This member brief is designed exclusively for Executive Members, to make membership easy, you can click below and gain access to hundreds of reports, our DTC Power List, and other tools to help you make high level decisions.
No. 344: IPO and The “Frontier Thesis”
By air and by sea, thousands of would-be gold miners traveled to California in pursuit of wealth. They’d come to be known as 49ers. In March of 1848, 800 non-natives made the trip to California. By the end of 1848, that number ballooned to 20,000. And by 1849, that number reached 100,000. The gold rush was one of America’s earliest examples of the frontier thesis. Historian Frederick Jackson Turner penned an essay in 1893 that explained that the economic strength and vitality of America was tied to moving towards the frontier.
I define ‘frontier’ as the social levelling associated with large numbers of people comprising a broad spectrum of skills, educational levels and class backgrounds, working alongside each other at rough parity in open access, high potential gold mining. [1]
That frontier line, a demarcation that separated the known from the unknown, spurred innovations in: commerce, behavioral economics, government, and social sciences. Of course, there is no longer any physical frontier. Today, that line is figurative. With any new industry, these behaviors repeat in seen and unforeseen ways. Direct-to-consumer brands have begun to reach venture-backed maturity. Like the physical frontier of old, this new line of demarcation bears many of the same traits — uncertainty is one of them.
During the gold rush, it wasn’t the miners that made the real money. It was the toolmakers, the workers that manufactured the implements necessary for the droves of miners to strike it rich. We remember Levi Strauss & Co but few rarely can recall top gold miners of the time. The toolmakers made riches; the vast majority of the miners went home empty handed. Not even their tools made the trip. As the adage goes: you can mine for gold or you can sell the pickaxes. Like the commerce tools themselves, venture capital eventually flooded brand retail. This not only affected who could scale, but also it affected how companies were scaled.
The problem with all of the tech-enabled customer channels, though, is that they are available to everyone. Indeed, the flipside of tech concentration when it comes to platforms and Aggregators is the democratization and commoditization of basically everyone else in the stack. That is how you end up with, as of August 2019, 175 different online mattress companies. [2]
Seated to my right on a flight from Ohio to Minnesota was a salesman whom we’ll call Dave. “Do you want to start a mattress company?” he utters through a smirk and a light smile. After his third whiskey he opens a laptop to reveal a spreadsheet with nearly 100 rows of data and says, “Look at this.” I’m interested and I immediately recognize several of the companies out of the corner of my eye. Of them, Casper is atop the list. Dave is an employee of a company that manufactures mattresses for many of the the top brands. I was stunned. “Wait. Casper doesn’t make their own mattresses?” I asked. Dave goes on and he asks if I want know how to start. Curious, he lays it out for me.
Start a website and use Spotify [SIC] or something. Pre-sale the mattresses for $800. Buy them from me for $400-$500. We will deliver them to you within three weeks of the sale. Rinse and repeat.
Dave was the proverbial pickaxe seller, and the DTC era was his gold rush. According to him, Casper was one of his company’s many customers. I didn’t believe Dave until I read Casper’s S-1 filing. He was correct, Casper doesn’t manufacture its own mattresses. And neither do the vast majority of its nearly 200 competitors. Instead, the Casper team buys them from a source and marks them up for resale.
While most of our product design is developed in-house, certain foam formulations are currently licensed from certain of our contract manufacturers pursuant to our manufacturing agreements with them, some of which include varying degrees of exclusivity. [3]
And this manufacturer isn’t the only pickaxe seller. While Casper.com is a custom cart build, a majority of digital natives are built within the Shopify ecosystem. This is a reflection of modern retail as a whole, which has been influenced by the greatest pickaxe seller of them all.
Venture capital has disrupted retail in a number of ways. Imagine an entrepreneur raising VC to launch a clothing, shoe, or mattress company in the 1990’s. The thought would have been implausible. But retail brands aren’t new; its tools are. Prior to 2006, these types of businesses pursued other funding sources: private loans, lines of credit, or friends and family rounds. They often began with the idea that unit economics would be at the forefront. Some decided to grow on cash flows. The earlier the profitability, the better.
And if these companies did go public, it would be after a measure of decades and not a measure of years. Take Ralph Lauren Corporation: founded in 1967, it went public 30 years later. Or Nike Inc., a retailer that went public nearly sixteen years after its founding. In Columbus, Ohio, there are a number of specialty retailers that took similarly long paths to becoming public companies: Express, L Brands, DSW, and Abercrombie & Fitch are but a few.
Web Smith on Twitter
On brand ceilings and valuations. 1967: RL was founded. 1994: Goldman acquired 28% of @RalphLauren at a $520 million valuation. 1997: RL IPOs at a $2.4b valuation after 30 years – a number of them in the black. 2020: $8.8b market cap (1.3x revenue) From the S-1:
Like a Cambrian Explosion, venture opened the door to a diversity of platforms, apps, logistics services, and packaging solutions. It also developed a new format for retail, one based on hyper growth. And by extension, venture capitalists began funding the companies that would be built on them. For would-be retail founders, the bar for starting a business reached an historic low. And the ability to raise historic sums of venture capital reached its high in the same period of time: 2014. The last decade of eCommerce was just as much about the tools sold as the nuggets of gold that were mined.
But while venture capital disrupted pickaxes for the better, one could argue that it disrupted the miners for the worst. The DTC era has seen few acquisitions and even fewer public offerings. Even so, Stitch Fix President Mike Smith suggested that staying private is the best bet for many of these brands. He explained to Recode’s Jason Del Rey:
Should you be a public company? In a lot of cases my answer would be no. You have to bring your A-game to the public markets. You can hide in the private markets and spend a lot of your venture capital on Facebook.
For the digitally native brands of today, they’ll have to think and behave a lot less like their contemporary peers as they approach the new frontier line. In this way, Casper’s IPO will serve as a bellwether for this era of digitally-native brands. Can they IPO without a realistic path to profitability? The thought has its headwinds. In these tweets below, I summarized most of the bear argument.
No Title
No Description
Casper’s management will have to convince Wall Street that they’re capable of something that few brands aren’t: they must “own the category” and do so profitably. There are two obstacles to this. And this is where it gets a bit technical.
Parallels: Casper and Mattress Firm
Consumer-based corporate valuation. In the company’s S-1, they chose not to report cohorted revenue data. But a few key figures stood out: 14% of customers returned within a year of the original purchase. In the S-1, Casper cites returning customers and not the figure in sales. According to venture capitalist Alex Taussig, the company’s annual dollar retention is just 6%. Their repeat business is nearly non-existent.
Casper’s average order value (AOV) is $867 with a repeat AOV of $87, according to Marketing Professor Daniel McCarthy. This is based on the assumption that 80% of the orders are at the primary AOV and that repeat AOV is $87. The customer acquisition cost (CAC) for that $867 sale is $324. In a fascinating thread of marketing mathematics, Professor McCarthy cites a five year customer value at $455 with a lifetime value (LTV) of $131. But one thought stood out:
Bulls will probably point to stores as a way to bring CAC down, upsell, and supply chain efficiency margin improvement. Bears will point to late adopters being harder to bring in, and competition picking up.
Back where we started. The institution that Casper disrupted with direct-to-consumer delivery is now its best hope — brick and mortar retail. Within the year that Casper launched, there were two separate instances of note. Of course, Casper quickly scaled its direct-to-consumer model. And Mattress Firm invested in a brick and mortar company as Casper’s DTC offering generated nearly $100 million in first year sales.
[Mattress Firm] was constrained by its decision to buy retail chain Sleepy’s in 2015 for $780 million. Instead of investing in digital tools and shipping infrastructure, Mattress Firm expanded its store base at exactly the wrong moment. [4]
Mattress Firm’s retail acquisition left the company over-retailed (by nearly 1,000 stores) at a time when customer acquisition arbitrage for mattress-in-a-box retail was peaking. Just a year later, Steinhoff International acquired Mattress Firm for around 1x gross revenues.
The South African retailer Steinhoff International Holdings will buy Mattress Firm Holding Corporation, the largest specialty bedding retailer in the United States, for $3.8 billion, including debt, both companies said on Sunday. The deal would create the world’s largest mattress retail distribution company. [5]
In 2018, Mattress Firm filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy to begin the process of restructuring, closing nearly 700 of its 3,230 company-stores. In effect, the bankruptcy began to offset the poor timing of the 2015 Sleepy acquisition. As Mattress Firm retracts, Casper hopes to gain its share. According to the Casper S-1, physical retail is a major component of their growth.
Our presence in physical retail stores has proven complementary to our e-commerce channel, as we believe interaction with multiple channels has created a synergistic “network effect” that increases system-wide sales as a whole. Driving continued success in our retail store expansions will be an important contributor to our future growth and profitability
The question remains whether or not Casper can convince Wall Street investors that their plan to capture the value that Mattress Firm is a viable one. While Casper’s vision of a sleep economy is grander, Mattress Firm’s annual revenue was $3.2b in 2019 (according to Steinhoff International). To capture this, they may have to rebuild the company from in inside out.
With nearly 700 employees and no in-house product manufacturing, Casper is a very large product company that doesn’t manufacture its own goods. This is evident in its G&A category. Casper’s spend on General and Administration is 5x that of Purple ($106.2m to $19.1m) with similar sales figures. To capture the value of its incumbents and fend off its challengers, Casper can be more competitive. For Casper to become a “category owner”, they’ll have become more like Nike internally. Founding CEO Phil Knight said it best:
Beating the competition is relatively easy. Beating yourself is a never-ending commitment.
A Leaner and Meaner “Nike of Sleep”
The comparison began with a quote in Forbes. In 2016, the same year that Mattress Firm was acquired, Casper Co-Founder Luke Sherwin laid out his vision for the company. In the interview with Ron Rofe, Sherwin explained:
Casper can do for sleep what Nike did for sports. We want to make sleep a lifestyle and build sleep environments that become a major part of your life.
In their securities filings, Casper laid the groundwork to address product commodity by expanding their total addressable market beyond the category of mattresses:
As the wellness equation increasingly evolves to include sleep, the business of sleep is growing and evolving into what we call the Sleep Economy. We are helping to accelerate this transformation. Our mission is to awaken the potential of a well-rested world, and we want Casper to become the top-of-mind brand for best-in-class products and experiences that improve how we sleep.
Nike owns 17.9% of footwear and spends 10% of its gross revenues on marketing and advertising. Casper owns 5% of mattresses and spends upwards of 33% of revenues on marketing. Without capital efficiency and a short-term path to profitability, Casper cannot mimic the brand that it aspires to. To become the Nike of Sleep, Casper must become more like the Nike of marketing and sales. They have to lead the industry in the ability to acquire customers efficiently. What I am suggesting is simple enough: leave the DTC industry behind altogether. With partnerships with Amazon, Target, Walmart, and Costco as a solid foundation, Casper can shift to a leaner and profitable model by:
- emphasizing relationships with third-party sellers for sales and distribution
- shifting from short-term performance marketing to a brand marketing strategy
Though Casper has raised at a $1.1 billion valuation, as recently as March 2019, most companies in and around its space are trading for 10-20x EBITDA or 1-2x revenues. For Casper, that means an initial market capitalization of $500-600 million (they’ve raised $339 million). In this report alone, there are two comparables to consider: Ralph Lauren traded at a $2 billion market capitalization on an EBITDA of $140 million. A year after Mattress Firm went public, it was trading at $1.91 billion or 24x EBITDA.
To reach profitability, Casper must “beat themselves” as well as they’ve beat others in the market — challengers and incumbents alike. They’ll have to build their company like the early-stage retailers of old, long before the abundance of venture capital and rising CAC. By reducing General and Administrative by even $50 million, annually, they will be close to break even. By shifting marketing spend from digital-first to third-party partnerships, Casper could be EBITDA positive in its first year.
Casper adopted the tech-adjacent model that’s plagued the DTC industry over the years: incredible sums of money raised, New York or Los Angeles offices, excessive marketing spend (relative to gross revenues), costly executive salaries, prime real estate leases, and startup perks. By reducing these expenses and shifting to third-party sales, Casper can become the publicly-traded brand that it is pitching to Wall Street. Existing competitors like Mattress Firm would welcome Casper’s partnerships alongside Sleepy’s, Purple, and others. With each of the aforementioned retailers, Casper brings a new customer to their stores.
At $50+ million in EBITDA, Casper can become the $1 billion brand that they envision. Like the gold miners on the frontier, Philip Krim and team can be the ones to map the path forward for digitally-native brands like Away and Glossier, two others with IPO intentions. To compete in public markets, these brands will have to operate more traditionally.
The DTC era experienced a decade of grow-by-any-means marketing and often inefficient operations masked by excessive venture capital. As private companies, this can last as long as rounds can be raised. But they’re at the frontier now. And this represents somewhat of a reckoning for the DTC industry. When the miners arrived, they would often choose to set aside what they brought with them. For some, it was valuables and others, it was an inflated sense of self-worth. There, on the frontier – where sacrifice and discomfort are a necessity – it was about what you brought home with that expensive pickaxe.
Research and Report by Web Smith | Edited by Carolyn Penner | About 2PM
Note: Subscribe here to receive Letter No. 344 on Tuesday at 2pm EST.
No. 340: A Mobility Collision Course
Steve Jobs believed that one of the few things that separated humans from high primates was our ability to build tools. In some cases, these tools mitigated the crippling inferiority of human mobility. Compared to some animals, humans possess lesser top end speed, endurance, and efficiency of movement. It’s our ability to engineer solutions that ultimately improves our collective mobility. Jobs assessed these shortcomings in a 1995 interview:
I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation.
Over the course of Jobs’ career, he predicted the future quite a few times. He foresaw what the inter connectivity of internet would do for humanity. He predicted the efficacy of the computer’s mouse, and the dawn of cloud computing, and the professional preference of the laptop computer. Jobs even understood that the diffusion of this technology would be so profound that ten year olds would own computers that are orders more powerful than the ones used by 1960’s-era NASA engineers. But it was perhaps his two distinct thoughts on figurative and literal mobility that may go on to define the next ten years of disruption.
Jobs indirectly recognized the inverse relationship between online retail and shopping centers:
The second thought expounded on his obsession with human physical efficiency:
Somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts.
This line of thinking is the origin of Jobs’ commentary on the personal computer serving as a proverbial bicycle for the mind. According to Jobs, “What a computer is to me, is it’s the most remarkable tool we’ve ever come up with. It’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds. Walking is relatively slow and inefficient.” This remarkable thought may end up meaning something more than what Jobs meant at the time.
The advancement of mobile payment technology and the evolution of physical mobility are on a collision course. The diffusion of one technology may lead to the diminishing of the other. There is no greater example of the potential disruption than China’s stark contrast to the nature of American retail. Cashless consumer economies will have a profound effect on mobility.
Many Chinese cities are now the closest we have to cashless consumer economies.
According to eMarketer’s Shelleen Shum: 79.3% of smartphone users in China will operate within a completely cashless economy. By comparison, the United States will see just 23% of smartphone users doing so by 2021. And Germany will have just 15%. Why is this significant? The move towards a cashless economy corresponds with a shift in mobility preferences. “The use of digital technologies—from smartphones and wearables to artificial intelligence and driverless cars—is rapidly transforming how city dwellers shop, travel, and live.Without a firm foundation in electronic payments, cities will not be able to fully capture their digital future, according to our analysis,” said Lou Celi, Head of the Roubini ThoughtLab.
No Title
Mobile payments are influencing a collision course. No. 1 market for mCommerce (payments) is China. Here is a quick comparison. Mobility:1a/ US cars per 1000: 8381b/ China’s cars per 1000: 179Retail locations:2a/ US sq. ft. / person: 23.5 2b/ China sq. ft. / person: 2.8
And here is the key question. If the United States is moving towards a cashless society driven by mobile wallets and smartphone-driven payments systems, will the shape of our economy begin to change with it? The data affirms. The shuttering of American retailers outpaced all of 2018 by April of 2019 according to data from Coresight Research. As of now, the correlation does not rely upon mobile payment tech. Rather, it’s driven by the growing adoption of online retail. However, online retail adoption in China is driven by mobile payment technologies. American adoption of such technologies will accelerate overall growth. The percentage of retail in the form of eCommerce will hockey stick when it does.
Smart Cities and Urban Mobility
There may not be a greater example of the potential clash between online retail and mobility than the city that is quietly known for its specialty retailers. In retail circles, Columbus is known as HQ City; the Central Ohio region is host to Abercrombie & Fitch (and Hollister), L Brands (Victoria’s Secret, Bath & Body Works, etc.), Express, Ascena Retail Group (Limited, Justice), DSW, Value City Furniture, and ties to American Eagle Outfitters. There isn’t a mall in the United States that isn’t influenced by this region’s businesses.
For Columbus, it’s a double-edged sword. The city’s working population is heavily influenced by this small group of very large employers. And these large employers have a symbiotic relationship with America’s inflated 23.5 square feet of retail real estate / person. In comparison, China has just 2.8 square feet of retail / person. Despite this lacking physical infrastructure, China passed the United States as the number one retail market in 2019. [1]
In 2015, Columbus, Ohio applied for a national grant for the Smart City Challenge, a national competition between a collective of technologically progressive cities.
Smart Columbus will help shift travel patterns. Even more, we want to shift people’s thought patterns and behavior. This means inspiring policy makers and influencing people’s preferences. We will partner with others to create programs, introduce new solutions and promote adoption. Once our city understands what’s possible, everybody should be able to get on board. This will be a gradual process over the coming decade. As a region with urban sprawl, we are committing to a new, improved ecosystem of solutions to move people and goods. [2]
A smart city is tasked with testing technological solutions and progressive policies to innovate mobility practices. As the winner of the first-ever Smart City Challenge, the city agreed to embrace the “reinvention of transportation to accelerate human progress.” The city would then serve as a standard bearer to other cities as they continue to evolve. In 2017, the city outwitted dozens of other top cities to include: Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Portland, Kansas City, Austin, and Denver. The result was an award of a combined $50 million grant from the US Department of Transportation and the Paul Allen Foundation. This award would then be amplified by hundreds of millions in public-private partnership, generated by the cities own businesses and political partnerships.
Through the Smart City Challenge, the Department committed up to $40 million to one winning city. In response, cities leveraged an additional $500 million in private and public funding to help make their Smart City visions real. [3]
The data suggests that the advancement of eCommerce adoption would influence mass transit and ride sharing as primary means of urban travel. This same data would suggest that eCommerce would also spur economic development in harder to reach areas of the region. But it would have to get much worse before conditions improve. Some 92% of the citizens in China’s largest cities use Alipay or Wechat as their mobile wallets and sole means of transacting. In rural China, that number is 47%. In both cases, the primary means of retail is through eCommerce channels. In contrast, America will see just 12.4% of retail by eCommerce in 2020. For rural citizens and underbanked Americans, that number is significantly lower. The majority of eCommerce transactions are located in or near major metropolitan areas. This is relevant and will be explained shortly.
Black Friday 2019
In September of 2017, the proverbial floodgates opened. Amazon’s patent for one-click purchasing expired. With this, any and every online retailer could build or integrate payments solutions to promote better consumer experiences on desktop and mobile platforms. The improved experiences were especially noticeable on mobile operating systems, where dropped carts were commonly 60+%.
The end of Amazon’s hold on one-click ordering gives opportunities to large and small retailers to reap benefits they haven’t had before. Perhaps the most widespread benefit will come in the world of mobile commerce where there are high rates of cart and purchasing abandonment. […] The patent expiration will allow for widespread adoption of one-click purchasing, which will challenge the market to adapt quickly. There is an opportunity for major reconfiguration of social networks to challenge major e-commerce giants such as Amazon. [4]
This coincided with the integration of tools like Apple Pay, Android Pay, and Shopify Pay, three solutions that would fuel mobile commerce in ways that were only previously seen in Chinese markets. Apple Pay recently crossed Paypal in volume of transactions. Amazon’s YoY growth was closely tied to the stickiness of similar technologies. An unnamed Shopify analyst suggested that with Shopify Pay, conversion rates were nearly identical to Amazon’s – an extraordinary improvement in performance between 2016 and 2019.
Over this most recent retail holiday, there was a contrast to observe. In 2PM’s most recent Executive Member Report, I explain the context behind the title “The Blackest Friday.” According to data pulled from Alibaba, Amazon, and Shopify – Black Friday was a success for the burgeoning eCommerce ecosystem and a disappointment to traditional retailers like Kohl’s, JCP, and Nordstrom. The holiday shed light on the growing divide between mobile adoption and the dependence on traditional retailers.
No Title
It wasn’t deals that drove the BF, it was ease of purchase. Via Adobe Analytics: 1/ 39% of eCom: mobile2/ 61% of traffic: mobileAnd Shopify added 400k stores in 2019. The avg. BF $ / merchant dropped just 1.8%. Payments ease mitigated the lack of trust or perceived value.
Adobe, which now owns Magento, revealed data that communicates a permanent shift toward mobile traffic (61% mobile). Shopify’s data (69% mobile) reflected the same. Physical retail continued to slip.
The drop in Black Friday physical shopping mirrors a year-long share pullback in departments stores including Macy’s, Kohl’s and Foot Locker, all of which are down more than 25% this year. Meanwhile, Amazon, the dominant U.S. e-commerce retailer, has gained about 20% this year. [5]
For Shopify, the result was especially positive. On the heels of Apple Pay adoption and the growth of Shopify Pay, the company added 400,000 new stores in 2019 while dropping just 1.8% in average store revenue on Black Friday. This tells a story. Despite the relative infancy of nearly 40% of the stores on the platform, new merchants were able to generate nearly enough in sales volume to match the per capita avg sales figure of the previous year’s merchants. This would indicate that the shift away from desktop and towards mobile payments mitigated issues of trust or early-stage brand equity concerns by lifting conversion rates. As mobile payment adoption increases, the divide between DTC-minded brands and traditional retailers will continue to grow. So where does this get us?
Conclusion: On Primates and Politics
If you’ve ever frequented Amazon Prime Now, you understand the value of two hours saved. In a matter of 90 seconds, you can click through on recently purchased grocery items to replenish your pantries. Then, in a matter of 60-90 minutes, those selections manifest. There are four packages at your door. When Steve Jobs suggested that software engineering would impact our mobility, it’s unlikely that he imagined the effect that mobile commerce would have on developed cities. Mobility isn’t just the efficiency, speed, or distance traveled. It’s what we can do with our time. Mobility is freedom.
When Columbus, Ohio was awarded $50 million to build the blueprint for a smart city, it’s unlikely that the city’s leaders understood the ties between commerce technology and physical mobility. If so, the heaviest investments would have been earmarked for commerce infrastructure:
- improving shipping lanes by designating key routes for delivery vehicles and couriers
- retrofitting struggling malls and shopping centers as fulfillment hubs
- investing in the numerous local businesses by equipping them with the same types of technologies that enable the DTC mobile revolution
- repurposing successful malls as meeting grounds, deemphasizing the emphasis on shopping
- and laying the groundwork for a city with 60-80% fewer cars and 70-90% fewer shopping centers
America is over-retailed. And unfortunately, innovation in online retail will exacerbate this. For Columbus (and many other forward-thinking cities), this is a conflict of interest. As regions shift toward mobile commerce-forward models, old ways of retailing will subside. And given early data – the numerous retailers that are headquartered in and around the city would be placed at existential risk.
It’s for this reason that Columbus serves a microcosm of traditional retail as a whole. The industry will have to choose between its past and its future, both of which are tied to shifts in mobility innovation. Like Jobs said in 1995: “People are going to stop going to a lot of stores. And they’re going to buy stuff over the web.” This is beginning to reflect in public and private markets. What happens when we stop driving to stores? What happens when shopping centers no longer have sufficient demand? What happens when advancements in last-mile delivery becomes carbon negative? This is happening now.
The largest retail economy in the world is no longer the United States. But this will potentially change, as the United States closes the gap in mobile computing and payments adoption. China has 10% of the retail square footage and 79% fewer cars. This should give us pause. These numbers provide a bit of foresight into how this country must adapt to modern retail. Computers did become the bicycles for our minds. And now, advancements in mobile computing and payments are influencing physical mobility. The smartest cities will correct for these advancements before the markets correct it for them.
Research and Report by Web Smith | About 2PM