The RealReal, Inc. (NASDAQ:REAL) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Caitlin Howe: Hey, Mark. And the other thing, this is Caitlin. The other thing that I would just add is, you know, one of the other that we look at, health of the business is just new members, right? And so that was up again, a million versus last quarter and so we feel good, like, we still have momentum in the business and as Rati mentioned, the active buyer’s piece was something that we did expect in the near term.

John Koryl: Mark, you did ask at the very end of your question about how that might impact our expectations for 2024 and I would just say that we continue to reiterate that we’re on track to being positive adjusted EBITDA in 2020 for all things considered.

Rati Levesque: Yes. And to add on a little more to that, we are looking at to Caitlyn’s point, the health of the business as far as the quality of those buyers, how much are they spending? What are they looking at mid and high value and so forth? So there’s other measure we can look at there, as far as the health of the buyer.

Mark Altschwager: Okay and as a quick follow-up, and apologies if I missed that I was redialing in during the first question, but just regarding the Q4 outlook, you essentially held the EBITDA guide while the GMV and sales are a bit below what was implied in the prior outlook. I was hoping you could pack that a bit more and just in terms of the unchanged EBITDA, how much of that is some incremental cost efficiencies you’re finding versus any shifts in revenue mix or other factors?

Robert Julian: Yes, Mark, this is Robert. I’ll take that. I would just say that our guide for Q4, there is a certain amount of uncertainty in the markets today. There’s a lot going on globally geopolitically with the economy. So we’re just being a little bit prudent and cautious, I would say, in taking that all into account. There’s nothing in our expected results for Q4 that indicates some kind of change in trend or any backtracking or anything else that might be negative other than just a little bit of uncertainty and, we’ll see how things progress, but, just again, trying to be prudent and taking all of that into account, but the things that have improved our results and you saw in Q3 are expected to continue and they’re largely structural what you’ve seen in our results in Q3 and so there’s nothing to be gleaned or nothing hidden in terms of the Q4 results. In terms of that progression going from Q3 to Q4.

Operator: Our next question comes from Ike Boruchow from Wells Fargo.

Ike Boruchow: Couple of quick questions from me. Congrats on the gross margin this quarter, above 70%.That’s great to see. Is that, I know there’s some seasonality, but now that you’ve kind of improved the efficiencies in the business, and got the gross margins up there, is that a run rate we should use. I think 3 months ago, you said you thought you could get to the high 60s exiting the year. Just kind of curious how we should think about gross margin in the fourth quarter and then my second question is, another reiteration of the adjusted EBITDA profitable by next year. Just be helpful if there’s any APIs you can kind of give us that underpin that, whether it’s AOV or gross margin, or just anything to kind of help us understand what what’s underpinning that assumption that you guys continue to reiterate.

Robert Julian: This is Robert. I’ll take that. Regarding the gross margin in Q3, as I mentioned earlier, the changes we made are largely structural and so we had a rate card change back in November, structural change. We have reiterated eliminating the direct business and that is a permanent shift to a much lower proportion of our total revenue coming out of direct, which improved our mix and improved gross margin. We’ve also seen in Q3, beginning of a return to the margin within the direct business improving and when we had some quarters, as we were trying to get rid of the work through the old inventory and work our inventory down, we were doing some pretty significant discounting of that direct inventory that direct owned inventory and we had some quarters where we had zero or even negative, reported gross margin and what you’ve seen is a return to positive margin for the direct business and that’s also a return to normal and more structural.