Thank you for standing by and welcome to RH first quarter fiscal 2021 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one on your telephone. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. If you require any further assistance, please press star zero. Would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Ms. Allison Malkin of ICR. Thank you. Please go ahead, ma'am.
Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us for our first quarter fiscal 2021 conference call. Joining me today are Gary Friedman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Jack Preston, Chief Financial 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 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 this call, 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'll turn the call over to Gary.
Great. Thank you, everyone. We're going to start with an overview of our shareholder letter, which highlights our results and outlook, and then we'll open the call to questions. To our people, partners, and shareholders, fiscal 2021 is off to a strong start, with revenues up 78% in the first quarter versus down 19% a year ago. Total company demand increased 101% in Q1, and RH core demand increased 109%, the strongest demand trends in our industry. We continue to set a new standard for financial performance among retailers, with adjusted operating margin increasing 1,260 basis points in the first quarter to 22.6% versus 10% a year ago. Adjusted net income increased 375%, and adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 285% to $4.89 per share versus $1.27 last year. We generated $228 million of adjusted EBITDA in the quarter and $136 million of free cash flow.
Q1 ended with total net debt of $382 million and trailing 12 months adjusted EBITDA of $896 million. Our expectation is to be net debt-free by the end of this fiscal year. Increase in fiscal 2021 outlook. Based on our current business trends, we are raising our outlook for revenue growth in fiscal 2021 to a range of 25%-30% versus our prior outlook of 15%-20%. We now expect adjusted operating margin in the range of 23.5%-24.3%, an increase of 170 basis points-250 basis points versus our prior outlook of 100 basis points-200 basis points, with ROIC in excess of 60%. As it relates to the second quarter, we expect revenue growth in the range of 35%-37% and adjusted operating margin in the range of 25.9%-26.1%.
While fiscal 2021 will surely be a tale of two halves, there are many data points that lead us to feel optimistic that our strong performance will continue through the second half of 2021, with growth accelerating in fiscal 2022 and beyond. These include a strong housing and renovation market, both with pent-up demand and a long tail, a record stock market, low interest rates, and the reopening of several large parts of our economy. Additionally, the unmasking of the general public could lead to a Roaring Twenties type of consumer exuberance. Town & Country captured the feeling perfectly on the recent cover of their magazine titled, "Remember Fun? Get Ready for the Comeback." Combine that with the largest new product introduction cycle in our history beginning this fall and the launch of RH International next year, and fun it could be.
You should also rest assured that we have pressure-tested our business assumptions and risks and are confident in our ability to maintain an adjusted operating margin in excess of 20% in just about any economic downside scenario we can envision. The emergence of RH as a luxury brand generating luxury margins. We've spent decades building a brand and business model that generates industry-leading profitability and return on invested capital, and believe, like Bernard Arnault, luxury goods are the only area it is possible to make luxury margins. With 21.8% adjusted operating margin in fiscal 2020, RH has eclipsed the operating margin of LVMH, and we now have a clear line of sight to 25%+ adjusted operating margin over the next several years. As it relates to our business model, what is often overlooked is the simplicity and low-risk nature of what we have built.
I thought it would be helpful to highlight some of the key attributes. No seasonal inventory. We don't offer seasonal categories like Valentine's Day, Easter, Halloween, Thanksgiving, or Christmas, nor do we carry collections or color palettes tied to spring, summer, fall, or winter, like many home furnishings or home improvement retailers. We spent years eliminating those categories to avoid seasonal markdowns, enabling us to have a significantly higher margin business. Limited fashion risk. Our business is not driven by the fashion cycles found in retail models that require frequent discounting. The major trends that drive our business are tied to architecture and design. Architectural trends tend to change over decades, not years. As an example, many point to the 1997 opening of the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, by legendary architect Frank Gehry at the beginning of the recent modern movement.
We launched RH Modern almost two decades later in the fall of 2015, when a critical mass of modern homes and condominiums was reached, establishing a sizable new market. As it relates to the dead, generations pass away and their belongings move through estate sales, which feed the antique markets, which drive the high-end interior design market, which influences the high-end reproduction market, the trends continue to flow downstream. If you want to know where the mid-century modern trend came from, do the math or visit a cemetery. Membership. Moving from a promotional to a membership model, as we did in 2016, simplified and streamlined our business, eliminating the chaos and costs associated with a constantly changing customer proposition. Membership also deepened our relationship with our customers, as the majority used our interior designers to furnish their homes.
This evolved our business from selling products to selling spaces, driving higher average orders and lower customer acquisition costs as RH has become their top-of-mind choice for luxury home furnishings. Luxury positioning. Luxury brands have proven to be less susceptible to economic downturns, as their customers may temporarily pause their spending, but do not lose the ability to spend. Additionally, investing in a home grows exponentially as customers accumulate wealth, acquiring more homes, which drives higher sales, resulting in lower advertising costs and a more profitable operating model. A compelling vision for the future. We enter this decade with a compelling vision for the future, a team passionate about bringing that vision to life, and the strongest brand and business model in our industry. We plan to launch an unimaginable amount of new innovative strategies designed to further elevate and expand the RH brand.
As I did in my recent annual shareholders letter, I will outline the strategic separation we've created and the strategies we are pursuing as we continue our quest to become one of the most admired brands in the world. Product elevation. We have built the most comprehensive and compelling selection of luxury home furnishings under one brand in the world. Our products are presented across multiple collections, categories, and channels that we control, and their desirability and exclusivity have enabled us to achieve industry-leading revenues and margins. Our customers know them as RH Interiors, RH Modern, RH Beach House, RH Ski House, RH Outdoor, RH Rugs, RH Lighting, RH Linens, RH Baby & Child, RH TEEN, and Waterworks.
Our strategy to elevate design and quality of our product will continue as we introduced RH Contemporary in 2021 with a 400-page source book, dedicated website, national ad campaign, and a freestanding RH Contemporary gallery in the San Francisco Design District. We also have plans to introduce RH Couture Upholstery, RH Bespoke Furniture, and RH Color over the next several years. Gallery transformation. Our ability to transform our legacy stores into multi-dimensional design galleries that double our retail revenue and profitability in every market will enable the RH brand to reach $5 billion-$6 billion in revenues, with mid-20s% adjusted operating margin in North America. These inspiring and disruptive physical experiences render our products more valuable while creating strategic separation and unmatched brand awareness, enabling us to gain significant market share at lower advertising costs.
This presents a conundrum for our competition, who are closing or downsizing their stores while we build the largest specialty stores in the history of our industry. We believe our galleries are proving to be a huge competitive advantage, enabling RH to acquire customers at lower fixed costs versus variable digital advertising costs that can change daily for storeless or store-closing brands. All you need to do is walk a mall to notice most retail stores are archaic windowless boxes that lack any sense of humanity. There's generally no fresh air or natural light. Plants die in most retail stores, and they can't be a good environment for humans either. That's why we don't build retail stores. We create inspiring spaces that blur the lines between residential and retail, indoors and outdoors, home and hospitality.
Spaces that are filled with fresh air and natural light. With garden courtyards, rooftop parks, restaurants, and wine bars. Spaces that activate all of the senses and spaces that cannot be replicated online. RH Dallas, which opened in May of this year, is off to a tremendous start with our rooftop restaurant booked until August. Our plan is to open three additional design galleries in 2021, including RH San Francisco, RH Oak Brook, RH Jacksonville, a freestanding RH Contemporary gallery opening in San Francisco, plus our first RH Guesthouse opening in New York this fall. Brand elevation. We are beginning to evolve the brand beyond curating and selling product to conceptualizing and selling spaces by building an ecosystem of products, services, places, and spaces designed to elevate and render our product more valuable while establishing the RH brand as a thought leader, taste, and place maker.
Our products are the core of our ecosystem and include RH Interiors, RH Contemporary, RH Modern, RH Beach House, RH Ski House, RH Outdoor, RH Rugs, RH Lighting, RH Linen, RH Baby & Child, RH TEEN, and Waterworks. Our services, RH Interior Design, RH Contract, RH Trade, and RH In-Your-Home render our product more valuable while extending the brand into adjacent businesses that amplify the core. As an example, we believe that RH Interior Design has become the largest residential design firm in North America and has facilitated our transition from selling products to selling spaces. RH Trade serves external interior designers and design firms, partnering on projects and acting as a support organization managing the logistics of large, complex designs. RH Contract serves the hospitality and commercial markets with design and logistics support for large-scale volume projects.
RH In-Your-Home elevates the customer experience with furniture ambassadors managing every detail of your delivery, extending the selling experience into the home while creating a memorable and lasting impression. We're also exploring the opportunity to expand our services to include RH Architecture and RH Landscape Architecture, as we receive constant inquiries regarding the design of our galleries, garden courtyards, and rooftop parks. Our places include RH Galleries, designed to elevate and render our product and brand more valuable. RH Restaurants, which further elevate the customer experience while driving high-quality incremental traffic to our galleries. RH Guesthouses, where our goal is to create a new market for travelers seeking privacy and luxury in the $200 billion hotel industry. RH Residences, fully furnished luxury homes, condominiums, and apartments with integrated services that will deliver taste and time value to wealthy and affluent time-starved customers.
Our spaces, conceptualized to inspire and elevate the brand, will initially include plane and yacht design and charter, where customers can access our design experience, view our work online, and charter RH ONE and RH TWO , our private planes, and RH THREE, our luxury yacht, which is available in the Mediterranean and Caribbean, where the wealthy and affluent visit and vacation. We will also be unveiling our first RH Bath House & Spa as part of our RH Guesthouse Aspen, scheduled to open in the second half of 2022, as well as other exciting spaces we'll be revealing over the next several years. We believe our seamlessly integrated ecosystem of immersive experiences inspires customers to dream, design, dine, travel, and live in a world thoughtfully curated by RH, creating an impression and connection unlike any other brand in the world. Digital reimagination.
Our strategy is to digitally reimagine the RH brand and business model, both internally and externally. Internally, regarding how we innovate, curate, and integrate all the dynamic aspects of our brand, and externally, as we introduce our customers to The World of RH, a new digital portal presenting our products, services, places, and spaces. This multi-year effort began internally last year with the reimagination of our Center of Innovation and Product Leadership, which will incorporate digitally integrated visuals and decision data designed to amplify the creative process from product ideation to product presentation. Our external efforts will begin this fall with the launch of phase one of our new digital portal, The World of RH, which will include rich, immersive content with simplified navigation and search functionality, all designed to enhance the shopping experience and render our product and brand more valuable.
We believe an opportunity exists to create similar strategic separation online as we have with our galleries offline, reconceptualizing what a website can and should be. Global expansion. We believe that RH has the potential to become a $20 billion-$25 billion global brand in its current form, and possibly larger if aspects of our ecosystem become meaningful revenue streams. Our view is the competitive environment globally is more fragmented and primed for disruption than the North American market, and there is no direct competitor of scale that possesses the product, operational platform, or brand of RH.
Our global expansion begins in spring of 2022 with the opening of RH England, The Gallery at Aynho Park, a 73-acre historic estate designed in 1615 by Sir John Soane, arguably one of the most respected and celebrated architects of his time. RH England will feature the Aynho Architectural Library, the Aynho Organic Gardens, the RH Restaurant, The Orangery, and the RH Champagne & Caviar Cellar, among other unique experiences. Pending reopening plans for France, our goal is to open RH Paris, the gallery on the Champs-Élysées, in the fall of 2022. Customers will arrive through magnificent 18-ft gates and walk down a decomposed granite path lined with majestic hedges that lead to a garden courtyard where you encounter 18-foot brass doors that open to a six-foot atrium connected by traversing brass staircases and a glass elevator.
RH Paris will include a restaurant overlooking the gardens inspired by the Grand Palais, a sparkling Champagne & Caviar Bar on the top floor, and a romantic rooftop garden where you can sip an RH Bellini while enjoying views of the Eiffel Tower. In total, we have secured five locations in Europe, including London, Munich, and Dusseldorf, and are in final lease negotiations for an additional five locations, which will open over the next 2-3 years. Climbing the luxury mountain while building a brand with no peer. Hermès, Chanel, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Cartier, Tiffany & Co., and the rest of the finest luxury brands in the world were all born on the top of the mountain. Never has a brand started at the base as we have and made the climb to the peak.
We believe RH can be the first to make the climb, knowing very well those at the top don't necessarily want us to. The truth is, we're not from their neighborhood, nor invited to their parties. To make the climb, we understand our work has to be so extraordinary that it creates a force for the creation of our brand, requiring those at the top of the mountain to take notice, have respect. It is not a climb for the faint of heart, requiring imagination, innovation, and a great deal of persistence and perspiration. We have to be willing to endure short-term pain to drive long-term gain, as we did moving from a promotional to a membership model, elevating our product, transforming our stores, redesigning our operating platform, or managing the business with a bias for earnings versus revenues as we built a financial model to support long-term, high-quality growth.
We also understand the strategies we are pursuing, opening the largest specialty retail experiences in our industry while most are shrinking the size of their retail footprint or closing stores. Moving from a promotional to a membership model while others are positioning their brands around lesser products. Continuing to mail inspiring source books while many are eliminating catalogs, and refusing to follow the herd in self-promotion on social media, instead relying on the design and quality of the products and experiences we are creating, are all in direct conflict with conventional wisdom and the path being pursued by many in our industry. We believe when you step back and consider, one, we are building a brand with no peer, two, we are creating a customer experience that cannot be replicated online, and three, we have total control of our brand from concept to customer.
You realize what we are building is extremely rare in today's retail landscape, and we would argue, will also prove to be equally valuable. I want to thank the people of Team RH who live our values and fight for our cause. A team that is building a culture of leadership versus followership, that strives to innovate versus duplicate. A team of people with the courage to continue the climb even as the air gets thin and the odds get slim. A team of people willing to get knocked down 10 times and get back up 11 as they strive to plant the RH flag at the very peak of the luxury mountain. We'll now open the call for questions.
As a reminder, to ask a question, press star one on your telephone keypad. To withdraw your question, press the pound key. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question comes from the line of Chuck Grom with Gordon Haskett.
Hey, thank you. An incredible results to the team. Gary, is there any way to size up the degree to which a category such as outdoor is supporting total sales growth? Maybe the penetration of the category in 2018 versus where you think 2021 could end up. Are there any other categories that you believe you're seeing outsized growth today? This is exceptional results.
Yeah, I think if you look at our demand trends, everything's way up, right? Outdoor is one of our best-performing categories. We're the most dominant outdoor brand at the high end in the world today and have the biggest business in the world at the high end for outdoor by multiple. You would expect that we'd dominate that category, even though there's really long lead times, and we've been sold out for a good part of the past year.
Great. Are there any other categories that you would highlight besides outdoor?
If you take the core business at 109% demand growth in Q1, they're all way up. The business is strong across all categories.
Great. In your shareholder letter last week, you wrote, "We have to be willing to endure short-term pain to drive long-term gain." You referred back to a lot of the growing pains in the business over the past few years. I was just curious if there's something down the road that you were referring to in terms of the future outlook.
It's the mindset of investing with a long-term view, one of the most admired brands in the world, and it's not a path that most people take. Most of the world is focused on duplication and moving a lot of small rocks, and we tend to focus on big rocks that create big value. Those sometimes take multiple years to move and to bring to life. Look, I think if you look at our guidance, it would indicate we don't see anything in the near future that could be disruptive to our results. And today, as we think about the investment horizon over the next several years, whether it's international or digital reimagination or product elevation or any of the big moves we're making, they're all implied in our outlook and our guidance.
From time to time, there may be a significant investment we have to make that's going to leapfrog the business further into the future, right? That's the way we have an operating margin that's, I don't know, almost twice the next best person in our category.
Great. Thanks, Gary.
We ask that everyone limit themselves to one question and one follow-up question. Next up, we have Adrienne Yih with Barclays.
Good afternoon. Let me add my congratulations. Eloquent as always, Gary. Gary, I guess my question is about the TAM opportunity, or actually, the $5 billion-$6 billion sales target in North America and the $20 billion-$25 billion, you talked about it being in the company's current format. Can you talk about the number of galleries that supports in North America, but more importantly, the number of galleries that supports globally? Is it just focusing on the home furnishings industry with no hospitality, no B2B, et cetera? Just at once get some more color there. My follow-up will actually be, when you're opening the stores internationally, all the different cities and different countries, is there anything that you're doing from a product market research or customization for each marketplace?
Should we assume that each of those stores delivers the same sales dollar, or is every one of them distinct? Thank you.
Hi, Adrienne. That was a lot of questions in one question.
Yeah.
Where do you want me to start? Let's see. The opportunity as it relates to the $6 billion in North America, $20 billion-$25 billion in the current format, how many galleries in North America and how many galleries internationally? It's an interesting question because in North America, I think we've always said about 60 galleries-70 galleries in North America to kind of penetrate North America. You've got to think about the fact that we built North America while we've transformed the brand and transformed the business, right? We had a pretty logical footprint that was in all the major markets and all the major suburbs, so on and so forth, and we basically consolidated and transformed, and are opening large design galleries and replacing the former footprints.
The question is, do you need as many galleries internationally as the world continues to evolve and change, right? As consumers continue to be comfortable shopping online, not seeing product. That's somewhat unknown, I think, to us. There's no indications today that we should have less galleries in North America. We wouldn't penetrate the markets the way we penetrate the markets today with less galleries as we do the math. Even though there's kind of a migration online, you've really got to be careful in today's world not to look at the channels independently. I really would caution any retailer who's doing that.
I think it's a foolish way to look at a business, because we're physical beings living in a physical world, and being able to see brands and know brands in a physical manner, being able to understand how big they are, what their assortment is, what they stand for, what the quality is like, what the taste and style is like, is, I think, critical. My sense is, as we're going globally, might we be able to build a few less galleries? I don't know. I don't think so. I think that replacing physical stores with digital advertising is a bad move. I don't know why anybody would want to sign up for a variable cost structure that could change daily to market a brand, right? Physical stores are basically big brand-building statements that are three-dimensional, that customers can interact with.
They can touch the goods, they can interact with the brand, they can see the size and scale of things. They can understand the taste and quality and style and all kinds of levels. I think that's impossible to replace that with some kind of digital advertising or other advertising format, especially when it's not a fixed cost format. Our view, while there's migration online and stuff like that, there's just natural migration online, even if you have a physical gallery. That doesn't mean it. It just means once a customer knows your brand and is shopping from you, they might go home and make a transaction after they've seen it in a physical store. People that believe they can close a lot of stores and have the same market share, I think are naive.
Yeah, when we look at this, we think our footprint will be similar to North America. That's how we look at it today. We're studying I think I mentioned on the last conference call, our business is basically breaks down 80% suburbs, 12% second homes, and 8% city, urban locations. I believe that'll be similar internationally. I think we wouldn't be wise if we said, "Oh, all we need is a store in the major cities in Europe." I just don't think we'd capture the market share we would in North America. It's no different than when you're in a country, or in a city, you kind of know the business better. For instance, if you came to Corte Madera, California, and you're at our Center of Innovation, four blocks down the street is RH Marin at the Village of Corte Madera.
There's no luxury stores in that mall today, not one. Nordstrom's, if you want to call it a luxury store, I don't call it a luxury store, is the highest brand store. If you want to call Apple luxury, there's an Apple store there, but there's not another luxury store in that entire mall. We opened one of our big new galleries there. It's got a restaurant, and it's going to be massively successful. If we probably weren't here and didn't have a legacy store in the mall, we wouldn't have understood the potential in Marin County. We would've been a lot smaller. I'm sure other luxury brands, now that we built our big gallery, are going to follow. In fact, I heard Tiffany is taking a location now, and now that LVMH owns Tiffany, I think we're going to see that change.
I think we're going to be pretty similar as it relates to the products. I think the world's getting smaller and smaller. A lot of people say to me, "Oh, the houses are smaller in Europe." Not really. Yeah. Are the city homes so much smaller? Yeah, the city homes are so much smaller and the urban demographics of North America also. Everything we carry comes in all sizes. We sell sofas from what, 6 ft to however many feet you want, right? You want it 5 ft, we'll make you a 5-foot sofa. Our products come in all kinds of sizes. I think we've got the assortments that will be appropriate for the world. I think the world wants RH. There's nothing like us out there, and I think our brand's going to translate very well. I tried to answer all those questions.
I don't know if I did.
You did.
Yeah.
You did. Easily. Yep, you did. Thank you so much.
Okay. Thanks, Adrienne.
Your next question comes from the line of Steven Forbes with Guggenheim Securities.
Good evening. Hey, Gary. Given your comments in the letter about maintaining a 20% EBIT margin in any scenario you can envision here, because I think we're all living in the scenario land. Curious if you can provide some color on how you're thinking about the potential paths of demand growth as we head into the back half? If you can contextualize the downside scenario that you tested in the model, so we better understand the flexibility that you see or that's inherent to the model that you have?
Sure. Look, I think the things that go up generally that you have no control over don't necessarily stay up. The question is, how long do they stay up? What does it look like when things evolve and return to some kind of normal? This isn't a new normal. I think it's naive to not really look at all the models. Look, if you were talking to me a month ago, I was a lot more pessimistic than I am today. I'm a lot more optimistic a month later because I have more data, and the organization, we can see more trends, and we can see what's happening.
Not just data internally and how our demand trends look, and as we look ahead and what's happened and what we think will happen, but just what's happening in the housing market, what's happening in the stock market, what's happening in the remodel world, the pent-up demand that exists. If you think about people that are building homes, the homes are taking longer to build. You can't get the trades. People can't get people to remodel their homes. All of that means that they haven't bought their furniture yet, right? We're kind of the last stop on the journey. There's this kind of pent-up demand, backup, a lot of things that indicate to us when we think about our pipeline and look at our pipelines that look very good as we look out into the rest of the year and possibly into next year.
When we get into next year, we've got some step-ups, right. We're going to introduce a record amount of new product beginning in the later part of the second half this year. That will mostly accelerate revenues in 2022. Right. We'll ship some of it this year, but not a lot of it. As we look at it, we kind of look at the current trends. We'll get something in the second half for new stores that we just opened, new stores we are opening. We'll get some for new product. Really, those will set up 2022. We have all of that momentum going into 2022, then we start opening internationally. Internationally is very different than opening a new Gallery in North America, because most of our Galleries in North America are replacement Galleries.
There's just a couple that are like Jacksonville, you could argue that's a new market or expanding the Florida market. Yeah, we've only got a couple ahead of us where we're not in Hawaii and we're not in Montreal. I can't even remember if there's anything else we're not.
Naples, maybe.
Naples. Yeah, you could argue Naples probably could be incremental, but they're not probably 100% incremental because we're somewhere in those countries already. We're not in the United Kingdom, right? We're not in France. We're not in Germany. We're not in the Netherlands. We're not in Spain. On and on and on. We're going to be opening countries, which is a very different dynamic, right? We're not only opening countries with a handful of galleries. We're opening countries with a multi-dimensional digital portal that people are going to have, and the entire country is going to have access to the brand. We'll probably figure out how do we think about selling cross-borders until we establish a presence there and delivery and stuff like that. We may be able to reach more of the continent.
I'm sure there's going to be customers that are going to want to ship to Russia and the Middle East and so on and so forth, and we'll figure out how to do those things. We won't officially open up the continent of Europe when we open the first handful of galleries. It's just a bit complex from an operational point of view and would create too much upfront cost. We'll learn as we go there, but that gives us a step up. When you think about the downside model, which is important to look at, right? We've had it ever since we saw this uptick, we said, "Look, how is this going to play out?" Today, my view is the rest of this year looks pretty good based on everything I can see and know right now, right?
Could the stock market fall apart? I don't know. Could the housing market slow down? I don't know. Your guess is as good as mine, right? My data is probably as good as yours, and vice versa. We're all speculating into the future, and every plan we have is some degree wrong. The question is, are we more right than wrong? Today, I believe we're more right than wrong about the outlook we gave you, right? We tend to be relatively conservative in our outlooks and give ourselves some room to navigate. I think about it this way. As we built our models, we went back and said, "What would normal have looked like?" Right? What would 2020, 2021, and 2022 in our long-term outlook for the company look like?
It would have looked like 10% growth in 2020, not 8%, because we couldn't ship things, right? We didn't really benefit from COVID last year. That's the point I tried to make. On only 8% revenue growth, we hit operating margins of 21.8%. Not really a COVID leverage like most other retailers. We have no cash and carry product, right? What do we sell, one-tenth of 1% of our sales walk out of the store? I don't think we have anything that walks out of a store in a bag unless somebody really needs a towel that day. We have really a direct-to-customer platform. It's all delivered to customers' homes. A lot of it's special order, has longer lead times, things like that.
It's not the thing, all of a sudden, you can turn on a dime and say, "Hey, we're up 40%," and the manufacturers can start delivering at that level. We have this big backlog that's flopping over. That backlog continues at about the same amount, about $150 million as we look forward. Will it all catch up this year? We don't know. It depends on how the trends look. Probably not all of it will flop into this year because as we ship those goods, we'll create new backlog. We're not exactly sure when it'll all normalize. If you looked at our longer-term plan, we would've said, "Hey, normal looked like up 10%, up 13%-14% in 2022 as we opened internationally," right? We would've had a bigger uptick then.
We look at it and say, "Okay, we were up 8% instead of up 10%." This year, you know the guide. We look at it and say, in 2022, if we landed where our normal business would be, what would that look like, roughly, right? At that level, we're saying, now let's give back any of the COVID lift. We've got math around what did we get that we shouldn't have got? We take that out, which is some number. You can do the math. We said, we're in the longest economic expansion in the history of the U.S., right? Without a recession. At some point, something's going to happen. It'd be naive and foolish to think it'll never happen, so you got to be ready for it.
We say, okay, let's say there's an economic downturn of 20% in 2022, and you take that. That's a big one, right? Because that looks like 2008, 2009, where we were down about 15% or so. To take 20% out, that's taking out a COVID lift, that's taking out 20%, and we're still, yeah, a 20% operating margin, slightly above. What I feel good about is that's how good our model is, right? That's how good our model is. What I feel comfortable at and confident about when people ask me, "Hey, should I buy your stock?" I tell people the same thing. I say, "Look, if you're a trader, and you have short-term, just focused on short-term stock moves, don't buy our stock.
If you're an investor and you have a long-term view and you're going to hold the stock for five years or more, you're going to make a lot of money here. Just as people did since we IPO'd, and you guys have seen the numbers on that. So, there's a lot of upside in the story. It's by far the best model in our industry. No one's got anything close. It's all a little messed because some people have a lot of COVID lift right now, and it looks like their business is better and their margins are better. They're not promotional. No one's promotional right now. Like Jesus, for God's sake, how can you be promotional with the kind of demand trends and you can't even get the inventory? The good news is it doesn't affect us because we're never promotional, right?
Our margins are our margins, right? You can count on our margins being our margins. Would I count on everybody else's margins being their margins? Not at all. There's no way when the world returns to some kind of normal in the home industry, the people that used to promote are going to have to promote again. It's very foolish to think they're not. I'm just happy we made the move from a promotional model to a membership model a long time ago because we don't have to change anything. Our margin structure is our margin structure. The only thing you're seeing in our margin structure that might be giving us a little lift through this period is we have less advertising expense. We cut back advertising because we couldn't get the goods.
If we would've had the advertising expense, we'd have probably done more volume. There's no sense spending the advertising and mailing books when you can't get the inventory, right? That would've been like just burning money, light a match and burn the money. We decided not to launch any products, not to advertise. My sense is when the advertising investment returns, we'll have the inventory and we'll get an incremental lift in the top line. That's another thing that I should've wrote about that in the letter. Now that I think about it, in fact is, we've pulled back on advertising. When we start mailing books again, that's also going to create momentum in the business. That's why we feel today, Steve, very confident about how we think about the rest of this year and what it looks like next year.
We feel extremely confident that if the world changed and the home industry gave back any COVID lift and you pop on top of that at a recession, and you give back another 20% of the business, we're going to be in the 20% range and we're going to be able to play offense and take a lot of market share and do a lot of smart things that I don't believe other people are going to be able to do.
That was super helpful, Gary. Really appreciate that. Just as a quick follow-up, it's sort of hard not to get excited here about RH International. Just curious as we're, what are we, less than a year away, right? What else needs to be done to ensure a smooth and seamless launch as you sort of prepare for this grand opening here?
Sure. All the things that you would expect. We've got to build the operational platform from a distribution and logistics and home delivery perspective, which we're working on and building. We've got to make the inventory investments and be able to get the inventory, which we're working on. We couldn't have launched this year, we'd have had no inventory, right? We had to delay everything by a year. Thank God we did. Because we wouldn't have any goods to sell. We have to have the inventory. Build the inventory and you'll start to see that being reflected in our balance sheet as we build the inventory for international. Then we've got to continue building the team. The good news is, what's the latest poll? How many people from our organization want to work for us internationally?
Several hundred.
Yeah. We have several hundred people that have already volunteered from America to go work in Europe. Some of them are from Europe. We've got a lot of enthusiasm about people who want to go help us open internationally. Plus, we've got a team, we've got a leader on international and we're building that team. If you came here and you were in our Center of Innovation, we have a giant RH International room with maps and dots and cities and numbers and country volumes and populations and things we have to do and where we have to go and where do we open home delivery, where do we open this and that. Yeah, we're working on all the things you have to do. The good news is they're all the things that we do here. It's not like there's anything really new.
In some cases, for the most part, everybody's speaking English. It's not like 50 years ago. There's slightly different currency, things like that. The question is, how do you price the goods? I think that the good news is, as we study it and we look at how other brands have priced their goods, there's probably a bigger margin opportunity than we thought. We feel more positive than less positive that RH International, as we begin to scale it, will actually be margin accretive, not margin dilutive.
Thank you, Gary.
Your next question comes from the line of Tami Zakaria with JPMorgan.
Hi, this is Tami. Thanks for taking my questions. My first question is around international openings. I think in your shareholder letter you mentioned you're going to open 10 locations in total over the next 2-3 years. Probably the cadence, I'm guessing, is 2-3 international opens per year over the next two, three years. Does that mean you plan on opening an equal number of U.S. and international locations over the next couple of years? Basically what I'm trying to understand is, what is your gallery opening cadence over the next two years and how is the split between international and domestic?
Sure. Thanks for the question, Tami, by the way, you had a crystal ball. I saw your note right before we announced, your projections are pretty close to our projections, good job on your models. The gallery opening cadence in North America will remain somewhere around, I'd say 3-5 or so, maybe 4-6, depending on how these deals come together. Then international, I would look at and say we've got two in the first year, as long as France opens and we can get work done there. Paris will either open in the fall of next year, if for some reason we continue to have COVID delays and we can't get in and do the work we need to do, it could go into the spring of the following year. Beyond that, we have the other locations.
Some of them are much easier to open than others. They're less complex. These first few are relatively complex and then London's relatively complex. Some of them are less complex, where some are not quite as big a footprint, and where we have an ability to kind of test, if you will, and have some flexibility. We don't want to be locked in everywhere in a bunch of countries where if we made a mistake, we have a permanent mistake. Net on RH England, that'll be a relatively low net capital deal as we've bought the property, investing some money, we'll do a sale leaseback. We'll have more capital in Paris. That's a long-term lease, and then we'll have more capital and we're more pregnant, if you will, in London, in Mayfair, where we're kind of stringing together four buildings to make a spectacular gallery.
Some of the other locations we have shorter leases on, and we're making a much smaller capital investment just so we can understand the markets and understand the country. Still spectacular real estate and buildings. The great thing about Europe is you have all these spectacular buildings. In the U.S., North America, just search for a building of stature and taste and style and great architecture. Europe is filled with them. We love the buildings, we love the real estate we're taking, and we believe they're the right locations, but we don't know for sure. We want to learn. We've got some with shorter term leases that give us flexibility. We're going to invest less capital. We're not going to open restaurants everywhere because that's a bigger capital investment.
We'll kind of test and learn, then we'll have flexibility and mobility to make a bigger investment once we know those markets better. To the consumer's eye, they're all going to be spectacular. As we look at it, they're slightly smaller, not all going to have the restaurant investment. We have a lot of galleries in North America that are our old legacy galleries that do big volume, are highly productive, and these are much bigger than those. These are, I'd say some of them are more like our kind of 1.0 design galleries like Houston or even Boston, where you've got 15,000 sq ft-25,000 sq ft as opposed to 50,000 sq ft-60,000 sq ft . That was all I had.
Your next question comes from the line of Michael Lasser with UBS.
Good evening. Thanks a lot for taking my question. Gary, it seems like what you're suggesting is RH has spent the last 20 years or so building this unique luxury brand that hasn't existed in home furnishings. It now has pricing power and should command luxury margins, which we've seen you realize in the last several years. COVID has allowed you to accelerate that process by raising prices and getting to the margin level that's appropriate for befitting a luxury brand in this market. Is there a case where you haven't gotten a great sense of elasticity in your core customer segment or the size of your core customer segment because of these unique conditions, and that could change on the other side of this. That's the first part of my question. The second part is, who is in the demographic that you've seen come in buying?
What have they been coming to buy in the last couple of months to drive this level of growth? Thank you.
Sure. I'll start with the second question. It's kind of a core RH customer, nothing different in the demographic that's buying from us. It's just more activity, more movement, more people moving, more people looking for city to suburbs, second homes, things like that. Then more people just refurnishing their current homes just because they've been spending so much time in their home, and they couldn't really travel. People doing their outdoor spaces and stuff like that, and that's all continued to be strong. As it relates to COVID speeding anything up, it really hasn't speeded anything up. Not for us. This year, it's going to give us a lift. Again, if you just go back to last year and say on 8% revenue growth, 7.7% revenue growth, we had 21.8% adjusted operating margins, right? That was lower than we thought we were going to be.
We thought we were going to have 10%-11% growth. Our model's pretty clean if you look at it through 2020. This year you have some lift. Obviously, we're going to be up 25%-30%. The way I'd look at it is just model this out over 3%. If you model this at kind of 10%, 10%, and 13%, you'd kind of be directionally right, plus or minus a point or so here or there. The question is, what is 2022? Is 2022 a give back year or flat year because the COVID cycle and the folks on the home goes back? Could be. We've got things that should make it a better year than that because of the fact that we haven't introduced new products for how long has it been now? 18 months, almost?
It will be two years in fall.
Okay. It will be two years in fall, where we haven't introduced new products. Think about that. Two years, no new product at RH. We've got quite a backup that will be introduced this fall, next spring. Just the product pipeline for the next 18-24 months is a really dynamic pipeline. New products in everything, right? In RH Interiors, RH Modern, not just RH Contemporary, but Interiors, RH Modern, RH Baby & Child , RH TEEN, RH Beach House, RH Ski House. There's a lot of new product coming, as well as RH Couture Upholstery, RH Bespoke Furniture, RH Color, lots of things we've been working on. That's a big plus to us, then we're opening up internationally, that's a big plus, right? That's 100% incremental, right?
It's not like just transforming a gallery where it's a market that is already doing $15 million and it's going to go to $30 million, or a $25 million market is going to go $50 million. This is not incremental markets, it's incremental countries. Thinking about it more as an incremental continent. At some point, we'll open enough galleries in Europe and we'll have our infrastructure and home delivery figured out, and then we'll just open up the whole continent. Whether we have galleries everywhere or not, we'll be able to figure that out. The big thing is why you can't rush to just open up the continent is you have to figure out the reverse logistics, right? You have to figure out, well, what am I going to do with the returns?
What you don't want to do is all of a sudden open up the country too soon, and you've got a bunch of returns in Russia or Copenhagen or places where you've got no infrastructure, no outlet infrastructure, and you've got no way to handle the goods, and you'll just lose a lot of money all day long, right? We're just trying to be prudent about how we open up these countries. At what point do we have the infrastructure in place and have figured it out, figured out how to handle returns, how to handle the back-end logistics, and how to wire that to change. A lot of people don't know. They're private, but I'm public, and I can say it. We made, in our reverse logistics outlet business, it's about a $200 million business.
We've got $100 million difference in profitability in that business over the last four years. $100 million, okay? We know what it looks like when you don't run that business well. We know what it looks like when you run that business well, and you figured it out, and all the handling and transportation costs and everything that goes wrong there. We just want to kind of build a really great business and a really great model there. We'll go a little slower. When you think about our model and the COVID piece, this year's going to have a little COVID lift. If you look at the growth that'll come next year, whether it slows down or not, where we're at this year is kind of a good place, because we have other things that'll balance it out.
The good news is like by the way, we didn't really take any price changes increases because of COVID, right? We just took our normal kind of price increases because that's what we do. Because we have our own brand, we can pass through price increases in other parts of our business, and that's one of the advantages you have when you're playing in the luxury market, and you have exclusive product, and you control the distribution. Right? But I wouldn't say our business is COVID affected except for the leverage we're going to get with a lot of the revenue that's going to hit this year.
Our next question comes from the line of Steven Zaccone with Citi Research.
Great. Thanks very much. Congrats on the strong results. Maybe shifting to the margin side. Given such strong performance here in the 1st quarter, is there any real change in thinking about the drivers of gross margin versus SG&A on a full year basis versus the initial guidance you provided back in March? I guess specific to the second half of the year, given the momentum in gross margin, is there opportunity for gross margin to continue to expand?
I don't know if, Jack, you want to take that?
Steven, I don't think anything's changed with respect to what we said in the last quarter. If you look at historically what's driven our operating income margin increases, I view it as three quarters of it roughly coming up in gross margin, one quarter up in SG&A. Of the gross margin, the bulk of that, call it three quarters coming from product margin. The moves we talked about, elevating design quality, taking the margin of the goods up. That's been pretty consistent as we look at the model back four or five years, as Gary was talking about the evolution. This year will have a little bit odd comparisons because of the way 2020 played out. Obviously with Q1 down 19% last year, Q2 being flat, and the growth rates we have now.
You're going to see a little bit swings in sort of the, I guess, the margin deltas versus last year. One thing we were just looking at, or that I like to look at is, in the same way that people look at two-year growth rates, I would look at margin changes on a two-year basis as well versus 2019. And that sort of formula that I alluded to earlier holds ongoing, and I would expect that going forward.
Great.
Then I think the opportunity for gross margin to expand is to address that. I mean, there's always that opportunity. I think our position on how we communicate our guidance and our outlook numbers to you and how our internal models are positioned, but it's something that we do well. We continue to elevate the design, the quality, the luxury modern, and I think you've seen the benefits of that, and I think that will continue to accrue to us.
Great. Very helpful. Thank you.
Our next question comes from the line of Anthony Chukumba with Loop Capital Markets.
Thank you so much for taking my question. Congrats on a strong start to the year. Gary, you guys are doing a lot of different things right now. A lot of very exciting initiatives, particularly international expansion, but all the product newness and some of these new concepts. I guess my question is, how are you personally allocating your time? Because I know, or I have to imagine that you're very, very intimately involved in a lot of this, particularly international expansion. Just would love to get a better sense for that. Thank you.
That's a good question. We say inside our company, we really do two things. We allocate human capital and financial capital, and the most important one is human capital and how we allocate our time. We don't work on any things in this company that the cross-functional leadership team can't work collaboratively on. Whether you look at the big product initiatives and think about the product initiatives, this happened over years, right? That by the time you're seeing RH Contemporary coming, we've been working on RH Contemporary for a long time. We've been working on RH Color for years. It's just been other things more important that we've launched, RH Color keeps getting to the back of the bus because we don't think it's as incremental as some of the other things that we're doing sooner, or maybe not as important to elevate the product brand.
All the big initiatives, we take the cross-functional collaboration of the entire leadership team to move the big rocks because they're all big rocks. Whether it's product elevation, whether it's the Gallery transformation, brand elevation, and the things that we're doing there to elevate the product and elevate the brand. The things we're doing to digitally reimagine the business, not just the website, but digitally reimagine the way we move information and data and how that can amplify the productivity of the teams and the decision-making of the teams. Then global expansion. They're all things that we, as a leadership team, allocate our time. We rank everything in this company through a lens of what's the emotional value, what's the strategic value, and what's the financial value in that order, right? To do really great work, you've really got to deeply believe in it.
You've got to be so excited that you'd rather be doing that than something else. To do extraordinary, remarkable, and amazing work is not for the faint of heart. It's not easy to do. Being the best in the world at what you do is not easy to do. It takes a tremendous amount of effort, and you're not going to put in that kind of effort. You're not going to have that level of commitment unless there's real high emotional value around an initiative and a strategy. We only focus on things that we're deeply passionate about, that we're really aligned about, that the entire leadership team is passionate about, because we've got to work on that in a collaborative way, and we've got to put in a tremendous effort. The second thing we look at is: what is the strategic value of an idea?
How does this idea render the brand or business more valuable? How does this idea create strategic separation between us and others in our industry? The ideas have to have high strategic value. Then third is financial value. A lot of companies, I think, work on it exactly the opposite way, and that's why they don't do great work, because someone comes up with an idea, "This is a billion-dollar idea," and nobody's really that passionate about it, so nobody works that hard on it. They get knocked down two times, and they don't get up a third time. When you're really passionate and you believe deeply in what you're doing, you get knocked down 10 times, you get up 11 times. You just keep going because you care so much about what you're doing.
Those financial ideas that people articulate that there's not high emotional value generally don't pan out. They become, "Oh, what happened to that billion-dollar idea?" "Yeah, we drove into the ditch, and we couldn't get out of it, and it never happened." The things you really care about, they tend to be worth more over time. We might have something that has really high emotional value, really high strategic value, and it looks like moderate financial value. What we've learned is, over the course of time, they're so passionate, they're working so hard, they tend to uncover more opportunities, see more, the work is better than you could imagine, and the financial value goes up over time. What you thought might've been a $500 million idea turns into a $2 billion idea because the work's that damn good.
We spend a vast majority of our time debating and deciding how to allocate our human capital, how to allocate our time, because that's the most important thing we do. I can always go figure out how to raise more money. We can go get more money. I haven't figured out yet how to get more time. We spend our time figuring out how we're going to allocate our time because that is by far the most valuable resource in the company. When you think of these, it seems like there's a lot here, Anthony, and there is. We've been working on this stuff for years. For years. These are not new ideas. These are just, now we're talking to you about them.
Somebody asked me, "How long have you been working on the Guesthouse?" I said, "Been working on the Guesthouse for 25 years. For as long as I've been traveling and frustrated about the experiences." Just asked, "Well, why doesn't anybody do this? Why doesn't anybody do that?" I designed the room for the Guesthouse 25 years ago. You'll see, it's way better, by the way. I'm pretty passionate about it as the organization. By the way, if you asked me two, three years ago, even three years ago, "How do you feel about the Guesthouse? How big of an idea is it going to be?" I would say, "Yeah, I think it's going to be great. It's going to be a very good idea." Now I tell you, I think it's a redefining idea.
I think it's going to define an entirely new market for privacy and luxury. I think it's so damn good, it's going to shock people in the industry. That's just because we're really passionate about it, so it tends to become really great work. No different than RH Contemporary. We're really passionate about it. There was a team in here last night, last couple of nights until 2:00 A.M in the morning. You couldn't get them out of here because they're so damn excited about what they're doing. They know it's going to break through, and it's going to change everything. It seems like we're doing a lot, but by the way, that's our nature. We do a lot. We're also highly focused. We know how to edit. We know how to say no to 1,000 things.
You're seeing the handful of things we decided to focus on, and that we have the capacity to focus on. You don't really know the whole team here. You don't know the depth and breadth of the organization we've built. We've got a very deep team and a lot of talent in this organization. You don't want to lose people because you're not working on enough extraordinary things. They'll go somewhere they can go work on something extraordinary. If you want to have the best talent, you better be working on the most exciting things in the world. Otherwise, they'll go work for somebody else. I wouldn't worry that we're doing too much. People have been saying that about us forever.
Got it. Thank you so much. I look forward to having champagne and caviar at RH England next year.
Okay. I hear that.
The next question comes from the line of Curtis Nagle with Bank of America.
Good evening. Thanks very much. Just turning back to international. A little too early to ask or assess this, just how do you think about what the baselines or the comps would be for some of these early markets you're doing in London and Paris, where you've got these magnificent spaces, recognition of the brand by certainly a decent number of people in those cities, they are new markets. Are the benchmarks, I don't know, perhaps New York, maybe that's aggressive. Is it L.A., San Fran? How do you think about that? Just as a quick model question. Could you comment on kind of what demand trends are doing now? Are they sort of proportionally similar to what you saw in 1Q in terms of how they are balanced relative to sell-through?
Sure. As far as international, we think about London like New York. If you look at the population demographic profile, broader New York market, broader London market, they profile pretty close. If you think about the U.K., we think about the U.K. a little bit like we think California. There's 68 million people in the U.K., there's 39 million people in California, so it should be bigger. If you look at the profile of kind of high net worth and ultra high net worth people, California skews a little higher per capita. We look at California and say California's probably, long-term, a $800 million to a $1 billion market. London should be somewhere around a $1 billion market. We've got to have the penetration of galleries and the brand recognition to get there. The upside is we're opening some pretty spectacular places.
We're opening with a brand that's got kind of worldwide recognition with our core customer. It's not like people don't know the brand at all unless they don't travel to America or they don't have any friends in America, right? The question is just how quickly does it scale? We don't know. We'll know more when we open them. We're going to do a great job. I think we're passionate about it. The work we're doing is going to be extraordinary, and it's going to be remarkable. I like to say that when you do extraordinary and remarkable work, you can usually figure out how to monetize it. It's very hard to monetize ordinary or unremarkable. We feel better than worse. We feel excited about this. We're very passionate.
As it relates to demand trends, we gave you demand trends through last year because it was kind of such an odd year. We don't want to get in the habit that we're going to do demand trends for the rest of our life here within a quarter. You can back into all that stuff with the numbers. We gave you pretty fulsome guidance. We gave you relatively normal guidance that we would have given before, right? We're not here not giving you guidance. We gave you guidance for Q2. We gave you guidance for the full year. You can back into those, and you can kind of figure out what the demand trends might've been no differently than you would have through our historical guidance.
We just don't want to sit here and all we're going to do is attract a bunch of short-term hedge funds and day traders if we're talking about like, "Hey, through last week, we're here." We want people who are more long-term based. You can figure that out. I think we've given the most fulsome guidance I've seen anybody give so far this year.
Yeah, for sure. The numbers speak for themselves. Totally fair. Thanks, Gary Friedman.
Great. Thank you. Thanks for this.
Your next question comes from the line of Max Rakhlenko with Cowen and Company.
Great. Thanks a lot, congrats on a really nice quarter. Just staying on Europe, just curious on the margin side, what do you think profitability could look like versus the U.S.? I think earlier on the call, you said that margins might actually be accretive. Just curious how you're thinking about GM versus SG&A, and then just leverage on the overall business.
I don't think we're ready to talk about that level of detail. When I think about it directionally and strategically, we believe that it can be accretive to margins long term and pull our model up as opposed to be dilutive to our model. We're going to have to get some scale. We're obviously going to open distribution facilities and capabilities and make investments in inventory and other infrastructure that we've got to be able to open the business to. Depending on how quickly we ramp and how quickly the business ramps will determine how the model evolves. When we're talking about it, I'm talking about more long term. We're studying now a lot of people's businesses, a lot of models, what people are charging, what they're charging there for similar goods, and we look like a tremendous value.
Our view is it can be a higher margin business than the U.S. Also, the reason it can be somewhat higher margin is you just don't. Traditionally, a lot of people, American retailers that would open in Europe, they duplicate all kinds of jobs. They duplicate buying teams and duplicate corporate overhead and infrastructure and things like that, and you had a lot of levels of duplication, and we don't believe we need to do that. We're going to run it more as a look at the world as kind of one place, and we'll have very few duplicative infrastructures. We obviously have to have some human resources and people leaders and people running stores and oversights and stuff like that. We're not going to duplicate many of the things that other businesses or brands have done.
The good news is we don't need a big inventory management team. Think about most retailers. Most retailers are filling a store with product that they're selling out of all the time, and they're replenishing all the time. We don't do that. We set up a gallery, and nothing moves for a long time. Nothing moves. We make sure that we steam the beds and we straighten it up, but nothing's moving in our galleries, right? You think about the complexity of inventory management in a normal retail store or other home furnishings retailers that are selling stuff off tabletops and this and that are in the cash-and-carry business. We're not in the cash-and-carry business. Much simpler model. Much simpler model. They would have to build big inventory management teams and duplicative teams in different countries, right?
They'd have to think about all these different profiles and what sell-through rates and all the other stuff. We don't have to do that. We keep a DC in stock, right? Everything pulls from there. It's a much simpler model. That's again, a lot of those reasons are why we think it's going to be accretive to operating margins. We just don't have a lot of duplication.
Got it. That's very helpful. Just as a quick follow-up on RH Contemporary with the continued supply chain disruptions, just how are you guys thinking about fulfilling what will probably be really strong demand? Are you guys able to bring anything in ahead of time, or is that not really feasible given that the business is really custom-driven? Just curious how the team is approaching these challenges as you are set to have a lot of newness over the coming quarters. Thank you.
Yep. Yeah, it's a good question. It's not that it's all special order. It'll probably have a slightly higher special order mix to start. We will stock a good portion of the product. The real key is the supply chain catching up and what the demand trends are and what the level of in-stock rates can we be at. That will determine, we'll probably go all the way to the wire to figure out how many books we mail, how big we get behind this, just so we don't drive another giant level of back orders and long wait times. We've got a few months here to see how the supply chain is happening, how people are catching up, what the current demand trends are going to be. We'll figure that out as we go.
There is a bit of a supply chain constraint, and that's why we haven't launched anything in a long time. Right now, we feel pretty good that kind of middle to later, I'd say late September, early October, we look like we can launch RH Contemporary. We'll launch the business. It's like our business, people get a book, they don't start ordering that much in the first few days. It's about a month to digest it, and the designs. Does that work in my house? So on and so forth. By the time people really start ordering RH Contemporary, we should have pretty good in-stock rates, but it'll keep getting better and better and better as we move through the end of the year. We think we'll be in a good enough shape.
If for some reason the demand trends are bigger than we think as we move into through the quarters, we may have to just launch RH Contemporary in a smaller way. Look, it's all a good problem to have, right? It's not like nothing's selling here. It's just that, okay, you don't really want the demand trends to go down so you can launch Contemporary on time, right? That would be bad to wish for. I'd like the demand trends to stay up and a good outcome would be, "Hey, guys, we've pushed RH Contemporary to 2022 because our demand's so damn strong." right? Now, some people would say that's really bad. I think that's really good. That means our business has continued stronger than we thought. It's not really exactly when we'd launch RH Contemporary. It's going to happen depending on demand trends and the ability to ramp production.
So high-class?
Yeah.
Your next question.
I think we cut out. Yes.
Your next question comes from the line of David Bellinger with Wolfe Research.
Hi. Thanks for taking the question, and congrats on the results here. Just looking at all the success over the past few quarters through the membership model, how much have you seen your customer base grow over the past, call it 12-18 months? And more importantly, where can that number go over time as you build towards the $5 billion-$6 billion sales target for North America and a much larger opportunity on the international side?
We don't really give that data, David. I might say, our membership count is disclosed. You can look at it in our 10-K. Last year, as Gary talked about, 8% revenue growth, our membership went up by 4.6%. It went from 415,000 members to 434,000. That's one proxy. Clearly, sales in general tend to outpace with increased average order values, other things we've talked about, they tend to outpace the growth in members or customers.
Got it. Okay. Just as you think about the trends here, just incredibly strong throughout Q1, are there any regions of the country that you're seeing within that strength that are either outperforming or being held back in some way? Do you see any moderation in trend as some of the areas of the country move closer to normal, or is this more of just a broad-based strengthening throughout the entire business?
It's pretty broad-based. Yeah, you had through this pandemic, obviously, the core dense cities where you had more of an exodus of people. Those were softer. The second-home markets were explosive, the suburbs were explosive. Now you've got the cities that people are coming back, and we're getting close to the unmasking of America that the energy's coming back, the business is coming back. They'll probably have a stronger kind of later surge is how we think about it.
Got it. Fair enough. Thank you, and best of luck.
Thank you.
Next up is Cristina Fernández with Telsey Advisory.
Thank you. Good afternoon. I wanted to ask a follow-up question on RH Contemporary. Do you think that RH Contemporary will bring in new customers to the business like RH Modern did a few years ago? How are you thinking about presenting in stores the price points? Maybe can you compare that to the launch of RH Modern, like how this one's going to be similar or different? That'd be helpful. Thank you.
Yeah, we think it's going to be a lot like RH Modern. We think it'll bring a new customer into the business. It's higher price points like RH Modern was versus the RH Interiors business. It's a higher level of quality. All the new product kind of reflects the elevation of the product and the brand, right? You'll see higher quality, higher priced product kind of flowing in over the next several years as we take the brand up the luxury mountain. You'll see the quality get better everywhere. You'll see the design get better everywhere. You'll see the designers and people we work with, people will be more aware of them. Designers that a lot of people said would probably never design for RH, are now coming onto the platform.
You'll see the product continue to elevate, and that should have a positive impact on average order, average ticket, and a lot of good things that help the model of the business. I think that's the thing that you got to think about long term with our business is you're kind of going up the luxury mountain. You're taking quality up. You're taking design and quality up. You're also taking price points up. You have more pricing power there. All the leverage flows through, right? I tell people all the time, imagine if you're selling a $2,000 sofa or a $10,000 sofa, and I mention a $10,000 sofa because that's our best-selling sofa. If it costs you roughly $200 to deliver a $10,000 sofa, it's a fraction, from a shipping cost point of view, as it is to deliver a $2,000 sofa, right? Your 2% versus 10%.
It'll cost you 1/5, and that's why you can get such better margins here. When you think about margin growth long term, you got to understand, we're still climbing the luxury mountain from a product point of view. I kind of look at it and say we're slightly above halfway. Maybe we're 60% up the mountain, 65% up the mountain. The product quality, the product design, the taste and style of the brand is going to continue to go up, and we're going to continue to be disruptive at the highest end of the market, right? That's where we think that the most opportunity is, the kind of independent showrooms and small boutique, high-end stores and retailers. That's all going to be very accretive to our model.
That's why, I think I mentioned before, I don't know if it was one or two quarters ago, I think it was a couple of quarters ago, I talked about kind of the correlation to Hermès. Not that we put ourselves in the place Hermès is in the world from a brand point of view, but we aspire to think like that. Hermès has a, I think, 34% operating margin, there's a lot of good things happening during this climb. It's hard to make this climb. No one's ever made this climb. Everybody who's up there is born at the top. We're kind of in uncharted waters here as we climb. It's all good stuff. The leverage, the customer acquisition costs, everything here is margin accretive, the path we're on.
I think a lot of people overlook that because they're so used to building models. There's not an analyst or investor that's ever built a model like this for a home business. People ask us all the time, "Well, are you more like, should I look at Home Depot? Should I look at this? Are you like this? Are you like that?" No, we're like nobody. Go look at other categories. There's people like us in other places. There's no model like us. That's why there's no results like us. Everything we're doing is going to be accretive to margins.
Yeah, that's very helpful. My second question, last year and this year, your sourcebook strategy changed. You only made it one. Do you think you'll go back to spring and fall? How are you thinking about, just broader about advertising sourcebooks as the business normalizes in 2022?
Yeah. Sure. We used to do 11 or 12 books a year, right? Then we went from 11 or 12 sourcebooks, we went to, I think, 3 books, then we went to 2 books. Then we went to 1 book, then we went back to 2 books. Now we're at 0 sourcebook. We'll go back to at least 1 book, then we'll keep testing. The world's changing all the time. One of the things to study, to think about, when you take RH, again, it's great because we have this point of reference here right next to us. I encourage anybody who hasn't, if you haven't been to our Center of Innovation Product Leadership, you ought to come out here and see not only what we're doing, but how we do it, and you'll understand how unique and different we are.
Then, we'll take you to lunch at RH Marin, and we'll walk you through. If you just walk the mall and look at, oh, there was our in-line store in the mall, and then you see us as a third anchor in the center that you can't miss when you come driving up to this place. You got to think about the fact like, hey, how many sourcebooks do we have to mail in Marin when everybody in Marin who is a potential customer of ours is going to at least come have lunch or dinner with us once a month? Maybe a little less frequently, but most likely. Every time they go to the mall, if they go to Nordstrom, they go to Apple, They get to drive by our magnificent gallery with how many 100-year-old olive trees surround it.
It doesn't even look like it belongs in the parking lot, but it's this magnificent thing. If you just look at it, then you just walk the mall and you look at all these other sad retail stores, you go, well, no wonder they might have to spend a lot in advertising. They're all 30 - 50-foot storefronts, with a little crappy storefront. They have no windows except for a little glass in the storefront. You walk into a windowless box, and everybody looks the same, and someone's standing behind the register. It's all the same. When you build the RH Galleries that we build, and you do the volumes we do, and you've got the hospitality component driving lots of traffic, I got to believe we're going to spend a fraction of the ad cost of everybody else to optimize the market.
Everybody looks at the negative investment into a retail store, and nobody does the positive. I tell people all the time, you know what would be an interesting world if we could all just go peek at it? Would be a world that only had online retail. Think about it, the last couple hundred years, you could only buy things in stores. I mean, buy things online, and there was no stores. All of a sudden, somebody invented a store, and they did a bunch of volume. All of a sudden, everybody started opening stores, and there was a shift to retail stores. All of a sudden you go, "Fuck, everybody" Excuse my language. You go, "Heck, everybody start closing their websites because stores is where it's at." Nobody ever shifts the perspective and looks at it differently. We're in a follow-the-herd mentality.
Humans are followers for the most part, and we don't like change. Everybody is just following the herd. They think like, "Oh, everything's going to go online." In my lifetime, we will not see more volume in online than we are going to see in retail stores in our category. It's just not going to happen. Unless everybody closes their stores and they force it to happen. That's really good. I hope everybody who sells our goods closes their stores. It'd be the best thing to happen for us. Our operating margins might be 40% if they do that. I hope they do. Look, right now, let them all follow each other and let us be the only inspiring, magnificent physical spaces in the world. I like the fact we'll be a market of one. Apple, so is Tesla.
Is all the great companies. They're generally markets of one because they don't follow everybody else. You got me excited on that one. Imagine that world. There'd be like a gold rush to open retail stores.
Your next question comes from the line of Brad Thomas with KeyBanc Capital.
Hi, thanks so much. A lot of exciting things to talk about. Gary, you mentioned an interesting point in the letter about the RH Dallas restaurant being booked through August. I was hoping you could just give us an update on where the overall restaurant business stands in its reopening and recovery and how that flow-through is translating over to the extent you can tell at the restaurants that have opened sooner than others. Thanks.
I think it broke up a little bit. What was the question?
Around F&B, the overall F&B business.
Oh, yeah. The F&B business is coming roaring back. Look, one of the things we did, we took the opportunity while everybody was sheltering in places. We reimagined our hospitality business. We redesigned our menus, our pricing structure, our turn times, our service standards. We've got a tremendous leadership team, and we fully believe we're going to make a huge impact once we can go back to full service, a huge impact in our F&B business, both from a revenue and a margin perspective. Many of the restaurants that maybe would've been $5 million or $6 million, we think they'll now be $8 million or $9 million, maybe up to $10 million, just by the enhancements we've made. Our pantries used to be more of a coffee bar.
Now it's really a wine bar, and we have 40 wines by the glass. We found out that, hey, you have 82 points of margin on average when you have wine by the glass. That's a really good business at the end. It's way better than coffee. Look, coffee's not a bad business, right? You wouldn't mind being Howard Schultz in Starbucks. We like the wine business. It's a really good business. When you're paying somebody to go carry something to a table, if they're carrying a $4.50 cup of coffee to a table versus a $24 glass of wine to the table, think about what that looks like on their payroll as a percentage of sales. Again, just keep everything we're doing, keep thinking, moving up the luxury mountain.
Kind of higher price points, more leverage, more volume, serving actually kind of fewer customers, and you make a lot more money. F&B, we've kind of done the same thing. We've elevated the menu, elevated a lot of things. In fact, most of the menu elevation we're doing right here right now in Marin, and we'll be rolling that out. I think that'll be a significant impact. I think we have one of the great hospitality businesses in the world right now. Our volumes are incredible. Our model looks incredible. Most of our restaurants are packed all the time. We can't wait until we can go to 100% seating. Just out of the gate, Dallas looks like it's going to be a $10 million + restaurant. With the new wine margin structure, which is really good. They're drinking a lot of wine in Dallas.
We feel good about it. It's going to be a good part of the model. When you think about how much traffic it drives to our galleries and what that does, and then what that traffic does to offset advertising costs and other things, it all looks incremental to us.
Great. Thanks so much, Gary.
Your next question comes from the line of Seth Basham with Wedbush.
Thanks a lot. My question, if you can hear me, is around the design services business. You mentioned it being the largest in North America. I am wondering by what metric you're measuring it. Secondly, can you give us an idea of what you've learned from that business over the last two years and how you might translate it to Europe?
Sure. Yeah. If you just look at the volume our interior design business generates and the volume our trade business, which is really part of our design services generates towards the external interior designers. If you look at residential design firms, I don't know of anybody that's larger than us or close to larger than us. It's been a big enhancement to our business. It's moved us from just selling products to selling spaces, and moved us from products to projects. It's a huge strategic strength of ours, and we've created great strategic separation. We continue to invest in that business. It's an important business for us. As it translates to Europe, we think that it's going to be very successful in Europe. If you just stand back and think, how many times in people's lifetimes do they get to furnish an entire home?
Very few times. Why would they be any good at it, right? You can't be good at something you only do a couple of times in your life. That's why if you look at, I would say, look at Zillow or look at Redfin or look at anything, and just go through the most expensive houses, the least expensive houses, you generally see bad architecture and bad interior design. So, we think we can make a big impact in the way people live, and to live with not just more beautiful environments and spaces, but massively more functional and logical. People just don't know how to do it. Why would you be any good at it? It'd be like walking onto a tennis court for the first time. You've only been a bowler or something like that. Why would you be good at tennis?
I think it's interesting, a lot of people are like, "Oh, I want my home to really reflect me." That's great. If you're not any good at interior design, your house will reflect you, and it's not going to be any good. I think our service, now that it's out there, and the great thing about our design service and why we're so successful at it and why it's so much more impactful than other people is the galleries, right? It's the galleries and the sourcebooks and the way we present goods. We don't build retail stores. Most people selling furniture and home furnishings, you walk in and it looks like a retail store. You got dining tables piled up with all kinds of seasonal crap on them. You've got stuff all over.
You've got shelves full of pillows and candlesticks and tchotchkes and all kinds of stuff. It looks like a mess. It doesn't look like a home. It looks like a store. You walk into one of our galleries, it looks like a home. It doesn't look like any home on Redfin and Zillow. It looks like better than any home than Redfin and Zillow. It's a very inspiring physical manifestation of our brand, and people want their homes to look like that because they haven't seen anything that looks that great. That gives our design teams credibility because they're servicing the customer within the example of the work, right? That's why we have credibility. If you walk into any of the other people that people might go buy from, it's a bunch of crap all over.
It doesn't look like a dining table with a bunch of tchotchke, Halloween or Christmas stuff piled on it, or pillows all over shelves everywhere and candlesticks everywhere. Most retail stores, you walk them all, you're walking into home stores, home furnishing stores, they're like a mess. We look like a beautiful inspirational space. That's why it works, and that's why it'll translate. You can't just say, "Oh, we have design services." Great. If your stores look like shit, nobody cares.
Your next question comes from the line of Zach Fadem with Wells Fargo.
Hey, Gary. Two questions on RH Guesthouse. You said a lot of exciting things here. First, I'm curious if there's anything you can share on the revenue model. Second, maybe you could walk us through the food and bev or experience offerings versus a typical boutique hotel.
We're not building a hotel, so I don't know how to compare us to one. The RH Guesthouse revenue model, you'll learn more about it once we open it. We're going to have fairly expensive rooms, and we're building an experience that the world's never seen. It's not going to be cheap. Think about it this way. The RH Guesthouse is the flag gets planted immediately at the top of the luxury mountain. Every other luxury hotel in the world, I think, is going to be forced to tip their hat. They're going to say, "Wow, we've never done that. Wow, how did they figure that out?" We're just going to do a lot of things that have never been seen, and we're doing it at the very top end of the market.
It's going to be an incredible aspirational, inspiring experience, and it's all designed about privacy and luxury. I think we're going to command very high rates, and we don't have to sell a lot of rooms because we don't have a lot of rooms. Most boutique hotels, they're all trying to be hip and cool, and they're trying to have lobbies with a bunch of people sitting in them. If you go to, what's the one? Hey, I forget now. I'm blanking. The one you go, yeah, the Ace Hotel or anything like that, which I think are cool for the market they're going after.
The original W.
Yeah, the original Ws. There's all kinds of people sitting in the lobbies, and they have their Apple. You see a bunch of little Apple lit up logos. Everybody's working. A bunch of unemployed people working on their laptops in the lobby. That's exactly the opposite of what we're going to have. This is about privacy and luxury. Private entrances with stuff to your room. You don't have to walk by a bunch of people in the lobby. There's no people in the lobby that can get up the elevator to your room. This is like a whole different gig. Then the F&B experience is super elevated. It's a beautiful restaurant with an incredible live fire component to it. There's no restaurant like it in the world that I've ever seen. We're really excited about the restaurant concept.
We're really excited New York's going to open with our first Champagne & Caviar cellar. That's going to be an incredible, I think it's going to be the best experience anybody's seen around caviar and champagne. It's targeted for a very wealthy and affluent and discerning clientele. The idea is it's going to elevate our brand. It's going to position us as a thought leader, as a pacemaker, and a placemaker in the world. Aspen will do the same. Aspen will have our first RH Bath House & Spa. That will have a membership component to it because we only have nine rooms in Aspen, so you can't run a bathhouse and spa with nine rooms. Aspen's going to be a really good model for us with having a membership to a bathhouse and spa.
That'll be the nicest spa you can go to in all of Aspen. You'll get it when you see it. The kind of stuff we do sometimes seeing is believing. It's no different than RH Modern when we first launched in that, a lot of people were like, "What? What's it going to be?" We launched it, now it's a huge part of our business. Same thing with Contemporary, same thing with Guesth ouses, same thing with everything we do. Just they just haven't been done before. Basically, we try to, anywhere we can, create new markets, right? We don't say, "Oh, let's do it like this person, just a little better." We try to conceptualize something that is significantly better and more unique and desirable than anything that's in the market. We think our guesthouse is going to be that.
This concludes today's portion of the Q&A call. I will now turn the call back over to Gary Friedman for closing remarks.
Great. Well, thank you everyone for your interest in our brand. I want to thank our team for everything they do to bring our brand to life. We're all excited about the unmasking of America and moving past this pandemic. We think it's going to be an exciting time, and we have a tremendous amount of innovation in our pipeline, and we look forward to talking to you next quarter. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, this concludes today's conference call.