Helen of Troy Limited (NASDAQ:HELE) Q3 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Peter Grom: Thanks, operator, and good morning, everyone. Julien, I want to say thank you for all the help, and I wish you nothing but the best in retirement. So I wanted to ask about the top line growth. Obviously, the return to growth continues to be delayed, but even kind of going back to the October earnings, there seemed to be a degree of confidence that we could still see a return to growth in the fourth quarter. And Noel, you touched on the environment hasn’t really changed, and I know we will get to ’25 guidance in April. But I guess, how does what you’re seeing today in terms of consumer demand or retail ordering kind of inform your view on when we could actually see a return to growth?

Brian Grass: Yes, this is Brian. I mean, I might look at it maybe a little bit differently than you. I think if you drew a line between — or plotted our points of sales performance over the course of the year, I think there’s a steady progression towards growth, and it kind of ends with the fourth quarter at the high end of our expectations at very slight growth for the fourth quarter. So I actually think it’s a very consistent and reliable, I would say, path towards growth, and very much in line with our expectations. We did adjust our range on the high end down slightly and up on the bottom end of the range slightly for the fourth quarter, and I would just view that as a fine tuning and narrowing, and we explained the reasons why we did that.

I mean, we had a slightly softer holiday season, and we’re projecting out at this point lower overall illness for the full cold-flu season versus an in-line level of incidence in the same period of last year. So in my mind, nothing really much has changed from the outlook that we gave in Q3, and I still feel we’re very much on track. And we are targeting growth for fiscal ’25, can’t tell you exactly what that looks like until we do all the work that we’re doing, that goes into that, but very much targeted and we feel it’s achievable over time, or we wouldn’t provide in our long-term outlook that has growth.

Peter Grom: That’s super helpful, Brian. Maybe a quick follow-up in the cough-cold-flu commentary. Obviously it’s maybe gotten off to a slower start, but can you maybe help us understand how much of a–like, when you think about the marginal changes to guidance, how much of the weaker season is having on the outlook. I guess should illness incidence pick up, which at least it seems around me they have, could this be a source of upside versus your guidance from here? Just trying to understand the degree of visibility where we are today as it pertains to cough, cold and flu. Thanks.

Noel Geoffroy: Yes, sure Peter. What I would say is what we look at is the data as it comes in, and both November and December were meaningfully below the prior year in terms of the illness levels. As you noted, and I noted in my prepared remarks, we feel like we’re hearing about it in the news quite a bit, and it is in the news quite a bit – there’s no doubt about that, but the reality is in really all cases, including COVID, which we’re hearing a lot about, it’s below prior year levels. Now, if that changes and things accelerate, that could be an upside to our fourth quarter, but it all depends on the severity and it depends on the timing of that, because it’s got to happen fairly quickly in order for it to make an meaningful impact to our fourth quarter, and that’s why we made the adjustment that we did in our outlook.

Peter Grom: Got it, thanks so much. I’ll pass it on.

Operator: Thank you. The next question is from the line of Olivia Tong with Raymond James. Please proceed with your questions.

Olivia Tong: Great, thanks. Good morning, and best of luck, Julien, with all that you have planned going forward. It’s been great working with you.

Julien Mininberg: Thank you.

Olivia Tong: My first question is really around visibility – you know, you mentioned in your commentary to Peter about the steady improvement through the year. We kind of look at this and think about this year’s performance versus last year, there have been obviously a couple of different fits and starts with respect to that, but maybe just boiling it down in terms of your view on visibility as you head into–as you finish up this year, head into next year. You mentioned that retail inventories are in a better place in terms of sell-in versus sell-through. Do you think the de-stocking is done? As you think about next year and some of the innovation plan for next year and reflect on the tumbler launch, where you are with respect to that, if you could just talk a little bit about some of the building blocks there, that would be helpful as we think about tying a bow on this year and embarking on next year. Thanks.