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On Wednesday, 05 March 2025, Hims and Hers (NYSE: HIMS) presented at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference. CFO Yemi Okupe outlined the company’s innovative strategies in consumer healthcare, emphasizing both challenges and opportunities. The focus was on personalization, strategic investments, and ambitious growth targets, despite recent stock fluctuations.
Key Takeaways
- Hims and Hers generates over 90% of its revenue from a recurring subscriber model.
- The company aims to achieve EBITDA margins exceeding 20% by 2030.
- Strategic investments are being made in lab diagnostics and peptide facilities.
- Expansion into new categories includes weight management and mental health.
- MedMatch tool launched to enhance personalized treatment offerings.
Financial Results
- Recurring Revenue: Over 90% of Hims and Hers’ revenue is from subscriptions.
- Personalized Products: More than 55% of subscribers are using personalized products, a sixfold increase in two years.
- Oral Weight Loss Business: Achieved a $100 million revenue run rate within seven months.
- EBITDA Margins: Targeting over 20% by 2030, with a significant increase expected in 2024.
Operational Updates
- Personalization: Focus on using data to tailor treatments across specialties like dermatology and sexual health.
- MedMatch: A new tool that matches users with treatments based on demographic data.
- Weight Management: Expanded offerings include oral medications and plans for liraglutide.
- Lab Diagnostic Testing: Investments aimed at enhancing precision in care.
- Verticalization: Growth through affiliated pharmacies and potential acquisitions.
Future Outlook
- New Categories: Plans to introduce one to two new categories annually, focusing on chronic conditions.
- Technology Integration: Use of AI for improved consumer experiences, including chatbots.
- Subscriber Growth: Aiming for tens of millions of subscribers by enhancing the breadth of specialties.
- Margin Expansion: Confident in achieving over 20% EBITDA margins by 2030 through efficiency and scalability.
Q&A Highlights
- Transparency and Pricing: Emphasized a transparent subscription model addressing healthcare costs.
- HSA Support: Introduced for weight management, with plans for similar services in other areas.
- Demographics: Subscriber base now includes a broader age and income range.
- M&A Strategy: Focus on acquisitions that align with corporate strategy, such as lab diagnostics.
In conclusion, Hims and Hers is poised for strategic growth, with a strong focus on personalization and efficiency. For more details, refer to the full transcript below.
Full transcript - Morgan Stanley Technology, Media & Telecom Conference:
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Well, good afternoon, everyone. I’m Craig Headenback. I cover healthcare technology at Morgan Stanley.
Very pleased to have with us Hims and Hers, CFO, Yemi Okupe. So welcome.
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Really excited to be here, Craig.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Yes. So I think the good thing about Hims and Hers in terms of Fireside Chat, very rich in content in terms of where we can go. But I wanted to kind of go back to the beginning in terms of company founded almost a decade ago. And hopefully, that could help shape this discussion in terms of how you built the platform up. So can we start there in terms of his and hers founding and kind of the platform and build on that?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. No, I think it’s a really great question. If you look at the consumer health experience in America today, one of the few things that comes to mind is a delightful experience, right? And so when you look at how technology has transformed so many different aspects of consumers’ lives across multiple industries, how we consume media, how e commerce goods are delivered, how we move around, Over time, all those experiences have become more and more delightful with technology. The genesis of HIMSS and HERSES healthcare is really one of those last experiences that leverage technology to improve the consumer experience.
And so pretty early on in the journey of the company, what we sought to do is remove friction for some of the most stigmatized conditions such as sexual health, hair loss, through doing a couple of things. One was elevating awareness around the fact that these treatments could become or could be treated. The second was also improving accessibility. And so the ability to reach a provider in a timeframe that was more reasonable, traditionally, oftentimes in brick and mortar settings, it can take weeks or in some instances, for some conditions, months to identify a provider to treat you. And so through leverage technology to remove some of those barriers, HIMS and HERS was able to build a very powerful brand where all the technology on our ecosystem has been built from the ground up.
So the EMR system that we use that serves as a brain that connects patients with providers was all homegrown built. And so that enabled us to improve convenience on the platform over time to enable consumers to tap into a provider experience from the comfort of their own home at a time a moment in time that was convenient for them. Since then, the company has followed on a similar journey of many of the industries that I referenced before, starting to leverage things like personalization and data to take the experience to the next level for the consumer platform.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Maybe just building on that in terms of the theme of disrupting health care. And if I think about some parallels to other industries whether it’s transportation and what Uber is doing and you worked at Uber before, so I’m sure you have some really good insights there. If I think about the entertainment industry and Netflix, what are maybe some of the appropriate parallels, but also differences in terms of healthcare disruption and scaling?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think a lot of the parallels are quite similar to those industries, right? And so when you think around where Hemsworth started, we started around primarily focused on awareness and accessibility. How do you make consumers aware of the fact that there is treatment for a variety of different conditions? How do you make them more accessible to a broader set of consumers?
Then we move to make the experience overall more convenient, how consumers access treatment from the comfort of their own home. And similar to others, we started to leverage the data and scale to fundamentally bring a greater degree of personalization to the experience. So to use your example around media, we all kind of remember the days of Netflix, where it started out as a delivery mechanism that enabled you to access a broader media library. Over time, through data recommendations, they were able to make you aware of other media content that you may not have been aware of. As streaming took place, that enabled you to consume content from the comfort of your own home.
And through leveraging more and more data, they were able to personalize the experience initially through showing you a greater library, but ultimately starting to build their own content. And so when you look at the journey of Hims and Hers, the ability to start to have a platform that’s driving greater awareness, driving greater accessibility, elevating the consumer experience with convenience, and you look at the personalization on our platform, where we’re taking feedback from consumer, identifying what are some of the things that are inhibiting them from commencing treatment or adhering to treatment, leveraging those insights to elevate the experience for all through leveraging that closed loop ecosystem. The experience is getting better and better. And we’re very excited about some of the future oriented things, such as as we bring on lab diagnostic onto the platform, having a greater degree of personalization and precision medicine is what we see in the future. And you’re seeing that bore out in the results, right?
And so, two years ago, less than 20% of people or subscribers on the platform had a personalized product. Today, that number is more than 55%, has more than 6x in the last two years. And so that really is a testament to the power of what we’re doing and it continues to get stronger and stronger over time with each new subscriber that’s added.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Can we touch on just the transparency of the platform? Because when I think about healthcare, right, and deductibles and what things what you think they might cost versus what you wind up paying, how does that play into kind of the business model and for the consumer?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes, it’s a really great point. So I think we strive to have transparent pricing in the form of a subscription model. And so Hims and Hers, over 90% of our revenue is recurring in nature and it’s fundamentally subscriber based. And so when a consumer comes to our platform, they’re not just getting medication. They’re getting a holistic ecosystem that enables them to message the provider from the comfort of their own home, enables them to have great follow-up care, also enables them to receive medical treatments as well.
And so they get that in the form of a transparent price. So there’s not the headache of trying to identify what’s in network, what’s out of network. Is there a surcharge if I tap on this component or message my provider too much? That was one of the fundamental things that we saw was required to make the ecosystem more valuable to consumers was giving them a transparent price on this is your subscription. It includes access to provider.
It includes the ability to have follow-up care. It includes access to a wealth of tools and then also includes access to your medication treatment. And what we found is more and more consumers are thriving and loving that experience, whether it’s the result of convenience, whether it’s personalization, whether it’s transparency or all of the above. And so an analogy that I’d almost use is, one, increasingly, healthcare in The U. S.
Is oriented more towards like the car insurance market. When you think around how you use car insurance, you don’t use it for your day to day expenses, such as your oil change or your tire rotations or things of the sort. If there’s a catastrophic event, that’s where you pay the high deductible to have your car insurance company step in. What we’re seeing from many consumers with high deductible plans that are becoming more and more prominent across the country is that they’re wanting transparent pricing, they’re wanting the simplicity, they’re wanting the convenience, and all those factors. But pricing and transparency is definitely a critical element that a lot of consumers value the platform.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. And as the platform expands, how about things like supporting HSA accounts?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. So I think we were very excited at the end of last year to roll out HSA support for weight management. And so I think we’ll look to continue to offer value added services for consumer in the form of those types of products as well. Again, the benefit of being a consumer platform is that we get that experience around what are the things that individuals would like to see very quickly, and we’re able to respond accordingly to find various elements of value to bring forth to consumers on the platform.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. It’d be great to kind of dig into some of the growth factors. And again, maybe we can start at the beginning in terms of sexual health and dermatology. One of the questions is just the durability of that market. And some of it you’re unlocking just from awareness and bringing people into the platform.
So can you talk about just some of the growth trajectory of the base business as it stands?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. So I think it varies across specialty to specialty. So if you rewind and you look at some of our most tenured specialties, I think the ability to drive awareness and accessibility in the early days of some of the most tenure categories such as sexual health or men’s dermatology, was pretty transformative at the time. But in our view, that fundamentally is table stakes today. When we think around what is driving the growth today in our most tenured categories and what will continue to drive the growth in the future, it’s really having the platform evolve towards some of the dynamics we spoke around earlier, such as personalization.
So the ability to have patients that have different clinical needs, whether that’s for a form factor or I think following the principle of individuals typically want to have simpler regimens, not more complicated regimens if we’re able to have or treat multiple conditions in one solution, users find a lot of value in that. And so what we’re seeing with our tenured specialties is the ability to leverage the benefits of personalization, take the user feedback into account to drive greater and greater value for consumers is fundamentally resulting in continued growth. Because again, I think that the fundamental principle for the company is less around how do you pull a consumer from competitor A or how do you convert a consumer from brick and mortar to online. But it’s going after what are the things that are fundamentally preventing a consumer from getting treated today for a given condition and how do you remove that barrier. And as we’ve done that, we’ve seen a broader and broader audience come onto the platform for even our most tenured conditions, and the growth rate remained relatively robust.
So I think this quarter, we disclosed one of our longest tenured specialties, men’s dermatology, is still growing at 55% year over year, which is truly phenomenal and a testament to as you remove those barriers, there still is quite a long runway. Now the beauty of this model is it’s not as if you’re starting from scratch every specialty that you go into. So the learnings that we’ve achieved from many of the most tenured specialties like sexual health, dermatology, identifying the data, leveraging the data in the affiliated pharmacies to customize and personalized treatments for users, we’ve been able to roll those over to some of our newer specialties, like the Hurst Dermatology business. And those businesses are growing in the triple digits from leveraging many of the learnings that we saw on the HIMSS platform.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. I definitely want to dig into Hers. Maybe before we do the category of mental health, which is a newer offering, but similar thing, are there learnings in terms of the base business and how you see the market opportunity for mental health evolving?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes, I think very much so. I think more than anything, mental health is a category that we were very excited by. I think continuing to elevate the experience and identify personalized treatments for users was a learning that the category benefited from early on in its journey. I think what we also saw with mental health is we had a full appreciation for the power of structured data on the platform. And so in the second half of twenty twenty three, we launched the beta product of Med Match by Hims and Hers that’s able to look at, based upon the profile of user that’s coming in, their demographic factors, side effect tolerance and other elements of their overall subscriber profile, what is likely to be a successful treatment for that individual?
And this is where the scale and the structure to the data benefits is that if you’re able to get a user to an efficacious treatment faster, that user values the platform and is likely to remain on the platform for longer. And so for more complicated conditions such as mental health, the ability to leverage that ecosystem to pair users with the right treatments in an efficient manner and have MedMat serve as a tool for our provider network was immensely beneficial, and we were excited to roll that over to the weight loss category last year as well.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. That’s a good segue into weight loss. I’d love to talk about just the breadth of the offerings there. I know compounded semaglutide gets a lot of attention in terms of that market and how quickly it ramped. But can we talk about just the breadth of the offering in terms of the oral medications, semaglutide and as well as liraglutide?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. So the overall offering across all of our specialties, we tend to look to have a broad set of offerings to treat a variety of different consumer needs. And so when we launched the weight loss category, we took a couple of years of really diligent seeing what are all the various aspects that are important to treatment, what is the full scope of the treatment, and just to ensure that it met the profile of other specialties and conditions that we have. And what we saw is, I think, weight is one of the most pervasive issues across the company. There’s over 100,000,000 individuals for a variety of different reasons that are suffering from weight related challenge just in America.
And so we initially launched with the oral based offering. And so what we do for each of our specialties is we look to democratize an experience that’s traditionally available to few, to many. And so we hired our SVP of weight management, Doctor. Craig Primack, and really started to leverage him and other partners to identify what happens in high end clinics. So when an individual comes to them for weight loss, what is the evolution of that process?
And we identified, oftentimes what they’re doing in the higher end clinics is they’re going after what is the underlying cause of weight gain, whether it’s a metabolic health disorder or depressive eating habits, binge eating habits and so forth. And so we sought to look for ways to leverage technology to replicate that improved experience and to launch the oral weight offering based upon that experience. And what we saw is the trajectory increase phenomenally well. We saw the oral weight loss business hit $100,000,000 revenue run rate within seven months. And so I think that there’s a lot of excitement around GLP-1s and understandably so.
I think what we saw when we just launched the oral weight loss offering is that GLP-1s fundamentally changed the dialogue around weight management in America. It made it more socially acceptable to view weight loss and obesity as a medical condition versus simply a lifestyle orientation. And so when we think to how can that specialty evolve for us, I think a breadth of different offerings at different price points, different efficacy levels, different side effect profiles, different modalities, similar to what you even see in our sexual business is a similar principle that we’re following, will continue to follow that we have seen a lot of success with.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. And on the call, you talked about you will ultimately stop commercial available dosages of semaglutide, but personalization you’ll still do. Can you maybe just give some context there in this market in particular and how that might compare to other things you’re doing on the personalization side?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think even when you look at the broader Hemsworth platform, I mentioned the majority of subscribers are on a personalized product today. So north of 55% of the subscribers of all subscribers are taking a personalized subscription. That has been a fundamental competitive edge where we’re able to leverage data and the power of our facilities to bring to market an unparalleled experience. As we think around weight management and the nuances of every individual human body, I think that, that is more important than ever.
And so what we saw pretty early on in the journey in our weight loss specialty is the ability to manage efficacy levels with side effect concerns is hugely, hugely, hugely important. If an individual is not able to get through the titration schedule or is not able to tolerate the side effects, they’re not going to adhere to treatment and you fundamentally don’t have a constructive business that fits durable. And so what we sought to do, again, is just go after what are the elements that consumers suffer for, so things like nausea, muscle loss, even the tolerance of side effects versus weight loss aspirations. How do you start to take all of those factors into account, leverage the structured data ecosystem on the platform to ensure that the consumer is hitting that right balance and fundamentally experiencing success with manageable side effects. And so in the weight loss space, we’ll look through that with personalized semaglutide, our oral offering.
We’re very excited to bring liraglutide onto the platform later this year. We’ll continue to iterate and evolve that offering across the breadth of choices.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. As we look forward, the company has talked about kind of introducing perhaps one or two new categories a year. Can you just talk about that cadence? Because you’ve been very deliberate in terms of expanding the breadth of the platform. Like you said, weight loss, it was a couple of years in the making.
So how do you approach it? And what are some of the interesting categories going forward?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes, it’s a really great question. I think we as you mentioned, we’re very thoughtful in how we approach categories. We oftentimes look for is to think through what are capabilities that we can build on the platform that will provide value to consumers in multiple angles. And so when you think around the world that we want to head, towards truly increased depth of personalized medication that’s more precisely able to address a user’s needs, one of the key elements of that is lab diagnostic testing. So for instance, my mom hates this, but I oftentimes would only visit my provider once every other year, once every three years.
But what I observed was I would go in, help the individual and they would effectively give me a lab work order and then they would send me the results and say, here’s where you’re optimized, here’s where you’re not optimized. But it would take me ninety minutes round trip between waiting in the doctor’s office, driving to the doctor to get that experience. And so what I identified was, hey, there’s other treatments out there that are willing to send a phlebotomist to your home to pull your blood and will give you the same insights. And identified things about myself that I didn’t know, like certain vitamin deficiencies and things of the sort. The ability to democratize an experience like that through a frictionless or relatively low friction at home kit that you can send to users that they can send back and identify as, Hey, Greg, you may have XYZ vitamin deficiency.
The ability to then start to truly have solutions that also address those needs, people are not necessarily going to come to the platform for a vitamin deficiency. But if you give them insight while they’re looking for things that do draw users, weight, your hair, your mental health, your appearance, the ability to have a precise treatment that addresses what you came to us for plus your potential deficiencies or unoptimized indicators becomes huge. And so that’s something that we’re very excited by to deepen the data profile that we have and as well as leverage our affiliated pharmacies to get even more precise care for users. We can also leverage that same capability to limit friction in conditions that require lab testing as well, such as low testosterone. The bar to convince a user to drive down to their lab clinic, pull their blood every so often, there’s going to be a motivated set of consumers to do that.
But if we’re able to remove the barrier through giving a lower friction at home experience, that can enable that aperture to widen. So some of the categories that we’re excited to explore in the future are things like low testosterone, menopausal support. Those are categories that align to elements that we see meet a few things. Number one, we’re looking for conditions that are chronic in nature. As the platform stands today, we want to build a relationship with consumer for years or decades, not necessarily one time.
We’re also looking for things that are top of mind for individuals. If you’re trying to draw users in for low cholesterol, that’s a very difficult value proposition to start with. But other elements such as menopausal support or low testosterone, you can feel changes to your body much easier to convince the user to come for those and you can do some of the other things as a value add service. And so we’re still going to have that discipline to look to do one to two categories per year. Our probably biggest challenge is doing the right thing in the right order at the right time.
And so we’re very thoughtful to continue to build and evolve the consumer ecosystem in a thoughtful way.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Maybe we can just expand on just verticalization and touch on the importance of the affiliate pharmacies. We touched on at least at home lab testing. You also made announcement of a peptide facility. So kind of the capability set seems to be expanding and just how that plays into kind of the vision and roadmap here?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think it’s truly incredible to see how the company has continued to evolve over the last couple of years. I think the reality is what we’re doing, each individual component is actually really hard to do. So, like, if you rewind, eight years ago, a company starting a platform and building their own EMR system to connect providers and patients and have structured data and customized treatment for 2,000,000 users probably would have been like an insane thing to think about. And so we see the benefit of verticalization.
First and foremost, it comes the ability to have more influence over the overall consumer experience to show that it’s delightful. With it comes better economics. But more importantly, what we see is the ability to iterate and evolve the platform quickly. If users are telling us that they’re disproportionately suffering from a given deficiency, the ability to have the network to develop the appropriate solutions to respond to that all in house is something that’s incredibly powerful. And so each of these things is connected, the brand to draw on the subscribers that’s known and trusted, the ability to have the platform that’s gathering the data that enables us to identify what are the things that consumers are suffering with, and the affiliated pharmacies, having that verticalized to be able to directly respond and address some of those concerns and needs is something that we view as a distinct advantage and fundamentally helps the platform get stronger and stronger with each subscriber that joins.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. On MedSmatch specifically, can we touch on just the benefits from the consumer perspective in terms of getting the treatments that they need, but as well as the company and maybe bigger picture, just AI and data, what you think that could do for the platform longer term?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. It’s a really good question. I mean, I think we think of AI and data, you can take that in so many different directions. And I think that the platform can fundamentally benefit in numerous angles. So we can go through a few of those examples.
But I think one of the first things that consumers have anytime they’re suffering for a condition is, has this worked for a user like me? And I think the ability to have the structured data set to say and help providers say, we’ve seen users that meet these demographics or meet this given profile, this is probably an appropriate course of treatment for them that instills a degree of provider confidence. It also instills confidence in the users behind identifying why are they prescribed a given treatment. Now going back to the principles behind why even have the company or why even start HIMS and HERS? And it’s really the ability to leverage technology to elevate the consumer experience.
And so the same way we’ve already enabled services, whether it’s a chatbot to encourage you and coach you on the appropriate meal plan or your ability to give feedback around, hey, these are the things that are working in my meal plan, these are the things that are not, and fundamentally, it aids you in your journey. And what I found is even in my when we talked around for myself pulling the blood work earlier, oftentimes what I would do is I would find myself emailing my provider first. They would tell me that I’m not going to die anytime soon. That’s not necessarily what I was looking to solve for. So I’d upload my results in the chat to GPT and say, Hey, how do I lower this or how do I do this?
The ability to start to have that experience all in one becomes something that’s incredibly powerful for as you’re unlocking insights to a user around things that they didn’t even know or that they could potentially optimize, the ability to proactively tell them, hey, here’s what you can do about that becomes very powerful. And so the same way that when I watch Netflix, there’s movies that I didn’t even know existed, but that show up in my streaming profile, that I fundamentally enjoy. The ability to leverage that same type of concept and delight users, whether it’s with the chat bots or the customized meal plans that we spoke around or even being able to proactively answer that question of, Hey, we’ve observed this, you can consider A, B, C and D over time. That’s something that is immensely powerful, and we’re excited to have a technologist join us in the coming weeks to help make that vision a reality.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Can we touch on just the demographics of the subscriber base? And if I think about kind of core millennials, but also talk about hormone replacement therapy and kind of broadening out. So 100,000,000 consumers out there, kind of what you see the path and how that demographic is evolving?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think so when the company started, I think it was primarily a lot of millennials came to the platform that were tech forward. I think that everyone in the same way that folks have adopted social media platforms as well as some of the media platforms and transportation platforms we spoke around earlier. Very much so, the same thing was happening with hims and hers, right? I think that irrespective of what demographic you sit in, there’s very few people that say, hey, I don’t want to have a precise and personalized experience or I don’t want to have a delightful experience.
And so our ability to remove barriers for one demographic is able to transcend multiple demographics. And so when you look at the audience that we have on the platform today, it’s across a whole host of age ranges, a whole host of income levels. Some folks are coming to us for convenience, others are coming for transparency and so forth, that it’s pretty broad across numerous demographics and we expect that to continue to evolve. And the breadth of the demographics in the platform gives us the conviction and the confidence to launch into categories like lower testosterone or menopausal support, that if you rewind eight years ago, probably were not associated with a platform like Hims and Hers. But over time, just the way that we’ve been able to remove barriers for each demographic across society and delight users across multiple demographics, that’s carrying forward where we now see a pretty healthy split of users from all kinds of backgrounds coming on, which enables us to enter multiple specialties.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. Can we touch on just personalization? Every once in a while, there’ll be some headlines or some competitive offering that sparks some concerns. How important is personalization to the platform and particularly from a retention perspective?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think what we found is personalized products tend to do two things, right? The first is they do drive higher retention. Oftentimes, we are looking at user feedback behind what were the things that prevented a user from adhering or commencing treatment. And so the ability to tackle that need fundamentally makes the platform stickier and stickier.
The other element is if you’re able to go after the things that prevented your current audience from starting treatment or maintaining treatment, as that experience improves and elevates whether that’s the ability to treat multiple conditions or offer unique form factors, that broadens the audience of the number of users that comes to the platform and the audience you can go after. And so what we’ve found is as we’ve rolled out personalization, a couple of things have happened. One, as you mentioned, the retention has gone up for the existing users. We’ve also found a broader and broader audience joining the platform. So that’s one of the reasons why you see categories like men’s dermatology still growing at 55%.
It’s not that the offering is static. We’re constantly iterating and improving on the offering over time with a greater and greater breadth of products that are more and more personalized in nature.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. And then just going back to the Hertz platform for a minute, I think it’s like 20%, twenty five % of the overall business. Learnings from HIMSS as it scaled and just kind of run away for growth because I feel like the Hertz side gets a little bit less attention than the base.
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think it’s the ability to lean into personalization earlier. I think having the scale to be able to do that early on in its life cycle is something that Hers definitely benefited from. The ability to even have a distinct voice for each customer, even the HIMSS versus HIMSS brands is a distinct choice. We found it be a competitive advantage.
I think that hers has also benefited from some of the marketing learnings from HIMSS as well. That said, I think there are nuances and differences across the platform. And so being able to quickly identify those but still leverage the infrastructure of HIMSS has been an advantage. But probably the biggest thing that we’ve observed is, number one, being able to leverage the structured data early on to identify what are the right treatments for users, what are the right specialties to even go into based upon demographic factors in the platform has been something that has been incredibly powerful, not only for HERS but also the newer specialties that we’ve launched. You’re not necessarily starting from scratch each specialty.
Every specialty carries a different nuance, but the ability to leverage general principles, consumers want simplified regimens, not complex regimens. What we talked around earlier, the ability to instill consumer confidence that this solution has worked for users like them in the past. Those are general philosophies that you can extrapolate across numerous brands and conditions that have been immensely powerful for the Amazon Hearst brands.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. As you come down, a few minutes remaining, kind of bringing all this together, the platform has scaled very rapidly to 2,200,000 subscribers. You talked about longer term potentially like tens of millions. And so talk to us about just kind of playing the long game in terms of the investments that you’re making and then also the balance in terms of you also have this 20% to 30% EBITDA margin target?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think the beauty of the platform is it gets more and more efficient with scale. And so that enables and makes it very easy to do, as I say, walk and chew gum at the same time. And so what I mean by that is as we start to launch new specialties, similar to what I mentioned before, you’re not necessarily starting from scratch each time, you’re able to get more and more efficient with marketing messages. You’re able to get more and more efficient with leveraging the technology platform to get greater and greater leverage.
And so when you think around what is the path to go from the 2,200,000 users we have on the platform today to tens of millions of users, I think it’s leveraging many of those same principles that are fundamentally simple in nature. And that is how do you increasingly have a more delightful experience for users, the ability to have more personalized treatments. So these are the investments that we’re currently making in things like the labs and the affiliated pharmacies to move from a world where you have a couple of hundred SKUs to move to a world where you have thousands of SKUs, like I mentioned. The ability to delight consumers through identifying things that they may not have even been aware were even possible. So when you think around devices that are all in our pocket, twenty years ago, the ability to take a picture probably was not thought of on a cell phone.
That’s pretty standard today. And so the ability to start to bring some of that value where you’re able to identify how do you optimize your health indicators, how do you optimize treatment plans for consumers is something that we see as a critical part of the journey to tens of millions of users. The ability to bring technology onto the platform and have consumers engage real time with a technological asset to optimize that experience, whether it’s the chatbot we spoke around earlier, the customized some of the customized meal planning, we think is immensely important. Then lastly, the ability to also start to be thoughtful around the breadth of specialties that we serve. So it’s very rare that you’re going to see us go enter five categories a year, but we will thoughtfully enter one to two categories per year and really just continue to chip away and bring more and more value to the consumers in the platform, whether that’s deeper insights into how they improve and optimize their health, more precise and personalized medicine in the form of enhancing the depth there or lastly, just entry into additional specialties.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Got it. So last two, just on the margin front, just the confidence in terms of being able to scale plus kind of hit those long term targets, how do you think about that? And then the second thing is you’ve done some very interesting tuck in acquisitions from a capital allocation perspective. Do you expect kind of more of the same? How are you thinking about the platform to generate more cash?
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Yes. I think on the first one, the 20 plus percent EBITDA margins by 2,030, I think we’re very confident in that. Even when you look at the trajectory over the course of 2024, EBITDA margins doubling year on year, I think, as a testament to 12% EBITDA margins to the power of the platform. And so I think as we continue to verticalize and just continue to look at the overall dynamics within a subscription cohort, or sorry, subscription oriented business, that gives greater conviction. So a lot of the marketing dollars that we have right now are going less toward acquiring an individual transaction.
But once you acquire a user, given these conditions are chronic in nature, that user sticks with you for a long period of time. And so as you stack on more and more cohorts, you inherently get more and more leverage. The second element is with personalization. As you start to go deeper and deeper into personalization, our expectation is that the retention goes up. The final thing, and I think that I really got an appreciation for this probably eighteen months ago, is that as you enter conditions that are visible in nature and as you become the scaled player, the ability to benefit from word-of-mouth becomes something that’s incredibly powerful.
And so you see that happening organically in online forums, but you also see it offline. And so I observed many individuals in our community would ask my wife, what do you do for your hair? That’s something that she would openly and freely talk about. It’s something that individuals would openly ask about. And the ability to say I use the HERS Blends product is something that you see happening more and more.
And so organic acquisition will continue to elevate as our brand becomes more known. So we’re very confident in the ability to achieve margins north of 20%. To your second question around M and A and capital allocation, we receive a lot of deal flow. The reality is with the business, it’s growing as strongly as ours. The bar for M and A is incredibly high.
So we assess each deal on an individual basis. We tend to bias towards those deals that fundamentally accelerate our corporate strategy. So the ability to acquire a lab diagnostic facility, be able to rapidly scale that, the 503B in the form of the MedAssist acquisition we made earlier, the ability to accelerate sterile capabilities in house. And so we’ll look to continue to explore those types of acquisitions that accelerate our corporate strategy, probably less biased towards buying revenue just given that the organic base of the company is growing so quickly and there’s so much opportunity that our ability to keep the focus on accelerating the footprint of the core business as well as new specialties, something that we will fundamentally focus on.
Craig Headenback, Analyst, Morgan Stanley: Great. Well, I think we’re at time, so I think we’ll wrap there. But Gabby, thanks so much for the deep dive at Simpson Hertz.
Yemi Okupe, CFO, Hims and Hers: Thanks so much,
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