Bill Chappell: Fantastic. Following up a little bit on John’s question, and not to be too skeptical, but this time last year, I think you had pretty much the same tone in terms of the retailers were engaged, this is going to be a great year, and we don’t see a lot of risk to the issue. Our consumers love the category. We’re going to have expansion. Within six months, we were blaming global warming, among other reasons for the bank. Is there any new data set? Is there any new information you have? Or is it just a view that, hey, this time last year, the consumer really wasn’t back to 2019 levels. Now we feel we’re back to 2019, and so it’s more forecastable?
Matthew Garth: Dude, you’ve been eating your fucking wheaties here.
Bill Chappell: Good morning.
James Hagedorn: Look, good morning. I start by — we live in a world, and there’s consumers and retailers. as much as we sort of felt like heels last year, here’s the thing. Volume was up like four and a half points. Okay? Did we achieve what we wanted to in loans? That was the whole thing. No. So I would say, where we fell down was on loans. I do think global warming, by the way, is part of that. But, when we talked to retailers about last year, you know what they say? I know you guys think it sucks. Lawn and garden was ace for us, and we thought you guys did great. So, I start by saying, Bill, like, yeah. this is just continued in the slog. I think that do I have data on that? I start by saying we had data on it was a pretty good year for us where we didn’t solve our issues is lawns, and it matters.
But I look at the year and say, maybe I should just feel bad. But we accomplished an awful lot under a ton of pressure. And did we make the revenue numbers? Not exactly, I think we did pretty much everywhere except lawns. And it’s a big business. We’re staying flat. We the approach on marketing, the selection of a new sort of global agency for Scotts and the focus on a much larger relationship at the creative level, a world-class creative team on an agency that we just haven’t signed a paperwork. So that’s probably involved in like working the fee. No, no, I’m not slowing that down. So I think that’s going to really help us. The level of average, a lot of the changes we made were a result of the fall. And I don’t know about you, but, in the spring, we saw a lot of we saw I saw a lot of commercials, on that early spring campaign we did and where the weather was good in Texas and Florida.
The results were phenomenal. Okay. Now the weather in the northeast at that time was not great. And we really saw like hardly any POS. And there’s a bunch of learnings there. But what it says is the advertising combined with promotion when the weather is right was really, really good. Weather was a factor in there. And I’m not blaming I’m not blaming the weather. I tried to tell everybody here when we talk about what went wrong with lawns. Let’s start with look in the mirror is the first is the number one thing. So we’re going to look we look at our core consumer and we’ve been chasing sort of the young up and coming about to be a homeowner pretty hard and the dispersion of our money into that when it gets into social media. You want to rent table here and then we’re all maybe a little bit older than that group.
None of us saw anything. And that was one of the reasons we made a change at the marketing level. Okay. The approach going forward is going to be much more intense creative focused on our core consumer and back to basics on spend and our back to basics on spend. There’s nothing new here is and this is kind of March Madness time is traditional media news and sports and not losing it as we chase people who are more challenge buying a home today than they have ever been based on interest rates and sort of lack of inventory in the market. And I think the data we have on that we can share with you for sure. And our retailers can if you follow the same people because this is something that we all are committed to but I you can basically throw us on at, you can throw shit at us.
We deserve it. But I but I would say that the year was we accomplished a lot and on the sales line. It’s not bad whether it was a factor. We are a factor, I think there were promotional glitches at the retail level that probably didn’t help the lawns business. But I think we’ve got a really good plan for the year and I don’t think we’re expecting a lot, you know flat on a business that is down at this point call it 30% from the previous two years before. So I don’t think we’re really swinging for the fence here. I think this is back to basics back to stuff. We know I don’t know make anything you want to add.
Nate Baxter: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. So pleasure to be able to talk to all you. So Bill, I think I would ask the question. What are we doing differently from last year? And you know Jim highlighted on the media side and the creative side. That’s a big change for us. I think the other thing is we’ve got more tools in our toolkit today. We’ve been building up our insights and data analytics team. So one of the things we’re leaning heavily into and I’ll give you example whether right, it’s really a case of results not excuses. There’s no doubt. It’s a factor but you’re not going to hear us talk about it as an excuse. What we’re trying to do is get smarter and use some of our predictive modeling and machine learning to help us make adjustments.
We proved that in the fall. We had a terrible heat dome over the US in the early fall and you saw the results in POS. We were able to adjust some of our media and targeting based on some of those models. So, I don’t want to rely too heavily on that but we fundamentally changed our operation whether you’re talking about how we’re going to target marketing and I think the big and I’ll reinforce what Jim said is focusing on our core consumer. as we’ve tried to manage this transition to digital, it’s been tough and I think we lost sight of who has the dollars to spend today. So that’s a big change. And then on the supply chain side, we haven’t talked a lot about it but we’ve done a ton of optimization and I think that’ll just help us on the back end from a margin perspective.
So we’re trying to work smarter than we have in the past and I’ll just close with, yes, it’s an aggressive plan but it’s the same thing I told the team internally yesterday. It assumes the consumer shows up in exactly the same way they did in ’23. We’re not assuming the consumer is going to show up anymore. Now there is a risk they could show up less but all of these plans are built on that flat POS assumption. It’s just the new listings and the promo gains. They’re going to help drive volume.
Bill Chappell: Got it. Thanks for that, colour. And then, Matt, just a quick follow-up on kind of the revenue outlook for this year. I don’t know or I don’t know if you quantified kind of, there was some earlier than normal shipments, especially in the March quarter? So I didn’t know if when you’re looking at that high single digit growth for the full year, I mean, how will you grow in the first half or is all that growth coming in the second half?
Matthew Garth: Yeah, I mean, I think Jim laid out a little bit how the seasonality worked last year versus what we’re expecting for 2024. And you will see kind of a more normalized revenue when you look at our historic averages, ’24 versus ’23. So it’ll conform more to what we’ve done historically. So you’d see, yes, first half growth because we are growing overall, but shipments themselves would be more normalized across the year.
Operator: [Operator Instructions]. And our next question comes from Eric Bossard with Cleveland Research. Eric, your line is open.
