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spk05: Greetings. Welcome to the SmileDirect Club first quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I'll now turn the conference over to your host, Jonathan Fleetwood, Director of Investor Relations. You may begin.
spk13: Thank you, Operator. Good morning. Before we begin, let me remind you that this conference call includes forward-looking statements. For additional information on Smart Direct Club, please refer to the company's SEC filings, including the risk factors described therein. You should not rely on our forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. All forward-looking statements that we make on this call are based on assumptions and beliefs as of today. I refer you to our Q1 2022 earnings presentation for description of certain forward-looking statements. We undertake no obligation to update such information except as required by applicable law. In this conference call, we will also have a discussion of certain non-GAAP financial measures, including adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow. Information required by Regulation G of the Exchange Act with respect to such non-GAAP financial measures is included in the presentation slides for this call, which can be obtained on our website. We also refer you to this presentation for reconciliation of certain non-GAAP financial measures to the appropriate GAAP measures. I'm joined on the call today by Chief Executive Officer and Chairman David Katzman, Interim Chief Financial Officer Troy Crawford, and Global Head of FP&A and Investor Relations Jesse Weaver. Let me now turn the call over to David.
spk07: Thanks, Jonathan, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I want to start by thanking our team members for their tireless focus and commitment to our mission of democratizing access to care, while delivering quarter-over-quarter revenue growth of more than 20% and shipment growth of more than 15%. Q1 financials performed according to plan, and we made considerable progress in strengthening our liquidity position with our $255 million secure debt facility. While we have sufficient cash on the balance sheet to hit our target of generating positive cash flow by 2024, This facility, which is secure against our accounts receivable, cash, and certain IP, gives us financial flexibility to continue making investments in key strategic growth areas of our business, like partner network, going after the higher income consumer, small shop expansion, and advancing our oral care products. With the launch of our fast-dissolving whitening strips, we successfully ended the quarter with our oral care products available in more than 16,000 retail locations. which is up from 12,900 stores at the end of Q4. We also continued our track record of oral care innovation with the introduction of our patented wireless premium whitening kit. We expect continued success in this category for years to come as our brand, product offering, and retail partnerships gain momentum. We are also pleased with the progress we've made on profitably expanding our smile shops. At the beginning of the pandemic, stay-at-home mandates and social distancing prompted us to reevaluate our small shop footprint, focus on kits where possible. Over the past two years, we have continued to reassess our small shop approach and ensure our shops are driving incrementality to the business. We've also developed sophisticated models that enable us to better predict the most profitable channel, shops or impression kits, for driving incremental demand in a market that may not currently have a shop location. In Q1, we opened seven net new shops in the U.S., and the early results on this strategy are promising. In the coming quarters, we will continue to monitor progress and update you on further shop and event expansion into the markets we see the most promise, driving incremental demand with scans. We've also made progress in the partner network. During the quarter, we continued to focus on growing Smile Direct Club's awareness and credibility with GPs while making operational improvements to our model that are paying off and improve practice productivity. Throughout Q1, we saw improvements in both submissions per practice and increases in total practices in our network. As Troy mentioned during our last call, the focus has been on tightening the model to maximize engagement and productivity through submissions within active practices. Before we scale the sales force to drive further practice growth, practice productivity is an important metric which ensures we are balancing the growth of our pipeline with our organizational focus on being the best possible partner to our GP network. and at the same time driving the highest possible returns and generating near-term profitable growth. Our commitment to partner network is as strong as ever. This initiative is expected to be a growth engine for the company that not only provides us with an incremental source of revenue from our core customer demographic through GP submissions of their existing patients, but also creates a critical entry point into our business for the higher household income demographic. As you know, our current core customer has a median household income of $68,000. In many cases, our safe, effective teeth straightening option was the only one that they could afford. We are extremely proud that our award-winning telehealth platform has enabled us to democratize access to care for these 1.7 million customers and county. With their support, we've been able to expand the category while building this incredible brand with 60% aided awareness, becoming the number two player in clear aligners worldwide, and growing revenue at a compound annual growth rate of approximately 45% since 2017. But as we've mentioned, since our Q2 call last year, the core customer is highly sensitive to the impact inflation is having on discretionary spending. In Q1 of this year, the acceleration continued with non-discretionary inflation increasing for our core demographic to roughly 9% versus 7.8% in Q4. While we have taken steps to mitigate inflation within our business through price increases, we've also been able to support our customers through our vertically integrated financing program by not raising their small pay monthly payments. This strain on our core customer's ability to spend on discretionary high ticket items has had a meaningful impact on our ability to grow this segment. And it's taken us from a record revenue quarter just one year ago in Q1 of 2021 to where we are today. While we believe strongly in our mission to democratize access to care and in our ability to achieve our long-term growth targets with this demographic, We also believe that the quality of our product, the convenience of our telehealth offering, and the awareness of our brand provides the right to win by taking share from traditional wires and brackets, as well as other more expensive clear liner therapies. We know traditional orthodontic customers come from higher income households. They expect the same level of quality treatment and similarly rely on dental professionals, friends, and online reviews to make their decisions about orthodontic care. But they also have different needs and wants from those of our customers today. While we continue to market to the higher-income customer by building credibility through our Challenger campaign, we recognize that higher-income households need more from us than education and awareness of our brand. They need to start their journey with a general practitioner, which for our business means they would start their journey in either a small shop within a dental practice or through our partner network, which again underscores the importance of our investment and focus on growing our partner network channel. We know that this channel serves a dual purpose in being both an incremental revenue stream for us with our existing customers today, as well as an access point for our higher income customers by allowing them to start their journey the way they seem to prefer, which is through a neighborhood GP office supplemented with our convenient telehealth platform and our advanced connected tools. The research we've done on the higher income demographic also highlights other areas in our offering that we can modestly adjust in our service model at a higher price point to greatly improve our offerings appeal. These insights also build on the value proposition we can bring to our partner network model for the GP. While we are not ready to share the specific details of this premium offering, the team is working diligently to get a test in market as soon as possible and begin rolling out in late 2022 or early 2023. As you may recall, in early Q1, we announced that in light of the current macro environment, we were reevaluating our international footprint for near-term profitability, right-sizing our operating structure, and allocating capital to core growth initiatives that can produce the highest return on investment. Our team members have demonstrated an incredible amount of grit and dedication as we've navigated this transition together. While I'm pleased with how we've operated during this time, as with any transition of this magnitude, there have been challenges. After the transition took place in February, we began to experience some operational challenges within our customer care team that have unfortunately impacted our customer experience and latest Net Promoter Score. The team acted quickly and built a remediation plan to bring us back to our target service levels in the coming weeks. Our customers are a top priority, and we always aim to deliver a best-in-class experience. In April, we spoke directly to our customers to acknowledge that we were not currently delivering against the high expectations we have set for ourselves and what they have come to expect from SBC. These operational challenges are temporary in nature. We have made significant progress already that will be reflected in our NPS in future quarters. To close, I just want to reiterate my appreciation to the team. As I mentioned, the transition was a very difficult decision for me and the leadership team, and in spite of the short-term challenges we've been facing operationally, I firmly believe in our direction and focus. This is not a story of retrenchment, but rather a story of highly focused investment in our game-changing platform. A few days ago, we announced that we won the MedTech Breakthrough Award for Best Telehealth Platform. MedTech Breakthrough is an independent market intelligence organization that recognizes breakthrough people, platforms, and products in the health, fitness, and medical technology industries today. Nearly 4,000 nominations were considered for the 2022 program. And as the winner of Best Telehealth Platform, we are the only company recognized in the clear aligner space in 2022. And we joined an impressive list of top companies in the larger digital health industry. While we recognize the need to deliver results against our financially strained core customer, this award underscores the importance of our breakthrough innovations. It also demonstrates the importance of the work we're doing to expand the reach of this amazing brand that we've spent the last seven years growing to the number one largest direct-to-consumer orthodontics brand and number two largest liner brand in the world. In a short period of time, this revolutionary platform has helped more than 1.7 million people get a smile they love while saving them over $5 billion collectively over traditional braces. And now I'll turn the call over to Troy, who will provide more detail on our Q1 financial results and full year outlook. Troy. Thank you, David.
spk02: I will jump right to our results for the quarter. Please be sure to review our supplemental materials posted to our investor website, which provide additional details on everything I will cover. As David mentioned, revenue for the first quarter was $152 million, which is an increase of 20% sequentially. This was driven primarily by 76,000 initial aligner shipments at an ASP of 1890. Our aligner shipment count was up over 15% from the fourth quarter. The year-over-year revenue decline of 24% is representative of what we have seen play out in the economy over the last year. We had a record quarter in Q1-21, driven primarily by the impact of government stimulus on consumer spending, but in Q2, we started to see the effects of the higher inflationary environment that continues to this day. Despite the year-over-year decline, the sequential increase from Q4 gives us some confidence that we can deliver on our revenue guidance for the full year. Providing some details on the other revenue items, implicit price concessions were 11% of gross line of revenue, down from 12% in the fourth quarter. We do expect IPC as a percentage of gross aligner revenue to trend back toward our historical level of 9%, as we have seen no significant deterioration in the quality of the portfolio. The fluctuation in the quarterly IPC percentage is impacted by the overall level of revenue recorded in the period, as well as the rebalancing of reserves. As we've mentioned in prior quarters, we maintain separate reserves for IPC and cancellation. We analyze and regularly rebalance those reserves based on current information. Reserves and other adjustments, which includes impression kit revenue, refunds, and sales tax, came in at 7% of gross aligner revenue compared to 10% in the fourth quarter, primarily due to the lower refund rate and the aforementioned reserve rebalancing. Financing revenue, which is interest associated with our small pay program, came in at approximately $9 million, which is slightly down relative to Q4 due to the lower accounts receivable balance. Other revenue and adjustments, which includes net revenue related to retainers, whitening, and other ancillary products, came in at about $24 million, or over 15% of total first quarter revenue, and is up $6 million from Q4. This increase was driven primarily from the rollout of our innovative new retail products, including our whitening strips in Q1. Now turning to SmilePay. In Q1, the share of initial aligner purchases financed through our SmilePay program came in at approximately 60%. This is in line with historical levels. As David mentioned earlier, the SmilePay program is an important component to drive affordability with our customer base. Overall, SmilePay has continued to perform well, and our delinquency rates in Q1 were consistent with prior quarters. While admittedly our core customer has had difficulty with the macro environment, the fact that we keep a credit card on file and have a low monthly payment gives us the confidence that SmilePay will continue to perform well. While we have recently increased the price of our liners, we also extended the payment terms from 24 to 26 months in our small pay program to help maintain the affordability for our customers. Turning to results on the cost side of the business, gross margin for the quarter was 72%, which was more in line with our historical trend compared to the fourth quarter, which included some one-time items, including startup costs associated with our small OS implementation and some higher retail inventory costs. Our gross margin includes a significant portion of fixed costs, and therefore higher revenue allows us to leverage those costs for a higher overall gross margin percentage. Consistent with Q4, our second generation automation machines are producing approximately 90% of aligners in line with our internal target. This streamlining is helping with turnaround time, productivity, reduction in scrap, and a more consistent and superior product for our club members. Marketing and selling expenses came in at $97 million, or 64% of net revenue in the quarter, compared to 79% of net revenue in Q4 2021. The sequential decrease as a percent of revenue is primarily attributed to the increase in revenue, but is also the result of a reduction in spend in targeted international markets that we suspended in January, as well as increased marketing efficiency. On small shops, we had 110 permanent locations as of quarter end, and held 130 pop-up events over the course of the quarter for a total of 240 location sites. We had a decrease in shop locations from the fourth quarter driven primarily by the closure of 38 shops from the international markets where we suspended operations in January. The pop-up events are an efficient way to meet our demand and enable us to fully leverage our small shop and provide flexibility for our customers that are coming to us through aided awareness, referrals, and marketing. We continue to evaluate profitable expansion of SmileShops and other scan distribution models where we believe incremental demand exists to cover the additional cost of these locations. Pop-up events have also been critical in supporting our partner network. We now have over 673 partner network locations globally that are active or pending training, increasing our footprint from Q4. As David previously mentioned, The partner network team has been extremely focused on tightening the model to maximize engagement and productivity within active practices, and we've seen positive momentum on productivity throughout the quarter. As mentioned earlier, our marketing and selling expenses in the quarter as a percentage of revenue declined to 64% compared to 79% in Q4 and reflect significant improvement due to the exit of specific international markets and our focused analysis regarding any investment in brand building to support our long-term growth. We did not see the full effect of the international market changes within the quarter as many of the changes were implemented after January. We did see efficiency improvements in the U.S. and Canada during the quarter. Sales and marketing as a percent of revenue was 78% in rest of world market compared to 61% in the U.S. and Canada. The focus in Q1 and what will remain the focus is seeking to find efficiency in our spend. This includes continued efforts to find greater unique reach in our spend on TV, with influencers and through our partner network offices, as well as driving the most qualified leads through our site. While iOS 14 changes continue to be a challenge year over year, by continuing to optimize our digital channels, we are finding levels of efficiency closer to pre-iOS 14 numbers. It's important to keep in mind that digital marketing is a highly fluid process that requires daily discipline on spend analysis, assessment, and reallocation. We're always testing and analyzing new channels and the impact of the channel mix amongst all channels. With a targeted focus on efficiency and quality leads, we are continuing to calibrate spend across a diversified platform base in order to optimize continuously through the period to achieve the optimal balance of high funnel leads and bottom of funnel aligner sales. General and administrative expenses were $71 million in Q1 compared to $74 million in Q4 2021. G&A costs were lower in the first quarter by approximately $10 million compared to Q4 when adjusting for incentive compensation differences between the quarters. If you recall, Q4 2021 included a reversal of four-year bonus accrual of approximately $9 million compared to a more normalized cost in Q1 2022 of $4 million. Stock-based compensation costs was also lower in Q1 2022 compared to Q4 2021 by $2 million due to forfeiture of stock awards associated with the cost changes implemented in January. The full effect of the cost actions in the quarterly run rate of G&A expense will be realized in the back half of 2022. And excluding stock-based compensation in G&A, we expect to see a continued step down in G&A between Q1 and Q2 that should continue through the balance of the year. Other expenses include interest expense of $1.6 million of which $1.1 million is related to deferred loan costs associated with the convert we issued in 2021, and $500,000 is associated with leases. Additionally, other expense was approximately $13 million, consisting primarily of one-time costs related to our January restructuring actions, including costs associated with severance and retention, as well as store and facility closure costs related to our international operations. All the above produces adjusted EBITDA of negative $34 million in the first quarter, which is a $28 million improvement over Q4 2021. Our first quarter net loss was $74 million compared to a Q4 2021 net loss of $95 million. Breaking out adjusted EBITDA regionally, the U.S. and Canada came in at negative $23 million, and rest of world adjusted EBITDA was negative $11 million. Moving to the balance sheet, we ended the first quarter with $145 million in cash and cash equivalents. Cash from operations for the first quarter was negative $61 million. Operating cash flow was negatively impacted by the cost savings initiatives we executed in Q1. During the quarter, we spent approximately $20 million on team member-related costs such as severance and retention, as well as costs associated with the exit of some geographies, including store and facility exit costs. Of the $20 million of cash outflow, approximately $13 million flowed through restructuring costs in the P&L, but were added back to adjusted EBITDA for the quarter, with the remainder of the cash outflow expensed in restructuring throughout the rest of the year. The total cost of the transition is still expected to be within our guidance of between $20 million and $25 million for the year. Cash spent on investing for the fourth quarter was $15 million. Free cash flow for the first quarter defined as cash from operations, less cash from investing, was negative $76 million. We have previously noted that we have access to additional liquidity to invest in our growth initiatives, including any accelerated investments such as partner network, higher income customer penetration, and small shop expansion. As David mentioned earlier, we successfully increased our liquidity by completing a new $255 million debt facility secured by our small pay receivables that has a 42-month maturity and is structured as a delayed draw term loan facility. At the time of closing at the end of April, We drew down $65 million on the facility, most of which was required as an initial draw under the agreement. As previously mentioned, in January, we took actions to reorganize our company and meaningfully reduce costs. Overall, these targeted cost reductions optimize our operations to refocus our business on achieving near-term profitability while minimizing any impact on revenue. These actions are tracking according to plan with a meaningful impact on our spending realized in the first quarter with full quarterly run rate savings anticipated in the second half of the year. As noted in our press release, we have reaffirmed our 2022 and long-term guidance, as well as assumptions underlining both that we provided on February 28, 2022. Overall, we are pleased to deliver Q1 results in line with our plan. We delivered a significant increase of 15% in aligner orders compared to Q4 and increased revenue across both our aligners and oral care solutions. increased gross margins, recognized efficiency gains with selling and marketing and G&A as a lower percentage of revenue, and accessed additional liquidity through our new debt facility. This financial strength provides a solid foundation to help us achieve our 2022 and long-term growth targets and provide the best club member experience. Thank you to everyone for joining today.
spk04: With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A. And at this time, we'll be conducting a question and answer session.
spk05: If you would 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 press star two if you would like to remove your question from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. Our first question comes from the line of Chris Cooley with Stevens. Please proceed with your question.
spk08: morning and thank you for taking the questions and congratulations on a impressive start to the new year just was hoping we could maybe get a little bit more color around your thoughts strategically with the partner network and the new premium offering sounds like you definitely are seeing some gains there in terms of not only I'm sorry new customers but also just better utilization within those existing practices could you just Maybe give us some metrics around that and kind of how you see that trending and then the end result of what you think that can do in terms of lift, in terms of growth and margin. Thank you.
spk07: Yeah, Chris, I can take that one. So what we're seeing in Partner Network today is not our premium offering. That's something that we introduced this quarter. We mentioned it in our deck and in our prepared remarks. So this comes from a lot of research. that we've done over the last couple of quarters where we're seeing that the higher income consumer, one of the ante's to play is that they do want a local neighborhood GP or ortho to start their journey and to use that network, neighborhood network if they choose to, but also have the flexibility of using our telehealth platform. So what we've been doing with the partner network today is more of the GP's patient base who wants to use Smile Direct Club to straighten their teeth. And we now have that offering inside the Partner Network. This new premium offering, which is a complete new service that we're going to be rolling out to end of 22, it's not in the market today. It comes at a higher price point. There's more service associated with it. There's more in it for the GP, which is exciting. And when we started out the Partner Network, it was not by design to appeal to the higher income consumer. It just so happens that the two initiatives, both of them were independent initiatives, our higher income consumer strategy, as well as the partner network, now have come together and the circles cross, which is very exciting for us. So what we're seeing today when we talk about we're getting more productivity per practice, that's in the core partner network with the GP patients. Every month we're seeing submissions, which is the productivity of those practices, go up. And that's what we've been working on very hard to get it to a certain level where it's profitable, it's consistent, and then we're going to really start to pour gas on it and roll it out. We're still in a state right now where we are opening more practices. And because of this, what we call SDC plus, that's the term for our new premium offering, we are going to have to open up more offices Many of those will be our small shops inside the partner network. We've already got about a quarter of them of our 110 shops are inside a partner network. It requires that we have at least two operatories and space to operate inside the dental practice, but it's been a good model. It's a good model for our core customers coming in. There's some comfort in being inside a dental practice, but it also really helps with the partner network patients coming over and getting scanned and utilizing our services. So eventually we'll move most of those small shops inside the partner network to support the SDC Plus. We'll then also expand beyond that in just having the partner network treat and service our higher income consumers as they come through SDC Plus.
spk04: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alex Nowak with Craig Hallam.
spk05: Please proceed with your question.
spk11: Great. Good morning, everyone. This is Connor. I'm for Alex. I guess first off, we saw the inflationary environment worsen in Q1, but it does look like your results are obviously starting to improve here. So just some more color on, you know, were you less exposed to those challenges in the first quarter here or just some more color there would be helpful.
spk07: Yeah, Connor, I can take that one. So yeah, definitely pleased with the quarter. A little over $150 million, up 20% in revenue. First of all, Q1 is a better quarter than Q4 seasonally. There is the new year, new you effect that takes shape every Q1. But beyond that, we have not seen inflation subside. If anything, it's at a higher level than it's been. I just think we're getting used to operating in this environment. Some of the newer marketing channels that we were forced to start spending money in because of iOS 14, we're starting to get our sea legs. We're becoming more efficient in those channels as we learn more. We really weren't spending money in TikTok and Snapchat at the levels that we are today. Podcasts, direct mail, all channels are being exposed to our marketing spend, and we're getting more proficient in each of those channels and spending less on Facebook, which wasn't performing. The other one that we don't talk a lot about is conversion improvement. So there's conversion improvement within each channel, kit and scan. We're always tweaking. We have a better is better philosophy. Everything from kit return rates are up, acceptance rates are up. So for the same dollars of marketing spend, there's a real gauntlet that you have to go through to get a kit, a successful kit back to order your liners. And so after five, six years of constant improvement and really focus on improving that funnel conversion or making strides there. So we saw in Q1 some good improvement conversion. The other conversion improvement is taking someone from a kit into a scan funnel. The experience in the shops ultimately have a better conversion than someone doing it themselves at home with a kit. And so we've seen an uptick in that as well. Coming out of COVID, we're starting to see more of our customers start in the shops, which has a better conversion. And we're going to continue to push that channel. As we mentioned, we opened up seven new shops in the quarter. We're opening more shops in Q2 as we see incrementality. They have to be incremental. And when we say incremental, let me define that for you. So it's not only do we get more case starts because someone in that DMA, if we didn't have a shop in there, would not have started with us because they don't want to do a kit at home. That's one incrementality. The other incrementality is, can you convert a large percentage of the people who were doing kits in that market to the shop so you have a higher conversion? So if you have the same thousand people who started with kits in a certain DMA, now that we have a shop there, let's say half of them now convert over to the shop, well, with the higher conversion rate, It covers the cost of that shop and then is profitable incrementally. So it's not one thing. It's really a game of inches. And all of these things performed to plan in Q1. And I think that's why we hit our numbers.
spk02: And just to build on that, just to build on that, Connor, a little bit, we did expect the seasonal uptick in our guidance for Q1. And we still expect that as we look at the rest of the year, that about 45 to 50% of our sales guidance range will be in the front half with about 50 to 55% in the back half based on the $600 to $650 million full year sales outlook with the lower end of that range being impacted by continued difficulty in the macroeconomic environment, with the high end of that, we get a little bit of an improvement from an inflationary standpoint through the rest of the year. So just wanted to give you that additional color.
spk11: Perfect. That's super helpful. And then I guess second, just if I could squeeze another one in, update, just a quick update on the competitive environment. You know, we're seeing a little bit more marketing from Candid and those alike. You know, what are you seeing and how do you intend to kind of defend against those with potentially bigger budgets now?
spk07: We're not really seeing them. I'm surprised you say that. Candid really has dropped out of the DTC space. They're not going direct. You can't buy the product from them other than through their own network of GPs and orthos. I don't see their marketing spend increasing at all. Byte, as far as their numbers, they're on a conference call right now, same time as us, so we'll have to see how they're reporting in. But nothing has changed from a competitive standpoint that we see out in the marketplace. I don't see any real increased spend from any of our competitors. I think, like I said, I think the $152 million that we achieved this quarter was just a lot of work in this inflationary environment, understanding our marketing spend, the channels we're in, all the conversion curves, the leverage that we have. You know, we're a very data-driven metric company. And, you know, game of moving these levers, you know, 1%, 2% conversions can be very meaningful in this business when you have the kind of visitor traffic that we have and demand that we have coming into the website.
spk04: Perfect. Appreciate the color. Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Tom Block with Stifel.
spk05: Please proceed with your question.
spk06: Great. Hey, guys. This is Tom Stephan. I'm for John. Thanks for the questions. If I can start with price, Troy, maybe with you, can you talk about the cadence of how the recent price increase flows through the P&L? Will it be fully reflected maybe starting in 2H? And then, David, is there any thought around additional price increases this year, just given the inflationary environment and then your ability to execute on this effectively through the longer monthly terms?
spk02: So just to address the price increase, so in the U.S., we'll have that rolled out during Q2. So by the time we get to the end of Q2, it will be fully baked in for Q3, and then we're rolling it out internationally after that. So, yes, back half of the year is when we'll start to see the full effect of the price increase.
spk07: Yeah, just to add on that. So it does take a while to have this flow through our system from website to CRM, paid media, all of it has to be adjusted. So we started with the US being the biggest market. We've got UK, Canada coming next, but it's going to take through Q3 to get all the six countries up to the 45% price increase. Now we are looking at, we don't anticipate another price increase on the aligners. We are looking at retainers now. Our retainers are $99. It's a good annuity. Some people are on subscription, but we have a good flow of retainer business coming in every six months. We expect our customers to order a retainer. That has not gone up since we started business seven years ago. So we anticipate we will take a price increase on retainers. We're just trying to figure out exactly how much that is, which will be helpful. Every little bit helps. And then this new premium offering we're talking about. Now that's both the retainer price increase premium offering for SBC Plus, which really isn't going to even come out until almost the end of the year. None of that is built into the model. So those are added if we roll out a retainer price increase, that'll be added into the model.
spk06: Got it. That's helpful. And then just my second question, as it relates to the Smile Shop expansion and the profitability there, talk about just what you're doing differently now Relative to pre-COVID, it sounds like more shops and side offices is helping. And then importantly, what is the sustainability as we think about sort of per store profitability? Thanks, guys.
spk07: Yeah, so we're much more strategic and much more surgical about our shop footprint. You know, we were growing like crazy in 2018 and 19. You know, our first shop opened in 2016 in the summer. We got up to over 300 shops in the U S with our, our partnership with Walgreens and Walmart, CVS, anyone who would take a shop, we put a shop in and COVID, you know, we started seeing it before COVID, but COVID with the shutdown of all the shops really allowed us to take a real long, hard look at the incrementality of these shops. There is expense associated with them, you know, the labor, the monthly rent, et cetera. So even if they're profitable within a four wall, that's not the way to look at it because that's how we were looking at it. And most of them, not all of them were profitable within a four wall. But what you have to say is, could I have gotten that business otherwise with an impression kit, even at a lower conversion? So if you factor in the lower conversion of a kit in that market with the higher conversion of the shop and all the costs associated with the shop, is it incrementally profitable? So we have a team that's headed by Jesse, who's on this call from our FP&A team, along with analytics. And they are, they look at every, data point imaginable against matched markets, and we're still testing learning. So we open up those seven markets in Q1, those seven shops in new markets. Some are new markets, some are incremental shops within existing markets. And then we wait six, eight weeks to see, to make sure that our hypothesis is accurate that this was incremental. It's pretty easy to measure once they open, obviously. And then we're going to the next round and the next round. Well, I don't anticipate we're going to get back to 300 shops because when we look at the numbers, we were just oversaturated. They were cannibalistic to each other. But we will have more than 110 shops that we have today. And that does help with the conversion like we're talking about as well as new case starts.
spk12: David, if I could just build on that a little bit. I think a couple of things have changed since the time pre-COVID when the company had well over 300 shops, as you pointed out. One, We do have the ability to look back at those shops and look at where we are today. And we have a good test control data set. I mean, when you have fully saturated the United States, it's hard to kind of tease out that incrementality. And now we can do that today so that we can crawl, walk, run into what I would say is the optimized number of shops. And then the other thing too, is the company has evolved in terms of its go to market for those, what we call internally scan distribution models. So we don't have just a single thread of all shops stand alone. Today we've got an operating model that has a different cost structure for a shop that's standalone or a shop in dental practice, or what we call a guide that could go work in a dental practice for one to two days a week, or even a pop-up. And with these different operating models, we can then marry what we estimate to be the incrementality opportunity in that market with the appropriate scan distribution model. And that really allows us to really focus on capturing what David said, that incrementality at the highest contribution margin. And we're still early stages and we're learning. And I think what we'll find is there's more opportunities probably than we can see today. But as we get out in the market and test it, we have a lot of flexibility because these are short-term leases and pop-up events are obviously very temporary to evolve it, to continue to tweak the model, as David pointed out, and sort of our process innovation culture. So it's a really exciting thing. We'll talk more about it, I'm sure, in the coming quarters.
spk04: Very helpful. Thanks, guys. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Mixick with Credit Suisse.
spk01: Please proceed with your question. Hi. Thanks so much for taking the question, and congrats on a good start to the year here. So, a couple of questions just maybe on cadence from here. So, first on cash flows, given the restructuring and financing announced during Q1, as you mentioned in your prepared remarks, you know, partial impact of some of those efforts during the quarter. Can you talk a little bit about the cadence of operating cash use as we get to Q2 and Q3, and then, you know, maybe any sequential improvements on that front as you stabilize the top line? And then I've got a follow-up question as well.
spk02: Sure, I'll take that. So just related to the overall free cash flow, it was negative 76 million for the quarter. It was impacted by the restructuring events that we executed in Q1. If you just look at what we've talked about before as kind of the way to think about free cash flow, EBITDA minus the CAPEX. So EBITDA was minus 34 million, CAPEX was 15. And then we had a restructuring event which cost us about 20 million from a cash flow perspective. The majority of that was spent in exit costs related to some of our international facilities. as well as severance and retention costs related to the changes that were made. So about 20 million of that, overall 76 million was, I would say, one time. Now, not all of that ran through the financial statements, the P&L in Q1. Only about 13 million of that was in the P&L, which we broke out on a restructuring line item. So we'll have some expenses for the rest of the year as we amortize those off, about $8 million through the rest of the year. We're still within our guidance range that we gave originally of $20 million to $25 million impact from restructuring. But as we go into Q2 and the rest of the year, as you remember the changes that we made in Q1, about $120 million in savings that we identified. We'll start to see the impact of that. from a full quarter perspective in Q2, and then certainly in the back half of the year. So we do expect free cash flow to get better as we go throughout the year without the one-time impact, as well as the changes that we've made from a savings aspect, which I think really goes to define the flexibility that we have in the model and some of the things that Jesse talked about, the changes that we're making from an efficiency and analysis standpoint. But we expect to see, you know, better margins, higher ASP coming from the price changes, better marketing efficiency. And as we exited some of those international markets, we'll see marketing costs come down. And then G&A as well, with the changes we made related to personnel to right-size the business, should be all positive impacts to free cash flow throughout the rest of the year.
spk01: That's great. And the CapEx element of that, is that still just kind of steady, consistent with 15 and Q1, or is there a trajectory to that number as well?
spk02: The original guidance we gave was 60 to 70 million for CapEx this year. We're sticking to that guidance right now. We've got some investments that we think we can make that are going to be very important for the business, but we're going to fit those into that guidance range.
spk01: Great. And then you've mentioned just, I think in the last question that, that, you know, you're, you're embarking on a number of different sort of fine tuning exercises and sort of, uh, in marketing and customer acquisition and profitability, uh, which is great. I'm wondering, Should we expect, should investors expect that to be sort of start to, you know, take shape or, you know, see the clear benefits of some of those in Q2? Or does that take, you know, a couple of quarters, you know, by the end of the year? When do you think you'll have a really sharp view of how these new programs are affecting, you know, growth trends?
spk07: Yeah, two things in that question. One was the incrementality or the process improvements that we make. We saw the benefits of that in Q1. So those are the things I talked about, kit conversion, shop incrementality, marketing efficiency. All those little inches we're always working on, and we started to see some of that in Q1. You'll continue to see that. That's in our model. That is in our model. The new initiatives, as far as Partner Network and SDC Plus, which is now almost really one initiative because they feed off each other, that is something that as we roll that out, and that's going to be probably late 2022 into 2023, it's a big initiative as far as getting these partner networks stood up so that we can roll out with a national campaign targeted at the higher income consumer with this premium offering. We're working diligently on it, but as that comes out, we'll start to report on the KPIs of that and some more metrics, and you'll see that in our 2023 numbers as we give guidance for that.
spk04: That's great. Thanks so much. Our next question comes from the line of Robbie Marcus with J.P. Morgan. See if we'll see what your question is.
spk09: Hi, this is actually Lily. I'm for Robbie today. Thanks for taking the question. You know, with all these macro challenges, is there any color you can share on how SmilePay dynamics have shifted over the last few quarters? And what are you doing to mitigate any sort of financial risk on that side as inflation continues to worsen?
spk04: Yeah, I'll take that.
spk02: We haven't really seen any degradation, I would say, in our overall portfolio related to SmilePay despite the macroeconomic situation. I think one of the things that helps us certainly is to have a credit card on file with the customer, which kind of allows for easy payments. You know, we did raise prices, but, you know, we're kind of offsetting the impact of that for the customer by extending the payment terms out to 26 months versus 24. So it keeps their payment low at $89. So we're somewhat offsetting the impact of that price increase for the consumer. But overall, I think we watch the small pay performance very closely. You know, there are some ups and downs between quarters, I would say, and even amongst, you know, individual performance month to month. But overall, I'd say we're still considering, you know, the performance of that consistent with prior years where we haven't seen any major impacts from an economic standpoint from that consumer.
spk09: Okay, that's helpful. Just a quick follow-up. You've mentioned that these headwinds are really affecting your core demographic. So how have some of the non-core markets you've moved into recently, like teens and the Challenger campaign, been trending recently? Thanks so much.
spk07: Yes, I'll take that one. There really wasn't a direct teen initiative. I will tell you that SDC Plus, going after the higher income consumer by using our partner network, local GP office as a way to start, this also resonated very, very high with the parent of teens. So that was a good outcome for us. So I think SDC Plus kind of rolled up, not only goes after the higher income consumer, but also goes after that teen market that we really under-indexed. We've never really gone after that market. So that initiative will take shape. And yeah, I mean, as far as other initiatives and things that we're doing, it's really more back half of the year. And I don't know, Troy or Jesse, if you want any color on any of that.
spk02: I'll just say, yeah, it's You know, for the most part, our results are driven by our core consumer right now, and that's the way we built our model. So to the extent we make conditional investments and make inroads into that higher income consumer, that's all opportunity for us. So, you know, while we've been focused on it and trying to grow partner network and some of these other initiatives, I think, you know, really all that is in front of us, I would say, for the most part.
spk04: And our next question comes from the line of Michael Reiskin with Bank of America.
spk05: Please proceed with your question.
spk03: Hey, thanks for taking the question. We've got a couple, but also sort of like the big picture one, and it's a little bit of a follow-on on the last point. You know, if we sort of take a step back and look at the big picture, at the time of the IPO, you know, the focus was really heavily on there were two targets that were sort of guiding your methodology as a business. And it was one, the lower price point, and two was for patients or customers who specifically did not want to go to the dentist or didn't have access to the dentist. And if you fast forward to today, obviously a lot has changed in the world, but you're increasingly emphasizing or focusing on the doctor-directed channel or the dentist channel. And now you've got the premium offer in SBC+. And it seems like you're, you know, continually shifting more and more back into that other part of the market where, you know, the number one player align is. So it's still, you know, I recognize it's still a small part of the business and the former category still captures the majority of the opportunity. But any thoughts longer term on that shift? you know, any learnings we can take from that on the size of the, of the, you know, truly DTC platform and the at-home platform, you know, and the market opportunity there and, you know, how you stack up, you know, in a market where you could be going more head to head with the, with the established players in the doctor directed channel.
spk07: Yeah, Michael, I think, I think the way to look at it is we, we, we have this pure telehealth platform, which is, Up until this inflationary headwind, it was doing really well. We talked about Q1 of 21. It was a record quarter for us. 199 million, EBITDA positive. That was all of our core demographic $68,000 a year customer. That customer has been a workhorse for us, and we will continue to grow the business with that customer. We're not abandoning that customer. We just feel we have the right to win, as I stated in my remarks. that we have the platform, we have Gen2 manufacturing, which is a really great product. It's really improved as far as comfort, fit, and our SmileOS, which is our software platform, which we have a great team of engineers putting out new releases every quarter. We're doing more cases, better outcomes. So we feel that the time is right To go after that higher income consumer, we have the platform. What was missing was they didn't want to totally do a pure telehealth play. Our research came back that they love the telehealth aspects of it, the convenience that that offers, but not at the expense of not having someone in their neighborhood that they can go to if they need to, or at least to start the journey. So these initiatives are for growth, and it really was a pivot away from international, which was going to be a growth driver for us, as we talked about. It was the right thing to do to shut that down. Most of these countries that were not performing or had long-term prospects, it was a cash drain. There was a lot of regulatory hurdles in a lot of these countries that we had to overcome. And so pivoting back to something that has a much better ROI, we can get this SDC plus up by the end of the year, less costly than opening up international countries and start to really compete for that higher income consumer, which our research is showing that this model and platform is It's very appealing to them to have the best of both worlds, the telehealth and the physical location, which also then gets us into more teen cases, which we're underserving as well. So I would look at it as not so much of a shift, but more of an additive incremental segment that we were not getting. We were not getting that higher income consumer. We were way under indexing to them. And there's no reason. It's 20 million plus case starts around the world. And, you know, we were adding a new category for people who can afford it, which is typically when you disrupt a category, that's what you go after. It's price inconvenience. Price scheme number one by far, which we came out with. These were consumers who came to us who could not afford $5,000 for teeth straightening. It's now time in the evolution of the product and the platform to now go after that higher income consumer, and that's exactly what we're doing.
spk03: Okay. Thanks. I appreciate that. And a quick follow-up. On the NPS hit, you called out on the quarter. I just want to ask on that, given you've been hyper-focused on NPS metric and prior updates, how do you think that comes back timing-wise? Do you have any lingering concerns from detrimental impact in the business? And can you clarify in a little bit more detail? You talked about operational disruption. as a result of the announcement in January, what exactly was it that you think led to that pretty steep drop-off?
spk07: Yeah, good question. And this one hurts internally because our DNA is all about the customer. Everyone in the organization is extremely customer-focused, and we did not want this to happen, and I'll take the blame for that. Basically what happened was when we did our modeling for Project Horizon, which was our restructuring, that we executed in January, we looked at this very carefully at our service levels and what was needed. And one of the cost savings was to take out, you know, we were 24-7 in all of our teams and categories within our contact center. Our dental team, our customer care team, our retention, our servicing smile pay, all of it was 24-7. And we felt like we realized we didn't have to do that. There could be some cost savings by eliminating midnight and some of these night shifts. that needed IT support, help desk support. And so we were going to move some of those people into the other two shifts. We have three shifts, three eight-hour shifts. But what happened was a big chunk of our labor force for that contact center is in Costa Rica. Hindsight's 20-20. And what happened was when we offered them, we thought they'd be happy about moving out of a midnight shift into a day shift. And many of them had two jobs and said, sorry, can't do it. And we were kind of caught short staffed. So we still have to shut down those nighttime shifts to save on the IT and help desk and other support. And now we're backfilling. We have a really good detailed plan to get back to our normal service levels, which we're proud of and are important in this business by mid-June. So 30 days from now, and every week we're seeing improvement because we are having hiring classes and we are doing things, not only just hiring, but also improved productivity within each of the team members, getting more productivity out of each of them. So our NPS, which was at 55 last quarter, our Q3 of 2021, went down to 37, as low as it's been in a long time. Very upsetting to leadership in the company. But you're going to see that bounce back. It's all hands on deck. It's not going to take long. And we'll get back to the right service levels and NPS capabilities.
spk04: Okay, great. Thanks a lot.
spk05: And as a final reminder, if anyone has a question, you may press star 1 on your telephone keypad to join the question and answer team. Our next question comes from the line of Laura Champigne with Luke Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.
spk10: Thanks for taking my question this morning. You've laid out sort of short-term targets in your presentation and still have long-term targets. Do we get to see those long-term targets for performance kick in in 2023 in your current view? And when do we get to EBITDA positive, just knowing all that you know today?
spk02: I can take that. So as far as EBITDA positive goes, we're sticking with our original guidance, which is 2023 EBITDA positive and then cash flow positive in 24 slash 25. I would say as we start to get through some of these initial investments and understanding what SDC Plus and some of these other initiatives mean, I think we'll certainly take a look at our long-term guidance and make sure that it's representative of what we see from a marketplace perspective. But I'd say overall right now, you know, sticking with the shorter-term guidance, the 600 to 650, you know, 600 million relates to, you know, a continued worsening of the environment with the 650, a little bit of an improvement. You know, as we make investments in the business, we'll take a look at that shorter-term guidance after the first half of the year and kind of potentially rework that based on what we've seen. But I would say we're not ready to change long-term guidance yet until we get a little more perspective on how these investments are going to play out and when overall.
spk10: Got it. And then just to follow on the credit facility that you just reported about, When do you think you'll see peak borrowings on that facility?
spk02: Well, right now I'd say it's all based on operating results. I think what it does is gives us a lot of flexibility going forward and the ability to, if we want to extend some of the investments we want to make, we have the ability to do that. So initially we took $65 million was the initial draw we took on the facility. Really that was just to start it off. But overall, not necessarily projecting that we need additional capital, but it will all depend certainly on how this year plays out and then towards the back half of this year, the investments that we want to make and how we see those play out as well. I think the key thing for us is that we wanted to make sure we had additional liquidity on the balance sheet if we wanted to make those additional investments to drive growth. I mean, one of the things we looked at hard as a part of Project Horizon, as David mentioned earlier, was really trying to focus on those investments that have the best return and the shortest term to higher profitability. So this really gave us the ability to potentially weather any storms in the future, as well as make those investments in the business that we need to continue to drive growth.
spk07: Yeah, I would say just to add to that, Troy. So with the ending cash balance in Q1, roughly 145 plus the 255 you're looking at 400 million of available liquidity it's not needed for the model you know so this is added liquidity you take cash when you can take it um and if we want to start accelerating we see really good results coming out of sdc plus in the partner network and we want to really accelerate growth there with a with a near term payback um you know, ROI, then we have those funds to do there. Now also if things really get bad and worse. And so from a cash perspective, you should look at this company based on our models, what kind of cash burn we're talking about for 2022, even a positive in 23, we have plenty of liquidity not only to weather storm, but also to fast forward and invest more heavily in things that are working. So we feel we're in a really good position. We, we, Really excited about working with HPS. This is a group that we had worked with in the past off of our SmilePay AR balance, and we are with them again.
spk04: Good folks to work with. Got it. Thank you. And we have reached the end of the question and answer session, and this also concludes today's conference.
spk05: You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.
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