Meredith Burns: Thank you, Sean. And certainly a related question here, what drove the 7% growth in the consumer segment? And can it sustain mid to high-single-digit growth under the new model?
Sean Quinn: There were a lot of contributors. To start, I think that the team really did a great job in the planning and in the execution. We always do a very extensive deep dive, to assess what we can do better. And that’s actually something that we’ve already, is well underway, even for next year’s holiday peak. But the team was able to take action on the things identified, from last year, and those are things that have to get worked on throughout the year to improve the experience to add new features, add new products, evolve our go-to-market approach across our markets and so on. So, I think the team did a really good job in all that planning and execution, and that was really over the last full year. There’s also the fact that, it’s not like consumer is a wholly separate business.
We define it based on product category, but these are customers that are interacting with the site and being put through the same experience improvements, the same reduced friction in our checkout, the same improvements to design help, improvements in terms of how we’re using data, improvements in site search, more efficient advertising. All the other things that we’ve been talking about, that are actually a big part of why the other product categories had the strength I just mentioned too. I think the consumer categories also benefited from the fact that, we’ve had healthier new customer acquisition cohorts, in the last quarters. And there are many hybrid customers in there that are purchasing across categories. They tend to be some of the most valuable customers in our customer file.
So those are some of the things that impacted the revenue performance. As we noted in the release, it was the first time that we had year-over-year consumer products growth since we started the transformation journey in Vista in 2019. And you may recall back then we pretty significantly reduced discounting and advertising. And that was, that had a big impact on consumer, because there were some things that we were doing in the consumer category that were destroying capital or not producing sufficient returns so we made some big changes there. So, it’s great to see that back to growth and doing what it’s doing. But it actually goes beyond just revenue. And so maybe just highlight a few other things. In our production facilities, we also had really good execution.
Just as an example of that, last year, In Europe, there were labor supply challenges in the holiday ramp, which increased cost. Team did a really nice job this year, changing how we approach workforce management, driving a lot of efficiency versus last year from a labor perspective and doing all that while maintaining a high on time delivery to customers. In our customer care, those teams, another area where we’ve made continuous improvement throughout the last year, but the team has really been focused on removing friction for customers, improving training for our team members, improving visibility of help on placement on the site. And we’ve been able to reduce contacts as well because we’ve improved the site experience, but also we’ve improved these elements of how our care teams interact with customers.
And so, all of that has led to about 100 basis points of savings just in our customer care versus last year. So, I mentioned those because it’s not just revenue, it really is across the Board it was a strong performance. There’s a lot that’s gone into that, and hopefully, that’s been a theme you pick up over the last quarters, which is, it’s a lot of little things an improved execution and focus that ultimately has driven the results.
Meredith Burns: That’s great. Thank you, Sean. All right. I’m going to move over to Robert for, one of our pre-submitted questions. So, Robert, what is ailing upload and print other than the tough year-over-year comps in the half of the year? What are you doing to fix it? And how should we think about it, about the sustainable growth in that segment?
Robert Keane: Okay. Well, thanks for the question. First of all, let me say hello to everyone and like Meredith and Sean, welcome you to the call. To answer the question, I will start by saying we see these businesses, the upload and print businesses, as healthy, not as ailing. We also are asking how we can continue their success and make them even stronger, which is an important question, but it’s not a question of what we need to fix. So, of course, and I will come to this in a moment, we explained in our release that revenue growth was below our plan, but that doesn’t change the overall picture. And let me explain that by starting with the success in driving up upload and print EBITDA and cash flow. As we’ve done across Cimpress, we are focusing on driving bottom line expansion to one show the underlying power of what we have as a business, but also to help with the corporate level delevering.
And upload and print just expanded profitability, EBITDA, 41% year-over-year. And we have strong bottom line prospects looking forward. Specifically, if you look at the upload and print on the trailing 12-month basis, that’s over $150 million which is driving again increased cash flow and cumulatively we’ve generated cash flow from this group that exceeds the capital we ever invested in them. And of course, there’s value in the business today going forward to the returns have been already attractive and we’re confident that those returns will continue to grow. So again, we see these healthy businesses. Now as to revenue, yes, it was lower than I expected, but it was in part due to making sure we drive the bottom-line, but also there were and you mentioned this in your question, high growth rates last year, we had a lap.
