Good morning. Next presenting company is Crown Crafts, ticker symbol CRWS, trades on the NASDAQ. The company specializes in infant and toddler products, toys, bedding, diaper bags, plush toys, you name it, they're in that space. Here today to start the presentation is Olivia Elliott, Company CEO, and with her is Craig Demarest, the Company CFO. Olivia?
Good morning. So, as John mentioned, we're Crown Crafts, an infant and toddler products company based in Gonzales, Louisiana, which, if you don't know where that is, it's kind of halfway in between Baton Rouge and New Orleans along I-10, so really easy to get to. We are a leading producer of infant and toddler consumer products. We sell under a wide variety of brands. Some of them are our own brands. We have some of the most well-known licenses in the world, such as Disney, and we sell to a lot of the major retailers in the U.S. under their private label brands. We have been steadily profitable for more than 20 years, and we have done a series of acquisitions over the last 18 months or so, one in March of 2023 and one in just this past July that we'll talk about both of those.
We believe that we're well-positioned for future growth. The company was founded in 1957, had nothing to do with infant products. It was what they called adult top of the bed, so it was comforters, sheets, curtains for the adult bedroom. They had a big Royal Sateen license, a Calvin Klein license, and then in the, well, they went public in 1968. Then, in the mid-1990s, they realized they needed to diversify, and so they bought a series of infant companies that now make up a large part of what is our business today. In the late 1990s, early 2000s, they fell into some hard times with the legacy part of the adult business. They lost a major license. They lost a program at Walmart.
And then they did, when everybody else was going to China, they decided to build a big plant in North Carolina that they never actually manufactured anything at. So, the combination of all of those things, the bank stepped in in 2001 and said, you know what, we're going to sell off all of the legacy business, and we want you to reemerge as just an infant, and really, at that time, it was just an infant products company. For the next five years or so, we pretty much worked for the banks. We had what was an astronomical amount of debt for a company the size that we were, and we really, really believed that the banks probably didn't think that we would survive.
It was a way to write off some part of the debt at one time and then have a few years before they had to write the other part off, but what we did was we generated a lot of cash, and we survived, and so a few years later, we were able to refinance that debt with a true asset-based loan, and we were able to come out starting in 2007 and start doing some more acquisitions. In 2010, we started paying dividends again, and we were able to get relisted back on NASDAQ. The company is really. We've got offices across the United States. We're, as I said, based in Gonzales, Louisiana. That's also where one of our divisions, Sassy Baby, is based.
Sassy also has product development and sales offices in Minneapolis and in Grand Rapids, Michigan, as well as a distribution facility in Eden Valley, Minnesota. That primarily is for just the Manhattan Toy brand that we acquired in 2023, but we are in process of moving some other toys for the Sassy division there as well because our most recent acquisition has made our distribution facility in Compton, California, pretty much overflowing. I think we have 100+ containers sitting out in the parking lot. So, we're in process of shuffling some goods around so that we can have more products coming out of Minnesota. NoJo Baby & Kids is based in Compton, California. That is where the distribution facility is for the Sassy brand as well as the NoJo brand, and then they also have an office now in New Jersey, which is where the diaper bag designers reside.
We have two foreign representative offices in China. We also have people in Arkansas in the Bentonville area. We do not have an office there. They work from home. It's just three employees. Our fiscal year ends the Sunday closest to March 31st. All of these charts are going to be for our fiscal year that ended in March of this year, which was before the Baby Boom acquisition. I'll mention a little bit about how the Baby Boom acquisition may change these charts, but just keep in mind that these are for the fiscal year before that. Toys were our largest category of business at 38%. That's a combination of both the Sassy Baby brand as well as the Manhattan Toy brand. Following that, we had bibs at 22%, and then toddler and infant bedding at 19% and 17%.
And then disposables are the smallest part of the business at that point in time at 4%. So, what Baby Boom is going to do, that adds almost $20 million in net sales if you look at it on a full fiscal year, which we will not have them for a full fiscal year for our fiscal year 2025, but it is probably 65% toddler and 35% diaper bags. So, that will probably leapfrog the whole bedding division, the infant and toddler, to combine to be the largest category of business going forward. And then it will also add diaper bags. So, same thing, fiscal 2024, Walmart has been our largest customer for as long as I've been with the company, which has been 23 years, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. They were 42% of the business. Amazon was 19%, followed by Target at 8%.
And then what you see is the Manhattan Toy acquisition really helped us diversify our distribution channels. It added a lot more of the national. It's got Barnes & Noble. We sell to Meijer. We sell to Kohl's, a lot of those different national brands. And a lot of those we had with Sassy and NoJo as well. International grew a little bit with the Manhattan Toy acquisition. The vast majority of the products that we sell internationally, almost 100%, is really the toy side. We have a lot of distributors in Europe that we sell both brands of toys to. It also got us LEGOLAND. So, we got the LEGO license with the Manhattan Toy acquisition, and we have products that are only sold in LEGOLAND. And then we also sell LEGO-branded products to some of the LEGO, the Discovery Centers, and then also to some retailers.
And then we got a direct-to-consumer website with the Manhattan Toy acquisition. And so, it was only 1% of the business because it really only sells the Manhattan Toy brand. What you're going to see with Baby Boom is kind of a swing back towards the Walmart, Amazon, and Target. So, we'll see that those pieces of the pie grow a little bit in 2025. So, these are pictures of the products. And so, what you'll see on the left-hand side is the traditional crib bedding. So, this is a product that is chosen by mom and paid for by the grandparents. It is a big-ticket item. It's typical, whimsical. It traditionally, at this point in time, matches the house. So, if the whole home is decorated in kind of grays and blues, then you're going to want the nursery to have that same look and feel.
Whereas, I guess 20 years ago, 15 years ago, when I was having kids, you painted your nursery pink or you painted it blue, and it was very much an infant-looking room. Now, mom is decorating it as part of the home. Then, when the child is about two to four years old, you can take the mattress out of the crib and you put it in a tiny little bed that's a toddler bed. Those products are almost 100% licensed. This is something that the child is choosing. If they're watching Disney on TV or they love princesses or Cars or whatever it is, Spider-Man, they're choosing that to sleep on in this little bed. Continuing with NoJo Baby & Kids, the goal is to design the whole nursery. So, they do wall decor.
We do pieces of decor and baskets and things like that that can sit on the changing pad covers, that type of thing. They do a little bit of plush. Typically, this is what matches the bedding set or is part of the Disney license, and then they do some things that are, if you look at the bottom left-hand corner, something that's become big with the social media is mom likes to document the child at one month old, at two month old, at that kind of thing, and they take a picture on these little mats that show how the baby's growing on those little mats, and so NoJo does a lot of that too, so moving on to Sassy Baby, this division used to be called Hamco.
And so, the products on this page are really the legacy part of the business that we had acquired back in the late 1990s up through the early 2000s. It's bibs, both reusable as well as disposable. And then it's a lot of the other disposable products. If you look in the middle right here, that's a Chick-fil-A mat. And so, the largest, I'm not going to say retailer, but customer for this product right here is Chick-fil-A. We sell almost $2 million a year in one SKU to Chick-fil-A, and they hand those out if you go into the restaurants. And then in 2017, we acquired the Sassy Baby Developmental Toy Company. And we merged it into Hamco, but that name, Sassy Baby, is a lot more infant and toddler name than Hamco is. So, we changed the name of the company.
This is now the largest part of the company before this most recent acquisition. We really pride ourselves on this part of the company. Our product development team really knows how a baby grows and what a baby needs to get the proper development along each different age group. Most of these toys are sold up to about two years old. We stay down in that kind of age category before they're starting preschool, and then in 2023, we added Manhattan Toy to that. As I've already said, they're based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. They came with a distribution facility. They also came with a couple of warehouses in Europe, both in Belgium and in the U.K. So that's where we distribute all of the toys out of now. It got us into dolls and into plush.
And if you look right here, if you saw the pictures of Sassy, they were more plastics. We sell those more into Walmart and Target and Amazon, whereas these are wooden. They're a little more higher end. And so, those are what's being sold into the specialty stores and some of the other national chains. And our most recent acquisition is Baby Boom. So, Baby Boom was based in New Jersey, founded in 1988. They were our largest competitor in the toddler category. So, this has pretty much made us by far the leader in market size in terms of the toddler. And then it got us into diaper bags, and that's something we're really excited about. We think that we have an opportunity to grow that business, take it international. We think we can get additional licenses in that side of the business.
So, that's something that we'll be focusing on really in the near future. These are some of the pictures, a lot of the same products, just different licenses that NoJo already sold. And then these are the diaper bags. A lot of these are sold at Walmart, Amazon, and then we have some other online business that these are sold. And these are some of our in-house brands. Sassy and Manhattan Toy are by far the most well-known of those brands, but Neat Solutions, NoJo, Bibsters, those are all some pretty popular brands for infants as well. And our licenses, Disney is by far the largest, but all of the licenses on this page are really well-known, internationally known brands that we're really excited about. We got PAW Patrol, CoComelon, Ms. Rachel. All of those came with the Baby Boom acquisition.
And then before I turn it over to Craig, I'll touch a little bit on our strategic plan. This is now about two and a half or three years old. We said that we were going to grow our toy category either by acquisition or internally, and we've kind of done both. We did the Manhattan Toy acquisition, and we've also had some organic growth there. And then that we wanted to enter new and adjacent product categories, both organically as well as tuck-in acquisitions. You saw us do the Baby Boom as well as Manhattan Toy acquisitions. At this point in time, we need to digest. So, I think you won't see us do any acquisitions in the next few years. As I said, we're busting at the seams in our distribution centers.
And then we just need to be able to absorb these, take these, grow them, and do what we thought we could do when we acquired them. We're also focusing on selling direct-to-consumer. We already have the Manhattan Toy website. It came with the acquisition. The NoJo Baby & Kids website should be up and running direct-to-consumer in the next couple of weeks. And then we're going to move some of the Sassy products to be sold up under the Manhattan Toy line. So, that's something that we're really, really close to getting up and running to a larger degree. And then, as always, we're well-known for being cost-conscious and for keeping our costs down. And so, we really need to focus on, we're going to continue to do that. And then we need to focus on getting a distribution facility that can take all of our products.
Craig will talk a little bit about this, but we did get a pretty hefty lease rent increase in our Compton facility because that came up for renewal at probably the worst time it could come up back in May of last year when everything was full and there was really no space. So, we're focusing on that as well.
Thank you, Olivia. We're going to give just a few slides on the financial side. The first slide is going to be a look back at our last three fiscal years' results. The second slide is our second quarter year-to-date results that we just released last week. And then finally, we will have a slide that gives a little history on our dividends.
Starting with the graph in the top left, well, first of all, as Olivia mentioned, our fiscal year actually ends on the Sunday that is closest to March 31st. So, what that does is it gives us a 52-week year, and then every so often we will have a 53-week year. And in these slides, fiscal 2022 is a 53-week year versus 2023 and 2024 are both 52-week years. And in 2022, our net sales of $87.4 million, we were still kind of coming off of the COVID high. The pandemic really started at the end of our fiscal 2020. And so, we saw the full effects of that in 2021 and 2022.
The pandemic, while it started off with problems getting product out of China, in the end, what it really served for us to do was to accelerate our online business as the decline in the brick-and-mortar business was more than offset by what we were doing online. 2022 net sales were up over 8%. Part of that is, again, the 53-week year that is fiscal 2022. And again, part of it is the COVID high that we call it from the pandemic. Moving on to 2023, we had a decline in net sales, again, coming off of the 52-53-week year. But in 2023, it was kind of post-pandemic where a lot of the retailers were over-inventoried. And we met the same headwinds that all of our competitors did with the over-inventory, with the big boys, the big box retailers had been caught without having enough product.
It was stranded on the Pacific Ocean. We could see that they were over-inventorying a little bit towards the end of 2022. That came through in 2023 when they reduced inventories at the same time that inflation and the economy, the consumers pulled back in 2023. At the same time, we had the buybuy BABY bankruptcy that also served to decrease the net sales in 2023. In 2024, we bounced back up to $87.6. That reflects mostly the acquisition that Olivia mentioned. Manhattan Toy acquisition closed in March of 2023. It contributed only a couple of weeks to our sales in 2023 and a full year in 2024. Really, all of that increase is coming from Manhattan Toy, partially offset by declines in our legacy business, primarily the toddler bedding business and to a lesser extent the legacy Sassy Baby business.
The next table is Earnings Per Share adjustments. We don't put too many adjustments to Earnings Per Share. In 2023, 2024, we didn't adjust it at all, but if you go back to 2022, the $0.98 per share that we reported, that includes $0.19 per share from the forgiveness of a PPP loan, almost $2 million, and so removing that gain brings EPS to $0.79. Similar adjustments are made in the adjusted EBITDA. 2022's margins were impacted a little bit by the closure of one of our subsidiaries, Carousel Designs. We closed it towards the, well, at the very beginning of 2022. In 2023, obviously, we've got the impact of the lower sales, the loss of buybuy BABY, which was a slightly higher margin product or a customer for us.
You've also got the impact of the, we wrote off some inventory and some receivables from buybuy BABY in connection with their bankruptcy. To a lesser extent, you've got some Manhattan acquisition costs in 2023. And that's when we first signed the lease right at the end of 2023 for the new warehouse, well, the warehouse in Compton, the new lease. So, 2024, again, margins, percentage decline. Again, that's mostly the result of the new lease at our Compton facility that Olivia alluded to that we are currently looking at options to consolidate into different distribution centers somewhere not in Compton. And we have the ability to sublease the space that we're currently in once we find a location to consolidate warehouses. Turning to our September results, these are our six-month numbers. A slight decline in sales of $600,000.
This is the impact of a decline in our legacy business, primarily on the bibs and toy side, not necessarily the toys. But we did have a major customer in the first quarter that was pulling back their inventory at the same time that we lost a bib program at another retailer. Those declines in the legacy business were mostly offset or partially offset by the Baby Boom acquisition, which closed in July of this summer and added $3.4 million to sales in the September quarter. Our diluted earnings per share, again, in 25, the six-month numbers. We did adjust that as we kind of looked to digest these acquisitions and clean up and do more cost cutting. We did close an office we had in the U.K. that we had acquired during the Manhattan Toy acquisition.
In the first quarter, we had about $244,000 of expenses associated with the closure of that office that we don't expect to recur. And then during the six months, we also had all the costs associated with the Baby Boom acquisition for $903,000, bringing an adjusted EPS to $0.14 per share. Looking at the adjusted EBITDA, again, there's a slight decline. This is mostly a result of product mix and to a lesser extent, timing of purchases that impact our inventory absorption rate. But with the addition of Baby Boom, we're expecting that the EBITDA margins can recover. And this is our historic dividends in 2011. After some financial restructuring in the 2000s, we started paying a dividend again in 2011 and have continued that $0.08 per quarter dividend ever since then.
If you look back in the most recent five years in 2021, 2022, we did declare special dividends of $0.25, $0.25, and $0.35 per share. Again, that was, I guess we were somewhat between acquisitions without any debt on the books and not an alternative use for cash. We do return it to shareholders. But starting in 2023, 2024, when we were actually in the midst of negotiating the acquisition of Manhattan Toy, we borrowed money to do that and obviously did not declare any special dividends during that time or last year when we were in the throes of acquiring Baby Boom. We do have our $0.08, the regular dividend, which we've paid through the first half of fiscal 2025, and we've already declared a third quarter dividend that'll be paid in January. And with that, we'll open it to questions.
Recently, there's been a lot of press about declining fertility rates globally. I'm curious how you view this trend. At the same time, just from personal experience, anecdotal experience, it seems like spending per infant and toddler may actually be increasing at least in our household. I'm curious if you have any comments on that and maybe layer in what you see that where you see the industry going in the next 10 years or so.
So, up until this year, I mean, the birth rates had been declining for some period of time. I think the peak was in 2007, a little bit above 4.2 or 4.3 million. And so, it had declined. We were holding pretty steady at a little under 4 million. But what we had seen that was kind of offsetting that decline is an increase in a mom that's from 30 to 35 years old as opposed to a decrease in teen births. So, we were seeing that the mom had more disposable income. So, that offset a little bit of the decline, and we really didn't see a big impact. Additionally, we typically cater to the first birth because what you see is that parents think they need everything when that first baby's born.
And then all of a sudden, that second baby's born and they're getting the hand-me-downs, particularly if you're looking at a bedding set, that type of thing. And you had two boys, then you just use the same one. And in today's day and age, most everything is unisex. So, even if it's a boy and a girl, you can use it again. The most recent birth rates showing a little bit more of a decline is a little bit more concerning because now we're seeing kind of that increase in couples that say they're not going to have kids at all. And so, that's where I think we'll have the bigger impact. What we're doing is that we're expanding into other categories because obviously, you can't sell more bedding sets if there's not as many babies.
We're trying to get into adjacent categories, which we've done both through acquisition, but we can do that organically as well. There are plenty of other adjacencies that we can get into. We're looking at maybe age grading up. We can take some of these toys to a higher. We could go into possibly juvenile bedding, take that next step to grow with the child. There are things that we can do to offset it. As far as looking into the future, that's really hard for me to do other than to say that we are seeing an increase in families that just are choosing not to have kids at all. Yeah.
You mentioned debt. How do you pay for acquisitions? Is there stock involved? Is it always cash?
So, the question was, how do we pay for acquisitions? And yes, we almost always do it through either cash that we have on hand or debt. We have not done any acquisitions so far that involve stock. And right now, we're really focused on paying the debt down. So, if we had to do another acquisition or if we had the opportunity to do something that we couldn't pass up, we would probably consider both because we have as high of a debt load right now as we really want to have. So, I think primarily you're going to see a stand down until we get this debt load paid down.
Two separate questions. What percent of the products are made in the U.S.? And then what kind of multiple do you pay for these?
So, the first question was, what percent of the products are made in the U.S.? And that's very little. The Chick-fil-A product is made in North Carolina. It has to be, it's called AIB Certified. It's a restaurant-grade certification. And while you can get that in China, we've really chosen to do that in the U.S. where we can control it better. And that's $2 million of our business annually. So, it's a very small percentage. The other question was the multiples that we pay for acquisitions. It depends on how you look at it. Manhattan Toy was actually losing money when we acquired them. A large part of that was because of the increase in the freight rates coming out of COVID when it hit an all-time high. And they were bringing the goods all the way into Minnesota, which cost them a lot of money.
And so, really, we were looking at that as what we could do in the future. So, it's very hard to say the multiples when they were losing money.
When looking at the previous acquisitions, what exactly are the levers that you can pull to create value? Why is it more to you than it is by itself? And what was the margin profile of Baby Boom? And then I'll save you one more. Just what have organic growth rates been like for the business if you think about acquisition?
I'll go backwards. The organic growth rates really haven't been that high lately. We've focused more on the acquisitions. That being said, on the toy side of the business, it had been growing because that acquisition we did in 2017 started out at about $10 million. It was probably actually $11 million when we acquired them. It went backwards a little bit as we refocused on the product line. It has grown from 2017 to now where it's more like a $17 million business. As far as the bibs, we were already the leader in the bib category. It's kind of hard to grow that when you have 100% of the business at Walmart. The bedding was pretty stagnant. We've actually seen a decline in the toddler bedding because that's something you don't have to have.
You can skip that category of business, and so, as the economy has kind of taken a downturn, in particular, as you're seeing that Walmart customer not have as much disposable income, it makes it hard to go buy something that you don't have to have, so organically, it has not been that high. The levers that we can pull when we do acquisitions and what we like to see in there is, with the exception of Manhattan Toy, which we bought the whole company and we kept their offices because we just didn't have the bandwidth to absorb that. Typically, what we see and what we're seeing on this Baby Boom is that we're able to absorb it into our operations as it is. All we really kept from that acquisition was the office in New Jersey that has about five employees that primarily design diaper bags.
Everything else was absorbed into the NoJo facility. I mean, we do have to hire a few employees. Obviously, we need a few people in the warehouse, some additional salespeople, but we didn't take the whole company. And so, that's what helps us with that. And what was your third question?
The margin profile for Baby Boom.
The margin profile for Baby Boom is actually a little bit better than our current combined margin. Yes, sir.
Now that you've had Walmart and Target report their earnings, are you seeing any weakness, I guess, especially since Target kind of characterized their weakness in most of its essentials items, how Walmart seems to be growing or at least taking customers from elsewhere? Is that what you're seeing on your end, or is it a general weakness?
The question was, now that Walmart and Target have reported their earnings, are we seeing the same trends as they are? We're actually seeing that shift from Target to Walmart without a doubt. What we're seeing at Walmart, though, is they're holding less inventory, which is obviously impacting us. It's making us need to hold more inventory. And of course, it's caused a decline in sales. So, as Craig mentioned, in some cases, they're not ordering to the POS. But what we are seeing is the POS is holding up in terms of units. So, as I mentioned, with the toddler bedding, we're selling as many units as we've always sold, but the consumer is trading down. So, instead of buying a three or four-piece toddler bedding set that's $49.99, they're buying a $12.99 blanket.
So, we are seeing definitely that trend and that shift to Walmart, but we are seeing them buy or spend less money.
Even now, for the stock trading, is there a price where you'd start to consider buybacks, or is that just most probably not?
So, the question was, with the stock price, are we considering any stock buybacks? At this point in time, no, we have not considered that. It's something that we've done in the past, and it really didn't help at all. We have such a low float that we were competing against anybody that wanted to try to buy our stock. So, right now, it's not a consideration. I'm not going to say that it's never going to happen, but it's not right now.
Do the retailers care about your DTC business, or do they have any incentive in order to get into it and grow it?
The question was, do the retailers care about our DTC business? I don't think that they're opposed to us having a DTC business. Obviously, they watch it because they don't want to see us try to undercut their prices. So, in particular, what you're seeing is, say, like an Amazon, if we try to close a product out on our DTC business and they see that all of a sudden the price is down, well, then they're going to either lower their price as well, and then they're going to come back to us and want us to help them with their margins. So, we have to kind of watch that play of what we put on our website.
I have a follow-on to one of the other questions. And I'm trying to understand the normalized margins post-COVID, post-acquisition integration. What sort of range are you targeting?
That's kind of a hard question. We don't really forecast. What we are hoping to do is get back up to where we were traditionally before kind of that year or two before COVID. And we saw really an increase, and then it went a decrease, largely, as Craig and I both mentioned, attributed to the lease rate in Compton. It's impacted us almost $3 million a year.
High single-digit margin?
Are you talking gross margin or EBITDA?
EBITDA.
EBITDA. So, it's kind of a low to mid double-digit EBITDA.
Yeah. Besides subleasing industrial space, what other tailwind kind of looking 12-18 months forward to your qualifying input cost inflation you guys have this year?
So, the question was, other than subleasing the space that we have right now, are there any other headwinds? I mean, what we're starting to hear is that there's hopefully an improvement in the economy. That's really the worst headwind we've been facing is just the economy, people not spending as much over the holidays. The most recent reports are that hopefully there's going to be an increase in holiday spending, and that could help us. So, I guess other than being able to sublease that, we need an economic improvement. All right. That's it. Thank you.