PLBY Group, Inc.

Thank you for standing by and welcome to second quarter 2021 conference call for PLBY Group, Incorporated. The information discussed today is qualified in its entirety by the form of 8K that has been filed today by PLBY Group, Incorporated, which may be accessed on the SEC website and PLBY Group's website. Today's call is also being webcast and the replay will be posted to PLBY's website. Please note that statements made during this call, including final 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's views and assumptions regarding future events and business performance at the time they are made. And we do not undertake any obligation to update these statements. Forward-looking statements are subject to risk which could cause PLBY's actual results to differ from its historical results and forecasts, including those risks set forth in PLBY's filings with the SEC, and you should refer to and carefully consider those for more information. The discussionary statement applies to all forward-looking statements made during this call. Do not place any reliance on any forward-looking statements. Hosting today's call are Ben Cohn, Chief Executive Officer, Rachel Weber, Chief Brand Officer, and Lance Barton, Chief Financial Officer. I will now open the call to Vencon. Please go ahead.

Thank you, Operator, and good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our 2021 Second Quarter Earnings Call. I'm excited to walk you through our recent results as well as to share an update on the significant operational progress we've made executing against our growth strategy. Before I dive in, I want to share the news that Suying Liu, has stepped down from our board. I want to thank him for his service and his many contributions. I also want to note that with CDN's departure, we have an even greater opportunity to increase the diversity of our board, a process we kicked off a number of months back. Our ambition is to live up to Playboy's remarkable legacy fighting for gender equality. With a workforce today that is nearly 75% female, even before including Honey Birdette's incredible female-led team, and a customer base with significant female representation. We firmly believe our board should have significant female representation as well. Okay, on to the results. The second quarter of 2021 was our first full quarter as a public company, and I'm pleased to report very strong results across all areas of our business. We have been hard at work building and expanding a unified digital commerce platform, optimizing our licensing partnerships, exploiting the natural synergies between and across companies, our Playboy, Yandy, and Lovers operations, and reinvesting in our brand and infrastructure to bring to market fiscal and digital products and experiences that today's consumers are most excited about. Our growth strategy is threefold. First and foremost, we are focused on expanding our U.S. direct-to-consumer commerce business to capture 100 cents of consumer spend versus the 5 to 6 cents that has historically been captured through previous licensing arrangements. Second, we are working to optimize our licensing business in key international territories and categories. And third, we are investing in emerging growth opportunities that we believe will accelerate our long-term growth trajectory and generate significant returns over a three- to five-year time horizon. I'm very proud of our team's results across our three priorities. On the direct-to-consumer side, we grew revenue 88% year over year, This is a result of the team's early efforts to ramp up influencer marketing and cross-selling initiatives across our channels. On Playboy.com in particular, we are seeing a dramatic shift in consumer behavior. Consumers more and more understand that Playboy offers high-quality lifestyle products and that Playboy.com is a place to shop. During Q2, our shopping customers grew by nearly 70%. This shift in consumer behavior is driven in part through our strategic influencer marketing initiatives. Each week, we average 100 influencer posts with influencers selected based on the strength of their product recommendations and their ability to convert or target audiences. Many of these influencers are part of our Playboy network of talent, including our Playmates and prominent adult stars. In addition to posting on their own channels and thereby massively extending our reach, these influencers provide a library of content for us to use across our channels, helping us to create consistent, and persistent touch points for sales and conversion. We've also seen great results from our work with top social media influencers eager to be associated with the Playboy brand. For instance, our Pride collection with Bretman Rock sold out in a matter of hours. Based on our key learnings, we have developed a robust calendar of influencer-driven streetwear and fashion collaborations to roll out in the coming months. Creating our own influencer-driven collections is the future model of Playboy Labs, We are now operating as a designer and operational owner of these drops and selling them directly to consumers on our own platforms versus licensing our brand to talent for sales on theirs. Consumer demand for Playboy streetwear has exploded, as evidenced by our own e-commerce sales and the rapid growth of PacSun's Playboy branded offerings. By working with influencers on a regular cadence of streetwear-oriented fashion drops, We create regular events that increase brand affinity, maintain cultural relevance, and help seed out the seasonality of our business. As we shared on our last call, the Playboy brand is incredibly strong with the culture-driving Gen Z audience, which requires our team to act fast on organic viral moments. Just a few weeks ago, the Playboy Hoodie Challenge started trending organically on TikTok, and the team acted within a number of hours to launch a fan contest that brought the conversation directly to our channels and allowed us to participate directly in the moment. The entirely organic, quick turnaround contest generated millions of impressions and engagements and reached over 300,000 unique users. And most importantly, our product or operation has the ability to act fast, too. Within 48 hours, we launched an additional 13 cover Herdy designs for sale on our site to capitalize on the product buzz. It's been very exciting to see the continued success of our Playboy and Yandy integrations. By leveraging shared design infrastructure and multiple owned distribution channels, we brought our biggest Playboy and Yandy partnership to market this April with a spring collection featuring 20 different designs. The collection generated roughly a half a million dollars in revenue from sales across both Yandy.com and Playboy.com and proved the power of the Playboy masthead in the Intimates category. Following this success, we extended our offerings with our first Playboy and Yandy swimwear capsule collection, and we recently rolled out our second Midsummer Night's Dream Playboy and Yandy collection just last month. During Q2, our operational integrations also extended to Lovers, where we now have a combined buying team across Yandy and Lovers, an integrated e-commerce and technology team, and cross-channel marketing across all of our brands. Lovers also saw its best in-store conversion rate to date in Q2, demonstrating the continued desire for sexual wellness consumers to connect with brands and people they are buying from. We are investing behind these early wins in direct-to-consumer with the expectation that our near-term investments will accelerate and expand our long-term growth. Most crucially, we are hard at work integrating our e-commerce technology platform and investing in the digital consumer experience. Consumer-facing improvements to come include enhanced navigation, streamlined checkout, wishlists that can be shared with partners and friends, reviews, rewards, and more. We have already unified email and communication platforms across brands, and we expect to step into a unified CRM across all brands by early next year. On the back end, we are implementing a new ERP, along with warehouse and order management improvements, so that next year every stage of our customer interaction will be unified. Perhaps most exciting of all on our direct-to-consumer transformation is our acquisition of Honey Burdette, a luxury lifestyle and lingerie brand created for women by women. With Honey Burdette, we are adding over $80 million of high-margin and fast-growing revenue and an extremely talented team that brings us the design, sourcing, and merchandising capabilities we need to accelerate the growth of our existing direct-to-consumer platform. HoneyBirdette's superior product design, sourcing, and direct-to-consumer capabilities will also accelerate our Playboy-branded lingerie, loungewear, swimwear, and sexual wellness go-to-market plans, targeting the prestige consumer. In addition, HoneyBirdette's uniquely weekly drop merchandising approach will provide a calendar consistency and help smooth out PLBY Group's seasonality, We expect to launch a new Playboy brand of lingerie and women's lifestyle label designed and operated by Honey Burnett's team in the first half of next year, expanding and accelerating our previous roadmap for these offerings. On the licensing side in the second quarter, we grew our revenue 12% year over year. In China, our partners capitalized on the June 18th online shopping holiday, selling more than 2 million Playboy branded apparel pieces on that one day alone. We also continue working with our partners to expand product offerings for female consumers through a successful Q2 apparel collaboration with the designers at Chin Studio. In India, we signed deals and hospitality for Playboy beer gardens and venues, as well as in digital gaming with partner gaming technologies, bringing Playboy Lummi to the market in 2022. And in the U.S. and Western Europe, the second quarter marked successful collections from both PAX Summoners Guided and new high-end collaborations with Amiri, Color Bars, Emotionally Unavailable, DefShop, and Duke & Dexter. In gaming, a key licensing category for us, we've made significant progress relicensing our US iGaming rights for digital casino games. We're very excited by the potential here as the North American expansion of regulated real-money gaming accelerates. Across our direct-to-consumer and licensing businesses, our second quarter and year-to-date performance is even more impressive when taking into consideration the continued headwinds from COVID. The supply chain challenges impacting many industries continue to impact our business as well. For example, throughout the quarter, Yandy remained out of stock on many of our top-selling items, and we have seen consistent delays on product launches on Playboy.com and with our licensing partners. In advance of the holiday season, we're working proactively to source product in new ways that minimize chances for disruption. It is also worth noting that ongoing shutdowns have impacted our gaming business in particular, including our London Casino and live dealer studios, and travel restrictions have delayed our ability to implement some of our growth plans, develop new partnerships, and restructure existing licensing agreements. The opportunities have not been lost, but rather shifted in timing, The ability to renegotiate deals, especially internationally, requires our ability to meet face-to-face with our partners, and we look forward to doing so when COVID restrictions ease. The transformation that we have discussed, moving from a licensing business to an owned and operated business in key categories and territories, is well on its way, but it takes time, especially in the face of COVID. I'm extremely pleased with the performance we've delivered across these first two pillars of our growth strategy. and we expect to see acceleration of the business once these headwinds abate. Now onto the third pillar of our strategy, emerging growth. While achieving strong progress across our direct-to-consumer and licensing businesses, we're also prioritizing emerging growth opportunities that we believe will accelerate and expand our growth significantly in the coming years. To deep dive into those initiatives, I'm going to hand the call over to our Chief Brand Officer, Rachel Weber.

Thanks, Ben, and hi, everyone. I'm excited to share an update today on the progress we've made on our highest priority new growth initiatives, first on NFTs and digital experiences, and second on Playboy's new label and category plans. We couldn't be more excited by the opportunities we see ahead for the Playboy brand and business in the world of blockchain technology and the digital creator economy. As our physical and digital worlds increasingly converge, We believe the meaningful differentiators in our business today, the badge value of the Playboy brand, our access to a coveted talent network, and our ever-expanding library of content will be increasingly valuable. Q2 marked our foray into the NFT space with our first drop on Nifty Gateway, a collaboration with the artist Slime Sunday that sold out in minutes and generated almost a million dollars in primary sales in 24 hours. In June, we partnered with Nifty again to release a collaboration with artist Chantal Martin, a series of augmented reality interpretations of David Bowie's 1976 Playboy interview in support of Pride Month. Our first two drops demonstrated the immense power and infinite possibilities of our prices archive, and we also learned a tremendous amount on what works and what still needs big improvement in blockchain-based consumer experiences. Overall, we've been thrilled by the enthusiastic community and collector response. This past month, we participated alongside major auction houses, art galleries, and marketplaces in Decentraland's second annual virtual art fair with our Miami Beach art collection. Our collection was minted for sale on the art marketplace SuperRare and most notably contained our first heritage print NFT, a digitized version of a photograph of a Playboy bunny pictured water skiing outside of the Miami Club in 1970. We're very encouraged by the reaction to the archival work and the 19th sale price, roughly $60,000 in value today for the single digital print. What's becoming increasingly clear in the world of NFTs and the broader digital creator economy is that great success and true differentiation lies at the intersection of content and community. Playboy pioneered the intersection of content and community. We therefore have both the right to play and the unique competitive advantage to win in this new world. Our path forward is built upon our ever-expanding library of highly engaging and coveted content, our 10 million piece archive, our built-in talent and influencer network, and the proven desire of our fans to be members of Playboy Worlds. What we're working on now is a consumer proposition integrated into our own ecosystem that leverages NFTs and blockchain technology to allow our fans to truly become members of Playboy today. We are applying the insights we've gleaned from participating with the most early adopter crypto audiences to build offerings that can extend to our mainstream fan base as well. The unique assets we have to offer that integrate physical and virtual goods access to creators and tools for creators, access to special events and experiences are what we believe can form our specialized value proposition. Over the weeks and months ahead, we will continue to strategically release digital art and collectibles as we work towards the rollout of this integrated content and community membership offering. We are so excited by everything we have in the works today. and we're also inspired knowing that we're still so early in this next era of Internet and technology explosion. We are acting fast to gain early mover advantage while simultaneously building for what we believe will have transformational long-term growth potential. The second new growth area I'm excited to talk about today is how we are leveraging Playboy IP to develop new sub-brands, or what we're calling labels, and new high-growth categories. On the new labels front, our first new launch will be Big Bunny. Big Bunny is a label designed for the new jet set. It combines the ideals of style, travel, and pleasure and represents the pinnacle of aspiration for the brand. We expect to introduce our first collection of products that tie back to this intersection of style, travel, and pleasure in Q4 this year. And then an entire range of offerings are expected to be released each season going forward. The reason we are creating labels is so we can appeal to different consumer segments in ways that resonate most with them. Playboy is an incredibly unique brand in its ability to go high-low, to offer a range of prestige and luxury, and to appeal across age and gender demographics. By creating specialized labels, like the Jordan label for Nike, we can go deep with each consumer segment and build massive new franchises that stem from the Hero Playboy brand. From a price point perspective, Big Bunny is for our upper-tier demographic. But while it will feel exclusive, it will not feel out of touch and will still have many accessible offerings and ways in for consumers who aspire to participate in the lifestyle of the contemporary jet set. In addition to developing new labels, we are also leveraging the Playboy brand to expand into new owned and operated product categories. After recently completing our deal to bring back rights in-house, we now have a robust beauty product roadmap in development. We are currently in the product formulation and design stages for our first collection that we plan to debut in 2022. We've begun some early tests in the category as well with our press-on nails collection and our licensed fragrance products, both of which just rolled out on Playboy.com this past week. Our licensed fragrance products have been performing well across European retail over the past few months, and we're excited to now offer them directly to our consumers as well. The investments we are making today to develop new labels and owned product lines are intended to both propel our U.S. consumer commerce business over the coming years and to serve as high-value new offerings to bring to market in international territories via strategic business models. Lastly, before I hand the call over, I wanted to add a warm welcome to our Honey Burdette colleagues. We've been huge admirers of Honey Burdette since we first met on a collaboration opportunity, and we couldn't be more thrilled to now be working side-by-side with their immensely talented design team to help us accelerate bringing to market our women's-focused Playboy labels. With that, I'll hand the call over to my colleague Lance Barton, our Chief Financial Officer.

Thanks, Rachel. Q2 was another great quarter that demonstrates the growth potential of this company. I'm not going to waste time reporting all the numbers that are disclosed in our 8K, but I do want to hit on some of the highlights and provide additional context on the investments that we're making. Total revenue growth accelerated in the second quarter to 44% year over year, a nice step up from the 34% growth we achieved in Q1. We saw strength in both direct-to-consumer, where revenue grew 88% year over year to $28 million, and licensing, where revenue grew 12% year-over-year to $15.4 million. On the direct-to-consumer side, we've made tremendous progress transforming Playboy.com into an e-commerce destination. Our hero website achieved 130% sequential revenue growth compared to the first quarter, driven by traffic growth, along with improvements in both conversion and average order value. We expect to continue driving conversion and AOV higher as we begin to integrate Honeybird App products exclusive to Playboy.com, coupled with the upcoming launch of Big Bunny and our own private label, Playboy Lingerie. On the licensing side, the demand for Playboy-branded streetwear remains evident, as PacSun once again delivered significant revenue growth of nearly 300% on a year-over-year basis. Although licensing revenue managed to grow 12% year-over-year, Ongoing COVID-related closures and impacts has led to a 75% year-to-date decrease in revenue from our three largest gaming partners compared to what we would expect to see under normal circumstances. We expect that our licensing revenue on the gaming side will ultimately recover once conditions improve, leading to improved growth prospects for our licensing segment. As Ben mentioned, we are investing behind the traction we continue to see as we build our direct-to-consumer business. with the expectation that these near-term investments will accelerate our long-term growth trajectory. These investments fall into a few key areas. The first, technology investments that provide a superior and unified customer experience across all of our brands, including HoneyBredette. The team is hard at work putting in place best-in-class infrastructure today in order to optimize and scale our business going forward, with a focus on empowering the customer's engagement with us. on-site, in-store, and across the globe. These investments fall under a customer 360 strategy to take their omnichannel shopping behavior to provide a better experience wherever they choose to shop with us and increase our ability to match them with the right product at the right time. We're investing today so we can realize operational synergies down the road across the company. Second, our product and brand investments we are making to develop and launch new labels and own product lines that Rachel discussed. such as the creation of Big Bunny and upcoming beauty and grooming products, along with the creation of new digital revenue streams that we are currently incubating. And third, increased costs related to being a newly public company, such as material increases in insurance costs and professional service fees as we implement the required systems and processes to scale this business as a newly public company. As part of this transition, we also recently announced that we engage BDO as our auditor. In total, we expect that these investments, along with the resulting increases in headcount to support our transformation, will increase our fixed operating expenses by roughly $15 million this year. That's resulting in short-term impacts to margins. But as our revenues scale, these incremental costs remain fixed, and in some cases go away entirely, providing us with opportunity for margin expansion. Additionally, we expect that the implementation costs will result in approximately $4 million of higher CapEx over the next three to four quarters until it returns to a more normal level. Which brings me to M&A. We closed on the acquisition of HoneyBredette on August 9th for a total consideration of approximately $235 million in cash and 2.16 million shares of PLBY stock. We expect $70 million of incremental debt to fund tomorrow in connection with the acquisition, which would increase the size of our term loan from $160 to $230 million, which will leave us with approximately $85 million of cash on our balance sheet after completing the transactions and payment of transaction fees, which gives us plenty of flexibility to pursue future M&A and growth opportunities going forward. On a pro forma basis for 2021, we are now a company with $280 million in revenue and 40% annual growth, with 70% of our revenue now coming directly from the consumer. On an as-reported basis, we believe that Honey Burnett will add an incremental $25 to $30 million of revenue for the remainder of this year, on top of the more than $200 million of revenue that we already expect to generate from our existing businesses for the full year. The biggest uncertainty to our outlook, especially the outlook for Honey Burdette, remains the ongoing impact from COVID. As it stands today, shutdowns in Australia have resulted in most Honey Burdette stores to close temporarily, which has a material impact on revenue for each week they have to remain closed. Fortunately, Honey Burdette has been performing extremely well in the U.S., helping to offset some of the softness caused by the acute impacts being felt in their largest market today. When we think about the near-term investments that we're making, combined with the growth potential we see for both Playboy and HoneyBredette, not to mention our excitement for building incremental digital revenue streams leveraging our IP, we believe that our prior target of $300 million of revenue by 2025 should be closer to $600 million of revenue. And if we find more opportunities to deploy our capital for accretive M&A or internal investments, we would look to further accelerate that timeline. Before I wrap up, I'd like to clear up some confusion that persists each time we file our registration statements with the SEC. In short, our resale registrations that are filed with Form S-1, including any supplements, and also an upcoming filing that we intend to make via a Form S-8, do not represent new issuances or new sales of shares by PLBY to the public. These registrations simply allow recipients holding restricted shares and equity grants to ultimately sell their shares in the market. We currently have two resale registrations on Form S-1 filed with the SEC for the 27.25 million shares that were issued in connection with the DSPAC merger, PIPE, and certain other pre-merger arrangements. These shares, plus the 6.5 million shares that were already registered in connection with the Mountain Crest IPO, get you to the 33.8 million shares that were outstanding as of May 12th, 2021. Then on June 14th, we completed a public offering of 4.7 million shares, bringing the total number of outstanding and registered shares to 38.5 million. In connection with the consideration paid to acquire Honey Burnett, we will soon file another resale registration on Form S-1 to register the restricted shares privately issued to the HoneyBurnett sellers. That resale registration will be similar to the resale registration that we've already filed. Similarly, as I mentioned, we'll soon file a form S-8 to register the 9.9 million shares that are already reserved for issuance under our approved equity plans. The S-8 is a typical filing by newly public companies and for recently adopted equity plans to register those plans. It simply allows recipients of company equity grants to receive registered shares. The S8 will not result in the immediate sale of a material number of shares by employees. Approximately 18.9 million of the 38.5 million shares currently registered and outstanding are subject to a lockup through September 7th, at which point 8.6 million shares will come off the lockup and 10.3 million shares will remain on lockup through February 10th of 2022. It's important to note that as a recently de-SPACed public company, we are not yet eligible to use Form S3 registrations or Form S1 registrations that incorporate by reference. So we generally have to file prospective supplements to our resale registrations when we file new disclosures with the SEC. And those 424B3 prospective supplements simply incorporate the 10Q and 8K, or other disclosure into the resale registrations already on file. The prospective supplements do not register new shares or involve the issuance of new shares. They're the reason you see us filing so many of these supplements. Hopefully, this eliminates much of the confusion we hear any time we file a new registration statement. I'd refer everyone to the pro forma shares outstanding table we included that's on page 10 of the Honey Burnett presentation we filed on June 29th for a good detailed breakdown of our shares outstanding that ties back to all the numbers that I've just read here today. With that, I'd like to ask the operator to please open the line for questions.

As a reminder, to ask a question, you will need to press star one on your telephone. To withdraw a question, press the time key, and please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Your first question is from the line of Austin Muldock of Canaccord. Your line is now open.

Hi, thanks for taking my questions. I have two on cross-selling. First, can you talk a little about specific cross-selling successes you've had thus far? And second, can you talk about how the three different entities will fit together, Yandy, Playboy, and Honey Burget, and how they'll each be positioned in the market given there will likely be some product overlap like in lingerie? Thank you.

Awesome. Thanks for the question. Let me address the second question first on how the brands fit together. Honey Burdette is a fast-growing 40% plus luxury lingerie brand that has unbelievable design and sourcing capabilities. As Rachel had mentioned in her prepared remarks, Playboy really goes high-low. And so we have products, whether it's for the Mastise, the Prestige, or the luxury segment, The lingerie that we're designing with Honey Burdette that we expect to launch next year is really geared towards the Mastige market, where given the highly fragmented nature of the lingerie business today and really the position that Victoria's Secret has abandoned, we think there's a huge opportunity for Playboy and Honey Burdette moving forward. On the Yandy and Lover side, we are now integrating those two companies as one. And we're thinking strategically longterm about how to position, you know, really leveraging for growth, the Playboy rabbit head and masthead, uh, and how that works in there, uh, from a private label perspective, moving forward, you know, on the cross selling, we talked a little bit about, uh, the Yandy and Playboy, uh, lingerie and swimwear collections, where we generated about $500,000 of revenue on the first drop. We've seen similar success on others. And really moving forward, you'll see as we come towards the end of this year, we'll be cross-selling in anticipation of launching Playboy Lingerie next year as a full-time business. You'll start seeing us sell Honey Burdette products at Playboy.com in the fourth quarter of this year. Rachel, Lance, anything else you want to add?

The only other thing I would add is that there's obviously the cross-selling that the consumer sees, and then there's the shared infrastructure behind the scenes, too. So, for example, for the Playboy Yandy Midsummer Night's Dream collection, we now have shared marketing efforts. So we create a campaign together. We create an influencer strategy together. We produce one set of content that goes out across all of our channels. And so we gain efficiencies that way, and we have one unified message as well to the consumer.

Yeah, I think that's a really good point Rachel makes, which is part of the investments we're making right now are that we can run this as one big company. And so on the digital side with the hiring of Kevin, we are now building an e-commerce business all under Kevin, independent of the brand. And so these investments to re-platform Yandy so that everything's on the same technology stack will benefit us long term. And so it's worth it in our mind to make those investments today to realize the synergies down the road.

Got it. Thank you.

Your next question is from Alex Furman of Craig Hellen Capital. Your line is now open.

Great. Thanks for taking my question and congratulations on closing on the Honey Burdette acquisition. I wanted to ask about your strategy for that brand and how you're going to be managing it. That brand obviously has grown very quickly over the last two years, and it's also been tremendously profitable with very strong double-digit EBITDA margins. How should we be thinking about how that brand is going to be contributing to your results over the next couple of years? Is it likely to remain as profitable as it's been? Or are you considering, you know, perhaps sacrificing some profitability in order to really accelerate the growth strategy there in Europe and the United States?

Yeah, let me start with the strategy, Alex, and thanks for the question. And then I'll turn it over to Lance. Look, we're thrilled by Honey Burdette. This is a brand that really resonates with all audiences. This is a company that's growing 40% year over year, and I believe we can accelerate that growth going forward. When I look at the prospects and what's happening in the U.S. e-com market, in opportunities in international markets, in Europe, even going into Russia and other places around the world, I think this is a brand, as I previously stated, that long-term could be a billion-dollar revenue business. More importantly, from a strategic perspective, But lingerie is a very technical product. And actually, when you look at the product roadmap that is coming out for Honey Burdette, it's staggering with Everyday Essentials, with swimwear that they just launched in Miami. We've actually started, now that we've closed, to integrate that centralized design function. And that's what's really leading to the expediting the launch of the Playboy lingerie as a full-time business moving forward. with a much better product than we have at Yandy today. It really speaks to the design and sourcing capabilities that HB has. And so, you know, moving forward, I'm very confident in the growth of HB, but I'm really excited by the lookbooks and what we're seeing coming forward for Playboy Lingerie. And you have to remember, you know, HB is a company that's been around for a little while in Australia. They've only been in the U.S., and in other places more recently. And so there's a ton of designs to leverage, et cetera, that have never made it to the United States that we can draw inspiration from that can come to market much quicker. And so I believe, as I said, with the hole that's been sort of left in the marketplace by Victoria's Secret and sort of they've lost their lust in the market, I'm really excited by what Playboy Lingerie can do on a global basis. And then you couple that with loungewear and swimwear and a whole host of things. I think it's going to be a huge growth driver for us going forward.

And on the margin side, you know, a few ways to think through this. I mean, first of all, as a standalone business, right, HoneyBirdette was putting up, you know, incredibly impressive margins, well north of 35% EBITDA margins. And a big part of that, remember, is the fact that over 80% of their traffic is organic. This is such a a brand that engenders so much loyalty from their consumers that they really don't have to spend that much on marketing like a lot of other brands do. So I think that will continue to be the case for them on a standalone basis. The other thing is you continue to scale this business and what they've managed to do incredibly well over the years is launch new retail brick and mortar stores that effectively, I'll call it a profitable billboard for driving growth on the e-com side. You've seen tremendous e-com growth from the business over the last few years. And what they see is every time they open a new store in a region, that really drives, the halo effect really drives e-com growth. And the cost of opening these stores isn't that significant. You know, it's in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, and they're able to pay that back in a matter of 18 to 24 months. And even within the first year, target 30-plus percent four-wall EBITDA margins. So from a standalone perspective, we think this business can continue to be quite profitable. You know, we've mentioned the investments we're making across the company in technology and warehousing and marketing and all of these things to really integrate our platforms. And so when we think through really the synergies that we can drive in all of these areas, we think that'll actually drive some cost synergies and actually help make their business even more efficient. We also see combined buying power by integrating across all of our brands and platforms, which could boost margin value as well. So on a standalone basis, we think they can continue to drive that margin. We think that there's actual real upside in terms of of cost synergies that we can achieve really by kind of making these tech investments now across all of our platforms. And so we're really optimistic about, you know, the ability to continue driving cash flow and profitable growth for the business.

Great. That's really helpful. Thank you both.

Your next question is from Jim Duffy of Stifle. Your line is now open.

Thanks. Good afternoon. Guys, can you give us some perspective on how Yandy and Lovers performed during the quarter versus the prior year? Specifically, I'm interested in performance in Agripp, but also, you know, store performance versus e-commerce performance, just how the channel mix shifted.

Sure. So, you know, starting off with Yandy. Yandy, obviously, a year ago in the second quarter was had seen a tremendous unlock in terms of growth as things shut down and buying shifted online. So at a huge quarter a year ago, that growth has really continued for the business. You know, it's come off the highs that they saw a year ago, but we've actually seen the business when you look at it compared back to 2019, we've really been able to sustain a lot of that COVID pop. So Yandy continues to perform quite well. As we mentioned, a lot of the collaborations that we're doing through Playboy and Yandy collaborations, we're also seeing improvements there, which has been nice. From a Lover's perspective, again, the stores had been shut down a year ago, so Lover's has actually seen a nice bump year over year. because of the stores being able to be reopened. And we've seen a huge lift there. And their e-com business right now is quite small at Lovers. And I think we mentioned, too, Lovers having one of the best conversion quarters that they've seen to date. So those businesses continue to perform quite well for us. We think that kind of through this integration that we're working through, you know, that can drive further efficiencies for those businesses going forward.

Yeah, Jim, it's Ben Cohn. The only thing I'll add to what Lance said is, you know, the COVID impacts are still impacting, you know, especially Yandy, where we've been continuing to be out of stock on a number of our top-selling items. That even extended, you know, to Playboy, as we mentioned in our prepared remarks as well. You know, on Playboy.com for our summer collection, we only got about 50% of the styles that we had ordered in. And it's just because of what's happening with the COVID issues around the world, and especially on the shipping and the port system. But, you know, very encouraged, you know, long-term that they've been able to maintain that COVID growth. And when supply chains normalize and the work that we're doing strategically to uh, on brand and how to leverage, you know, this, this mass awareness that we have with Playboy, uh, you know, very encouraged by that as really, you know, as we, the previous question, I think often asked about how you segment, you know, Yandian lovers is really our mass product at the end of the day, um, where Playboys can play a little bit more into the prestige market, mastige, if you want to call it that. And then obviously HB as a luxury.

Yeah. Thanks, Ben. Uh, um, The supply chain impact is evident just looking at the webpage. A lot of stocks are prevalent. I think certainly more so than you probably planned. I want to talk about the $600 million revenue objective. Thanks for that. I want to think about it in the context of capital structure. Can you give us a sense for how this splits between organic growth and acquisitions? And then I'm curious, you know, threshold for pro forma net leverage. Do you have a high bound that you won't cross?

Sure. So on the $600 million, as I mentioned, we view that really as organic growth. So a lot of different ways you could get there, but rough math, if you think through the strategy that we've really laid out for all of you, which is driving the growth through our direct-to-consumer revenue and then continuing to optimize and grow the licensing business. If you're able to grow licensing in the high single-digits, and then grow the direct-to-consumer business north of 20% over the next four to five years, you get there. And we think that that's quite achievable given that we've been growing well north of that and for all of the reasons we've talked about in terms of our ability to bring more of this in-house and drive our direct-to-consumer revenue, not to mention all of the growth that we see potential on the Honey Burnett side. Now, Obviously, the mix of that could change. If we decide to bring more licensing to owned and operated, you may grow direct-to-consumer faster and licensing slower. Those decisions, you know, will evolve over time. But certainly something that we think makes sense. I'd also say another way to put it into perspective, you know, talking about $3 billion of consumer spend against our brand and Playboy-branded products globally is if you believe that you can get, you know, 5% to 10% of penetration of that through direct-to-consumer sales that we do, I don't think that would have much of a dent on our ability to generate licensing revenue and could generate anywhere from $150 million to $300 million of that increase over the next few years. So, yeah, that's all through organic growth. You know, like I said, we would look to accelerate that by deploying our capital, whether that's through more accretive M&A like we've been doing or whether we invest more heavily in some of these emerging projects as we see fit to the extent that our digital offerings start to get traction and this NFT strategy really starts to evolve. That could be an area of investment and that could be a nice area of upside for us as well, but we'll have to see what we learn and how this evolves over time In terms of leverage, you know, look, I'd say we're at a comfortable level of leverage right now, you know, pro forma for the HoneyBirdette deal once we add on this incremental $70 million that we'll be doing this week. I wouldn't want to take leverage really higher than that necessarily. I think we can de-lever as we generate cash and grow our EBITDA over time, you know, Our preference, I think, you know, over time would be to continue delevering and get that down even further. So I think we're at a very comfortable level. It gives us a lot of flexibility on the balance sheet to do what we need to do going forward, especially as it relates to M&A.

Jim, the only thing I'll also add just for Lance's comments on the organic side is is, again, there's a huge opportunity down the road that we've talked about previously taking back other licensing businesses or other licensees out there. Again, you know, what Lance was talking about in the 600 is the organic growth and still, you know, growing licensing. You know, obviously, given the $3-plus billion of consumer spend, the $600 million to be a very different number to the upside to the extent we decide to take back other categories ourselves.

Super helpful, guys. Thank you for all that perspective.

Your next question is from George Kelly of Frost Capital Partners. Your line is now open.

Hi, everybody. Thanks for taking my questions. Just a couple for you. So first, the $15 million of incremental investment, I think, that you're going to layer in over the next few quarters, So a couple questions around that. Have you already started to take, like, do 2Q results show some of that? Are you already sort of on that path? What is the progression? And then I guess the bigger question is, when that's all complete, and I know there's a bunch of different sort of channels that make up your DTC business, but when this $15 million is through, how should we think about incremental margin on the other end of that? Thanks. Sure.

Thanks, George. So it was starting to hit in the second quarter, but certainly not all of it. And I'll give a little bit more context on that. So the first quarter, right, we weren't public the entire quarter. So from an insurance perspective, those costs weren't fully baked in the first quarter. They're now fully baked in the second quarter, and those costs will be the same, and they'll be ongoing. And look, they're when you think about it compared to when we were a private company, you know, above $4 million more than we were back when we were private. The other costs that you didn't have in the first quarter that you started to have in the second quarter were some of the product development costs and some of the initial big money costs that we were starting to layer in. So those costs started to hit in the second quarter. We'll ramp up a bit more. in the third and fourth quarter. You know, some of this other brand development stuff that we've done as well, that has started to hit in the second quarter, but it increases a bit as you get into the third and fourth quarter. Also around a lot of the tech and infrastructure investments that we're talking about, we haven't rolled in as much of that yet. I mean, we started our ERP implementation. We've started to implement some of these costs, but when you think about you know, the licensing and ongoing subscription costs that we'll have, those will come more clearly into view as you hit kind of the fourth quarter and then perhaps into the first quarter as well next year. So it's going to continue to build over time, but wanted to kind of bucket this as a way to think through the incremental costs that we're layering onto the business. In terms of, you know, how this transitions over time, right, you're going to have, what I'll say is a temporary impact to margin, right? Because you're layering on new technology on top of whatever existing systems and processes that you have, and you're going to have to roll that off over time. So you're kind of, in a way, being hit twice in the near term, and then you can roll off those old or legacy systems and roll off those costs. Similarly, We're launching new brands and then actually building out new products right now. Those are, call it one-time or startups.