Sally Beauty Holdings, Inc. (NYSE:SBH) Q1 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

And we’re pleased that they continue to reward us with high NPS scores on both the Sally and BSG side as we are kind of on this journey with them.

Olivia Tong: That’s very helpful kind of sit well for my second question around your new own brands like bondbar, the ones you mentioned. But longer term, I mean, actually, right now, where is the contribution of own brands stands now? And where do you expect it to go longer term? And as you think about further penetration of your own brands, can you talk about like where you think it goes from here?

Denise Paulonis: Absolutely. This quarter, owned brands represented about 34% of the Sally segment. That’s up about 1% from last quarter. but a nice steady growth through last year as we continue to roll out Strawberry Leopard and then just recently introduced bondbar. We’re targeting that number for the Sally segment specifically to become about 50% of the business. We think it will take four or five years to get there in the path of getting there. This quarter, we’ll fully roll out the rest of the bondbar line. We only had the first four SKUs in market through the holidays. But had good customer reaction, good performance out of those as they were starting to come to market. So we’re excited to see that come to fruition with the rest of those SKUs coming online in Q2.

And we’ll continue to build around that in future years and as well as the strength of owned brands in our European businesses. So that will be a source of growth for us for the time to come. And importantly, as we move up that penetration curve with owned brands, it’s a nice tailwind into our gross margin. We think that there’s a nice complement between continuing to drive our owned brands and growing brands with our external vendors to have a great complement of product over time for our customers coming into their stores. And while owned brands is really a focus on the Sally segment, we are also excited about the innovation and continued growth that we can drive in our BSG business with a number of our pro-vendor partners, and we continue to see more innovation in the pipeline in that space as well.

Operator: And next, we can go to Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley.

Simeon Gutman: Two parts on SBS. I think, Denise, you mentioned that store closures largely done. I wanted to get maybe the U.S. store count where it is and then where that will eventually land. It sounds like similar to where it is now. And then in terms of the drivers of the comp, can you talk about product initiative versus price? And then you said recapture rate was in line, but could you quantify how much of the comp could have been helped by some store closures?

Denise Paulonis: Sure. Let me work through this in order. So in SBS, the closures are largely done. So as I mentioned, 350 stores was the plan, vast majority completed in Q4. Sally U.S., that leaves our store count at the end of this quarter at about 2,430 to 2,440. And broadly in SBS, it’s about 3,150. Those are down pretty notably from a year ago, and we’ll finish the year, as Marlo said, as an entity, inclusive of BSG down 6% to 7%. We think that this is about the right place to be. I think the piece I’d reemphasize is, all of the stores were 4-Wall EBITDA positive. The strength of the store optimization opportunity really came from such a positive reaction and ability to capture the sales transfer in the stores and into e-commerce.