Experienced team and experience Board. Like you said, we’ve done this at just a smaller magnitude. We were a smaller company, too. So we’re a bigger company [indiscernible]. So I kind of like where things are. I think, look, there’s — everybody is speculating, right? Like if you just like — just look at what happened in this quarter, our stock started this quarter the day after earnings, $274 a share.
Jack Preston: $247.
Gary Friedman: Yeah, $247 a share. At the end of Q2, it ended today at $369. It peaked at $402. It went up 49%, and it peaked at 63% up. Within a quarter, with the only information and disclosures was we bought back 17% of the shares. So everybody could do the math about how many shares we bought back. And because there’s new disclosure that have to be made every time my ownership goes up by 1 point, there’s a lot of disclosures. It’s a lot of filings. And so you thought, “Hey, you don’t now. they’re buying back the stock up 17%, this go up 20%, it’s about 14%.” I mean it went all the way up to 63%. And at the end of today, it was up 49%. After hours, it’s still up 36%, even though it’s down, I don’t know, 28 — what’s it now 28 points down.
So like that, they just flashed it over here a second ago. So — and people like, wow, like, well, is it a bad day now. Looking a bad day. I don’t know we’ve had 1 million good days, 1 million bad days within a quarter — not a million, but like so many — so much volatility in the market because so many people are guessing like what’s next, what’s this, when is the Fed going to ease? What are they buying back stock? What does this mean? And I would just say, stay focused on what we write. You want to know what we mean, re-read the letter. That’s why we write these letters. So it’s on there. It’s not random comments from a conference call that can sometimes be less focused and just everything I spent a lot of time right in those letters. And the team spent a lot of time together saying like crafting what we believe is the best version of the truth and what we believe is going to happen with the business.
We’re not going to always be right. But yes, we have a pretty good track record over a long time. And so — but there’s just a lot of volatility at the time of speculation, right? When — or is that going to ease? Or are they going to tighten the housing market bottoming, is the pent-up demand, is there going to be more inventories, as it relates to our market. And RH’s new book is going to work or the good is going to be, or is the customer is going to accept the goods, where the margin is going to be at, okay, all kinds of stuff. We just put out a release today that confirmed the year’s numbers, confirmed them and the stock is down $30 in after hours. I don’t think any of it made sense going up. I don’t think it makes sense right now going down, but maybe it does just to kind of say, hey, where should it be?
But yeah, but we’re all kind of looking at the same information. I mean that’s the funny thing. So I’d say it’s like one of the things you learn — if you really study Warren Buffett, there’s a real long-term consistent view about how they operate and what they do. And yeah, we try to learn from people like that or Bernard Arnault and how he’s built LVMH and how people have built things. And even if you look at like a lot of people think that there’s so much inconsistency with Elon Musk, I see consistency. He consistently innovates. He consistently keeps innovating. And so have you ever hit a launch target on anything or an intra target? No, he consistently doesn’t because he doesn’t manage the business. He leads the business and he innovates consistently.
And so there’s always going to be kind of more fluctuation short term. But long term, he’s building one of the most incredible businesses the world’s ever seen. And so I was just kind of stand back and look at the long term, I hear people snipe at Elon Musk, he bought Twitter and that’s stupid, he turned it into X, like whatever. Those are little side shows. The guy is building one of the great companies in the world. Like people say, oh, he lost his head of HR or he lost this like — no, if you look at it over a number of years, he’s building one of the best thing in the world. And anybody that’s bet against them has lost a lot of money. And I think we’re just trying to build one of those great things. And so we just try to stay focused on the long term, learn from all the short-term data, but don’t overreact.
We know we made some mistakes and we know we are arrogant in pricing, and we know we kind of — or muscle atrophied a bit in new product introductions and trying to ramp back up was in our — yeah, it wasn’t our best work. We learned from that. We’re going to snap back from that, and you will see us not only snap back, you’ll see us better than you’ve ever seen us and I feel real confident, like, and so we’ll see how it plays out. We’ll see how right we are.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Jonathan Matuszewski from Jefferies. Please go ahead.
Jonathan Matuszewski: Great. Good evening, Gary, Jack, and thanks for taking my question. It’s on the contemporary business. In the past, you referenced $1 billion milestone over three years. Just hoping to see if we could get an update on how that business is looking today as more product has been rolled out across the galleries, and how we should maybe think about the run rate of that business, maybe by the time of early next year, which would be a couple of months after the October Sourcebook mailing. Thanks so much.
Gary Friedman: Yeah. I think about the totality of what we’re doing here. I wouldn’t just isolate contemporary, right? Contemporary — it’s a new book. Do we think it’s going to be $1 billion? Yes, we do, but you’ve really got a — you’ve just got to look at this whole thing in concert, right? The biggest book is our interiors book. It’ll continue to be contemporary — modern being number two, contemporary, number three. Contemporary might ramp bigger than modern. We may make decisions, a lot of times, what exactly goes in contemporary versus what goes in modern versus what goes in interiors can be somewhat subjective. Like there’s sometimes some blurred lines that are going to be there. I’d say — I wouldn’t go kind of micro like that right now.
I think you’ll miss the bigger idea. The bigger idea is the totality of the product transformation we’re making. And I think about it as we’re going to mail about 1,200 to 1,300 pages of product, and across that, 70% to 80% newness. I think the next biggest book that competes with us is 228 pages. We haven’t mailed anywhere near those number of pages in a long time, and we’ve never had this much new product hit a market like this, at the design quality, the quality of the make, and the — what we believe the value equation. And any time we’ve done anything like this, we’ve moved the business meaningfully. And so this is the biggest thing we’ve done. I think it will be the biggest — the most meaningful thing that we’ve ever done strategically.
It will reset the company for the next five years.
Jonathan Matuszewski: Appreciate the color and best of luck.
Gary Friedman: Thank you.
Operator: Your next question comes from the line of Steve McManus from BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.
Steve McManus: Hey, afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. So I had the same question on suppliers. We’re seeing more and more suppliers go out of business here, pretty big one on the high-end side last week. So just curious what you’re seeing with respect to the financial health of some of your key suppliers. Any challenges that you’re facing right now that’s worth calling out?
