Shaver Shop Group Limited (SSG) Earnings Call Transcript & Summary

August 26, 2024

Australian Securities Exchange AU Consumer Discretionary Specialty Retail earnings 44 min

Earnings Call Speaker Segments

Operator

operator
#1

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Shaver Shop Results Presentation and Investor Conference Call for the 2024 financial year. Please note that today's call is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]. Presenting today will be Cameron Fox, Shaver Shop, CEO and Managing Director; and Larry Hamson, Shaver Shop, CFO and Company Secretary. If you wish to follow along with the slides, Shaver Shop presentation has been launched with the ASX and is also available from Shaver Shop Investor Center website. I will now hand over to Cameron Fox. Please go ahead sir.

Cameron Fox

executive
#2

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for joining us today. As always, please note the forward-looking statements slide at the end of the presentation. In terms of our agenda today, I'll first walk you through a bit of Shave shop's history, our business and what differentiates us in the market. We'll then move on to provide an overview of our FY '24 results. I'll then hand over to Larry, who will take you through our financial results in a bit more detail before I speak to our FY '25 priorities and our trading update. We do have a bit to get through today, so let's get right into the main agenda items for today. So let's start on Slide 4, which provides a high-level snapshot of our business. Shaver Shop was founded back in 1986 as a men's Shaver repair shop. This is important to note because it's service-based ethos and focus on product knowledge remains core to our DNA today. Over time, we have developed a trusted and recognized brand in Australia with unprompted brand awareness of around 87% and Shaver Shop being increasingly known as the market leader for men's and women's personal care and grooming solutions in this market. We are the only large-scale pure-play specialty retailer in our sector, which means we are intensely passionate about the categories we sell and ensuring our customers' needs are met. It also means given our scale in these categories that we are able to negotiate exclusive access to new and innovative products being launched by our major global suppliers like Braun, Oral-B, Phillips and Panasonic. These are strong, long-standing supplier partnerships that have been forged over decades in the business. We are a true multichannel retailer with 123 stores across Australia and New Zealand. We also have around 23% of our sales being generated online. All of our online sales are fulfilled by the closest Shaver Shop store to the customer, which means they can be comfortable shopping online with the knowledge that the local Shaver Shop will assist with any post sales services they need. Our balance sheet is strong with net cash and no debt. The hallmark of our business is strong cash flow generation, which is being used to reinvest the growth as well as paying a healthy dividend yield. Finally, we have a strong and experienced leadership team with an average tenure of more than 10 years. Now moving on to our growth drivers. We have many business fundamentals that underpins Shaver Shop's growth trajectory. We are in a robust and growing market, particularly in men's grooming, where there is less competition and an increasing acceptance in society for men to adopt a beauty regime. We drive brand loyalty and repeat purchase by investing heavily in training so that all our teams are product matter experts and deliver exceptional customer service. We have built a very strong and proven omnichannel capability. Our well-established store network comprises 123 stores across Australia and New Zealand, and it's been consistently profitable, which means we rarely close stores. Our customers often share the same passion about the products we sell as we do. So we leverage our scale, 38-year experience, data and insights about the sixth sector to drive profitability. Finally, in terms of business fundamentals, we have a strong balance sheet. We generate robust operating cash flow and a proven profitability, which allows us to support ongoing investment in the business. Now on top of these strong business fundamentals, we have the strategic proprieties to drive incremental growth. 3 key growth strategies are listed on this slide. The first is strategic category management, which is designed to extend our category leadership through range differentiation, like exclusive access to products and brands, ensuring that we have the broadest and deepest offering in our core categories and ensuring we minimize any gaps in our range. The second key growth strategy is range expansion, which means we are looking at opportunities to expand into adjacent categories or add innovative products and brands that have strong growth opportunities for Shaver Shop. Third, with the amount of activity in sourcing new and differentiated products, we need to continue evolving our store design so that we can merchandise properly and continue delivering our customers and engaging and enjoyable shopping experience. In summary, Shaver Shop is a solid business with a strong track record, and we have both business fundamentals and strategies that we expect to drive future growth. With that, let's move on to our financial results overview on Slide 7. Sales were down 2.3% in FY '24 to $219 million, with online sales continuing to represent approximately 23% of total sales. Margins remained solid at 44.4%, down 10 basis points, and we maintained tight control over operating expenses. This led to Shaver Shop generating net profit of $15.1 million, down 10.1%. Consistent with prior years, Shaver Shop once again delivered strong operating cash flow of $34.1 million, which was used to reinvest in our business as well as return $12.8 million to shareholders by way of fully franked dividends. With $13.3 million in net cash on our balance sheet, our financial position remains rock solid. Today, the Board declared a $0.05 fully franked final dividend, which brings total dividends for the year to $0.102, consistent with last year's payout. Customer service metrics remain exceptional with NPS averaging 89 out of 100 across the year. So moving on to Slide 8. We made good progress with our key priorities last financial year. In terms of strategic category management, we were very active. We secured the 5-year exclusive distribution rights for Skull Shaver, a brand with a global cup following that has quickly become one of our fastest-growing ranges. We were also able to secure exclusive distribution rights for [ Apple Lady ], [ Silken ] and Oclean, which we'll be launching in the coming weeks across Australia and New Zealand. As a market leader in men's and women's personal grooming solutions, we can offer overseas suppliers a simple turnkey go-to-market strategy for building the brands and sales here in Australia and in New Zealand. This is true for both new and existing brands in the market and by having the exclusive rights, Shaver Shop is executing its strategy to be the category leader with a unique and differentiated offering for our customers. In terms of range expansion, we added brands like American Crew, Jericho and Cremo to our men's consumable range. We revitalized Foreo to give us a stronger [ Fema beauty ] offering, and we added a number of leading shampoo conditioning brands like Kevin Murphy, Olaplex and K18. Finally, we are continuing to optimize our store network, having secured improved store locations for our stores in Frankston and Woden. These stores now have a store footprint and the linear wall space to allow us to properly merchandise our entire product and category lineup, something that just wasn't possible when the stores were 50 to 60 square meters. We also continue to refit our older stores to ensure they reflect our latest brand standards and improve our merchandising to make it easier for customers to shop and find the products they want. This activity will continue into FY '25 and also beyond. I'm now on to Slide 9 to discuss our sales trends over the last financial year. The graph on the top right shows the improvement in sales growth across each quarter. Now after a very soft first quarter, we were able to turn small declines in sales in the second and third quarters into positive growth over quarter 4. What we've increasingly seen is, customers focusing their shopping intensity around the key gift-giving periods like Black Friday, Boxing Day and into financial year when promotions are the strongest, and they can maximize value from their spending budget. We continue to work with our suppliers to secure highly compelling offers over these key periods that drive customers into our stores and give us the greatest chance to secure a sale at attractive margins. This balancing act worked well with declines in sales volumes being largely offset by increases in average transaction values across many of our categories. Now we're looking at the split by sales channel, online sales have stabilized at around 23% of total sales and stayed relatively flat over the year at around $51 million. So let's now look at some of our operating metrics on Slide 10. In terms of in-store, the most significant driver of the decline in sales last year was outside customer foot traffic declining 13%. In-store customer foot traffic also declined, albeit not to the same extent as the outside measure. Our store teams did a good job converting customers that entered our stores with sales conversion of 43.3%. Now this was not enough to prevent transaction volumes declining 6.1%, but we're able to mitigate some of this impact with in-store average transaction values increasing 3.6% for the year. In terms of online, total unique visitors were $10.5 million, with sales conversion of approximately 3.2%, which was up on the prior year. Total active online customers were approximately 330,000 and consistent with in-store; we were able to maximize transaction values, which were up 7% to over $145 on average. Now this was in part driven by changes in category mix. Overall, given the headwinds we faced, we think it's a solid result in a pretty complicated and challenging retail environment. Our focus on being product experts and delivering exceptional customer service is evident on Slide 11. Our Net Promoter Score remains around 89, a world-class result that reflects the passion and dedication of our store teams, day in and day out. I'm extremely proud of this metric as it ensures our customers are leaving our stores after having a positive shopping experience. Something that we hope will spur word-of-mouth recommendations and ensure we have these customers returning in the months and years to come. Our sales conversion metric, the number of customers that buy something in our stores as a percentage of customers that enter our stores dipped slightly in FY '24 to 43.3%, a reflection that propensity to spend dropped during the year as shopping budgets became tighter following the high interest rates and the cost-of-living pressure over the last 24 months. Now that said, we're still very pleased with this result. In our view, we're achieving the right balance between actively selling to our customers without them filling 2 pressures to buy. Moving on to our gross profit trends on Slide 12. Despite channel mix changes towards a lower margin long-term hair removal and her styling categories, we were able to hold gross profit margins roughly flat at 44.4%. Now going back 12 to 8 months, we felt hair styling and long-term hair removal solutions would prove more resilient. So we backed up our conviction with good stock rate and commitments with our suppliers. Our female categories remain very important for our go-to-market strategy. Remembering around 50% of our customers are female, but generally, they come into our stores, shopping for the men in their lives. However, they increasingly leave our shop, understanding we range leading female beauty brands like GHD, Cloud Nine and Foreo. Overall, I'm very pleased with our FY '24 gross margin results as it shows we were able to again achieve a good balance by retaining or growing market share and maximizing gross profit dollar contribution. I'll now hand you over to Larry, who will walk you through our financial results in more detail.

Lawrence Hamson

executive
#3

Thanks, Cameron. I'll first speak to our financial performance on Slide 14. As Cameron mentioned earlier, our sales declined 2.3% to around $219 million. In-store sales were down approximately $5 million or 2.9% for the year, while online sales were effectively flat, declining only $0.1 million. In addition to maintaining gross profit margins, we tightly controlled our operating expenses with our cost of doing business increasing only 0.7% in absolute terms across the year or about $0.4 million. As a percentage of sales, cost of doing business were up 80 basis points to 27%, more influenced by the drop in sales rather than an increase in expenditure. With our average lease tenure continuing to decline an increasing proportion of our store rent costs were in lease amortization as opposed to lease interest, leading to EBIT of $21.9 million. With the increase in interest rates on deposits, we were able to generate a decent yield from our net cash balance across the year, with interest income of approximately $0.7 million. All these factors combined led to Shaver Shop generating net profit after tax of $15.1 million, down 10.1% on last year with basic earnings per share of $0.117, down 10.7%. Cash EPS, which adjusts for the tax benefit on the franchise buybacks completed in prior years was $0.125, down 10.1% on last year. This tax benefit finishes in FY '25 with the final deduction being worth approximately $780,000 to cash NPAT. Let's now look at our cost of doing business in more detail. Our biggest operating expense is employment costs and with the minimum wage increase of 5.75% last year, it's probably no surprise that the biggest inflationary impact was from this line on the P&L. Occupancy expenses increased given we didn't receive any COVID-19 rent relief in FY '24 in contrast to the beneficial impact of the prior 2 financial years. We continue to test and experiment with our marketing spend and with the intent of maximizing returns on investment. This led to lower television spending as well as a reduction in absolute terms in digital advertising spend. We may have cut too hard in some cases, so I'd expect that marketing and advertising expenditure would return closer to FY '23 levels in dollar terms in the coming financial year. We are also able to drive savings across operational expenses as well as our corporate overheads. Overall, we think our cost control last year was a solid result for the business and a critical factor in our profitability remaining fairly resilient in the face of declining sales as well as an inflationary cost environment. Now on to our financial position on Slide 16. Our balance sheet continues to be very solid with net cash and no debt. We have a $30 million debt facility at our disposal, but have not needed to draw down on this for the last 3 financial years. Inventory levels increased by $1.2 million to $23.1 million at 30th June ‘24. We feel this is still slightly below optimal levels with strong end of financial year sales, leading to lower than optimal stock levels in our stores at year-end. Right-of-use assets and lease liabilities continue to decline as Shaver Shop generally renews most leases now on 3-year terms. We feel this is prudent given consumer demand remains subdued, leading to continuing uncertainty around tenancy mix in some centers. As Cameron will speak to, we are also working to evolve our store format to align with changing merchandising requirements. So shorter lease terms provide more flexibility if there is a need to change locations. Our trade payables balance was slightly higher than last year caused by one of our suppliers having payment terms that extended into early July. This helped our net cash position and operating cash flow for FY '24 and will have the reversing effect next year. Lastly, our net asset position increased by $3.2 million to $87.7 million. Now moving on to our net cash flow on Slide 17. I Shaver Shop continues to be a highly cash-generative business. Operating cash flow was $34.1 million, up $1.1 million on last year's result, but was in part supported by the $3.8 million in stock purchases, which were due on the 1st of July as referenced on the last slide. We used our strong operating cash flow to invest $3.4 million into the accretive 5-year exclusive agreement with Skull Shaver as well as to continue investing in the business by way of store investments and continuing our technology stack improvements. We also returned $12.8 million to shareholders by way of fully franked dividends, leading to Shaver Shop finishing the year with $13.3 million in net cash, down around $0.2 million on last year. Which leads us to Slide 18 in our capital management. Our solid balance sheet, strong operating cash flow and resilient profitability has led to Shaver Shop's Board today announcing a $0.05 fully franked final dividend. This brings total FY '24 dividends to $0.102 for the year and means that Shaver Shop has increased its payout ratio to around 88% of reported net profit after tax and 82% of cash NPAT. This is slightly higher than the Board's target payout range of approximately 60% to 80% of cash NPAT. With Shaver Shop's strong financial position, we intend to continue to invest in accretive opportunities for the business, such as exclusive sourcing arrangements like the Skull Shaver license that was announced in June to ensure we continue to offer our customers a unique shopping experience with the broadest and deepest range in our core categories. We'll continue to build our private brand offering to fill gaps that exist in our current range. As well, we would like to maintain the flexibility to consider other growth initiatives should they occur. Importantly, Shaver Shop's return on capital employed remains very healthy at 25.2%. I'll now hand you back to Cameron to walk through our FY '25 priorities and trading update.

Cameron Fox

executive
#4

Thank you, Larry. Our FY '25 priorities build upon our business fundamentals and our key strategic growth priorities. Being category leaders with the latest innovative brands and products in our core grooming ranges is crucial for our ongoing competitiveness. With exclusivity for Skull Shaver now secured for the next 5 years, we're really excited to maximize this opportunity. Over the last 3 to 4 years, while Skull Shaver has been a massive success for our business, we had been doing all the heavy lifting in building the brand in Australia and New Zealand through paid advertising spots via ESPN as well as through our social channels. Whilst this worked very well for Shaver Shop, we're convinced it was also driving sales to competitors, including directly to Skull Shaver themselves. Now that we have exclusivity locked in for the next 5 years with full rights to sales from Skull Shaver local website, all over and above advertising will drive returns for Shaver Shop without dilution. Now as discussed earlier, we also intend to use the Skull Shaver arrangement as an example of what can -- what we can do for other innovative suppliers that want to establish a presence or grow their brand in Australia, New Zealand, and personal care market. We have also made great progress with our social media presence over the last 12 months on TikTok as well as Instagram and YouTube. Finally, we know consumer budgets are tight. So it's crucial, we maximize our share of wallet over the key gift-giving periods like Father's Day, Black Friday, Christmas and Boxing Day. Our promotional programs for the first half are already largely locked in with suppliers. So it's now a case of ensuring our store teams are fully trained and engaged to maximize performance over these key trading periods. To this end, for the first time in 5 years, we are bringing all our store managers to Melbourne for a training and development conference in September. This is a really important event, which has been designed to create alignment across our key priorities for the coming months as well as building excitement and momentum across our network as we enter our most important quarter. With the new product and brand launches, I'm about to talk about, we think our teams will be highly energized as we go into the quarter 2 period, which is critical to Shaver Shop. So moving to Slide 21. The first half of FY '25 has the greatest number of new brand launches for Shaver Shop that I can remember. Pleasingly, fall within our core categories like long-term hair removal hair cutting, power oral care and men's wet shaving. So I'm very excited for the potential of these brands within our business. Epileve is offering a novel laser-based home treatment that is FDA approved and safely used on all skin and hair colors. Now this is a game changer in the industry, even more traditional IPL solutions shouldn't be used on skin with darker pigments and isn't as effective for people with lighter hair colors. Silken also offers a novel FDA-approved home pulse light solution that offers safe and effective long-term hair removal at home. We expanded our men's consumable product offering biting American Crew, Jericho and North America's leading Wet Shave brand, Cremo. Oclean is a new power oral care brand that differentiates itself by using the latest technology to help users brush their teeth better. As an example, the top-of-the-range model has a touchscreen, several cleaning modes, and we'll talk to you if you're brushing too hard. This brand has successfully launched overseas with customer reviews rating their product 4.9 stars out of a maximum of 5. So we're pleased to have the exclusive rights to the range across both Australia and New Zealand. Finally, Meridian has a range of award-winning men's and women's body groomers and trimmers that come in a contemporary range of colors that we feel will resonate strongly with consumers. So in summary, we have lots of new product innovation that is sure to create a lot of buzz and excitement with our store teams as the products start hitting our stores over the next few months. But we've not just been working hard to expand our range with global branded products. We've also been diligently identifying gaps within our current portfolio and sourcing high-quality products that we launched under Shaver Shop's first true private label brand Transform You. With our deep domain knowledge of local customer needs and with, Shaver Shop is uniquely positioned to identify gaps in our product range and work with global manufacturers to design products that match the specific requirements for our quality, performance and value for money. Transform You clearly builds upon Shaver Shop's long-standing tagline of Transform Yourself, and were selected after months of consumer research and focus group feedback. In total, our intention is to launch 30 lines in time for this Christmas period. Whilst this is an important step for our business and one that we think is strategically important over the long term, we are not expecting a material contribution from this brand over FY '25. That said, because we are now sourcing and importing products directly from overseas, there is a working capital impact of approximately $2 million to $3 million that will impact FY '25 as we buy initial minimum order quantities and build adequate stock levels within our stores. Now we hope this initiative will drive incremental sales and margin growth for Shaver Shop over the medium to long term, but we are also clear that our global branded partners will always remain the most important sales contributor to our business. Lastly, on our FY '25 priorities, we need to continue evolving our store design to create a pleasant and engaging shopping experience for our customers. It also needs to reflect our latest brand standards and our contemporary look and feel. Our new store design must ensure shoppers that are passing by our stores are still invited to come in and touch and feel the products that we sell. Tactility is an essential aspect to our sales process and crucial in trade-up conversions with customers. Finally, our store evolution needs to clearly showcase that we are the house of brands with all the leading global players adequately represented. As we continue to expand our brand portfolio, we think it's also necessary to evolve the layout of our stores, so there is adequate floor and linear wall space to properly merchandise and simplify the shopping experience. Otherwise, our stores can easily feel cluttered with customers somewhat over the world. Some of our stores like Frankston and Woden were only around 40 to 50 square meters. So as you can imagine, it's very difficult to properly merchandise stores of that size, and it's why we've worked with the respective landlords to increase our store footprint in these centers. We think the optimal store size is currently around 80 to 100 square meters, but we intend to continue testing and evolving our store layouts over time, so we create the most stimulating and enjoyable shopping experience possible for our customers. This brings me to Slide 24 in our trading update for the first 7 to 8 weeks of FY '25. Following a strong end of financial year sales period in June, where we saw the strongest monthly sales growth for the business in more than 12 months, July proved more challenging when the end of the financial year sales campaign ended. All these sales ever have improved with total sales growth returning through the 21st of August with our Father's Day promotion resonating well with customers in our core hair removal categories. FY '25 year-to-date sales are now effectively flat, being down 0.8% in total and also on a like-for-like basis. We are continuing to try to balance top line sales growth with maximizing gross profit dollars, leading to gross margins being roughly in line with last year. Now looking forward to the remainder of the first half, we're very excited to launch the greatest number of new brands that we've seen in some time, including our new Transform private label offering. This will create a buzz in our stores that will hopefully translate to strong sales in the all-important second quarter. As discussed already, Transform You will result in an incremental working capital investment of approximately $2 million to $3 million in FY '25 as we pipeline fill our stores. Now just to reiterate, we don't think Transform You will have a material impact to our FY '25 financial performance but are hopeful that it will drive incremental sales and margin for the business over the medium to long term. Over the next 2 to 3 years, we are clear on our strategic priorities. We must continue to drive our category leadership by securing a differentiated range with a high percentage of exclusives. We need to continue evaluating category creep opportunities and securing access to new products that will drive like-for-like sales. We also need to continue evolving our store format so that it showcases our house of brands and delivers the best possible shopping experience for our customers. In closing, I'd just like to thank our store and our support office teams for their ongoing passion and dedication of Shaver Shop. With their positive contributions, we have a very strong and resilient business as evidenced by FY '24 financial results in what was a pretty challenging retail environment. As we look forward to the second half and beyond, we hope to see stronger consumer trends emerge where interest rates begin to moderate and cost of living pressures subside over the next year or so. That said, we are not waiting for the macro environment to improve with a full slate of priorities to act on to drive our business forward, consistent with prior years and having regard to the importance of Black Friday, Christmas and Boxing Day trading results to Shaver Shop's FY '25 performance, it is not appropriate to provide sales or profit guidance at this time. Now that concludes our formal presentation. We'd now like to invite any questions you may have. Thank you.

Operator

operator
#5

[Operator Instructions] Your first question is from the line of Andrew Johnston with MST Financial.

Andrew Johnston

analyst
#6

Cameron, Larry. A couple of questions around the new products and that whole focus of starting to shift that business probably more aggressively than we've been done for quite a while. There was a comment there about category creek into adjacencies. Is that what we're seeing with the new products you're bringing in? Or is that a reference to something else that you're looking at?

Cameron Fox

executive
#7

No, I think it's a combination of both, Andrew. So we obviously have a lot of new brands that we're bringing in. Then not necessarily category creep opportunities. But in addition to that, if you look at some of the brands we're bringing in across men's hair styling, women's shampoo and conditioner, fragrance, I'd classify all that as category creep opportunities we just feel there's a natural opportunity for Shaver Shop and people coming in purchasing their product to increase basket size through these ancillary opportunities and category creep opportunities specifically.

Andrew Johnston

analyst
#8

So a question as partly related to that is about M&A opportunities. I'm just wondering whether you can add any more color to the things you've looked at to what extent is the things you're looking at adjacent to what you're doing or step out or maybe you don't want to mention at all about those?

Cameron Fox

executive
#9

Yes, I'll leave that, I think we've mentioned before, Andrew, we're always open to M&A opportunities as any good and experienced board of management team would be. However, in terms of the M&A deals that we're looking at or could be looking at, I think it's a combination of things. You can't really simplify. Yes, adjacent categories may make sense, but you're also looking at what's a good fit from a management core competency point of view as well. Because at the end of the day, Andrew, as we've discussed, we've got a very good business here at Shaver Shop. That's a bit of a cash cow business. It's very profitable, and our focus still has to remain on the core business. So if an opportunity comes up, obviously, we'd look at that, but we also appreciate that it's easy to have been done.

Lawrence Hamson

executive
#10

Just to add a little bit on to that. So we've looked at a couple of things in the last 6 to 12 months. We're not actively looking at anything at the moment. It's more of an opportunistic thing if something comes across our desk that looks interesting. We'll take a look at it, but nothing sort of matched what we think is the right fit for Shaver Shop.

Andrew Johnston

analyst
#11

You previously just on that, I think it was a year ago or when you talked about starting to look at opportunities, which was shipped coming out of Covid, you indicated that there was a sort of a time period. If you haven't really seen anything that you might start thinking about some sort of capital return. Is there any more thoughts on that? I mean, I suppose you've actually sort of mentioned that you're pretty keen to keep the balance sheet in the shape of. So maybe that's the answer to the question I'm asking?

Lawrence Hamson

executive
#12

Yes, I think at least at the moment where we're seeing good opportunities to drive accretion into the business through some of the deals that we've been able to source like the Skull Shaver deal. We think that's a really strong prospect for the business that's going to drive some really incremental value for shareholders. So as long as we still see those types of things coming through, then absolutely, we think the right thought at the moment is to keep that cash on the balance sheet so that we can drive incremental returns for shareholders. If that changes down the track, the Board is always considering capital management. So we'll look at it at that time.

Andrew Johnston

analyst
#13

Just to be clear on Transform You, is really the only cost there, a balance sheet inventory cost for introducing that product?

Lawrence Hamson

executive
#14

It's primarily the stock investment that is there, but there's also some incremental just in terms of brand development and those types of things, create the logos, design the boxes and the packaging and those types of things, but it's largely just around the stock. The others is pretty immaterial in comparison.

Andrew Johnston

analyst
#15

If I can just sneak in one more question. A pretty impressive performance versus the foot traffic trends that you were seeing. Can you give us any more color around that for foot traffic trend about how that's evolved over the 12 months?

Lawrence Hamson

executive
#16

I think it's been probably pretty consistent. It just seems to be that the outside passing traffic within shopping centers, certainly shopping centers we are in is down that sort of double-digit figure or thereabouts. Inside traffic in terms of our stores is not quite as pronounced, which is hopefully testimony to the good strong brand awareness we have in equity. The people are coming in our doors a little bit more than what the ratio is declining shopping center footfall. But the key always comes down to Andrew ultimately is our customer conversion. That's why there's so much focus on that, so much focus on our product training as well as our staff training because ultimately, if your foot numbers are declining in shopping centers, obviously, our team has to be very on point and conversion has to be up. That's why things like conversion percentage, our basket size, ATV become particularly critical.

Andrew Johnston

analyst
#17

That makes that chart on Figure 9 that quarterly sales growth on Figure 9 perhaps even more impressive.

Operator

operator
#18

Your next question is from the line of James Casey with Ord Minnettt.

James Casey

analyst
#19

I just had a question on the new private label range. So just wondering if I could get a bit more background as to how long you've been developing these products where the products will come from? Then if you've incurred any costs along the way that have been capitalized for the private label program.

Cameron Fox

executive
#20

This is the first couple. I mean in terms of background and work probably 12 months, and we certainly haven't lead forward too much with the prospects on this because your test products, you look at products and 99% of them don't stack up in terms of quality or fit for Australian purposes or commercial. So it's been a really extensive process, held a lot of due diligence placed on this. Of course, then you get the product and then you've got to go hit the consumer market research, get your branding right. So yes, it's taken time. But at the end of the day, we're really conscious that we did not want to go to market unless we were very confident that the offering we had and the branding we have was on point and we're very comfortable, as comfortable as we can be with the product range we develop.

Lawrence Hamson

executive
#21

I'll speak to more of the financial questions. So most of the products, as you probably expect, are sourced from China. There are some that are being sourced from Europe as well, but primarily from China. There is a bit of an increased FX risk because we are sourcing it in U.S. dollars. But again, as Cameron said, it's not sort of a material number overall. The last point, sorry, your last question, always around capitalization of potential capitalization costs. We haven't capitalized any cost to the P&L in FY '24 relating to this. There were some incremental costs in relation to brand research and brand development, but those were all expensed.

James Casey

analyst
#22

Then obviously, there's an increase in inventory that you've highlighted this $2 million to $3 million. So does the inventory to sales ratio move up to kind of 12% or 13% permanently. Is that the way to look at it?

Lawrence Hamson

executive
#23

I mean the reality is the stock level sort of fluctuate a bit throughout the year. If you're looking at that year-end number, then that's probably relatively close. So we've highlighted 2 things. So we ended the year with $23.1 million in inventory. We said we thought just in normal business that was probably $1 million to $2 million lower than optimal because of the strong sales in June that we had. Then we're looking to add another sort of $2 million to $3 million in terms of the Transform You brand launch. So that sort of gets you up to around that $27 million, $28 million, I guess, number at the end of the financial year.

Operator

operator
#24

Ladies and gentlemen, there are no further questions at this time. I will now hand back the conference to Mr. Fox for his closing remarks.

Cameron Fox

executive
#25

Just a few closing comments. In terms of the Shaver Shop, we are a segment leader in both online and in off-line. We are a large and growing market, driven by changing consumer preferences and new product innovations. Now product range is applicable to almost all demographics. We've spoken a lot over the last half an hour or so of our differentiated and resilient specialty retail business model. We deliver excellence in customer service, and we have unparalleled product knowledge in our categories. We have a plethora of product exclusive opportunities, and we offer competitive value-based pricing. We also have the potential to further increase market share. We have high brand awareness in Australia. New Zealand is a growing opportunity for Shaver Shop. We have a proven and highly profitable omni-retail model. Again, we have a clean balance sheet, no debt with very high cash conversion. We have an experienced Board and management team, and we are focused on investing for growth and improving total shareholder returns. Finally, we have an attractive dividend payout and franked dividend yield. That concludes our presentation today. Thank you for everybody's support.

Operator

operator
#26

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your lines.

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Programmatic access to Shaver Shop Group Limited earnings transcripts and 32,000+ others is available through the EarningsCalls.dev REST API. Plans from $24.99/month — full transcripts, speaker segments, full-text search, and the recently-added /api/v1/transcripts/recent polling endpoint for ETL pipelines.