Redbubble Ltd

ASX:RBL

Earnings Call Transcript 2022-Q1

[Operator]

Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Redbubble Limited Q1 Market Update. [Operator Instructions] I would now like to hand the conference over to Louise Lambeth, Head of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

[Louise Lambeth, Head of Investor Relations]

Thank you. Good morning, everyone here in Australia, and good afternoon and evening for our U.S. investors. This is Louise Lambeth, Head of Investor Relations for Redbubble Group. Welcome to this investor call following the release of Redbubble's FY 2022 first quarter trading update released earlier today. With me on the line are Redbubble's CEO, Michael Ilczynski; and CFO, Emma Clark. As well as the first quarter results and report, the key information for today's update is contained in the ASX announcement and accompanying slides also released to the market this morning. Please note that the financial results and operational metrics are from internal management reports and have not been subject to audit. Mike and Emma will now speak, and then we will open up the lines for questions. Please note that this session is also being recorded. Before we start, I would like to call your attention to the safe harbor statement regarding forward-looking information in our ASX release. That safe harbor statement also applies to this investor call. I will now pass on to Mike.

[Michael J. Ilczynski, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you, Louise. Hello, everyone, and welcome to Redbubble's FY '22 Quarter 1 Trading Update. Given that this is mostly a financial update, I will shortly be passing to Emma to walk you through the numbers in more detail, but I'll just take a few moments to introduce the results. The growth of the business over the last 18 months shows that we continue to make real progress on our mission to create the world's largest marketplace for independent artists. This mission drives our ambition. We remain passionately committed to it. Redbubble is uniquely positioned to capitalize on our medium to long-term opportunity and emerge as a significant winner in what are very large addressable markets. Coming into this quarter, we knew that the prior period performance would be a tough comparison, and we had set and hopefully communicated our expectations accordingly. As we flagged in August, first half of FY '22 Marketplace revenue growth would likely be negative year-on-year as the business cycle is particularly strong in the prior period, which was driven by the COVID-related lockdowns and market sales. As such, we are pleased with the actual results for this first quarter, and what we're sharing with you today are well in line with our expectations. We're also encouraged to see improving performance during the quarter from July to September. Emma will talk to this in more detail. But in summary, underlying Marketplace revenue in July on a paid basis was down 11% versus July last year, with this improving to just negative 2% for September versus September last year. This trend, coupled with the operational progress we're making, gives us confidence about the near-term outlook. And we're also using this opportunity to reiterate the full year revenue and EBITDA guidance provided in August. Redbubble business has a truly global footprint, and North America is our largest market followed by the U.K. and EU. There are now early signs of what post-pandemic normal might look like. In those markets, society as a whole and their economies have really opened up. As we discussed in August, off-line retail outlets are now mostly all open, people are able to move around freely, dine out, travel with increasingly more choices to their spending.As such, this first quarter essentially captures what a post-COVID normal might start to look like across both marketplaces in their largest geographies. In that, we are encouraged to see the shift to online platforms like ours has withstood the opening up of both off-line retail and services more generally and that our business has held on to much of the underlying gain that we saw last year. While there will still definitely be some uncertainties ahead, the early data points we have seen continue to give us confidence about our business over the medium to long term. Redbubble Group now is at significantly larger scale than we were 2 years ago pre-COVID. And at the top line, gross transaction value has grown 57% since Q1 of FY '20. That's 2 years ago. Artist revenue has grown 53%, and Marketplace revenue has grown 55% on that 2-year basis. The team continues to pursue initiatives that will expand and scale the business towards our medium-term aspirations. I want to briefly make mention of some of the experimentation and operational highlights the team achieved during this quarter. We don't provide detailed operational updates on these quarterly trading releases. But given we're still in the early days of developing a culture and process of targeted experimentation and investment across the business, we felt important to share some information on how we're doing, and I'll hit some of those highlights now. Firstly, building on what we shared in August, I discussed how the team has launched Buy Now Pay Later provider experiment. And the early signs show some meaningful increase in average order value for customers. Since then, we've chosen to partner with and rollout with Afterpay. We launched to U.S. customers a couple of weeks ago and have just gone live and added Canada, the U.K. and Australia this week. In terms of loyalty, we've conducted 13 loyalty experiments across the 2 marketplaces, with 7 of those experiments showing early positive retention signals in that the repeat purchase rate for those in the experiment was significantly more than those in the control group. Several of these experiments still require more time to reach their 90-day condition, and the next step is for us to complete our analysis so we can determine which experiments are economics of scale or to repeat at scale next year. In search and recommendations, we've been running experiments to try to improve the discoverability of new artists and new works. We know that it's quite important to drive sales for artists within the first 28 days and so this recent experiment is taking some artists and giving them additional boost to help them appear more prominently in search results pages. In terms of products, we talked about being the first large-scale print on-demand marketplace to launch baseball caps and dad hats when we spoke last, and they have performed well in their initial weeks. Redbubble has continued to add new products and extended existing product lines with desk mats, mouse pads and the new iPhone 13 cases now available on site in time for Thanksgiving and the holidays. We've also increased localization for 6 products at 4 fulfillers. This further enhances the resilience of the fulfillment network as well as moving production closer to customers ahead of holidays. And additionally, we ran a significant experiment in our search and shopping acquisition channels across both businesses to test these channels given the evolving data and attribution landscape prior to holiday. This had a material impact on acquisition spend that Emma will speak to in more detail. These are just a few of the examples of the work the team is doing. For those of you who are familiar with our operating rhythm, you will know that we're now heading into the busy and important holiday trading season. This means we'll be pausing most of our experimentation activities to focus on delivering a great holiday season for artists and their customers throughout this current quarter and into early next year. And finally, I want to touch upon the important topic of ESG. Redbubble's business model has always emphasized a small environmental footprint, together with a strong focus on social good including diversity at all levels of the group. We continue to work to better understand our material ESG impact and more clearly integrate ESG into our business strategy and decision-making. I would point you to our just-released 2021 annual report, where we have shared an overview of our ESG strategy and approach that we will develop further over the year ahead. Most recently, we were very proud to see the company ranked #10 in the Australian Chief Executive Women's diversity ranking in our first year as part of the ASX 300. We will continue to champion diversity and inclusion as part of our ESG and people and culture strategies. And I'll now hand over to Redbubble Group CFO, Emma Clark. Emma?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Thanks, Mike, and hello to everyone. Today, I will be discussing the first quarter financial metrics provided in the update and also using this opportunity to reiterate our near-term outlook. Please be aware that unless otherwise stated, the financial results discussed are on a delivered basis, but have not yet been subject to audit. For those of you who have been following us, you will remember that at the full year results in August, we flagged that the first half of financial year 2022 would likely be negative and so it's important to emphasize that the first quarter's results were in line with our expectations. We had added 2-year compound annual growth rates to this slide given the extraordinary events of the last year. As I speak to each of the major metrics, I will at times mention both the year-on-year and the 2-year growth rates, which is representative of a longer-term view. In the quarter, Redbubble recorded gross transaction value of $142 million. Year-on-year, this was down 21% and 20% on a constant currency basis. Compared to 2 years ago, GTV has grown 57% and so the 2-year CAGR was 25%. Artist revenue was $21 million in the first quarter, and we are proud of the continuing financial impact that the platform is able to deliver for artists. This quarter's Marketplace revenue was $106 million, down 28% year-on-year and 27% on a constant currency basis. Again, compared to 2 years ago, Marketplace revenue has grown 55%. And so on a 2-year view, the CAGR was positive 24%. In the first quarter, Redbubble also recorded gross profit of $42 million, down 34% year-on-year and 33% on a constant currency basis. Margin came in at 40% for the quarter. On a 2-year basis, gross profit has grown and was up 64%, representing a CAGR of 28%. As we travel down the profit and loss, I would like to pause on paid acquisition, which, as you can see on the income statement detailed in the appendix, came in at 14.4% for the quarter. This is higher than we would have ideally liked to see and is due to a number of factors. Most of these factors related to the iOS 14 ATT update, which has caused the digital advertising environment to become quite chaotic, with acquisition attribution by channel difficult and costs subject to significant fluctuation. We had a hypothesis that we were seeing underattribution, particularly in search and shopping, and so ran a tactical experiment during September where we materially increased spend in those channels. This increased spend ran for the majority of the month. And whilst it was the right experiment to do at the right time, it ultimately did not generate the outcome that we had hypothesized. The spend was inefficient and increased our paid acquisition costs materially. Additionally, we undertook prospecting spend during August as our internal data shows us that this is a good time of the year to do this as an increased percentage of visitors generated at this time purchased on the platform during the holiday season. Whilst we expect the challenging digital marketing environment to continue, it is important to note that the major drivers of the spend level this quarter were as a result of our own decisions and are not in and of themselves recurring in nature. Moving on to operating expenses, which grew at 11% year-on-year. This uplift was actually lower than our expectations due to slower hiring than forecast. We had expected increases in web hosting expenses, administration expenses and increased creative marketing costs. There have been additional employees joining the past quarter, largely in engineering, products and on our exec team. These onboarding employees will continue to increase our operating expenses as we progress through the financial year. Other expenses were particularly low at $200,000 for the quarter. This line incorporates share-based payments expense, leasing expenses and foreign currency movement, and the latter is the reason for the low expense. Operationally, currency is quite neutral at the moment, as is evidenced by how close to constant currency growth rates are when compared to the floating growth rate. However, approximately 47% of our cash on the balance sheet is denominated in U.S. dollars. And as such, there can be material swings as this is revalued into AUD at the end of every quarter. EBITDA was $3.9 million compared to $25.7 million in the first quarter of last financial year and $1.4 million in the first quarter 2 years ago. EBITDA margin for the quarter was therefore 3.7%. Finally, we closed the quarter with $109 million in cash, providing the business with a strong balance sheet and continuing strategic flexibility. Delving into Marketplace revenue in more detail, I'd like to refer to the bridge that had been provided on Slide 3 in the accompanying slides. We have shared this chart to illustrate how management is measuring and assessing the performance of the business this quarter. Within last year's quarter 1 reported Marketplace revenue of $148 million, there was an $8 million positive delivery date adjustment which was disclosed at the time. From there, we have adjusted out the $29 million of mask sales, and this bridges us to a first quarter financial '21 underlying Marketplace revenue of $111 million. Moving to this year, the first quarter of FY '22 reported Marketplace revenue was $106 million. However, we also adjust out the same factors, which in this case was $4 million of mask sales and a $2 million negative delivery date adjustment. This results in underlying Marketplace revenue number of $104 million for this year's quarter 1, which is 6% below the prior year on a floating basis and only 4% on a constant currency basis. This trend is as per our expectations and flagged with the market in August when we gave guidance that the first half of this year's Marketplace revenue growth is likely to be negative. As the quarter progressed, we were encouraged to see the underlying growth in the business without mask sales improved meaningfully from negative 11% in July to negative 2% in September. At this point in time, the year-on-year growth rates are much less meaningful, and the sequential trends month-on-month provide better signals for managing the business. In a quarterly update, we do not normally share geographic and product splits. However, we acknowledge that Australia has not as yet opened up in the 2 largest states and felt that it would be helpful to provide data on how each of our major markets performed for the quarter. As Mike mentioned earlier, Redbubble Group operates truly global marketplaces. North American customers contributed 69% to overall Marketplace revenue and remains our largest market. It performed per our expectations this quarter. We knew coming in that the prior period comps were very strong and driven by a confluence of macro tailwinds. This time last year, there was a tremendous surge in online spend, especially around July and August of 2020, and this was the case for all of our major geographies. Now a year later, as most countries have started to emerge into the post-pandemic normal, albeit some at a faster pace than others, we can see that the business remains well positioned for geographies either in or out of lockdown. The U.S. is representative of the average, whilst Australia, with the majority of its citizens still in lockdown, contributed 8% to the total, which is slightly higher than its historical contribution. On the next slide, you can see that we have provided a breakdown for the first quarter performance by product categories. These numbers include masks, which are captured inside accessories, and it's clearly shaded and shown in this chart. In this quarter last year, masks contributed 21% of total revenue, and this has fallen away to 4% in this quarter. All things being equal, one would expect to see everything else down approximately 6%, and this is not the case. The accessories category itself ex masks was essentially flat year-on-year with contributions from other products such as bags and pins. T-shirts, which is our largest-selling product category, had grown by approximately 8%, and apparel is neutral. At the other end of the spectrum, homewares are down approximately 27%, which is unsurprising, and stationery and stickers are down approximately 20%. Finally, I would like to reiterate our near-term outlook for the financial year 2022 as we stated in August. As said then, we don't normally provide any form of guidance. But given the ongoing uncertainties in the macro environment, this can result in those modeling the business generating widely varying outcomes. We would like our shareholders to be as aligned as possible with our own internal views on near-term performance. The latter part of financial year 2020 and the first half of financial year 2021 saw phenomenal growth across the business. This means that in the near term, Redbubble will continue to cycle strong prior period comparatives. As we have previously shared, masks were a significant contributor, adding $57 million to last year's Marketplace revenue. And therefore, the underlying financial year 2021 Marketplace revenue was $497 million. Looking forward, Redbubble expects financial year 2022 Marketplace revenue to be slightly above financial year 2021's underlying Marketplace revenue. This will still represent solid growth on the $350 million achieved in financial year 2020. To again reiterate what we said in August, the first half of financial year 2022 Marketplace revenue growth will likely be negative year-on-year as the business cycles a particularly strong prior period. From the second half, we expect a steady return to year-on-year growth rates consistent with meeting our medium-term aspirations. Targeted investments will continue to be made and will affect gross margin, marketing and OpEx lines. Investments in this financial year will focus on key aspects of the customer experience, both digital and physical, and these are aimed at driving cumulative increases in users, order rate, average order value and repeat rate. As noted in the April 2021 release, EBITDA margin as a percentage of Marketplace revenue is expected to be in the mid-single-digit range for FY '22, with EBITDA margin expected to expand over the medium term along with top line growth. We will now open up the line for questions.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your first question comes from Owen Humphries from Canaccord.

[Owen Humphries, Senior Industrials Analyst]

The first question, you just talked about DDA in the first quarter versus the PCP. Can you just tell us what the delivery date adjustment was for the fourth quarter of '21?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Sure. That's a great question. Thanks for that, Owen. So obviously, when we came out in August and spoke, we were speaking largely to the full year. We had the fourth quarter profit and loss in the appendix of that release, which we always do, so I would refer back to those numbers. So if you look at those numbers in that release, you'll see that the fourth quarter Marketplace revenue was $97 million. That was the reported number. If we adjust it to an underlying basis to be on the same basis that we talk about, the $104 million in this current quarter, that number is $92 million. So between masks and DDA, there was a $5 million adjustment to those numbers if you were comparing underlying. So for ease of understanding, if you're sitting there and saying what was the fourth quarter underlying revenue compared to the last year, compared to the first quarter underlying revenue for this year, that number has moved from $92 million to $104 million.

[Owen Humphries, Senior Industrials Analyst]

Good one. Fair enough. And the second one, just around the marketing investment that you made that you believe that was ineffective, can you just maybe quantify that amount of the $14.4 million?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes, absolutely. So if we hadn't conducted the experiment, marketing spend still would have been slightly higher than we would have ideally liked because of our prospecting spend. So it would have come in somewhere between 13% and 13.5%. But the impact on revenue, and this is going to demonstrate how inefficient that spend was, would have only taken somewhere between $1 million and $2 million off the underlying revenue number of $104 million. It was very inefficient.

[Owen Humphries, Senior Industrials Analyst]

Good one. Okay. And just obviously, you're flagging a level of investment across the 3 major lines, so gross profit investment and then marketing and then OpEx, to kind of get the bottom 2. But just talk through where the investments could be in the COGS line. You're talking about prices and delivery. And do you expect to make those investments in the second quarter into the big period? You obviously got $109 million of cash. You've got plenty of flexibility. But is that -- or is it more of a calendar year '22 investment?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. No, that's a good question, Owen. So it's more of a calendar year '22 investment from a margin perspective because the reality is the 2 things will happen in this current sort of October to December quarter. So one is we generally -- and as Mike flagged, we'll pause all experimentation during that quarter anyway because we really need to just keep things nice and smooth to be able to deliver a really great holiday season. So that happens every year, and this year is no exception to that. So there will be very little experimentation. In terms of -- so nothing will happen until we come out. The other thing that happens in this next quarter is if you were to go back and look at the business seasonally, you will see that margins actually take a little bit of a dip during holidays anyway both due to the increased rate of promotions that we do in that holiday quarter and also just due to the lagginess in some of the December results and returns that flow through from that. So margin across sort of the next quarter and the third quarter tend to be slightly lower than margin in the first and the fourth quarter. And we would expect that seasonal profile to continue.

[Owen Humphries, Senior Industrials Analyst]

Good one. And maybe last one for Mike -- to Mike. Good to see you're rolling out some experiments and you said before that purchase rates are high. Can you maybe just quantify some of the exciting experiments that you're doing and some of the changes in consumer behavior that could be -- you could see going forward?

[Michael J. Ilczynski, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. Thanks, Owen. We talked about this before. And particularly when we talk about the loyalty experiments, they're all targeted at the same -- they had sort of the same success metric in terms of increasing repeat purchase just right over 30, 60, 90-day period. We're not going to talk to the specific experiments that worked because, to be honest, we don't want to share them out with other players. That's now sort of hard-earned IP for us. But I think as we talk to that, none of them are going to double retention or anything like that. It's very much we've talked about a grind and needing to continue to make those incremental improvements, and that's very much what we see with these experiments. We're actually really encouraged that more than half of them seem to be positive in terms of the impact they've had on retention. The next step for us, as we said, some of them need to get through the 90-day condition. And then we need to complete the economic analysis because while they may have had a statistically significant impact on retention, the next step is to compare the incremental cost of those changes that we might have made with the incremental revenue that they've brought in. With those -- with the ones that are clearly economically positive, that's great. We move either into the scale if they're an ongoing thing or we move into scaling them and we'll repeat those initiatives. For the ones that were positive but maybe not quite economically positive, then we'll try and see, does it have more of an impact over beyond 90 days because it may get up to economically positive when we extend the time. Or are there some tweaks that we can make to those conditions and to the cost that we put into it that don't have a decrease in repeat rate that do bring down the economics. So I'm sorry I'm not being specific, but you can understand. Some of them are remarkably straightforward. And like I said, they're not ones that we want to put out openly.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Anthony Porto from Morgans Financial.

[Anthony Porto, Senior Analyst]

A few from me. Just the customer data platform that you mentioned at the full year, just the progress here and where you're at being able to actually have that single view of the customer to really drive those initiatives. Obviously, delivery in e-commerce has been a big issue. Can you just remind us of the percentage of product sales that you've got through localized fulfillment now? And are you seeing any impact of delivery there and impact on conversion rates from delivery? And then, Emma, you went through that marketing thing pretty quickly. Just -- can you just reiterate what the impacts were on marketing? And I guess, even from that 13% to 13.5% range that's probably normalized marketing, you saw a 400 basis points increase quarter-on-quarter last year. Would you be expecting anywhere near that amount in the second quarter? Obviously, that's the largest percentage of Marketplace revenue quarter for the paid advertising.

[Michael J. Ilczynski, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. Thanks, Anthony. I'll speak to the first one and then hand over the second to Emma. Yes, on the CDP, we've continued to make progress. It's only been really sort of 7-odd, 8-odd weeks since we spoke, and that theme continues to, to be honest, generate really good insight for us. There's a lot of work to continue to do to, I guess, cut our cohort data in different ways to really extract the insights from it, from the data that we're collecting. But it's coming along really well. It's starting to get shared more openly across the business. So we're feeling good that will be a good investment. And it will allow us and enable us to continue to be more targeted in our marketing to slowly start to make decisions. At the moment, all of our marketing decisions are, as we've talked about, are really focused on that first click and first purchase profitability basis. So to be able to make targeted investments where we can see clearly that some of those channels actually have a longer -- actually have a higher sort of customer lifetime value that would justify spending more in those channels rather than what we do today, we can see that starting to come along now. We're starting to see some of those areas. To be honest, as we talked about, we won't experiment too much now heading into holiday. It's really important we deliver good holiday. That's part of the reason why we did the marketing spend in our search and shopping channels now in September preholiday. It was the right month to do that. But yes, we're feeling good about where the customer data platform is and how that team -- it's a small team, and we'll continue to invest in head count and build that team. But we're feeling good about how it's progressing. I'll hand to Emma.

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. So the 2 questions that I captured, Anthony, were one on localization and has the percentage of products being shipped from -- in location -- to customers in location increased. And then the second one was about the marketing spend and looking forward, what might occur in the next quarter as a result of it being higher in the first quarter. So on the localization piece, I don't have the exact number to hand. But it's -- the way we define localized is in geography. So if you think about the U.S., it's U.S. to U.S. Most of the localizations that we've done in the last quarter, actually in fact all of them, have been within the U.S. when you think about bringing it down to more localized regions within the U.S. So it's at that sort of next sublevel down, which is excellent and what we should continue to do. So that means that the percentage [ quote ], which I'm pretty sure off the top of my head is in the mid-90% in terms of in-market delivery, will be pretty much the same. But effectively, the most recent set of localizations take that down to an even more granular and nuanced detail to say, okay, are we localizing on the East Coast and the West Coast for each of the product lines? So we did 5 localizations in the quarter. Now we're really focusing on the U.S. on those subregions. Broadly, and once again, I understand the reason for the question because I, like everyone else, am getting the Australia Post email saying they're not picking up things and please do all your Christmas shopping like in July because we're not sure we can deliver it. So I get where the question is coming from. Really, once again, I would say Australia is a little bit of an outlier in terms of actual performance. Like we're actually seeing pretty strong delivery performance across our entire network and think that the conditions for us in terms of holidays this year will actually be substantially better on that basis than last year. So obviously, monitoring Australia as its own separate thing. But overall, in terms of getting product to customers, we're feeling like we're in a pretty good space at the moment. And then in terms of the quarter-on-quarter increase to marketing, so as you point out and I said, even if we stripped out the experiment that we ran, marketing still would have been pretty high at 13% to 13.5%. And when you look at last year and the increase from Q1 to Q2, your question very simply is, would we expect to see 4% on top of that? And the short answer to that is no. I would expect to see it relatively flat, if not reduced, across the next quarter.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Tyler Glauser from Grandeur Peak.

[Tyler Glauser, Research Analyst]

Just one quick question. I'm not sure if you said when you're going through the products and segments. Can you give us a sense for the difference between the TeePublic business and the Redbubble T-shirt segment? Is there a material difference between the performance there?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

That's a great question. Thanks, Tyler. So in terms -- we don't obviously do report it. We don't split segment reporting by marketplace so we don't show TeePublic versus Redbubble. But what I can actually say, high level, the differences between the 2 is TeePublic as a marketplace is much more U.S.-focused. So obviously, disproportionately contributes to the U.S. geographic split number and is much more T-shirt-focused so disproportionately contributes to the T-shirt percentage. What I can tell you is that the growth in T-shirt, so the $54 million to $58 million, was across both marketplaces.

[Operator]

Your next question comes from Chami Ratnapala from RBC.

[Chamithri Ratnapala, Analyst]

I actually wanted to follow up on the TeePublic platform from the previous question. It seems that the TeePublic platform appears to have sort of outperformed the Redbubble core platform. Correct me if I'm wrong. And could you talk to any differences of -- I mean, you did say that the growth in T-shirts were across both platforms, but any differences that you can talk to?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Thanks, Chami. So as we disclosed before we came into COVID -- because obviously, for those who have followed us for the longer term, you'll note that for the first year that we owned TeePublic, we did actually provide the split of revenue growth by marketplace. We did that at that time to demonstrate to the market that, that was a really good use of our shareholders' funds to go off and buy that business. And yes, at the time that we were reporting that, TeePublic came in with a very high growth rate. It actually got as high as 55% per annum. And it happened to coincide at a time when Redbubble had a low growth rate. So the differences coming into COVID are quite stark. During COVID, we've been asked this question a few times over various quarters. And whilst I don't provide those splits anymore, I had said and will continue to say that the performance across both businesses is quite consistent, and there's not anywhere near as much differential between the 2 businesses and say what's coming in, which mathematically also has to be the case because we couldn't like double the size of our business the way that we did without Redbubble picking up most of that just due to its larger size. As we go back to the post-COVID, we've now got our second quarter of more normalized trading, we can see that the performance across both businesses is strong and continues to not have as much of a gap as they did coming into COVID.

[Chamithri Ratnapala, Analyst]

That's very clear. And just one more question. Anything that you can talk to on the repeat rate of customers?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Yes. So the repeat rate is flat. So in terms of what we -- the numbers that we had at year-end, it's flat in Q1, repeat rate.

[Operator]

[Operator Instructions] Your next question comes from Aryan Norozi from Barrenjoey.

[Aryan Norozi, Analyst]

First one is just when looking at the next 12, 24 months, how are you balancing capital allocation between new customer acquisition and retention? Just give us a bit more color around that, please, those 2 buckets.

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Look, I can have a go at that and then hand over to Mike to add some more flavor to it. So obviously, one of the hallmarks of Redbubble across its entire history from a transactional perspective is our ability to generate users and customers at a really good transaction profitability rate. And even though -- obviously, I made the comment about the experiment, talked about the chaotic digital environment, the reality is there's nothing that we see in the business at the moment that makes me think that we can't continue to generate profitable customers on first transaction, that we can't continue to get user growth. Obviously, if we're comparing users year-on-year, the COVID bump makes that look more negative than it actually is. But if we look to your question out 12, 24 months, we would expect to continue to generate user growth. That being said, as we've said previously in the last couple of updates, we really need to focus into loyalty, and we really need to try and get that annual average order value up. And the real way to do that is to -- obviously, we can get customers to spend more on first order, AOV, but the more important one is actually over the long term, to make sure that they come back to the platform, entice them to come back to the platform multiple times. So an increase -- there will be an increasing focus on that as we build our capability and modify our technological platforms to sort of enable us to experiment more and more into that space over time. I don't know, Mike, if you want to add anything to that.

[Michael J. Ilczynski, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. Thanks for the question. And probably just to build on it a little bit, the reality is that we need to invest into both from a user acquisition point. At the moment, we've talked about that -- the importance of that first click -- first transaction, first click profitability, first transaction profitability. And as we understand our cohorts better, then that will allow us to open up and there will be -- we would expect there to be incremental investment, where we can see that, that will be profitable over a second or third transaction when they've got that broader view. At the same time, though, we know that repeating that repeat rate -- increasing that repeat rate is super important. Those change -- and for that, though, is there's no real simple, easy, low-hanging fruit. There's just a whole lot of experiments we need to run and improvements we need to make both to our on-site digital experience and then also the physical product lived experience of customers. And that's why we've talked openly about our OpEx investment increasing over the next 12 months in this financial year. As Emma mentioned, our actual OpEx increase was below our -- a bit below our expectations mainly because in -- hiring has been okay. But we've had a bit more attrition than we expected so our net is a bit lower. We will continue to be investing in our people. Those people will be working particularly in our digital areas and our product and engineering space on building out that digital experience, which we think will lead to better first transaction conversion and basket size, but then importantly, into their repeat rate.

[Aryan Norozi, Analyst]

Perfect. And in terms of marketing return on investment, can you give us an update around how the ROI and your customer acquisition cost is this quarter and how that's tracked over time, please?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Sorry, just checking I wasn't on mute. I was talking away and was muted. So in terms of our ROI, as those who've following the business for a long period of time also know, we run per transaction profitability on a monthly basis. So even at that elevated level of spend across that quarter, those -- they'll also -- like the ROI is still there. They're still profitable. Obviously, the CACs have gone up a little bit. It's not as profitable as if we've spent 12 cents in the dollar or like last year when we had a confluence of favorable factors and we're spending 10 cents in the dollar. So obviously, it's slightly less profitable, and you can mathematically calculate that by using the metrics that we give you. But it's still profitable is the important thing to note. And so whilst it's still profitable, we're still going to go and spend the money to acquire the customers.

[Aryan Norozi, Analyst]

And just last one, just in terms of your exposure to cotton pricing. Obviously, cotton price is going through the roof more recently. I mean you guys, obviously, you have the fulfillers, but how is that sort of feeding into -- or how will that feed into your -- the costs over the next 2 to 3 months, please?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Yes. Thanks for the question. Obviously, inflation is a thing that's on most people's minds. I had a few questions come through in the last quarter about this. And unsurprisingly, we know we'll get questions on that this quarter. From our perspective, we have, in the last quarter, had 3 to 4 very small price increments across like 135 products. None of them are actually related to the cotton price increases. They're all actually to do with the shipping container rates and the delays and the holding of more stock as a result of the process of getting things across the globe. We have now pretty much locked in almost all of our pricing through holiday. So not sure what will happen after holidays. But certainly, for the near short term, we feel relatively comfortable with where our pricing is at the moment.

[Aryan Norozi, Analyst]

Sorry, just one more if I can. Just I guess you mentioned the performance of TeePublic and Redbubble core platform has been converging more recently, look closer together. I mean pre-COVID, there were a few issues like competition in T-shirts because the Google algorithm changed that slowed that organic Redbubble growth rate. So I guess what I'm asking is, are those issues now behind you and you're confident that this is sort of the base moving forward for that core Redbubble platform?

[Emma Clark, Chief Financial Officer]

Been asked this question before. And so yes, how you characterize it is correct. What we did see is if we think all the way back to January and February 2020, we'd already started to see growth back in the core Redbubble marketplace before COVID hit. So as I'm fond of saying, I was thinking about the March quarter, I'm thinking this is going to be great, like we're going to be able to come out and say how growth has occurred back in the main marketplace, and we can sort of put that behind us and move forward. And then, of course, COVID happens and everything went haywire. So that has actually started to unwind and go back to what I would consider a more normalized base before COVID. Then obviously, everything happened during COVID, growth rates all accelerated. And so as we come out of it, we're happy with where the Redbubble marketplace is tracking by itself and where the TeePublic marketplace is tracking by itself. And obviously, if Redbubble was negative or continuing to demonstrate that it couldn't generate growth, I wouldn't say that. And sorry, Michael, I was going to hand back over to you.

[Michael J. Ilczynski, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Yes. Maybe just to build on it and more of a general comment. I think one of the strengths of the group now is we have these 2 businesses that operate in marketplaces that are a little bit different. They're a little bit different in terms of their geographic coverage. They're a little bit different in terms of their product coverage. And they're also a little bit different in terms of the way that the sites are architected and their approach to SEO and SEM in particular. And we think that that's a real advantage so -- because it allows -- the businesses talk a lot. The teams talk a lot with what they're seeing on their different platforms. If they're seeing some positivity or negatively, being able to talk to one another and go, is it us or is it the market? If they're both seeing it, it tends to be external. If one's seeing it versus the other, then it tends to be internal whether positive or negative. That's a real benefit for us. It does mean that potentially there could be external changes that might impact one of the marketplaces more than the other. That's obviously still a possibility because the sites are a bit different. But as I said, we see that as a real strength for us at the moment. Having those 2 marketplaces that are in -- doing similar things that can learn off each other and have slightly different exposures from a technical and a customer and a geographic and product basis, we feel, is a real positive.

[Operator]

There are no further questions at this time. I'll now hand back to Mr. Ilczynski for closing remarks.

[Michael J. Ilczynski, Group Chief Executive Officer]

Thank you very much. We really appreciate all the questions. We have our AGM in a few weeks, and we look forward to speaking to you all again then. And for those we're catching up with over the next few days, really looking forward to continuing the discussion. Thanks again for the support, and we will speak to you again soon.

[Operator]

That does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.