Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Redbubble FY 2021 H1 results announcement. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Paul Gordon, Company Secretary. Please go ahead.
Good morning, everyone here in Australia, and good afternoon for our U.S. investors. This is Paul Gordon, Company Secretary for Redbubble. Welcome to this investor call following the release of Redbubble's FY 2021 half-year results and reports earlier today. With me on the line, I have Redbubble CEO, Michael Ilczynski, and CFO, Emma Clark. As well as the half-year results and reports, the key information for today's update is contained in the ASX announcements and investor presentation also released to the market this morning. Please note that unless stated otherwise, the financial results are audit reviewed. The accompanying strategic and operational metrics are from internal management reports and have not been subject to audit review. Mike and Emma will now speak, and then we will open the floor for questions. Please note that this session is being recorded.
Now, before we start, I would like to call your attention to the safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information in our ASX release. That safe harbor statement also applies to this investor call. Now I will pass on to Mike.
Thank you, Paul. Hello, everybody. My name is Michael Ilczynski, and I am tremendously excited to be speaking with you today as Redbubble's CEO. I too would like to extend a warm welcome to all of you who have joined us. I would like to thank all of those shareholders that have already reached out to me in a number of ways. I'm sorry that I haven't really been able to respond until now. Importantly, I'd like to express my thanks to the board for giving me this opportunity. 2020 was a unique and tragic year for many across the globe, and our thoughts are with all of those who have been impacted over this past year. It brought with it a tremendous shift to online activities, of which Redbubble was a clear beneficiary.
This has resulted in a record half for the company. This set of results showcases the strength and economics of the business when it is able to operate at this level of scale. At the group level, Redbubble delivered AUD 353 million of marketplace revenue in the half, up 96% year-on-year and up 105% on a constant currency basis. This growth at the top line translated into strong financial results further down the P&L. With gross profit after paid acquisition of AUD 100 million, up 116% year-on-year, and EBIT profit of AUD 42 million compared to AUD -1.9 million in the first half of 2020. We also had a closing cash balance of AUD 130 million at 31 December. Emma will go into more details of the financials in a few minutes. Slide three.
We believe that the investment thesis for Redbubble is clear. The events of last year brought about a marked acceleration in e-commerce activity. The structural shift to online has been underway for many years, and we believe that much of the spike during 2020 will prove to be an enduring part of the retail landscape over time. We also believe the trend of consumers desiring products that are personalized and unique, as well as the focus on environmental sustainability, will continue to grow in importance, with Redbubble being an ongoing beneficiary of each of these structural trends. We are on our way to realizing our ambition of creating the world's largest marketplace for independent artists. With rapid scaling enabled by a combination of artist or user-generated content combined with make-on-demand technology. We're in the fortunate position to be the owner of two industry-leading marketplaces in redbubble.com and teepublic.com.
Marketplaces are hard to build and they are even harder to replicate, especially when they are three-sided like ours. As the marketplace or flywheel effects start to strengthen, the value and opportunity inherent in these sorts of marketplaces start to become clearer, and I believe that this is the place that we are in now. The businesses have been building this virtuous cycle for some years now, and its power to generate scale economies and financial outcomes has been demonstrated in this latest set of results. The business has also shown that our model is scalable, diversified and resilient. The benefits of the third-party fulfillment network were demonstrated last year with continuity of operations and supply maintained throughout, even in the face of surging demand and record volumes.
The flexibility of this third-party network also enabled Redbubble to add new product categories, localize production, and manage shipping delays that many companies experienced due to this COVID surge during this time. The scalability of the make-on-demand network meant that this demand was able to be met efficiently and profitably. This means that Redbubble is positioned to really invest for the next phase of growth. We have confidence in the business model, confidence in the opportunity in front of us, and confidence that continuing to invest into all aspects of the marketplace will generate strong growth over the medium to long term. Moving to slide four. The importance of the flywheel to our business can't be overstated. The strong results of the half were only possible because of the strength of all three elements of the marketplace.
For those of you unfamiliar with why this is so important, the flywheel creates a virtual cycle across the elements. As more artists enter the marketplace, they provide more content, attracting more customers. More customers create more order volume, more order volume enables a bigger and better fulfillment network. This in turn brings back more customers and with more customers, more artists join, and so it goes, creating a reinforcing growth cycle. In the first half of this financial year, this reached really significant scale. 572,000 selling artists. Those selling artists attracted 6.2 million customers. Those customers bought AUD 442 million of products in gross transaction value. These products were created at 41 fulfillment locations all over the world. Over the next few slides, we'll talk further to each of these in a little more detail. Slide five.
In the first half, approximately 572,000 artists received AUD 65 million for their sales across our marketplaces. As an organization, we are really proud to have been able to help facilitate this level of sales for artists across the globe in a time when this income was really important for many individuals. Growth in selling artists has closely tracked the trajectory of other aspects of the marketplace, and this growing cohort of selling artists is both an asset and a defensive moat for the business. Slide six. 2020 saw millions of new customers shop online, and we believe many of them will continue to shop this way. Redbubble recorded 6.2 million unique customers in the first half of 2021, representing customer growth of 69% versus the previous corresponding period. Moving to slide seven. During this period, repeat purchases grew 98% year-on-year, which was in line with overall growth rates.
The split of revenue from new versus repeat customers has remained at approximately 60/40, with loyalty remaining an area of significant opportunity for the business moving forward. Personally, I've been a customer of Redbubble for a number of years and understand the special nature of our offering and the joy that giving or receiving or purchasing our products can bring. We have a unique opportunity to make the most of the momentum that 2020 gave us and focus on building loyal customers and a global brand. Slide eight. Our mobile apps are an important part of this long-term strategy. As such, it was pleasing to see marketplace revenue on our apps grow 163% year-on-year in the first half, outpacing the already overall strong growth.
14% of Redbubble's marketplace sales are now coming via the iOS or Android apps, and we believe this will be a key part of helping to attract and retain loyal users over the medium to long term. I'll now hand over to Redbubble Group CFO, Emma Clark. Emma.
Thanks, Mike, and hello, everyone. Redbubble's exposure to major Western markets is a key strength of the business, and growth continued across all of the core geographies. North America remains our largest contributor to sales, making up 69% of the total and grew 89% in the first half. The U.K. was a standout during the first half, growing 105% year-on-year, and we also saw continued strength in the ANZ and EU markets. Our current key markets have a combined population of almost 1 billion consumers, so there's plenty of future growth available. The marketplace has also hosted a diverse range of physical product offerings. With 117 products across six major product categories, reliance on any given product is diminished. Face masks were unsurprisingly a highlight during the half, boosting accessories growth to 358% year-on-year.
Their contribution began to moderate prior to the holiday season and was 7% of total sales for the second quarter. During holidays, customers shifted towards categories that are more amenable to gifting, with extremely large percentage growth, albeit off a small base, for products like jigsaw puzzles and socks. Both artwork and home décor continue to grow in excess of 100% year-on-year, and encouragingly, T-shirts also saw a boost during the holidays. Redbubble has seen a continuation of record results, with almost all key revenue metrics doubling from the prior corresponding period for the half. Before I delve into them, please note that unless otherwise stated, the numbers discussed below are on a delivered basis as per our statutory reporting requirements. Firstly, I will comment specifically on the first half results.
As Mike has already mentioned, the business delivered AUD 353 million of marketplace revenue and growth rates of 96% in the first half of this financial year. Customer demand was sustained through the peak holiday season, even as offline retail started to reemerge from COVID-impacted trading. This revenue flowed through to AUD 144 million in gross profits. The business achieved a 118% growth in gross profit, and margins improved from 36.7% in the first half of last year to 40.8% in this half. Paid acquisition costs were 12.5% of marketplace revenue for the half, and we delivered GPAPA of AUD 100 million at an improved margin of 28.3%, compared to 25.7% in the first half of last financial year. Operating expenses were also managed prudently through the first half and grew at a significantly slower rate than GPAPA, even as the business continued to rapidly scale.
We have also shown the second quarter results on this page, and I'd like to make the following comments specific to business performance during the most recent quarter. Revenue growth for the quarter was pleasingly strong at 84%. As most of you are aware, Amazon ran their annual Prime Day promotion in October, and we took advantage of this timing, as did most retailers, to kick off our holiday sales season earlier. Customer sales remained strong during November and December. However, COVID-related disruptions meant that global shipping conditions were challenging, particularly in December. This affected many in the e-commerce space, and we too saw an impact as a much higher proportion of our customers selected express rather than standard shipping.
This behavior resulted in lower margins for the month of December, and this, along with the reducing proportion of mask sales, is the reason that Q2 margins are lower than in the Q1. As we flagged in our last quarterly update, we increased paid acquisition during the holiday season to capture additional customers while ensuring that we kept an eye on overall GPAPA margins to protect profitability. Operating expenses increased by 19% for the quarter, and the entirety of this increase was driven by the higher sales volumes. Foreign exchange headwinds have started to materially emerge, and thus the strengthening Australian dollar resulted in AUD 2.2 million of currency losses in the Q2, which are captured within the other expenses line. Overall, we are proud to have achieved our largest first half EBIT profit of AUD 42 million.
The business model is able to scale rapidly and efficiently. These advantages are clearly seen in both Redbubble's financial profitability and increasing cash balance. Looking forward, the second half has also started well with marketplace revenue paid growth rates of 66%, which is 82% on a constant currency basis for the month of January. I'll now hand back to Mike to close.
Thanks, Emma. To conclude, 2020 demonstrated the potential of the Redbubble and TeePublic marketplaces. 2021 presents the chance to build on this and to go after the global opportunity that clearly exists for the group. To do this, we will continue to focus on the four key themes Martin and Emma outlined last year. We believe a continued and consistent focus on investing in improving the core aspects of the marketplace is the optimal path for the business right now, and the best way to generate long-term shareholder value. As such, we will continue to focus on artist activation and retention at a group level, user acquisition and transaction optimization, customer understanding, increasing our customer loyalty and building our brands, and adding new physical products and expanding the fulfillment network. With that, we will now open the lines for questions.
Thank you. Your first question comes from Tim Piper from RBC. Please go ahead.
Morning, team. Well done on the update. Michael, great to have you leading the team at Redbubble. Just a general one to start with on the competitive position. Just given your background, Michael, business with the market-leading position in its geography, how do you view Redbubble's competitive position in the U.S.? You flagged that flywheel effect of growing artists and customers, and that's driving strong growth. Is there a level of scale you see the business needing to drive greater repeat customer share? Also, is there a level of scale where some defensiveness in the business model can come through from a competitive point of view?
Thanks, Tim. Really appreciate the comments and the question. The competitive positioning is an interesting one. In some ways, Redbubble is somewhat unique in our three-sided marketplace. In other ways, the business is exposed and competing against some of the biggest and most sophisticated retailers in the world, if we look more on a product basis as opposed to a make-on-demand artist services marketplace. The competitive positioning for the business is one of the interesting questions. I think that what the business experienced in the half, as we talked about, is that that level of scale started to be really demonstrated. That there are very positive economics and feedback loops when the business can operate at the scale that it did.
I think rightly, though, you highlighted that one of the big opportunities still in front of the business is to really focus on moving these customers that have come to Redbubble for the first time into loyal customers that repeat. As customers repeat, to turn them into customers that purchase, invest into numerous aspects of the business. That's both the digital experience and also the physical product experience. Obviously, the more scale that we have, the more that we can invest into those aspects. More scale allows us to add more fulfillers. More scale gives us more leeway at both the OpEx and a margin perspective for those investments. For us, the focus is on investment, and then on top-line growth because we can see the impact that has on the economics as we start to grow.
Thanks. You started touching on my second question there around investing for growth. In your opinion, what are the priorities for the business in terms of investment across things like platform marketing, et cetera? How do you view the incremental value that investment will create? How do you measure that? Is it purely on a gross profit-type return? How do you measure that?
An excellent question. Over the medium to long term, the metrics that we'd want to see is obviously revenue growth and then margin growth, and then bottom-line growth in that order. In terms of the investment, though, there are investments that are required into what I'd call the foundations of the business. Whether that's on-site in terms of making sure that our site is scalable, that we continually invest in, as we've highlighted, in our user acquisition, in our transaction optimization. As we invest in our customer understanding, there's work into our marketing platform, into our data capabilities to make sure that we're capturing and understanding, capturing data, and understanding our customers. Additionally, the work into the new physical products. There's investment required to launch and improve different physical products.
Customers and across the physical product, all of those areas are opportunities for investment that we believe will pay off over time.
Thanks. Just one final one from me, maybe for Emma. Just on the cash flow was very strong. I know you get a seasonal strength in the second quarter there. What do you think the second half kind of looks like from a cash flow perspective? Typically, it's been negative, but you're kind of now firmly in positive EBITDA territory. Are you expecting an operating cash outflow in the second half?
Look, obviously, I'm not going to comment specifically on future guidance on that. You're right, Tim, in the sense that we look a lot like a traditional retailer in terms of the profile of our business over a year. You would expect to obviously see the largest inflows during that second quarter, and obviously there will be net outflows as always in the third quarter as we settle all of the invoices that we effectively got billed for in the second quarter. January is always a month that a lot of cash sort of goes out the door, and that's just part of our normal operating rhythm. In terms of moving forward, as you yourself point out, we're operating at a significantly larger scale now. I think, the dynamics of comparing year-on-year cash flows are still going to be favorable.
That being said, I would definitely still reemphasize that there is that retail pattern. Obviously the sales will come off seasonally as they always do. Therefore, that will also have an impact on how much cash we can generate in any given quarter.
Thanks. I'll leave it there. Michael, welcome again to the Group. Thanks, bye.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Anthony Porto from Morgans Financial. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. I hope you can hear me. Welcome, Michael. I know you mentioned some of the issues that quarter, 500 basis points down on kind of the first quarter. How much of that, you generally see about a 200 basis point differential? How much of the other 300 was made up of those two specific areas versus kind of needing to discount a bit heavier?
Yeah.
Thanks, Anthony. I'll give that one to Emma. Yeah.
Yes. It's a good question, Anthony. This is why I called out the specific trends that were at play. The reason that the margins fell more than it has historically from a seasonal perspective was really that dynamic in December where we saw a lot more people move to express shipping. Redbubble makes little to no margin on express shipping because the cost of the service is so high, and we saw double the amount of customers swap that shipping option than what we would see in a normal year. Obviously, because of the broader COVID issues impacting the global supply chain. I think we all got emails saying, "Shop early." It's been the main driver of the decline. As I've said, and I think this is now like my sixth call.
We consistently want the business to be operating at margins that are around 40%, and there's nothing that makes me change that view in terms of what the BAU margin should actually be.
Yeah. Okay. I guess, you have mentioned increasing repeat usage, et cetera, is a key driver. Can we get a little bit more tangible, what's gonna propel that, and how far behind do you think you guys are there?
I think, Anthony, I'm not going to speak to other companies. I think, however, that there is opportunities all the way along the customer experience to improve the experience, and that will help generate. Since that strategy was announced, there's been a team pretty focused on that work and what those different loyalty levers might be, whether that's on-site as you talk about search and discovery, whether that's about ongoing recommendations to customers when they're on and off platform right through and not forgetting the actual physical experience that someone has with our products, with the products that we help our artists sell. When a customer receives a product by an artist on Redbubble, we want them to be surprised and delighted not just by the design, but also by the quality of that product. That's where there's opportunities all the way along.
Whether it's the on-site experience, whether it's the physical product, whether it's the unboxing and delivery experience. I'm sorry that I'm not giving you specifics, that's because we do believe that there are opportunities all the way along the experience to continue to invest in the platform, invest in the marketplace, and improve it. Each one of those, we believe, will go to driving loyalty. There definitely isn't one silver bullet. It's just a whole lot of hard work, we think there's plenty of opportunity, this is going to be an ongoing focus for us for not just six or 12 months. This will be an ongoing focus for a significant period of time.
Yeah. I was going to ask then, dovetailing that into, I guess some of Tim's questions there. How do you think about that investment you're going to make into the need to cycle the start of the pandemic and the uplift you got there, and obviously 90% or 100% growth rate. How do you think about phasing that investment over the next period, or are you not too worried about kind of short-term results?
I think what you've seen well with the business is the business has been pretty prudent in the OpEx over the last six months. That was really clear in the results that were demonstrated. We're of course, going to be cognizant of the macro environment, and at the same time, though, we want to invest to build a great business over the medium to long term. Yes, there's an opportunity given the financial position of the business, particularly the cash position to very strategically but very carefully do some investments in OpEx. We're not going to by any means blow it out of the water. Where we think there are clear opportunities to do some target investments, whether that's into, and particularly focused on internal capabilities. We will do so, but it's not going to be crazy massive step-ups.
I'm not going to talk to exact amounts. I think what's on us is to demonstrate that those investments are worthwhile and are the right things to build the business over the medium to long term.
Great. Thanks for that, Michael. Look forward to catching up in person.
Thank you.
Thank you. Once again, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. Your next question comes from Ash Chandra from Goldman Sachs. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Michael and Emma. Thanks for taking the questions. Just a couple from me. The paid acquisition costs in that second quarter stepped up quite a bit. Is there anything here on timing of these costs that relate to revenues that you'll only be booking after 31 December? I think you've had these timing issues in the past where you haven't been able to get the product delivered. I'm just wondering if I could ask if, one, there's a timing mismatch, and two, the underlying trend in paid acquisition costs ticking up. Has that been anything that you think is now a sustainably high cost of acquisition because of increasing competition across e-commerce?
Yeah. I'll give that to Emma. Thanks, Ash.
Hey, Ash. Good questions. In terms of the overhanging revenue, and you can see this if, for those of you who like to look through our financials in our 4D, we still have a substantial amount on the balance sheet for unrecognized revenue. In total, it's not all delivery date adjustment, but the majority of it is, and it's almost AUD 20 million sitting on the balance sheet. Obviously that's unrecognized at this point in time. Obviously, as we've discussed previously, if the business keeps on going, that remains unrecognized. It is there. There was nothing specific in terms of the delivery date adjustments on the December month-end that were unusual. There's really nothing there that would be materially affecting the result. The step-up in costs across the quarter was actually quite deliberate, Ash. There was really good customer demand out there, and it was profitable.
We still maintain first transaction profitability. As I said before, we made sure we were keeping an eye on our GPAPA and margins. We had room to go and obtain those extra customers, that's what we did. That was a conscious choice rather than external market dynamics coming and making us spend that extra money, if that makes sense. In terms of as we look forward, does that mean that structurally, we would have to spend AUD 0.141 on the dollar moving forward? Absolutely not. We still stick within our overall range of 10%-12%. There is, as we said earlier on in our presentation, certainly some of the offline retail is reemerging from COVID-induced lockdown.
We are seeing more competition on the paid marketing front, but nothing that, once again, would make us think that our long-term trajectory in terms of what we pay on paid acquisition is going to materially change.
Okay. Got it. Understood. In terms, Michael, I don't know if you will answer this, but I'll ask it anyway. Not too long ago, Redbubble used to talk about 20%, 30% sustainable revenue growth year-on-year. Just given the global scale of the platform that you've got and the breadth and depth of the product portfolio being significantly better today than it was at the time these were targets. Just in broad terms, do you see those sorts of levels of growth beyond this COVID tailwind as still achievable? Do you have any view on this?
Thanks, Ash. Yeah. Look, thanks. I understand the question and understand you're asking it. To be honest, two things. One, it's way too early in my time to be commenting on those sort of specifics. Secondly, to be honest, there is significant macro uncertainty. That we've had this huge surge, really clearly driven significantly by COVID. We're now going to enter into a really interesting phase as some economies start to open up, as some of that pent-up demand for services reemerges. How that balances out and impacts short-term consumer demand for our sorts of products is going to be really interesting to see. Whether there's a bounce back or where it lands is really interesting. The next 6- 12 months could actually be quite volatile from a consumer demand perspective. The reality is, nobody knows where that lands.
Our view is we're going to focus on ourselves in terms of investing into our platform, and we're going to focus on the customer and improving that experience. I do think that 2020 was so unique. 2021 will have some very interesting and probably counter dynamics that where that then lands us on a steady state basis through that is something that we need to work through. What that then means for future growth rates is going to take us some time before I think we can give projections like that.
Fair enough. If I could just sneak in one last question. Again, it's sort of a twist on the repeat usage question that you've been getting. Obviously, you've indicated that this requires a broad range of areas to invest in. Could I just perhaps ask, over what sort of timeframe, though, would you expect that you and we might be able to see an improvement? Is this a three to six-month process? Is it 12 - 24 months? Yeah. What would you be hopeful would be visible in what timeframe?
Look, it's a very fair question, Ash. Again, though, I don't want to give specifics because I'll be pinning to watching a particular metric go up and down at the next results, which we're not ready to do. With all businesses like ours that are digital and physical marketplaces, the combination between investing in the underlying foundations, which don't have immediate business impact, but set you up for medium and long-term growth. You need to balance those internal investments in the foundations with specific business-impacting initiatives that do hit in more like a three to six-month period. For a business like ours, as Emma said, we do look a fair bit like a traditional retailer where a large percentage of the sales and profit is made in the back half of the calendar year.
A lot of the work we'll be doing this year will be to focus on impacting into that holiday season. We're trying to balance the short-term business impact with really investing now into the foundations because we've got confidence of what the three, five, seven-year opportunity looks for this business. That's one of the challenges that we have as management is getting that balance right between things that will impact for the coming holiday season and things that really build on the foundations that gives the platform to build on over the next three, four, five years.
Terrific. Thank you kindly. Thanks, Michael.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Owen Humphries from Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Just taking my question and welcome to Redbubble, Michael. I might just start with obviously a couple of questions coming to me from your investors, I might just ask them directly. Just around the margin profile, more in the second half. Can you maybe just provide a bit of understanding of, so to speak, the margin, just that has stepped down in that last quarter and what you're expecting for the next six months around the gross profit and GPAPA margins?
I think Emma can speak to that.
Yeah. I think, hey, Owen, it comes back to the question that I answered previously from Anthony on the same topic, which is there were things on the margin that were quite specific to the quarter. As I've disclosed in previous quarters, masks themselves also have a higher margin than a lot of our other products. As they decline as a proportion of the mix, they're the two things that were impacting margin for the quarter. Masks, you need to separately make a call on what you think is going to happen with that product over the next six months and the impact on margins. The express shipping thing was definitely a holiday thing that is not part of the remaining three quarters of the year in terms of behavior.
Okay. No worries. Just to understand, just around the unit economics and sales and marketing, can you just remind me, Emma, what's the percentage of your revenue derived from, call it, paid versus unpaid?
Yeah. It's remained relatively consistent in low 60s unpaid and therefore high 30s paid.
Good one. Just last, just on the OpEx step-up quarter-on-quarter, call it AUD 2 million, you said it on the call, stepped up due to growth factors. Is that seasonal or is that people costs?
A little bit of both. Largely seasonal in the sense that, as you know, having been through a few Christmases with us before, we obviously step up customer service over the Christmas quarter to deal with the increased sales volume. Obviously that's quite seasonal. There is a small step-up in fixed operating cost expenditure, but keeping in mind, of course, that's coming off a very low base. We're actually coming in on a lower OpEx base than we were running when we were running half the volume.
Yeah. Okay. Good one. AUD 130 million of cash on hand. You've built it by AUD 45 million in the quarter. Obviously, part of that was working capital build and seasonal factors. Maybe, Michael, a question for you. I'm guessing you're not going to answer it, but being in the role now for six, seven weeks, a lot of people are asking where the reinvestment will be from your perspective. Obviously, you've stepped up sales and marketing in the quarter. The team has. Has the team thought about capital management initiatives or where you plan to utilize the excess liquidity on your balance sheet?
Yeah. Thanks. Thanks, Owen. We were expecting that question from investors, which was why the board put out an explicit statement in the release saying that there's no plan or intention to pay out a dividend in the short to medium term. In terms of other capital management initiatives, I think similar. Obviously, it's incumbent on the board, and they will consistently look at opportunities, but there's no plans in the short to medium term. I think there's two reasons for that. Number one, primarily is we view our business as a growth business and that there are significant opportunities to invest into the business. Now, that doesn't mean that we're going to be spending all of that cash internally. We understand the impact that would have on profitability and other things. We do think there is significant opportunities to invest internally into the business.
As I said before, we will start that in a relatively slow and considered fashion. As more opportunities present themselves that we think will generate a really strong return on that investment over the medium to long term, then having that cash in order to undertake those activities is something that provides the business with real strategic flexibility moving forward.
Secondly, as I said, there is just a general amount of uncertainty as to what the coming calendar year will look like and There was an incredible change in consumer demand in the last 12 months, and just providing us with the flexibility because there is unknowns about what happens to consumer demand in 2021 versus what hopefully by 2022, 2023 calendar years looks more like a steady state is something that I think it's important for the company to know that we've got stability regardless of whatever scenario plays out. It's a sort of broad answer, but I wanted to pass on our thinking. Our thinking there, we do think there's great opportunities to invest in the business. We're also cognizant of the fact that we're entering into another period of macro uncertainty through 2021.
Good one, and I look forward to catching up in person.
Thanks, Owen. Cheers.
Thank you. That does conclude the question session at this time. I will now hand back to Michael for closing remarks.
Thank you very much. I'd like to close by saying that myself and the board and management team, we truly believe that Redbubble is a unique organization, and it is an immensely exciting time to be joining and to be part of the company. The business has experienced a tremendous increase in scale from a year ago, and this has flowed into strong financial results, demonstrating the potential for our business model when it can operate at this sort of scale. All of this has been achieved during a global pandemic with our teams working remotely, which is a testament to all of the group's employees right across the globe. The strategic priority for the group now is to ensure that we capitalize on this and build from the market position that we've established.
To do this, as I've said a few times now, we're going to focus on the core aspects of the marketplace to make the most of the opportunity and ensure long-term levels of growth. I'm personally really excited and looking forward to the journey ahead, and I thank all of you for being part of it. With that now, we will close the call, and I look forward to speaking to a number of you in the coming few days. Thank you.
Thank you. That does conclude the conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.