Good afternoon. My name is Chantelle, and I will be your conference operator today. At this time, I would like to welcome everyone to the RH fourth quarter and fiscal 2017 Q&A conference call. All lines have been placed on mute to prevent any background noise. After the speaker's remarks, there will be a question and answer session. If you would like to ask a question during this time, simply press star, then number one on your telephone keypad. If you would like to withdraw your question, press the pound key. Thank you. Cammeron McLaughlin, you may begin your conference.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for RH's fourth quarter and fiscal 2017 Q&A conference call. Joining me today are Gary Friedman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Karen Boone, President, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer. Before we start, I would like to remind you of our legal disclaimer that we will make certain statements today that are forward-looking within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements about the outlook for our business and other matters referenced in our press release due today. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially. Please refer to our SEC filings as well as our press release issued today for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results.
Please also note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events. Also, during our call today, we may discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which adjust our GAAP results to eliminate the impact of certain items. You will find additional information regarding these non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of these non-GAAP to GAAP measures in today's financial results press release. A live broadcast of this call is also available on the investor relations section of our website at ir.rh.com. With that, I will turn it over to the operator to take our first question.
At this time, I would like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press star, then number one on your telephone keypad. In order to allow time for everyone to ask a question today, limit yourself to one question and one follow-up question. We'll pause for just a moment to compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Steve Forbes with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.
It's John Heinbockel in for Steve. Guys, maybe touch upon, you mentioned learnings in recent galleries that have led to the new prototype. Maybe what are some of the key learnings, particularly as it relates to merchandise curation? When you think about the use of the new prototype, does that alter in any way your thinking about what the ultimate size of the gallery footprint you need to cover the U.S.?
Sure. This is Gary. I'll take that. As you know, we started developing these new larger galleries in 2010. We're seven years into it, and over those seven years, we've continued to innovate and evolve quite dramatically as a business and a brand as it relates to the breadth and depth of the assortment, the business extensions or brand extensions, and new businesses that have been added to the brand. If you think about this, we've continued to evolve this over a number of years, including adding hospitality. Now what we've done over the last couple of years is really been able to study productivity, study space investment, and now design a gallery that we believe will yield the most productivity, and integrate all of the businesses in a single footprint. While the square footage looks smaller, and it is, it will have no less assortment.
Particularly, it's just a much more efficient design. It's probably the most efficient presentation of all the businesses. Our view today is as we look at the majority of the markets, that this will be the best expression of the brand in a majority of the markets, and it also simplifies it for our organization to execute and roll out. The stores will all have the same presentation, the same goods presented, and the biggest question becomes: Do we want to put the integrated F&B component of the business in the gallery or not in the gallery? One of the big breakthroughs for us was really RH West Palm, where we had not yet tested a restaurant on a rooftop, and quite frankly, that was not our initial intent.
If you read my shareholder letter, we designed that store much smaller initially than Baby Child Teen became real. Design ateliers became real. We added a whole back section to that gallery. Once we did Chicago and we saw the response to the F&B component of the business, the only place we could actually put a restaurant was on the rooftop. Honestly, we were worried about it. It's on the fourth floor of the rooftop. You couldn't see it from the ground. We didn't know if it would work or not, and it is our highest performing hospitality experience. You saw in my comments, it's tracking to do in excess of $7 million in its first year. It draws people. What we like is it draws people up and through the gallery.
We really like the courtyard, really like how in Chicago and how that creates energy in the middle of the gallery. We really like how the rooftop restaurant pulls people all the way up through the gallery and exposing them to a lot of products as they're walking through. There's so many things we like about the components. We took really the best of the things we've learned over the last 5 to 7 years, and now have been working for the last couple of years integrating it into what we think is the ideal prototype. We don't foresee any huge, big changes. We've got a lot of brand extensions, some new businesses, but nothing that will shift the footprint dramatically.
We think this puts us in a position to be a lot more efficient with our time, with our capital, and we're going to have a much better return on capital. Think about the first 15 of these as an ongoing experiment over the past 5 to 7 years. Now we're pretty locked in on what we think will serve the majority of the markets in a tremendous way. There's nothing cut back in this gallery. It's a fantastic experience. That's really how to think about it. There's no less productivity we're planning. It's just a really efficient design, and expressing the best of what we've learned.
Just as a follow-up, you think F&B will be in what percentage of the new prototypes?
I'm not sure yet. I don't want to commit to anything, but I'd say probably, the way we're thinking about today, probably about a third, maybe more.
Okay. Thank you.
Yep.
Your next question comes from the line of Matthew Fassler with Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Thank you so much, good afternoon, guys. With hospitality, you seem to have a successful, somewhat more high frequency draw to the stores than you had in the past. Can you talk about whether you expect this to impact membership, whether there's a way to tie membership into hospitality, and whether you've seen membership trends different in the stores that have the element of hospitality today than from some of the other galleries?
Yeah, I don't think they really tie together. I think that we have a dynamic F&B experience that is clearly driving incremental traffic into our galleries. If you stand back and think about shopping for furniture, right, and going to a furniture store, and how often people do that, it is massively infrequent. Right? It's massively infrequent. Most people might go to a furniture store every five or 10 years. It's driven by a real need. It's an event-driven business. It's based on people buying a new home, remodeling a home, or redecorating, redesigning their home. You've got the dynamic of the industry we're in that has really low frequency of visits, right? What we're trying to do is, one, when we have a visit, they're long extended visits, right?
If you're doing your job and you're helping a customer design their home, it's multiple visits and they're long visits. What we're trying to do is really enhance that experience. They don't have to leave for lunch. We can offer them coffee, a glass of wine. We can really present a hospitality experience that's more home than store. Right. That was one of our initial goals.
A second goal was just understanding the business we're in and the customer behavior of infrequency is, would we, because we believe we build pretty inspiring spaces and present goods in a really artistic and inspiring fashion, could we, by driving more foot traffic, not just foot traffic, but driving the right consumer traffic into our galleries, could we have people come in when they might not have come in, experience the gallery, sit and experience the restaurant, look around and be inspired by the environment and say, "Geez, honey, look at that beautiful chandelier. I wish we had that in our dining room." As they walk through the gallery while they're waiting for a table and enjoying a glass of wine and see a living room or a bedroom setting and be inspired by it and say, "Geez, why don't we redo our bedroom?
Why don't we redo our living room or possibly redo our whole home?" Right. I think a lot of us. It's interesting about the furniture business, but people spend significantly more time obsessing about buying a $3,000 couch than they do a $100,000 car, right. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it just is what it is, where for some reason, there's a perception that when I change my furniture, it's for the rest of my life, right. I get it because, again, most of us really, if we just think about our days, we don't really go a lot of places that we see inspiring environments, inspiring architecture, inspiring installation of home products, inspiring interior design. There's nothing that's really exciting us to kind of pull a trigger or to kind of think about that.
We believe by having people come into these galleries that are massively unique in the industry, right. Architecturally and from an installation point of view, interior design point of view, and be inspired, then say, "Gosh, I wish our home looked like this." The biggest comment, I think I've said it before, when we first did the first few galleries like that, all the way back to Houston, was when we got feedback from our clients and customers, and we ask our teams, "What are people saying?" The number one comment people were saying is "I want to live here." Right now, I've been in this business for almost 40 years, and I've never heard anybody say they wanted to live in a retail store, right, until now. I think there's something to that.
Getting people to come into these environments, feel inspired, be in a place that makes them say, "Gosh, I'd love to live like this." We think it's highly important. That was always a goal. That's the most important piece of hospitality, trying to tie it in a membership or make things. There's so many people that through loyalty programs and other things that are doing so many meaningless things with points and this and that. Does it really affect anybody's behavior? I don't know. I get so much of that marketing stuff coming at me. We don't want to complicate membership. We really don't. It's simple and it's working, and it has smoothed out our business and allowed us to begin building an entirely new operating platform that is going to leapfrog this company's operating performance.
Thank you so much.
Yeah.
Sorry. Thank you.
No. Go ahead.
Your next question comes from the line of Michael Lasser with UBS. Your line is open.
Good evening. Thanks a lot for taking my question. My first question is on the memberships. How did the memberships trend in the last few months? To get to your longer run sales growth estimate of $4 billion-$5 billion, what do you have to do from a membership perspective? How many memberships are going to be inherent in achieving that long-term outlook?
Yeah, we don't even think about it that way. A simple way to think about getting to $4 billion-$5 billion is thinking about our real estate transformation and some modest product expansion, that gets you there.
What about how recent membership trends? I think you mentioned in your letter that 95% of your sales are coming from your membership.
Right.
It would be helpful to have context on how that's been trending.
That's the same.
It's been similar.
Yeah
It's been that way for several months. It hasn't really changed significantly.
Okay. As far as some of the tweaks to your outlook from what you had previously provided, can you give a sense for what's changed today versus a few months ago, both on the top line and on the margins as well?
Specifically what part of our outlook?
Revenue growth is going to be a little bit lower, margins are a little bit higher. Why is that?
Yeah. We've said that we're going to restrain ourselves from chasing low-quality revenues, as many are in the industry. Really manage the business with a bias for earnings versus growth right now as we're building the operating platform. As we've gotten into this, and as we've gotten into re-architecting and beginning to build this new operating platform, we see so much potential. We see just incredible opportunity to have an operating model that distances this brand, separates this business and brand from any other model in our industry, meaningfully. The opportunity to stay focused on that and to get that work done is so incredibly valuable that I've made a decision to not introduce any new businesses or brand extensions this year. We have many in the pipeline.
I don't know, a month ago, guys, a month and a half, we were off-site, we're doing our planning, as we keep peeling this back, we just see so much opportunity. This is once in a lifetime to build. It's hard enough to reset and rebuild an operating platform in a business that's running. It just rarely ever happens. It takes the leadership of the entire cross-functional leadership of every part of this company to sit together in an integrated fashion, collaborative and integrated fashion, and rebuild the company from the ground up and rethink everything that we're doing. We think it's the best investment of the human capital and the financial capital in the company is to focus on that. I think we need another year, we just pushed everything out and said there'll be no new businesses.
That's why 2018 is again the year of execution, architecture, and cash. I think it's going to be the best investment we ever made. I think we'll look back and say, "Boy, that time and that effort made all the difference.
Just to clarify, the difference in the top line and the bottom line is more about delaying some of the launch of the new business lines rather than pulling back on some of the promotional activity that you'd mentioned?
No. We don't really have promotional. Like we've always said, we're just not going to chase low-quality revenues. Yeah, it's just pulling back, basically.
On the revenue, this is Karen, it's exactly as Gary mentioned, it's both N.Y. and it's new businesses. On the bottom line, I think as you probably noted in his letter and in the press release, we are seeing just tremendous benefit from the work we've done so far with architecting the operating platform. All the things we said last year about what we thought was going to happen with reverse logistics and with closing 2 DCs, we're seeing all of that and then some. It's actually even been more profitable than we expected. That's where you're seeing. We took that 9%-10% operating margin to 9.2%-10.2%, even though we have $50 million lower sales in that top-line target in our 2018 guidance.
Of course, net income also has a tax benefit, but even just the operating margin is better because of some of the gains we're seeing from all this operating platform and re-architecture work that we are doing.
That's very helpful. Thank you so much.
Your next question comes from the line of Curtis Nagle with Bank of America. Your line is open.
Great. Thanks very much for taking the question. I guess just going back to the 4Q gross margin. You guys put up just terrific results, again. Just out of curiosity, what drove it so materially higher? I guess just what changed from last time we spoke in December, and it wasn't that long ago, and did look like it was materially higher.
Sure. Part of that was just kind of being cautiously optimistic at the time about whether we were going to achieve all of those savings. Again, our gross margin does have occupancy, so we had savings from the DC closure and not having rent, but also just reverse logistics because transportation is up and gross margin was better. The biggest thing, almost the entirety of the beat, and a lot of that 390 basis point expansion is product margins. That's really just cycling last year's SKU rationalization, the outlet drag, all of that, not happening this year. As Gary mentioned, not chasing those low-quality sales. We're pretty happy with our sales. We're still smack in the middle of our guidance and with such good gross margin expansion.
A lot of things have been going really well based on a lot of the work we've been doing.
Terrific. I guess a follow-up on that. It sounds like the DCs are now closed. I guess, are you guys now operating on the new supply chain model? I guess what could you say about early operations, early earnings or learnings, I should say, and, yeah, how you feel it's going?
Yeah, Curtis, we have two of the DCs closed. We're just again in the early stages of architecting this new model, including the DC network redesign. There's more to come and as we're working through this, whether it's the DC network redesign, the redesign of our reverse logistics and outlet model, we're still in the mid stages of that. Reconceptualizing home delivery, which we have an early test happening in a market and still doing a lot of work and a lot of math around that. So, yeah, we've got several more years of work to do here. I think we've got another solid year of design and architecture, right? Just really understanding everything that moves and measuring everything that moves and understanding what all the optionality is and just how to think about it differently.
I think what I've learned, I'm a guy that grew up at the Gap, so I grew up in apparel. I went to Williams Sonoma and was selling housewares and then stumbled into a Pottery Barn business. We tested and started selling furniture, and next thing you know, we got into the furniture business. I came to RH, right? This was a business that was, when I got here, it was 52% discovery items, knick-knacks, and things like that. I think we were about 24% furniture at the time. When I look back at my career and I think of my experience at Williams-Sonoma, Inc. and at Pottery Barn, and I think of my experience here, I realize that no one's really built a national supply chain for furniture.
Maybe there's been some private companies like Ashley or some companies that that's all they did for their life, and people don't really get in the insides of it. Most companies, when they build a supply chain, they hire one of four or five consulting companies. The companies come in with their best practices, and they give you their view, and they do their model, then companies generally execute against that. That's been my experience at Williams Sonoma, and that was my experience in the early years at RH, right? In fact, we used the same consultants at Williams Sonoma and we kind of got the same thinking and supply chain. Sonoma supply chain, think about it, is a lot different than ours. Ours is a much higher percentage of furniture. We've really become a serious furniture business and big ticket, big items.
Furniture is high ticket, low velocity business. Like I say, it's very difficult because in my days at the Gap, you had men's and women's tops and bottoms and accessories. Everything folded the same size, everything went in the same size box, and nothing broke in transit. Everything here comes in a different size box, and almost everything except bedding and some of the textiles can break in transit and get massively damaged. It's just a completely different business with completely different math, right? What I realized is everybody's kind of doing the same thing, and nobody's really doing anything different, and nobody has really ever scaled a national supply chain. The furniture business historically was built in a kind of a regional model, right? It was kind of regional family-run businesses. You had power players in California, in Florida, in the Northeast, in Texas.
I realized why it's regional, because once you get national, it's very difficult from a supply chain and execution point of view and a cost point of view. What we're doing is just really challenging all the conventional wisdom, all the assumptions. We realize that the math is entirely different, when you look at it and when you challenge it. We're doing it ourselves without any consultants, without any people that have never done it except done it for someone else, right? We're doing it from the inside out. That's what's taking the enormous time, cross-functionally from the entire leadership team. Right? I just think we're going to do it better than anybody else because we're thinking about it at the detailed level that nobody's ever went to.
I think we're going to wind up with just a completely unique and differentiated operating platform. We're still learning as we go. The good news is we're more and more excited about it. Look, people know, my reputation is on the creative merchandising side and conceptualizing new businesses and growing businesses, and that's what I've done my whole career. It's probably a little odd for everyone to go, "Friedman's focused on execution, architecture, and cash," right? Got 90% of my time focused on rebuilding this operating platform because I believe it's going to be such a huge unlock and such a huge leapfrog. We need more time. It's not that I wouldn't say 90% of my time, call it, I don't know, 70% of my time. We're still focused on the product. We're still going to have really exciting product.
We've got a worldwide team of the best designers and artisans in the world. We're going to have the best operating model in the world when we're done. I don't think in our lifetime anybody will ever try to do this.
Great. Thanks very much for the commentary. I appreciate it.
Your next question comes from the line of Bobby Griffin with Raymond James. Your line is open.
Good evening, thank you for taking my questions. Two quick questions for me. One on the gross margin improvement that's implied next year in the forecast of 260-340 basis points. Is it mostly from merchandise margins or is it from the work with the supply chain and the outlet? Can you kind of help us understand the buckets there?
Sure. I'd say three-quarters of it is product margins. The rest is primarily DC and some transportation.
Okay. The transportation is just the redesign of the outlets, or are you getting different rates from a transportation contract standpoint?
Yeah, no, it's a redesign of the entire supply chain, right? It's the DCs, it's the outlets, it's the reverse logistics. It's a lot of things.
Exactly. That's even offsetting. There is some nominal, just increases in the industry we're seeing, which is freight, both the ocean contracts, UPS for our parcel business. Those are actually going up. This is kind of more than offsetting some of those increases.
Okay. That's very helpful. I appreciate that. Just lastly, a quick modeling question. Can you just update us on the cadence of the Source Books introductions this year and how we should think about those in our model?
Yeah. We are going to test a second drop for both RH Interiors and RH Modern this year. As you know, we've, over the years, went from, I think, 10 to 12 books a year. We went down to two books a year, then we went to one book a year. Again, you've got a long-tail data on the business we're in, and you really got to look at your contacts. It's not like typical catalog businesses that look at their contacts every six to 12 months. Our contacts, sometimes you got to look over three to five years. Again, people don't necessarily change their home that often. As we've looked at our data and looked back at the data from when we went from two contacts to one contact, there's enough data now that says that there's people that were affected by that contact.
We believe there's an opportunity to test the second contact. You're going to see us have two contacts of RH Interiors and RH Modern. We'll test that again this year. We think that will also be a benefit to revenues in the second half, especially having that second contact of Modern in the second half.
I appreciate the detail and best of luck this year.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Jeff Small with Citi. Your line is open.
Hello, Gary and Karen. Thank you for taking my questions. I first wanted to ask about the longer-term 8%-12% revenue growth target, particularly the level of comparable brand revenue growth you're anticipating, as well as the proportion of growth that will come from gallery openings and other new initiatives.
Yeah, the way to think about it is probably, we've got somewhere between half to two-thirds will be new store kind of driven and one-third to half will be comparable growth driven. It'll change depending on what years we are introducing kind of new businesses, brand extensions, and et cetera.
Okay, that's helpful. On the longer-term operating margin target for a low- to mid-teens level, can you potentially break that down between the gross margin improvement you're expecting and the SG&A leverage, please?
Yeah. Well, we kind of laid out the key levers, I think in the letter. I don't know if Karen.
I'd say it's not unlike our prior bridge, just seeing very specific things that are a drag right now that we'll kind of grow out of as we start to not having as big of a hospitality drag. Some of the things that we will continue even just this year, continuing to cycle out of inventory optimization. Now we're seeing, I'd say, even more benefit in gross margin. We've always seen benefit from gross margin occupancy related to the stores as we have this more efficient model. Now we even see more opportunity with the DC architecture and some of the work that we've been doing. As we put more of these real estate boxes and have those open and have the higher volumes, we will see leverage in SG&A. At this point, I'd say it's about two-thirds, one-third gross margin versus SG&A.
We'll continue to tweak that. Some of the savings we're seeing in the DC architecture is actually coming from some labor that actually hits SG&A. As we continue this work, we'll have even more refined thinking on how that will split.
Thanks again. Best of luck with the rest of the first quarter.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Adam Sindler with Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Yes. Hi, good afternoon, everyone. Thanks so much. I guess my first question, either for Karen or Gary, was on SG&A, and maybe you just answered it with the second book drop. I think when we heard back in November about some potential outlook for 2018, we were talking about 50-100 basis points of SG&A leverage. Now it looks like we're talking maybe about 30, 20 basis points of deleverage. I'm just wondering if you can help us bridge the gap between those two.
Sure. We just have some continued ongoing investments with both hospitality, with some store openings. There's actually more this year than last year. Just thinking about some of the other investments we want to make in the business as we're thinking about people and process and just some of this architecture we're doing. It's still modest. It's not as big as we thought then, it's still roughly flat. It's not a huge deleverage from prior year.
Yeah. It's too much of a one-time step up in bonus plan, too, because we're planning to have a really good performance this year.
Yeah. Incentive comp is up modestly, not as big as the jump from last year to this year. In 2018, it will go a little modest step up as well.
Perfect. Just thinking about some of the new businesses and brand extensions, obviously in the out years. Is there a way, I know in the past, when we were thinking about RH Modern, you gave us sort of a few things you guys were thinking about working on. I know in the past you've talked about the hardware side of the business. I know in the past you've talked about RH Color, things like that. Any way to help sort of conceptualize what maybe some of these things could look like or some opportunities you'd like to address?
Not at this point, no. We don't need to lay out our product roadmap for the rest of the world. Yeah.
Okay. Very good. Thank you.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Peter Benedict with Baird. Your line is open.
Oh, hey, guys. Thanks for taking the question. There were some filings yesterday that provided some additional disclosure around the revenue mix. Showed like 20% of your sales in the first half of last year were contract and shipping. I'm just curious how that 20% breaks down between the two. Is one materially larger than the other? How does that look on an annual basis? I'm not sure if there's any kind of seasonality that may have affected the first half numbers.
Peter, I'm not sure what you're referring to when you said filings yesterday.
Well, there were some letters that were filed that were going back and forth from you guys and I guess the SEC. We can take it offline, but it just gave some further breakdown in terms of your revenue mix over the first half of the year. It's not a big deal. We can follow up offline. I guess my second question would just be, help frame the home delivery reconceptualization that's going on right now. Where are you with that? When do you think it'll be completed? Just remind us what the key benefits are going to be of that.
Yeah. We're at the very early stages. We're working on designing it. We're learning a lot. We're testing the market, and as we get ready to do more, we will share that with you. I think we've articulated the key benefits many times. One, there's an opportunity to enter our customer's home. What should that experience look like? What are the opportunities when you enter your customer's home? Which is the place you're working on, or there's tremendous opportunity, and it's a sacred place for the customer. What should that experience look like? We think we can massively improve that experience, and capitalize on opportunities when we enter the customer's home. We think that there is tremendous opportunities to reduce returns, to reduce damages, to reduce transportation and handling costs. All of these are going to be huge impacts.
Again, I think if you looked at the rest of the industry, everybody's basically doing it the same way. One of the benefits we have and why we can do it another way is because we have a much higher ticket than everyone else, right? We have the opportunity to invest, where other people might not be able to, right? If you do think about the simple math and why we will probably be able to build something nobody else has, we're the only ones selling high-end furniture at scale in the United States today. Period. We're the only ones selling what we sell at scale in the country today at our price points and average ticket and average orders. That allows us to have an opportunity to build a platform that nobody else can.
That's all. Well, thanks, Gary. Last one, just on the tax change, I'm just curious if it influenced your 2018 plan at all, or are you guys just pretty much letting it flow to the bottom line? Thank you.
Sure. I think our investments and what we were going to focus on hasn't really changed. For the most part, it's flowing to the bottom line, and we continue to feel really strongly about what we are investing in and don't really think that needs to change.
Yep. Okay. Fair enough. Thank you.
Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Peter Keith with Piper Jaffray. Your line is open.
Hey. Thanks. Good afternoon, everyone. Interesting point on West Palm running substantially ahead of Chicago. I'm wondering if the early read is the more successful hospitality you have within a store, does that then lead to more successful furniture sales in that same store as well?
The store is outperforming our expectations.
That would be for both hospitality and on the furniture side as well?
Correct. We have an expectation of the translation of hospitality revenues to retail revenues, the incremental lift that we get, and we are getting the additional incremental lift based on the high performance of hospitality.
Okay. Very good. Second question is just on the overall macro backdrop. I would say affectionately, I think you guys kind of march to the beat of your own drum. The broader furniture industry seems like it's had a little bit of a slowdown here in the first quarter, maybe from weather, stock market volatility, what have you. Curious on what you've seen as of late, if it's been pretty consistent or if you've seen a little bit of a slowdown that leads to that Q1 guidance.
Yeah. Not really anything outside of what we communicated in our release.
We did have stores closed with weather on the coast-
Yes
Everyone had that.
Yeah. The northeasters have hit us and closed stores and clearly, there's other disruptions. March for Our Lives was disruptive to the weekends business and as you'd might expect in some markets and Look, it is unusual times right now so, we're being cautious and optimistic at the same time. We understand we're in a late cycle of an economic expansion and we're in a period of rising interest rates and the expectations for rising interest rates. I think that's creating volatility in the markets and But again, I think we've got a conservatively positioned plan, that we believe we can execute and perform against. We feel relatively similar to how we felt last year. I mean, the market wasn't quite as volatile. I think the market's a little bit more volatile now for many reasons, but we're not good speculators on the economy.
I thought there was going to be a recession three years ago, that's why I did the two convertible bonds, we can play offense in a defensive market and nothing happened. We're just more focused on what we can control and what we're working on here, and we're in a position where we have contingency plans based on any kind of market we operate in, so.
Okay. That's great feedback. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Oliver Chen with Cowen and Co. Your line is open.
Hi, Gary. As you do build these really unique capabilities and this vertical integration and curation skills, what are your thoughts on M&A as a method of value creation? Our second question was just about the reality of the membership program over time and the intersection of membership and personalization and big data. What do you want to build in terms of community and engagement five years out in terms of the future of your membership program?
Our biggest priority is have them be excited about the goods we sell, right? Because I think a lot of people in our industry miss that point. It's about the goods, and it's about your presentation of the goods and the value equation of the goods. You can do all the social media stuff and all the loyalty programs and all the customer engagement you want, and if you don't have the right goods and they're not presented the right way with the right value equation, you're gonna go home. That's where we focus. As we mentioned, membership was first and foremost. The strategy was to smooth out a chaotic business, and it's done that.
Our priorities is, or to have the best product in the world presented in the most inspiring ways in the world, at a disruptive and the best value equation in the world. That's how we've gotten to where we are today, and we think that there's nothing to that that has changed. Nothing to that that has changed. Lot of people doing a lot of things on social media and investing a lot of money and a lot of fancy talk about all the trends, anything you want to talk about, augmented reality, this, that, so on and so forth. Put on a pair of glasses and walk through a virtual store looking at crappy goods, they're still crappy goods.
This is a business about the right product presented the right way at the right value equation and being the best in the world at that. Also in our business, what's so important is in being the best in the world at delivering those goods and executing on the back end.
Yeah.
It's a part of the business that I think is very different than apparel or other things from supply chain can be something that is a huge positive or a huge negative in a business like ours. That's how we think about it. I don't think you're going to see a lot of bells and whistles and membership coming out from us. We're extremely happy with what's happening today. Doesn't mean we won't keep evolving and thinking, but we're not following all the trends everybody else is.
You have that creative approach to M&A.
Big data is interesting. I always tell people, "I don't even know what big data means." Everybody's like, "Big data, what does that mean?" I say, "All I care about is the right data. The right data to make the right decisions." What is the decision data we need? Most organizations, most people are overwhelmed with data. I just read a study the other day that we are absorbing 7 times the information than we were 20 years ago as human beings. That the pace of change based on that, generational change used to be measured in 30-year increments. The same change that happened in 30 years is happening in five years. I think in a world of massive data, it's even more important to be able to edit. To be able to edit and focus.
The great skills we have with product and presentation, I think those skills are going to be very valuable when you think about data. When you think about sorting, editing, and focusing and presenting data to make great decisions.
Mm-hmm. Gary, about M&A, you've been creative and you pursued some great assets in the past, you're building capabilities which will be difficult for others to replicate. There's also a lot of innovation happening at all kinds of brands and capabilities. Do you think that's part of your journey as you think about different ways to drive value?
It's not our focus. It's not what's at the top of our list. At the top of our list is all kinds of internally generated ideas and opportunities. I think I mentioned before that Waterworks was on my list of like to own businesses for 15 years. Because they had the best assortment and had the best brand in their space. 15 years later, that business is now part of RH. We don't have some M&A list. We're not an M&A-focused business. We don't have an M&A team inside the company. I'm not going to say never, but if you look at our past, I think I'm 16 years here now, we've done one thing.
Yeah.
I wouldn't expect that cadence to change materially. Again, I never say never because it could be three years from now, we're sitting on such a prolific operating platform that gives us so much leverage and so much capability that could you put other brands on top of this and could you do something like an LVMH kind of platform for the home? You could. We talk about things like that. Let us get there first and maybe those opportunities will open up, but right now we're heads down and focused and getting the work done.
Okay, lastly, you gave us a lot of details on supply chain, Gary. What's the nature of the harder questions that you're facing as you build this yourself? I'm just curious about which ones are the more challenging questions about the network and digitization and the omni-channel approach, or the easier ones, if you can contextualize what kind of decisions you're facing to make sure that you try to make the best decision possible.
Look, I think it's all hard work. None of this is easy. Most people don't really try to do it themselves. They're hiring consultants to come in and spend a couple million dollars and have someone give you a binder and tell you what to do. It usually looks like everybody else. The hardest thing is allocating the time and the human capital to get into the details and understand your business at a level that nobody else does. That's where the opportunity is. It's being able to motor up really high and see the bigger picture, see the opportunities at a high strategic level, and be able to get into the smallest details to really understand the truth, if you will.
If you ever listen to Elon Musk talk, he talks about first principles thinking. That is basically doubting everything and boiling everything down to the essential truths, then building up from there. We use that framework of thinking inside our company, whether it's the physics first principles thinking or the Cartesian doubt theory, where you just doubt everything until you get to the truth. Most of the things that happen inside companies or even inside life are some version of somebody's perspective, or it's some outcome of other people's thinking. We can all be victims of our own history, and our history can serve us well, but in a world that is speeding up and evolving faster and faster, your history can be a prison. There's new data, new information, new methodologies and technologies being introduced all the time.
You have to be completely willing to be open and to pivot. It's really hard to do that if you don't even know what people are talking about. It's like I think about all the supply chain strategy sessions I was in over the last 30 years of my career. Most of the stuff everybody's talking about, you couldn't really understand. You're in a meeting for an hour or two, and people are presenting a deck. You're like, "I guess that must be right." If it moves right now, we're going to know about it, and we're going to measure it, and we're going to understand it. It's not rocket science. We're moving things around. Right? I think we can figure that out.
Thanks for the comments. Very helpful. Best regards.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Cristina Fernandez with Telsey Advisory Group. Your line is open.
Afternoon. I wanted to ask about the fourth quarter comp, the 2% versus the -18% the year before. It was a little bit lower than we expected. Can you quantify how much did the SKU rationalization pressure the fourth quarter, and any other factors that could have held back that comp from being higher?
I think one of the things that people are getting confused on, I'll just give a breakdown of how that 13% growth breaks down, is the 53rd week, that extra week, we did consider non-comp. Just looking at most people were in line with where we were on revenue, but just had the comp sort of out of whack. I think people didn't include the 53rd week as non-comp. Outlet contributed 2 points, which is a non-comp item. The 53rd week was worth 6 points, new stores was about 3 points. That just basically is the 2% comp. Hopefully that clarifies it because we've been getting a couple questions on that item. Really, I think for us, SKU rationalization, we've been saying, has been something that was contributing this year, but also was even more so last year.
If anything, it was a margin drag, hard to be up against. That's something that this year, most of those efforts are done in the inventory optimization. You saw the -30% in inventory. We feel really good about the progress there. It is something that even in Q1, that we're up against versus last year. That will start to dissipate as the year goes on.
Yeah, I think we're living in really interesting times, right? I can't tell you how many retailers who have kind of had a dead cat bounce, right? They've run negative comps for so many quarters, and all of a sudden they run up one or two with operating earnings down and earnings down, and their stock goes up 10%. Because everybody's so excited about comps that drive less earnings. We're not interested in that, right? We're just not. We're really focused on building a great model. We're not going to send out a whole bunch of friends and family last-minute emails and create a bunch of crazy promotions to try to squeeze out another point or two and not make money on it, by the way. Have our operating margins go down.
It's just really hard to compare us to everybody else right now, and we talk about it here. I'm like, I sit there and go, "You're kidding." Earnings are down. Operating margins are declining, but because somebody got a two comp or a three comp, Wall Street thinks it's really good. That's not the lens we use.
I do think the prior year was not even a real comparison because we went from pre-membership to membership. This year, the growth rate from last year is not really relevant anymore because it was two completely different models. Just looking at last year Q4 to this Q4, that's more relevant, and that's where that 13 is from with the two comp. Hopefully, that helps clarify.
Yeah, no, that's helpful. As my second one, I wanted to ask sort of a macro question. When you think about some of the changes from tax reform and the impact they could have on your business, particularly, you do have exposure to high tax, high property states like New York and California. How are you thinking about your customer in those markets and whether you could see a negative impact from the changes there?
I think it's too early for us to tell yet exactly how it's going to impact those customers. I think what you're saying is well known. We know, we're thinking about it. Again, we're not economic predictors, and we don't exactly know how it's going to shake out. You've got the stock market still at relatively all-time highs. You've got people paying lower taxes on some levels, paying higher taxes on other levels. We're not smart enough to figure it out. That was the end of my comment, yes, by the way.
Your final question comes from the line of Janet Kloppenburg with JJK Research. Your line is open.
Hi, guys. Congratulations on a great year. Just a couple questions. Gary, when you talk about the holiday quarter, you always said it's kind of.
We can't hear you, Janet.
Janet, speak up a little bit.
Yeah. Can't hear you.
Can you just talk about the holiday quarter a little bit, Gary? Not so much about the comp or anything, but about what Restoration Hardware's opportunity is in the fourth quarter. It's always a bit of a conundrum for the brand, and just love to hear your thoughts there.
Yeah.
Second-
Go ahead. Yep.
Okay.
I'm better with one question at a time, by the way.
Okay, that's fine. Go ahead.
All right. As you know, we keep kind of pulling back and editing holiday out of the assortment because we're no longer a typical mall-based store that piles up products on their dining tables and coffee tables at any time of the year. We think especially it's detrimental at holiday. We're giving back a lot of businesses and exiting, and we'll be exiting more this year. As we finally completely transform the brand into an interior design platform. Holiday will become less and less important to us. In fact, the month of December is generally the smallest month in the furniture business.
Okay, great. Thank you. When you think about SG&A, Gary and Karen, with the tax opportunity and all of the ideas at hand, I was actually impressed that you only look for a small amount of deleverage in 2018, because of the gross margin opportunity and also the tax opportunity. I wondered how you thought about the timing of investments and if you're skewing them all, or a greater percentage to 2019, perhaps we won't have as much operating margin improvement in 2019, because you're making the greater investments. I know what the goal is for 2021, and I get that, and I see how it's achievable. I was just wondering about the cadence of operating margin and your thoughts there, with respect to investments. Thank you.
Yeah. Again, I think if you take the guidance that we're giving today of 9.2%-10.2%, projecting that out to 2021 and say we're going to be in the low to mid-teens. That's a pretty huge opportunity.
It's just I wondered about the cadence between 2018 and 2019, that's all. Yeah.
Okay. It's going to depend on the pace of work and the opportunities we uncover. We'll let you know more as we know more.
Okay. Well, let me ask you another question, Karen. Are there more opportunities to lower infrastructure in fiscal 2018? Could there be another DC closing or something of that nature that would provide some natural opportunity on the SG&A line while investments are being made?
We're not prepared to comment on anything we're not commenting on in our broader release. If we had plans on anything like that, we'd be talking about it. I wouldn't anticipate anything like that today.
Okay. Can I ask one more question, Gary?
Sure.
The first quarter guidance, largely anticipated because we knew you had a heck of a lot of clearance last year, could you just comment about the underlying strength of business and the full price business, how you're feeling about that?
We feel really good about the full price business. We're as excited as we've ever been about the potential of the brand on every level. We're just cycling through a lot of transformative efforts, the landscaping of the P&L, and the business is going to look a little funny for the next 4 more quarters at least. Through this year, I think the model's going to be much more understandable. I do think if you stand back and At least the way we think about it here is, look, Q4, from just an operating margin point of view gets us back to historical kind of high levels.
Okay.
Q4 still has drags in it, in the P&L. Q4 is nowhere near where it could be, but if you look at Q4. We're halfway through the quarter, right? We're not going to be a lot off on Q1. Knock on wood, I hope nobody does anything crazy from an economic environment point of view, but if the world is similar to how the world looks today, everybody's going to believe Q1, right? If you believe Q1 and you believe Q4 and you just bookend the year, you believe the full year guidance. You go, okay, that's where they are today, and here's the other opportunities. That's how I think about it. The biggest thing is, we've had to have the most volatile stock over the last 10-12 months in our industry.
Every time we do a release, our stock moves 40%, 42%, 44% one day. It went up 27% at our investor meeting. I don't know how much it is up in after hours now. That's a reflection of a lot of people not believing what you told them. I tell the team here, "Hey, guys, no one's going to believe what we're telling them." When we told you 9-10, it's like I got to believe 90% of the people didn't believe 9-10, of course they didn't believe 9-10. Our stock went from a high of 109 and went all the way down to 75. It just told you what everybody believed. The key is how people can connect the dots and see what we see.
We obviously have an internal view of this and can see more than any of you can see today. We'll try to do our best to help you connect the dots. Hopefully, some of the dots that everybody's connecting is, wow, look what happened over the last several quarters. Gosh, there's been a lot more good news than bad news. Yes, it's a little hard to understand all the moving parts, the news looks really good, at least as good or better than what they told us. We feel every bit as confident about the outlook and the guidance that we just gave you for 2018. I think from our point of view, I tell the team, "Don't worry about the stock." Everybody was saying, like, "Oh my gosh, should we put out a pre-release for Q4?" Why? Because the stock went down?
Really? We didn't do anything different. We're going to build this company and run this business like we own 100% of it, and we're going to do what's right for the business and right for the long term. We're just not going to be reactive to the fact that the stock's volatile or so on and so forth. I think if everybody stands back and goes, "Hmm, record Q1 operating margins historically for this company was 4.4% in Q1." That year, they made 9.7% operating margins. We just guided Q1 operating margins at the midpoint at almost 8%, right? That looks a lot higher. We just had a Q4 that kind of looks close to the operating margin of before. Well, what do you think, the middle's going to fall out? It's not.
I think just now people are going to start to get and believe where we're going. But honestly, we still have, I think, one of the highest short positions on the stock. We're going to be subject to short squeezes and doubters and naysayers, but that's what you get when you run a public company. I just tell you that we've just never been so confident or excited and driven to build something truly unique in this world. Anyway.
Well, thank you. Just to clarify, I wasn't doubting the guidance. I just wondered what the underlying business tone was.
I just used it as an opportunity to set up to say what I wanted to say, Janet. Thank you, though.
Okay, good. Have a great evening.
All right.
Thank you.
Thank you.
There are no further questions at this time. I will now turn the call back over to Gary Friedman.
Great. Well, thank you everyone, and thank you to all our people and our partners around the world, who help bring this brand to life every day. Thank you for all of your support and all of our shareholders and stakeholders who are betting on us to win. For those of you who are betting against us, I wouldn't want to be on your side. Thank you.
This concludes today's conference call. You may now disconnect.