We picked up more margin than we hit more strategic separation. So — and I believe, as we should, our consumer move more, our consumer had more urgency. And in some cases, where other people promote it, maybe they got a little bit more top line than us but we just didn’t promote. But it’s like trying to act like, oh, this is a surprise. Now like — I mean, the Fed pumped so much money into the economy. They created inflation. They held interest rates at such low levels, they made it easy for people to buy homes. Now we’re on the other side of that. Quantitative easing, interest rates are up. We’ve got inflation. Who’s seen this game before? Anybody on this phone, not unless you were in the market in 1975 to 1982. This is a whole new ball game that no one’s even seen.
We’re trying to just look at the patterns and look ahead and say, what’s the best way to play this, where we come out and we really are positioned for the next five to 10 years, not the next two to three quarters or even the next five or six quarters. That’s not relevant long-term. Relevant long-term is what’s the next five to 10 years is going to look like? And what are the decisions we’re making today that are going to — that are going to impact that vector, right, that helps us slightly more up and over the long-term makes a big, big difference. So that’s how we’re focused. We’re not managing this business. We’re leading this business, somewhere bigger and brighter and our journey is going to be a little longer. It’s going to take a little longer.
So there’s going to be people that have patience and there’s kind of people that don’t have patience. We have patience. You need patience if you really want to be extraordinary in this world.
Max Rakhlenko: Got it. It’s really helpful. And then can you just separately speak to the customer reception to Contemporary. How is that going compared to your expectations? And then just any updates on the time line of the rollout to other galleries?
Gary Friedman: Yes. We’re very happy with the initial response. We wish we could get more product faster. It’s two things, a lot of it got impacted by the supply chain backup, which are now just kind of all coming unlock. But also almost all of the new products is really new product that has never been made at scale before. So one of the things that is going to happen to us during cycles. This happened to us in 2008, 2009 when we kind of transformed the assortment in the business. It happened us in 2015, 2016 when we moved the Modern, and it’s happened to us now. When we make these big moves and they’re generally every seven or eight years because those are kind of the big cycles in our business. I mean trends can last 10 to 15, but there’s generally — I think every — every brand needs a major refresh every seven or eight years.
And so our just having to be timed to economic downturns. And a lot of that coincidental, quite frankly. In 2015, 2016, it wasn’t really an economic downturn. We created somewhat of a downturn when we moved to membership because that was a kind of a year transition to do that. But when you bring in this much new product that the world hasn’t seen before that no one’s ever scaled Travertine furniture or Burl wood at scale, you can see pieces out there. Antique stores or some retailers have a piece or two, a couple of pieces. They don’t have collections with 130 SKUs. And no one’s out there making that stuff at scale. So we are going to constantly for the rest of time have to continue to build the supply chain capability that enables us to invent.
