Net Income Down 17% But It’s All Part of the Plan? Tilly’s Quarter

In the quarter ended November 1, Tilly’s grew its sales 6.1% to $131.3 million compared to the same quarter last year. But net income fell 17% from $6.15 million in last year’s quarter to $5.11 million.

Meanwhile, in the conference call, President and CEO Daniel Griesemer’s first statement about the result is as follows:

“We’re pleased with the meaningful progress we are making on our initiatives to increase sales and profitability as our third quarter results exceeded expectations.”

I actually just went back and checked to make sure I was looking at the right conference call transcript and financial statement. I am. I know there’s a certain promotional aspect to conference calls- that you want to put your best foot forward and all that stuff. But don’t you need to oh, I don’t know, mention in passing that your profit fell when revenues and the gross margin were up?

Perhaps not if you’re Tilly’s. After all, when they took the company public it was done in such a way that the founders and owners still controlled the voting shares. Well, as I said when they went public, I admire them for going public but maintaining control, though I can’t figure out why people bought the stock under those circumstances.

I’m the first one to champion the idea that one quarter doesn’t matter in the scheme of things. But hey people at Tilly’s, you’re really making me dig to try and explain why in this case. They do, by the way, give me some possible reasons to think that. I’ll get to those.

The gross margin rose from 30.6% to 30.9%, due to an increase in product margin. SG & A expense rose from 15.5% from $27.7 to $32 million. As a percentage of revenue, they rose from 22.4% to 24.4%.

Selling expense as a percentage of sales rose from 15.4% to 17.3%. 1% of that increase was because “…store and field payroll, payroll benefits and related personnel costs increased at a higher rate than net sales primarily due to the addition of new stores…” There was a 0.9% increase “…related to increased marketing costs, supplies and other store support costs, primarily due to higher catalog and other marketing spend compared to last year.”

General and administrative expenses rose just 0.1% from 7.0% to 7.1%.

Operating income was down from $10.2 to $8.6 million, or by 15.7% “…primarily due to a decline in our comparable store sales and increased costs related to new stores growing at a faster rate than sales. Our comparable store sales decreased 1.2% for the thirteen weeks ended November 1, 2014, which followed a 1.9% decrease for the full fiscal year 2013 and compares to a 2.4% decrease in the third quarter of fiscal year 2013.”

Average sales per store during the quarter fell from $592,000 last year to $571,000. For three quarters, it was down from $1.777 to $1.623 million. They ended the quarter with 207 stores.  They had 99 stores at the beginning of fiscal 2009.

Tilly’s stores are located “…in malls, lifestyle centers, ‘power’ centers, community centers, outlet centers and street-front locations.” This feels like store location is strongly driven by how good a deal they can make on real estate. That may serve them well in coming years.

The balance sheet remains strong, with a solid current ratio and no long term debt. Cash flow from operations for the nine months was $21.1 million compared to $27.3 million in last year’s nine months.

CEO Dan Griesemer tells us in the conference call they are working to increase market share and improve profitability through “…increased product differentiation and innovation, a greater emphasis on our digital platform and evolving our real estate strategy.” Any retailer might say that. In fact, they mostly do. Tilly’s goes on to give us a little more information.

“In keeping with our history of offering our customer the most relevant assortment of action sports inspired merchandise, we introduce more products and brands that are new, unique or exclusive to Tilly’s. Our new brands, brand extensions, exclusives and collaborations continue to perform well and strengthen our confidence in this product strategy. We introduced new brand expansion including GoPro, Stance, Sector 9 and Full Tilt Dream. We delivered a number of exclusive products including collections from Hurley and LRG. We also introduced several new or exclusive collaborations including offerings from Volcom, Adidas and Vans.”

I don’t see how that differentiates them from what other retailers are doing, but having the right brands at the right time is obviously important. I also hate brands doing SMUs, but that just seems to be where we are in the market. If a brand does an SMU for Tilly’s just whose brand is it?

With regards to ecommerce, “…we launched a new state of the art responsive design e-commerce platform for desktop and mobile…The new platform offer significantly improved look and feel, navigation and performance and offers a much more compelling user experience… Given what we know about their shopping habit, we are now able to tailor our product, marketing and promotional activities based on user preferences as we believe will lead to improved sales and profitability.”

“We believe our new state of the art e-commerce platform dedicated e-commerce fulfillment center and omnichannel capabilities now put at significantly ahead of our peer set and position us well to take advantage of the extraordinary e-commerce opportunity we see ahead of us.”

Important, obviously, but what everybody else is trying to do. Is Tilly’s going to do it better? Don’t know.

In real estate, CEO Griesemer notes, “… our new stores opened this year are performing well and in line with the new store economic model and more stringent site selection process we outlined earlier in the year.” I don’t know what the specifics of that process are.

In the fourth quarter, Tilly’s “…expect to incur incremental marketing expenses in the fourth quarter based upon the continued strength in customer response to our marketing efforts to date.” Isn’t it wonderful to have a balance sheet and cash flow that allows you to do it!

In what was a pretty short conference call, a couple of analysts ask for some metrics around specific issues and were given none. It’s not like that never happens in a conference call, but I’m wondering if that doesn’t reflect the founder’s control of the voting stock.

Tilly’s has a strong balance sheet. Store growth has been pretty rapid, and may explain some of the higher expenses and lower profitability. I conjecture that real estate is a core competence for them and that may be particularly important over the next few years. Their other initiatives don’t seem different from other retailers. We’ll see if they can perform them better.

The stock opened at $18.80 the day Tilly’s went public on May 4, 2012. As I write this (December 15, 2014), it’s at $8.94. But it closed at $6.98 the day before earnings were announced, so I guess people liked what they heard.

You know, it took me a lot of work and reading between the lines to be able to conjecture on what might be going on here. Tilly’s is making money, and there are some possible reasons why the decline in profitability might make sense if you take a longer term perspective. But Tilly’s doesn’t do a very good job explaining that.

I wish they would, because then I wouldn’t be sitting here wondering what’s going on. I’m confused and don’t know what to think.