LZB - NYSE

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the La-

Thank you, Hollie. Good morning, and thank you for joining us to discuss our fiscal 2023 second quarter results. With us this morning are Melinda Whittington, La-

Thanks, Kathy, and good morning, everyone. Yesterday afternoon, following the close of market, we reported excellent fiscal ‘23 second quarter results for the total company. In addition to record consolidated results for sales and profits for our Q2, our company owned retail segment again turned in stellar performance with all-time quarterly record delivered sales, profits and non-GAAP operating margin. These record setting results were enabled by a strong supply chain execution in the period and enabled us to reduce our backlog and improve service to customers and consumers, particularly for our retail business. Our lead times continue to improve and we are edging closer to our brand promise, custom furniture in four to six weeks. A competitive differentiator for us in the marketplace, all supported by our North American manufacturing footprint. Delivering on this value proposition is good for us, good for our commercial customers and great for our consumers. While we're pleased with our delivered results in the quarter, near term headwinds continue to slow the written trajectory across our industry, and we know this challenging environment will require ongoing adjustments and increased agility. While still up versus pre-pandemic levels, our industry is experiencing a slower pace of store and e-commerce traffic versus last year. A reflection of macroeconomic concerns and geopolitical uncertainty weighing on consumer sentiment, as well as a shift in discretionary spending patterns post-pandemic and these factors again impacted our written business in the quarter. For the period, total written sales for our company owned retail business were down 5% versus last year's second quarter, with same-store written sales down 10% versus pre-pandemic, fiscal 2020 Q2 these total written results were up 18% and same-store written results up 12%. The entire La-

Thank you, Melinda, and good morning, everyone. As a reminder, we present our results on both a GAAP and non-GAAP basis. We believe the non-GAAP presentation better reflects underlying operating trends and performance of the business. Non-GAAP results exclude items which were detailed in press release and in the tables in the appendix section of our conference call slides. On a consolidated basis, fiscal ‘23 second quarter sales increased 6% to $611 million versus the prior year quarter, with pricing and surcharge actions and a positive effects of product and channel mix, offsetting lower unit volume. Consolidated GAAP operating income increased to $62 million and non-GAAP operating income increased to $61 million, a record for the second quarter and an increase of 19% versus last year's second quarter. Consolidated GAAP operating margin increased to 10.1% from 9.4% and non-GAAP operating margin increased to 10% from 9% in last year's second quarter. GAAP diluted EPS increased to $1.7 for the fiscal 2023 second quarter versus $0.89 in the prior year quarter. Non-GAAP diluted EPS increased 24% to $1.5 in the current year quarter versus $0.85 in last year's second quarter. Over the 12 months, non-GAAP diluted EPS was $3.68, a 22% increase versus the year ago period. In the second quarter, we delivered disproportionate profit growth as we shifted supply chain capacity towards servicing our retail business. As we have discussed, many of our wholesale customers had warehouse constraints that limited their ability to take delivery of new product during the quarter. These short-term dealer constraints once again allowed us to pivot and increase deliveries of our own retail backlog during the quarter, improved service to consumers and drive strong operating margin as we leverage the benefits of selling through our company owned retail business. As I move to the segment discussion, my comments from here will focus on our non-GAAP reporting unless specifically stated otherwise. Starting with our Retail segment, delivered sales increased by 31% to an all-time record $252 million, as we improve service to consumers and make progress towards returning to our pre-pandemic lead times. For the quarter, delivered same-store sales increased 25% versus a year ago. Retail posted record high non-GAAP operating profit dollars and non-GAAP operating margin increased to a best average 16.5% versus 12.5% in the prior year quarter. These results were driven primarily by higher delivery sales relative to selling expenses and fixed costs. Our retail team's focus continues to provide an incomparable consumer experience and we congratulate them on their outstanding performance. As Melinda noted earlier, growing the La-

Thanks, Bob. I'm extremely optimistic about the future of La-

Thanks, Melinda. We will begin the question-and-answer period now. Hollie, will you please review the instructions to get into the queue to ask questions.

Certainly. Ladies and gentlemen, the floor is now open for questions. [Operator Instructions] Your first question for today is coming from Bobby Griffin at Raymond James.

Good morning, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions.

Good morning.

Good morning, Bobby.

I guess the first question is more a little bit of High Industry Level question and maybe some commentary on what you're hearing from the wide range of your kind of wholesale customers. But when I think about their inventory situation and trying to work through kind of this excess inventory that you have in the channel, are you hearing any type of timeline on it couple of quarters into 2023 calendar year 2023 or anything just to kind of help us get a sense of when we might get industry back to more of a normal inventory position?

Yeah, Bobby. It obviously it varies, right. It varies by customer, it varies by all of their sources of products, those that are more heavily balanced towards some Asian manufacturing in their mix probably are suffering the most for us and that catch up of orders that they put in on the books a long time ago that finally containers freed up and showed up. So we're talking about general dealer type folks sitting on a lot of stock inventory as opposed to custom. What we tend to hear is kind of for the ones that are still backed up is three to four months, but if I’m honest that it’s perpetually three to four months here, we've been saying that for a bit. What I can tell you is, we do see progress and certainly for custom orders, we're seeing that movement. And within our own retail, we're able to move through that and we're seeing lead times come down and we're intentionally bringing our in stock levels back up getting close to where they were pre-pandemic. So if the consumer does want to come in and buy something and have it delivered not custom, but have it delivered in the near term. We're getting back up to levels in our own warehouses to be able to support that as well.

Okay. That's helpful. I appreciate it. And then, Bob, I guess, when I look at the implied sales per week of production here and third quarter coming up, it steps down a little bit from 2Q. I think $47 million to $44 million. Is that just a function of that inventory aspect in the renewals just talking about or is there something else that would cause the weekly production, the weekly delivered sales for production week to drop down? Because I think you guys did mention you still have a good bit of the backlog to still try to deliver in the third quarter.

It's a function of the fact that during the third quarter that backlog will be gone. So during Q2, we were able to use that backlog all throughout the entire quarter to drive those sales at $47 million a week you just mentioned. During Q3, that will end up going away during the quarters and that's why the average per week is going to end up going down.

Okay. That makes sense. And then to take that a step further, given where we are in the demand side, out of the flexibility inside the plants and stuff going to look going forward on for kind of a new demand environment now that we've worked through this backlog?

So as we've talked because our product manufacturing is so inherently manual, it's mainly about people and flexing down is in many ways easier than flexing up, right? So we had over the last several years had people working really significant levels of over time. And we've slowly backed that off and are actually have people working hours that they like now in reasonable amounts of time. We backed off the overtime. We backed off in a few places like second shift. We're actually seeing efficiencies go up as we're doing that. And then we're -- because we're just not working people quite as hard as we had to a while back and we appreciate the fact that our folks stuck with us and work through that time. The other thing we're taking advantage of is just natural attrition and manufacturing environments, particularly those like ours, still have a fairly meaningful amount of attrition that happens naturally and we're letting that happen to sort of downsize as we go. Those are really the main drivers to-date on how we've downsized.

Okay. I appreciate the details. I'll jump back in the queue, but thanks again for answering my questions this morning.

Thanks, Bobby.

Your next question is coming from Anthony Lebiedzinski at Sidoti and Company.

Good morning, and thank you for taking the questions. So first, just curious about coming off of Black Friday. Can you just comment as to what you saw in your stores in terms of traffic and written sales for the -- when -- I think you guys talked about before that the industry overall is returning to just people buying more furniture around the holidays. So just curious to get your input as to what you saw over Black Friday?

Yeah. Good morning, Anthony. I'd start by saying, if you look at year-on-year comparisons for like our furniture galleries, we actually saw some improvement in pace Q2 versus what we were seeing in Q1. So that -- and that's over three months, that's a little more of a trend. As far as over this last holiday, last Friday is Cyber Monday, we're actually generally pleased with our performance in both our furniture galleries and for Joybird, right, which are real consumer businesses where we have to some (ph) on the pulse and what the consumers doing. We saw continued strengthening thus far in November of sort of that pace year-on-year, too early to call a trend, right? But in general, we've seen a trajectory of improvement.

Got it. Okay. That's good to hear. And then in terms of dealers delaying the receipt of finished goods because of warehouse constraints, are those mostly firm orders or is there maybe potential risk that some of those orders could be canceled? How should we view that?

Mostly firm orders, and to be clear, some of that sits in, if you think about some of our case goods and all, where we're importing finished product that's a driver where we're manufacturing in some cases that's just slowing the pace of the manufacturing to get those things out the door as well as we're communicating with our customers on the timing they'll take.

Got it. Okay. And then in terms of the demand levers, is increased advertising the main tool that you're using or do you think perhaps you'll need to be more promotional given the current demand environment?

We'll likely end up in doing both. The marketing piece is important for the retail stores to drive traffic. And once we get them in the store, we're able to do a great job converting them and upselling them with design sales. On the promotion side, we haven't seen a very large -- we're looking, we're watching, we're waiting for somebody to go out there and start doing some crazy things get product moving off their floors or out of their warehouses. We haven't seen that yet. We'll be keeping our eye on that. We continue to say that we don't want to leave down crazy amounts of discounts, but we also want to make sure we maintain share. So we will ensure that we remain competitive as we move through the holiday period into -- in the President Day and we see what happens with the economy, with the consumer and with what our competition is going.

Got it. And then lastly, how should we think about segment profitability near term and long term, if you could just give us different puts and takes as to how we should think about that?

We made a number of comments. We continue to make a number of comments. Our goal as part of Century Vision is to reinvigorate that La-

Got it. Thank you very much and best of luck.

Thanks, Anthony.

Your next question for today is coming from Brad Thomas at KeyBanc.

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. I was hoping to talk a little bit more about Joybird and I was wondering, if you could talk a little bit more about how much some of the marketing dynamics are affecting sales, your underlying enthusiasm for the business? And if you could talk a little bit more about maybe putting aside any kind of one-time issues? what you think sort of underlying unit economics are looking like in your enthusiasm for the business as we look out a little bit longer term? Thanks.

Good morning, Brad. Yeah. So Joybird, two things are happening. I think if you look across e-com, you're starting to see that consumer growth more broadly look like the broader furniture industry, right? So I think there's some pacing there that we'll take out execution, right to really over perform and we're still very bullish on what the Joybird brand can do. In this quarter, as you alluded to, we had sort of a one-time effect as well that we're still working our way through. And it's just a matter of, you think about marketing mix modeling that you've done over the years, now it's more technical, right and involves more algorithms and artificial intelligence and so forth. And as we move to some more automated solutions, we just affected the traffic that we had coming to our site. So that's been reversed. And again, too early, as I said in my prepared comments, too early to claim complete victory, but we're certainly seeing improvement as we back that out. But that said, I do think that consumer is going to -- so the movement in the growth I expect is probably going to look a little bit more like the rest of the industry, like our more brick-and-mortar type of businesses. So what that says for us is, one, it takes out execution, it takes a great brand. And it also says, we need to optimize costs and sort of structure the business to prepare for that type of an execution. So with all of that kind of rounded out, we still feel great about the brand, it still resonates very well with consumers. Our stores are doing well. As I noted, we're going to be up to 10 stores by this summer and our path as we have 25 identified, we may manage pace a bit, but we'll have 10 open here by this summer. And we're going to continue to invest on that brand even some of the honing we've done over the last quarter on the messaging to make sure we're really enticing that that consumer with fresh post-pandemic messaging just like we're doing across the rest of our brands looks to be resonating. So we still feel good about the long term, not thrilled about some of the challenges in the near term, but we'll work our way through that.

That's really helpful, Melinda. And if I could just ask a follow-up about kind of the state of promotions in the industry. It's one that obviously always has promotions over the holiday weekends. It feels like a number of brands out there trying to kind of still stay disciplined on promotions and not do kind of blanket store wide, getting discounts and only use some closer selling items. But every month that goes by, it feels like we're sending more and more promotions as we do our checks. I'd be curious what you're seeing out there and how much you think that might be a risk to your medium doing more promotions over the next six to 12 months here?

Yeah, Brad. As you -- we started, so think of Labor Day, from Labor Day all the way through Presidents' Day, that's the promotions kind of continue to increase over that period because you see some over Columbus and you see a lot in Black Friday, but you see more New Year's. And then finally, the biggest one is of the year for everybody is going to be Presidents' Day. So just to seek increased promotions -- promotional activity like that is not unexpected. Generally speaking, very few things are sold on a non-promotion basis and they're priced that way, so that they can do a 30% off or 35% off and hit the margins that we're delivering in the marketplace. What we're keeping an eye on is people doing 50% off, 60% off, those types of items that's where folks are getting desperate trying to get rid of inventory, trying to generate cash from their inventory if they're running into -- if they're running into again cash flow problems, et cetera. So that's what we have our eye on. Again, we continue to look at that, we are working with our sales force to understand what's happening out there and we are making sure that we are putting out promotions as we do our planning for the back half of the year that will ensure that we stay competitive.

I would just add that input costs overall, while they're mitigating somewhat from all-time highs, we're not seeing dramatic relief beyond sort of containers for ocean freight. And so you tend to see a little bit more those Asian import kind of products where there's more room and a cost deceleration. As Bob said, we're going to keep our -- very much keep our thumb on the pulse of what the consumers -- how the consumer is acting and what they're looking for. But we also believe that quality certainly deserves a little bit of a price premium, but it's got to be within the right range, no doubt.

Really helpful. Thank you all so much.

Thanks, Brad.

There appear to be no further questions in queue. I would like to turn the floor back over to the management team for any closing comments.

Thank you everyone for your time today and thank you for your interest in La-