City Chic Collective Limited (CCX) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. My name is Krista, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the City Chic Collective Full Year 2026 Results Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to turn the conference over to Phil Ryan, Managing Director and CEO. Phil, please go ahead.

Good morning, everyone, and thanks for joining us. I'm Phil Ryan, the CEO of City Chic Collective, and I'm joined today by our CFO, James Plummer. This morning, I will run through the presentation, starting with the key highlights and business update. James will then take you through the financials, and I'll come back to discuss the FY '27 trading update and outlook before opening up to questions. Moving to Slide 2. FY '26 was another important year for City Chic, and I'm very pleased with the progress we have made. Underlying EBITDA increased to $12.3 million, up 92% on the prior period. This was driven by the continued execution of our strategy across customer, product and cost discipline. ANZ revenue was up 7.6% and trading gross margin dollars were up 8.2%. This shows that the strategy continues to gain traction even in the consumer environment that remains challenging due to the cost of living crisis. The continued improvement in margin demonstrates the success of our strategic focus on product elevation and pricing discipline with average selling price increasing a further 4.5% in FY '26. Cut for Curves is our Fit Promise to our customer. It's at the core of our brand and remains our key strategic differentiator. And as I previously discussed, aligned with our strategy, we have taken significant steps forward in the evolution of our product development progress -- process, sorry, to deliver on that promise. We've implemented in-line quality control, meaning garments are checked during production to improve consistency of fit and quality. We've introduced greater rigor into our design process, and we are well advanced in leveraging AI through our partnership with SeeStone and other AI platforms to support design, forecasting, buying and allocation decisions. We've changed the construct of our range, increased our casual offer and realigned our price architecture to better reflect where our customer is spending in the current environment. Importantly, we're not reducing the price of our product. We are adjusting the mix of the range to be weighted more towards lower price point items that deliver value to her while maintaining our margin structure. These initiatives have delivered a stronger summer range in the Southern Hemisphere with improved timing, better assortment balance and greater alignment to our customer strategy. Early sell-through has been encouraging, especially in store, and we expect this to support performance through the first half. City Chic, the brand, has regained its momentum. We have more customers than ever before, record NPS, our strongest social sentiment in years and Australian traffic growth of 12.6% for the year. These are all leading indicators that our strategy is working and the brand is resonating with our customer. While engagement with City Chic is strong, annual spend remains below historical levels as customers continue to feel the effects of the cost of living crisis. The U.S.A. continues to trade profitably at a contribution level. We deliberately reduced investment in inventory through FY '26 in response to tariff-related volatility. But with the reset complete and new product now the major driver of sales in the market, the U.S.A. is primed for growth in FY '27. Our focus is on acquiring new customers and rebuilding scale, and we are seeing encouraging signs as we move towards this important holiday trading period. We reduced our cost of doing business $7.1 million while continuing to invest in areas that matter most to our customer and to our future growth. From a cash perspective, we delivered positive cash flow of $2.2 million for the period, and James will expand on this later. While retail trading conditions remain challenging, City Chic is well positioned to grow sales and drive sustained improvement in profitability. The first 7 weeks of FY '27 have started well. Overall, ANZ sales are flat with store comp sales growth of 11.4% as the standout result. ANZ Online has delivered a further material reduction in promotional activity, positioning us strongly heading into the key summer trading period. In the U.S., our increased investment in inventory and new product is expected to drive a material improvement in the season's change in both revenue and margin, and this will play out through the second half. There is still work to do, but the business is in a much stronger position. The more we deliver on our Cut for Curves promise to differentiate ourselves in the market, aligned with our simplified business model, we have a clear platform for growth. Moving to Slide 5. Revenue for the year was $130.5 million. Excluding the closed wholesale business in the U.S.A., this was an increase of 1.8%. ANZ comp sales growth was 5.6%, with comp margin dollars of 7.8%. And this is exactly the outcome we want to see with growth being delivered at higher margins through improved product execution, stronger customer engagement and trading discipline. Our active customer base grew to a record 517,000 people, up 3% on FY '25. What gives me confidence is that customers are responding to the changes we have made. She is engaging with the brand. She's responding to the product, and we continue to bring new customers into City Chic every month. The opportunity, as I've said, is to increase her annual spend as her confidence returns. Inventory finished at $24.1 million, down 11% year-on-year, reflecting tighter inventory management and the deliberate reduction in USA purchases with net cash at $5.2 million. Trading gross margin was 60.6%, up 209 basis points. We continue to progress towards our 62% target with the quality of this improvement particularly pleasing. It's been driven by better product, lower product costs, higher average sale price, stronger sell-through and tighter promotional discipline. Moving to Slide 6. The operational highlights of the year show how the strategy is translating into commercial success. On the customer side, our target high-value customers were up 8%. NPS increased to 76% and traffic was up 7% globally and 12.6% in Australia. That matters because our strategy is built around putting her first. We listen to her, we design for her, and we're building a brand relationship that is based on trust, fit and fashionability. We've continued to improve the product assortment, increase speed to market and introduce new test and learn factories producing smaller volumes. This allows us to trial product with our customer online and in selected stores before investing deeper in the styles that resonate. We have also invested in AI-enabled buying and merchandising tools. These are tools that help us make sharper product decisions, refine size curves by store, region and channel and support the differential ranging we have spoken about previously. The pace of change in this technology is extraordinary. Beyond SeeStone, we're using Claude and Copilot to generate trend briefings across categories informed by our sales data and customer insights. What we have learned is that AI is a powerful tool, but still requires human judgment. It's excellent at identifying patterns and opportunities. However, our team remains critical in interpreting those insights and identifying the newness and creativity that drives successful product decisions. We continue to optimize our 72 store network. Our stores are a critical part of the City Chic brand and customer experience. However, they must be profitable and support our omnichannel model. In FY '27, we have already closed 4 loss-making stores and secured 1 new location. We've raised our contribution profit hurdles to ensure every store is generating an appropriate return and earning its place in the network. Moving to Slide 8. The strategy has always been about creating competitive advantages that are difficult to replicate, and this slide highlights the key ones. We have more customers than ever before. We have a differentiated product proposition through our Cut for Curves Fit promise. We have simplified the business and built a scalable platform. We understand our customer better than anyone else, and we have multiple touch points that allow us to engage with her wherever she chooses to shop. Those are the building blocks of our strategy, and they are the reasons I'm confident about the future growth opportunity for City Chic. Moving to Slide 9. Our strategy has been consistent with Cut for Curves as our strategic advantage, and it continues to deliver EBITDA improvements. The 3 pillars remain Her First, Cut for Curves and A Simpler Business. Her First is about deepening the emotional connection with our customer. She has more choice than ever before, and our job is to ensure that City Chic remains the brand that understands her, fits her and makes her feel confident. Cut for Curves is our product promise. It's not a slogan for us. It's how we design, buy, fit and range. We are focused on fit and quality while continuing to improve gross margins through stronger product execution. And A Simpler Business is about staying disciplined on costs. We have successfully strengthened the product, simplified the business and built a more scalable platform. The focus now is driving revenue growth. Moving to Slide 10. In ANZ, the growth opportunity is unlocking customer spend in today's retail environment. We have record customer numbers and a strong response to the product evolution, but annual customer spend remains below historical levels. Consumer confidence has also been at historical lows as she remains value conscious with the cost of living increases. From this, we are making deliberate changes to the assortment to deliver her value without moving away from the City Chic brand DNA. We're continuing to extend the CCX value range to drive frequency and are realigning price point mix through the range, increasing our casual assortment and using differential ranging to make sure we have the right product in store. We are also using bundling and promotions to improve basket size and increasing online styles and options to drive sales. We have successfully extended size options to 10 and 12 in selected parts of the range where we see there is a clear need for our fit expertise. Size 12 already represents 8% of store sales and is growing rapidly, demonstrating both the strength of our product improvements and demand for specialized fit solutions. This is important. We are extending our reach without changing our DNA. We are not moving away from our customer. We are solving more of her fit and fashion frustrations across more occasions while providing value she is looking for in today's environment. Moving to Slide 11. In the U.S.A., the reset is complete, and we are now focused on scaling the opportunity. Our market strategy is simple. City Chic USA wins on dresses. We want to become the dress authority for curves. The U.S.A. curve dress market is materially larger than the ANZ curve market, and we are investing behind the dress range where we have the strongest authority and the greatest opportunity to win. We are selectively increasing marketing investment as the return on spend meets our expectations. Importantly, this investment is driving profitable customer acquisition and building the foundation for future growth. We are building community as a scale engine. Paid media drives discovery, but community drives the belief in the brand. We're increasing our influencer and affiliate network, improving customer retention through the digital journey and taking a controlled approach to partner expansion, so we protect brand authority. You can see some of our influencer partners on this page. We're focusing them on our proven winners, showcasing products that have already tested well in the market and where we have inventory depth. And when we combine great product with authentic advocacy, sell-through materially improves. We've also included examples of our U.S.A. customer feedback in the appendix, both directly and through social media. The consistency of the feedback reinforces our belief that when we deliver the right product, there is a significant opportunity to grow the business in the market. We're also expanding our international shipping through Global-E, giving us ability to reengage customers in markets where we previously have had a presence. The way I think about the U.S.A. is this. We're not just selling dresses. We are building the dress community for curves with digital advertising at its heart and letting growth follow belief. Moving to Slide 12. We're also turning volatility into an opportunity by investing in tools and capabilities that improve decision-making, customer outcomes and profitability. A good example is SeeStone, the AI-powered platform that converts product images into sales forecasts and supports sharper buying decisions. This is now a meaningful capability for our buying and merch teams. We're using Claude and Copilot to identify emerging trends and customer demands earlier than we have ever before. Combined with our more agile supply chain, this allows us to move fast behind winning trends and reduce the risk of getting product wrong. More broadly, AI is live across the business. We use Jasper to create and optimize marketing content, and it's been trained in our brand tone of voice for a number of years. We've connected all of our key business data into a single source of the truth, allowing Claude to analyze information across sales, customers, websites, stores, labor and even finance. And this is creating new opportunities to improve decision-making and increase efficiencies and uncover insights across the business, and we are already seeing very strong outcomes. We're using AI tools to understand, analyze and learn from customer behaviors on our website, we use AI-driven product recommendations and on-site customer journeys, and we use AI optimized digital marketing execution to drive a strong return. This is not about AI for the sake of it. It's about making better decisions, improving the customer experience and building a leaner and more scalable business. We're also recognized this year as a finalist for the Australian Fashion Industry Gamechanger Award, acknowledging the transformation of City Chic and our ability to adapt in a rapidly changing retail environment. Moving to Slide 13. Another area where the market is changing is the adoption of Ozempic and other GLP-1 drugs and the way it's reshaping apparel demand. Using our Fit Expertise, we see this as an opportunity to deepen customer relations as body shape and size evolve and wardrobes reset. As weight changes, fit becomes more important, not less. That plays directly to our strength as a brand dedicated to solving fit and fashion frustrations for curvy customers. In the U.S., 21% of households now use a current GLP-1 taker and adoption has more than doubled in the last 16 months. Momentum is building in Australia and New Zealand, where it's believed up to 0.5 million people take a GLP-1. And consumer behavior is changing as a result of this. Apparel spend increases 10% after 6 to 8 months on GLP-1 with half of the users purchasing clothing and the majority experiencing a meaningful size change. Most importantly, for City Chic, clothing considerations are shifting towards what we are known for. Fit and quality are way more important through this journey. City Chic has always supported her through her size and shape. Our reputation has been built on trusted fit helping customers feel confident on their journey, and that positions us extremely well as this dynamic continues to evolve throughout the market. Moving to Slide 14. Our response to GLP-1 and changing size dynamics is to extend our reach without changing our DNA. We have more customers now than ever before, providing clear evidence that our strategy is working, and we see a significant opportunity to leverage our Fit Expertise as customer size and shape continue to evolve. Historically, customers moving up and down in size has been reasonably balanced. And more recently, we've seen a much greater proportion of customers moving down in size. However, the vast majority of them still remain within our specialty sizes. We are seeing growing demand in size 10 and 12 with size 12 now representing 8% of store sales. And this reinforces our belief that there is a significant opportunity to leverage our Fit Expertise across a broader size range while remaining true to our customer. Our actions are clear. We are broadening size coverage, so our Cut for Curves fit extends to smaller sizes. We're expanding stretch, adjustability and forgiving silhouettes in key wardrobe building categories. We're using AI-enabled buying tools to redefine size curves by store, region and channel, improving our fit guides and styling advice to help customers rebuild their wardrobes with confidence. This is about extending our reach without changing who we are. It's about being there for her and giving her confidence in our fit and fashionability through every stage of her journey. Returns remain an important focus as they impact both customer experience and profitability. We have seen a material improvement in returns rates recently. The biggest driver of this has been the work we've done on fit consistency and quality control. We are already leaders in this area. However, by implementing in-line quality control across our factory base, we've delivered greater consistency across the range and reduce many of the issues that historically drive returns. We are also investing in initiatives that give customers confidence when purchasing online. One example is our partnership with Mys Tyler, a leading fit-focused fashion technology platform, which integrates creator generated fit and styling content directly onto our product pages. The early results are encouraging with returns down 10% in the U.S.A. and 7% in Australia through the trial. And in the first 7 weeks of FY '27, our overall returns rate improved by 85 basis points compared to last year. This is another example of our strategy in action. By solving fit frustrations and helping customers purchase with confidence, we improve the customer experience while simultaneously improving our profitability. I'll now hand to James to take you through the financials.

Thanks, Phil, and good morning, everyone. As Phil has already highlighted, we were pleased with the continued improvement in profitability during FY '26 with underlying EBITDA increasing 92% to $12.3 million. The improvement reflects the continued execution of our strategy. We delivered strong trading margins, lower fulfillment costs and ongoing discipline across our cost base while continuing to invest in the product, customer and technology initiatives that support the business for our long-term growth strategy. While group revenue was down year-on-year, it was very much a tale of 2 regions. ANZ delivered revenue growth of 7.6%, supported by improved product, stronger customer engagement and good store performance. In the U.S.A., revenue was lower following our deliberate decision to reduce inventory investment during the period of tariff uncertainty and our move away from the Amazon wholesale channel. Importantly, our focus has remained on the quality and profitability of sales rather than growth at any cost. This was reflected in the continued improvement in gross margin and the growth in trading gross margin dollars across ANZ. Cost control also remained a key focus. Underlying Cost of Doing Business reduced by $7.1 million, benefiting from the annualization of prior year initiatives and further management actions during FY '26. Operational marketing costs reduced by almost 25%, allowing us to maintain investment in digital advertising and customer acquisition. Wages were down 5.5% and other operating expenses by over 20%, more than offsetting the high inflationary pressure seen across almost all areas of the business. Overall, FY '26 represents another year of progress. The business remains some distance from where we ultimately want it to be, but profitability has continued to improve and the underlying economics of the business are moving in the right direction. Turning to the balance sheet. The business remains in a stable financial position. We finished the year with a net cash balance of $5.2 million, up significantly on the prior year. During FY '26, we repaid $5 million of borrowings and ended the period with our debt facility undrawn. We also extended that facility through to March 2028 on unchanged terms, providing the business with continued liquidity and flexibility as we execute our strategy. We have already completed the first of the 2 covenant clean down requirements for FY '27 and expect to complete the second one before 31 December 2026. Inventory reduced by more than 11% during the year, reflecting our deliberate decision to reduce purchasing in the U.S.A. while tightly managing working capital across the group. Trade payables were influenced by the timing of supplier payments around year-end and the rebuilding of the U.S.A. collection. More broadly, our working capital position remains well managed and aligned with the current scale of the business. The key takeaway for me is that we have continued to improve profitability, remain disciplined on costs and maintained financial flexibility while still investing in the customer, product and technology initiatives that support future growth. There is still more work to do, but we believe the business is in a better position today than it was 12 months ago. With that, I'll hand back to Phil to take you through the trading update and outlook.

Thank you, James, and I will now talk to the trading update and outlook. While retail trading conditions remain challenging and the cost of living pressures continue to impact our customers, City Chic is well positioned to continue growing sales and deliver sustainable profitability over time. Over the past 2 years, we have strengthened the product and brand, simplified the business, built new capabilities and improved the balance sheet. The focus is now on leveraging those foundations to drive profitable revenue growth. And the first 7 weeks of FY '27 have been encouraging with continued momentum in stores, stable gross margin and improving trends in the U.S. Overall, sales are flat. However, the quality of the result is encouraging. Store comp sales are up 11.4%. Gross margin has stabilized at our targeted level, and we continue to see strong engagement with customers across the brand. Online revenue remains impacted by our decision to continue to reduce promotional activity. While this is impacting conversion in the short term, we believe it positions the business to better capitalize on the key Australia and New Zealand summer trading period. We've continued to optimize the store network, closing 4 stores, as I said earlier, and maintaining our focus on profitability and return on capital. In the U.S.A., the trends are encouraging. Revenue momentum is improving across both our own site and partner channels with strengthening gross margins and strong sell-through of the new dress ranges. Our strategy remains clear. We are building City Chic USA as the dress authority for curves. We're investing behind customer acquisition, increasing inventory depth in winning categories and using community-led marketing to build belief in the brand and strengthen customer retention and drive new customer acquisition. With the recent income tax changes in the U.S., we think that will drive some momentum in and around our customer base. As James said, the business is now in a very different position. We have strengthened the product and brand, simplified the operation, improved the balance sheet and established a scalable platform for growth. There is still more work to do, and we are focused on leveraging that platform we've built to drive profitable revenue growth and continue to increase the value of the City Chic brand. That is how we will deliver on our objective of sustainable, profitable long-term growth. I'd like to thank the whole City Chic team for their work through FY '26. The progress we have made is the result of disciplined execution, a lot of hard work and most importantly, a real commitment to our customer. I'd like to thank the Board for all their guidance in the last year, and I would like to thank our shareholders for their ongoing support. I will now open up to questions. Thank you.

[Operator Instructions] We have no questions at this time. Mr. Ryan, I'd like to turn the conference back over to you.

Once again, I'd just like to thank all of the CC team for all the effort they put in this year. And again, to the Board and the shareholders, thank you. Yes, that will do.

Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's conference call. Thank you for your participation, and you may now disconnect.