PLBY Group sales hit by D2C, licensing declines; narrows losses for 2023

PLBY Group reported total revenue from continuing operations for 2023 fell 23% to $143 million, hit by a decline in the company’s direct-to-consumer sales and licensing revenues.

The owner the Playboy and Honey Birdette brands said direct-to-consumer sales for the year declined 26% year-over-year to $78 million in 2023, where revenues from Playboy.com e-commerce declined by $16.6 million  the company completed the transition from an owned-and-operated model to a licensing model.

In addition, revenue from Honey Birdette decreased 13% year-over-year to $72.9 million. Hone Birdette reduced the days on sale during 2023 by 34%, in an effort to protect brand integrity and combat rising production and distribution costs, said the U.S. firm.

Moreover, Licensing revenue decreased 27% year-over-year in 2023 to $44.3 million, hurt by the poor financial performance of the firm’s China licensees and the resulting non-payment of minimum guarantees.

Finally, digital subscriptions and content revenue was up 10% compared to a year ago, to $20.7 million. Revenue growth from the company’s creator platform more than offset a decrease in the company’s legacy digital business revenue, it added.

The company also continued to narrow losses during the 12 months, reporting a t​otal net loss of $180.4 million, an improvement of $97.3 million, from a total net loss of $277.7 million in 2022.

“In 2023, we worked on five main goals. First, restructure the Company and move to a capital-light business model; second, reduce overhead; third, stabilize and reposition Honey Birdette back to a premium brand; fourth, move our China business to a JV model with better accountability and control; and fifth, grow our creator platform, the Playboy Club. We made major progress on all five goals in 2023,” said 

As part of our restructuring, we sold Yandy and Lovers, two businesses that were not core to our future plans. We also organized our art and furniture collection for auction, signed contracts with two auction houses, completed one successful sale in November of fine art and plan to have two other, larger auctions in 2024, which we expect will result in the sale of a majority of our collection. We also successfully outsourced operation of our e-commerce business, eliminating approximately $11 million of direct losses, as incurred in the full year of 2022.

“We have significantly reduced our corporate overhead from approximately $50 million for the full year of 2022, to this year’s projected corporate overhead of approximately $27 million. We remain burdened by long-term fixed overhead costs, such as our corporate office lease that was signed before Covid, but we are actively working to reduce overhead where we can.”
 
For 2024, the Los Angeles-based company looks to home in on Honey Birdette, increase the Australian brand’s product pricing by 10%, and to focus on selling higher margin items at higher price points.

In China, the company will focus on re-licensing previously licensed product categories and the development of relevant new lifestyle categories.