Lifetime Brands at Sidoti Conference: Strategic Growth Insights

On Wednesday, 19 March 2025, Lifetime Brands (NASDAQ: LCUT) participated in the Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference, where CEO Rob Kaye provided a strategic overview of the company’s performance and future direction. Lifetime Brands showcased its resilience in the consumer durables sector, highlighting both its successful initiatives and ongoing challenges. The company reported better-than-expected fourth-quarter results, driven by margin improvements and strategic partnerships, while also addressing challenges in its international segment.

Key Takeaways

• Lifetime Brands reported a 6% year-over-year revenue increase, with international growth at 7.2%.
• The company is shifting production away from China, aiming for a substantial reduction by 2025.
• Strategic partnerships, including those with Dolly Parton and Jamie Oliver, are driving market expansion.
• Project Concord aims to improve international segment profitability, targeting breakeven by year-end.
• The company plans to maintain its dividend and continue deleveraging.

Financial Results

• Fourth-quarter core business margin increased by 130 basis points.
• The international business margin saw a significant rise of 1,340 basis points.
• E-commerce sales comprised 24% of total revenues.
• The Dolly Parton partnership generated $7 million at wholesale and $14 million at retail in its first year.
• Despite international segment challenges, the company remains committed to improving profitability.

Operational Updates

• Lifetime Brands is expanding into the dollar channel through the Dolly Parton partnership with Dollar General.
• The "Build A Board" charcuterie board achieved $12 million in retail sales.
• A new distribution center in Maryland will offer 50% more space and is subsidized by $13 million from the state.
• The company is expanding in Europe with national accounts like Carrefour and Tesco.
• Production shift away from China is expected to be substantial by 2025.

Future Outlook

• Lifetime Brands is focused on maintaining and growing gross margin dollars through product and market share gains.
• The company is exploring acquisitions in the foodservice, outdoor, and pet spaces to diversify its portfolio.
• The Maryland distribution center will provide significant cost benefits for the first three years.
• Project Concord aims for the international segment to reach breakeven by the end of the year.
• The company expects significant growth in its professional food service, particularly in front of the house.

Q&A Highlights

• CEO Rob Kaye emphasized the importance of maintaining gross margin dollars rather than focusing solely on percentage increases.
• The company is open to acquisitions that offer margin expansion or entry into new categories.
• Maintaining its dividend remains a high priority, along with a focus on deleveraging.
• Mergers and acquisitions are seen as key to creating value and expanding the company’s reach.

Readers interested in a deeper dive into Lifetime Brands’ strategy and performance are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - Sidoti Small-Cap Virtual Conference:

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Lifetime Brands, ticker symbol LCUT. It is my pleasure to introduce the CEO of the company, Rob Kaye, who is with us this morning. We will be doing this as a fireside chat. We will have a total of thirty minutes. I will kick it off with questions, and we’ll take questions from the audience as time permits at the end.

But and if you do have some questions, you can type those into the Q and A box at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and I’ll incorporate the best I can in this fireside chat format. So, Rob, again, welcome to the Sidoti conference. It’s great to have you again being part of our conference here. So I guess, first, I think it would be helpful, especially for those new to the Lifetime brand story, to do a general or high level overview of the company, talk about your main product segments and your top sales channels and customers.

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Sure, Anthony. Again, thank you for hosting us. Glad to be here. So Lifetime Brands is a consumer durables business. We make stuff used in the home, used every day.

Most of our stuff is average ticket is $10 and under. If you go into your kitchen, chances are there’s going to be some of our products. Our largest category

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: and we

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: look at the while we have many brands and we’re mostly a branded business, we look at the business by category. Our largest category is kitchen tools and our largest brand goes across several categories as Farberware. And if for instance, if you go into a Walmart and you want a branded consumer tool, kitchen tool, it’ll be ours, and many other places because we’re sold pretty much wherever the consumer shops. Another big category for us is tabletop and that would be dinnerware, serveware, glassware. Makasa is our leading brand in that space.

The company started as a cutlery or a kitchen knife company. Actually, our ticker symbol, Elcutt comes from there. Lifetime cutlery, started in 1945, went public in 1991, and then grew, you know, by getting into all all these other categories. We make everything from the rabbit corkscrew, which is fairly famous, Taylor, which is by far the number one player in both kitchen and bathroom measurement, both for consumer and retail, and lifestyle. So home decor, beverage containers or water bottles, Swell, a very well known brand that actually started the beverage category as one of our brands.

So many brands, we do use sometimes other people’s brands. Our biggest, license arrangement, which is a twenty year partnership with Whirlpool, is for KitchenAid, where we’ve developed a line of kitchen tools, sinkware, knives, which gives us, you know, a from a good, better, best, very much of a best offering, phenomenal brand, that is driving a lot of growth for us. And then we do things like we were never in the dollar channel, and we used that this past year. We used a partnership licensing Dolly Parton’s name to get into four categories and launch newness and get into the Dollar Channel. And we launched in all 22,000 stores in Dollar General.

And in just the first year alone, we went from zero because it was new to $7,000,000 at wholesale, $14,000,000 at retail of incremental sales.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Mhmm. Gotcha. So, yeah, last week, you reported better than expected results for the fourth quarter. For those that may have missed the results, maybe if you could just provide us a quick recap of that and kind of maybe just go over what you saw from the different sales channels and product categories in 4Q?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Sure. It was a strong quarter. We’ve done a lot from a product mix perspective and what we’re offering also to focus on margin and that continues to benefit us. So in general, we saw 130 basis points increase in margin in our core business, in our international business, which is a turnaround and we were selling stuff at low margin and we’ve replaced that with a much better product offering, our margin for the quarter was up an unusual thirteen forty basis points to a level that it’s now more sustainable and profitable. So we saw growth in the international channel, but we also saw growth in The U.

S. Business in particularly e commerce and our e commerce sales or revenues as a percentage of total revenues was 24% in the quarter. And we saw an interesting trend where people expected a strong holiday season in the fourth quarter, but it wasn’t that strong coming out of the box, in October and even November. December was incredibly strong, and a lot of that was, it seems a lot of consumers waited, shopped online, and, you know, that helped drive the growth. We also saw some nice growth, in the club channel.

So that really fueled our growth in, in the fourth quarter, which was around 6% year over year and, again, a little stronger internationally. It’s a little over seven, about 7.2%.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Mhmm. So I know you touched on Dolly Parton a little bit. I know you’ve done some other partnerships and collaborations with Drew Barrymore and some others. So maybe just maybe talk about some of the other partnerships that you’ve done and whether or not you guys would be open to doing another type of arrangement with perhaps another celebrity or some social media influencer. How do you guys think about that?

Just wondering if you could touch on that. Sure,

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Anthony. Now, you know, we spend most of our time on building our own brands and that is the core of what we do and the core of what we sell. But besides KitchenAid, which again is a twenty year partnership and is integral to our business, we’re always looking for opportunities that are a plus one basis. If we looked at and we always like to say we sell wherever the consumer shops and that’s true. But what wasn’t completely true is we weren’t selling in the dollar channel, and we just couldn’t figure out the correct approach.

And then a little over a year ago, we were able to hook up with Dolly Parton’s people, and we thought it was great opportunity to bring her name into our categories, and Dollar General agreed. So while it was in a contractual relationship, we launched that product line with Dollar General, and they do have 22,000 stores in this country. So it’s a big opportunity, did extremely well. Dollar General said the greatest, single biggest launch that they had ever experienced. So we were happy.

They were happy. We’re we’re getting Dolly Parton into now new channels. But if we we always look for opportunities, that give us a plus one plus one opportunity to take incremental shelf space and be able to sell more product.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: That makes sense. So if we just go back to like the full year ’twenty four results, so obviously, you talked about Dolly Parton and some others. Just maybe just can you go over some of the additional meaningful products that you view as growth drivers? How do you guys think about that?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Yes. So we’re always looking to bring newness both to our retail customers and our consumers. And if we look at innovation, a lot of what we do, we do level four what we call a disruptive innovation, we bring things to the marketplace. We do a lot of what we call level one innovation, which is just refreshing or bringing what we call lipstick on a pig and you’re sort of making things a little better or you’re looking what’s on trend. We follow a lot of trend.

And if you look at right now in knives, we’re not inventing a new knife, but we’ve got a whole new knife set with white handles with trim because that’s very popular right now and we do that. But there’s a lot in between. And one thing that we noticed a little over a year ago in our product development cycle, that charcuterie was really gaining momentum in this country and actually globally. So we created a new charcuterie board, which we called Build A Board, and it allows with the dome for it to be portable. So you can make your charcuterie, bring it to the dinner party.

And we launched that across many, many channels, except a couple of our, you know, the MASK guys didn’t pick it up in 2024, a big, big part of the marketplace, but, we sold $12,000,000 so ’24 at retail. And we would have sold a lot more, but we kept on running out of stock. It’s a way of staying on trend, and, you know, that drove a lot of incremental growth for us and big market share gains in cutlery where we already have the number one position, but grew a lot from that number one position with this new product introduction.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: All right. This sounds definitely an exciting opportunity for you. So with the ongoing macroeconomic, geopolitical, and tariff uncertainty, how do you think that Lifetime brand is positioned with its price points, its products, and potential market share gains?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Yeah. I mean, look, to begin with, there’s no visibility. But if you look at in different environments, inflationary environments, recessionary environments, and you look historically, this company has always performed well, always made money, always produced cash flow. I like to use the example of our largest SKU that we sell, which is a can opener. It’s a we have a very, very large market position in that space.

And I, you know, like to say whether, you know, someone’s buying that for $6 or it’s tariffed and it’s they’re paying $6.60 for it or inflation, they’re paying $6.60 or $7 or bad times. People don’t go into their tool chest and take out a hammer and screwdriver. They go buy one of our can openers. So there is resiliency to our products. We sell good, better, best.

So we’re selling at different price points to be able to capture the market. It’s not a luxury item. It is affordable. And for that matter, in tough times, people tend to cook more at home and they need our products to do so. So I think we’re well positioned.

If you look at the tariff environment, we lived through this already you know, several years ago in the first trade wars. And to this day, those products still maintain a 25% tariff. So, you know, we noticed or came the conclusion about two years ago that the West and China have decoupled from an economic perspective. And we started shifting production out of China, which is where traditionally 90% of our production came from. Why?

Because it’s just much more efficient and economical to do there if you just looked at this without any macro or other inputs. So we’ve been shifting to many geographies. We’ll have a lot of our production out of China within 2025. And we are also in the process as is the whole market passing through price increases, just a reality that people need to do to mitigate the tariffs. So we think we are prudently positioned in what’s the reality of the trade war, which seems to change every day.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Right. Right. It continues to be a fluid environment for sure. Now are you also talking with your suppliers asking them to absorb some of these cost increases as it relates to the tariffs?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: We are, and there’s a lot of press in the media that Walmart has gotten pushback from their direct purchasing of some private label goods from Chinese manufacturers. And the reason for that is just pure math is there’s not much there, Right? Which is why you really have to shift geographies and why price increases are our reality, of which all the big retailers, the public ones have said, hey, price increases are coming, and you’ll see that. So it’s not you’re not going to absorb. So if you look at China, we’re paying a 25% tariff.

Now you’re paying 45% because they put the 10% on 10% or they add another 10%. That can’t be absorbed through cost reductions. You can get a little. But the majority is going to come from the other strategies that I mentioned.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Got it. So just shifting gears. So when I look at your business, obviously, the vast majority of your business is based in The U. S, though in the last year, about 8% of your annual sales came from your international segment, which has admittedly struggled with profitability. Last week, when you announced your fourth quarter results, you also announced Project Concord.

Can you please talk about what’s been happening in your international segment? And what are your strategies behind Project Concord to improve the profitability of the international segment?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Look, the international segment has struggled for quite some time. When I took over the business, we looked at that and restructured the business dramatically. Most of it, about 90% is in The UK. And so one of the things we need to do first is as we delved into the details of that business, we were selling money at negative margins, so we had to restructure the product offering, and we feel comfortable that we’ve done that. And that’s actually starting to drive some of the growth you’ve seen in the last two quarters in that business and the dramatic improvement in gross margin.

But the bulk of that business, it is losing money, over $9,000,000 in 2024, and we need to eliminate that. So a lot of what we have done is gonna drive a big improvement in profitability in 2025, but not to breakeven. And the pace is just too slow, so that’s why we launched Project Concorde, which is as opposed to running it as a complete standalone, which traditionally it was, it’ll be much more integrated into the global business. And therefore, we can be much more efficient and remove cost. And that will drive us as well as several other things, including reduced inventory of excess inventory that is there.

We’ll monetize that to improve the cash flow, but that we believe will get us to a breakeven level in the business run rate by the end of the year because there’s going to be a lot of cost to get there and it’s going to take some time. And that’s the purpose of Project Concord is we’re not comfortable in just improving that business this year. We need to get it to breakeven and then look at our strategic options to drive value from there.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: And can you also talk about what you’ve seen as far as moving more towards the national accounts in Europe. I know Carrefour is a big retailer based in France. You’ve had some success there and some others. And I think maybe talk about some of the product lines. I think you have a new line with Jamie Oliver.

So maybe can you just speak to that as far as how that’s going and how that will help the international segment?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Sure. So two core strategies that you bring up in terms of how we’ve restructured the business, Anthony. One is that the traditional sales channels that that business was going was the independent, what you see in this country, the independent gourmet or over like in The UK, it’s called Cook and Dine Shops. Great businesses, wonderful shops, but they’re in tremendous decline, both here and So we needed to shift into where people were shopping and that would be grocery and large national retailers. So if you look at Dunelm is a great retailer that’s doing well in The UK that we’re now building a good business there, other people like Tesco and Next, and you mentioned a few names.

So we shifted from a distributor model to a direct model because we had critical mass and we’re selling some large chains like in France, Carrefour, and Leclerc, Etika in Germany, America, in in Denmark, which I think is a 84 stores, about 60% of the market, and and it’s it’s driving a lot of growth. And it’s one of the things that you’ve seen in the last six months, and you’ll see it more in 2025. These are healthier channels, and all new, so it’s all incremental business, and it’s going to drive a lot of what we’re doing. So the go to direct model and selling to these channels is going to improve our business. The other thing is, we needed volume.

So we look at where as we build the portfolio, good product lines that we can offer. And KitchenAid has driven a lot of growth as we extended that relationship internationally and will continue in the international markets. But in Dinnerware, we hooked up with Jamie Oliver, who, interesting enough, is very popular in the Commonwealth countries. But if you look at the book, authors in The UK, the number two selling author is Jamie Oliver, not the number two selling cookbook author, you know, just behind, JK Rowling. Very, very popular.

And, we launched a new Jamie Oliver line. It’s a there’s a two two levels, you know, a, veteran, a best. It’s so far, the sell through has been tremendous. You know, we hope that’s a good sign of things to come. Gives us another great offering of a brand that’s very popular in a lot of the markets we are go after.

And Australia, which is a big growth opportunity for us, which we’ve been growing nicely. Again, we launched with the largest retailer in Australia, Meijer, and the initial sell and sold through, I believe it was six weeks, I may be incorrect. So KitchenAid, Meijer, Swell is doing very well international. So we’re trying to get brands that are playing very well and build our portfolio with those brands.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Gotcha. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. So looking at your professional food service program, let’s talk about that, you know, how that started and, like, where was that in ’twenty four? What are your expectations for ’twenty five?

And just maybe also touch on the, also, the margin profile of that business as well. We would love to hear that.

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Sure. Starting with the margin profile, if you look at the gross margin in that business, it is absolutely phenomenal, but it’s a multistep distribution model. So we may sell Chili’s or Brinker’s, but then they’ll say, hey, go buy that through a large distributor like Edward Don, and then there’s a lot of program costs to do that. And what’s your specked on? You’re selling that same product for five years, so it becomes an annuity.

So very, very different from the consumer side of the business. But the gross margin, really, really good. But the net margin also strong. The net margin is in line with the higher points of the margin that we sell in retail. So it’s good business.

And if you look at when we combined the company that I was running Filament Brands into Lifetime back in the middle of twenty eighteen, well, Filament had a long relationship through Taylor in what’s called the back of the house, stuff used in the kitchen. So we knew food service very well and it’s a great market. And a matter of fact, if you look at over the long term, it grows at a faster pace, you know, 6% or so, than, the GDP and then the core retail business. So great market, but Lifetime had never been in that market, because they didn’t necessarily understand, but had all the products and the price points for what’s called the front of the house, serveware, dinnerware, glassware. We’re we’re a big player.

We have brands that matter. We can hit all different price points. So we saw an opportunity to launch a much bigger presence, in that area where a bigger player that had the distribution capabilities that understood food service, because we do it from the back of the house, could be a meaningful player over the long term in what is roughly a $2,300,000,000 addressable market where there’s limited number of large players. So flatware, we’re the largest player in this country on the consumer side, you just don’t take your flatware and take a knife and a fork and sell that into food service because they’re really trashing it, right? They’re cleaning it all the time.

So you make thicker millimeter, right, a thicker product. So we redesigned it and we launched it. We launched it just when COVID hit, perfect timing, but we continue to invest in the business. So losing money because we’re building infrastructure and now we’ve gotten credibility, I think we’ve established, plus I know we’ve established ourselves as a player and we’ll see big growth in that business. So in 2024, we sold around $25,000,000 in food service, most of that being in the back of the house, we’ll see nice growth, particularly in front of the house, fourfold growth in what we call Macassa Hospitality, which are front of the house offering in 2025.

And a big piece of that growth is also gonna be driven by a partnership we announced last year with Royal Leerdam, which is a phenomenal glass manufacturer, which we’re distributing their products now in North America. And that already has established distribution by taking that over that’s going to seamlessly add a lot of growth to our foodservice portfolio.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Mhmm. Gotcha. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And looking back a few weeks ago, you guys announced a new distribution center in Maryland.

Can you talk about how this will help with the expected growth of your business and managing your distribution costs?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Yep. So the driving factor of moving to Maryland from Southern New Jersey is really cost containment. So we’ll avoid tens of million dollars of cost increase as opposed to just driving down costs tens of million dollars So the benefit is really staying cost neutral. But we also expect a facility that is 50% greater than our New Jersey facility. And that 50% incremental space, because it’s a build to suit our builder slash landlord, has agreed to 100% of that incremental costs, we will not be charged for the first three years.

That gives us the ability to grow into that space. We can use it day one, you know, then obviously we’re paying nothing for, you know, big part of our distribution center, and that that’ll be a benefit. We’ll get, some automation, some efficiencies, and we’ll utilize that space. We have plans to, which will improve efficiencies. Maryland, we worked with on a very cooperative basis.

They are giving us $13,000,000 of subsidies to offset our costs which would be include $10,000,000 of capital that we’ll be spending for this facility over 2025 and 2026 roughly evenly between those two years.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Got you. Got it. Okay. So just wanted to incorporate one quick question that we did get from the audience. So as you look to do all these sourcing changes for in terms of your product sourcing moving away from China, what do you think as far as your ability to maintain or expand gross margins this year and next?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Yeah. No, it’s a great question. Look, we’re focused on execution risk and we have substantial systems, particularly on the quality side that are proprietary, that have managed these moves and that’s really our focus in 2025 is continuity, which we think we’re well positioned and positioned extremely favorably versus most of our competition. Really also with the price increases that are happening in the marketplace, Our focus is to maintain and then grow through product and market share gain our gross margin dollars. So we’re not looking and we’re not focused on increasing our gross margin percent in this environment as we’ve been dramatically increasing through the changes that we’ve discussed over the last couple of years.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Gotcha. All right. And then shifting gears now to acquisitions. So you’ve done some acquisitions in the past. How do you guys think about that in the current environment of what types of companies would you be looking for to acquire?

To me, it seems like maybe in the commercial foodservice business may make sense. But also, can you just talk about valuation multiples as to what you’re seeing nowadays?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: We’ve seen multiples in general come down across the different types of end markets that you’re looking at. Foodservice is definitely someone somewhere where we wanna be aggressive. It does carry slightly higher multiples. And I talked about the end markets being slightly higher than GDP, so it makes sense that you’re paying a higher multiple for it. So the math all works out.

We’re always looking at fold in acquisitions that are highly accretive from day one. And our strategy is core to be looking for businesses that give us either margin expansion or growth opportunities on the top line and get us into new categories. We’ve been actively looking in the outdoor space, in pet, which we’re not players in, and we just sort of dabble a little bit, and we figure, we think we would do much better with a brand that’s established in that place, and people that are active in that space more than we are. And that’s why an acquisition would be good in food service. It’s really speed to market and to be able to grow faster and get a good return with that investment, because we’ve built this infrastructure, we’ve been funding it for the past couple of years, we’re extremely well positioned and we’ll get there, but we’ll get there faster if we include acquisitions in our growth.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Got you. So historically, your business has generated very healthy free cash flows. Obviously, you’re going to be spending a little bit more than usual on CapEx this year, next because of the new distribution center. But after you get past that, CapEx is still going to be fairly minimal. So fairly asset like model, pretty good free cash flow.

So can you just talk about what your top capital allocations priorities are?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Sure, Anthony. So look, it’s a, in our mind, very, very strong free cash flow model. Right? As you point out, it’s asset light. You know, we have occasionally, like we’re doing in Hagerstown, Maryland, you know, some uses of capital short term, you know, still will generate cash.

So it is a very strong, you know, which is why, you know, we always delever in all environments and we continue to delever on an absolute basis every year and all the time. We also though pay a dividend. So we have no intention of changing that and we’ll maintain our dividend. And so we’re using a bit of cash for that. We do use our balance sheet for working capital on a competitive basis from time to time.

So when we picked up nice market share in the few years ago in the global supply chain prices because we could use our balance sheet to build up inventory, a lot of our competition can’t. For that matter, we’ll do something similar as we ship production against people that don’t have that capability. So we do use it as an offensive weapon, obviously, in bad times, we use it as defensive weapon because it’s very strong. And then we have tremendous amount of liquidity while we’re very disciplined, we do see M and A as a good value creation vehicle for us and we’ll use money for that. Obviously we will look to quickly delever for any lever that we would take leverage that we would take on in conjunction with an acquisition.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: Got it. Got it. All right. So as we look to wrap up this presentation or this fireside chat, just wondering if you had any closing remarks or anything else that we may have missed that you want to highlight to investors as they look at the Lifetime brand story?

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Anthony, look, we appreciate your coverage and interest. I think for us, we are really focused on trying to get our story out there. We view that our story is just not necessarily understood and not necessarily spread out. So we appreciate the opportunity to be here so that people can understand the story. As we were just talking about, it’s a very, very strong cash flow company that will in good times and bads generate good, good cash flow, which we think you talk about food service, we talk about just fixing international, add $9,000,000 plus to the cash flow line and EBITDA line.

So there’s a lot of avenues for growth beyond the core business and we’ve continued to innovate and gain market share. So we think it’s a good story more importantly. We want to try to get it out there and let people evaluate for themselves and appreciate this opportunity.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: All right. Well, yeah, absolutely. And, you know, great to hear an update here from you and hope you have a productive day of meetings. I know you have a busy day at our conference. So thank you very much for joining us and sharing your thoughts.

And thank you, everyone, also listening and participating as well. So with that, we’ll wrap it up and have a great day.

Rob Kaye, CEO, Lifetime Brands: Thank you.

Anthony, Host, Sidoti: All right. Thank you.

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