Lifetime Brands at Consumer Growth Conference: Strategic Moves Amid Challenges

On Tuesday, 10 June 2025, Lifetime Brands (NASDAQ:LCUT) presented at the 25th Annual Consumer Growth and E-Commerce Conference, offering a strategic overview marked by cautious optimism. While the company faces challenges from trade wars and a dimmed consumer outlook, it remains committed to navigating these hurdles with strategic initiatives and operational adjustments.

Key Takeaways

• Lifetime Brands plans to diversify its manufacturing base outside of China by the end of the year.
• The company experienced a strong holiday season in 2024 but faced a slowdown in consumer spending in Q1 2025.
• The Dolly Parton product line is a successful growth initiative, with revenues expected to more than double this year.
• Lifetime Brands is relocating its East Coast distribution center to Maryland, driven by cost avoidance.

Financial Results

Lifetime Brands reported a soft start to 2024 but saw a robust holiday season. However, Q1 2025 witnessed a slowdown in consumer spending, impacting sales. Margins shifted due to a change in customer and product mix, with the club channel sales having lower margins due to their direct import nature.

Operational Updates

• The company is shifting its manufacturing from China to countries such as Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Vietnam to mitigate tariff impacts.
• Price increases have been implemented to maintain margin dollars rather than percentages.
• The relocation of the East Coast distribution center from New Jersey to Maryland is on schedule, with $13 million in subsidies from Maryland aiding the move.

Future Outlook

CEO Rob Kay emphasized a defensive strategic posture due to macroeconomic and political uncertainties. Despite these challenges, Lifetime Brands remains focused on growth, with particular emphasis on the Dolly Parton product line and food service initiatives, which are expected to contribute significantly to future revenues.

International Segment and Project Concord

• The UK segment has been restructured to address losses, with Project Concord aiming for breakeven by 2025.
• Costs are associated with integrating the international business into US operations to streamline expenses.

Q&A Highlights

• Rob Kay noted the importance of maintaining margin dollars amid trade uncertainties.
• Guidance for FY ’25 remains withheld until there is clarity in trade wars and tariff regimes.
• M&A opportunities are being considered, focusing on margin expansion and new product categories.

In conclusion, Lifetime Brands is navigating a challenging landscape with strategic shifts in manufacturing and distribution, while focusing on growth initiatives like the Dolly Parton product line. For more details, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 25th Annual Consumer Growth and E-Commerce Conference:

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us at Oppenheimer’s twenty fifth Annual Consumer Growth and Ecommerce Conference. My name is Fredrik. I’m the senior food, grocery and consumer products analyst here at Oppenheimer. I’m happy to introduce our next presenting company, Lifetime Brands. Joining us today are CEO, Rob Kay and CFO, Larry Winoker.

So thank you both for being here. The format of today’s session will be a fireside chat, and then we’ll move to audience Q and A. So if you have questions, please enter them into the quick question panel below the video. Let’s get started. So maybe to kick it off, for those unfamiliar or new to Lifetime Brands, what should people know about the company?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Yeah. So just to give you a little history of the company, the company, is a consumer durables business. We sell stuff that is used in the home every day. The average ticket of what we sell is $10 and under. And, we sell, like, a good, better, best offering, in almost all channels.

So our idea is to be agnostic where the consumer shops, where they shop. We want them to be able to buy our product. So just to, back up a the company was founded in 1945 as a cutlery company, so kitchen knives. And if you fast forward to today, if you look at the cutlery cat category and look at the POS, the Surcana data, we have well over a 20% market share, through a variety of brands, but predominantly are Farberware brands. And the company grew, added brands, went public in 1991, and used that to continue to add brands.

But in 02/2018, I orchestrated a combination with a private equity backed company I was running, and we combined those two companies about a $500,000,000 lifetime with about a $175,000,000 of cofilament brands, and we relaunched the company to focus more on trying to get our story out, be a more visible public company, and also just change the directory more to growth and profitability. And and we’ve had a pretty good success on doing that. So we’re in multiple categories. Tabletop tools, kitchen tools are our biggest thing, and it like I said, things used in the home.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: And then, Rob, do you mind providing a few minutes on your background? And then, Larry, are you able to do the same?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Sure, Rupesh. So I come out of the management consulting world, but many years ago, actually, when I was 31 years old, I left that to, become CFO of a of a smaller public company, and then from there got the opportunity to become, CEO of a, private equity backed company that was an, industrial roll up where we made a lot of acquisitions, very high positive free cash flow profile, and had a successful exit from that. And ever since then, I’ve been involved in the consumer space and consumer durables of building up private equity companies, including Filament Brands, which we bought in 2000 or launched in 02/2012, which then in 02/2018, we merged into Lifetime, and I became CEO of Lifetime in conjunction with that.

Larry Winoker, CFO, Lifetime Brands: I I started as a CPA. I’ve been with Lifetime since 2007 as a CFO. Prior to that, I was also private equity and held various financial roles, controlled, by an individual who also, controlled Revlon, and I was the treasurer of control at Revlon for five years.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Great. So now I wanna touch on a few macro and industry questions. So on the consumer, how would you describe the overall health of your US consumer as you sit here today, and what are you planning for on the consumer front for the balance of the year?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: So I preface this as visibility is a little dim, I think, in general. But, you know, they if you look at 02/2024, you know, the consumer wasn’t necessarily robust, and then there was a belief that there was pent up demand coming into holiday season, which started out slow but ended up to be quite accurate with a strong holiday season in ’24. It slowed down then. The consumer slowed down in terms of spending, in q one a little bit. And, of course, now, with the trade wars, creating uncertainty both from a retail, and supplier channel as well as from a consumer channel.

The consumer has gotten more wary, and, you know, it’s resulted in some slowdown, at the retail level. Another trend we are seeing, and we definitely saw this in q four, is we saw a little acceleration in terms of people buying online, and it was driven mostly with the wariness of the consumer. They were delaying spend, and then, they can still get that gift in one to two days by buying online, and that greatly helped online shopping in in q four and continues to do so. Okay.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Great. And then now switching to the competitive backdrop. Overall, what is your team seeing on the competitive front here in The US?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: We’re seeing a bit of bifurcation. Whereas if you look at a lot of people that we compete in, they’re small, either private equity backed or privately owned companies and a lot smaller than a couple of the larger players like us. And in this environment, having the resources to move manufacturing and supply to many different geographies on and maintain quality while you do that using your balance sheet, for for building inventory, and, just having, you know, financial stability. You’re starting to see some of those companies, hit some breaking points, and that actually, for us, we believe would be a good m and a opportunity. But, you know, we a lot of in the competitive environment has shifted to operational issues moving geographies and moving out of China where most consumer products are made and focused on repricing product, which has retarded or slowed down a little bit the pace of new product introduction noticeably.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: And then just from a channel perspective, so in The US, we’ve seen obviously Amazon, Costco, Walmart with a lot of momentum, but just are you seeing any differences lately from a channel perspective?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: You know, not really. As I mentioned, you know, there is we’ve seen a little bit of pickup online over the last six to nine months. The club channel driven by Costco is is very, very strong both in food and nonfood. In the mass channel, particularly Walmart, you know, has done fairly well. And the the only two other channels to mention is been ups and downs in the dollar channel, but for us, it’s more of a newer channel, and, you know, we think that still will offer value to the consumer.

But off price continues to do well and grow as a destination for the consumer.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: And then just from an inventory destocking perspective, just overall, what are you seeing from retailers on the inventory destocking front right now?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: So what that’s being in terms of the overall destocking that happened, you know, particularly a couple of years ago as retailers changed their footprint, you know, to have some buy online and, you know, pick up in store. You needed to change your store format, you know, and distribution and and what you’re using the square footage in the stores to be able to do that. And there was a bit of destocking, a. B, when challenging economic times, the larger retailers, will shift towards, using their vendors, balance sheet instead of theirs because it’s just, you know, financially prudent, and and, you know, we’ve seen a little bit of that over the last, you know, year or so. But the big input in terms of retail’s inventory is driven by the tariffs.

So people were rushing, to get pre tariff inventory in, you know, but particularly when there were a 145% tariffs on China, you saw a lot of people that just shut down, including Lifetime ordering any product from China. And then when that changed, you saw a lot of people, including Lifetime, dramatically accelerate, you know, bringing in product in that window, not knowing what’s gonna happen, and, again, using your balance sheet, to, buffer the inventory less so on the retailer except a direct import private label product, where they have to buy that directly. Whereas before they were hoarding, and and putting up inventory, they basically been driving that down, and they’re not hoarding now except, where they can on their, again, direct import private label product.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. That’s a great segue into the next topic, which comes up in really all my investor con conversations. So on tariffs, I have a few questions here. Can you remind us how the company was positioned heading into the new tariff environment, including your China exposure? And how we should think about potential impacts and mitigation efforts from here?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: So, to begin with, Lifetime viewed that China, which is traditionally where our products and, you know, almost all from Apple, you know, to to Lifetime and everything in between, are are made, because it’s much more efficient, good quality. It’s, you know, good cost, understand, you know, how to make product and police against underage labor and other social responsibility issues. So it really makes sense for a lot of reasons to make there. But we saw a decoupling with China, what we viewed as decoupling between China and the West. And two years ago, I brought in our manufacturing base and said, look.

We need to start moving out of China, of which we have, and our view was to do it on a distributed basis. So, we are now shipping from Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia. We’ve been in Vietnam for a long time. A lot of metal products, particularly our flatware has been in Vietnam for well over a decade. India.

But, you know, while we started shifting that, in terms of putting the capital of which we’re relying, to to propagate our asset light bar model, we lie rely on our manufacturing partners to put up that capital to build those plants. We shifted more back in the last, year and a half to China on a temporary basis or an interim basis, I should say, because it was cheaper, and we were offering a cheaper product to everyone. Once, and then that’s one part. And then in October, before the election, we said, look. As a defensive measure, we’re gonna start buying inventory to buffer if, you know, Trump administration comes in and put in increased tariff program.

Now we didn’t no one expected what happened. So that helped us buffer and allows us time to implement the actual moving of more product out of China because we’re still where most of our products made. So we’re aggressively doing that, and, you know, by the end of this year, we’ll have most of our products manufactured out of China. Now the other aspect of of tariffs is passing on price increases, of which we have done across, you know, our our complete customer base. A lot of that you don’t see yet at retail.

You know, you’re starting to see the direct import private label because they pay that, you know, faster. But, you know, that will happen in the half of the year in terms of retail prices.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: And can you remind us of, as we think about pricing, the magnitude of price increases? And then maybe it’s still early, but I don’t know. Are there any early reads on elasticities at this point?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Well, you know, I’ll divide that in two. You know? So the tariffs, like, I don’t know what’s gonna happen tomorrow. It changes all the time. You know?

So, therefore, it’s very difficult to price, and it changes. So we’ve had to be very reactive in working with our customer base, you know, to to put that in place. Now we don’t pass through a 100%, and, you know, we’re looking really to maintain margin dollars as opposed to margin percent as we do that. You know? So that’s that’s part of our our contribution.

In terms of elasticity, I think the best thing we could point for in our products is looking at history. So if you look at 02/2008, you know, which was a, you know, pretty deep recession, people are still buying our products. You know? I I you know, our we sell about 10,000,000 units of can openers a year, manual can openers, biggest provider. And I always like to use that as a good example because, you know, in tough times and high inflation times, people don’t necessarily open up their toolbox and take out a hammer and screwdriver.

You know, they’ll go buy and maybe now $9, now be a tariffs, you know, $11 for that can opener as as opposed to using a hammer and and screwdriver. So relatively in many of our bigger categories in elastic, certain categories, you know, like, particularly tabletop, is is there’s less price elasticity in those categories. So I should say there’s more elasticity in in in the majority of our products, though.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Great. And then just switching to q one results, is is there anything you think is important to re highlight to for us from your report?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: So I I think the big thing in q one is, look, there was a little bit of softness, you know, that we saw based upon, you know, coming off of a strong fourth quarter. But the big thing, we really were not tariff impact. You know, those things did not happen in q one. But our margin shifted, and that can happen quarter to quarter because margin is a lot driven by customer mix. You know, if you look at the club channel, great relationships, great customers, very healthy channel, but most of that is direct import.

You know? And and therefore, look, there’s no working capital investment. There’s no working capital cost, but it’s lower margin. So customer mix and product mix. You know, we do a lot of different products and a lot of different categories can change things, and we saw that in q one, which had an adverse impact.

You know? So sales were good, but but, margin was not because of the customer and product mix.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: And now I’d to discuss your international segment. How are you thinking about your opportunities overseas versus here domestically?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: We don’t have enough time. So, look, when when you know, I I relaunched the company in 2018 and took it over. We inherited an international business that were several acquisitions. Most of it was in The UK. It was losing a lot of money, well in excess of $10,000,000.

Also, we were selling products once we got a handle of that business, which we didn’t have, we were selling products at, you

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: know,

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: negative margin, you know, no right to win. So we completely restructured that business, shut down a lot of facilities, eliminated couple 100 heads, changed the product offering, and changed our go to market strategy. And as I mentioned, mostly in The UK, it was working for us, from losing a lot of money. You know, we were got the business to break even pre Brexit. Then Brexit hit, which had a significant impact on the end markets that we’re in in The UK.

And if you it took our infrastructure, we could not fund the infrastructure and put another way. We started losing money. So in 2024 last year, we lost $9,000,000 there. So that’s why we talked about Project Concord, which is designed to restructure that business, further integrate it because it’s really kind of run as a stand alone into The US business, take advantage of that infrastructure, which allows us to streamline the cost to get that to break even as a business, on a run rate in 02/2025. And we’re seeing good progress on what we call project Concord, which is that project.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: And then how focused are you today on growth? What initiatives are top priority for your team?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Look. We’re always focused on growth, but in this environment, you know, we’re taking a more defensive posture because there’s just so much noise out there, you know, until we settle, everything going on with all the macro and political, issues and and any impact that has on the consumer, which drives our economy. We’re more defensive and less growth oriented than we’ve been in terms of investing that. We’ll shift that back, you know, once we see the opportunity, but we’re not ignoring growth. You know?

If you look at the launch of our new Dolly product line last year, it was, you know, over $6,000,000 of incremental revenues last year. We’re more than double at this year. There’s a lot of new product. And we’re taking Dolly Parton into other away from Dollar General, not away. It’ll double in Dollar General, but we’ll, bring it to other retailers.

And we’re also growing Dollar General with other brands. So there’s good growth. We continue to invest in our food service initiative, which will grow as on a percentage basis significantly this year. It’s gonna hit critical mass and start, you know, contributing a positive contribution margin next year. And, you know, we’ve talked about the addressable market there being over $2,000,000,000.

We see this as a $100,000,000 ultimate opportunity, but, you know, we’re we’re a little less than 30, so we’re focused on 60,000,000 first.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Great. What is the latest on Project Concorde? What should investors keep an eye out for in the re remainder of 2025 and into 02/1926?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: It’s a Project Concorde, you know, which is bringing the The UK business and the international business to to a breakeven level run rate. There’s cost to getting it. So you’re not gonna see an immediate impact because there’s cost to achieving that, you know, which have to run through the income statement as well. But we are on plan. We’re making we we’ve, it’s just execution now.

We’ve developed and and are working on, many, many different, pieces of that project, and are very pleased with the progress that we’re making.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Are there updates on the relocation of East Coast distribution center, and how should you think about the benefits of the re this relocation?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: So the we’re moving our our large Robbinsville, New Jersey distribution center to Hagerstown, Maryland. We are on plan, and on schedule. We’ve broken ground. It’s we will not own it. Trammell Crow is building this It’s built to suit.

And what the driving factor for that move is if we stayed where we were with all the different inputs and you, worked out what that meant in terms of economic impact, our cost, over the next couple of years would have increased significantly. So by, executing this move to Hagerstown, Maryland, our cost will not increase. So it’s more cost avoidance than pocketing, you know, $2,030,000,000 dollars of savings. Now this will cost capital. You know, it’s asset light model.

This will cost capital, but we’re also getting $13,000,000 in subsidies primarily from the state of Maryland.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Perfect. I’m gonna wrap up with two final questions. So just going back to your FY ’25 guidance, your team has not provided annual guidance at this juncture. At what point would you feel comfortable actually providing guidance for FY ’25?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: When when there’s clarity in the trade wars and the tariff regimes, you know, not elimination, just clarity, stability in that. And as that is stabilized, then would be the time to issue guidance.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Great. And then maybe one final question just on m and a. Can you remind us of your acquisition criteria? What does your ideal target look like?

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Yeah. So, Rupesh, I won’t say an ideal target because in m and a, it takes two. Right? So we may totally want, you know, you know, see this is the perfect acquisition opportunity, but if it’s not available, well, we’ll never do it. Right?

So in general, we’re looking for either margin expansion, you know, new product category growth opportunity, within our core markets. You know? That’s that’s our driving factor in food service, which is a very attractive opportunity for us to acquire, our our speed to grow our market position through an acquisition would make it highly attractive. Right? So that there’s a different, criteria that we’re looking in in that area.

And then, you know, fold in acquisitions are immediately accretive, but, you know, there’s opportunities, particularly in this environment that we see that are more transformative, that gives us much more critical mass, which we think is important for us as a public company, and to provide, you know, more liquidity and other, size benefits by by being able to do that.

Fredrik, Senior Food, Grocery and Consumer Products Analyst, Oppenheimer: Okay. Great. Well, thanks, Rob and Larry, for joining us today.

Rob Kay, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Well, thank you. Appreciate the opportunity to be here.

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