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Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference

Mar 8, 2023

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

8:35, let's get started. Before I introduce my guests, let me just read the research disclosure here. For important disclosures, please see the Morgan Stanley Research Disclosure website at www.morganstanley.com/researchdisclosures. If you have any questions, please reach out to your Morgan Stanley sales representative. My name is Erik Woodring. I lead the hardware research efforts here at Morgan Stanley. I'm very pleased to be joined by two members of the Cricut team, Ashish Arora, CEO, Kimball Shill, the CFO. A lot to talk about today, but you guys reported earnings last night. Thank you guys for coming here early in the morning immediately post that. Great to talk to you.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah, thank you for having us here.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Ashish, I'll start with you. Your second time at the TMT conference. I think most people in the audience know what Cricut does, but let's maybe just start off with a bit of a postmortem just because you reported 4Q earnings last night. Really what my question is what were some of the more important points of the report as we look back over the last 12 months? What did you do well? Where did you leave room for improvement? What's the message as we enter 2023?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Sure. Thanks, Erik. You know, we reported our results yesterday evening.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

A couple of key takeaways that we had, you know, first of all, you know, we basically announced that we acquired about 1.5 million users, which is close to what, you know, gets our user base to about 7.9 million. We're really excited about that. As part of that, one of the things that, you know, I'm particularly excited about is that we are able to penetrate our SAM, which is still only, you know, less than 6%, and we were able to acquire a lot of beginner users and Gen Zs. You know, we basically reinforced that we have a large SAM ahead of us.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We're in the very early days of that acquisition. Our subscriptions business was a highlight.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We, you know, we had a very solid performance in our subscriptions business and just we have a, you know, a really strong roadmap there as well. I think a couple of things that we noted were that the company's really kind of leaning in on building a platform, you know, a platform that drives engagement. We had a couple of challenges and a couple of opportunities, and I think specifically we talked a little bit about the margin compression in our accessories and materials business.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

...and also our plan, which, you know, we're very confident about, to reinvent and reinvigorate that business over the next 12-18 months. I think those are probably some of the takeaways.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Perfect, we'll get into all of that. But before we do the specifics, I wanna kinda take a step back and think about the long-term drivers of this business, of this platform. You know, while some things have definitely changed over the last two years, since the start of the pandemic, I'd imagine a lot of the long-term drivers have stayed the same. What are they, what's most important, and again, how have they, if at all, kind of changed in the last two years in terms of driving the longer term growth story for you guys?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. Yeah, you know, Erik, our market, our SAM, continues to be huge, and we're in the very early days of that. Our funnel is very healthy. You know, we continue to add people into the funnel. We do believe that there's a little bit of reticence in terms of people, you know, really kind of getting to the bottom of the funnel and actually purchasing the product. Having said that, you know, we have a number of initiatives in place. One of the things that makes our category very unique is, you know, at the top of the funnel, we have a lot of network effects, right? We, we actually are very efficient with our sales and marketing spend as we continue to bring more people through social media, through friends and family, through network effects.

None of that.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

...has really changed.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? As a company, we have more insights about what it takes for people to get from a broader awareness to where they're starting to get familiar with the product. We are working on tools that help address their questions. Specifically at the bottom of the funnel, where you kind of drive purchase and conversion, one of the strategies we had to actually take In the last 12 months, we were generally a little bit more promotional than we'd like to be. We think that it's in the best interest of the company and more sustainable in terms of actually redeploying some of the dollars to the top of the funnel and driving awareness.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

I think all of this, you know, is kind of vested in the fact that we have an ongoing relationship with that with our users, and that really creates a very sustainable moat, and, you know, a sustainable, profitable business over time.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

I would also add to that the long-term trends, the macro trends that have driven our business since 2014.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

That's right.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

...remain in place.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We're now in over 50 countries around the world, and we find the same motivators for creation and applicability of our business model in every one of those countries, not just in our U.S. market.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay. Okay. Let's talk about those users. You know, historically, your user base was very over-indexed to females, very over-indexed to the U.S. You know, you made some comments last night about the characteristics of new users being a bit different today, and maybe just expand on how that user base is really changing now.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. Yeah. You know, as Kimball pointed out, the trends that drive our business, which is around, you know, personalization, creativity, That's really true for every part of the globe, right? You know, we don't see any significant differences for that user. As you pointed out, over 90% of our users are female, We're really under-penetrated at this point in that user base.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? We've continued to be in the very early days of that SAM. I think those are some of the things that we feel good about. One of the things that we talked about is that we have a lot of beginner users in Gen Z.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

A comment that I specifically made in our prepared remarks is that, you know, that beginner doesn't show a difference in terms of the types of machines they buy.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

...and the type of engagement they have, which is really good news. You know, as we are broadening our penetration in our SAM, we're able to attract a high-quality cohort of users.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? I think that's really good. One, you know, the one last point I'd make is that, you know, a really healthy percentage of the users we are being able to attract is actually even beyond our SAM.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? I think the quality of that cohort seems to be very, very similar to our historical cohorts that we acquired.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

You just answered my next question without me asking you. I was gonna say, I think the initial concern that one could hear when you talk about onboarding beginning users is the monetization curve might look different. I think what I took away from your comments last night and now is that actually, the engagement with the platform might not be different between cohorts. Sure, post-pandemic, maybe engagement for the whole user base is a little bit different, but the cohorts are behaving very similarly. I guess my question really is, kind of how do you leverage that knowledge to inform your product roadmap and kind of what you are, what you're doing with the platform, as you think about the opportunities to go from 6% penetration to whatever that number might be.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

In the future?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

About 74% of our users. Actually, let me actually maybe back up. The way we count engagement is actually the number of people that are cutting on our machine.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? 74% of users, ever since we started in 2014, actually cut in the last 12 months, right? You know, the number of users, the number of people who actually cut on our machines increased 6% year-over-year.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We think there's a huge opportunity just across the board, right? Not specifically to any new cohorts or anything. We obviously, you know, could dramatically increase that number, and we are focused on a number of initiatives to actually help drive onboarding and engagement. We talked a little bit about this, which is the user behavior in the first four to six to eight weeks really kind of becomes predictive of how they behave over time, and we've been doing a lot of, you know, experiments with onboarding. We've had some really good results.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We're actually planning to scale that, right? The opportunity we have, Erik, if you think about the user journey, right, we actually count the transaction saying when somebody cuts, but there's a huge, rich journey that happens when the user decides that they actually wanna make something.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? It's the early part of the inspiration. Our platform plays a key role. Other platforms like Pinterest play a key role. I think there's a huge opportunity to get that user early on in the cycle.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We are building a platform which has a ton of inspiration. We basically are really leveraging mobile. Think about this, right? Somebody could be on the road away from their machine for 10 days. They could be interacting with our platform. They could be bookmarking stuff. They could be creating projects. We don't count any of that as engagement.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm. Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? And that creates a huge opportunity in terms of really interacting with the user and creating other forms of monetization over time, so we're actually really excited about that.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay. That now. I have two questions off the back of that. Maybe first just starting with engagement. You know, I would say there have been temporary headwinds, but last night you also talked about kind of making the journey less complex, making it simpler for your users. Help us understand what exactly that means and how that can translate into better engagement metrics, again, longer term over time.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. You know, I think one is clearly the out-of-the-box experience and the initial, you know, first few weeks of engagement, and like I said, that becomes very predictive.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

You know, it's basically giving them the education, the tools, the out-of-box materials, and helping, you know, hold their hand to lead them through the project. The other thing I would say is that, again, our platform enabled, which is we have hundreds of thousands of pieces of inspiration, and the user. We got to get to a point where, you know, somebody can just click on something, they can actually make it, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

I think we are in the early days of that, and I think as we do that. Now, one actually interesting stat that I'll share, which is when we ask customers who haven't come onto our platform for six to nine months, "Okay, what do you think about Cricut? You know, why haven't you come on the platform?" There's a very high percentage of those users that'll say, "Oh my God, like, this is really good. I love using Cricut," right? "I really enjoyed it." Then when you ask them saying, "Well, why didn't you?"

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

They'll say, "Oh, well, I just ran out of time," or, "Life just got in the way." What they're really saying is it's an opportunity to make those experiences frictionless, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

It's to help them do those things in less than five or 10 minutes. Again, I think mobile plays a key role, right? The platform plays a key role. Think about this, which is we wanna generate personalized, relevant triggers.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? Even if the user wasn't intending to do something, we just reminded them of a birthday project they made last year.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

A nd think, "Hey, somebody's birthday is coming up." All of those possibilities exist, and that's where the platform is going, which is really leveraging user data to understand their behavior and giving them highly personalized, relevant nudges-

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... to do something.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

I think we think that that'll move the needle over time.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

That's change, you're saying?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay. The other part of the comment that you made just prior to this one was the ways in which your users engage with the platform that potentially you don't monetize today. I guess my question is, you know, you touched on some studies last night about different cohorts, different user engagement. You know, what did the data show in terms of is there an opportunity to figure out maybe how to monetize engagement that doesn't necessarily get picked up by the metric you discussed earlier?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. You know, Internally, we take a very broad view on that metric, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Like I said, anytime the user interacts, I go back to the example, right? I'm on a vacation.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

And I'm creating projects for my classroom. Like, let's say I'm a school teacher. We don't count any of that as engagement.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

It's an opportunity to inspire them with relevant things. It's an opportunity to propose types of materials they can buy, what kind of projects they can make. Yeah, there's a huge opportunity to monetize those eyeballs.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... both in terms of... We, you know, some of that we've already done today, and we have some proof points, right? Which is one of the reasons why our subscription products done really well is because we have... As they, you know, there's 150 million bookmarks that were created, right? Every week, millions and millions of bookmarks get created, and what that means is a user intent that they actually.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... come back and make that project. We can start to propose, "Hey, these are the materials you need to buy. These are the things that you need in order to make this project." Again, as we help with discoverability and, you know, help people think about ideas to make things or even give them reminders to make things, it's an opportunity to not only create digital revenues, but also physical revenues in terms of materials, et cetera.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

I think proof point that you started to mention was, you know, we're advertising our Access subscription service more frequently throughout the platform.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We're seeing.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

... increases in annual subscriptions just based on advertising that opportunity.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right. Right.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We have about 10 or 15 touch points inside our software that can basically you know, reinforce with people as to the benefits they're missing. One of the reasons Cricut Access is, you know, the amount of users that come into the platform is overwhelming.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Like I always tell people saying, "Those many users don't go into craft aisles every day.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yet we interact with those users multiple times a day," and that's really exciting for us.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. I guess your point is the helping educate them across multiple different fronts is something that you believe can help with the monetization curve, help with the engagement curve, again, help take the platform from where it is today into the future. Fair enough.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah, absolutely. you know, the community itself is playing a huge role in

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yeah

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... enriching the platform. We said, you know, there's 80,000-90,000 projects that have been made by the community. What that means is that another user that comes up, basically, if they click on a project that has been built by community, you know, in one click they actually have all the design work. That's basically saving them 60 minutes of time.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Again, you know, one of the things I talk about platforms is where the participants of the platform have created more value...

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Than the creator of the platform itself.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Right.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? We believe that ultimately the value proposition of subscription, the value proposition, and the ease of use will. We will provide the enabling infrastructure, but it's the users that will make it easy for other people to do things.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

It's the users that will inspire other users to do things.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

That's an important point. When we, you know, when we've gone through this process for multiple years now, and I think something that really stood out early on when you became public was just how engaged your user base is on social media, far in excess of, I'd say, your competitors. Far in excess of your competitors, even far in excess of other, let's call it, technology platforms. How can that translate into kind of maybe P&L efficiency for you guys? How do you leverage that to, again, drive profitability to the bottom line?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. Yeah. Let me kind of talk about that. Over 40% of our users come to know about our platform from friends and family.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Over 80% of them, you know, are become aware of Cricut and the platform through social media, through Pinterest, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, et cetera. Even if, when you compare on TikTok, for example, us compared to really large brands-

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... some of the biggest brands in the world.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

It's pretty wild, honestly.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... we're right up there, right, in terms of engagement. I think there's a huge opportunity to drive network effects.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

If you think about the nature of the category, when our users create projects, they're incredibly proud and they feel so accomplished and they feel they've made all these things and they advertise for us, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

How that translates, I think there's a huge opportunity for us. Those network effects exist today.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

There's an opportunity for us to leverage them and even harness them even more so.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

What that does is basically, and I talked about the top of the funnel, is that helps drive awareness with efficiencies that other brands are not able to achieve. I think our opportunity in terms of, you know, even though our sales and marketing expense is, in our long-term model, is about 8%-10%, if I remember. Right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We were up at 15% this year, and that's mostly because we are spending a lot of money on the POS dollars and promotions for conversion.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Our strategy going forward is to actually, you know, leverage some of the top of line awareness effects rather than. Be less promotional.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yep. Right. Okay.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

That, we believe, we have a strong conviction that our funnel is very healthy.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We have data that shows our funnel is very healthy, and we believe that the customer is coming through the funnel, but they're just stopping.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

of that conversion. There's opportunities to improve that, but we believe that as consumer spend returns, we will be benefiting from that.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Okay. I'm gonna get into the numbers, Kimball, don't worry. I just wanna touch on international expansion first before we get to some of the segments. It's been an initial year for you guys. You just mentioned in more than 50 countries. You know, again, this has been a challenging last 12 months, if we take away kind of the noise, you know, talk to us about the long-term international expansion. Where is your focus? What countries are you most focused on today? Maybe as we look out over the next 12 months, what new countries might emerge as more core to the story?

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

I wanna make a point on the international because our financials show that we're down slightly...

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

On a constant currency basis, we actually would've been growing at kind of mid-single digits.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Right? We did have some currency fluctuation. As to the countries I think we're in most of the countries we plan to be in for the next year or two, and we're looking at deepening our footprint.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Right. The way we go to market is very organic, right. We start small. We use social media effects similar to how we do in the U.S., and that takes time to build momentum. That process is in flight, and it will take a year or two for that to bear fruit. You know, our largest markets are the ones we've been in the longest. If you look at U.K., France, Germany, Australia, that's where the bulk of our revenue comes from today. We talked a little bit yesterday on the call about how economic headwinds, particularly in U.K. and Australia, really kinda weighed down that piece of our business.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Even though we had growth in some of the less mature markets, it didn't fully offset what we saw happen in the bigger markets.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay. Then maybe last question on international is just, in terms of engagement and monetization, is there any difference in, you know, take away currency and all that, any difference in the international user versus the domestic user?

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Well, in terms of what motivates them to create, no. We see that very similar. We actually do see, in some markets, higher attach rates to subscriptions than we see in the U.S., but it's also early days, early adopters, I mean, it's like too early to conclude trends from that.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Okay.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We don't see any differences in terms of what motivates people. In some countries, especially in some of the developing markets, a user may come in because they wanna start a business, or, you know, versus a hobby.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Other than that, the underlying motivation and the intrinsic drivers are the same. The, you know, again, it's early to tell because even though some of the attach rates are higher, these may be early adopters.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Overall, we think that they're demonstrating very, very similarly across the board.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Let's get into the segments. Connected machines, 2022, sell in didn't necessarily match sell through. You were working down channel inventory. What's the message for 2023? Just as hardware guys, you know, you don't need to open the kimono and tell us what's coming out, but how should we think about, you know, the cadence of new product launches? What should we get excited about on that front?

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Yeah. So let me talk about the margin piece 'cause I think it's important to understand the portfolio nature of our business, right? We're talking about connected machines. We did see margin pressure over the last couple of years as we are transitioning from old generation to new generation machines, but we do expect incremental margin improvements on machines as the mix tilts now more towards our newer machines.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Got it.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

On our accessories and materials business, we did talk about, and maybe we'll get to that.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

... we did talk about how that piece of our business is gonna see pressure for the next couple of years, but that's not talking about the entire business, and that's at a gross margin level.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We do expect to see operating margin improvement for the full year.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

I, you know, I'll just add on the new products. When we look at our portfolio, especially around physical products and, you know, the hardware stuff that we do, we're very, very, very focused on connected machines, and we have a super exciting roadmap. I think you'll see a lot of innovation from us, not just within our existing category, but in new categories. You know, we're in the very early days of that. Having said that, you know, the company has always had this vision of really evolving the platform, and we've really leaned in.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We believe that... You know, the beauty about our business, Erik, is that a user buys a machine, and then they go on a journey with us.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We interact with our user every single day. Every time they use their machine, we can talk to them, right? We believe that the platform plays a huge role in leveraging that machine. We're very excited about our hardware roadmap. We're gonna have some exciting new things coming.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Good.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Also we're very excited about our platform and where the company is going.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Good. Good. Let's, again, touch on the aftermarket stuff. Let's touch on subscriptions. Let's touch on accessories and materials. Kimball Shill, you talked about accessories and materials, so I'm just gonna take that and run with it, and that is, you know, it did see challenges in 2022. Talk to us about the competitive landscape, but really, I want the focus to be on Cricut and more so the actions that you're taking to really reinvigorate this business because you do have IP here. But again, perhaps there are tweaks that you need to make. What are those tweaks that you guys are making?

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Yeah. We're seeing a price-sensitive consumer right now, and that clearly weighs on the business. Let me kind of take a step back, right? Accessories and materials for us is a very broad category of products. We have a $1,000 heat press product called Autopress, and we have a $5 roll of vinyl and a whole bunch of stuff in between. Things like vinyl, there's a lot more competition for that.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

In vinyl and iron-on, we see, you know, cheaper inferior products coming in, especially online, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We're responding to that by being price competitive. You saw some of the pressure on margins related to our promotional dollars on materials. Over the long term, we're gonna reconfigure our supply chain and focus on more efficient packaging and differentiating by channel so that we can actually have healthier margins even as we compete and win our fair share. We sell a fair number of our materials as bundled with machines. As we've sold fewer machines, that's impacted the A&M segment as well. You'll see us leaning into a bundle strategy more broadly, both with brick and mortar and online to help accelerate that. Ashish has talked about engagement.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

... and those engagement efforts, as people begin to cut more, 'cause as you highlighted, all users are cutting a little bit less coming out of the pandemic, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yeah. Yeah.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We think we can help reverse that trend as we lean into engagement. At the end of the day, our materials are designed to work seamlessly with our products. We believe we have a right to win in this space. As we work through existing inventories and make some of these kind of medium term changes to our supply chain, it'll take us 18-24 months to get there.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

That's why we talk about kind of margin pressure.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

... gross margin pressure on materials-

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

... you know, for that time period.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Let's go to subscriptions. It's a business that grew over 30% year-over-year in 2022. You ended the year with 2.6 million paid subscribers. Attach rate, that's around 33%. You know, how do we think about that metric trending into 2023? Really, you know, we kind of touched on this, but what changes are you making to the subscription offering to really enhance that value proposition to get your users to say, "I want to be a subscriber"?

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Yeah. We're really excited about our subscription business. We think it's a huge opportunity for us over time, and the team has done a great job over the last 18, 24 months, as we're just beginning our roadmap of improvements. We have lots of premium design features like automatic background removal, editable images. We have our contributing artist program, where we have third-party artists who create content that's diverse. It's an important part of our, you know, localization for content as we move around the world. We're just getting started on those types of features.

As we look to 2023 and we talk a little bit of the pressure we'll see here, is we get new subscribers primarily from adding new users to the platform.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We do believe we're going to have lower new users this year than we did last year.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

That's largely driven by as someone buys a machine and they register it, there's a time lag.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Before when they actually come onto the platform. In kind of Q4 of 2021, we had a much stronger holiday season than we did this last year.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

we don't have that same influx of new users in Q1 to kind of boost our numbers.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Right. Okay.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

That's short-term pressure. We believe as our acquisition efforts you know, get traction, that we will re-accelerate that business.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. Erik, I pointed this out last time, I'll do it again, which is our subscription product has a lot of stickiness...

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... in terms of our platform itself is very sticky, right? For example, if a, you know, if a user on our platform has made 50 projects while they're subscribed.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

They've added like let's say 100 hours of design time, you know, and they've uploaded photos, they've done a lot of edits. That product that they have now created value around is not accessible if they stop subscribing. In some ways, what we provide the raw ingredients, they create the derived work, and in order for them to access that derived work, they have to be a subscriber. We are actually really pleased about the long-term structure of that business-

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yep. Yep.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... and our focus on, you know, these incredible design software tools. Our entire value proposition, as Kimball talked about, is content is gonna be king.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Our community, the participants of the platform add more value to that content are about to become part of the subscription.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Software tools will play a key role, and then software and then services will play a key role. You know, our long-term outlook and our long-term viewpoint on that business is very optimistic.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Can you just on the software side, again, I know you mentioned mobile earlier, but outside, you know, there's clearly a focus on software and enhancing the cloud-based offering that you have. Again, you can't take your project with you elsewhere. It's on the cloud-

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Sure.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

... on the Cricut journey. What else are you doing on the software side to, again, whether it's enhance the platform or enhance engagement or monetization, what's the priority today?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. It's, you know, first and foremost, right? In fact, we have two leaders in our company. One is driving subscriptions, the other is driving engagement. They actually work hand-in-hand, right? The number one focus of our software, which was when we started, was to connect. We make an incredibly cloud-connected device.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

The number two was let's really invest in our subscription effort, and that's where we are about 12-18 months ahead.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

The third piece is the engagement piece, which is how do we get our users to come to our platform five to six to 10 days? How do we get them to come to our platform if they didn't even have an intention, right? The fact that people can follow other creators, the fact that people can, on their mobile devices, bookmark things that other people have made, right? The likes, the bookmarks, the follows. Finally, I would say search and personalization is huge.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We wanna give people incredibly personalized, highly relevant content, even when they didn't know that they actually needed it, right? We are very much like how a you know, a content platform would behave.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

I think those are some of the technologies, the advanced machine learning, you know, looking at something in you know, in other technologies that are coming up.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Yeah.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We think that there's an insane opportunity going forward.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay. If we add this all up, we kinda talked about the top line stuff. We've touched on some of the cost side. Again, we're ramping up towards that target op operating margin range, which is 15%-19%. Again, what kind of takes us from where we are today, we, I think it was 9% in 2022, looking to incrementally increase that this year. What takes that from this year to that, to that range? How do we get there?

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

I think a lot of that is scale.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

If you look at the size we were in 2020 2021, we were in those operating margin ranges. Part of this is re-accelerating the business with some of the efforts that we've talked about. In the interim period, we are very focused on managing profitability, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We're a business that generates cash. We paid a special dividend this year 'cause we had more cash than after we'd fully funded all of our investments that we wanted to fund.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

We expect to generate cash in 2023 as well.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay. Okay. Just have a few seconds. you know, I'm sure you're excited to put 2022 behind you and refocus the message on 2023, getting back to growth. Just leave the audience with what's your final message that you wanna tell everyone before you step off stage, and why you should be interested, why Cricut should be on their radar?

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Yeah. Yeah, Erik, we believe that we have a massive SAM.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

129 million people in just the top six markets, right? The underlying trends that drove our business from 2014 are largely, in fact, are intact.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Right? We believe our funnel is healthy. When COVID happened, you know, we didn't all of a sudden, people didn't go on the web and start searching for what is a home device they can use, right?

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We had a healthy funnel, and COVID just converted those people. We have a very healthy funnel today.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

We believe we are being more efficient in bringing people down.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Mm-hmm.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

As that consumer spend returns on discretionary products, we believe that we'll be in the consumer's list. You know, we take a very long-term view.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

Okay.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

... we're building our business, we're building our platform, and we think we have sustainable levers, and we're in the very, very early innings of the game.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Good.

Erik Woodring
Managing Director of Equity Research, Morgan Stanley

I wish you the best of luck. Thank you for your time here, and thank you guys for joining us.

Kimball Shill
CFO, Cricut

Thank you.

Ashish Arora
CEO, Cricut

Thank you.

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