Playboy, Inc. Q1 2026 Earnings Call - Deleveraging and Media Renaissance Drive Margin Expansion

Operator: Good afternoon. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to Playboy, Inc.’s first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. During today’s presentation, all parties will be in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, the conference will be open for questions. This conference is being recorded today, May 11, 2026, and the earnings press release and Form 10-Q, from which information may be referenced during this call, were issued after the market closed today. On our call today are Playboy, Inc.’s Chief Executive Officer, Ben Kohn, and Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Marc Crossman. I would like to remind you that the information discussed today is qualified in its entirety by the Form 8-K and Form 10-Q filed today by Playboy, Inc., which may be accessed on SEC’s website and on Playboy, Inc.’s website.

Please note that statements made during this call, financial projections, and other statements that are not historical in nature may constitute forward-looking statements. Such statements are made on the basis of Playboy, Inc.’s views and assumptions regarding future events and business performance at the time they are made, and we do not undertake any obligation to update them. Forward-looking statements are subject to risks which could cause the company’s actual results to differ from its historical results and forecasts, including those risks set forth in the SEC filings, and you should refer to and carefully consider those for more information. This cautionary statement applies to all forward-looking statements made during this call. Do not place undue reliance on any forward-looking statements.

In addition, throughout today’s call, the company may refer to Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP financial measure, which it believes provides helpful information to investors about the performance of the business on an ongoing basis. A reconciliation of Adjusted EBITDA to its most directly comparable GAAP financial measure is included in today’s earnings release, which is available on the Playboy, Inc. investor relations website. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Playboy’s Chief Executive Officer, Ben Kohn. Ben, the floor is yours.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Thank you, operator, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. Welcome to our first quarter 2026 earnings conference call. When we spoke in March, I told you 2025 was the year we largely completed Playboy’s transformation into a focused high margin asset-light platform focused on four verticals: licensing, media and experiences, hospitality, and Honey Birdette. I want to use my time this afternoon to walk you through what that platform produced in Q1 2026 because that was the quarter where that strategy showed up as visible, tangible progress across almost every part of the business, as well as why we’re excited about meaningful growth going forward. Headline first, then we’ll get into the substance. Consolidated revenue grew to approximately $30.2 million, up from $28.9 million a year ago.

Adjusted EBITDA was approximately $5 million, up 111% compared to the prior year, marking our fifth consecutive quarter of positive Adjusted EBITDA. Excluding litigation expenses, Adjusted EBITDA would have been approximately $5.8 million. We closed the UTG China transaction, paid down $15 million of debt, reducing our gross debt to $145 million, and plan to further de-lever by almost $37 million more from future UTG payments, which will bring our net debt well below $100 million. Honey Birdette grew top line double digits with full price sales accelerating, gross product margin expanding, and Adjusted EBITDA margins continuing to improve.

Given the operational improvements and part of our larger business plan, we have also started terminating or non-renewing licensees that do not fit with that plan so that we may bring on fewer and bigger licensees that better fit the Playboy brand. During Q1, we made key hires to reinvigorate our growth. David Miller joined as President of Media and Brand, and Philip Picardi joined as Chief Brand Officer and Editor-in-Chief. David has taken direct ownership of the consumer-facing platform, the website, the media and experiences business, and the day-to-day alignment between content, commerce, and licensing. Philip is reshaping the editorial voice of Playboy, journalism, photography, and cultural authority at a level the brand has not operated at in a long time. The clearest proof point is Philip’s first issue, the Spring 2026 magazine.

Our cover star was Karol G, one of the most followed artists in the world with more than 70 million Instagram followers. We generated more than $3 billion media impressions, over $40 million video views across social platforms, and the earned media value was in the tens of millions of dollars. The issue puts Playboy back at the center of culture, speaking to the value the magazine brings to the company. This is not a one-off. We have two other major celebrity covers lined up following Karol G, and our editorial calendar for the balance of 2026 continues to get stronger by the day.

When artists of this caliber and the photographers, stylists, and writers who work with them actively want to be on the cover of Playboy, that tells you the brand’s health is real. Practically, it is the engine that pulls audience onto our platform and the value into our licensing conversations. Under David’s leadership, we launched a preliminary subscription offering for both digital and print content. Executing on the architecture we have been describing to investors for more than a year. Free content drives top-of-funnel audience, premium content, and member experiences sit behind the paywall. We will continue to add utility, event access, exclusive drops, community features as we scale playboy.com through the balance of 2026.

Building upon our first paid voting contest, The Great Playmate Search, which drove more than 1.7 million votes from over 17,000 contestants, we recently launched our next model search contest, a collaboration between Playboy and Honey Birdette. This is the second paid voting contest we have taken to market. It is a brand collaboration between our two largest assets, and the winner becomes the face of a global advertising campaign and is featured in the Playboy quarterly magazine with a $100,000 prize. It is also a revenue and audience engine. Every vote is a paid engagement. Registration runs through June 8th, and voting closes July 31st. 2 weeks into the contest registration, we are on track to exceed 30,000 contestants, a significant improvement from our last contest. Paid voting has the potential to become a real revenue lever for us.

We will continue to layer it into additional programs throughout the year. Now that UTG has closed and our balance sheet is in a good place, we are proactively optimizing our Rest of World licensing business, not renewing off-brand licensees and creating new white space as we align our content strategy with our licensing business under David’s leadership. This continues the strategy we have been describing. Fewer, bigger, high-quality partners focused on a consistent global brand. With Q1, Honey Birdette has now delivered 6 consecutive quarters of double-digit brick-and-mortar comparable store sales growth and 4 consecutive quarters of combined brick-and-mortar and online comparable store sales growth. Valentine’s Day 2026 was Honey Birdette’s best yet. The multi-piece full price set strategy is working. Our Valentine’s assortment all drove record average order values or AOV weeks.

Our The Honey Club loyalty program, which we launched in mid-October, has now crossed 110,000 members. In early Q2, the Addison Leopard launch has already set the tone, our best-performing launch of 2026 so far. The U.S., now Honey Birdette’s largest market, led the quarter. Retail and online both expanded, the U.S. store base was nearly unanimously positive on a like-for-like basis. The U.S. economics are clear. U.S. stores are meaningfully more productive and profitable than their counterparts in any other region, with four-wall Adjusted EBITDA margins at approximately 40%. With that profile in mind, we have redesigned the future of Honey Birdette stores, reducing our future build-out costs by almost 40%, which will significantly increase our ROI.

We have received great interest from third parties in our capital raise efforts at Honey Birdette, and we intend to open 5 new Honey Birdette stores in top-tier U.S. malls over the next 12 months. These are the highest return investments available to us anywhere in the Honey Birdette portfolio, and they clearly fit with our existing capital plan. When I look at Q1 2026, I see a quarter of not only execution against our 4 pillars, licensing, media, and experiences, hospitality, and Honey Birdette, but also the groundwork laid for substantial growth in the future.

It starts with bringing in the right leaders, putting Playboy back in the cultural conversation with Karol G on the cover and two more major names lined up behind her, launching a new subscription offering, building momentum with a new paid voting contest, closing the UTG transaction, as well as five other new licensing deals, creating a clear path to further de-lever the company, continuing to make progress on a new Playboy Club in Miami, and further growing the Honey Birdette business 15% year-over-year. Every one of those is a decision, not a headline, and taken together, they give us real compounding momentum as we move forward. With that, I’ll hand the call over to Marc to walk through the financial details.

Marc Crossman, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Thank you, Ben. Consolidated revenue in the first quarter grew to $30.2 million compared to $28.9 million in the first quarter of 2025, an increase of $1.4 million or 5% year-over-year. The year-over-year increase was led by strong Honey Birdette performance. Honey Birdette net revenue grew to $18.8 million, up 15.4% year-over-year. Retail delivered double-digit comp store growth across every region. With Q1, Honey Birdette has now delivered 6 consecutive quarters of double-digit brick-and-mortar comparable store sales growth and 4 consecutive quarters of consolidated brick-and-mortar and online comparable store sales growth. Full price sales further drove the quarter. Full price sales were up 23% year-over-year. EBITDA margins at Honey Birdette continue to improve.

I’d like to spend a moment on the U.S. specifically because that is where we see the most attractive incremental return on capital. Our U.S. stores are running at approximately twice the sales productivity of the rest of our portfolio of stores and approximately three times the per store profitability. Four-wall margins in the U.S. were approximately 40% in the quarter. With those economics in mind, we intend to open 5 new Honey Birdette stores in top-tier U.S. malls over the next 12 months. The capital cost is modest, the payback is fast, and we already have the playbook, the supply chain, and the brand recognition in place to execute. Licensing revenue was $10.9 million in the first quarter, slightly below the prior year quarter. The year-over-year decrease in licensing net revenues is consistent with repositioning our brand and licensing strategy for fewer and bigger deals.

Accordingly, we let a number of off-brand legacy licenses expire, which was partially offset by 5 new licensing deals in the quarter, spanning apparel, sleepwear, direct to retail, and headwear across North America, EMEA, and APAC. In addition, we did not sign any new deals in China during our UTG negotiations. Our ByteDance strategic partnership contributed $5 million of digital licensing revenue in the quarter, consistent with the contractual minimum guarantee. Corporate operating expenses on an adjusted basis, excluding stock-based compensation, transaction expenses, and other items we normalize for Adjusted EBITDA were approximately $7.1 million, a reduction of approximately $1.6 million versus the prior year quarter. Within that total, corporate operating expenses excluding brand investment were approximately $6.2 million, with personnel and occupancy savings driving the year-over-year reduction.

The remaining approximately $900,000 represents direct investment in the Playboy brand, the magazine’s editorial, and the consumer platform. We view that spend as an investment, not overhead. Net loss for the quarter was $4 million or $0.03 per share, which included $3.5 million of transaction expenses related to the UTG deal, compared to a net loss of $9 million or $0.10 per share in the first quarter of 2025, an improvement of approximately $5.1 million year-over-year. Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter was $5 million, an increase of $2.6 million versus the prior year quarter. This represents our fifth consecutive quarter of positive Adjusted EBITDA. Excluding litigation expenses, Adjusted EBITDA would have been $5.8 million.

On the balance sheet, we ended the quarter with approximately $34.7 million in total cash, including restricted cash. Total debt was $144.9 million, down from $159.9 million at year-end 2025, reflecting the $15 million pay down from the initial UTG proceed following the close of that transaction on March 20th. That concludes our prepared comments. Operator, let’s open the line for questions.

Operator: Thank you, sir. We will now begin the question and answer session. If you have a question, please press the star followed by the one on your touch tone phone. If you would like to withdraw your question, please press the star followed by the two. If you are using speaker equipment, you will need to lift the handset before making your selection. I will now pause as we assemble the queue. The first question we have is from George Kelly of ROTH Capital Partners. Please go ahead.

George Kelly, Analyst, ROTH Capital Partners: Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking my questions. First one for you, Ben, you mentioned in your prepared remarks about capital raise efforts at Honey Birdette. I was wondering if you could give any more detail on that process.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: George, thanks, for the question. Good afternoon. Look, we’ve had a lot of interest. It’s a, it’s a great brand. The business is performing well. Irrespective of the capital raise and based on the new store designs where we’ve reduced our build-out costs substantially, we’re gonna be opening 5 new stores. You know, I would say things are looking good on the capital raise, and we’ll see what happens in the future. You know, can’t really speak more to it, just given that it’s an ongoing process.

George Kelly, Analyst, ROTH Capital Partners: Okay, fair enough. Then with respect to the stores that you’re opening, can you just walk us through the four-wall economics, the build cost, the kinda, the AUV and margin, just the key aspects of the four-wall that you’re underwriting as you plan new stores?

Marc Crossman, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Yeah. Our, you know, we said that our four-wall margin was about 40%. In terms of productivity, we’re seeing about $1,500 a sq ft is what we’re getting on the average in our U.S. stores. In terms of build-out, we think we’re at about $500,000 all in, and that’s before TIs. We’ll probably have $30,000-$40,000 of pre-opening expenses, and you have about $35,000 of inventory.

George Kelly, Analyst, ROTH Capital Partners: Remind me.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: George, that substantially from, you know, what used to be about $900,000 to open a store. If you look at, you know, from an ROI, and especially with the, you know, what we’re seeing for full price items in the U.S., you know, it’s a good use of capital. You know, there’s a ton of growth left in that brand.

George Kelly, Analyst, ROTH Capital Partners: remind me the on average, square footage per store?

Marc Crossman, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Playboy, Inc.: About 800,000 sq ft.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Eight, eight hundred square feet.

Marc Crossman, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Playboy, Inc.: 800 sq ft. Sorry.

George Kelly, Analyst, ROTH Capital Partners: Okay. Okay, great. Just 1 last Honey Birdette question, I wanted to ask about 1 other topic. Your year-over-year compares get harder starting in 2Q for Honey Birdette. Aside from store growth, do you think you can maintain, I don’t know, high single digit, low double digit growth just given the more challenging compares? How should we think about growth for the remaining quarters of 2026?

Marc Crossman, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Playboy, Inc.: You know, we don’t wanna give guidance. I don’t think you’ll be too far off of where we are right now going forward. Retail is a little bit more difficult comp, but online is obviously a lower comp that’s getting better.

George Kelly, Analyst, ROTH Capital Partners: Okay. Okay, fair enough. Last question from me, just with respect to UTG. I know it’s early days there that the deal didn’t close that long ago, can you just update us on the status of that business and how far along it is and what the kind of plan is in the near term, and just any kind of update on UTG post-close. That’s all I had. Thank you.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Sure. You know, UTG is off to a good start. Again, as you said, we’re only, what, 8 weeks into it, something like that, not even. You know, they’ve been working with our existing partners, making sure there’s a smooth transition. You know, I think we feel comfortable with where they’re gonna come out for the year from a revenue perspective. You know, it’s important to note also, George, that when you look at Q1 for us and really going back, you know, to late in Q4, we stopped signing new deals in China, any new deals. That was because part of what UTG wanted to do was free up categories for themselves as well, ’cause they are an operator. We feel good.

I think that it’s a good relationship. We’ve known them for a long time, we’re excited about their plans and the investment they’re gonna make into the brand and the marketing of the brand. You know, I think China’s in the best place it’s been in years. We’re actually making progress also on our recovery of the litigation award that we won last year. We finally got through the Chinese courts, and they’re helping us begin the enforcement action against our former partner.

Operator: The next question we have is from Alex Fuhrman of Lucid Capital Markets. Please go ahead.

Alex Fuhrman, Analyst, Lucid Capital Markets: Hey, guys. Thanks very much for taking my question. Ben, you talked about letting some licensees kind of run off as they expire. How many more, you know, could there be, and how long do you think it’s gonna take just if you let, you know, all of the kinda underperforming licensees naturally expire? How long would it take to kinda get through that process? Could you just kinda help us to size up, you know, what is ultimately the opportunity here? Are there, you know, big categories, big regions that you really haven’t been taking advantage of that you think you could unlock if you kind of clear out some of these underperforming legacy relationships?

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Sure. Thanks for the question. Look, I don’t wanna say they’re underperforming, right? I think these are proactive decisions we’re making based on the improvement to the company. You know, when we had balance sheet issues, which I think we have largely solved at this point, you know, we took a lot of deals on the licensing side, some of them small. You know, stacking a lot of nickels show, shows real revenue. I think we’re taking, you know, especially with David on board and the editorial strategy we have, you know, we’re taking a much more deliberate approach to long-term brand health. Some of the deals are just not underperforming, they’re just deals that are off-brand. We’re looking for fewer and bigger partners.

That should allow us, you know, in the future, to be much more efficient operating anyways for the business. It’s hard to sort of give guidance on it ’cause it’s sort of a step function, as I’ve always described licensing. You know, licensing has the potential to be substantially larger than it is today. That is going to come down to what we’re doing on the editorial side of the business as well. You know, we are one brand, which is Playboy, and we have to make sure that what we do on the editorial side aligns with what we do on the licensing side, especially in the Western Hemisphere, and that’s what we’re focused on. You know, part of that, Alex, was China. We didn’t do new deals in China.

There were some deals that were expiring there. Because of UTG, we put all of that on hold. Part of that is proactively in the U.S., as a couple deals came up, decided that we’re not going to renew them as we have a larger strategy for U.S. licensing moving forward.

Alex Fuhrman, Analyst, Lucid Capital Markets: Got it. Okay. That makes sense.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: I think to answer your question, there’s a lot of categories that we are targeting right now, but that will tie directly to what we’re doing on the content side. You know, as we relaunched, you know, this Playmate franchise, which is off to a great start, there’s a lot of opportunity for products around Playmates. When you think about color cosmetics, you think about lingerie, you think about swim in our move to Miami, there are some opportunities there that we’re excited about moving forward. You know, rest of the world, obviously, you know, putting Karol G on the cover, phenomenal influencer and musician.

There’s a lot of white space in South America, and so that is deliberate, you know, moving forward, which is, you know, you start with content that opens the doors for us, and then you start to build around it.

Alex Fuhrman, Analyst, Lucid Capital Markets: Yeah. That makes sense, Ben. Thanks for that. You mentioned paid voting, some pretty big early numbers there. You know, can you talk about how profitable that business is and how big that could get for you?

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Yeah. Let’s just start. You know, we’re only a couple weeks into this new contest, which is a collaboration between Playboy and Honey Birdette. Honey Birdette has designed a capsule collection of Playboy lingerie, and we’re excited to see how that performs. We have already now surpassed, I think as of today, the 17,000 contestants that we had registered in the last contest, and we still have about a month to go in registration. We think paid voting could be millions and millions of dollars a year. You know, let’s see how this contest does. You know, the early economics of the first one, even with all of our technical issues we have, and that we have now, you know, resolved with a new partner, you know, it was very, very promising.

On an annualized basis, that was multiple $7 figures. I think if we do this one right and you get up to 30,000 plus contestants, you know, this contest alone should be multiple $7 figures from a revenue perspective. The profitability is great, but more importantly, it’s the top of the funnel. Remember, you know, as I sort of said in the prepared remarks, you know, between sort of free content that sits out there as well as some of these contests, you know, the last time we did this in the fall, we had 500,000 users register at playboy.com. We own that data moving forward, that allows us to now go back and market, you know, membership or subscription and other offerings to those users.

Not only is paid voting, you know, extremely profitable for us, but it’s an unbelievable top of the funnel, which is, you know, the women sign up to win the cash prize and to become the face of the Honey Birdette Playboy lingerie line. They go out to social. They ask their fans to vote for them. Their fans vote for them, but they’re voting for them at Playboy, and then we own that data moving forward. It serves multiple purposes for us as part of our larger, you know, content, media, and experiences strategy. You know, we’re excited to see how the Playboy Honey Birdette line performs as well.

Alex Fuhrman, Analyst, Lucid Capital Markets: Great. That’s really helpful. Thank you very much.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Thanks, Alex.

Operator: The next question we have is from James Heaney of Jefferies. Please go ahead.

James Heaney, Analyst, Jefferies: Yeah, great. Thank you, guys. Ben, can we just get an update on the success that you’re seeing with the magazine? I mean, obviously, you’ve generated a lot of hype with the Karol G cover, we’d just be keen to hear about that release and how it’s driving halo effects and traffic into your digital properties as well.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: James, thanks for the question. Look, obviously Karol G is a huge name, but most importantly, we have two other huge names lined up behind her for the balance of this year. The conversations we’re having with talent, I would say, are getting easier and easier. You know, as far as traffic, you know, we launched what I would say is a very preliminary membership or subscription with the Karol G cover. We have a lot of learnings from it, but very pleased with the initial results of the number of people that have subscribed. Actually, a little bit shocking that in some of the earlier things we did, we saw more people subscribe for print. This one, we’re actually seeing a lot of people subscribing for digital.

The print magazine sold out as, I think we said, within the first day, online. Wish we had more because we obviously left some on the table there. The sell-through at Newsstand was very strong as well. That’s all part of our top of the funnel, right? It’s getting those names to drive traffic that we then drive into a paywall situation, moving forward. Without getting into specific numbers yet, because it’s still really early and we have a lot of learnings, very encouraged by the early results. We’re seeing the same thing with Playmates, right?

Launching Playmates on a monthly basis on social and then getting them to drive to see their galleries behind a paywall at playboy.com is also showing, you know, positive, you know, very positive results and something that we’ve learned a lot from. As I’ve said before in previous calls, you know, everything with us is now about testing and then iterating, testing and iterating. We will continue to put resources behind things that are working, and we’ll put resources behind things that aren’t working. Early on, what we’re doing on the media side, especially with Philip and David now on board, are very promising sides for a lot of growth in the future.

James Heaney, Analyst, Jefferies: Yeah, that’s great. Maybe just one for Mark. Was hoping you could talk about some of the OpEx levers that you continue to see in the business. I mean, you’ve done a great job taking out OpEx over the last year. Particularly, I think sales and marketing was strong. Interested kind of where you see potential for additional cost savings going forward.

Marc Crossman, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Yeah. And thank you for the question, I think we have a lot of room in, you know, the tech space with our tech stack. We’re integrating AI throughout the company. We’re finding that to, you know, to help just on an overall basis bring costs down. In addition to that, there are probably a, you know, a few other things we can do that we probably shouldn’t be talking about. It’s, Yeah, like I said, there are still levers there, and we’ll continue to pull them.

James Heaney, Analyst, Jefferies: Great. Thank you.

Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end of the question and answer session, and I would like to turn the call back to Ben Kohn for closing remarks.

Ben Kohn, Chief Executive Officer, Playboy, Inc.: Thank you, operator, and thank you to everyone for joining us today. Q1 was a quarter of visible execution across all four pillars: Revenue growth, our fifth consecutive quarter of positive Adjusted EBITDA, the closing of the UTG transaction, and continued double-digit growth at Honey Birdette. As we move through the balance of 2026, we remain focused on disciplined capital allocation, putting Playboy back at the center of culture and further delevering the balance sheet. We appreciate your continued support and look forward to updating you on our progress in the months to come. If you have any further questions, please feel free to reach out to our IR firm, MZ Group, who would be happy to answer them. Thank you. We look forward to talking to you on the Q2 call.

Operator: That concludes today’s conference. Thank you for joining us. You may now disconnect your lines.