Superior Group of Companies Inc (SGC) 2021 Q2 法說會逐字稿

Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to Superior Group of Companies' Second Quarter 2021 Conference Call. With us today, on behalf of the company are Michael Benstock, the company's Chief Executive Officer; Andy Demott, its Chief Operating Officer, Chief Financial Officer, and Treasurer; Phil Koosed, Chief Strategy Officer; and from the Promotional Products division, we have Jake Himelstein, BAMKO's President. After the speakers' opening remarks, there'll be a Q&A session. This call is being recorded, and your participation implies that you agree to this. If you do not, then simply drop off the line.

I'd like to turn the call over to Hala Elsherbini, Senior Managing Director of Three Part Advisors, who will read the safe harbor statement. Please go ahead.

Thank you, and good afternoon, everyone. This conference call may contain forward-looking statements about Superior Group of Companies -- the company within the meaning of the Securities Act of 1933, the Securities Exchange Act of 1935, the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995, and all rules and regulations issued thereunder. Such statements are based upon management's current expectations, projections, estimates, and assumptions. Words such as will, expect, believe, anticipate, think, outlook, hope, and variations of such words and similar expressions identify such forward-looking statements, which include statements on the impact of COVID-19 on the company's business, including inventory, supply chain, manufacturing capacity at the company's own and contract manufacturing facilities, service capacity and customer demand. Forward-looking statements involve known and unknown risks and uncertainties that may cause future results to differ materially from those suggested by the forward-looking statements. Such risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the following: the effect of the COVID-19 crisis on the U.S. and global markets, our business, operations, customers, suppliers, and employees; general economic conditions in the areas of the United States in which the company's customers are located; changes in the markets where uniforms are worn, where promotional products are sold and where call center services are used; the impact of competition, the company's ability to successfully integrate operations following confirmation of acquisitions; and the availability of manufacturing materials as well as the risks and uncertainties disclosed in the company's periodic filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including the company's annual report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2020. The quarterly report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2021, and the 8-K filed recently. Shareholders, potential investors, and other readers are urged to consider these factors carefully in evaluating the forward-looking statements made hereunder and are cautioned not to place undue reliance on such forward-looking statements. The company does not undertake to update the forward-looking statements contained herein to conform to actual results or changes in the company's expectations, whether as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise, except as required by law. Please note that all growth comparisons that management makes today will relate to the corresponding period in 2020 unless otherwise noted.

With that, I'll turn the call over to Michael.

Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you, Hala. I think your portion of this gets longer and longer every single quarter. Thank you all for joining us to discuss our Q2 results. In addition to Andy and Jake, I'm pleased to be joined by Phil Koosed, our recently appointed Chief Strategy Officer and the newest member of our C-Suite. Phil is a dynamic leader with proven strategic acumen, and we're excited to further tap into his expertise. Additionally, Jake has been an invaluable leader serving as COO and CFO of BAMKO these past few years. His depth and breadth of business and industry experience as well as his prior M&A work is a tremendous asset. His recent promotion to President is certainly well deserved. For the call format, I'll open with second quarter highlights, and Phil will provide higher-level thoughts on our strategic direction, followed by Jake's review of BAMKO. Andy will then provide an operational financial review. As usual, when we are done, we will open the line for questions.

So let's get started. Sales are quickly moving in the right direction. Our core businesses are prospering. In particular, we are seeing a faster than expected recovery in most of the sectors of our uniform business that were weakened by the pandemic. We are also seeing a return to normalized yet strong levels in our other uniform channels. Overall, second quarter results and visibility for a strong second half gives us greater confidence to update our sales guidance that we gave during our first quarter call. We now expect to approach $525 million in revenue for fiscal 2021 versus our guidance last quarter of approaching the $500 million mark. This puts our revenue target on par with 2020's spectacular numbers. To keep some perspective here, and I'm going to throw out a lot of numbers now, I hope we can keep up with it. In 2019, our total sales revenue was $377 million. In 2020, our sales revenue were $527 million, exceeding our budgeted $408 million by $119 million. Our core non-PPE sales for 2020, this is last year, was $396 million. Our anticipated sales for this fiscal year will greatly eclipse our actual core sales results last year. Our 12.5% guidance with respect to our growth through 2025 remains the same. We are on track to meet our consolidated CAGR goals of organically achieving nearly $900 million in revenue in 2025 and along with acquisitions, expect to exceed $1 billion.

Let's take a closer review of our segments. As anticipated, our Uniform division serving both healthcare and essential employee ID end markets are normalizing when compared to the frenetic pace of pandemic purchasing last year. For HPI, activity is booming and with some customers, demand is nearing and even exceeding pre-pandemic levels. This is particularly evident in the lodging, entertainment, hospitality, food service and transportation. As corporate customers realize rebounding sales, they are returning to initiatives paused during the pandemic, including uniform upgrades and market checking RFPs. As a result, we are also seeing a marked increase in customer acquisition opportunities. We are excited about an initiative we began last quarter at HPI to combine the HPI sales team with our BAMKO sales team as a shared service to move both divisions towards a more direct sales approach versus the cross-selling approach that we've successfully executed since our acquisition of BAMKO in 2016. I can tell you this, this exponentially deepens our ability to uncover and participate in many more opportunities. This strategy, which we beta tested in Q2 is already paying dividends. Jake will speak more about this in his remarks.

Our remote staffing division, the Office Gurus, continues to post remarkable results as existing customers add seats and many new customers are onboarded. We are seeing more openness than ever for nearshore outsourcing as many of our customers and prospective customers are experiencing difficulty in hiring in the USA. Many of these had their teams in the U.S. working remotely during the pandemic and have come to the realization that many of the tasks they thought had to be done in office could be done in the remote environment, and they're now looking to do the same work at a lower cost with us. Customer preference for in-center work is somewhat of a mixed bag. We are seeing more customers willing to accept the hybrid solution of work from home and from center. Regardless of their choices at our current rate of growth, we'll have to only slightly tweak our future investments in infrastructure to accommodate this unprecedented opportunity for growth. Overall, we continue to capitalize on tremendous tailwinds, resulting in a quarter where we added 437 billable agents across all sites. Keep in mind that we added 184 agents in Q1 for a total of 621 agents for the first half of 2021. To put this in perspective, our original 2021 forecast, which was ambitious, called for 362 new seat requirements for the entire year. We've already put on 621. From a profitability standpoint, the team delivered outstanding results again and an operating margin of 24%. BAMKO delivered the third consecutive quarter of record sales in core promotional products. I'm going to leave the rest of our discussion around BAMKO to Jake.

Turning to our operating environment. Global logistical and supply chain challenges as well as increased prices for raw materials persist for many businesses, including ours. We are not immune from the disruptions, but our proactive stance on building our inventory early has provided a level of insulation and gives us on a longer-term basis further advantage over smaller competitors. In addition, like others, we also face hiring challenges domestically in lower-wage jobs, which has presented a headwind for our distribution centers. We believe the coming cessation of the supplemental unemployment benefits, combined with our creative and aggressive recruitment, incentive and retention programs should allow us to maintain needed staffing levels. In regard to the recent tragic events in Haiti, fortunately, our own managed facilities in Ouanaminthe are far removed from the epicenter of disruption in Port-au-Prince. The company's production facilities remain largely uninterrupted, except for a couple of days following the tragedy and a two-day government-mandated mourning period. Overall, we have not experienced a material impact to our business and our inventories and the products made in those factories, as I said earlier, are more than adequate to offset any unexpected disruptions. We are also still in aggressive hiring and training mode in our Haiti facilities as we begin to staff now that the third facility has been opened.

As I said at the start of the call, we continue to be impressed by the rising leaders in our company. Our team is passionate, driven, and hard-working. They are the key to our future success. Phil's entrepreneurial drive, innovation, and strategic mindset are assets to the company. We're pleased to welcome him as our first Chief Strategy Officer. Phil, take it from here.

Thank you, Michael. I'm very excited to take on this new role and to help shape the future strategic direction of SGC as we enter our second 100 years of growth. I'm an entrepreneur by nature. So I know that growth and the ability to reinvent is really central to the success of any company. This ability to reimagine the future of this business is built into the DNA of SGC. It's the reason why after 100 years, we are more than just surviving, we are thriving. Reimagining the future of this business is the main focus of this role and the primary reason I'm so excited about it. We have built an incredible foundation upon which we can create future growth. Some critical areas to build upon will be shaping our technology strategy, focusing on client experience, expanding our M&A efforts, and enhancing our talent throughout the organization. I will touch on each of these briefly. First, shaping our technology strategy. Nowadays, every company needs to be a tech company, and SGC is no different. Technology already weaves into every aspect of our business. This will expand rapidly in the next decade as we benefit from the developments in AI, machine learning, advanced robotics, and blockchain. Some of these developments will involve building upon our existing proprietary technologies that we have developed in-house, and some of these efforts will require being at the forefront of new technologies that can improve our business. On the client experience side, we have some amazing highlights with some of the largest companies in the world, showing just how good we are at customer experience, however, we must not rest on our laurels. We will be obsessed with client experience, and we will work diligently to improve it at every level. Our M&A strategy will continue to build upon our rich success we have had with the previous acquisitions. We have made six acquisitions in the last eight years, and their effect has been transformational. We will be focused on maintaining a robust acquisition pipeline, so we can continue our current strategy of being extremely selective in terms of who we acquire.

Lastly, on the talent front. We know that talent is everything. As a global company, we have the luxury of hiring anywhere in the world. Therefore, we will be laser-focused on making sure that we attract and retain the best talent in the world. This organization is an entrepreneurs' playground, and I feel privileged to be part of it. We are called the 100-year old startup because we are continuously experimenting with new ideas. Our culture encourages this type of experimentation. And is the primary reason, we will be a $1 billion company within the next five years.

Now I would like to turn the call over to Jake Himelstein. Jake served as our CFO and COO of BAMKO before being promoted this quarter to become our new President of BAMKO. Having worked with Jake for eight years, I can think of no better person to take on this role. I'm excited to watch as his exceptional leadership elevates the business to new levels. Jake?

Thank you, Phil. This is such an exciting time for SGC and for BAMKO. I'm honored and humbled to lead such an incredible team.

Now onto the quarterly review. As expected, PPE sales slowed down substantially this quarter. Our extraordinary PPE sales of Q2 2020 did not recur in Q2 2021. That did not come as a surprise. However, we are thrilled to report that our core promotional product business has experienced a resurgence in sales, and we expect that to continue throughout the rest of the year. Overall, BAMKO ended the second quarter of 2021 with revenue of $48.7 million, gross profit of $16 million, and operating income of $5 million. While these figures represent year-over-year decreases from our extraordinary PPE-driven Q2 of 2020, when you consider the anomalous nature of our PPE sales a year ago, this quarter's results were phenomenal. I'm particularly happy to report that this quarter's promotional product revenue was at an all-time high at $47.7 million. Promotional product revenue made up over 98% of total quarterly revenue. Perhaps most impressively, this is an 85% increase over the same period last year. This now marks the third consecutive quarter that our division has set a new all-time high watermark from promotional product revenue in a quarter. This is our core business. It has come back with a flourish, and it's exciting that we continue to trend upwards to even greater heights. With the rollout of the vaccine in the U.S. and the easing of COVID restrictions, the promotional products industry started to see an increase in spend during Q2. Clients in the entertainment and travel sectors have increased their spend much quicker than we anticipated. Marketing budgets have started to open back up, and we have already seen companies planning for year-end employee gifting. While the promotional products industry as a whole was up about 3% or 4% in the first half of 2021 compared to the first half of 2020, it will remain down by about 20% when compared to pre-COVID levels. Our backlog at June 30 was $67.6 million, almost entirely made up of core promotional products. This backlog is 66% higher than at March 31, another sign of the continued resurgence in promotional product spend. We've discussed our ability to create operating leverage with scale in prior calls. And this quarter continues that trend with a very strong operating margin of over 10%. Overall, our BAMKO team executed well during the first six months of 2021, posting a 6% sales gain compared to an exceptionally strong first half of 2020. We benefited from continued market share gains, PPE customer conversion to branded merchandise customers, and sales contribution from our January 2021 acquisition of Gifts By Design.

On the M&A front, we are seeing more opportunity surface as a result of pandemic-related impacts as well as potential tax law changes. The pipeline is robust, including many unsolicited proposals seeking out SGC as a strong potential partner. In Q2, we altered our approach on cross-selling promotional products and employee ID uniform programs, now allowing BAMKO's 70-plus sales reps to directly sell uniform programs to both new and existing clients. This move made sense given promotional product and branded uniform programs typically have the same buyer groups within our customers. This represents the vast expansion of the team selling large corporate uniform programs and has already yielded many significant opportunities that otherwise would not have been uncovered.

Finally, I'm proud to announce that BAMKO was ranked #11 in the latest listing of top promotional product distributors in North America. We jumped eight spots this year from our position at #19 last year, and we achieved the biggest growth rate of any company on the entire list. This speaks to the strength of our customer value proposition and the incredible BAMKO team, which continues to receive high industry honors. BAMKO is also named as one of 2021's greatest companies to work for in the promotional products industry for the fourth consecutive year.

I'll now turn the call over to Andy for his operational and financial review.

Thanks, Jake, and good afternoon, everyone. We're on pace with capital investment initiatives across our distribution facilities. At our Eudora, Arkansas center, beta testing of new upgraded robotics are slated for Q4 with a go-live launch early next year. The consolidation is expected to yield approximately $2 million of annual savings as well as provide significant technology advantages and efficiencies. We continue to reap the benefits of improved efficiencies resulting from higher automation and robotics in our CID Dallas distribution center as well. And our third manufacturing facility in Haiti is now beginning operations.

Turning to the financial highlights. Consolidated net sales, exclusive of PPE sales, increased by $23 million or approximately 23% compared to the second quarter of 2020 as we continue to see a rebound in markets, and we continue to take additional market share. Including PPE, consolidated sales declined 18% compared to the prior year quarter to $130.8 million. This decrease in PPE sales was in line with our expectations. Uniforms and Related Products net sales, excluding PPE, decreased 7% or $4.5 million compared to last year. PPE sales were $5.8 million versus $8.9 million a year ago. Additionally, second quarter 2020 sales of non-PPE health care products, including an extraordinary surge in demand that has been reduced as we move through the pandemic. We were successful in adding new business and channels to offset the bulk of this change and are well-positioned to continue to capitalize on this growing part of the market. We are seeing an offset to the higher PPE health care uniform demand in the second quarter last year with a resurgence in demand for non-healthcare recovering industries, such as restaurants, transportation, and the hospitality industries. As we progressed through the pandemic, we felt it was critical to provide backlog information each quarter to provide transparency on the PPE business that had been booked but not yet delivered. Now that crisis PPE is not expected to be a significant portion of our uniform revenue moving forward, our backlog for uniform sales consists primarily of orders that were shipped very quickly and is not meaningful for evaluating the state of the uniform business.

Jake's already reviewed BAMKO's results, I'll move to the Office Gurus. The team reported tremendous growth and exceeded expectations with net sales after intersegment eliminations, up an impressive 73% to $13.9 million. Growth is attributed to expanded customer relationships and onboarding new customer engagements at an incredible rate. We continue to have tremendous tailwinds in this segment. For the quarter, consolidated gross margin as a percentage of sales increased to 36.1%, a 100 basis point improvement from 35.1% in second quarter of 2020. Our total SG&A expenses decreased approximately 7%, reflecting a decrease in bad debt expense of $2.8 million. And as a percentage of sales, SG&A was 25.9% versus 22.8% in the second quarter last year due primarily to the lower PPE sales in the current period. Income from operations for the second quarter was $13.3 million compared to $19.6 million in 2020 second quarter. Operating margin was a solid 10.1% compared to 12.3% last year.

During the second quarter, we terminated our two noncontributory qualified defined benefit pension plans, which were fully funded. Consequently, we recognized a settlement charge of $6.9 million during the three months ended June 30, which represents the acceleration of deferred charges previously included within accumulated and other comprehensive loss and the impact of remeasuring the planned assets and obligations of termination. The pension plan terminations did not require a cash outlay by the company. Net of the recognized tax benefit of $0.6 million, this charge resulted in a reduction of diluted earnings per share of $0.39 during the second quarter of 2021. Our effective tax rate for the quarter was 17.3% compared to 19.6% a year ago. The effective rate for second quarter '21 was favorably impacted by $0.8 million of windfall tax benefits from stock options exercised during the quarter and $0.6 million of stranded tax benefits that were recognized as a result of the termination of the pension plans. These benefits were partially offset by the non-deductible pension termination charge. Net income was $4.6 million or $0.28 per diluted share compared to $15.2 million or $1 per diluted share in Q2 last year. Excluding the impact of the pension termination charge and related tax benefit, net income would have been $0.67 per diluted share in the second quarter of '21. Also of note, our second quarter 2020 represented the highest quarterly earnings in the company's 100-year history. We are in a strong liquidity position and at June 30, we had cash and cash equivalents of $7.5 million and increased $2.4 million in the current year. CapEx for the first half of the year was $11.3 million. We are on target with our CapEx investments in automation and efficiency and still expect to be in the range of $16 million to $17 million for 2021.

In recognition of our continuing strong performance, the Board of Directors increased our regular quarterly dividend by 20% in the second quarter to $0.12 per share. In total, for the six months ended June 30, 2021, and 2020, we paid $3.4 and $1.5 million, respectively, in dividends.

I'll now turn the call back to Michael for his closing remarks and a general outlook.

Thanks, Andy. That was long, but a lot of information in there. Those of you who have been with us before, we are -- you know that we're always laser-focused on our future. And our top priority still remains having a disciplined execution of our long-term strategies, both organically and via targeted acquisitions. SGC is on its best footing ever, and I'm confident that our talented, hard-working, passionate leadership and workforce will take us to new heights in the coming year. We strongly believe we have the right plans in place to grow beyond being a $1 billion business in less than five years from now. These are very exciting times for SGC.

With that, we'd like to open the call for your questions.

(Operator Instructions) First question comes from Tim Mulrooney, William Blair.

On the uniform business, excluding PPE, I think the uniform business was down about 7% on a tough comparison. But I do think those comparisons start to get easier in the back half of the year or so. With that in mind, based on what you know today, would you expect to see year-over-year growth in this business in the second half of 2021, excluding PPE?

I'll jump in on that. Yes. It's Michael. Thanks for the question. It's a good one. With the resurgence we're seeing of what was considered nonessential business during the pandemic and the fact that we're playing catch up at this point, I think we pretty well explain that from a surface standpoint, these logistical nightmares have been quite unusual. And also, our customers are ordering 2 or 3x what they normally ordered in a quarter has left us pretty shy of some safety stock in some areas. So as we catch up, we're going to see a quick resurgence of that business. On the other hand, we're starting, with the health care business was starting to calm down a little bit, although we're in new channels, and we're selling for certainly our fashion scrubs in a lot new channels at walmart.com and target.com and zappos.com recently. It's a new one. On the institutional side, a lot of that will depend on what happens with the pandemic as hospital censuses are going up, we expect to see somewhat of a resurgence in our scrub apparel, our patient apparel, even our isolation gowns, barrier coats and all the items that were bought in great quantities last year. So yes, we expect our uniform business to be -- to have leveled off. By the end of the year, certainly, is to have made up the difference, Tim, and we're working to create the environment where we'll even go beyond that.

And you kind of address my next question, which was going to be specifically on the health care opportunity because you mentioned new channels helping to make up for some of the difficult comparison with PPE. My question was going to be -- are these new channels, mostly on the institutional side or on the retail side, but you named a bunch of retail channels. So is it fair to say that is that what the larger opportunity is for you guys moving forward? Is it mostly on the retail side when it comes to where the growth is going to come from?

It's really mixed bag. Yes. On the retail side, for sure, but we also have the new distributor press release a couple of months ago, SanMar, who's moving our product through the branded merchandise customers of theirs, the 22,000 customers of theirs. We also have the INDY product, which is kind of a crossover between Fashions Seal Healthcare and CID that I believe UniFirst and others have announced that they're adopting as their fashion product for the institutional health care side of the business. So it's a very mixed bag. It really is going to come from both of them.

I wanted to say, congratulations to Phil and Jake on your promotions.

Thank you.

Jake, to you. Jake, to you specifically, it looks like the backlog at BAMKO is very strong. And I know you helped out a lot of folks during the pandemic with PPE, including a lot of new customers that you hadn't previously engaged. So, I guess my question is, how much of this increase in backlog, if any, do you think is the result of converting some of those PPE customers into traditional promotional products customers?

Yes. Certainly, there is some of that, right? We stated it before, and it stays pretty consistent. We've converted about 1/3 of our PPE only customers in 2020 to promo customers, They -- we were there and they trusted us in their toughest times when they needed PPE, and we've been able to convert about 1/3 of those into promotional product customers. And we continue to work with these customers to find additional opportunities to penetrate and get the promotional product business, and we think that's only going to continue to expand. And I think across the board, our backlog is really strong. And I think you mentioned in the script, but the most impressive part of it is that virtually none of that is PPE. It's all promotional products and brand and merchandise. And that's what's most exciting is that we're seeing that resurgence coming into what we think is going to be a really strong holiday season as well.

If I could just sneak one more in. I don't know if this should be for Michael or Andy or Phil, but it's on PPE. So, you expect PPE to be I guess, about $45 million this year, down from $130 million last year, but still well above the $4 million or so that you generated in 2018 and 2019. Is this level this $45 million kind of what you'd expect moving forward, PPE revenue to be much lower than the peak in 2020, but still remain elevated relative to pre covid levels?

Yes. I mean, I think the $45 million, I mean, it does include a little bit of crisis PPE that we've already -- that we had really more in the first quarter. Our expect -- and let me back up a little bit. Part of the PPE product that we're selling has kind of become part of uniform programs for our starter kits for the gig economy type people. I think going forward, people are going to have hand sanitizer in their starter kit, they're going to have a mask, they're going to have gloves. Some of that -- this is just going to be in our normal product and not really show up as being PPE. But from an ongoing basis, I think your pure PPE non-crisis type you're probably talking somewhere in the $5 million, $10 million.

Next question comes from Tim Hartch, Memphre Investments.

Great quarter. I had two questions. The first cash flow outlook for 2021, it looks like in the first half of the year, there was a big use of working capital, and you mentioned that CapEx was sort of heavily weighted there. So I was wondering if you could just sort of address how the cash flow -- free cash flow will go for the full year of 2021? And the second question was addressed to Phil, just to talk a little bit more about the specifics around the technology strategy and the customer experience, which were the first two items you highlighted in -- as your focus.

Okay. Relative to the cash flows, I mean, the first half of the year really included some extraordinary incentive type payments that were based off of last year relative to really executive and sales comp across the company as well as significant earn-out for -- from some of our acquisitions, primarily in the promotional products arena as well as paying income taxes on those items. So it was a heavy use of that during the first half. We also, as Michael mentioned, we did beef up our inventories a bit due to the supply chain. And just to be prepared for that as we go forward. We would expect to see that start leveling off and work its way back down now, as the supply chain continues to work its way out. From a capital expenditure perspective, as I mentioned in my remarks, we do expect for the year, that number is going to be somewhere between $16 and $17 million. So we would expect from here, we should be positive from a cash flow perspective. Michael, do you want to answer to it?

No. Phil was the second part of the question.

Yes, I'll take the second part of that question. So without disclosing too much. On the technology front, we've been heavy into technology for quite some time. And I would say we've been well ahead on the technology curve in our industries and our respective industries for quite some time. The exciting part now is that, we're seeing more and more ability to integrate technology further into our business. So over the course of the last couple of decades, I would say the technology has been an advantage and been an advantage that we've been be able to stay ahead of our competitors on. But we believe that we can widen that gap by embracing some of the newer technologies out there that are really making advancements and permeating various industries across the board. I mentioned AI and machine learning and advanced robotics and blockchain on the supply chain side. And that's stuff that we're already working towards. And in many cases, we already have some pretty advanced robotics right now in our warehouse, and we have some pretty good direction in terms of how AI might affect our business in the coming years. And so we're looking forward to seeing that really come through because we think that will widen the gap between us and our competitors on the technology front.

On the customer side, to the second part of your question, our -- focusing on our client experience and making sure that what we've done in the past and what we've delivered from an experiential perspective continues in the future. That's first and foremost. I mean, I think that's something that in any business out there that's worth their salt is going to be focused on their customers' experience and making sure that their customer not only goes and is happy with what they've got and what the services that we're providing, but are actually fans of our business. And I think more and more we get business from referrals and the main reason why is because of the fact that we've actually developed sands within our customer base. And so that's really our focus is how do we go and make this experience so good that we're not only going and making the customer happy, but also, they're ranting and raving to various folks and referring business to us in the future.

Can you measure customer retention and sort of fan level among the customer base?

Yes. That's something that we measure and we'll continue to measure.

Next question comes from Kevin Steinke, Barrington Research.

I wanted to start off by asking about, Michael, I think you mentioned in your prepared comments, seeing more opportunities to bid on new uniform programs. And can you just expand on that a little bit and what's driving that pickup?

I think there are so many factors driving it. But let's start with the fact that everybody is struggling to get new employees right now at the low wage jobs that people are -- most people are wearing uniforms. So they're enticing them by putting them into more uniforms, par levels have improved. We've been told, instead of giving employee two sets of uniforms, they might be giving three, four or five. Also turnover has increased. So, you hired employee two weeks later, he decides to go somewhere else. You've read the jobs and reports about people leaving their jobs. So they have to go get a new uniform for the new person they hire. There's another sale for us. I think health care workers have been working on the retail side, they have been working crazy hours of overtime. They've made a lot of money doing it. They're buying more fashion scrubs. I think we've spoken about this before, Kevin, that whenever we've come out of a recession, which is really our only context here, we've never come out of the pandemic, at least not that I remember. Well, we did in 1920. But whenever we come out of recession, we always come out stronger. We always see a flurry of marketing dollars being spent. Makeovers of stores that have been very, very slow. Everybody is about branding and rebranding themselves. We see people doing new logos, new logos required new RFPS, recolorations of their current logos and their stores require new RFPs for uniforms that will match all of that. It's the normal flurry we saw post the big recession a decade ago, more than a decade ago. And it's something we've gotten used to. And I think because we were so active during this recession during the pandemic and reaching out to prospective customers. We didn't get lost. While a lot of other people, I think, ducked their head in the sand, collected their PPP money and said, I just got to make it through this period of time, we got even more aggressive. I think our strategy with respect to that we described with respect to HPI was now going from five salespeople to 75 salespeople, it's huge. There is an opportunity in this country that we will not uncover, I believe. And it's many more than we could have in the past. And we're training those people up, but quite frankly, we have a big team behind that group of 75 people, that's ready to start getting in front of customers and presenting. And all those 75 people have to really do just get us face-to-face appointments or in today's world Zoom appointments. So, I think everything is moving in the right direction from a standpoint of RFP activity. I think a lot of people were let down there in the pandemic, too, who needed good service. And this logistical nightmare is truly that. But I do think that we're much better positioned than most of our competitors to deal with this logistical nightmare that's out there. And it's pretty nightmarish. We're talking about what used to take 45 days, taking 90 days now. And when customers ordering patterns pick up and suddenly you find yourself short of inventory because of that, but you can't get inventory in any faster. I think it's hurting a lot of our competitors. So I think it's -- I call it the perfect storm. But for us, it's like the rainbow. We just have to follow it to the pot of gold, and that's what we're doing.

I wanted to follow-up on just -- you're now targeting sales in 2021, approaching $525 million compared to about $500 million previously. Is that increase being driven by any specific business? Or is it just kind of across the board strength in all your segments?

Kevin, it's really -- it's across all of them. I mean, we feel very good about where we're at with all the businesses. Michael talked clearly about how well TOG is doing covered on BAMKO and the uniform business is bouncing back stronger. So we feel very comfortable, really it's going to be across the board.

I think something that you didn't mention on the call, unless I missed it, was last quarter or two, you've talked about CID and their plans to expand internationally. Can you just provide us an update on that initiative and where you stand with that?

Sure. I can provide a little bit to you without giving away any competitive advantage. We are starting to ship and take orders for our Poland warehouse. We have hired a person away from a consulting firm that was working for us, where they agreed to what that person work for us directly as an employee. We have already resumed our strategy of going to trade shows in Europe, and whereas last year, we did no trade shows the year before we did. Keep in mind that our business last year for international was about $30 million overall across all of our segments. So, we're looking to turn that, quite frankly into a $100 million business in the next few years. And we think we've got the makings to do that. We've got the right people. We brought another sales executive into our international group. We're doing some very serious deep strategic planning right now to make sure that we're focused on the right areas of Europe. We are actually engaging some experts in that area to help move us into the right places. So we don't waste a lot of money doing it. And so that's essentially how we're going to get there.

And you talked again about the logistics and supply chain issues and how they're rippling through the economy. And have you seen any sort of loosening or improvement on that front? Any updated thoughts on that? And I guess also related to that also inflation. I know you implemented some price increases around the time of your last call in the uniform business. Do you see the need to do that again going forward? Or just kind of any update on those various macro issues?

We're looking at whether we need to add price increases again or regularly. We wouldn't be the only ones to do so in our industry. We initiated our price increases pretty early to cover ourselves. As I said, we've taken long positions on inventory to try to protect our customers as much as possible so that at least what we have in our pipeline will be at as the lowest cost it could possibly be. It's not going to change the fact that the freight cost ocean, air, everything is more than doubled, in some cases, more than tripled. So the first part of your question, no, we don't see any easing of logistical problems. They seem to not be easing at all. In fact, they're getting worse, which I think helps us, quite frankly, because we're still in a better position than any of our competitors. We hear about people struggling out there very, very badly. And many of our competitors' customers are reaching out to us. So, I'm sure in places where in specific places where we're not servicing our customers up to the level that we'd like to, even though we're being very transparent, we're having constant communications with our customers, not burying our heads in the sand. And I'm sure there's some of that activity going the other way also. But as I've said in the past, particularly with HPI, they have whatever it is a 6% or 7% market share. There's still 93% of the market. They don't have a share of. And so if more of our competitors' customers are upset than our customers in the end, we win. And that's essentially where we see it. I don't think -- from everything I read, I don't think we're going to see any easing of this logistical problem this year at all. And it might be mid next year before it gets resolved. Look, there's not enough ships. People have learned to Internet shop. There's this still this capability of ordering something online. To your house and having it shipped from Asia. And that's taking up a lot of cargo space now because if it's under $800. It comes into this country, they don't pay duty on it. So there's a lot of people who have kind of reinvented their own businesses to be able to ship directly from Asia, but it's taking up a lot more container space in doing so. So I don't see an easing of it. And eventually, it will become too expensive for some folks, and their customers don't want to pay the bounty that they have to pay to get products. And those people will become hopefully our next prospects and opportunities.

Okay. Great. And then I wanted to lastly ask about -- you mentioned -- I think it was Jake that talked about more M&A opportunities bubbling up in the promotional product space. As you look at those opportunities, and you mentioned quite a few inbound calls about potentially combining with BAMKO. If you look at that pipeline, how many of those do you think would kind of represent really solid candidates that you'd maybe want to partner with? I know you try and maintain a high bar when you're looking at opportunities. But just kind of maybe talk about the actual opportunities that you think can arise, that would be nice quality opportunities as a result of this challenging environment for competitors.

Yes. Thanks for the question, Kevin. I mean, look, we're looking at acquisitions across all areas of the business. All of our divisions, all of our companies and each area of the business has opportunities. Certainly, BAMKO has a robust pipeline, but there are opportunities elsewhere as well. And you're right, we have a high bar for what we look for for acquisitions. It's got to be accretive to the bottom line, easy to integrate, good for culture, bringing us into new lines of business and we saw that with Gifts By Design, we did earlier this year in Q1, hit all those different targets that we needed in order to be the right acquisition. So, we're in discussion with a number of companies, some of which we've been talking to for years. And we've always held, Kevin, that we have to be talking to a lot of different targets, in order to find the right ones. And there could be dozens and dozens that we're talking just to find the right one. So, we're not going to jump at an opportunity, just because it presents itself to us. And more often not, people calling us this is not the right opportunity. But we're being opportunistic. And you never know when the time is right for some of these. So, we're certainly going to keep looking at them as they come in and as we solicit new opportunities.

Okay that's helpful. Thanks for taking all of the questions and I wanted to add my congratulations to Phil and Jake on your new roles.

Concludes the question and answer session. Now I'd like to turn the conference back over to Mr. Michael Benstock for closing remarks.

All right. I'll make this real quick. This has been long for all of you. Thank you very much for joining us today. And we're very excited about where our business is at, and hope to report to you next quarter, continued great results. We'll see you in October.

The conference has now concluded. Thank you for attending today's presentation. You may now disconnect.