Oxford Industries, Inc. (OXM) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

I'm pleased to welcome Oxford Industries up on the stage here with me is CEO, Tom Chubb, with him here at the conference is CFO, Scott Grassmyer, and Brian Smith, Director of Financial Reporting and Investor Relations. We're going to start with a handful of slides that Tom is going to run you through and then we're going to get into some Q&A. So Tom, I'll kick it over to you.

Okay. Thank you, Brandon, and thank you for the introduction, and thanks to all of you for being here this morning. Happy 2025 to you. That's our safe harbor statement. You can find that in a lot more investor information on our website at oxfordinc.com included on the website is an 8-K that we filed yesterday morning that includes all the slides that we're presenting here today. So if you've dialed-in and you want to be able to look at the slides or you're sitting in the back and you can't see them, they're on the website, they're part about 8-K. So this is our North Star slide. We actually use this slide all the time in employee meetings and investor meetings and even our Board of Director meetings, we literally start off every Board meeting with the slide, and it's just a reminder to us of what we're trying to accomplish. And it starts with our objective, which is to maximize long-term shareholder value. To do that, we've got to build a sustainable business that can last for the long term. And we also have to make sure we always conduct ourselves with ethics, integrity and respect for people and everything that we do. Then our strategy for delivering that shareholder value is to own a portfolio of lifestyle brands that deliver sustained profitable growth. Then the next one is a little bit different, but it's actually super important, and that's our purpose which is to about happiness. And when we do that, when we take our customers to their metaphorical happy place with our products, our brands and most importantly, the wonderful service that our people deliver the profitable growth tends to take care of itself. And then last is our focus, which is just a reminder that what we're really trying to do here is generate a lot of cash that we can then reinvest in growth in the business and the return of capital to our shareholders. So what does that all look like? Well, we've got 7 brands, Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer, Johnny Was, Southern Tide, The Beauford Bonnet Company, Duck Head and Jack Rogers, you can see on the right, Tommy is the biggest part of our business. It's a bit over half of the total. And then a lot of people talk on the channel, but we truly are omni channel with 39% of our revenue coming for our own bricks and motor stores, 34% from our own e-commerce websites, 19% from a wholesale and then 8% from our very unique and brand-enhancing hospitality business. We're listed on the New York Stock Exchange under ticker nimble OXM, and we proudly paid a dividend every quarter since we went public in 1960. So 2024 has been a challenging year. We'll end that at the end of this month. We expect to end the year a little bit down in revenue and a bit down in earnings and operating margin. The issue has really been a consumer that's pulled back quite a bit on discretionary spending. And we think there have been a couple of things that work there. One is the cumulative effect of several years of high inflation. The second is that this year, in particular, there was just a lot of distraction in the marketplace with the election, all that went along with that, the wars, the hurricanes, the Olympics, there was just a lot of distraction and we think that distraction was exacerbated in our case by our 45 and up customer base, which tends to be both more headline sensitive and more market sensitive and then our extreme exposure to Florida, which is about 1/3 of our bricks and mortar business and a little less than that if you look at all channels of distribution, but it's a very big part of the business. Despite all that, we continue to invest in the business with 30 new stores, several new Marlin Bars and a new distribution center and process. As we look to fiscal 2025 and really the end of '24, we got past the election, sentiment started to improve, business really picked up quite a bit, things are looking much more optimistic. We've got great plans for 2025. We're going to focus on the #1 priority is on expanding the operating margin. We've got great plans to do that. So this is Tommy Bahama nothing about happiness like the dream of living the island lifestyle and we do that every single day in Tommy Bahama through our stores our restaurants and bars, our hotel, our e-commerce website and most importantly, the wonderful service that our people deliver to our customers every day. And by evoking that lifestyle business. We built a big, beautiful, sustainable business that's got a lot of white space still in front of it. Lilly Pulitzer of Oaks happiness by taking people to a resort state of mind, born in Palm Beach, 65 years ago, Lilly Pulitzer is famous and known for its vibrant and optimistic colors and its unique proprietary prints. By taking those colors and prints and applying them to more contemporary on-trend silhouettes. Lilly Pulitzer has managed to stay relevant to a continuing cycle of new girls and women up to this day. Johnny Was evokes happiness with its California chic lifestyle. We bought this business in 2022. That probably wasn't the best timing given the downturn in discretionary spending that followed shortly thereafter. But to be very direct about it, Johnny Was, at this point, is not performing at the level that we would like to see it perform. That said, we love this brand. We've got a great team there we've recently augmented that team with a couple of new positions and a couple of new hires. We love the affordable luxury pricing. We love the geographic footprint, which is more West Coast oriented than any of our other brands. We love the store economics. There's a lot to love about this brand. And with all that we have going for us and Johnny was, we're confident that we can get it to the same levels of profitability as Tommy and Lilly over time. Then we've got our emerging brand group. This is our 4 smaller brands, and this is a platform where those smaller brands can maintain brand and creative autonomy while still ensuring best-in-class execution, it gives them an opportunity to grow and also gives us a vehicle to onboard new brands as well. This is a very important slide, not a lot on there, but some really critical numbers. The first being that 2.8 million active customers, active for this purpose means they bought something from us within the last 12 months. And you see that, that number is up 37% above pre-pandemic levels. So we've grown the business by adding customers who are staying with us and they spend at an average rate of $385 a year. We've added a lot of stores in the last couple of years. It actually gets a little bit confusing because we've actually -- we've closed a handful but opened a lot, you see there we've laid it all out for you on the slide. If you go back 2 years ago to the end of the third quarter of '22, we had 290 stores. We now have 342. So that's a net addition of 52 stores over the last 2 years. We're also investing in a big DC in Georgia, which I mentioned earlier. As our business evolved and grew, we found ourselves with 2 issues. We were under capacity in East Coast distribution and a little bit over in West Coast. So we've adjusted some of the West Coast but are still shipping too much out of the West Coast that still ends up on the East Coast. So we're going to solve the capacity issue and the geographic issue by building this DC. It's about $130 million all in, state-of-the-art, highly automated. We spent about $75 million of that in '24 with the balance to come next year. When we get it done, again, it addresses the geographic and capacity issue and also enables us to get e-com orders in the hands of our customers much faster and replenish stores more frequently and more quickly. And what all of that does is it allows us to increase inventory times and fundamentally to do more business on less inventory and that will support all of our brands for some of them that will be their only DC for some of them that will support part of their needs. Then we've got a slide. Our objective here is to increase long-term shareholder value. There are 2 ways to do that through the stock price, which is the line on the top and it has increased over the last 10 years, albeit with a bit more volatility sometimes than we'd like. And at present, to be very blunt. It's not quite where we'd like to see it, but it is increasing over time. And then the other way that we create shareholder values through our dividend, which are the bars along the bottom and we've actually grown that over the last 10 years at a compound annual growth rate in excess of 12%. Then you've got our cash flow and capital allocation. We generated a very healthy $178 million in cash flow from operations. Last year, we invested that in the growth in the future of the business with $120 million of CapEx and $9 million of acquisitions and then the return of capital to shareholders with $43 million in dividends and $6 million in share repurchases. And while doing all of that, we were still able to reduce our very modest amount of outstanding debt by about $7 million. So update on where we are in the quarter back in December, we issued guidance in our 8-K on Monday, we basically confirmed that guidance and said that we felt like we were right on track to deliver the guidance for the year. I'll remind people, as we always do at this conference that January is a very important full-price month for us, given all the resort business that we have. But again, we feel very good about our ability to deliver the fourth quarter. And with that, I'll get my friend, Brandon here to help with some Q&A.

Thank you. That was great. I know 2024 didn't play out like you expected. But I think it's important to note that overall operating margins are tracking to be above pre-pandemic levels. Your 2 largest brands, Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer are still generating double-digit operating margins, as you just highlighted, really strong cash flow. So the financial foundation is pretty solid as we head into fiscal '25. So I just -- that's important to note for the audience. Oxford has been in business over 80 years. During that time, it's gone through some significant transformation from a manufacturer, private label, primarily wholesale business to being an operator of some really strong retail brands. That strategy started with the acquisition of Tommy Bahama in 2003. And I think since you guys have bought -- since Oxford has bought that business, that too has gone through a pretty meaningful transformation. So maybe just talk about some of the changes Tommy Bahama has undergone since under your ownership and then kind of how that's changed maybe the market opportunity for that brand?

Yes. Great question, and thanks for that question. And Tommy Bahama has just been an incredible acquisition for us. It really transformed our company and gave us the jumping off point to pivot from being as, Brandon, said, the 100% private label manufacturing to 100% lifestyle brands. And when we bought Tommy Bahama, some of the key things that have changed since then. The culture hasn't changed at all. A lot of the people that we came with the company when we bought it or still there, including the CEO is still there, he was the COO at the time. But what has changed. The distribution has changed pretty dramatically. It was very much a wholesale business when we bought it. They did have some company-owned stores, and they did have the beginnings of the food and beverage concept. But it's interesting when we bought it, the founders thought it would never be more than 1/3 direct-to-consumer. And now you look at it, we're over 80% direct-to-consumer. And that's a massive shift really in not only the way the business looks from the outside but how you run it from the inside. The next thing is the e-commerce website. We didn't have e-commerce when we bought it. It took about 5 years, and then we did that. And at the time that we started e-commerce. We thought it could be as big as our biggest store, but now it's in the $200 million range. So that's a big change. We did have food and beverage, but it was a full service restaurants, and we didn't have the Marlin Bar concept, which is our casual -- fast casual concept that really where all the growth in the hospitality business has been for the last 10 years and just a great concept. And then the next thing I would touch on is really the women's business. They sold women's when we bought it, but it was very small and not particularly successful. At this point, we've worked very hard to get that women's proposition right, and we managed to grow the business to 30% of Tommy Bahama's total at this point, which is great. But it also leaves us with a lot of white space because right now, if you think about it, we're 2/3 men and 1/3 women's, that's really sort of the inverse of what the market is. If you're going to track the market, you'd be more like 2/3 women's and 1/3 men. And what that tells me is that among the white space that we have at Tommy Bahama has a huge women's opportunity and we're really winning in that space right now. So those are some of the highlights, some of the changes.

All right. And then maybe dovetailing that you mentioned the Marlin Bars, the women's maybe what are you most excited about for Tommy Bahama maybe over the next 1 to 3 years and not specifically just in 2025.

Well, I think it really is those 2 things that continuing growth and development of the Marlin Bar concept, which ultimately does a couple of things for it. It's a great way to bring new customers into the brand. It's a great way to cement their love of the brand by giving them that complete 360-degree experience in the restaurant, the bar and the retail store. And then what it does for our numbers, retail stores that have a food and beverage piece attached to them within Tommy Bahama do about twice the sales per square foot, that's stores that don't have food and beverage. So the potential to both on the customer side and of this year volume side are really quite big. And then the women's business, I mean, we are fantastic in men's will continue to grow in men's, but that huge opportunity in front of us on women's is super exciting.

Great. Shifting gears. Your second largest brand, Lilly Pulitzer acquired back in 2010. As you noted, this is an iconic brand that dates back to the '50s touched on it a little bit. But with that distinct look, that history and heritage. How do you keep the brand relevant and attract kind of a younger consumer in this fast fashion world that we live in today.

No, that's a great question. And a couple of things about Lilly that will never change or its foundation and the vibrant optimistic colors and the proprietary hand paint and prints never changed that. It will always be about being in a resort state of mind. But what we need to do to stay relevant goes back to the 3 pillars of any brand, product, distribution and communication. And so on product, what we've got to do is take those colors in those prints and apply them to more modern-looking on-trend silhouettes. And we do this really, really well. If you look at our website, the colors and prints won't look all that different than what you've historically seen from Lilly Pulitzer for 65 years. But if you look at the silhouettes, they look very relevant to today's customer and marketplace. Then the same thing on distribution. And by that, I'm talking about stores, wholesale, e-commerce and how all those fit together. The way that shoppers shop has changed over time, and we very much evolved with that. I think we're very much at the forefront of that and Lilly Pulitzer is one of the best omnichannel operators, I believe, in the market, and our customers are shoppers. They want to be able to shop in that modern way, and we give them that opportunity and then communication is the third piece of it, and that's both sort of the broader communication, the generic marketing and making sure we're showing up in the places where she's ingesting media in the ways that seem relevant to today's consumers. So we're doing that. We're all over digital. We're all over all the digital channels we're doing events and activations and collaborations, all of which helped. And then it's also the more personalized communication with e-mails and SMS messages and that type of thing where we want to make sure that we're communicating with her in the way that she wants to be communicated by doing all those things, as I said in the prepared comments. I think we've done a great job of being able to stay relevant despite being 65 years old at this point.