Five Below, Inc. (NASDAQ:FIVE) Q4 2022 Earnings Call Transcript

Kenneth Bull: On the leverage, yeah. Matt, your question around the comp and the leverage, the comp point for leverage. You’re right. Historically, we’ve talked about 3%. There’s been a lot of noise over the last few years, so it’s hard to really kind of decipher based on the most recent activity. But Joel mentioned it before, if you just look at 2023 now, again, there’s a few things going on this year that are not normalized, right? We’re getting back to a — more normalized incentive compensation, and we’re lapping some of these one-time cost management strategies. But even with that, you’ll notice that like a 2.5% comp, which is the midpoint of our range that we guided to, we are getting slight leverage. I think the bigger part of that is as we move forward, our expectations are that we should see greater leverage as we’ve moved forward into out years, and potentially at a 3% or lower comp as we start to leverage on those investments we’ve made over the years, like distribution and corporate overhead in areas like that.

So, I do think we have the ability to lever at a lower than a 3% comp, or slightly lower than a 3% comp.

Joel Anderson: Thanks Matt.

Kenneth Bull: Thanks Matt.

Operator: The next question is from Seth Sigman with Barclays. Please go ahead.

Seth Sigman: Hey, everybody. Thanks for taking the question and Ken, congrats to you. Hey, I just wanted to follow up on the composition of comps. With transactions driving the comps now, it’s obviously quite different than we’re seeing with a lot of other retailers. Also, interesting, given some of the inherent ticket drivers in your business, can you just give us a little bit more context on what is driving transactions, and then perhaps what are some of the offsets to that? Thank you.

Joel Anderson: Yeah. I think the two biggest ones for us is, I mentioned my prepared remarks everything we’ve done around data and analytics. We have a much better robust tokenization that we haven’t had in past years. So, we really utilize that for marketing and that proved well to drive transactions. And then secondly, the new cohort that Matt was talking about, as we continue on these conversions, we’re immediately seeing a lift in sales, and it’s primarily through transactions. So, those are two areas that are really driving transactions and it clearly came through in Q4 for us. Thanks Seth.

Operator: The next question is from John Heinbockel with Guggenheim. Please go ahead.

John Heinbockel: So, Joel, two related questions. Number one, what would you say Michael’s two or three priorities are, right, product wise for 2023? And then I know the tech world has been a pretty big drag for the last — I don’t know, 12 to 15 months. What’s your prognosis on that, right, in terms of what you can do to improve that or just maybe that category getting better naturally?

Joel Anderson: Yeah. Well, listen, Michael’s got a couple priorities. One, it’s really all been around our version of consumables. The focus on all the teams to — in some cases, grow the space dedicated to consumables, improve the in stock associated with consumables, has been area number one of his focus. The second one has been around Five Beyond. And we have learned a lot as in our journey on Five Beyond, what types of items sell, what don’t sell, what kind of quantities to buy and et cetera, et cetera. So that is an area where he’s really leaned in to make a big, big difference on that. And then the third one is really just about the $1 to $2, $1 to $3 product. In this recessionary time, this time of high inflation, if we can continue to really focus on that low price point and deliver value, that’s the third area.