launching our new product collaboration with Blake Shelton in the fall of 2022. We're very excited for this collection, which will offer a broad range of categories, including woven shirts, denim, outerwear, knit tops, and sleepwear. We believe that both of these initiatives will provide meaningful brand-building opportunities for Lands' End. We also remain highly encouraged by the meaningful opportunities to extend our third-party partnership, grow our nascent Marketplace offering, and continue to launch exciting collaborations. Moving to Lands' End Marketplace, while we remain in the very early stages of growth,…

Operator

Operator