The Container Store Group, Inc. (NYSE:TCS) Q3 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Christopher Horvers: Thanks. Good evening, guys. My first question is, you sit in an interesting viewpoint in the economy at this point, you do have housing exposure, you do have a pretty wealthy customer base, considering where your geographic footprint is in your €“ you do sell big ticket that there’s some relationship to housing. So I was curious if you could just share high level thoughts of what you’ve observed maybe since the last time that you spoke with us on the last conference call? Do you think that is the consumer getting worse is sort of the quarter-to-date trend? It’s simply just a function of comparisons or is there some sort of change that’s going on there? Anything you can share that’d be helpful.

Satish Malhotra: Sure, Chris. We will double team this one. I will take the first part. I think, look, there’s no doubt we’re still navigating a challenging consumer environment, right, it’s impacted by the ongoing macro-related headwinds. We are seeing a decline in traffic and transactions. We’re seeing customers buying fewer items or spaces, and they are requiring a compelling reason to shop, right? One of the reasons we did see strength in our custom space business compared to our general merchandise business, which was actually up 4.1% over LY in average space value, but the number of spaces was down almost double-digits. And so we see customers willing to engage, but €“ and spend those dollars on the space that they’re looking for, they’re just buying less of them.

Similarly, as you heard me say in my opening remarks, a Holiday Shop, which was comprised of some compelling stocking stuffers and gift wrap performed very well, comparable sales are actually over positive over LY. However, we saw less engagement with more traditional general merchandise categories like kitchen in particular. So, it’s what we find is, we need to give our customers a compelling reason to shop. If we do so, they will engage. And for customers who are looking to really take advantage of improving their Custom Spaces throughout their home they will, they’ll just buy perhaps less items of them.

Jeff Miller: Yeah, Chris, the only thing I would add to that just a little more color on our sales outlook. There’s two ways I mentioned in our opening remarks. There’s two ways we look at revenue trends. One is course to GAAP numbers that we report and track internally every day. The other piece is demand comps. And the demand is really just to define that better for you to, say, that demand comps are customer purchases, they’re tracking customer purchase, and they don’t necessarily reflect if the order has been installed or delivered to the customer from a general merchandise or custom space perspective. So, referring back to what I said in my guidance comments, the high end of our Q4 outlook assumes quarter-to-date demand comp trends sustain what we’re seeing today.

And our ability to pull forward €“ not pulled forward, but to accelerate the installation of Custom Spaces that are placed during the quarter. And on the low end, it assumes a slight deceleration in the current quarter-to-date demand comp, and no acceleration of the installation spaces. And the other thing I would call out is, as it relates to sequential trends from Q3 to Q4, keep in mind that Q3 did benefit from an earlier start to the annual Elfa event transform for Elfa, which started 2 weeks earlier. And we talked about, of course, as well not anniversary 2/22/2022 in Q4. So there’s two things there from a trend perspective to keep in mind when looking at the comp.

Christopher Horvers: Got it. And so, just so I understand that was the pull forward in the 3Q maybe could you size that. And, if you sort of have a decelerating demand comp, should installations actually accelerate just as like the available labor pool like what’s the constraint? Is it €“ you maybe a more installers, where you could conclude those transaction and drain that deferred revenue?

Jeff Miller: Yeah. So I’m trying to quantify the impact of pulling forward the for 2 weeks, it’s difficult to measure, right? But we do believe that it helped Q3 and it could be a headwind to Q4, as it relates to the trends, when we look at it from Q3 to Q4 on the demand comp side of quarter-to-date, it’s a slight acceleration from what we saw occurring in Q3.