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Dec 03Next Earn

Q3 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptDecember 11, 2025

Operator

Good day, everyone, and welcome to the RH Third Quarter 2025 Earnings Call. As a reminder, this call is being recorded.

I would now like to hand the call over to Ms. Allison Malkin.

Please go ahead, ma'am.

Allison Malkin

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone.

Thank you for joining us for our third quarter fiscal 2025 earnings call. Joining me today are Gary Friedman, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer, and Jack Preston, Chief Financial Officer.

Before we start, I would like to remind you of our legal disclaimer that we will make certain statements today that are forward-looking within the meaning of the federal securities laws, including statements about the outlook of our business and other matters referenced in our press release issued today. These forward-looking statements involve a number of risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially.

Please refer to our SEC filings, as well as our press release issued today, for a more detailed description of the risk factors that may affect our results. Please also note that these forward-looking statements reflect our opinions only as of the date of this call, and we undertake no obligation to revise or publicly release the results of any revision to these forward-looking statements in light of new information or future events.

Also, during this call, we may discuss non-GAAP financial measures, which adjust our GAAP results to eliminate the impact of certain items. You will find additional information regarding these non-GAAP financial measures and a reconciliation of these non-GAAP to GAAP measures in today's financial results press release.

A live broadcast of this call is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at ir.rh.com. With that, I will now turn the call over to Gary.

Gary Friedman

Great. Thank you, Allison.

Good evening to those of you on the East Coast, and good afternoon on the West Coast. To our people, partners, and shareholders: We continue to generate industry-leading growth with revenue increasing 9% in the third quarter and up 18% on a two-year basis, demonstrating the disruptive nature of our brand despite the worst housing market in almost 50 years and the polarizing impact of tariffs.

Adjusted operating margin of 11.6% was below the 12.5% midpoint of our guidance due to higher than forecasted tariff expense on prior period special order and backorder sales delivered in the quarter and higher than expected Paris opening expenses. Adjusted EBITDA was 17.6%, and we generated $83 million of free cash flow in Q3.

Year-to-date free cash flow reached $198 million, and we are on track to achieve our outlook range of $250 to $300 million for the year. Net debt at the end of the quarter was $2.427 billion, down $85 million from Q2.

We ended Q3 with real estate assets that we believe have an estimated equity value of approximately $500 million and that we plan to monetize opportunistically as market conditions warrant. Additionally, we are making progress on our goal of reducing excess inventory estimated at $300 million, with inventory down 11% versus last year and down $82 million versus the second quarter.

While a meaningful portion of our market share gains are coming from the fragmented to-the-trade design showrooms, regional high-end furniture stores, and local independent boutiques, we are also gaining share from the better furniture-based national brands, as you can see from the table below. I would point out that our share gains on a two-year basis range from a low of 12 points to a high of 28 points.

We find it fascinating that the market chooses to reward companies that set remarkably low expectations and slightly beat them versus setting high expectations as we do and at times miss them while still meaningfully outperforming our industry. Let me turn to our outlook.

We are providing the following updated financial outlook reflecting our year-to-date performance and our current trends. For the fourth quarter: revenue growth of 7% to 8%, adjusted operating margin of 12.5% to 13.5%, adjusted EBITDA margin of 18.7% to 19.6%.

The above outlook includes an approximate -200 basis point operating margin impact from investments and startup costs to support our international expansion and 170 basis point impact from tariffs net of mitigations. Fiscal year 2025: our current outlook now is revenue growth of 9 of 9% to 9.2%, adjusted operating margin of 11.6% to 11.9%, adjusted EBITDA margin of 17.6% to 18%, and free cash flow of $250 to $300 million.

The above outlook includes an approximately -210 point basis point operating margin impact from investments and startup costs to support our international expansion and a 90 basis point impact from tariffs net of mitigations. "In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine," Benjamin Graham.

We are a company that is playing the long game, historically innovating and investing during uncertain times. We also believe post this high-investment cycle and historically low housing market, the weighing machine as it has done over our 25-year history will accurately reward us for the truly unique, high-performance brand we are building.

On the other hand, there is no denying what an unusual time it is in our industry, and we also believe it's not a time to underestimate risk. We're in the third year of the worst housing market in almost 50 years.

In 1978, there were 4.09 million existing homes sold in the US when the US had a population of 223 million people. We are on track to average 4.07 million existing homes sold over the three years from 2023 to 2025 with a population of 341 million, or 53% higher than 1978.

This is a market we've never seen before. Not a time to underestimate risk.

Tariffs are disrupting supply chains and driving higher prices. There have been 16 different tariff announcements over the past 10 months that have resulted in significant resourcing, product delays, out of stocks, and driven multiple rounds of price negotiations and increases.

Despite the chaos, we continue to demonstrate our ability to gain meaningful market share while aggressively investing in strategies that we believe will create long-term strategic separation. While not a time to underestimate risk, also not a time to run from it.

It's important to separate the signal from the noise and remember necessity is the mother of invention. Our most important innovations were birthed during the most challenging and uncertain times.

Our strategic separation is a result of innovating and investing during those uncertain times, and this time is no different. Launching the most prolific product transformation in history of our industry and believe the launch of our new concept in the spring of next year will reaccelerate our growth and create another step change in our business.

We're building an iconic global selling platform that will likely never be duplicated in our lifetimes. Construction costs post-COVID have doubled across the industry, making it very difficult to emulate our immersive platform.

At the same time, we've created new, equally immersive physical experiences that are massively more capital-efficient that we plan to unveil on our call next quarter. We just opened what might be the most beautiful and talked-about retail experience in the world, in arguably the most important city in the world, especially if your vision is to build a global luxury brand.

Which one I'm talking about: RH Paris, you have to see it to believe it. We're developing a global hospitality business that generates significant brand awareness, traffic, and cash flow.

We have built a powerful restaurant company that is seamlessly integrated into our core business and will generate operating income that represents, on average, 65% of the average aggregate gallery's rent they reside in. The RH Ocean Grill at RH Newport Beach is our first $20 million-plus restaurant that we believe will reach the mid-20s in its second full year, and its cash flow next year might cover the rent for the entire 90,000-square-foot gallery.

We're establishing a global interior design firm that is moving the brand beyond presenting and selling products to conceptualizing and selling spaces. We opened our first freestanding RH Interior Design office in Palm Desert, California, with no product except for two small sitting areas in front of our designers' offices.

There's four four offices in the building and a workspace with clients. It's a real freestanding, customer-facing design firm, which really don't exist in the world if you think about it.

It's like finding a dentist. You move to a new area, you buy a new home, you need a dentist.

What do you do? You Google it, you ask a friend.

Where do you find an interior designer? You can go online, I don't know how that's going to really help.

If you think about it, the world of interior design is not a customer-facing business. We opened our first freestanding interior design office in Palm Desert with no product.

It's a real freestanding customer-facing design firm, and it's generating a million dollars a month in design business in 3,000 square feet with rent of $200,000 a year. You can do the math.

All of which is resulting in building a brand with no peer while generating industry-leading growth with high teens adjusted EBITDA margin. Imagine what our performance will look like in a robust housing market as we cycle and leverage these investments.

Never underestimate the power of a few good people who don't know what can't be done, especially these people. Carpe diem.

Operator will now open the call for questions.

Operator

Thank you. Everyone, if you have a question today, please press star one on your telephone keypad.

We do ask that you limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. Our first question comes from Steven Forbes from Guggenheim Securities.

Steven Forbes

Good afternoon, Gary, Jack. Gary, you obviously mentioned RH Paris.

Curious if you can maybe give us some color on how the demand book is building, noting it's early. The reason I ask is just curious if you can maybe help inform us how RH Paris has influenced your expectations ahead of RH Milan and RH London.

Gary Friedman

Sure. RH Paris is one, it's really quite different.

While we did open our first gallery with hospitality, it was really two hours out of London at RH England. There's not a lot of traffic out there as known how our business has developed.

We kind of talked about it last quarter. Many of the other galleries, as I've spoken about, we didn't open in particularly the way we believed we should open.

To acquire the RH Paris and RH London, which we think are one-of-a-kind locations, we had to take a kind of a portfolio of galleries and open some of those before we wanted to. That's why we opened RH England to open something that kind of set a tone.

I think people know in Europe, Americans aren't really known for building luxury brands, were not really looked upon by the Europeans of having great taste or style. All the luxury brands are from Paris or Italy.

The UK has a couple, and you can argue that we have a couple. Argue that Ralph Lauren is a luxury brand.

A very small part of Ralph Lauren's business is luxury. The biggest part of the business is a more of a department store-based higher-end business, but not luxury, and a giant outlet business.

That's not to say anything bad about Ralph Lauren. It's the incredible company, incredible brand.

It's just not a real focused luxury brand. You can argue that the only one we really had, pure luxury brand in many ways, was Tiffany, and now the French own it.

Right? The path we're on is a tricky one.

It's a tricky one to travel. We used the metaphor of climbing the luxury mountain, and Eric coined the phrase, as you get higher and higher on the mountain, it's where the air gets thin and the odds get slim.

No one's really made this climb, especially from the level we started at 25 years ago. The next few moves we're making are really important moves.

I heard several years ago someone asked probably the most famous guy in the luxury world, and I didn't hear him say this, I'm not going to say who said it. You can imagine there's only a couple of people that built really the best luxury platforms in the world.

I heard someone asked the question, "How do you build a luxury brand in China?" The response was, "You build great stores in Paris, London, and New York."

I heard that years ago, and I've always thought about that as thought about RH and how do we unveil this brand? We built RH New York and we opened it in 2018, and we said that was our bridge to Europe.

We did it a little backwards. As we think about it for our business, it's really Paris, London, Milan, and New York.

Because Milan is really one of the design capitals of the world, not only for design, but also for fashion. It's where the biggest design show in the world is, Salone, where 500,000 people go once a year.

It's also the time we're going to open RH Milan. Paris, we pushed ourselves to another level.

It's not a particularly large gallery, but it's very unique. I described that on the last call.

If you haven't seen it, we had a video. Is the video on the website or no?

It's a video. We're also making a kind of a documentary video like we have for some of our other iconic buildings, and you'll see that come out probably next couple of weeks.

It might be one of the most beautiful and aspirational and inspiring retail stores that was ever created. There's one natural things we loved about it.

One, it's the only building on the Champs-Élysées that doesn't have an entrance on the Champs-Élysées. You can't enter the building.

You enter through these 22-foot gold leaf gates, and you go down 195 steps to the front door. We built a freestanding interior design office there.

We were able to get a building approved, and there's so many elements of it. It's where we built the first World of RH, which is a immersive experience that brings to life all the places and spaces that we've built around the world.

We think it's an important part of communicating who we are and connecting with consumers. While we only totally, I think, in hospitality have about 150, 155 seats, it's really like a normal restaurant, but it's really two because it's in two smaller spaces.

One's on the terrace, it's Le Jardin restaurant, and we invented some very new dishes there that we're going to be rolling out in the US because they're so good. Also Le Petit, which is on the top floor in the rooftop.

In the rooftop and were so happy we figured out how to work with Foster + Partners, and we saw the building. We went up with side-stair ladder thing to get on the rooftop.

We couldn't believe we could see the Eiffel Tower and the Grand Palais and the Louvre and yeah, and everything like that. Concerns what we use this rooftop, and there is no way to get to the rooftop.

You said you'd have to build an elevator. You'll never get an elevator approved because it'll block people's views of the Eiffel Tower.

Foster + Partners, why you want to work with the best people, is they said, "Well, maybe we can design an elevator that a hatch opens in the roof, and a glass elevator pops up, and then it disappears." I said, "Well, you ever done that before?"

They said, "No, but we'd love to do things that haven't been done before." Once you see the rooftop, you couldn't unsee it.

Once you were up there, you say, "Well, we've got to figure out how to activate this." What's interesting, we have 40 seats, I think, on the rooftop.

Unfortunately, right now the rooftop's closed because weather in Paris gets pretty grim in the winters. We can't evacuate the roof if it starts to rain and pours.

There's not enough seats to relocate everybody to the level below. The rooftop, when it was open, the first few months we were open, it is the highest-grossing part of the restaurant operation in the two restaurants.

We're doing more there per seat than anywhere else. Just again, learning about creating incredible spaces that has made us kind of rethink some of the work in Milan and some of the work in London, and find some tweaks there.

Then we found out that we were building this World of RH, and with this space with the building terrace back and we thought, "God, what if we put a bar in here?" Try to make it a lounge.

We put a bar in there. Then we said, "Well, We found out you can't have a bar in Paris unless you have food.

You couldn't just have nuts and snacks, you had to have a small menu." We had a small menu.

The day we opened, we served our first meal in a place that in our mind wasn't even a restaurant. On opening night, one of these places was packed.

Now we actually had a kind of retrofit it and put real tables in there that were big enough, and now we're serving most of the menu there. Are we basically?

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a great offset as we've lost the seats on the roof. There's just been so many lessons, and there's so much we're learning about the customer and who knows us and who doesn't know us and how truly international the business in Paris is.

I wish I had the list in front of me right now of all the design jobs we have in Mallorca and Morocco and, you name it, Middle East, and the design jobs that the team's working on. It's truly a global store, and the clientele is incredible.

Many people don't know us. The team's walking people up to the World of RH and walking people through, and people I think they're kind of shocked by our body of work because they, many still don't know us.

Just the thought of how important that World of RH is and what a tool that is for our teams to kind of not just try to explain who we are or try to pull it up on a website, but walk people into a really immersive experience that brings our spaces and places to life and speaks to our authority in architecture and interior design and landscape architecture. Cuz all of our buildings are representative of those kind of core competencies.

At the last minute we decided we didn't think it was communicating enough about our truth, and so we had four weeks together, six weeks to go. We decided to build a architecture and design library like in RH England.

Now you can't unsee it. It's so incredible.

You walk in, you look through the main doors, and if you've seen pictures of the gallery, you've seen the Vitruvian Man under the RH design ethos that you have to interact with. You I think most people stop and read it and take pictures in front of it.

Then left and right, we have these fountains, beautiful fountains. Above the fountain we came up with this line.

My wife came up with a line, cuz I thought I wrote a really great letter to Paris, and she read it and she just said, "Give me a day." I said, "Well, what do you mean?"

Like, "You don't like it?" I got insecure.

Then she wrote that last night, the little last line if you if any of you got the invite to our party. We used the letters, an invite with music and so on and so forth.

Then used it for the opening of our video. It says, "In Paris, the measure is eternity.

This we know and have built accordingly." You walk into that entry, and you can't help but read that as you go left and right around the design ethos.

Then you're going to this immersive architecture and design library. There's no product.

You don't see a It's just doesn't look like a furniture store at all to anybody, right? You actually see we've now owned two copies of De architectura, the 10 books on architecture where the first modern printings were in 1521, and we've got a one in French.

We have three iconic French architects, De l'Orme, Haussmann, and who's the third? Then we've got Vitruvius, da Vinci, and Palladio displayed with busts and historic books and so on and so forth.

It's something you've never seen anywhere. Like I've never even really seen one.

We built our first one in RH England because there was a library there, and we came up with the idea, and we created something, I think, really meaningful. I remember telling the team, the night before we opened, we were in the architecture design library, I said, "This might be the most important work we did here."

Because it really communicates our truth and why we do this and what we believe in. Now we've went back, and now you're going to walk into the entry of Milan, which kind of looked like a lobby of a building.

It looked beautiful, but we didn't know what to do. A couple of couches and a couple of chandeliers, and it didn't really you might interact with the first person and go, "Oh, excuse me.

Is this a condominium building? Is this a" Cuz it doesn't look like a store.

You walk in and you immediately look through this kind of loggia into a backyard, and yeah, and you have to kind of go up and left and right. It doesn't have a grand staircase except for that goes down underground if we did our first underground restaurant.

Like everybody's going to go, "Oh, well, you have a rooftop restaurant like this place and that place, don't we?" Now we have a restaurant that's underground.

That's got a skylight in the middle of the park. We're putting a architecture and design library now in the entry, and all of a sudden you're going to kind of go, "Wait.

Who are these people?" Look at this: Vitruvius and da Vinci and Palladio and Scamozzi and Alberti and all the Italian iconic architects that shaped the way the rest of the world was designed and built very early on.

That's going to come to life there. We're going to have the World of RH in Milan on the top floor in a space that we probably wouldn't have done anything with.

It was kind of like an attic. The team reconcepted it as this incredible lounge, and I think it's going to be an iconic place that'll help people understand who we are and what we believe in.

Also, these are great spaces that we can rent out and do events in that bring the right people into our galleries. We're starting to test the event business because we've got these incredible spaces.

I've said no for I don't know how many years now, 15, 20 my line was always, "Our galleries are our homes, and we don't rent our homes." I've turned down Oscar parties and Grammy's parties, the top artists and everything.

Then I thought, we finally did an event. We did I go to a lot of Warriors games, I'm friends with Joe Lacob and Nicole Lacob, and Peter Guber, the owners of the Warriors.

They hosted the NBA All-Stars. They wanted to use RH San Francisco to do the owners' party, the opening party for the NBA All-Star Weekend.

We did it. We just got tremendous response.

All the right people there. It made us think like, "Huh.

Maybe we should to attract the right clientele." We have such incredible spaces.

We, and Paris so far right away Chanel wanted to take the World of RH to hold a dinner. We've been contacted now about like, "Can so-and-so do their fashion show here and take over your galleries for the evening?"

I think we're learning about this idea of we're doing these iconic spaces and the ability to actually we have these unique architectural masterpieces, and the ability to bring the right people because we have the right place. I think it's even more important.

Everybody thinks everything's moving online. I think people are dying for experiences.

They're dying for authentic connections not only with people, but with places, and with history and with beauty and with food and, how many nights can you order DoorDash or Grubhub? I love the services when I have no time.

You want to get something delivered. I don't know about anybody else on the phone, but I'd much rather go somewhere and see people and feel like I'm somewhere and connected.

I think that's why people still congregate and aggregate. Maybe they're not going to movie theaters so much anymore because that experience is not as unique and differentiated.

You don't maybe you don't want to be in a place where someone's coughing behind you and so on and so forth. That one I get.

I just think the places that we're building, people like to see and they like to be there. There's not a lot of places that are public like ours that you can get a meal in and experience.

We're learning in Paris. We're having all these people coming from all over the world seeing it.

We're thinking about like, "Gosh, well, we have to have more people fluent in more languages." We need to ramp the design team faster.

Our design team in Paris kind of got overwhelmed. We had no idea that we'd have the traffic we had in Paris.

It was just so many people that came in, and we were just overwhelmed. Even finding out how early you have to hire people.

Because people have to have long tenures. They can't just give a two-week notice and come to work for you.

We kind of got behind in hiring for the restaurants. We were behind, we had to fly people from America to kind of help run the restaurant and cover the shifts.

They didn't speak French, and that was important. There's just so many things we're learning, especially bringing hospitality into a high-volume space.

Then just a little about the builds. I did my own little math, and I was trying to understand, trying to isolate the hospitality business, because the hospitality business lost 25% of its seats after the first couple of months.

Expect that to be a little off, and it's only tiny bit off with all the seats we lost. The highest productive seats.

We're thinking that gosh, we might be able to tent that rooftop and actually do events there and maybe make bring in just as many people, if not more, yeah, because you can only seat 40. I think 44 people max there.

The just about the staffing, about design. Oh, we're learning a ton, and team's sent some incredible recaps and learnings and we're going to be so much more prepared and so much more efficient.

The builds are really interesting. The math I was looking at kind of looked at the first eight weeks cuz well, September's a five-week month.

We lost, didn't open the first week, opened on the 5th, which is it's kind of a day, and then the next week started. I kind of trying to isolate just our business.

Cuz when you open cold in a market like this, right? You're not shipping to anyone here.

You've got no revenues happening. It's interesting what we're learning all around.

This one in a high-volume, high-traffic, iconic location, international people coming from all over the place. The first eight weeks Well, I think the first eight weeks and yeah, I kind of took the four weeks of September, the four weeks of that we were open in the four weeks of October, and then I've looked at then in the next really I've almost six weeks.

I had to estimate the last three days just the kind of cuz we didn't have the business. When you look at the demand on the core business, and we haven't seen ramps like this.

The six weeks the average per week is 62% higher than the first eight weeks. The first eight weeks actually had more traffic, as we I think it was, it's still that the fall, and there was a lot of people in Paris.

You had a lot of people coming in. We still had very good traffic.

You can tell the team's starting to kind of get their feet underneath them. We started people are starting to kind of figure out who we are and, do I trust them?

Am I going to buy furniture from them? We had some people that know us cuz they either lived in America or they're traveled internationally, and they know us from America.

I didn't expect the ramp on the core goods that because we opened with such a traffic. I wouldn't have thought it'd be a 60 52%, 63% ramp those weeks over the other weeks.

When you start to think about that and how that might build, I think it's going to take a while to kind of really understand it. Because we've got to get our arms around the design opportunity.

There's when you look at all the places we're doing work and you think, "Oh, man. Our designers are going to have to fly here, fly there," and then and our customers pay for that.

We've been flying people from America to all the major cities in the world, so many of the major cities. We've had customers flying our people to Sydney, Australia, to Melbourne, to Shanghai, to all over Italy.

I said almost every country, what, except

Allison Malkin

Middle East.

Gary Friedman

Middle East, yeah, we did for the with the Prince of Qatar, right, four homes on his compound, and a $3 million job or something. We're doing jobs like hundreds of thousands into the millions.

We just got a famous building in New York, I can't talk about it, it's disclosed, but we're doing a $3 million design project in one of the most famous mansions in New York City, and done another $1.8 million project for someone I can't talk about, very famous. Just we're and that's why I think I made the point about that design firm.

There's so much that we're learning about Europe and so much we're learning about just the potential of our brand if it's evolved. Long random rambling answer, but you started with a good question.

I could talk about Paris for a long time.

Steven Forbes

Thank you, Gary. I'll actually pass it on.

Thanks so much.

Operator

The next question comes from Max Rakhlenko from TD Cowen.

Maksim Rakhlenko

Great. Hi everyone.

Gary, this is the first time that you guys have taken pretty outsized price in a while. Can you just talk about how the customer responded in 3Q and the elasticity that you're seeing from the higher price points?

What are the learnings, and how are you thinking about the right price points for the brand ahead? Depending on where tariffs go, could we actually see RH continue to take prices further?

Gary Friedman

Hey Max, trying to just clarify. You're saying your observed Q3 was the first time we raised prices for a while, is that what you're saying?

Maksim Rakhlenko

Not necessarily the first quarter, but you have taken prices just given where tariffs have gone, just curious what the elasticity looks like, how the customer is responding.

Gary Friedman

We're learning. We've taken a lot of price increases this year.

We've had a lot of movement in tariffs, and tariffs were set at one level, and then they went up, and they're moving around. It takes a while, everybody from manufacturers to product designers and everybody who's involved in the development process and yeah, it's first time we're all trying to navigate this through the same.

I don't know, maybe it's going to stop moving for a while, but for a while there we May. were kind of frozen.

I think, so far, as long as it's fair to everyone, I think that there's some businesses that might be kind of violating the rules. I think that all the people that are coming in, the businesses in other countries that are opening up in the US and they might be making the goods, but they might not be bringing them in at the right price.

There's a lot of things going on. Especially where there's marketplaces, and you might have manufacturers bringing in goods and they're figuring out how to get around tariffs, and if we're going to all have tariffs, let's just make it fair.

Don't let some foreign manufacturer come in here and those are the people you're trying to stop, and there's actually loopholes. They're kind of getting product in here, and I think going to pay next to nothing.

That might be an advantage for certain people for a certain amount of time, but I think that stuff's getting to the administration and hopefully that it'll become a fair playing field for everybody. Then if it is, it is.

The market will kind of conform to the reality. The customer is going to have to conform.

Things cost more, that's what happens. We've had inflation forever in this country, and many times much worse than this.

I think we just think about, hey, just make it a fair game. Don't let manufacturers come in and open a US entity and their price is really $1,000 for something, don't let them bring it in for $100 and then pay almost no tariff because they're shipping it to themselves.

So.

Maksim Rakhlenko

Got it. Yeah.

No, that's helpful. Then, Gary, just any more color on the new collection that you're looking to roll out next year?

Just how are you thinking about the timing and just what could it look like as we think about some of the building blocks for next year?

Gary Friedman

We just got back from a trip that we worked exclusively on that, and I don't think we've ever been more excited about anything that we've worked on. I think we've worked any harder, not because we had to, just because we wanted to.

I think Eri, Lisa, and anybody who was with us on the trip that has any perspective of the big moves that we've made over the years, I think this is going to be the biggest incremental move we've ever made. I think it's going to be a 10-year thing.

Not only is it a part of our assortment that we were way underpenetrated in, it's if you look at the architecture that it's targeting and the homes it's targeting, it's targeting the biggest architectural block, aesthetic block, especially at the high end. Some of our data says 60% of homes $5 million and above represent this kind of architecture.

It's where we used to be strong, and when the launch of Modern and Contemporary, and really the Modern book is the Modern book, and Modern's Modern. Interiors kind of became Contemporary.

That's why we consolidated it all together. Then the major look, without saying too much, and where we built the company on, it's more classic.

It's not only big, it's the next trend. What we're doing is our best work and our partners' best work.

Everybody is excited about it, especially after this last trip. Our target is to launch it at Salone in Milan, the biggest design show in the world, when we have probably the biggest opening parties that anybody's had in Salone, and have the world come see it and talk about it and try to get it into as many galleries as we can as quickly as we can.

It's what our interior designers and teams are getting asked the most about. It's what they're most excited about.

We don't really represent it very well. The work we're doing is I think just incredible work.

I think we can't wait to jump back on a plane and go do some more of it. It can be so big.

I think I kind of look at it, and I say, I don't know, it's worth a few billion dollars over the next several years. I don't know if it's five years or 10 years, but it could be the biggest part of the brand.

It should be, especially with the trend that's going to be powering it and that trend should go 15 to 20 years when you look at cycles. This is the first time we're going to actually kind of lead a cycle.

I used to say, don't go too early on the wave. You're like a surfer, you'll get a false negative, the wave will go underneath you.

Wait until the wave breaks, let a few people ride that wave, learn from it, and then go own the wave. This one, it's actually the first cycle I actually was a consumer.

I bought my first house, my wife was a high-end interior designer and it was actually I met her, she was a interior designer. It the first place I ever bought a small condo in San Francisco, and I was the consumer for that look, and my house in Belvedere, the first house I built, and we did that house, and that was the look.

I kind of know this one. I actually was like, "Wow, I'm old enough to look through the cycle here."

That's a good and a bad thing, right? Why Did we announce?

We didn't even announce that yet. No.

I got to get off stage. It came out in Business of Home.

It came out in Business of Home? You were interviewed.

Oh, okay. Yeah.

If you guys know, we've bought Michael Taylor, Michael Taylor Designs. Michael Taylor was the godfather of the California look and one of the most famous interior designers of his time in the '80s, and he did the Auberge du Soleil and his famous diamond tables in the lobby of the Auberge du Soleil.

I have the dining table in my Belvedere house. I've had the Michael Taylor dining chairs and the snaps, really very cool iconic pieces.

We bought the Michael Taylor brand, we own all the IP, and you'll see a fresh, whole new thing coming. I'm giving the competition a little heads-up.

I better shut up. Why I didn't say anything in earnings calls.

I was going to kind of do this thing, and I thought like, "No way." In the world of AI, everybody's going to try to copy, but we bought another company besides that, and so we're well on our way.

It's going to be a big deal. Awesome.

Maksim Rakhlenko

Thanks a lot, guys. Best of luck.

Operator

Up next, we'll take a question from Michael Lasser, UBS.

Michael Lasser

Good evening. Thank you so much for taking my question.

Gary, you wrote in the letter that the way you offer your guidance is you have very high ambitions, and at times you may fall short of that. Would it make sense to slow the pace of all the initiatives and aim for a little bit more predictability in light of this very dynamic environment?

In that case, profitability might come a little higher as a result, or is your theory at this point we're going to drive top-line growth at all costs and the profitability will eventually come?

Gary Friedman

I I guess if I if I thought that, I would have wrote that, right? That's not what I wrote.

I I just think that Wall Street's a funny thing. A lot of people said to me throughout my career, "Hey, hey, hate being a public company, and you got to report quarterly earnings and it gets you to think small."

I and I said, "I, I, I think that's a choice." I actually like the discipline of being a public company.

I actually like that we have to report earnings once a quarter, right, and report numbers. It makes us stop and think and assess and prioritize and, yeah, and so on and so forth.

I I like that we have, quarterly board meetings, and I like that we, have to go through that process and distill things down and simplify and, assess everything. I I don't mind it.

I think that the thing I've I've learned and I've observed, I think so many people, they get so focused, like on on quarterly results that, that becomes their whole mission as a CEO, or a leadership team. It's like, "How do we make the quarter?"

They do a lot of stupid things to make a quarter that aren't brand-building or, business model-building or anything, you know? I I just I I just think it's not a smart way to build something great, you know?

We one of our board members, grew up in Silicon Valley, and she's, early Facebook, team member and everything. He says like, "We're We're like a Silicon Valley startup, but we're, semi-mature public company."

I think that's a good thing to be. It creates energy, it attracts great people.

Great people don't want to come in and just like, "Oh, how are we going to make the next quarter? Oh, let's lower our expectations.

Let's make sure we make it." That's like a downward spiral a lot of times.

We, we we want to do something great. We want to be the best in the world at what we do.

That's not for the faint of heart, it's not for everyone. We don't need everyone to buy the stock.

We don't, that our our strategy is really simple here. From business point of view, I'd say it's it's we do what we love with people that we love for people that love what we do.

We don't do focus groups, we don't do stuff like that. We, it it's just very personal business to us.

It's probably, reflects the same way with shareholders, you know. We have some people who have been with us forever, and some people are in and out of the stock, and that's okay.

They love us sometimes, sometimes they don't love us. It's, it's a free world.

I don't know, like I I, it's like sometimes, like in good markets, we're beating quarters and making quarters, and a market like this, this is the time to, make moves and take market share and, create real strategic separation on the upside of it, be ready for the for the turn. I don't think anybody's going to be more ready than we are.

I think like look out when the housing market comes back. Wait till you see You think we're creating You look at our two-year numbers, like just a handful of, it's not that many publicly reported people, but if you look at furniture-based retailers, and a lot of those people, even on the list, they sell a lot of accessories and other things, there's not too many that are just focused on furniture that are even, that I've every day in their stores, someone says like, "They'll put this company there."

Are they even in California? Like why would we think about them, as a competitor?

Like it they they don't sell anything like that's, not not at our price points or anything. We we took, kind of national, public players and and they have a, at least probably 50% furniture, we're 80% furniture.

We're going to be more cyclical because of the furniture content, but furniture is the biggest part of the business, and so should we lower our our ambitions? Like, no, I don't think so.

Will we be more stable? I don't know.

Like, are are we not stable? I don't know.

Like, we're we're going to make high-teens EBITDA.

Michael Lasser

My question was not on the Yeah. the ambitions.

Gary Friedman

It was more on the pace of Yeah. It was more about the pace of initiatives and slowing down to eventually speed up.

You're not going to love my follow-up question in light of that, I apologize in advance. But Oh, it's okay.

I like you, Michael. You have good questions.

It makes me think. Oh, well

Michael Lasser

thank you. My second question is in light of the guidance for the fourth quarter that calls for a slowdown in the top line, as well as some absorption of the tariffs, is this a signal that you're running into limitations on being able to manage the tariffs with price and we should consider that as we factor our models for next year?

Not only did that put a little bit of a drag on the top line, but also we should consider that you may have to absorb some more tariffs into next year. Thank you.

Gary Friedman

You want to take that, Jack?

Jack Preston

I'm thinking, Michael. The tariff piece, we didn't materially change the impact from a basis point perspective.

Obviously, that's just representative of cost alone. The other piece that's not calculated on that is the price increase.

Gary called out in the letter one of the Q3 items was just the tariffs from the back-ordered special-order goods. Some of that was timing, right?

Because we have expected increase in tariffs, we do our mitigation efforts, we do our resourcing efforts, but we concurrently also change prices. You're never perfect.

You have some delays in the effectiveness of those. You're not going to call your customers back and say, "Oh, by the way, the thing you just bought, we're going to be importing it at a 20% tariff, can you give us more money?"

As we thread that needle and get all that dialed in, that is some of the things that surprised us in Q3 and it'll flow a little bit in Q4. I don't know that we're ready to make a statement like you're describing.

It's dynamic situation. Not to mention looking at competitors.

What do competitors do? We don't lose sight of that.

As far as what 2026 looks like, obviously we're a little early for that. I understand the question and the desire to know.

We'll talk about that at the end of March. I think we're proud of how we've been navigating the tariff situation with price, with mitigation, with resourcing, with vendor partnerships, with price increases, everything that you would expect us to do, so.

Gary Friedman

Yeah. Plus, we probably had the most difficult situation based on where we were resourcing from and what we did.

We read it wrong. We thought moving goods to Vietnam, and Vietnam's a smart place for us to move goods into, and all of a sudden Vietnam got hit with a 47% tariff or 46% tariff, and we're like, "Uh-oh."

That was costly to move it to Vietnam, and it was a lot of work and a lot of effort, and we were just getting ramped up. Then, "Okay, now where are we going to put it?"

Then China's going from one tariff to another, and there's other places we're moving goods to and moving to the US. That's a bit chaotic right now.

Again, I kind of look at it all in context, and I say everything that we're investing in, we're building a restaurant company, I don't know, name somebody's ever done restaurants of our quality integrated into a retail experience, especially a furniture store. Now you'll say, "Well, IKEA or something, they sell meatballs or something," right?

Actually, we're generating cash. We're paying 65% it's an offset, 65% of the rent of the buildings on average.

Some are higher, some are lower. I think we're one of seven global luxury hospitality companies that own and operate their own business?

A lot of people go like, "Who's your chef? What hospitality companies run your restaurants?"

We run them. We're the chefs.

Obviously we have culinary leaders and chefs, and we all get together and collaborate. They're a reflection of what we love and what we do, and we're getting good at it.

We're getting better and better. Our average ticket was $38?

Jack Preston

$38 in 19 in

Gary Friedman

In 2019? Yeah.

Here's interesting good fact. We just had our 10-year anniversary in October being in the restaurant business.

We opened in Chicago. The partner that we did it with is a great guy, still a good friend, and super successful.

A lot of times, if you really want to do something, someone's full-time and they're doing this, and we just realized most of the chefs driven businesses that are doing hospitality for other people, it's kind of a license the name thing. They're not there.

We had a deal with Brendan, and we had half his time for a while, but then he had so many other opportunities, and we realized this is turning into a real thing for us, and we need to make it a core competency. We've invested now many years.

That restaurant in Chicago that we opened, it did $5 million its first year. The estimate was going to do about $1 million first year, and it did 5.

It does $9 or $10 million now?

Jack Preston

Just shy of 10.

Gary Friedman

Just shy of $10 million, and we opened a second restaurant, a second gallery in a suburb not too far from that that's doing $11 million. You'd think it would have been cannibalized more.

Our team is growing and maturing and collaborating, and we're getting better and better. If someone would have said 10 years ago that, "Hey, how many people want to wake up in the morning, go to a furniture store for dinner or for lunch?"

I don't think anybody would have. Think about that one.

Should we not have done it? Because you could have said, "Gary, that was really hard.

Why did you do that?" We do hard things, and we do things that are unique and differentiated, and I think because we're more ambitious than others, we think more deeply than others, and we're not just managers of something.

Managers arrange and organize the status quo. We're leaders.

Leaders are leading people somewhere they've never been, doing things they've never done. Leaders have to be comfortable making others uncomfortable, cuz that's what leaders do.

Cuz, and starting with the leader, the leader's got to be someone who's comfortable. I know I'm sorry if I'm making you uncomfortable.

It's just what I do. That's how I know I'm leading.

That's how you know you're on the right path. If you can build things that other people haven't built and if you can lead, you can create a lot of value.

We believe we're going to create a lot of value. Maybe not at this moment.

We look really risky, I guess, cuz we have debt. We've said we're comfortable with paying down the debt.

There's lots of things we can do. Heck, we've done more zero-convertible notes than anybody in history, I think.

We did four. I don't think anybody's done four.

I remember Yahoo! had done two, and so at some point we might tap the convert market, at some point we may refinance some of the debt, at some point, who knows?

We got a lot of real estate, and we think we can monetize that over time. Our inventory has been high, we're turning inventory into cash, and I'm pretty comfortable.

Hell, I lived on the edge of bankruptcy my first 10 years. This is nothing.

Michael Lasser

Thank you for all the insights. I wish you all a very happy holiday season.

Thank you. Great.

Happy holidays to you, Michael.

Operator

The next question comes from Simeon Gutman from Morgan Stanley.

Simeon Gutman

Hey, Gary. Hey, Jack.

Maybe one question. Maybe let's talk furniture.

Can you talk about the backdrop? I know it's been a tough overall market.

Can you just talk about how the quarter, how the customer changed the demand for furniture, how your current lines are resonating? Then barring anything in the backdrop getting worse, can we assume that free cash flow stays positive from here on out?

Thank you.

Gary Friedman

I don't know if this is the time to assume anything will be a certain way, right? We just had China and Russia fly bombers over Japan.

Hello, was anybody expecting that? Then we rallied bombers with Japan or fighter jets or whatever.

Who knows what's going to happen in this world right now? There's a lot of discord and there's a lot of noise.

We expect free cash flow to remain positive, but did we expect at any time early in the year that we were going to have all the tariff announcements in such a unpredictable, chaotic way, and have to delay our Interiors book by eight weeks? Did we think we were going to launch Estates this year?

We did. I said the name.

Oh, god. Chris, sorry about that.

It's a really unusual time. We're not trying to be flat or up three right now.

If we're trying to be flat or up three, would we be more predictable? We might.

I don't know, would that be really good for the long term? I don't think so.

I love what we're doing right now. I love the moves we're making right now.

I think people are going to be shocked. I think competition's going to go, "Oh, now what?"

I love our strategy in Europe. Is it more expensive than we thought?

It is. We built these things during and post-COVID, and they're way more expensive.

It put pressure on short-term cash flow and things. Sure, but wait till you see what we invented.

Again, necessity is the mother of invention. Put us into a corner, make things tough for us, we'll invent our way out of it.

We've designed I think some of the most exciting retail concepts coming, new versions of RH that I think are mind-blowing and they cost half as much. We have other ones that are equally creative that will take probably less than half the time and cost less.

We've got design ecosystems, we have design compounds, we have interior design office, we've just got a lot of things. They all make a ton of sense.

I think we're pretty responsive strategically. We just don't like to get stuck in the weeds and not see the bigger picture.

We're really excited about where we are. We're super positive.

Can you say things are going to be super predictable just what we've just seen in the last 6 to 12 months? I'd say it's going to be predictably unpredictable.

That's just what we've all had to navigate and deal with, and there's still changes. Who knows?

There could be a whole new round of tariffs. The Supreme Court could say, "Hey, this is illegal."

Then all of a sudden it's going to be, if you read the news, it's going to be these things happen, that thing's happen, those things happen, this changes. We'll improvise, adapt, and overcome.

That's what we do.

Jack Preston

Simeon, on free cash flow, we talked about the $300 million of inventory coming down, so that this year is a kind of a $200 million figure we talked about. There's still that element to come.

We talked about reduction in capital spending last call a little bit here. There's building blocks to maintain positive cash flow going forward, but obviously there's a lot of unknowns and a lot of uncertainty.

We'll be talking a lot about that and try to drive that result as well.

Simeon Gutman

No accidents over the Like mine?

Jack Preston

Thank you.

Operator

Up next, we'll take a question from Jonathan Matuszewski from Jefferies.

Jonathan Matuszewski

Oh, great. Good evening, and thanks for the time.

Appreciate the color on market share, Gary, and it's easy for us to track the public players you outlined in the table, but less easy for us to assess the health of the fragmented design showrooms, those regional high-end stores, and the local independent boutiques. Curious if you could give us a sense of what you're seeing from a dislocation standpoint with the majority of your share gains coming from those channels.

Thanks so much.

Gary Friedman

Harder for any of us to measure, but the feedback we get from some of the people that we've acquired and people that we know believe we've been the biggest disruptive force at the high end of the business for the last 10 years, if not more. Especially with what we've done with the new galleries and with the assortment and moving upmarket and taking the quality up, and the level of design up.

We used to track how many independent high-end boutiques there were, right? There used to be 32 between Sausalito and Santa Rosa county in Healdsburg and stuff in Napa.

We always said that they all exist because RH had a 6,000-square-foot gallery in Corte Madera. Most of those boutiques were, I don't know, 3,000 to 15,000 square feet, all the majority of them.

Kind of close to the size we are. It wasn't obvious the assortment.

If you didn't get our book, you didn't know how big our assortment was. If you didn't go to our website, you didn't know.

We always said when we have the assortment in physical marketplace, there will be a lot less. You're making me want to go do the latest math.

We know that it went from 32 to about 18 or 20 over x number of years. We should go do the math again.

I think we've went from 300 million to 3.5 billion, and yeah, some of it's hospitality and there's contract business, and we own Waterworks. We believe most of the share came from the higher end and came from the showrooms and they came from the independents, and they came from the regional furniture stores, and they came from the Ethan Allens of the world or people like that.

Not to pick on Ethan Allen or anything, but Ethan Allen, when I started at RH in earlier days, they were 1.2 billion or something, and we looked up to them, and I don't know if they do today 5 or 600 million or 700 million. There's always going to be those shifting dynamics.

There are sometimes hard to measure, but we like how our business has been performing from a market share point of view, and there's enough data to say we're one of the leading share gainers right now that are at a certain size, especially furniture-based, right? Again, there's other people that have a big table top business, they have big accessories business, they're in seasonal businesses like Halloween and Easter and this and Christmas, and we're not in any of those businesses anymore.

You got to compare us to the right kind of people. We don't have some of those other businesses that might make us a little less cyclical.

There's some of the businesses I think we exited too far, we ought to probably have some more home accessories or some designers that would like to have more things to complete a home. We're considering those things.

We used to have a book called The Objects of Curiosity, and we may relaunch that at some point, and you might see us I don't know, I wouldn't even rule out would we be in the tabletop business, but just in our own way, and I don't think I want to be in the chase the holiday businesses, but doesn't mean we can't have beautiful candles and that are our branded stuff. Then we can't have our Hermès blanket or things like that, and that are really high-end and aspirational and can be great gifts and things you'd really want in your home that identify your status and where you are in life.

If we think we build the brand correctly, there's going to be other opportunities like that. It's that fragmented, right?

It's not easy to exactly know.

Jonathan Matuszewski

Helpful. Thank you, Gary.

Operator

That does conclude our question-and-answer session. I'll hand the conference back over to Mr.

Gary Friedman for any additional or closing remarks.

Gary Friedman

Great. Thank you, Operator.

Thank you, everyone, for your interest. Want to thank our teams that bring our brand to life each and every day, throughout our galleries, our hospitality, our distribution centers, every aspect of the company, everybody in every location around the world and all of our partners around the world that work so hard to bring these beautiful products to life.

We appreciate everyone and your efforts and your collaboration, and we wish everyone just a wonderful holiday. Look forward to talking to you in the next year.

Thank you.

Operator

Once again, everyone, that does conclude today's conference. We would like to thank you all for your participation today.

You may now disconnect.