1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc. (NASDAQ:FLWS) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

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Jim McCann: Anthony, I think you’ve reported on and we’ve seen ourselves that for consumer-facing businesses, particularly those who are in e-commerce arena, but not just, the CAC, the customer acquisition cost, has gone through the roof for most companies. So we’re able to pull in our horns on an advertising basis when that is very expensive or make it more expensive for others and rely on our existing customer base, our Passport customers and our ability to stimulate the existing base with offers beyond our primary brand of introduction. So that’s why we’re able to — you’ve seen our costs come down so much. So we’re sort of continuing that [rope] (ph) until the opportunities are better, and that’s when people are more in market for gifting occasions as Thanksgiving — Halloween, Thanksgiving and Christmas.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: All right. That makes a lot of sense. So as far as Passport members, are you still seeing them spend two times or three times more than non-members? Has that trend more or less continued?

Bill Shea: It has continued, Anthony. We have seen that stable and in fact, multi-brand customers, Passport customers, we’re seeing the AOV tick up a little bit with those customers, too, for the year.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Got you. Okay. And then you also talked about seeing lower cost for certain commodities. So where have you seen the most relief and where are you seeing the most pressure points?

Jim McCann: Well, Bill is our expert on commodities. He spend a lot of time on the farm with the chickens. We bake and make a lot of product, Anthony, Cheryl’s, Harry & David, Wolferman’s, and there, we use lots of eggs and lots of butter. And those have been stubborn, but we are starting to see the trends improve there. They tripled in cost within four or five, six months. We had [to hold] (ph) chicken shortage from a flu that went through, cocoa costs for all our chocolates, all of those commodities were high, Bill. Did they peak at almost triple and where are we trending now?

Bill Shea: Yes. So [indiscernible] all the way back and exit back to their kind of historic mean as butter and all types of nuts, cashews, almonds, that we use a lot of. The ones that haven’t are wheat, due to some of the macro and geopolitical issues, corn continues to be high, sugar and cocoa continue to be extremely high. So we have a mix of commodities that some have already reverted back to their historical means from a cost basis. Others are still at very high levels.

Jim McCann: On the other side of the cost kicking ahead we got last year, we pointed out the team, Chris and Bill and Tom pointed out that ocean freight was the real shocker. Now we use ocean freight, both in BloomNet and in our Food Brands, particularly with bringing in packing materials, container shipping materials and non-perishable stuff. And Bill, what were our increased unbudgeted costs there last year were, $60 million?

Bill Shea: So we’ve historically spent around $10 million kind of pre-rise, that raised up at peak to about $50 million. We’re back down to those historical levels now, into that $10 million.

Jim McCann: That’s — we told you, Anthony, that we don’t think labor will revert. We think the inflation of labor is stalling, but we don’t think — we certainly aren’t going to go backwards in our labor rate, which is a good thing for people and good thing that we’ve been able to adjust. But ocean freight has now come back to just very close to pre-pandemic level. So we went from a high of a container or something in a $25,000 range back down to $5,000, maybe the low with pre-pandemic was 4%. So we’re very close to pre-pandemic levels there. But on the labor side, we’re not expecting huge inflation there, but we’re not expecting it to come down either. So that’s why automation, being able to fill the jobs and not incurring big overtime costs as we prep for the holiday to burden this any this year.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Understood. And my last question, I guess, for Bill. What’s the CapEx outlook for fiscal ’24?

Bill Shea: Yeah. We think CapEx will be at or below last year’s level. So if you remember, because of a lot of the automation efforts and some of the technology spend, fiscal ’21 and ’22, we had elevated CapEx of $55 million and $65 million, respectively. This past year, we brought it back down to about $45 million. And for fiscal ’24, we expect to be in that $40 million range.

Jim McCann: But it was good prudent spending, obviously, because CapEx on automation really helped the throughput and helped us on where labor was really challenged.

Anthony Lebiedzinski: Okay. Well, thank you very much and best of luck.

Jim McCann: Thank you, Anthony.

Operator: This concludes our question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the conference back over to Jim McCann for any closing remarks.

Jim McCann: Thank you, and thank you for your interest and your time today. I appreciate all the good questions. We’re getting ready for a holiday weekend at the end of this summer. So I hope it’s a good and fun one for you and your families. If you have any other questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out to us and Bill and Andy and Tom are available to handle any of questions you have. So we look forward to addressing those in the days ahead and certainly after the holiday weekend. So best of the weekend to you.

Operator: The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today’s presentation. You may now disconnect.

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