Playboy - Q4 2023

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to PLBY Group's full year and fourth quarter of 2023 earnings conference call. Hosting today's call are Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, and Marc Crossman, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer. The company will be hosting a question-and-answer session today. To join the queue to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. While we wait for the queue to fill, I'd like to hand the call over to Ashley DeSimone of ICR.

Ashley DeSimone (Partner)

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone. I'd like to remind everyone that the information discussed today is qualified in its entirety by the Form 8-K filed today by PLBY Group, which may be accessed on the SEC's website and PLBY Group's website. Today's call is also being webcast, and a replay will be posted to the company's investor relations website. Please note that statements made during this call, including financial projections or other statements that are not historical in nature, may constitute forward-looking statements. Such statements are made on the basis of PLBY Group's views and assumptions regarding future events and business performance at the time they're made, and we do not undertake any obligation to update these statements.

Forward-looking statements are subject to risks which could cause the company's actual results to differ from its historical results and forecasts, including those risks set forth in the company's filings with the SEC, and you should refer to and carefully consider those for more information. This cautionary statement applies to all forward-looking statements made during this call. Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements. During this call, the company may refer to non-GAAP financial measures. Such non-GAAP measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures is available in the earnings release PLBY Group filed with its Form 8-K today. With that, I will hand the call back over to the operator to begin the Q&A session. Operator?

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Again, at this time, we will be conducting a question-and-answer session. Again, if you'd like to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may also press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using any speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing these star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first question comes from the line of Jason Tilchen with Canaccord Genuity. Please proceed with your question.

Jason Tilchen (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question, and thanks for all the helpful color in the press release. A few questions, maybe one to start off. Licensing revenue came in pretty well ahead of our expectations. I'm just curious, how much of this was driven by sort of occurring, recovering more of the minimum guarantees that you have in place already versus contributions from some of the newer partners that you've been adding over recent months?

Ben Kohn (CEO)

Thanks, Jason. Good afternoon. It's Ben. Yeah, we're happy with where we are on the licensing business and the strategic changes we've made to especially rebuild our China business. You know, we are in active negotiations to replace the terminated licensees, as well as going after one of our former licensees on a legal basis over there. So, you know, we're starting to see traction, and we're starting to see what I would say is stability, especially from a macro perspective in that business.

Jason Tilchen (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. That's helpful. And then, one I have on Honey Birdette. Last quarter, you talked about how, you know, right now, maybe with the market backdrop, it wasn't the right time to sort of, look at the idea of asset, but longer term, you didn't see it as part of your core strategy. I'm wondering, given the momentum that business had in Q4, some of the things you laid out in terms of your goals for this year, if that view has changed at all. And sort of a follow-up to that, would be: Do you see an opportunity to leverage Playboy Club creators to drive some of the organic advertising and marketing that you talk about within your goals for that business, this year?

Ben Kohn (CEO)

Sure. So I'll reiterate, you know, what I've said historically, is our goal is to move to an asset-light model, but we believe Honey Birdette is a very valuable brand, and we were going to make the operational changes in the interim, and we've made those, and we're starting to see the performance through that, both on the top line and the bottom line. You know, we are in the process of phasing in a 10% price increase this year to the products. We had not really done that, given the mass inflation we've all seen as consumers over the past few years. And we haven't seen any resistance to that from the consumer so far. And so our goal long term is still to find the right owner for that.

But in the interim, you know, we are not going to just give away that asset at the wrong valuation for our shareholders as a fiduciary. And so, as market conditions improve and the business continues to improve, you know, we're always open to being opportunistic, especially given our debt. Our goal is to delever the company. You know, as far as integration, yes, I can tell you we have creators that come into the office every day wanting Honey Birdette, and I think there are a lot of things that we can do moving forward to better integrate our creators into working with and promoting Honey Birdette. We're working on something right now for a Formula One event we'll be having in Miami with that.

You know, no promises, but I think there's other rewards now that we've introduced our tier and point system within the Playboy Club app, to reward creators down the road with merchandise as well.

Jason Tilchen (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay, great. That's really helpful. And just at higher level, following up on that, you know, in terms of you talked about how because of the licensing challenges and headwinds last year, you didn't really invest as much into promoting and marketing the creator platform. Curious, if you can maybe dive into some of the strategies you plan to deploy this year. You talked a little bit at the end of the press release about how you, you're gonna focus on growing and marketing that digital business. I'm wondering if there's anything else you can share on that plan.

Ben Kohn (CEO)

Sure. And I think, you know, last year we spent basically nothing on, on marketing or promoting, that, and we still saw phenomenal, top line growth in that business last year. But, you know, I think we have to return the company, to what its roots were, and I think we talked about that in, the earnings release. I think, you know, the expression a lot of people hear, you know, hear these days are sort of go woke and go broke. I think, you know, we, this, this is a business, that has always been about, you know, working with, working with beautiful women, and, and a lot of the way we've, we expressed that historically was through content. And we plan on getting back into the content, game this year.

And so that content will come to life in many forms, including, you know, the return of the Playmate, hopefully bringing back the magazine, but then also producing content that lives on other platforms with the goal of acquiring audience and acquiring creators. And so we think creators want three things in our mind. They want to make money, make as much money as they possibly can. They want to build their brand and their audience, and they care about their reputation. And we think, you know, at Playboy, we can build all three. I think, you know, we also launched membership, and membership is very strategic for us. Not only, you know, does it increase our revenue, but it gives us a product that we can actually, spend money against marketing. We have not done that to date.

Very happy with sort of the organic revenue that we are generating off of membership. But now with a $100 price point, we have money to actually go spend, to generate new users, and creators to the platform through performance marketing. But, you know, the majority of our spend moving forward will all be through content. We think that's the most effective way to market the platform, that content featuring our creators. And it also helps us from a brand perspective on the licensing side.

Jason Tilchen (Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Great. Very helpful. Thanks a lot.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Greg Pendy with Chardan. Please proceed with your question.

Greg Pendy (Analyst)

Hey, guys. Thanks for taking my questions, and congrats on the strength in Honey Birdette carrying in from 3Q into 4Q. But I just wanted to pick at that a little bit. I was wondering if you could provide any color on the decision to close those stores. Were they in unattractive lease locations? Because I know they're typically in very high-end locations, or any color on what made those three stores kind of stand out versus an overall strength in the brand?

Marc Crossman (CFO and COO)

Hey, Greg, I'll take that. It was, they're primarily stores in Australia, and a lot of the stores in Australia have been around for quite some time. And so we're looking at end of life for these leases versus the amount of CapEx we'd have to put in to refurbish them, and also whether or not they're running at a four-wall loss or profitability. And so if we have a lease that has come to life, we would still have to put new CapEx dollars in to refresh it, and it's losing money, that's a store that we earmarked to close. And as we had said in the release, there are probably about four of them that you'll see us close over the course of the year.

Greg Pendy (Analyst)

Okay, that's helpful. So there's gonna be a limited termination fee probably on the lease because they're near end of life?

Marc Crossman (CFO and COO)

The ones that are near end of life, yes. There won't be one. But there's one that we're looking at, which, you know, there would be a small termination fee.

Greg Pendy (Analyst)

Okay, that's helpful. And then just shifting gears, just one on the digital strategy. It just looks like a... I wanna make sure I understand, you know, how you guys are thinking about it in 2024. I know you've made a lot of changes and improvements to the platform, but it seems like, you know, this strategy, maybe versus your competitors, is to really support the creators and hope that it's the creators that will then drive the subscribers. Is that, is that fair to say?

Ben Kohn (CEO)

Thanks, Greg. I'll take that. So a couple of things. You know, obviously, we rebranded the platform, the Playboy Club, and I think in doing some research with consumers, what we found was the historical names we used for it didn't really support what the main purpose or the main action people were doing, which was interacting with creators. And so the Playboy Club now, from what we're seeing and from what we're hearing from users, you know, clearly supports the place to come interact with our creators. You know, from a creator, from a user funnel perspective, there's a number of things that we're doing.

So first, you know, creators bringing their own users to the platform, and that's mostly done through their social media platforms, whether that be TikTok or Instagram, where they're putting a link in their bio to their Playboy page. We also have users that just come to Playboy because of the strength of the brand. And actually, we recently replatformed our 70 years of archives, which was a standalone product that historically had been licensed, called iPlayboy, but it was run as a third-party site, and we actually replatformed that into our current code. It sits as part of membership now. But more importantly, what it does is it allows us to SEO 70 years of archives. And so we're seeing things like that start to drive more organic traffic.

And then the third strategy moving forward is obviously to start to produce content alongside our creators. With the goal of that content sitting on third-party platforms, whether that's a podcast on Spotify, video content on YouTube, you know, really highlighting our creators through what we think are, you know, historical franchises like Twenty Questions, like the Playmate, et cetera, with the goal of driving people back to our platform. The other thing is we think we can put advertising revenue, programmatic advertising revenue against that content, and we'll share in that advertising revenue with our creator as well.

Greg Pendy (Analyst)

Great. Well, that's, that's very helpful. Congratulations on the quarter, and good luck in 2024.

Ben Kohn (CEO)

Thanks, Greg. The only other thing I'll mention is, you know, the launch in membership is very strategic in the ability to acquire users moving forward as well. And so what's actually interesting is we're testing our funnels. As we've seen, almost 40% of our members today come off our Playboy Plus platform. Playboy Plus is a platform that we've actually never bought traffic for. It's just on affiliate deals, and so we think there's another opportunity over there to actually start to expand our traffic acquisition strategy there. It's a separate subscription product, but then we're seeing that conversion of people that are signing up for Playboy Plus, also signing up for the Playboy Club membership. And so things like Bunny Money enable us to make that transition and that user flow more seamless.

You know, long term, as we said in the press release, that we will look to re-platform both those products, Playboy Plus and Playboy.tv, and so that we can have a single sign-on user flow.

Greg Pendy (Analyst)

Okay, that's helpful. And then, just so that I understand, the membership right now, it's 100, and is there, is it $25 in the Bunny Money right now, to help incentivize and move the membership?

Ben Kohn (CEO)

So, the membership is $199 right now. You get $25 of Bunny Money as part of that to spend on your favorite creators. You know, we think there's use cases to continue to expand Bunny Money to attend Playboy events, Playboy golf tournaments, poker tournaments, et cetera. Right now, it's, you know, the primary use is to spend on the creators. And then, you know, long term, we see multiple different tiers of membership, each one being more limited in nature at a higher price point, but unlocking more of the Playboy lifestyle.

Greg Pendy (Analyst)

Okay, and then one final one on the Bunny Money. I know it's bundling the transaction. Does that only lower the fee on your end, or does it—does the user kind of also see the benefit of using Bunny Money?

Ben Kohn (CEO)

Well, there's multiple different benefits. So we've just started with Bunny Money. But yes, from our perspective, the way our credit card fees work is we pay a per transaction fee as well as a percentage of that transaction. And so if someone is tipping $1, you're paying a per transaction fee every single time someone tips $1. And so by bundling transactions and saying that any transaction under $10 has to be used by Bunny Money, where it's a one-time charge on your credit card. The other thing we heard from users, actually, was there was too many transactions showing up on people's credit cards, and was there a way to aggregate all those transactions? Bunny Money allows us to do that.

You know, long term, we can use Bunny Money very much like DraftKings and other gaming companies do to incentivize first-time spenders, to incentivize people to come back to the platform that might have churned. And so I think we will continue to, you know, let the data speak for itself, but continue to expand the use of Bunny Money long term on the platform. It's just the economics make sense for us. The economics don't change for the consumer or for the creator, and so it makes sense overall.

Greg Pendy (Analyst)

Great. That's very helpful. Thanks a lot.

Ben Kohn (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question and answer session. I'll now turn the call back over to the CEO, Ben Kohn, for closing remarks.

Ben Kohn (CEO)

I appreciate everyone dialing in for our Q4 and full year 2023 results, and we look forward to talking to you in a few months on our Q1 results. Appreciate it, everyone.

Operator (participant)

This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.