Thank you. I'd now like to turn the call over to Ms. Cammeron McLaughlin.
Thank you.
Our RH investor relations.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for RH's first quarter fiscal 2016 Q&A conference call. Joining me today are Gary Friedman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Karen Boone, Co-President, Chief Financial and Administrative Officer. Prior to this call, we posted a video presentation to our investor relations website, ir.restorationhardware.com, highlighting the company's continued evolution and recent performance. 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 and video presentation issued 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 website at ir.restorationhardware.com.
With that, I will turn it over to the operator to take our first question.
At this time, I'd like to remind everyone, in order to ask a question, press stars, then the number one on your telephone keypad. We'll pause for a moment to compile a Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Peter Benedict from Robert Baird. Your line is open.
That's a no.
Relocating much of that to a different floor, or are a lot of those items part of the SKU rationalization?
Hey, Peter, we missed the first part of that question. Can you repeat that?
Yeah, sorry. It's around the first floor product that's getting replaced by the Modern in the fall. Where is that product going? Is it going to a different floor, or is that part of the SKU rationalization?
Yeah, those products will be marked down and just in a floor model sell-off activity.
The remodel-
They're still very productive SKUs that are in our stores. Our stores generally reflect our most productive assortment.
Just to clarify, the remodel and refresh of the floor set is, we're talking about the legacy gallery, so they really do only have one floor, so it's really just taking certain product off and replacing it with other product. It's not necessarily that it can go to a different floor.
Yeah. The front third of the stores will become RH Modern, and part of the middle of the floor will be some of our new RH Interiors collections.
Okay, good. That's helpful. The other follow-up would be, you mentioned simplifying the supply chain. I was just wondering if you could give some more color on that. You mentioned it in the video, but any more color on what you're doing and the timing of that would be helpful. Thank you.
Sure. I think our bias today, after a pretty fulsome review, is to really simplify our distribution points, and hold inventory in fewer distribution centers, as opposed to spreading it out across multiple distribution centers. Our previous plans were to continue to open more distribution centers. Our analysis says that the inefficiencies and extra inventory you had to buy and hold, to be in stock across multiple DCs, was causing us inventory deleverage, and bloating our balance sheet. Also, making it difficult to be in stock in the right DC, driving DC to DC transfers up, transportation costs up, et cetera. Our view is to hold inventory in fewer locations, in fewer DCs.
That will improve our in-stocks, reduce our working capital needs and inventory, improve our return on invested inventory, and simplify things for both our internal teams, who are leading and managing inventory, and our vendors.
Okay, great. Thanks for that, Gary.
Your next question comes from the line of Adrienne Yih from Wolfe Research. Your line is open.
Thank you very much. Good afternoon. Two quick questions. The first one is, inventory obviously growing faster than sales. Can you give us some color or qualification on what is the content and composition of that inventory? Because there's still delays elsewhere. My second is a follow-on to that. What % of current orders are being fulfilled within an acceptable delivery window? Do you feel like the worst of the delayed inventory is now behind you? Thank you very much.
Sure. Let me take a couple of those points and I'll let Karen also address it. As Karen's addressed earlier, we expect inventories to significantly come down in the back half of the year. Some of that will be from the actions we've just articulated and that we're taking. We are, I think, way past the worst of the issues with RH Modern and the launch. The in-stocks today at RH Modern are sitting at slightly above 80%. We expect those in-stocks to reach 88% by the end of August, 91% in September, and 95% in October. Our current total company back orders are running at some of the lowest levels that we've experienced in the last couple of years.
Some of that is due to the fact that we have some of the highest inventory levels compared to our sales growth, so that is one of the outcomes. Overall, I would say our execution is significantly better today. That's why you see the difference that Karen articulated as far as the cost as it related to the RH Modern issues and some of the customer experience issues we were dealing with, mostly related to Q1 and lower in Q2.
With respect to the composition of the inventory, it is the overstock, if you will, the 27% that we were up. We had said we were 30% at the end of Q4. We were going to stay at about 30%, so we're a little bit under. That is all core and interiors and outdoor and overstock product.
Yeah
I'd say the composition of it is very healthy goods. We don't have to mark it down very low to move it, but we are getting more aggressive, and that's where we're talking about accelerating some of the SKU rationalization efforts. The SKU rationalization is getting rid of SKUs that we don't think we need any longer in the assortment. There's certainly some of that. The other stuff we'll work through by the end of the year just by lower receipts on some of our continuing product.
Okay, perfect. Great. Thank you very much, and best of luck.
Thanks.
Your next question comes from the line of Brad Thomas from KeyBanc Capital Markets. Your line is open.
Yes. Thank you for taking my question. Question about the outlook for sales and what has changed the most in terms of how you're looking forward to sales for the balance of the year, as we think about the difference between the new 1%-3% guidance and the prior low to mid-single digit guidance. Thank you.
Yeah. Well, I think we articulated that as one really being the macro factors that are affecting the luxury market that we believe is an accelerating headwind. I think that's seen pretty clearly across our industry and anybody who's serving that luxury market today. The other issue that I think it relates to is, as we pushed out the spring books to fall, and as we're looking at the early trends there, we believe we probably are going to take a bigger hit in the short term than we had anticipated. I would expect that to affect us in Q2 and Q3. We've taken sales down further because of the shift out of the book. Third, one of the other key issues here is the longer selling cycle that we're seeing with RH Modern.
While we're very happy with the adoption rate, we're very happy with the average order size. One of the learnings here in the very early first several weeks of the program is that the urgency to close a sale that has been kind of artificially imposed with end of sale events, is now not there. Right? You've got projects are getting bigger, but they're now transacting over a longer period. What we've done is as we've reforecasted the business, we've got an effect where you're pushing sales in each quarter forward, and that includes pushing sales from Q4 into next year. That has an effect on us taking down revenues for the year, especially when you compare it to last year's Q4 where we were highly promotional.
Just to be clear-
Got you.
That was reference to the RH Grey Card. I know Gary mentioned RH Modern at the beginning. Just want to make sure that description was regarding RH Grey Card.
Got you. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Adam Sindler from Deutsche Bank. Your line is open.
Yes. Good evening, everyone. I guess first, on the SKU rationalization. I know when you sort of launched Modern initially, you had talked about going light on total product that you were going to sell because you really need to see how sales trends develop, and then that's why you're light on inventory and chase the sales. Is the inventory rationalization in Modern or is it across the board? Was my first question.
Really across the board. The SKU rationalization is not really focused on Modern. There's a few things, obviously, in Modern we missed on and we might be disappointed too. You've got really small issues there. It's just really across the broader business and how to optimize inventory across our broader offering in RH Interiors.
Okay. The follow-up to that is, I know everyone does a lot of work around their own sort of in-stock checks. As you talk about in-stock at close to 80% today or above, we did our own work last week, and over 760 SKUs came with an in-stock of 60%. Several categories were in the 40 range. What are we missing there? Are you just close to 100% in stock in other categories? Or sort of as we think about in stock-
Sure
as you discuss it, how do you define that?
In stock in the products where we're supposed to be in stock. One, I don't know how you're characterizing special orders, which is a big component of the upholstery business.
This is excluding special orders.
Excluding special orders.
Yes.
I tell you maybe go through and count all the SKUs, because maybe you took a portion of the SKUs and you were in some categories that were better than other categories. We look at this every day.
Right. No, of course.
Yeah.
That's the question, right? I guess even the last follow-up to that is that as you look at this, there was pretty significant variation between some of the categories. Is it limited to certain vendors? What categories are very good and which categories are weak?
It's more related to collections.
Okay
within the category. We have several collections that have significantly longer lead times as either there was production issues with those or we may have under bought those and they performed higher than our expectations.
Okay.
Yeah. There's obviously quite a few SKUs. 700 SKUs isn't anywhere near the-
Right
the offering. Maybe your sample's a little skewed just by which categories or how you counted it.
Okay
slightly better than 80% is the current number.
Okay. All right. Very good. Thank you. I appreciate it.
Across all the SKUs. Yeah.
Okay.
Your next question comes from the line of Brian Nagel from Oppenheimer. Your line is open.
Hi. Good afternoon. My question, maybe two parts, but with all that's going on and the steps you're taking to strengthen the business now, has there been any thought given to potentially slowing down, recognizing you're still early in the rollout of the large format stores, but has there been any thought to potentially slowing that down further? Related to that, with the changes to the outlook today, how should we be thinking about the capital generation and funding the growth over the next few years? Thanks.
I'm not sure we heard the word after you said slowing down. Slowing down what?
Well, the question I'm asking is, I don't know what you heard, but I'll ask again, is that with all that's going on now and the retrenchment steps you're taking, is there any thought to slowing down the rollout of the large format stores?
I think we mentioned that we were going to be in the last call or two. We were being more selective in real estate and only doing very favorable deals right now, and that's why we took the growth numbers down in real estate. Based on what we've communicated most recently, that's where we are. We're not taking it down any further than where we are today.
Yeah. We have four this year. Two are in Q3, two are in Q4, we have five to six that we're looking at for next year, depending on where some of the latter ones in Q4 fall. It's really not big. We have a couple other ones that are signed that we'll probably push to 2018, but to us, that feels like a much more measured pace than what we were looking at even 18 months ago, two years ago.
Yeah. If you step back here, we look about a retrenching, or if you think about the actions we're taking, this is not a company that all of a sudden is running negative 10 or 15 comp. We're still performing in a positive sales growth versus very aggressive numbers over the last several years. We see these moves as short term in nature. We believe moving the book out is going to have a pretty significant drag on Q2 and Q3. The book begins to get in home in the middle of Q3, will be all in home by the beginning of Q4, we expect the business to begin to accelerate in Q4 and are very optimistic about the content and the goods.
We're going to have the most significant refresh of new product at retail in the history of our company, and we're going to remodel the stores and install design ateliers, expand our design services. I wouldn't think about the fact we've got a broken top-line model. We've had some difficulties in the short term. We're taking some actions to fix those. We're making long-term investments that we think are right for the business and the brand long term. We feel very good about the long-term strategy, very good about the real estate strategy, and the product expansion strategy.
With respect to capital generation, we feel like we're in a really good shape as far as where the balance sheet is right now. Even after the acquisition of Waterworks, our cash on hand, we funded that from existing cash balances, and we're projecting to end the year with significant cash available and plenty of room on both our asset-backed line and a lot of time left on our two converts. In addition to that, we feel really good about our cash generation just internally in our free cash flow. We think that this year, just given some of the short-term factors we're experiencing, we're kind of tapering off as far as will we be really positive free cash flow or slightly negative or about break even. That's still something that we're chasing and we're very committed to.
We don't have any concerns about the long-term capital generation of the company.
Yeah. I think the other thing I'd say, because it's come up quite a bit, a lot of people are trying to point to another company that tried to get off promotions and change their strategy and have similar worries about our move to a membership program and to the Grey Card. This doesn't resemble that other company, right? That other company lost a third of their revenues, and that's not happening here. Even though we've taken revenue guidance down, you're going to see this company. There's multiple reasons here for the revenue guide down. We're not happy about it, but it's not a broken model. This is going to be a business that re-accelerates as we get into Q4. Some of that re-acceleration will be masked because of the longer selling cycle, and we're up against the most promotional Q4 in our history.
We will come up against the kind of missteps that we had with Modern in Q1 and in Q2, and I think I'm as bullish as I've ever been when I think about this company cycling into 2017.
Appreciate it, . Thank you.
Yep.
Your next question comes from the line of Matt Fassler from Goldman Sachs. Your line is open.
Thanks so much, and good afternoon. I want to focus a bit on Grey Card and the selling cycle, and what you think it's done to it. You talked about the change in urgency, given that you don't have the artificial deadlines associated with sales. How prolonged has the selling cycle essentially become? Related to that, I'm wondering if the insight on the deferral of the fees, which seems like it probably would've been embedded in your numbers, and I know this is a significant drag on the P&L this year, was originally contemplated in your guidance. Thanks so much.
Yeah. One, it's very early and as we said in our press release and video, we're pleased with the adoption rates and higher average orders, Matt Fassler. We believe that the current selling cycle is longer. We have data that kind of says that it is. As these transactions are not closed with the same urgency as artificially imposed promotional deadlines. That's, I think, we probably should've done a better job anticipating that. We're seeing it, but at the same time, we're seeing the flip side of higher average orders, meaningfully higher average orders with RH Grey Card. We're very encouraged about that. It's going to take us a few quarters to really understand what's happening here. We've got to get far enough past our most recent promotional periods, right?
We're not that far past a very promotional fourth quarter and promotions that were still happening in the first quarter of this year. I think we've got to get a full couple of quarters away from that to start to change behavior and expectations with our customers, and reestablish those expectations. I think change is hard. It requires building new habits and we'll keep you posted, but at this point, we're optimistic. Again, if for some reason, we're really wrong here and we see the business really decelerate and we think we're giving away a lot of business long-term, we can always turn promotions back on. This is not do or die. This is not like we made a change and if it doesn't work, we're just going to kind of stay the course and drive the business down. That's not our goal here.
We think this is the right long-term move for the company. We're making long-term decisions and investments for the brand and business, and we think they're the right ones. If for some reason we're wrong, I can tell you, being I think I'm still the biggest shareholder in the company, I'm going to change course, and we will make decisions that are the right decisions for the business, the brand, and the shareholders. There's some short-term pain for long-term gain, and we believe we're going to have long-term gain here. It's going to take us a few quarters, and we're going to have to cycle through it, but we think we're going to come out. You're going to see in the fourth quarter the business start to accelerate. It's going to be slightly masked because of pushing revenues.
It's going to be slightly masked because we're eliminating stocking stuffers and nostalgic knick-knacks in the stores at holiday. We're going to give some low-quality, low-margin business back. I think you'll see in our operating results as we get into Q4, the company's going to look very different as the books get in-home, as we finish the remodels and the resets, as we roll out design ateliers in all the stores, as we've expanded our number of designers. They've went through new training and education. We have what I believe is going to be the most compelling product assortment we've ever had at retail and the most productive. Remember, one of the data points we have here is we've now tested RH Modern, and we tested it in several stores. The most significant test, I believe we tried to point out, was in New York City.
In New York City, we had a clear arbitrage move where we took off a floor of existing core. You can only imagine that the goods in New York City, being our highest volume gallery, are all highly productive, our most productive goods. We took off a third of the assortment and put on a third of the assortment that we had no data on. That was the biggest risk in my mind. That was the biggest single risk we took. If we would've taken up a third of the product in New York City and put in new product with no data, not even knowing if it's the best of Modern, we had no data on the Modern. My sense is New York could have been easily down 10%. We could've had a negative arbitrage.
Instead, we're up 35%, and New York has the strongest growth in the entire company, and it's being driven by RH Modern. New York is New York. Some of the other markets, we don't expect to have the same response to Modern. We also had a very similar response in a different way in Los Angeles. We opened a freestanding Modern store three blocks from our Melrose gallery, which is, again, right there with New York, our highest-performing galleries in the company. We didn't have a negative effect on Melrose. We had an incremental lift. We believe we've created a new and bigger market. We now have data on the product and what products sell. We now know what is the best of Modern, and we've now done the math, and we know what products to take off our current gallery floors, our existing legacy galleries.
We're going to remove about a third of the product and replace it with a third of the best of Modern. We believe there's a meaningful positive arbitrage there. Do we think it's 35% across all the galleries? Of course not. We wish they all acted like New York. We don't expect them to. If they're a third as good as New York or a quarter as good as New York, you can do that math. There's going to be a positive arbitrage that we have here at retail. We're going to support that with marketing and an expanded book and deeper mailing. We feel very good about it. There you go.
Yeah. Matt, with respect to your question about the deferral of the revenue, you're absolutely right. That has been contemplated in our guidance. It has been for a while. That's how it was designed. What we're trying to do, because we've received a lot of questions and confusion on this, is that membership fee, so the revenue we're retaining from the customer, when we designed the program and we were going to a deeper discount rate at the 25% off than we typically do other than last Q4, the membership fees tended to offset that. Because we're recognizing it over that 12-month period, there's obviously a step up and ramp up of that time period where we're recognizing it. We didn't necessarily quantify the margin impact because we had zero data.
We're just trying to be clear about what exactly that looks like and the complexion that has on our gross margins just from a pure having that revenue and it's all being 100% deferred versus having these sales now come through at the 25% discount. It's really just going to be about a year until we build up and are starting to recognize the full months of revenue for the corresponding product sales.
My follow-up, I promise will be very brief because you guys were very generous in answering my first question. Cammeron, it sounds like the changes to the outlook that are incremental then would be the inventory rationalization, the $0.30-$0.35, and then the residual reflects sort of just the core business sales, et cetera, given the environment. Is that accurate?
The push forward of sales-
Yeah
more into next year.
It's really sales, which is kind of overall environment and the longer selling cycle with RH Grey Card. Sales is the biggest one. The incremental expense items is we did have some SKU rationalization and inventory observation in our forecast. We're just going a little bit quicker and a little bit deeper, so it's having more of an impact. Our Delight costs are a little bit bigger, obviously, than we first anticipated, but that's only about $0.08 or so on the year.
Got it. Thank you so much, guys.
Your next question comes from the line of Jessica Mace from Nomura Securities. Your line is open.
Hi, good afternoon. My first question is just a quick clarification on the previous question to understand that the $0.30-$0.35 on the RH Grey Card membership deferral cost only reflects the accounting of that revenue. The incremental sales push forward is a separate impact on the guidance. Is that correct?
Yes, absolutely.
Correct.
Okay, thank you. My second question is, I was wondering if you could just talk a little bit about the decision to open more outlets and how that fits into the overall strategy. Thank you.
Sure. That's to support our more aggressive stance in rationalizing our SKU base and reducing our inventories.
A couple of those are very short-term leases, so we got some great occupancy deals that we can move through the inventory and get out of those. It's not necessarily that we plan to open that many outlets year over year over year.
Yeah. As I mentioned, we believe we can offset some longer-term investments in opening new DCs long term. We were scheduled to have a shovel in the ground this year and begin construction on another distribution center. We believed it was better to accelerate the SKU rationalization, move through inventory, and believe we could probably push out the next distribution center 2-3 years. In total, with inventory and savings in capital, probably over the next two years, save the company about $200 million-$250 million.
Great. Thank you very much.
Your next question comes from the line of Budd Bugatch from Raymond James. Your line is open.
Yes. Thank you very much for taking my questions. I apologize for getting into some of the weeds, I just want to make sure I got the numbers right. If you collected $6 million in Grey Card fees, that implies about 60,000 members. Is that correct? How did that portray over the quarter?
Yes, it is 60,000, and we didn't launch it until the middle of the quarter, so that's over a six-week time period. We're not going to probably get into the.
I see
specific weeks, but at the very beginning, we had people buying the membership without even buying a sale yet, just because they were so excited. There's certainly a little immediate pop, and then it was a little more normalized. The other thing I.
Karen, of the revenues, how much of the revenues would you attribute to Grey Card out of the $455 million of revenues? What would be a corresponding Grey Card-associated revenue?
That we have not disclosed and don't plan to at this time. I would just say it's a much larger percentage of the $. There's certain orders that are very small $ that those folks are the ones we expected and who wouldn't buy the RH Grey Card.
I see. I think in your presentation, you said $0.34 in the first quarter was due to the accommodation costs and the RH Grey Card deferral. If I did the math right, it looks like $0.27 for the accommodation of the $0.30 that you're saying for the year. Is that right?
$0.27 was basically the Modern and other customer accommodations. That's the amount in Q1. We're only expecting another $0.03 in Q2. Again, we don't expect to have much of that beyond Q2 because our back orders and in-stocks will be back to kind of a normalized level. That issue is about $0.30. Separately, we did have about, call it $0.08 or so, from if we had been able to recognize the $100 at the same time as those sales instead of deferring it over time, that would have been a benefit. We expect to continue that throughout the year. That's the $0.30-$0.35 range.
Right. That's.
for that item.
Yeah. That got me to the $0.34 I think you said was in the first quarter pull forward, right?
Yep.
That would get you to the $0.29. Okay. Next question on the savings that you're expecting, the $20 million. When will that start to appear? Is that starting already? How much is there of a charge, of a severance charge?
That's an annualized number that will start later in Some of it has started, but it'll start in Q2, and there will be a severance charge. We haven't disclosed that yet, but we'll disclose it as part of our Q2 close.
I see. Is the $20 million net of the severance, or is that above the severance?
That is above the severance. The severance, we're kind of considering one-time and non-recurring.
I see. Okay. You talked, Gary, about increasing the number of designers and the training for the designers, and I think that's all great. Can you give us maybe a feel of how many designers you have now and maybe what the growth of that is over last year?
Yeah. We haven't disclosed how many designers we have, but we have a design team in every one of our galleries today that's proportional to the business, and we're expanding that effort. There's two things to think about as we mail the fall books. The other point I think that everybody's not aware of, but the mailing of the fall books will really be the first real advertising of the RH Grey Card, and we will also have significant marketing behind our design services and our new design ateliers. If you've seen Chicago or seen the video on Chicago or seen some of our newer large galleries, the next generation galleries that we opened, we tested these design ateliers, fully integrated spaces for architects, interior designers, and customers to plan projects and plan their home and their designs.
We're very pleased with the results and what we're seeing in the average orders in those locations, and we're rolling that out to the entire company, as well as expecting to have an uptick in design projects because of that and are ramping up and expanding our training and education in that area. The other thing to remember is that the books are going to go out, and for the first time ever, you're going to see our catalogs that show the regular price and then the Grey Card price.
Previously, if you just take an example of our Cloud Sofa, our Cloud Sectional, and say it was $10,000, you would've seen $10,000 in our books previously, and the only customers that would've known that that sofa was on sale, if we were having an event previously or even today, are people that are on our email file. Our email file is not as big, anywhere near as big as our mailing file. We'll be mailing meaningfully past the number of people on our email file. They will now see instead of the $10,000, they'll see regular price $10,000, member price $7,500, and a $2,500 savings on a $10,000 item. We think that's very compelling.
The Grey Card launch is only being supported with email, which is limited, and we ran a couple of ads, and we've done some online advertising and retargeting and so on and so forth. We think the big impact's going to happen when we mail these books this fall.
I got you. Just a couple of other questions, if I could. Karen, in your guidance for the second quarter gross margin, I think you have 210 basis points-310 basis points of net other. Can you help us with what that net other might be?
One, we've kind of quantified the very specific items within product margin that we had been talking about. The SKU rationalization, the RH Grey Card membership, and the customer accommodations. There's also, we're up against a much lower discount rate from last year. When we look across and know that now we have a 25% for the entire year discount rate, when you come up against different periods that have more or less promotions from the prior year, you're going to see more or less kind of general upside or downside into gross margin, depending on what we're anniversarying. Q2 is one of the lower discount rates last year. Q4, for example, is one of the much higher. It's going to change and have some variability in how much of other product margin we have.
The other two things are we step up our retail occupancy, both from the outlet openings, but also we start a little bit more pre-opening rent for some of the full-line design galleries. The DC occupancy with that Northern California DC, that wraps in Q3. That's when we will stop having a drag in our DC occupancy.
I see. That 210 or to 310, much of that's the RH Grey Card differential for the RH Grey Card members. Is that what you're saying? Is that correctly?
No, it's retail occupancy, DC occupancy, a little bit more product margin, and a little bit of shipping. It's a hodgepodge of the rest.
I see. Okay. Oftentimes you give us order growth in the numbers. If I missed it, I apologize, but did you have an idea of order growth and backlog today?
No. No, we've never given
Last quarter, the Q4, we gave-
Oh, demand. Yeah, we did for Q4 just because it was such a big delta between because of the RH Modern issues which created all this demand. That's not something we plan on giving going forward. It's much more in line where that delta isn't nearly as wide as it had been in the past. Again, that was such an anomalous result, so we gave the demand, versus the shift or revenue for that one period.
Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks for taking my questions.
Thanks, Budd.
Your next question comes from the line of Oliver Chen from Cowen. Your line is open.
Hi. Thank you. We had a question regarding the guidance. What does the guidance assume in terms of your thoughts on how the demand environment may evolve? Just because there's a fair number of variables that aren't necessarily within your control, and the environment seemed to get a lot worse than people had expected. As we think about risk management, and if the demand environment does get worse, what are some levers you can execute on just to manage the business in a tougher than expected scenario? Also related to that question is, does this new guidance incorporate a continuation of the demand environment now, or does it have other factors you contemplate happening? Then I know, Gary, you talked a lot about the last mile a little bit in your prepared remarks.
It sounded like you wanted to engage in a degree of vertical integration just to ensure that the customer experience is holistic and executed in a luxury-like fashion. I was just curious about your thoughts on what you're diagnosing the business needs versus what exists now in terms of how you execute all the way to the customer. Thanks.
Sure, Oliver. Let's try to start at the top of your questions. The demand environment, and the evolution. We believe we've taken how we see the consumer responding today, which we think that there's definitely a slowdown. We've incorporated those trends in our go-forward guidance, and we believe we've been appropriately conservative in how we've guided. That's how we think about it. If there's another meaningful step down, we're not anticipating that today. If there's another meaningful step down, we'll have to reevaluate our business. There's obviously multiple levers that we can pull in the business. Whether it's reducing orders and reducing inventories so inventories grow slower. We can always become somewhat more promotional. Even with a Grey Card, there's ways to promote.
You just saw us just recently, Grey Card members get generally 10% off clearance, and we increased that to 20% off clearance for a limited time to accelerate the movement of clearance. There's things we can do there and other promotions we can also run if for some reason we get into a scenario where there's another meaningful step down. We look at it as kind of a continuation of the current environment. Then we've got the bridge of all the actions we're taking and movements that are happening, whether it's the book moving out, the selling cycles now we know are longer, so we've adjusted for that.
We've got a few weeks where the books were in home last year, and we could see where the business is trending, and it looks like we didn't anticipate the business to fall as much when we came up against the books. We've, I think, appropriately taken that down. We feel pretty good about the top line and the demand and how we forecasted that today. If there's not a change to the current environment, I would characterize it as conservative when we look at it in the back half of the year. I would say today, if I had to characterize it, I think there's more upside than downside as we get into Q4, as the books get in home and the legacy galleries are all remodeled and the new goods are out on the floor.
The first time we have broad-based advertising of the RH Grey Card and the 25% off that the RH Grey Card gets you. As it relates to the final mile, and how we think about that, it's a continuation of what we articulated before. We have a bias, I think, at the high end of the business, and you work in the luxury end of the business, there are higher expectations from our consumers. We have a bias to take more control than less control, especially as it relates to entering a customer's home and delivering products into a customer's home. Today, it's generally all outsourced, that last delivery. It's been a cost decision in the past, not a service decision. Obviously, we believe we can deliver better service if there are people, and it's our equipment and it's consistent.
We are testing that right now in the Bay Area, and we are ramping up and we're going to do a complete test and understand the impact. We believe, long-term, we'll be making investments to take more control and elevate the customer experience. If you're making cost decisions, you'd probably outsource your sales force in all of our galleries. We have people come into our home, and they're our people. Then we're going into their home, and they're not necessarily our people. We think we could probably, long term, do a better job. Does it pencil out in every single market where the volumes are lower? It may not. As we look at this more, we'll make those decisions. The goal is to operate at a luxury level and have the best service in the industry.
We believe we have the best product. We believe we're building the best retail environments and the best print materials, and we'll be building the best website experience. It's all got to be first class, and it's all got to be best in class.
Okay. That's helpful. Really helpful.
Oliver, with the final mile, I would say that we are now underway with the last modules of that bigger program is in a pilot. We've been on it now for over three weeks, and that is going really well. We've had no issues. We're seeing great benefits from the centralized scheduling. We have better inventory visibility, which is not only good from a control and shrink end perspective, but also just in getting better information to the customer. We're now using the paperless. Everything else before was paper and pen when you get a delivery. Now it's all done on a tablet. We're really pleased with how that pilot's gone. It took us a little bit longer to get there. The rollout's going to be going through 2017.
So far, we couldn't be more pleased with what that's enabling. Prior to that, we couldn't see a lot of the product, couldn't see a lot of the things, now it's just a lot more systems versus manual processes that we had in the past.
Great. Our final question, Karen and Gary, about inventory SKU rationalization, just the science of matching supply and demand, it's risky either way, just because you want to make sure you're rationalizing the right items to get the right goods at the right place at the right time. For modeling purposes, Karen, will this continue to weigh on gross margin on the back half? Then strategically, how do we get comfort over making the right decisions here? Because it's probably iterative in terms of determining how to optimize across different categories and price points. Another concern I had is if there's items you get rid of that were actually traffic stimulants that are just hard to decipher until you figure it out later. I'm just curious about those topics as it applies to risk around what seems like a very good decision to sell more with less.
It's just not easy in retail.
Yeah, no, all good questions. All of our strategies here and decisions are based on a lot of math and science and a lot of data of evaluating the selling of not just the products, but the collections, the number of sizes, the number of finishes things are carried in and so on and so forth. We've been testing collections versus collections, finishes versus finishes. What happens when we edit sizes or edit finishes? How much transfers to another size or another finish? What's the right amount to optimize the top line and optimize the bottom line? Again, we have new data every day as we're making these decisions and working through it. We think we're going to be a lot more right than wrong. It's not absolutely perfect science.
We're generally pretty good at making these kind of decisions, whether it's adding product or editing product. It's all based on the math and the productivity of the SKUs and the investment behind the SKUs and how much it costs to carry the inventory across the network. Should the inventory be in all 4 DCs and 3 DCs, 2 DCs, 1 DC, or no DCs? We look, should it be marketed in the books, in the stores, just online? There are multiple things we go through here. We don't just decide we're not going to like it and we're going to mark it down. It's all math.
Yeah. Oliver, I'll just say too, there are different flavors of it. Just like Gary said, there are certain items we might have 3 sizes in, and there is 1 size that just doesn't make sense. It's not going well together. There are finishes that aren't selling as well. There are SKUs that are going way out of the assortment altogether because they're highly unproductive. There are also ones where we've decided we can have it in 1 DC. It's part of a stocking strategy. It's multifaceted. It's been certain things going to special order, certain things going to stock. We're always doing those kind of things. This is just a much bigger effort to really take a targeted look at the overall inventory. The 2 ways that we're doing that is clearance and these outlets. We have a big clearance event going on now.
We're going to keep many things on clearance in Q3 and then have another clearance event in Q4. When we talked about that $0.30-$0.35, it's more pronounced in Q2 and Q4.
Okay, that's helpful. Gary, just lastly, you have a really great view of retail. How do you think Amazon is impacting the way maybe the RH consumer is just thinking about the retail experience overall and expectations shifting in terms of consumer touch points and frictionless shopping-
Sure
kind of generally as well? Yeah.
Yeah. Specifically on Amazon, I think about it a couple of ways. One, almost every consumer is becoming an Amazon consumer, because of the breadth of their assortment and the simplicity that they bring to the consumer for many goods, and especially durable goods that you need and repeatable purchases. Look, I'm a big Amazon customer. Does Amazon serve the customer at every level in a way that is relevant? I'd say no. I don't think Amazon's going to be the only retailer left on the planet. I highly admire them. I would say short-term, they're advantaged. Because they don't have the same earnings hurdles that many traditional retailers have today. You have retailers that out there, have been making 8%-15% operating margins, and all of a sudden Amazon's coming in with 1% or 2% operating margins and eating their lunch.
It would be an interesting world to see if all the other retailers lowered their operating margins to 1%-2%, what would the fight look like? It's a little bit of an unfair fight. Because Amazon's not being held to the same standards from a profitability point of view. Today, the market's allowing that and actually rewarding that. I think they're advantaged, and listen, I think Jeff's a very smart guy, and he's using that advantage for all it's worth, and he's been using it, and he's been killing them. God bless. We can all learn from a lot of things that Amazon's done, and what they continue to do. We're big students of Amazon, and big fans of what they do. As it relates to our business, I think it is more protected.
One second here. We've got advantages of our own, and we like the advantages we have. We also think just like Amazon's reinventing online retailing, and we're learning from them, we believe that we're reinventing physical retailing, and we're building advantages that nobody else has on the physical side of the world. Look, today, everything's changing in our industry. If you're not a complete student of the entire retail business, no matter what channel, you're going to get behind. I think we just announced that we're hiring a new chief digital officer. We've just hired someone. They haven't started yet.
They've got great experience here in that area. We're making other significant investments to upgrade our digital strategy. I think we're about as well-protected against the Amazon effect as anyone. I don't want to jinx us by saying that. I don't want to motivate Bezos and his team to come after us. I wouldn't pick us. We'd be way down on the priority list if I had his job. Yeah, so.
Thank you. Really helpful. Thanks for the illumination and best regards.
Thank you.
Your next question comes from the line of Steven Forbes from Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.
Hey, guys. Maybe I'll start with a question for Gary. I guess, how would you assess the organizational capacity for change in an absolute sense? How, if at all, does the new co-president structure influence future innovation and the company's ability to avoid disruption to the customer experience?
Yeah. We like to say that we have to be willing to destroy today's reality to create tomorrow's future. It is part of who we are at our core and part of our values. I think if you look back at the last point in time, the markets were difficult, and whether it was 2008 and 2009, and the actions we took, and we simplified our business. We kind of redesigned our way of doing business. We turned the model upside down and went from an inside-out design-driven, sourcing-driven model to a platform model, what I call an outside-in model, that we're building the best platform, and we bring in the best thinkers, designers, and developers in the world to sell on this platform. We're always kind of unfinished and on the move, and it is in our DNA to constantly innovate and improve.
This is just who we are. I think the organizational changes we're making, and it begins with the co-president structure, is really designed, first and foremost, to kind of leapfrog the business forward and the way we operate forward and to really break down silos that naturally build in organizations as they grow. I don't know one company that goes through growth periods with management structures that don't become siloed. When you become siloed, you become less efficient, and you wind up getting people working really hard on all the wrong things because they don't have a holistic view of the business and understand all the interconnectedness.
The view here is that the co-president structure is going to operate as thought partners and operating partners in the business, is going to have a much more holistic view, is going to be allergic to silos, and it's going to break those things down and work through problems in a more holistic manner and in a much more integrated fashion. We're already seeing it happening. The team has spent time together and re-looked, and re-mapped out and assessed the organization, assessed the architecture of the organization and how we're working, and has simplified how we're going to work and believe we can just move much faster and be much more decisive, and eliminate a lot of the redundancies and inefficiencies that just happen. They happen everywhere in every company I've ever seen.
I think it's just part of the process of kind of shedding your old skin and looking at things fresh and new all the time. That's what we're doing. Again, it's part of our DNA. We're a company, if you think about it, when we went public, we just introduced our first new gallery in Beverly Boulevard as our first new resto. Now that's not even in our portfolio anymore as a Restoration Hardware. It's now an RH Modern, for God's sake. We built a store three times the size over on Melrose. We are engineered for innovation and constant improvement. It's just who we are. I think, by the way, it's going to have to be the norm to win in the future. Everything is changing around us all the time. How we communicate, how we move.
Moving from point A to point B used to mean, in my generation, you had to have a car. In my daughter's generation, everything's about Uber. It's about a different way to communicate. It's a different way to move through the world. I like to tell people here that I go to breakfast with my daughters, and they order their French toast, and before they take a bite, 35 friends have liked it on Instagram. It's just a completely different way to communicate, I think you'll see us adopting these new ways, right? Adopting change faster than others, and lead rather than follow. We're very excited about all the things we're doing. I know it's a tough day. It's a tough day for our shareholders, myself being one of them. We don't like to disappoint. We don't like to miss our numbers.
We came out of the gate, we were kind of the perfect public company for three years. There's change that's needed now, we're making those changes, I think the changes we're making and the investments we're making, whether it's the new galleries, the investments in Modern, the design ateliers, the new books that we have, the relooking at organizational structure, relooking at our supply chain network strategy, all of it reminds me of 2008 and 2009. I think this is another leapfrog moment for RH. I know there's going to be people on the sidelines that think that the model's broken because we just missed guidance that we just gave you. Apologize for that. I think you'll find that we're very quick learners, and we adapt and change very quickly.
I think we're going to be sitting here a year from now and it's going to be a very different tone, and you're going to be seeing us moving very quickly and creating much more separation between us and anybody else in our industry. There's a lot of people out there that are making restructurings, that are announcing bad earnings, that are reducing costs and workforce. Their strategies of where they're going next are not real clear, besides, "We're going to work harder," or, "We're going to focus on our core business," or, "We're going to close stores," or, "We're going to do things like that." There's no real offense. We have a big offense here. We know how to play offense. We know how to build businesses, and we know how to win.
We make mistakes, and we learn from them, and we will change quickly, but don't underestimate us.
Thank you for that. Then just a quick follow-up. Given all the change you outlined, has anything changed as it relates to the margin drivers underlying your long-term operating margin target?
Not at all. I think what we're going to go through with the organizational changes that we're going through with the network redesign of the distribution centers, with how we think about inventory, and capital requirements and needs and capital investments long term, if we're more right than wrong on these assumptions, those numbers could prove conservative. Today, there's no reason to change them. The product expansion strategy is working. Modern was not a demand problem. It was a supply problem, and we're fixing that. All of our new galleries are exceeding our pro formas and our plans. Today, like I tell the team, many people, for the most part, our brand is invisible in the marketplace, except for places like Chicago and Los Angeles, and the markets where we've done these new big galleries.
When we change the physical impression of this brand, it's going to massively change our top line and our operating performance. Nobody's got a strategy like that in retail today. I don't think anybody has a similar strategy or better long-term upside. Again, painful day. Don't like being here, we made some mistakes and we're adjusting and we will be back from here.
Thank you.
Yep.
There are no further questions at this time. I'll turn the call back over to Gary Friedman.
Okay. Well, thank you everyone. Again, we look forward to better performance in the future, we will fight hard to make that happen. We look forward to talking to you next quarter.