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spk01: Thank you for your patience. The Thorne Health Tech third quarter 2022 earnings call will be starting shortly. Thank you for your patience. Welcome to the Thorne Health Tech third quarter 2022 earnings call. At this time all participants are in a listen only mode. A brief question and answer session will follow the formal presentation and to ask a question at this time please press star 1 on your touch phone keypad. If you change your mind at any time please press star 2 and for operator assistance at any point it's star 0. Thank you. Now Let me turn the call over to Thomas Wilson, Vice President of Investor Relations. So, Thomas, you may begin.
spk05: Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining Thorne Health Tech's third quarter 2022 earnings call. With me today to share our results are Paul Jacobson, our CEO, and Brian Conley, our CFO. Tom McKenna, our COO, and Michelle Crow, our CMO, are also available for questions. Before we begin, please note that today's discussion contains forward-looking statements that are subject to risks and uncertainties. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by our forward-looking statements. More information about potential risk factors can be found in our 2021 Annual Report on Form 10-K and our upcoming Form 10-Q, which we anticipate filing after market today, and in other SEC filings. Today, in addition with U.S. GAAP reporting, we will be discussing financial measures that do not conform to GAAP. We believe these non-GAAP measures enhance the understanding of our performance because they are more representative of how we internally measure the business. Non-GAAP financial measures should not be considered in isolation from or as a substitute for GAAP measures. The reconciliation of GAAP and non-GAAP results is available in the earnings press release we issued after market closed yesterday and in the supplemental investor presentation posted to our IR website. In three weeks, we will be participating in the Evercore ISI Health Connects Conference and holding investor meetings. A webcast of the event will be accessible on our IR site, and we look forward to meeting with you. With that, I'll turn the call over to Paul. Thank you, Thomas. Good morning, everyone.
spk07: Thank you for joining our third quarter earnings call today. I'll summarize our strong financial performance for Q3 with record sales and strong profitability. discuss how our consumers are holding up in the current environment, step through a handful of recent developments and opportunities on the testing and R&D sides of our business, and round out my prepared remarks with our outlook to close out 2022. Brian will provide further discussion of our Q3 performance and capital deployment in his prepared remarks. Lastly, additional details can be found in the earnings release and supplemental investor presentation that we issued after the market closed yesterday. With that, let's dive in. During Q3, we remained focused on a few core areas of our operations that drive strong performance for the business. These included ensuring seamless operations from ingredient sourcing to distribution, an area where we are beginning to see certain supply chain improvements. Continuing to deliver the highest quality products, innovations, and thoughtful, engaging content to our customers in support of their health journeys. and our cutting-edge health tests and remote sample collection capabilities, which significantly improve user experiences over current industry norms and are presenting significant business development opportunities in multiple fields of health and wellness. We are also preparing to further scale the supplement business as we move closer to expanding manufacturing and fulfillment to support continued growth and anticipated future demand. With the expansion, we will be able to drive increased efficiencies for better margins and industry-leading turnaround times. On the demand front, let me take a moment to highlight a few trends we're seeing relative to customer strength and behavior in this market, which contributed to our strong Q3 results and helped inform our updated full-year outlook. In addition, while we do not normally refer to business performance on a sequential quarter basis, I'll provide some color through that lens given the challenging nature of the current economic backdrop. Thus far, Thorne customers continue to be resilient. Our total number of customers and active subscriptions continues to climb. Our unit economics, such as typical order size and order value, are up Q3 year over year. Unit economics also held firm from Q2 to Q3 and remained solid through October. We've experienced increased demand for our products containing ingredients that have been relatively more impacted by global supply chain disruptions. such as certain bulk powders like creatine, where we forward bought a large quantity of the global supply at lower margins in order to be able to serve our customers ahead of anticipated shortages. While we continue to see strength in our typical high-end consumer, we do not expect to be insulated from economic conditions that will impact certain pockets of our consumer base as we progress through Q4 and into next year. That said, we are generally encouraged by recent trends holistically, and the early implications for 2023. Now, with consumer health backdrop in mind, I'll transition to some of the financial highlights for Q3. Starting with the top line, I'm pleased with our record net sales of 58.4 million, representing growth of more than 21% for the quarter. Sales performance was driven by 47% growth in our direct-to-consumer channel, primarily from continued traction, growing brand awareness. including from our Healthy Aging brand campaign, which occurred during the second quarter of this year. Our growth was broad-based across third-party marketplaces and Thorne.com, in line with our approach to meet customers where they are. The strong D2C performance was underpinned by 60% year-over-year growth in subscription sales, which increased to 37% of direct-to-consumer sales. We experienced a 41% year-over-year increase in transaction sales, although Q2 transaction sales dollars were greater than both Q1 and Q3, which we mainly attribute to heightened transaction volumes stemming from the campaign running in Q2. Rounding up direct-to-consumer channel growth drivers, we continue to achieve superior customer satisfaction stats that are significantly higher than the average digital retailer. For the quarter, our net promoter score was 72 compared to a retail average of around 35. We also recorded an LTV to CAC ratio of 7.8, inclusive of the benefits of the Q2 campaign spend that did not reoccur and therefore drove CAC down. Turning to the professional and B2B channel, we continue to experience comparability challenges from the impacts of previously disclosed lost distributor sales to its end customers in Ukraine, Russia, and Eastern Europe. Despite the impact arising from that conflict, professional and B2B channel sales increased almost 6% over Q3 of last year, driven primarily by a continuation of steady growth in professional sales, led by the combination of our Salesforce efforts and continued growth in online dispensary sales. As a percent of sales, direct-to-consumer channel sales and professional and B2B channel sales were 46% and 54% of total net sales, respectively. On a go-forward basis, we continue to expect our annual sales mix to be closer to 50-50 split from direct-to-consumer channel growth, outpacing professional and B2B channel growth near term. With respect to gross margin, there are a couple of primary factors to unpack that drove margins down year over year. First, in the last two quarters, we highlighted our advanced purchases of raw materials to mitigate against potential supply chain disruptions. As a reminder, many but not all of our ingredient purchases are governed by pre-existing supplier agreements. However, to further ensure supply continuity amidst the current economic conditions, we proactively identified second procurement sources, which resulted in higher average material costs than historical norms. In Q3, those higher raw material costs flowed through our cost of sales line, concurrent with our strong revenue growth, driving gross margin down. Second, many of the ingredients and products that have been the most impacted by global supply chain disruptions have lower gross margin profiles, such as creatine products and bulk powders. Our second source pricing and margin levels have not been where we would prefer under long-term supply contracts, resulting in an unfavorable mix shift to margins. However, we are currently entering into agreements with these suppliers as needed. This month, for example, we entered into a new supply agreement for creatine, which will significantly reduce our per-unit costs starting in 2023 after cycling through remaining higher cost inventory in Q4. Moving down the P&L to operating expenses, R&D decreased slightly year-over-year to $1.8 million, mainly from lower third-party spend, which can vary depending on in-flight research project activities. Marketing costs of $4.5 million decreased significantly to about 8% of sales in Q3, compared to 22% of sales in the prior year. That decrease was due to the combination of the change in timing and related costs of our major brand campaigns, which occurred in Q3 of last year compared to 2Q of this year. And the decision we highlighted on our last earnings call to prioritize delivering on our full-year profit goals and by extension reduced the level of full-year spend by deferring a follow-on marketing campaign originally planned for Q3 2022. As expected, the reduced external spend resulted in slower new customer growth. I would highlight, however, that excluding the quarters associated with these last two major campaigns, our marketing run rate has been about 10 to 11% of quarterly sales for the last two years, a level which has historically been effective yet driving meaningful growth. The deferral also provided some insights that allow us to deepen our understanding of consumer behavior in a challenging environment on a more organic basis, and therefore helps us inform our go-forward strategies. I'll provide directional commentary on our near-term marketing approach in connection with our updated 2022 outlook shortly. Moving along, SG&A increased by almost 36% year-over-year, primarily due to continuation of increased selling costs from the combination of top-line growth, a more normalized run rate public company cost pool, including a full quarter of stock-based compensation in Q3, as we completed our IPO in September 2021. Bryan will provide more color in the individual components in selling, distribution, general administrative expenses in his commentary, which will show favorability we are seeing as a percentage of sales on a trended basis. Turning to profit from these results, our adjusted EBITDA grew significantly to $8.3 million, with expanded adjusted EBITDA margin of 14.6% for the quarter. Rounding out the bottom line, GAAP EPS grew to $0.07, and adjusted EPS grew to 12 cents. That wraps up my prepared remarks related to Q3. Before looking ahead to guidance, I'll share a handful of updates related to our health tests and blood sample collection technology with a few comments on our scientific team's brain health work. Starting with gut health, after relaunching our proprietary test, which revolutionizes longstanding user experience to microbiome testing, our customers who take these tests for deep insights into their health have opted to use the new technology despite our ongoing support of the legacy test. This fact pattern is effectively in-market evidence of the user preferences we confirmed during the white technology study. As awareness of the importance of microbiome health grows, which it certainly is on a global stage, our first mover advantage in IP creates lasting competitive moats. The recent interest we've been getting from potential early B2B adopters, albeit still low volume from nascency, has expanded into broader discussions that put a spotlight on the level of science we deploy across the business. I believe these holistic business development opportunities that showcase our science and range of solutions provide levers to drive a continuation of our above market growth longer term. We've also made great strides in bringing our OneDraw blood sample collection device to the consumer market. Our recent progress is positioning us well to capitalize on ample business development monetization opportunities spanning from our own D2C ecosystem to decentralized clinical research in the near term. In August, we achieved a significant milestone upon receiving D2C medical device clearance from Japanese regulators. We believe that validation is significant to our upcoming work with the FDA to deploy a new product that will be accessible to anyone because of the high hurdles required by Japanese regulations. As we push ahead to D2C clearance in the U.S., we have not slowed our efforts to expand OneDraw's capabilities, which should lead to earlier and more significant new business once the device is in market. For example, we're continuing development of a serum separation cartridge to expand the range of device applications in addition to health panels related to conditions consumers can't test for today. Working with a partner lab to improve DNA preservation and extraction, we identified a process that allows for cold, chain-free sample preservation that optimizes retrieval of DNA from the device's sample strip, the results of which have been superior to our current methods. With that, I'll turn to guidance, as Brian has a packed agenda and I want to leave plenty of time for your questions. As we look to the future, we continue to evaluate our marketing spend. We believe we have an opportunity next year to thoughtfully increase our investment to drive efficient new customer acquisition and support long-term brand equity. In addition to further investing in a diversified paid media strategy, we will also strategically scale our influencer marketing efforts. Our goal is to take advantage of the broad community of differentiated customers to build deep personalization in content and use this network to build user-generated content cost-effectively. Performance data from 2022 has shown us that the inclusion of influencers in our marketing generates better returns for paid, owned, and earned tactics. Our more strategic approach to influencers starting in 2023 will be applied across the business, including in more cutting-edge R&D areas where influencers have not been deployed before, such as our brain health platforms. We also know that a personalized customer experience or helping the customer answer the question, what do I take and why, increases engagement and drives better conversion. In 2022, customers that engaged with quizzes and health tests had a higher conversion rate and greater lifetime value. We will continue to prioritize a personalized customer experience by expanding our capabilities with dynamic web content, scaling Thorne Advisor, and adding a more interactive approach for our customers with various key influencers. We're building plans to move away from some of the more traditional marketing tactics to deploying a more data science-driven approach to our community of customers and customer influencers. We believe we are positioning ourselves for continued significant profitable growth over the long term, far above industry market rates, such as the 6.3% estimated CAGR for the global nutritional supplements market from 2022 to 2030 for a recent TAM study by Grandview Research. With respect to our brain health initiatives, our scientific team continues to produce cutting-edge research and insights that could be transformative to how certain conditions are approached. For example, we received summary results from a placebo-controlled clinical trial conducted with Mayo Clinic. The objective of that trial was to measure the decline in cognitive processing speed and efficiency and whether there was a rise in protein indicative of injury, even in the absence of concussion symptoms. The trial participants were junior ice hockey players, with that cohort having been selected due to the repetitive head impacts over the course of a season. The data, which is embargoed at this time, will be presented at an international conference on brain injury in early 2023. and the results will be published in a peer-reviewed journal around the same time. Based on the study results, a similar study is about to launch in another category of ice hockey players. The work we have going on around brain health is front and center when we think about being the leading company in scientific wellness and healthy aging. Based on our year-to-date performance through October and aforementioned topics, we now expect our full-year guidance to be Net sales of between 232 million and 235 million, representing growth of 25% to 27% over 2021. Gross margin of between 52% and 53%. Adjusted EBITDA of between 25.5 million and 28.5 million, representing growth of 24% to 38.5% over 2021. And adjusted EPS, of between $0.34 and $0.37. In addition, our guidance for adjusted EBITDA and adjusted EPS includes the following assumptions. Marketing costs of between 14% and 15% of net sales, depreciation of approximately 2.7% of net sales, an estimate full-year adjusted tax rate of 10%, and diluted weighted average shares outstanding of $53 million as of December 31st 2022. With that, I'll turn the call over to Brian.
spk04: Thank you, Paul. And good morning, everyone. I am happy to report another quarter of strong financial performance as net sales grew by 21.7% or 10.4 million to 58.4 million during the third quarter of 2022. The increase was led by double digit growth in our DTC channel, which grew by 47.2% to 8.7 million. Subscription sales of 10 million continued to strengthen during the quarter, growing 17.1% over the same period last year. Subscription sales during the third quarter represented 37% of our DTC sales and 17.1% of our total sales. Our transaction-based or non-subscription DTC sales also grew by 4.9 million, or 40.6% year over year. In terms of our professional and B2B business, Sales during the third quarter were $31.4 million, an increase of 5.9%. Gross margins during Q3 were 48.2% of net sales, declining 500 basis points from last year, and was impacted by short-term increases in specific raw material costs and a marginal decline in ASP driven by the continued growth in our professional B2B channel, driving an unfavorable shift in sales mix during the quarter. We continue to remain critically focused on operational efficiency and discipline cost management and actively review and engage our strategic suppliers to ensure that the short-term cost impacts are minimized and long-term savings opportunities from scale are realized. On our Q2 call, we indicated we were beginning to invest in and upgrade our manufacturing facility to maximize production efficiency, increase throughput, and drive long-term cost savings. During the third quarter, we officially broke ground on the expansion, which will double our maximum manufacturing capacity and set us up for our next leg of growth to be on $500 million in annual sales. We expect the expansion to be completed during the fourth quarter of 2023. Looking at operating expenses, SG&A grew $4.9 million, or 36.6%, to $18.3 million, representing 31.4% of net sales. As a reminder, our SG&A costs are comprised of three primary operating functions. One, selling. Two, distribution fulfillment. And three, general and administrative. Selling costs are comprised of the cost of our sales professionals, including commissions and related direct selling costs. During the third quarter of 2022, selling costs were 4.1 million, or 7% of sales. compared to 3.1 million or 6.5% of sales in the same period last year. Distribution and fulfillment costs are comprised of costs to operate our two distribution and fulfillment centers and include fulfillment personnel costs, outbound freight and shipping costs, and facilities costs. These costs were 3.7 million during the third quarter of 2022 or 6.4% of sales compared to 3.3 million or 6.8% of sales last year General and administrative costs, which include our corporate costs and general overhead, were 10.5 million, or 18% of sales during the third quarter, compared to 7.1 million, or 14.7% of sales last year. Adjusted to exclude the impact of depreciation and equity compensation costs, general and administrative costs during the third quarter of 2022 were 7.9 million, or 13.5% of sales. compared to 6.4 million or 13.3% of sales last year. We continue to remain focused on managing our SG&A expenses and leveraging the fixed cost components of our corporate cost structure. During the third quarter, marketing expenses were 4.5 million or 6.3 million lower than the same period last year, as we reduced and deferred marketing spend and prioritized delivery on our four-year profit goals for 2022. Research and development expenses were $1.8 million during the third quarter, down 18.9% from $2.2 million during the prior year. Third quarter per share earnings on a gap basis were $0.07 per share, which is $0.06 per share higher than a year ago. Adjusted EBITDA for the third quarter of 2022 was $8.3 million, an increase of $7.2 million compared to the $1.1 million reported during the prior year. Looking at year-to-date results for the first nine months of 2022, net sales were 169.2 million, an increase of 33.8 million, or 24.9% over the prior year. Growth in sales were led by a 26.9 million, or 49.1% increase in our DTC sales, of which 10.7 million was attributable to the continued growth in DTC subscription sales. B2B professional sales during the first nine months of 2022 were 87.5 million, an increase of 6.9 million, or 8.5% over the prior year period. Gross margin for the first nine months of 2022 was 53%, an increase of 10 basis points compared to 52.9% during the same prior year period. During the first nine months of 2022, SG&A expenses grew 17.5 million, or 47.2% to $54.5 million, or 32.2% of net sales. Drilling down into the three primary operating functions of our SG&A costs, during the first nine months of 2022, selling costs were $11.8 million, or 7% of sales, compared to $7.8 million, or 5.7% of sales during the first nine months of 2021. Distribution and fulfillment costs were $12.2 million during the first nine months of 2022, or 7.2% of sales, compared to $8.6 million, or 6.3% of sales last year. General and administrative costs were $30.5 million, or 18% of sales during the first nine months of 2022, compared to $20.7 million, or 15.3% of sales last year. Adjusting to exclude the impact of depreciation and equity compensation costs, general and administrative expenses during the first nine months of 2022 were $22.9 million or 13.5% of net sales. Comparatively, G&A excluding depreciation and equity compensation costs for the nine months of 2021 was $18.8 million or 13.9% of net sales. Marketing expense during the first nine months of 2022 was $27.5 million, an increase of $7.4 million, or 37% over 2021, driven primarily by the $10.2 million investment into our 12-week healthy aging campaign aimed at increasing brand awareness and driving new customer acquisition, which ran the majority of the second quarter of 2022. Research and development expenses were $5.5 million during the first nine months of 2022. Earnings on a per share basis for the first nine months of 2022 were $0.06 per share, an increase of $0.05 per share as compared to the first nine months of 2021. Adjusted EBITDA for the first nine months of 2022 was $15.6 million, an increase of $0.4 million compared to $15.1 million during the prior year. Turning from operations and focusing on capital and liquidity, as of September 30, 2022, we had a cash balance of $27.4 million, of which $22.5 million was unrestricted. Operationally, during the first nine months of 2022, we used $8.8 million of cash in our operating activities. driven by marketing and advertising spend, and growing our inventory, including raw materials, which increased by 13.4 million, to support our continued growth, new product launches, and to protect our supply chain. As mentioned in my earlier comments, during the third quarter, we broke ground on the expansion of our primary manufacturing facility in Somerville, South Carolina. This project will expand our production facility by 74,000 square feet and allow us to double the manufacturing capacity to support our continued growth to approximately $650 million in annual sales. This project has a budget of $32 million for construction and an additional $12 million for manufacturing and production equipment. We expect the expansion to be completed and online by the end of 2023, and we'll fund the investment with a combination of borrowings from our revolving line of credit, a tenant reimbursement provided by the current landlord, and cash from operations. The $12 million in purchases of long-life production equipment will be financed through our current equipment finance facility. Simultaneous to the expansion project, during the third quarter, we also commenced the upfit of a new warehousing and fulfillment facility directly adjacent to our primary manufacturing facility in Somerville, South Carolina. This facility is under a long-term lease, which will commence during the second quarter of 2023, when we expect to take control and have access to the property. The budgeted cost for the outfit of the new facility is approximately $11 million, which we also plan to fund with a combination of borrowings from our revolving line of credit, a tenant allowance from the current landlord, and cash from operations. As of today, we have not drawn any amounts against our revolver and the full $15 million remains available to fund working capital requirements and strategic initiatives such as the expansion of our manufacturing facility and the new warehousing and fulfillment facility. As we move into the final quarter of 2022 and work to close out our first full year as a public company, I want to recognize and thank our team members for all of their incredible efforts and valued contributions. You are the foundation of Thorne and the reason our customers trust our brand for their bodies. Your unwavering commitment to excellence continues to make Thorne Health Tech a leader in the health and wellness space. We could not be more excited about the opportunities ahead. This completes our prepared remarks. We would now like to open the line for any questions you may have. Operator, can we have our first question, please?
spk01: Thank you. I will first question. comes from the line of Elizabeth Anderson of Evercore. Your line is open.
spk08: Hi, guys. Good morning. Thanks so much for the question. I was wondering if you could comment on, I understood what you were saying in the quarter about the advance purchases and securing a more diversified supply chain. Can you help us think through sort of the expected sort of timeline that these like new purchases cover and just sort of how to think about that, you know, over the next couple of quarters and whether you're sort of thinking about continuing to do that, you know, as we get into the fourth quarter?
spk07: Yeah, Elizabeth, how you doing? It's Paul. I'll answer a piece of it and then I'll let Brian or Tom comment. So, The situation is really focusing on a couple of ingredients, one specifically where there were supply chain problems globally. We had an opportunity to either do no business in this particular ingredient area, which is important to the sports performance business in particular, and to those who participate in certain areas of athletics that are consumers, or to step up and make a major play, knowing that we were doing it at low margins and doing it in a way that would protect our business going forward. So we made a significant purchase, basically locking up a huge supply chain where we were one of the few companies able to provide. The margins were low. I think it was around 18% or 20%. And we'll be washing through that supply during the course of 2022 through the fourth quarter where we know that we have the inventory sold. Our team recently, the team reporting to Tom, recently made a significant change in the supply agreement going forward where our margins in this ingredient will return back to something that's more normalized. And we expect the profitability on this particular ingredient to be good going into 2023. But it'll wash through during this quarter. And it affected our overall gross margin.
spk08: Got it. No, that's super helpful. Can you talk about your sort of pricing strategy in this era of obviously inflation plus like a more volatile macro?
spk07: Yes. So, you know, we try to operate under the theory that we have a high and consumer base, but there has to be some realism baked into the way we price products. You can't just continuously rely on price increases and hope people will buy. So what we have done in the past is we've raised prices pretty much across the board in the last couple of years on sort of a 3% level. we can get away with just doing it across the board. This year, at the end of this month, actually, we will finalize our approach towards next year's pricing. But I will tell you that what we're doing is going through an entire SKU rationalization play. So there will be products, and we expect that we will take a net price increase going forward into next year. But there are products that we think we could drive a lot more sales if we drop the margins potentially from something like 70 or 80 percent down to something more normalized and Raised prices on some other ingredients where we think we have more pricing power So we will be taking an increase but we're not going to just slap it out to our customers isn't across the board It's going to be rationalized and done one-off and I think Between production and marketing they pretty much finalized the approach to going forward Got it.
spk08: And maybe the last question I realize obviously the macro is somewhat volatile, but I was wondering if you had any early thoughts on 2023 you could share with us in terms of where you expect sort of particularly on the revenue line sort of growth to come out.
spk07: So let me just say that so far in October and the beginning of November, we've seen very strong demand. So it gave us some confidence anyway that things are going to hold together and maybe improve. Going forward into next year, we have not finalized our budgets for the year, but we anticipate projecting significant growth next year. And we are also looking at ourselves almost as a startup when it comes to to the way that we want to address marketing. And Michelle is working with her team to come up with a data science influencer-based strategy that we think is going to be really great for us and hopefully drive sales going forward aggressively into 2023. Got it.
spk08: Thanks so much.
spk01: Thank you. Our next question comes from Sean Dodge of RBC Capital Markets. Your line is now open.
spk06: yeah thanks uh good morning um maybe just on one of your last comments there paul about um the demand holding up well in october and looks like so far into november uh you you said most of your consumer base is pretty insulated economically but but still some pockets potentially of sensitivity there maybe just give us a sense of um you know when we think about guidance for 22 the expectations you've built into there around um you know kind of how your consumer base specifically, you know, holds up, does everything kind of have to remain strong for you to hit the guidance or, or is there some, some kind of, I don't know, cushion or wiggle room in there for a little bit of deterioration? Yeah.
spk07: I mean, I, again, I, it's why I tried to mention something, give you a little bit of a heads up on October and November. So, so far things look good and we're not quite halfway through the quarter yet. Um, But I think that our guidance is set that we feel pretty comfortable with it. We've gotten through some of it already. But look, I don't want to tell you that if the world fell apart in December that we'd absolutely lock into everything. I mean, I can't tell. But so far from what we've seen, it's based on strong demand for our products.
spk06: Okay, fair enough. And then before you mentioned some impact from your distributor partner selling into Eastern Europe, is there any update you can share there? Has that gotten worse or better? And then how much is Eastern Europe at this point contributing to revenue?
spk07: Right. So I don't want to make excuses here, which is why I didn't bring it up too much in this. But I'll give you the numbers. We're taking a $17 or $18 million hit here. from this one particular customer that's an international distributor for us that happens to sell in multiple parts around the world, but they went to zero as a result of the war. So, you know, we're not for that. We'd be having a blowout year to the upside. That's been the growth determiner on our B2B channel, and it has been the – you know, it's become virtually – Well, it's very, very hard to forecast with these guys going forward. I'd say that we've had a month or so recently where we've had some pickup in business, though. But I don't know whether that's going to continue going forward.
spk06: And as far as when you begin to laugh at it, that kind of late February coincident with the Russian invasion, is that when that kind of gets dropped out of at least the year-over-year comparables?
spk07: Yeah, I'd say right around some part of the second quarter.
spk01: Thank you. Your next question comes from Oliver Chen of Cowan & Co. Please go ahead when you're ready.
spk03: Hey guys, it's Max on for Oliver. Thanks a lot for taking our question. So first on top line, just a couple of parts here. It looks like there was a bit of a sequential decel in the DTC segment both year over year as well as on the two-year. So if maybe you can comment on that. And then also if our math is right, it looks like guidance implies a pretty large step up. I guess that speaks to your comments on October and November. So just curious sort of any comments on what happened in 3Q within DTC and does that mean that demand is actually accelerating sequentially as well?
spk07: Okay, so I'm going to let Michelle answer the first part, and I'll answer the second part.
spk02: Yeah, so kind of looking at the year-over-year trend, you know, demand lines did remain strong. So you see demand in the quarter at 47%, and we saw a growth in the number of purchasing customers both quarter-over-quarter and year-over-year. But in terms of unit economics, that's where we really saw an increase. So order size was up 25% year-over-year, net price per unit about 6% year-over-year, and then really stable order frequency, which, we feel is promising given that we continue to acquire new customers further from the core. And in general, you know, through our conversations with our distributor partners, we've learned that the category of consumer health is a softening that other categories have, like apparel and outdoor. And moreover, that Thorne is outperforming brands in our specific category. So, you know, all of that is really promising in terms of year-over-year performance. To your question specifically about kind of the really substantial trends, specifically around the transactional, that's really a function of scaling back the marketing budget by about $9 million for the second half of the year. You know, we actively want to mitigate the impact of that scale back by focusing on unpaid tactics, so like SEO, content marketing, scaling our ambassador programs, some own channel, you know, marketing automation tactics. But the... you know, $9 million cutback did impact the Q3 web traffic and number of purchasing customers, but we're confident that with these strong unit economics, despite that cutback, that once we scale up spend again in 2023, that we can convert those prospects we reached during the campaign and get back on a potential growth trend.
spk07: Right. And, Sean, to your question about the guidance being a major step up, I would say that... It is a result of kind of what we've been thinking about when we gave guidance at the beginning of the year that we'd see a step up in the fourth quarter. I think it would have been a lot more had we not made the marketing cutback that we did. But from what the demand we're seeing so far through the first half of the fourth quarter, it looks pretty good.
spk03: Got it. Okay. That's very helpful. And then on gross margin, obviously there's a number of moving parts here, both on the Ross side, building out the new supply chain, probably it's going to have some impact, I would guess. And then also you mentioned potentially taking AURs down a bit. So I guess, how should we think about your gross margin, both over the next several quarters? as well as long-term? Should the declines be pretty similar as what we saw in 3Q, or how should we just model that line?
spk07: Okay, sorry. I know it's Max, not Sean. So the margin, the way we're looking at margin, we guided towards 52-53 for next year. We're going to have, we expect the fourth quarter margins to be slightly better. We are going to run off these purchases of ingredients that we did buy at low margins and do it in size by the probably end of the fourth quarter. It might seep a little bit into January. But in general, the guidance that we gave on margin of $52.53 is where we are. Now, there's a little bit of an element here with the new facility coming online. that is having some negative impact on the margin short term, which is why we're forecasting 52, 53. Once that facility is online, we see all sorts of reasons that we think the margins can go up fairly dramatically from there. And I do want to emphasize that this expansion of the facility led by Tom McKenna It's something that we have done before, and we're not new to this. It's not nearly as complicated as what we've done in the past, so we're quite confident that we'll be able to drive higher margins once this is done going forward. The other thing is that it will allow us to engage in the way we're bringing in new equipment and some of the things we're doing and much more personalization of our business and including meeting demand that we've had for years for specific unit of use packaging that our customer base has been clamoring for. And the only reason we haven't introduced it in the past really has been COVID being such that we couldn't, we haven't been able to get hold of the new machinery that we wanted.
spk03: Got it. And then just one quick last one, but how should we think about your LTV tax going forward? Obviously, 3-2 is very strong, but it's been pretty volatile just given your marketing campaign. So I think you gave us a number previously, so just curious if that should still hold. And then furthermore, how should we think about the right marketing budget for the business going forward, say next year and really just longer term?
spk02: to take the first part of sorry yeah definitely so in terms of our customer acquisition costs specifically we're really striving to be efficient for the whole year and from an LT to CAC ratio perspective our goal is you know three times or better to your point about kind of the fluctuation quarter to quarter that really is a function of the timing of the spend but in 2023 Based on our strategic approach, we're going to be having more always-on marketing spend, which will kind of level out the spend and therefore level out the customer acquisition costs impacting the LTV impact ratio. So that would be kind of more stable as we move forward.
spk07: And in terms of the overall marketing budget, so I'd like to emphasize a couple things. First of all, Risk control is what we're after right now until we see the economy beginning to turn around. We're anxious to take risks, but do it intelligently. As I mentioned a little bit earlier, and I tried to allude to this in my prepared remarks, we are taking, under Michelle's leadership, a very, very hard look at what we think marketing should look like on a go-forward basis over the next few years. We are in the process of doing a deep dive into bringing more data science approach to the way we're going to do things in-house and keep it vertically integrated and utilize what we think is an underutilized asset, which has been the community we've built of influencers over the last several years and try to find new and differentiated ways to deploy that to marketing. So we're in the process of building the budget now, but that means that we're also taking a look, as I mentioned, at almost like what would we do if we were a startup and how would we market ourselves given the assets we've already built up over the past half dozen years or so. So I guess it's a long-winded way of saying that we expect to engage in marketing in a really intelligent, risk-controlled way, but expect us to step it up.
spk03: No, that's very helpful. Appreciate all the color. Best regards and happy holidays. Thank you.
spk01: Thank you. Thank you. As a reminder, to ask any further questions, please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad.
spk00: We have had no further questions, so I'd like to close the call here. Thank you all for joining.
spk01: You may now disconnect your lines and have a lovely day.
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