Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Temple & Webster Group Limited f ull year 2021 results investor conference call. All participants are in a listen only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If your wish to ask a question, you will need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. I would now like to hand the conference over to Mr. Mark Coulter, Chief Executive Officer. Please go ahead.
Thank you. Good morning, everybody, and thank you for your time today. This morning, Mark Tayler and I will take you through the investor deck uploaded to the ASX. I'll begin by giving you an overview of the year, after which I'll hand over to Mark to take you through the numbers in more detail. I will then quickly take you through our strategy before throwing it open to questions. Before beginning, I would like to acknowledge the difficult period that many Australians are currently living through. At Temple & Webster, we do not take for granted how fortunate we are to still be able to trade during these lockdowns. Our singular goal is to keep delivering a great customer experience and hopefully have our customers enjoy their homes even just a little bit more during these challenging times.
Turning to page two of the deck, you can see that once again, Temple & Webster has delivered a record set of results. With full-year revenue up 85% to AUD 326 million. This growth was across all major categories, geographies, channels, and demographics. Our market remains massive and subject to accelerating tailwinds, and we are well-positioned financially to capitalize on our scale. Importantly, we were a high-growth business pre-COVID, growing 30%-50% on any given period. While the lockdowns have no doubt accelerated the underlying trends of the shift to online shopping, what was pleasing to see was that we maintained growth when there was little to no restrictions on retail. Our final quarter actually grew a healthy 26% up on the final quarter of FY 2020, which in turn was up 130% on the final quarter of FY 2019.
What we've seen this year is that the growth has translated into operating leverage, with EBITDA up 141% to AUD 20.5 million. We want to reiterate that we feel that this is the time to be in reinvesting some of this profit into growth initiatives to cement our market leadership. Mark will take you through these in more detail. On page five, you can see our customer charts. Active customers are up 62% year-on-year, with growth even on COVID periods from last year. Now, it's worth noting that active customers are mostly a function of first-time customers, since if a customer repeats in the period, they are only counted once. Obviously, the final quarter of FY 2020 and the first two quarters of FY 2021 delivered a massive amount of first-time customers, as you can see on the right-hand chart.
This was a result of many Australians turning to our channel out of necessity for the first time. Now, we were never going to be able to replicate that kind of once-in-a-generation growth in first-time customers, and we've been open about that. Our job was to give those customers a great experience to get them to continue shopping online, and more relevantly, keep shopping with us. The great news is that you can see on the right-hand chart that orders from repeat customers are growing quite significantly and have now overtaken first-time customers for the first time. This goes to our public position that we feel COVID has resulted in a permanent shift up the adoption curve. The growth in repeats will help us maintain a high growth rate, even while working through the lapping of the spike in first-time customers from last year.
As previously communicated, we've begun to invest into building our brand moat, with the goal of becoming the top-of-mind retailer for Australians shopping for their home. While we have a long way to go on this journey, the return on investment from our TV experiments continues to be positive. We've expanded our brand marketing team and are now preparing plans for future campaigns. On page six, you can see that as predicted, the customer acquisition cost has increased due to these longer payback challenges. However, pleasingly, this has somewhat been offset by a 12% increase in annual revenue per active customer, which is now over AUD 425, as you can see on the right. This is due to a higher repeat rate and a higher average order value for both new and repeat orders.
While a lot goes into this, it indicates customers continue to get comfortable buying larger items online. We're doing a better job at driving cross-sells by surfacing more relevant items from our catalog on-site and in our various marketing channels. Before taking you through some of the notable launches of the year in more detail, it's worth commenting on the customer satisfaction chart as measured by Net Promoter Score on the right of page seven. The Net Promoter Score is a standard measure of customer satisfaction and ranges from negative 100% to a positive 100%. A score of 65% is actually world-class, especially for an online retailer. Look, unfortunately, the consequence of a record peak period towards the end of the first half was that the third-party logistics network and our internal customer service team stretched beyond breaking point.
This was further exacerbated by a crunch in our capacity at our 3PL warehouses due an incredible spike in demand for warehouse space around the country. Over the half, we have increased our capacity nested in our five warehouse locations and worked hard at improving our internal and logistics partner systems and processes to allow for smoother scaling. The good news is that our NPS has returned to our target levels. Now, while we have no immediate plans to own sheds or trucks, we continue to investigate how we can take more control of this fulfillment journey to ensure we are delivering a great customer experience. Our own inventory program or private label has been a strategic focus for the business for a while now. We have publicly stated a goal of getting the share of revenue to these products to 30%.
It's great to announce that we grew the share from 19% -2 6% in the year, as you can see on page eight. This was done by increasing our buying and merchant planning teams, diversifying our factories outside of China, adding multiple warehouses, including now in Sydney, investing in our data and analytics to improve forecasting accuracy, and expanding our quality and compliance team. We were able to make a step-up in inventory while maintaining our target weeks cover and a very low level of age stock. Importantly, we have no plans to change our negative working capital and asset-light model. However, our conservative level of inventory allows us to take strategic bets from stock to fill product and price gaps we've identified using our massive amounts of data. Another goal has been to launch both iOS and Android apps and target a native mobile customer experience.
We now have apps in both app stores with early feedback tremendously positive. The iOS app, which was launched during the first half, now has more than 4,000 reviews with an average rating of 4.8 star out of 5. The app customer is a more engaged customer with a high conversion rate and repeat rate. Interestingly, now more than 50% of customer orders, consumer orders, so excluding B2B, are now placed on a mobile device, which we expect will only increase. One of the benefits of the mobile experience, both app and mobile website, is the ability to use functionality, such as the phone's camera, to use augmented reality. While there are many use cases for augmented reality, one of the most straightforward ones is seeing an object in your home, a feature which is now being piloted as detailed on page 10.
With AR, customers can judge the look of the item and its size relative to their room or other pieces of furniture. We believe features such as AR can only help in reducing the barriers to buying online. Building a library of 3D assets remains the focus of the business to enable this use case. Along with AR, during the year, we launched an artificial intelligence interior design service, again, aimed at reducing the friction of shopping online. It is in partnership with an Israeli startup in which we have made a second round of investment after a successful pilot and service. The first version of the product is a 2D version with flat images, as you can see on page 11. The next version will be using our 3D models to generate a photorealistic room.
We love this service as it exposes our huge range of beautiful products across our many categories to our customers. After a difficult end to the previous financial year, it was great to see our business customers come back in full force during FY 2021, with our Trade & Commercial division growing 110% year-on-year. Again, it's worth noting that these are great customers with high repeat activity and large order sizes. This year, we continue to focus on the rebounding residential property development sector and the regional hospitality industry. Our range and flexible go-to-market model has allowed us to quickly pivot and chase these growth sectors. I now hand over to Mark to take you through the numbers in more detail.
Thank you, Mark. Good morning, all. As we've stated publicly, our the interim strategy is all about growing as fast as we can and continuing to take a disproportionate share in our market. It's pleasing to present some results today that reflect that strategy. I'm going to start on page 15, which runs through the profit and loss results for FY 2021 in comparison to FY 2020. Revenue for the year, as Mark mentioned, was up 85% year-on-year to AUD 326.3 million, and Q4 was up 26% year-on-year. Which was a pleasing result given Q4 last year grew 130%. In terms of margins, gross margin percentage increased from 44.6% in FY 2020 to 45.4% in FY 2021, primarily driven by an increase in private label, which now makes up 26%. Required us to transfer stock interstate and sites.
By June 30th, the issues were resolved and [inaudible] percent in FY 2021 from 11.9% in FY 2020. This is primarily due to the step-up investment of AUD 3 million in TV in FY 2021. This is certainly a medium which we will continue to invest further in FY 2022. Contribution margin after one-off distribution costs came in at 14.6% of revenue or 15.5% before the one-off distribution costs. Our updated short to medium-term target range is now 12%-15% to allow for our stated reinvestment strategy in which we will be aggressively going after market share through better pricing, tactical promotion activity, and increasing investment in brand-building marketing initiatives. This reinvestment activity will also extend into the fixed cost line. Although FY 2021 saw a reduction in fixed costs as a percentage of revenue, now down to 7.9% versus 10%, excluding share-based payments.
We expect fixed costs as a percentage of revenue to land somewhere between these two points in FY 2022 as we continue to invest in areas that will essentially build strategic moats around our business. As a result, the group produced a record level of profitability on the prior year. Where to from here in terms of our financial profile? If you turn to page 16, we have reiterated our commitment to above-market growth and reinvesting for the future to be the number one player in our home market. What does this mean? It means we will be running the business to the highest possible revenue growth rate while staying profitable and staying within our 2%- 4% EBITDA range.
Reinvestment will take the form of more variable-type investment, as I mentioned before, pricing, promotional activity, marketing, and more fixed cost type investment, primarily people in areas such as mobile technology, augmented reality, AI, 3D, our Trade & Commercial division, improving our delivery experience, growing the size of our catalog and our private label ranges, and data and personalization. This strategy was deployed in the second half and will accelerate our growth and competitive positioning. Longer term, we will take advantage of our market leadership position by leveraging our scale and strategic moats by improved trading terms, lowering our marketing spend as a percentage of sales as a result of much larger brand awareness, and lowering our fixed costs as a percentage of sales as the natural operating leverage comes through. Page 17 shows our current balance sheet position, which continues to strengthen.
Cash end of the year at AUD 97.5 million, off the back of a strong trading period, a capital raise which took place in July 2020, and the benefits of the group's capital-light, negative working capital business model. In terms of outflows, we continued our step-up investment in our private label range to complement our drop-ship range, with really strong results across the board, with private label now making up 26% of sales, as we mentioned before. We will continue to invest in private label where it makes sense to do so. However, we do not take an investment in private label lightly. We have invested in a team of experienced buyers. The platforms that we're using, quality and compliance teams have strict controls in place to ensure our key inventory metrics remain strong and the inventory we hold is low risk and it's high turn.
Also, as Mark mentioned earlier, we have increased our investment in our Israeli-based AI interior design startup. Initial investment was $500,000, we have increased this initial investment by a further $1.5 million in July 2021 to accelerate their growth, but also the speed of product deployment. Look, all in all, some really pleasing results off the back of a very challenging year for many people. We're starting FY 2022 in a position of financial strength with a balance sheet to take advantage of both organic and inorganic opportunities. I'll now hand you back to Mark.
Thanks, Mark. Before taking you through the strategy, it's always worth retouching on the investment piece of Temple & Webster. On pages 19 and 20, you can see that we operate in a large AUD 16 billion market, billion with a B. Importantly, this excludes any of our second or third horizon growth opportunities, such as the B2B furniture market or the home improvement market. It's just currently sold online, which compares to circa 25% in the U.S., which is showing no signs of slowing down even at this point, by the way. Millennials, the oldest of whom are turning 40 this year, which is either comforting or horrifying, depending on which side of the fence you're on, will be driving this penetration for years to come. We believe that this high-growth part of the adoption curve is the time to invest and scale our market leadership.
This is the period where customers are choosing their trusted brand, and we want to be that brand. We have a simple strategy outlined on page 21. We want to have the biggest and best range, having everything you need for the home. Importantly, the best bit of this means we won't list everything. We want to be seen as a place for quality, but at an affordable price. We want to be a source of inspiration and the place you go to when you want to make your home more beautiful. We want a seamless customer experience, both at the support level and delivery into the home. As page 22 sets out, with scale comes benefits, such as being able to forge closer relationships and obtaining better terms and exclusive product ranges, making bigger investments in the areas that Mark outlined.
In effect, the bigger we get, the better and stronger our customer proposition becomes, which is the flywheel effect. This is leading us to increase our market share. Page 23 is our one-page growth strategy. It's pretty simple and doesn't change that much. We want to keep improving our range to ensure it stays the biggest and best. This includes expanding our private label range. We will be driving our digital advantage, including making better use of our immense amount of data through initiatives such as personalization. Half the country knows about us. We want the other half, too. One of our key pillars is inspiration. We've added editorial design, 3D artists, video resources across the team. We'll be adding more of those resources. As I said, we're in the process of building out a 3D model library.
We'll be improving our customer care teams for better training and platforms and specialization. We want to be seen as the home for innovation for delivery experience, particularly around bulky delivery, which is the hard bit. Of course, Trade & Commercial provides another growth market, and we'll be building our team, building out a range and service proposition to keep winning market share in this segment. Trading update is on page 24. The year has started strongly with year-on-year growth of 39%. That's from the 1st of July to 24th July. We continue to experience strong tailwinds, including, as I've talked about, the adoption of online shopping due to these structural and demographic shifts, the acceleration of those trends due to COVID, an increase in discretionary income due to travel restrictions, and as we're all reading about, the continued recovery of the housing market.
As Mark has said, we will be continuing our investment strategy, investing into growth areas of the business to cement our online market leadership and drive market share. Now, as always, a big shout-out to the Temps team. Once again, you have shown an incredible resilience while we've bounced in and out of the office, and you've had to cope with a business bursting at the seams. You've done so with humility and grace and a customer-first mindset. Thank you, everyone, for your time this morning. As you've heard, another great year with record revenue, profit, and customers. Our market still have a ton of growth left, and we continue to make great progress on ensuring our customer proposition is the best in our category. We'll now take any questions you may have.
Thank you. If you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone and wait for your name to be announced. If you wish to cancel your request, please press star two. If you're on a speakerphone, please pick up the handset to ask your question. Your first question comes from Owen Humphries from Canaccord. Please go ahead.
Good day, guys. Again, congratulations on another great result. Pretty much flawless. Just a couple of questions from me. I might just start just to understand the supply chain of your business. If I go back and look at my notes from many moons ago, you guys had maybe 6, 700 suppliers where you guys sourced from. Can you maybe talk through how that's evolved, where we are today? Maybe talk a little bit around have you been able to diversify, and maybe talk about the increasing percentage from offshore suppliers, to get exclusive products on your website.
It's a good question, Owen. The total number of suppliers hasn't changed that much. It's definitely grown from those numbers. We are a bit militant about pruning the catalog and pruning suppliers as we add, to make sure the ones that we have are delivering not only the right product quality for our customers, but also the right operational quality for our suppliers. We track how quickly the suppliers can fill, the cancellation rate, the refund rate, how quickly they answer our queries, et cetera. We have a scorecard by supplier and go through that every month by suppliers. We have a [inaudible] team manage the suppliers. Any suppliers that aren't meeting our operational KPIs, including things like average star rating by products and any kind of issues around the products themselves, we would delist.
It's a bit of give and take in the catalog at any given moment. Some suppliers are coming on, some suppliers are coming off, or put in remediation where we try to fix them actually. The total number has grown a bit. Definitely in terms of offshore diversification, you can see that the percentage of the business from private label has increased, which means more of the business we're importing ourselves. Within that, we have made deliberate strides to diversify our factory base. That's grown. That's not because of any issues, but it's really a risk. As we get bigger, we want to make sure that we're not vulnerable to any particular market. COVID has shown the world that on the single markets or single supply chains can be problematic. We are making a concerted effort to diversify that supply chain.
Okay. Good one. Just around-
I think I would just add one more very quick point to that as well on the diversification point that Mark made, which is really important for us from a risk perspective, but we've also done that on the drop-ship side as well. We're always evaluating how much particular drop-shippers are making up as a percentage of our revenue. It's really important for us not to be single-point sensitive to any particular factory nor drop-ship supplier as well. We've got big diversification in terms of category mix and big diversification in terms of all of our suppliers. In particular categories, you'll have key accounts, but we don't have any drop-ship suppliers that make up a significant percentage of our revenue base, which is really important from a risk perspective.
Good one. Maybe just a quick one on private labels. Private label nudging up to 26%. The growth has been pretty phenomenal the last 12 months. 30% is the target. Is that a steady state target that we can think of in the medium term?
Look, there's obviously pros and cons with private label. Importantly, when we talk about private label, we're not talking about our house label or white label, because actually, most of the site is sold under brands that we've made up. When we talk about private label, we talk about import. That's products that are on our balance sheet. Of 30% is a number which we think balances those pros and cons. It's a number which means that it doesn't flip our working cap model to be a positive working cap model. We can still fund our growth from cash flow. I think it's a number which we think is a good target for now. Obviously, within each category, that splits into a different amount.
That's an aggregate amount, every category has a different percentage level. We will keep monitoring that number and update the market if we think that needs to change.
Okay. Good one. Last one from me. Obviously, Wayfair saw some very positive gains when they launched their mobile app. Can you just talk through, I know it's early, but around the different purchasing patterns, conversion rates through the app versus through, I guess, the desktop or mobile native. Just talk through ARPUs or conversion rates, if that's possible.
Yeah. We don't disclose our conversion rate or ARPU by channel. I can say, though, and which we said here and I said before, that what we're seeing is the app customer is actually converting to a higher rate, is repeating more, and is more engaged. Actually having a higher AOV as well. Now, obviously, the great customers or the customers that find an app are naturally going to be probably better customers anyway because they're higher up or lower down the funnel in terms of intent. However, what we've tried to do is isolate those customers and look at the same customers pre- and post-app usage. It's actually the same people. How do they behave pre-installing the app, and how do they behave post-installing the app? It does definitely look like the app itself is driving better behaviors. Which means, we're pushing our customers.
We have started marketing it. You can do some of your own back-of-the-envelope. We've got 4,000 reviews. It means we have a lot more installs. We're pushing it. Our app install base is growing. Once we've tested the Android app a bit more, we will start doing bigger scale marketing campaigns because now we can promote both.
Awesome. Well done, guys. I'll step back in the queue.
Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Tim Lawson from Macquarie. Please go ahead.
Hey, guys. Just two questions from me. I've asked a couple of others, and I'll see if you can bear as well. [inaudible] the repeat versus first-time customers, has that sort of crossed that line earlier than you expected? Was that sort of what you thought would play out?
Obviously, the incredible period of first-time customers growth that we've experienced last year has led to a growth in repeat because all those first-time customers, because not a lot of them are now repeating, which has been driving the repeat customer growth. Yes, it happened earlier than expected because obviously COVID wasn't in any of our plans. The year we've had has been a phenomenal year in terms of customer acquisition. It was always going to happen at some point because it's almost mathematical that once your install base becomes so big, then the repeat levels are going to outweigh the first-time customers. That's what's happened pretty much every business ever. Do we still think there's heaps of first-time customers? Of course, there are. For many customers that have transacted with us in the past, that our repeat rates will most of the business will be repeat.
Yep. Okay. Just within, if we adjust for that AUD 2.9 million one-off, the EBIT margin or EBITDA margin goes above 5% in the second half. Obviously, you're holding that 2%-4% sort of target range. Just the reason why it was on an adjusted basis still above 5%. Can you just sort of talk the mechanism to get it back below 4%?
Yeah, I'll take this one. Look, when we announced that, we were rolling out that strategy throughout the second half, to start playing within those ranges. It does take a bit of time, obviously, to adjust your investment and your spending to that sort of level. I think now that sets the tone for the next couple of years for us, two to three years, and then we'll sort of reassess things. Investment will be going into those areas that we kind of spoke about before. There'll be, I suppose, a variable-type investment, which will be focused on both promotions and pricing points. Also a fairly significant investment, a continuation, and continued step up in terms of brand building marketing. What that will do, that will naturally bring the contribution margin percentage down to within the ranges that we're talking about at the moment.
If you work back from that 2%-4% range, the residual investment is going into the fixed cost base. Which is primarily people, and it's primarily people into the growth areas that we spoke about before. Look, it's not easy managing a business to a particular profit outcome, but we're going to do our best to manage the business to that point and reinvest the leverage that we're building off the back of strong growth back into the business to really be driving that above-market growth rate.
Yeah. Okay.
I think it's worth noting, obviously, that everything takes time. In the real world, it's great to put out a plan, but everything in the real world, recruitment takes longer. Building teams and technology, et cetera, takes longer. There's a bit of delay in terms of some of our investment cases as well, which is just real-world delay.
Yep. Yeah. Just maybe outside that, the warehouse one-off that you've called out. Just general sort of cost pressures in the supply chain. What are you seeing there?
Yeah, look, there's certainly some inflationary pressures that have been placed on a lot of businesses throughout FY 2021. If you look at container costs, in particular. You know, multiples as to what they've been historically. A lot of that is a result of a variety of different things. We're certainly not immune to those increases, and we'll be watching it very closely. Thankfully for us, we have a business model that in terms of our supply chain is quite diversified. Obviously, 75%, 74% of the business is drop-ship, and then the residual is private label. We'll feel a direct impact on the private label because we're sourcing direct from factory. We're managing the inflows and outflows or the inflows. Whereas drop-ship's a little bit different. We're not really seeing material price inflation coming through the drop-ship network.
I think for us, given how material we are now to most of our suppliers and the growth that we're delivering to those suppliers, I think that's kind of helping us in terms of our terms with our drop-ship suppliers. Certainly, on the private label, there's been some inflationary pressures that have come through in FY 2021. Look, we'll wait and see how that sort of plays out in FY 2022. We're watching it very closely. Thankfully for us, we've got quite a flexible business model. The cost base is very variable. We can scale up our pricing points quite quickly. We can scale up and down our investment in marketing and branding quite quickly. We can scale up our fixed cost investments up and down quite quickly. That for us on a relative basis to our peers, probably puts us in a pretty good position.
Okay. That's great. Thank you.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Wassim Kiswani from Jarden. Please go ahead.
Good morning, guys. Can I ask around the trading through June and July? Obviously, a very strong start to this financial year. Competitionally, does that look any different to trading over the last 12 months in terms of the types of customers, the demographics or the categories that are coming through?
Look, with lockdowns, there's always a little bit of spike in things like gym equipment and things like that, which is a tiny part of our sales. Office category does better, obviously, with the home office. Broadly, it's pretty consistent to a general category mix. We're at the size now. There's not huge shifts in those category mixes month to month.
The trading in the non-lockdown states, is the July update sort of indicative of trading broadly across the business? Or is that skewed to what's happening in Sydney?
Obviously, the parts of the country which can't go to stores are growing faster. That's been every lockdown. No, we've seen growth around the country. We've seen that throughout the year. There are some areas of the country which actually have been not affected that much at all, and they're still growing.
Okay, great. Then you touched on some opportunities, inorganic opportunities if they come up. Are you able to elaborate on that in terms of where the priorities are and whether there are indeed opportunities to deploy your cash balance in a broader sense?
Yeah, look, we're always looking. There's always opportunities out there. Being the largest online retailer and being listed and having a good balance sheet obviously helps our position. We do tend to see pretty much everything that is out there. For us, M&A isn't a strategy. M&A for us is a tactical response to a strategy. We're always working with our different departments to look at their growth strategies and whether M&A can assist or if it's something that may hinder rather than help. We'll continue to be assessing a number of different opportunities as we are all the time. Having the cash on the balance sheet means a couple of things. It means that we can transact in a way in which it means that there's going to be less dilution for shareholders to start off with.
Secondly, it means that we can act quickly. A lot of the opportunities that we've seen in the past, particularly the opportunistic ones, you've got to act pretty quickly. Having that strength in the balance sheet will allow us to do it. We're very cognizant of the fact that these types of deals aren't easy. Usually, they're not a slam dunk. There's a lot of work that goes into them. We will make sure we're very diligent in what we're looking at, who we're looking at, and why we're looking at them.
For us, I think in terms of the landscape, we've said it in the past, I do not think it's going to be anything sort of transformational for the group, but it's going to be more about sort of bolt-on opportunities that are going to be strengthening some of those capabilities or some of those strategic moats for the business. It could be technology-led, could be AI, AR, personalization, data-led. Could be logistics-led to improve our last-mile logistics. Could be in the B2B. There's a lot of opportunities in the B2B space. I'm sure there'll be something done in the future and utilizing that balance sheet. We're currently assessing a number of those opportunities.
All right. Thanks, Mark.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Aryan Norozi from Barrenjoey. Please go ahead.
Hi, guys. Hope you're well. Just in terms of the July 2021 update, are you seeing a similar marketing return on investment than the 2.3 x you've done during the half? Or have you further stepped up your customer acquisition cost to get that customer to transacting, please?
We don't disclose our ROI by month. That gets disclosed when we release our reports. Well, actually, I've only been on TV one week of this month, so that gives you an answer, I guess.
Perfect. Thanks. Second one, just in terms of your brand awareness, I think you called out it's about 55%, and it's pretty similar to the first half. Is that 55% for the particular half?
That's from November. We want to do the brand awareness annually. I think any shorter periods, there's too much fluctuations and noise. You have to give campaigns the time. We'll be releasing that brand awareness result each year, once a year.
Yep. Perfect. Last one, just in terms of the customers you've acquired during calendar 2020, that COVID peak period, what are you noticing in terms of their behavior of those cohorts? Your average revenue per customer is obviously up strongly. [inaudible] s trong characteristics. Can you run us through maybe some numbers or qualitatively how they're transacting, please?
No, that's a great question. The cohorts that we acquired during the COVID periods, end of FY 2020 and the first half of FY 2021, definitely, you can see, have a higher repeat rate, so they're ordering more frequently and spending more when they do, both in terms of the type of item they spend and the number of items they put in their basket. All in all, pretty good customers. I think it goes to a couple of things. One is, I'm going to take credit for everything we do, but a large part of it is external. There is definitely things that we're doing better. We're doing things like the AI interior design service, so we're servicing more of the content.
If you're shopping for a coffee table now, we're showing you the lamp and the rug and the sofa that goes with it, you can complete your room, that's generated on the fly. Things like that. We're doing cross-sells. Actually, as you check out, and other parts of the site. We're doing more personalized marketing and communications. In your email, you'll see product suggestions based on what you've bought or what you've looked at. There's lots of stuff we're doing to drive cross-sells and items to basket. Also, in terms of the actual dollar amount or how expensive an item is, we continue to focus on furniture. We're experimenting with things like capped shipping to reduce shipping as a barrier. All in all, there's lots of things we're doing.
However, I think there's also an element of these customers are just better customers generally because early adopters tend to be a little bit more fickle, a little bit more price sensitive. By definition, they're an early adopter, and so therefore, they're probably an early adopter of other things and other competitors. Whereas the kind of customers coming to the market now are a bit stickier, probably a bit wealthier, and once they've had a good experience, are going to spend more money in the channel and more specifically, spend more money with us. I think there's also that kind of, as we move up the curve in adoption, you should see customers look better. I think it's a factor of both external and internal factors that are driving that.
That's perfect. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Scott Hudson from MST. Please go ahead.
Yeah. Morning, gents. Just a couple of questions. Firstly, surprised that there's no impact on the gross margin line from, I guess what looks like a pretty heavy period of price promotions. Can maybe just understand why that wasn't evident through the half?
Hey, Scott. You will actually see that come through. If you look at the margins coming through from the first half to the second half. There is a little bit of an impact there. They've held pretty strong. Like I said, in terms of some of the investments that we were making in the second half, a lot of that actually went into the marketing line in terms of TV.
Okay.
I think you'll start to see some of the impacts or some of that investment in pricing and promotional points. Us testing a number of different initiatives, particularly with shipping as well. We can see the direct correlation there between conversion and what we're charging for shipping. We'll be testing a number of those types of initiatives in FY 2022. We didn't go too hard in the second half. Certainly, we'll start to be testing some of those things in FY 2022. In terms of that variable investment, the bulk of that variable investment above the contribution line will be in marketing.
Got you. Thanks. Then I guess in terms of controlling that delivery experience, obviously, the cost you had to incur through the second half is indication that some of these things are outside of your control. I guess, what are you doing going forward to ensure that you don't have those negative impacts on NPS? I guess how do you take more control of that delivery piece to ensure customer experience stays strong?
Yeah, that is the AUD 64,000 question or the 65% NPS question. Look, to be honest, it's hard. Bulky delivery is hard. If it was really easy, everyone would be doing it. I kind of like hard things. Strategically, businesses should do hard things because if you can crack hard things, you've got a really solid moat. We have been pivoting the business or shifting, focusing on furniture and bulkies for a while now, for years. There's a bunch of reasons why that is a good business to be in. The con is that the logistics is hard. The short answer of what we're doing is that we're scaling our capability in the area. We've added people with significant experience in logistics into the team.
We are now working much more closely with our logistics partners to integrate with them, and actually to the point where we're providing things like technology advice to those partners. TBD how we, what we do going forward. I can say at the very least, we will be ensuring that we take more control over the delivery experience. That may mean actually making sure that we know and can control the various legs of the delivery network from pick-up to middle mile to last mile. That does not mean that we will necessarily have our own trucks doing any or all of those bits. It may mean for some parts, for some customers in some areas, that has to be worked out. It doesn't necessarily mean that we will have our own sheds or any of that. We may have.
We are likely to have much tighter contracts and SLAs and dedicated partners running the bits of the fulfillment chain for us. Essentially, what we're doing is as we get bigger and we're increasing our sophistication, it's allowing us to actually start putting in place the bits of the pieces to allow us to take more control, and therefore ensure the customer experience. Now we're actually pretty confident we can do it without increasing cost per orders. We think we can do it while at least maintaining our costs. We should be able to avoid those one-off costs you've seen, as we take more control and make sure our partners are on tighter contractual positions. Look, as I said, the goal is customer service. That's the number one goal.
I'd probably pay a little bit more if it meant that we can ensure a great customer service, because I think that the business case in terms of repeat and everything else will pay for that. We have no desire to become an asset-heavy kind of company. We don't want to become a logistics company. We just want to make sure that we're controlling the end-to-end experience.
Thanks. How long, I guess, before you have those contracts in place?
It's already starting to happen. For example the, one of the, our 3PL, for example, has now opened a dedicated site for Temple & Webster in Melbourne. That is our own site. It's run based on a variable contract, and the economics are the same, but it's our space. We get tighter control over who works there, the processes, everything else. You can see through that, and that's a function of scale. We have the scale now to go, we want our own type site because we're big enough. We want you to still run it, so we're not just want change in the economics, but we have tighter control over how that space operates and the processes we put in place. That's an example of something that's already happening.
Doesn't hit the actual cost base because it's the same model, but it's allowing us to have much tighter control over that fulfillment from that space.
Great. Just the last one for me, I guess 26% top line growth through the fourth quarter. Any noticeable trends through that quarter? I mean, was it fairly evenly spread month to month?
We announced our April trading, which was lower. You could see that as the quarter went on, the growth rate improved. That's also a function of April last year was the month that basically the whole country was locked down. That was our fastest-growing month. That was the hardest. Obviously, the faster the periods we grew last year, the tougher it is to conquer, right. It's math. Last year there were peaks and there weren't any troughs, but there were peaks and less peaky bits. The peakier bits are going to be slightly lower growth rate, and the less peaky bits will be higher growth rate. There is a fluctuation throughout the year.
Yeah, good. Thanks very much.
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 Joseph Michael from Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead.
Morning, Mark and Mark. Congrats on a great result. Just a couple of questions from me. Maybe first one just around the mobile apps. I guess now the Android app is up and running. Do you have plans to go harder on marketing and push uptake and download of that app now that you've got both iOS and Android working?
Yes. Android, we only launched very recently in the App Store. We're still in that piloting, testing, getting enough customers to ensure that all the bugs are worked out, stability issues or performance issues. While we test and iterate. At the same time, we have pretty high levels of performance and standards that we put on ourselves on a public release product. As soon as it passes all that and we're okay with that, which is probably another a couple months away, yes, we will be in a position to go, okay, we're now happy to stand behind both our iOS and our Android app, and we'll do more public marketing campaigns. That could be as things like changing the end card of the TV ad to say, install the app today and get a dollar off, some discount off your next order. We'll work that out.
Okay. Got it. Just to follow up there, I look at some third-party download data, and it did look like the iOS, the number of downloads started taking off from sort of April, May. Was that part of a deliberate strategy to push people into the app?
It's been taking off probably a bit before then. We launched the app in the first half of the year. Again, we went through the same process.
Right.
Iterate it, test it, learn it, pilot it, make sure we're okay before pushing it. When we got in a position that we were okay with the iOS, then we started pushing it from a digital marketing perspective. It's more targets. We're targeting iOS users, so you won't see it unless you're an iOS user. It's been growing for the last few months. It'll be the same with the Android, the same position with Android. As soon as we're ready, we'll start pushing it.
Okay. Got it. Next question, just on the B2B division. Obviously really strong growth rates there, 100%+. Do you think that's a sustainable growth rate given you're growing off a small base and clearly residential property has been quite strong? Do you think you can continue those kind of growth rates?
Obviously, we don't put out guidance for any particular part of our business, but I can say, look, we are a tiny bit of a pretty big market segment. We're now back of the envelope for B2B because we can't find research reports, but we've done our own in-house and commissioned our own research to understand the opportunity. No matter how we cut it does suggest it's multi-billions of AUD, is the furniture market for B2B. Think about it's basically every room in Australia outside of the ones you live in at home. Think about all the rooms you go into over the course of a day. When you're not stuck at home, obviously. Whether it be schools or restaurants or hotels or offices. There's so many different rooms. That's why it adds up quite quickly.
The business is, yes, it's growing quite strongly, but it's still a very small part of the overall Temple & Webster revenue line, which suggests we've got lots and lots of opportunity. The other thing is it's quite fragmented from a competition point of view. You have specialists in things like premium office furniture, or you have specialists in hospitality furniture or education, et cetera. There's very few national brands in the space that do multi-category, multi-offering, multi-product even, offers. We think that Temple & Webster, by leveraging the B2C bit, by leveraging the range we've already built for the B2C, by adding more bespoke and commercial-grade furniture into that, which is for our B2B customers. Having that national offering built into our business model because as an online retailer, we can scale nationally.
Supplementing that with salespeople to chase down the actual decision-makers in the purchase decision. We think we can actually have a scalable proposition that could become that national brand. If you play that out, if we become a national brand and get a relatively, even a okay market share in that category of a multi-billion AUD category, you get to big numbers, which implies big growth rates for a long time.
Okay, great. That's clear. That's all I had this morning. Thanks for your time.
Thank you.
Thank you. There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Coulter for closing remarks.
Thank you, everyone. As you can see, it was a great year. Reiterate, obviously, that it is a tough period, and we don't take for granted that we can be delivering these sorts of numbers in this period of history. It was a record year of revenue, profit, and customers. As I said before, market still has a ton of growth left, and we continue to make great progress on our customer proposition. On that note, thank you for your time. Thanks all.
That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.