Oddity Tech Ltd. (NASDAQ:ODD) Q1 2024 Earnings Call Transcript May 8, 2024 8:30 AM ET
Company Participants
Maria Lycouris – IR
Oran Holtzman – Co-Founder and CEO
Lindsay Drucker Mann – Global CFO
Conference Call Participants
Dara Mohsenian – Morgan Stanley
Andrew Boone – JMP Securities
Youssef Squali – Truist Securities
Javier Escalante – Evercore
Lauren Lieberman – Barclays
Operator
Good morning and welcome to Oddity’s First Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded and we have allocated time for prepared remarks and Q&A. At this time I’d like to turn the conference over to Maria Lycouris, Investor Relations for Oddity. Thank you. You may begin.
Maria Lycouris
Thank you, operator. I’m joined by Oran Holtzman, Oddity’s Co-Founder and CEO, Lindsay Drucker Mann, Oddity’s Global CFO, and Dr. Evan Zhao, Oddity’s Chief Science Officer. As a reminder, management’s remarks on this call that do not concern past events are forward-looking statements. These may include predictions, expectations, or estimates, including statements about ODDITY’s business strategy, market opportunity, future financial performance, and potential long-term success. Forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties, and actual results could differ materially due to a variety of factors. These factors are described under forward-looking statements in our earnings press release issued yesterday and in our Annual Report on Form 20-F filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on March 6, 2024. We do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements which speak only as of today. Finally, during this call we will discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures, which we believe are useful, supplemental measures for understanding our business. Additional information about these non-GAAP financial measures, including their definitions, are included in our earnings press release, which we issued yesterday.
I will now hand the call over to Oran.
Oran Holtzman
Thanks everyone for joining us today. The first quarter was once again another record-breaking quarter for us. We achieved massive scale online, growing revenue 28% to $212 million, and we did it very profitably with 23% adjusted EBITDA margin, generating $79 million of free cash flow. A massive record cash generation quarter. We continue to deliver above our plan, beating our guidance for the first quarter on every metric. This is what we have done every single quarter since we went public and every single quarter even before that as a private company.
During our IPO last summer, many investors told us that they had concerns that we would not be able to lap our enormous revenue performance in Q1 2023 where we grew more than 80%. And we tried to explain why we had full confidence in our ability to continue to grow on top of it. Now we are here today, after growing 28% against that quarter, and we achieved it with record profit margins. It is another proof that the demand online for beauty is very high and that our platform allow us to capture this demand and enable profitable growth.
I will provide a few data points that shows the demand and the strength of our platform. Q1 2024 revenue is more than double our revenue from the first quarter two years ago. In Q1 2024, with $212 million of revenue, we delivered almost the same amount of revenue that we delivered for the full year of 2021. And, Q1 2024 is more than double our revenue from 4Q 2023, just the quarter before it. We have shown, once again, that we can power our business up and down on a dime, a huge advantage for us and something almost no other business can do. We are in full control of our growth pace. This efficiency is what makes our model so attractive and profitable, and even with this growth, we don’t see a ceiling. In my view, we didn’t even come close to reaching our limits, and this is our strategy to ensure very strong, profitable, cash flowing growth, for many years to come. With the huge success of Q1 and the great results we have already seen in Q2 so far, we are even more confident in our outlook for the full year, and raising guidance on revenue, profit, and earnings per share for 2024.
I would like to take a moment to touch on our industry. Over the last couple of months, we have heard some of our competitors talk about their businesses slowing. I want to be clear, we don’t see any signs of slowing down in our platform. Not in new users and not in existing users’ behavior. What we do see is that the industry is transforming, moving online, and moving to science-backed products. This is a transformation that Oddity is leading and investing a lot behind it to win in both. We believe our investments will allow us to continue winning for the long-term. Our data and massive investment in our future give us high confidence in our long-term financial targets of more than 20% revenue growth and 20% adjusted EBITDA margin. Our results in 2024 will be even stronger than this, as Lindsay will explain soon. This makes Oddity a real outlier in our industry, growing 3 to 4 times faster than our main competitors, which means we are taking market share and strengthening our competitive advantage every day. Our Rule of 40 growth algorithm is among the best that exists in consumer and tech businesses. And it’s a function of three powerful drivers.
First, we are competing in a massive global TAM with great unit economics that work for online, while still being dominated by offline incumbents. Second, our huge technology advantage over incumbents who are behind the curve allows us to win in the online arena, which we believe is the most important channel of the future and will make up at least 50% of the market. Third, we have proven again and again that our platform is a scaling machine. It’s the power of our more than 50 million users and over two billion data points that we already acquired in the past five years. This combination of data, technology and a category with high online demand has enabled us to consistently win across the board. It only took us a few years to scale IL MAKIAGE to be what we believe is the largest online beauty brand in North America. We scaled our second brand SpoiledChild to be the most successful DTC brand launch of all time, crossing $100 million of revenue, profitably, in less than two years. Also, in just two years, we scaled IL MAKIAGE SKIN to be 20% of brand revenue in 2023, and we expect it will scale further to be 25% of the brand revenue in 2024. It is 25% on a massive base due to our existing color business.
Our powerhouse brands, IL MAKIAGE and SpoiledChild, both had very strong results in the first quarter, and both are on track to my goal, which is $1 billion for each brand. We will scale new brands and new categories in our future. Brands three and four are being built in two large categories in beauty and wellness. We believe the opportunity is massive for each of them, and we are spending a lot of time and focus to make sure we will capture this massive opportunity.
After addressing the current trends in beauty, I want to touch on a point that many people are worried about which is the viability of the DTC model. As we all have seen for most DTC businesses, the more they scale, the harder and more expensive it is for them to grow, but for us it is the opposite. The more we scale, the easier growth becomes for us. This is for two main reasons. One, because we are growing with so much repeat, and that repeat compounds. Repeat was over half of our sales last year, and it will be an even greater portion of our sales this year. Two, because we know so much about our users, we are able to build the brands and products that we know they want and build the machine learning models to put those new brands and products in front of those users. Higher scale means more data, means better conversion, and greater share of wallet.
Let me give you one example of this with IL MAKIAGE. Our customers, who started with us in color but then they try skin, shop more than twice as frequently and spend more than twice as much with us over the next 12 months. This is the magic of offering multiple products into the same user base while leveraging the data, and a clear example of how our platform allows us to gain share of wallet. This is why we deliver one of the best margin profiles across all of DTC even as we continue to scale and invest in future growth. So, while many other DTC businesses rely on external capital to grow, we do the opposite. We have a cash balance of $252 million which we generated. Zero Debt. We did 23% EBITDA margin and generated almost $80 million of free-cash-flow in Q1 alone.
To summarize, we are very pleased with how we delivered in Q1 and have total confidence in achieving our plans for the full year. But, as I’ve said many times previously, what is most important is our future. We do not rest and enjoy the massive margin and high growth. We are executing a long-term plan with huge investments across current and new brands, technology, vision, and of course, ODDITY LABS, where we are growing the teams massively as we speak and other domains to ensure we continue to win and build a large cap company.
With that, I will hand it to Lindsay.
Lindsay Drucker Mann
Thanks, Oran. Let’s turn to our Q1 ‘24 results, which I will refer to on an adjusted basis. You can find the full reconciliation to GAAP in our press release.
Oddity delivered a record breaking first quarter across the board. We grew net revenue by 28% to $212 million. This strength was driven by both IL MAKIAGE and SpoiledChild across a wide range of product categories. Last year, we talked at length about the huge preparations our teams were making to ensure we have many ways to grow in 2024, many different levers to pull, everything tested and ready to go. And we immediately saw the benefit from this preparation as we entered the year. We quickly began to deliver results ahead of our plan. This very strong start to the quarter allowed us to, once again, slow the business down with full control in order to pace our growth. As is always the case for us, there were no single drivers of our strength, but a combination of so many improvements across our entire business.
Just a few examples from Q1 include, getting even better in our acquisition and retention, using data and our tech to segment customers, deliver personalized marketing campaigns, and curated experiences to drive a number of our KPIs. Our expanded product portfolio which Oran mentioned, it allowed us to do an even better job meeting user demand at very attractive contribution margins. And continued integration of computer vision into product matching and recommendation models. These are just to name a few examples.
Moving down the P&L, gross margin of 73.8% expanded 284 basis points in the quarter. The gross margin beat versus our guidance was driven by specific supply-chain and logistics efficiency initiatives at both brands. We delivered adjusted EBITDA of $48 million for the quarter. Adjusted EBITDA margins of 22.7% expanded 559 basis points from the prior year, driven by gross margin expansion and higher mix of repeat, offset by increased investment in future growth drivers. Adjusted diluted earnings per share was $0.61 and reported diluted earnings per share was $0.53 in the period. We delivered very strong free cash generation of $79 million in the quarter, powered by our asset light model and very strong returns on capital. And we exited the quarter with $252 million of cash, equivalents, and investments on our balance sheet. And zero debt.
Turning to our outlook. We remain committed to our targets of 20% plus revenue growth at a 20% adjusted EBITDA margin over the long-term. In 2024 specifically, with our very strong start to the year, we expect to do even better than these long-term targets. We expect net revenue between $626 million and $635 million, which represents 23% to 25% year-over-year growth. We expect to deliver 71.0% gross margin for the full year. And we expect to deliver adjusted EBITDA between $139 million and $143 million, including a significant step-up in growth investments, such as LABS and our new brands. We now expect the timing of these growth investments to have a greater negative impact on EBITDA margin in the back half of the year, versus the second quarter where EBITDA margin is expected to expand. We expect full year adjusted diluted earnings per share will be between $1.57 and $1.62.
Turning to the second quarter. The strong business results we saw in the first quarter continued into April and so far in May. We are very pleased with the complexion of our growth, across both brands, multiple categories, and with first orders and repeat. We continue to be very disciplined in managing our rate of growth and are proactively slowing our business down so that we do not over-deliver on our revenue and profit objectives. Given the very strong start, we expect Q2 net sales will be between $185 million and $189 million, or 22% and 25% revenue growth. You can find more details on our Q2 outlook in our press release.
And with that, operator, we are ready to take questions. We also have Dr. Evan Zhao on the line to answer questions on LABS.
Question-and-Answer Session
Operator
[Operator Instructions] Our first question is from Dara Mohsenian with Morgan Stanley.
Dara Mohsenian
Hi, guys. Can you give us an update on the LABS side and molecule development and what you’re expecting in terms of commercialization and the rest of this year and then looking out to next year? And then also just a couple of months later after the last earnings call, can you give us an update on any plans for Brand 3 and 4 and any more insight you can give us there? Has anything changed on that front? And then, I’ll come back with one more question if that’s okay.
Oran Holtzman
Sure. Hi, Dara. Oran Holtzman. Thanks for the question. For those who don’t remember, ODDITY LABS used the same technology being deployed in pharma to develop higher efficacy molecules. I view the opportunity as endless. This is why we spend so much time around it. We are building a system. We grow the teams. We invest a lot in the infrastructure. It takes more time than I initially projected. It is really hard. But — also building the tech in Israel six years ago was really tough for us, but we made it. It will continue to be an investment in the next three years and we will never launch a single product from LABS without being 100% sure about its efficacy and safety. In terms of product range, range of categories including skin, especially for Brand 3 color and hair, and many other things that we are working on now. We are working with the team to ensure we have the capacity to support our pipeline and to ensure we are delivering the highest efficacy product. It means we need to transition from a research lab to a factory output model and this is what we do as we speak. To achieve this goal, we are focusing on two things. Number one is massive recruitment and number two is building a full operating system with process and control. In terms of recruitment, bioengineering and chemistry teams are where we spend most of our recruitment focus. Those are the teams that are doing the research and running the actual LABS work. As a development in virtual molecule screening to develop the molecules, we plan to grow the team to 75 to 100 people, mostly PhDs in the next 12 months. Second area where we focus a lot is building methodology and solidization, a complete system to ensure we remain the highest standards and quality as we scale. We are adding protocols. We are building something, again, very deep to make sure that we can scale it up. But at the same time, we are not letting quality be a secondary. We are adding a lot of systems. My sister and I there almost every month. And it’s not easy. I fully believe in it, but it requires a lot of work to build it properly. But, like, we never tried to do something that was easy. We never followed any playbook and when we started to build the tech team and the data usage in Tel Aviv, we didn’t have any playbook there, and we started from scratch. At the beginning, it was tough. It’s the same here. But we already have products that are ready to go. And since we don’t need the growth in, like, in this quarter, we are improving again and again and using them as use cases to shape the system and to build something that actually work at high scale. So I’m very pleased with where we are today. Again, it takes more time. I feel very confident that we’ll make it, but thank God, as I said in the previous calls, it will be our number one focus, but it’s what we don’t need it for the near term growth. Second question is Brand 3 and Brand 4. Brand 3, as a reminder, is a medical-grade skin and body brand. Issues like acne, eczema and other skin issues are huge pain points for our users and the majority of them tell us they are unsatisfied with the current solution. In my view, the user experience out there is really bad. With Brand 3, we are building an end-to-end solution that position us to win in my view. This includes platform that uses data machine learning, computer vision to deliver diagnosis and precise treatment, and coaching to ensure compliance and success as well where we are today, the team is being built. We have a strong CEO for Brand 3, Tom Amsterdam was — already has a large team. We completed Brand 3 branding process with defined identity and brand name, not like that, that is already on track. Physical product line development of wide range of products across OTC and prescription products is in place. In terms of vision technology for the diagnosis and treatment tracking, we are working on that front for the past two years and building the machine learning vision capabilities for accident diagnosis including severity, localization and classification. We have already built algorithm that can classify severity with 86% accuracy and we are currently improving [leisure] (ph) and localization accuracy from 77% to 90%. Again, another domain that doesn’t exist in the market, we are building something from scratch. When we started two years ago build like working on those machine learning like it was really tough, it was very hard to get together read. But we already have machines in place ready to go with very accuracy. So those things takes time. But we believe that Brand 3 will be massive as for timeline, no change. Still planning to launch it next year.
Dara Mohsenian
Great. That’s helpful. And then, Lindsay, can you just give us a little more insight on the revenue upside in the quarter? Where did you come in better than expected the brand level in terms of IL MAKIAGE versus SpoiledChild or skin versus color, how you break it out? And was the upside more existing customer upside or new customers? Just basically looking for a bit more insight under the hood there and then implications in terms of the way you think about the business in the balance of the year after that Q1 upside from a revenue perspective? Thanks.
Lindsay Drucker Mann
Great. Thanks, Dara. So as Oran talked about in his prepared remarks and I mentioned as well, we’re running the business well below its actual potential based on the demand we see and the strong returns we’re able to get on our spending. And as a result, we’re delivering very strong revenue growth, but we could be growing more than that. And we actually saw that very visibly when we started the year. So we basically went from no investment in new user acquisition to in January the team came out swinging really strong. We very quickly started to see our revenue pace increase relative to the 4Q run rate. And then we also very quickly started tracking ahead of our plan. And after that, we started to slow the business down again. And you guys are used to us doing that by now. But we always want to make sure we’re delivering guidance objectives that we know are things that we feel with very high conviction that we’ll be able to achieve on, and that feel bulletproof to us. And so, we felt strong confidence we’d be able to hit the targets of the 23% to 25%. We came in a touch above. We talked about last quarter that our plan was to really land the plane on what we were delivering versus our guidance. You would not see big beats, huge beats, outside beats, the way we delivered last year, we want to really, really land the plane. And so, we’re thrilled with the outcome in the first quarter. And based on how 2Q has already started and we’re through a lot of it already, 2Q is going to be another great outcome for us. In terms of where the strength was, both brands are great. IL MAKIAGE had an awesome quarter, color and skin were very strong, SpoiledChild also had a really strong quarter. It was across a number of product categories. New acquisition was great. Repeat again, very strong, or repeated on track to be even higher as a percentage of our sales this year versus last year again. So just all around, very strong outcome.
Dara Mohsenian
Great. Thank you.
Operator
Our next question is from Andrew Boone with JMP Securities.
Andrew Boone
Good morning and thanks so much for taking the questions. One for Lindsay and one for Oran, please. Lindsay, guidance suggests an expansion in 2Q EBITDA margins and then an investment in the back half of ’24. Can you talk about where you’re spending those dollars in the back half of the year and how we should think about that? And then, Oran, you talked earlier about a greater penetration of repeat rates for 2024. Can you help us understand the drivers of that comment? And then what you’re seeing maybe at a cohort level in terms of repeat rates? Thanks so much.
Lindsay Drucker Mann
I’ll start with the first one. So, yeah, we have some really nice EBITDA margin expansion. We had it in the first quarter. We’ll have it again in the second quarter. And as we talked about before, Andrew, the underlying profitability of the business is much higher than what we are printing because we want to reinvest a lot of that profitability upside into all the future growth opportunities that Oran talked about. In terms of the second quarter, in particular, and the first quarter, we have so much increase in repeat, which is very profitable business for us. So that’s really the primary driver of the EBITDA margin expansion. We’re also getting great gross margin behavior on top of that as well. In terms of where we’re investing, there’s three big buckets for us. First of all, there’s new brand development. So we’re doing a lot to invest behind both Brand 3 and Brand 4. We already have teams in place, product development, trials with consumers to make sure we have the product absolutely right, pre-funding as much of the launch as we possibly can in a way that’s really thoughtful, where we know we’ll get a strong return. The second, Oran talked a bit about ODDITY LABS. That’s a huge focus of investment for us, the teams, the infrastructure. It’s a huge focus for Oran and Sharon. And right now all that you’re seeing is truly the expense portion of it impacting our P&L, but we believe the profit upside will be huge for us. And this is, again, another massive competitive moat that we’re building today alongside what we did with technology. So we think that’s a great use of our capital. And then the last is technology continues to be the largest team in the company. We have to make sure we preserve our competitive advantage and develop new products that will increase all of our KPIs or conversion or satisfaction and allow more categories to work online. So those are really the three primary areas of investment.
Oran Holtzman
Hey, as for repeat, as I mentioned before, unlike most D2C companies, we generate most of our revenue from repeat. And this is although we grew 28% in Q1 2024 comparing to 80% growth last year in Q1. And this is why the business is so profitable and we continue to see the repeat percentage of revenue grow consistently. There is nothing more impactful and meaningful to the business strength than this. And by the way, this is why you will see Q2 guidance for EBITDA margin so strong because we enjoy a lot of repeat coming from new users from Q1. And currently 12 months and net revenue repeat rate is around 100%. This compares to less than 50% two years ago and still getting better in every cohort. What’s driving — it is like three main things. Number one, more repeat for the same product. Number two, expanding wallet share with new products. And number three, now that we are getting cross-selling from IL MAKIAGE and SpoiledChild in the future, new brands. Where it will go, again 100% today is already the best that I’ve seen in any D2C. And this is why we are profitable. But I didn’t see any ceiling for that. We continue to improve the cohorts. More products and more brands that people love means higher repeat as we use the same user base and same customer base. And basically, we are taking more share and from others under the same user base. That’s it. Lastly, I would say about repeat again, very hard to grow against that quarter last year with having still more than 50% coming from repeat. And this is what we saw. And that’s why we could grow again this quarter with such strong profitability.
Andrew Boone
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question comes from Youssef Squali with Truist Securities.
Youssef Squali
Hi. Thank you. Good morning. Two questions here, please. Lindsay, can you please talk about return rates in the quarter and kind of what — how do you see those kind of progressing in Q2? And then, Oran, maybe going back to the ODDITY LABS topic, so just trying to get a sense of when do we get — when do we start seeing new products coming out of that? Should we be thinking that Brand number 3 will be kind of the official kind of launch of the new pipeline coming out of ODDITY LABS? Or have you already started, you know, kind of infusing existing products within the two brands with some of the ODDITY LABS innovation so far? And if so, is it in skin, is it in color, is it anything?
Lindsay Drucker Mann
So I’ll start the repeat rate. So we don’t disclose repeat rate specifically by quarter. We were really pleased with the return rate. We were very pleased with the return rate that we saw in Q1. As you know, last year, in fiscal ’23, return rates were lower on a year-over-year basis, and would actually expect them to be a touch lower again this year. However, we have no, in our model, we don’t project return rate to continue to decline as a percentage of gross revenue, mostly because we think that’s a really important investment that we have, acquisition investment we have, a way to push new products and expand into new categories, where you’ll just naturally have some threshold level of return rate. But for us, we’re managing towards a contribution margin, which is most important. I will say and I talked about, in the prepared remarks, how we’re incorporating vision more into our matching engines. And we actually are seeing on a like-for-like basis with vision improvement in return rates for the same products. And there’s — we’re still very early days here, but, for example, for the first time, we can use multimodal data sets for our machine models that includes vision reviews, data around purchase rates, et cetera. And putting all those things together, we can lead to an improved training set, which is now driving better models. We can also use vision during the matching process itself for the first time. Again, it’s still very early days, but these things are allowing us to improve on our return rates.
Oran Holtzman
I will touch one thing regarding the return rate. Look, I never view it as improvement because don’t forget how we work. When I want to launch a new product or a new category, I start to train the machine learning. In order to train the machine learning, I need to say, like, I need to be wrong. I need to send the wrong product to the wrong person, and then — and that’s the way that we train the machine. So if I decide to invest now in building more machine learning for new products, it means that I will have higher return rate. But, like, that’s — like, we are prepared for it, and this is not an outcome, that’s like, it was our decision. So that’s why like — just pay attention to the return rate doesn’t represent anything about the business. As for ODDITY LABS, for sure, you will see it in Brand 3. We will start to do things even before that. When we need, just to be clear, if we wanted or needed products out there in the market, they would have been ready. We won in some projects and even we two already. But we are already pacing the growth without it. So I didn’t — I need — I didn’t need to do it. I don’t — for new products, I don’t need 50 or 100 PhDs in Boston, and I don’t need to spend my time there and also their time. We build LABS to build something that never exists before. We build LABS to take the business 5x or 10x. And therefore, another year or another quarter, if I don’t need it, like, I’m not putting pressure, I do put a lot of pressure around, and way higher efficacy in terms of products and very high safety protocols. So if we need before we will launch it, probably we’ll start launching products to see the reaction, but a meaningful wave should come with Brand 3.
Youssef Squali
All right. Thank you. Thank you both.
Operator
Our next question is from Lauren Lieberman with Barclays. Miss Lieberman? Miss Lieberman, your line is live in the conference. Our next question is from Lorraine Hutchinson with Bank of America.
Unidentified Analyst
Hi, this is Melanie on for Lorraine. Thanks for taking our question. I wanted to talk about the marketing strategy that you guys implemented in 1Q. Just how that looked versus prior years, and that it drove such a strong start to the quarter that you ended up pulling back a bit. Just any context on that strategy? Thanks.
Oran Holtzman
Same strategy. We’ve put a lot of attention in Q1 for new user acquisition. That’s how we did historically. Acquisition environment was very favorable for us, and you can see that in the strong margins that we just printed. Again, we grew with new users and without damaging — improving them and the EBITDA margin went from 17% to 23%, and from Q1 to Q1. And we are — we have very different approach from other companies which make us more efficient. We use a lot of data. We’re acquiring users. We’re not acquiring customers. And therefore, when we hear a lot of, like, problems around acquisition with other companies, we still continue to acquire at very high scale new users at very strong metrics. Next question, please.
Operator
Our next question comes from Javier Escalante with Evercore.
Javier Escalante
Hi. Good morning, everyone. Oran, Lindsay, how are you? I’m kind of new. So would like to explore your business model a little bit better. It’s proving it’s quite idiosyncratic, it’s proving advantage. In our neck of the world, $200 million per quarter is quite a scale, and you did it very rapidly. So two parts from me. I guess, Lindsay, if you could give us some more color on the repeats, if you have it. Was it particularly in IL MAKIAGE, whether it was led by new product launches or repurchase of so-called hero products or it’s your best sellers? And then I have a follow-up to Oran.
Lindsay Drucker Mann
Sure. Repeat rates continue to be very strong. We talked about last year it was more than 50% of our revenue, and in 2024 it’ll be even higher. In terms of 12-month net revenue repeat rate, we’ve talked about this 100%. So in other words, for a year ago, all of our first customers spent $100. Over the next twelve months, they spent an additional $100. And as far as we know, this is by far the highest repeat rate, 12-month net revenue repeat rate of any D2C, certainly that we’ve seen. We have no specific plans to increase that hire because it’s a huge rate, but we haven’t yet found a ceiling. And of course, as we continue to add new brands and new products to the mix, and we’re gaining more share of wallet from the same user base, that will grow. Oran had a really important data point that we disclosed for the first time on this call, which is what happens when we add skin to IL MAKIAGE. So, as you know, we had no skin business a couple years ago, and now it’s 20% of our revenue as of 2023, and it’s on track to be 25% for 2024. And Javier, I know based on the industry you cover that you understand how hard it is for a beauty brand to actually expand into skin. And when we started, everyone told us it wasn’t possible, and yet here we are with a huge color business and now skin on track to be 25%. What Oran talked about was for our customers who came into us through color, they were previously color purchasers, but then they try skin, over the next 12 months, they’re shopping with twice as much frequency and they’re spending twice as much as our other customers. And it goes to show you the power of the ability to know who our user is, use that data to create products that he wants, have the machine models based on that data to put them in front of her to drive transaction, drive frequency. Obviously, with the repeat, we get a lot of profitability at very high incremental margins. So we certainly saw great trends again for IL MAKIAGE. And for SpoiledChild, that portfolio is set up to be a great repeat business. And so, on a standalone basis, we’re seeing very strong repeat behavior at SpoiledChild again. And then at the ODDITY level, it all compounds together to lead to overall better repeat.
Oran Holtzman
Because it’s the same user, same user, same customer. We started with offering them color, few products in color for IL MAKIAGE. Then we added more color product. Then we added skin. Then we added SpoiledChild building this brand for her. So that’s why it compounds — that’s why it continues to grow. By the way, it grows both for ODDITY LABS, but also for IL MAKIAGE and for SpoiledChild standalone businesses.
Javier Escalante
Now, yes, this is all very impressive and I like the fact that you kind of like link it back to the business model that is so unique. But, Oran, more strategically and in the context of your business model and your solid repeat and new users at a time when traditional companies spoke of a market deceleration. So going forward, there’s going to be changes in digital marketing. So do you expect your business model to prove as advantage or even more advantage relative to your beauty peers, if and when programmatic advertising or cookies go away as people. There is this rumor. Thank you.
Oran Holtzman
Thank you, Javier, and welcome. Look, I cannot answer it. The only thing that I can say that when iOS 14 took place, most of my competitors had really, like, bad quarters trying to navigate, and we didn’t see any problem. I think the main reason is because we use data. And the main — and the second main reason is because we are not acquiring customers. Actually, I’m not acquiring revenue. Okay. I’m acquiring users, then I’m enriching the data, then I’m building products and I’m converting them based on what I believe is the best thing for them. And the biggest question is people continue to use that like social media and search, and I believe it’s going to grow every year. We have more people on those platforms. So as long as they are there, I don’t see any problem.
Javier Escalante
So conceptually, you are basically personalizing beauty products to your existing user base that’s kind of like the secret sauce, if you will.
Oran Holtzman
Learning a lot about them, trying to understand what is missing in their routine, building machine learning models that actually can work to send the right product for them and then matching it with the right physical product to send them because at the end of the day, you can have all the technology in the world, but if you don’t have very strong beauty products that matches them and they are happy with, and then they will return and the repeat will not be high. So continue to increase our machine learning capabilities, but at the same time continue to add more and more products for those users, who did not convert three or four years ago. That’s why the business continues to be so strong, because we have such a strong and large user base from — that we built in the past five, six years. One last thing that I would say building a business like this today would be way harder because the everyday market is getting more expensive and to acquire 50 million users today would cost fortune and, like, again, this is an advantage that we had as a first mover.
Javier Escalante
Good stuff. Thank you so much.
Oran Holtzman
Thanks a lot, Javier.
Operator
Our next question is from Lauren Lieberman with Barclays.
Lauren Lieberman
Hey, thanks. Sorry about that before, my phone was on mute. Oran, notwithstanding what you said earlier about return rates and in certain respects part of the process, I was just curious if you’re seeing any tick-up in return activity as we’re kind of in a tougher consumer environment, where consumers are reallocating their spending and making different decisions. So any uptick in that type of, if you will, return rate? And then also any change in the mix in terms of demographics of your consumers? It was my first section of questions.
Oran Holtzman
Sure. Hi, Lauren. Look, I almost think that people want me to say that we see softness. But the answer is no. It look like we were trying to get as much data as we can internally, learning the core, learning the return of behavior, learning the repeat, and we didn’t see softness, we see the same metric and in terms of acquisition, we didn’t see any problem acquiring new users at a high scale this year, again, although the consumer is a bit more challenging based on what we heard from others. So no, the answer is no. So far, so good.
Lindsay Drucker Mann
I’ll just add on to that, Lauren. So I think it’s really important to remember that, first of all, we are tiny in a huge market. And number two, our demo is expansive, okay? So if you look at on a safe basis across the United States, we are almost evenly perfectly aligned with that distribution. We have a big portion of our customers that are under 30. A big portion of that are over 50, a big portion that are right in the middle. We service upper, middle and lower income. We see people trading in from luxury brands into our categories. We see them trading from CoverGirl and Maybelline. And it’s important to remember, like we are dominating what we believe is the most important and will be the largest channel in beauty, and we’re really alone in acquiring customers at scale in this channel. So you really wouldn’t see it here, I guess, is the punchline.
Oran Holtzman
One last thing, Q1 ‘24, comparing to Q1 ‘23, return rates was better this year. So, again, to your question, we don’t see it.
Lauren Lieberman
Okay, great. And then second thing was just on the decision and timing on new launch activity. And Oran, very consistent, what you said this quarter is what you said last about timeline for launching products from LABS. But one of my questions was if some of these products have such demonstrable efficacy and improved quality versus anything in the market, let alone versus what you’ve already got in the market, why wouldn’t you be looking to launch, to raise the profile? Like Lindsay said, you’re tiny, but raise the profile, raise the word of mouth that exists around some of your products. If you’ve got things that work better than anything else, why wouldn’t you want those in the market sooner rather than later?
Oran Holtzman
Because I want to be sure 100% that it’s way better than others. That’s my honest answer. I want to make sure that we have a system that is very strong, we build protocols, we make sure that, again, we are doing it for the first time. I don’t want to go to market when I don’t need it with something that is better but slightly better. I want to go with products that are way better and it takes time.
Lauren Lieberman
Okay. I appreciate that. Thank you so much, guys.
Oran Holtzman
Thank you.
Operator
Our next question is a follow-up from Dara Mohsenian with Morgan Stanley.
Dara Mohsenian
Hey. So, Lindsay, we’re more focused on the top line side, but gross margins are really notable in Q1 at record levels. It looks like you’re expecting a solid Q2, but that implies the back half will decelerate sequentially and on a year over year basis. So just try to understand that implied guidance for the back half. Perhaps it’s just conservatism but help us understand the pacing of gross margins as we go through the year. And I’m just wondering if that has implications for the out years, the back half, or how we should think about that. Thanks.
Lindsay Drucker Mann
Sure. Thanks for the question, Dara. So just as a reminder in terms of how we build our brands and our product launches, we really focus on gross margins last. We’re going to make sure, number one, we have the absolute best performing product. We’re going to make sure that we’re building a experience that’s going to drive the right kind of customer satisfaction, the right kind of return rate that we’re going to sort of optimize for all our KPIs. We’re then going to see if it scales, if we can scale it, and it’s only after we achieve those that we go back to solve for gross margins. We know that there’s a threshold gross margin level to achieve, but in the beginning, we’re not at all focused on delivering it. So for example, with SpoiledChild early on, we were air freighting everything. And now, obviously, we’re much, much better at inventory planning and we’re much more skilled, so we’re able to extract cost efficiencies. And the same thing goes for IL MAKIAGE. The team has done an awesome job going back across the supply chain and picking low-hanging fruit candidly that we had in order to — and it’s delivered more gross margin improvement than we expected. The truth is though that as an organization we are not focused, gross margin is not a KPI that we are focused on. We are focused on contribution margin. And so if we’re making a trade-off where gross margins are lower but frequency and repeat are higher, we’re very happy to make that trade-off as long as we’re meeting our contribution margin and EBITDA margin targets. We’re already several quarters into the kind of cost optimization that you saw that drove us for the last few quarters in terms of gross margin. We start to lap that benefit. And again, we always want to make sure we’re delivering targets that we’re not ever going to miss. We feel very confident in the gross margin targets that we’ve laid out. Remember certain products for ours have lower gross margin profile than others, and if we opt to mix more into those, you’re going to see gross margins — the complexion of gross margin change. And so we’ve laid out targets that we believe are achievable. We feel very confident in them. And we’re sort of towards the end of that big tailwind from cost optimization you saw earlier.
Dara Mohsenian
Great. That makes sense, thanks.
Operator
Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question-and-answer session. I would like to turn the call back to Oran Holtzman for closing remarks.
Oran Holtzman
Thank you very much, guys. See you next quarter. Have a good day.
Operator
Thank you. This concludes today’s conference. Thank you for your participation. You may disconnect your lines at this time.
