I believe BBWI is going to crush earnings based on 5 months of store stalking and no one is talking about it. Literally not one mention about earnings on wallstreetbets. TLDR at the end.
Background:
I have been on paternity leave for a little over 5 months now. I live 20 minutes away from 3 different malls and thought I walking around them for an hour or two every day would be a great way to kill some time while also letting my newborn see new things. Around the same time I watched a video on how a Chinese coffee shop got outed for fake financials by people literally watching the store and counting the number of people buying things. That gave me the idea to track how many people were in stores and how many shopping bags I saw around the mall from each store indicating a purchase. Obviously there is a major difference between dozens of people watching stores vs just little old me but the data I gathered has been spot on for earning beats on what I considered to be outliers. The stores that have surprised me with their high volume are Gap, Abercrombie & Fitch, Urban Outfitters, Sephora, and of course Bath and Body Works.
Method:
All in all I have 124 days worth of data so far. I usually only visit one mall a day but sometimes two. Any day of the week and usually between 12pm and 5pm. I try and park at different entrances so I don’t get biased in my counting of bags because I park right next to one store or another. I go to three different malls each catering to a different economic class. Pretty much lower, middle, and high income. I do 2 passes, about and hour apart, of each store I am tracking. I count the number of customers in the store. While I walk around, I also count the number of bags I see from each store. This is a bit harder to trust though as people with multiple bags usually condense into one. So stores with small bags (looking at you Sephora) are underrepresented. I would occasionally go into BBWI and count the items in people carts too but only did this a handful of times.
Data:
The average number of people I have seen at BBWI is 9.82 on weekdays and 23.68 on weekends. This crushes the average from all the stores I tracked which was 2.98 on weekdays and 8.2 on weekends. The only store with a higher average was Sephora which was 10.36 and 25.25 respectfully. All three malls had similar numbers with the higher income mall being slightly higher but not enough to note. I think this was due to young girls traveling in packs of 3 or 4 which I didn’t see at the other two malls.
The average number of bags (aka purchases) for BBWI was 4.1 on weekdays and 11.67 on weekends. Which again crushes the average of just 1.45 and 3.11.
For some context here are pictures of the check out line Saturday 30 minutes apart. Wanted to hide people because I think it is rude for a random stranger to snap pictures of people and post them online. There are currently multiple tellers checking out customers with 5 more people in line.
30 minutes later and still 5 people in line
Other Things to Note
Male Skin Care – Something I didn’t track, but surprised me, was the number of males in the store alone or with another guy (this goes for Sephora as well). Doing a bit of research on the topic of men's skin care shows a 6.2% year over year growth and a 389% increase in TikTok videos on the subject in the last year. I think it is actually going to be higher based on what I am seeing at the stores and Gen Z starting to come into their own money. That generation has pushed the needle on male beauty standards much more towards the feminine astatic (think Timothee, Lil Nas X, Brady Potter, Jungkook) and with that comes skincare. This is a huge expanding market that is just getting tapped into and based on what I am seeing in person they are capturing the market well.
Dupe Culture – This has been on the rise over the last year but it is starting to snowball now. Gen Z and Millennials are finally starting to push back on the, “buy the brand not the product” mentality. This was evident with E.L.F.s recent earning report and will be echoed in BBWI. Their house products have been praised for matching much more expensive fragrances. Paulreactss is one of the most popular fragrance TikTokers with 1.5 million subscribers and he has videos identifying BBWI scents that dupe much more expensive variations. Seriously just google Bath and Body Works dupes and you will see tons of people gushing about what BBWI has to offer and people saying they bought tons of their new product line that came out in the end of Q1.
Subreddit – The Bath and Body Works subreddit has 86k subscribers. Just yesterday there is a post from an associate saying they are flooded with orders from their summer sales and people are buying literally entire lots of items. https://www.reddit.com/r/bathandbodyworks/comments/1d6t0dr/from_an_associate_to_customers_we_love_you_but/
Notable quotes from the thread:
"It’s just been the second day of SAS and already we’ve gotten over 100+ BOPIS orders placed"
"…and bringing in 2 or more baskets of items is just not only exhausting but also unfair to the other customers who would’ve wanted to get certain products but now can’t because someone else decided to buy all 10 sprays that were JUST put out…"
"Yep I felt so bad for my friends because everytime they went on break or even took a second to look away from the bopis, the number would go back to 99+"
TLDR – I have been to a Bath and Body Works over 250 times in the last 5 months to count the number of customers in the store. It has crushed my expectations. This coupled with male skin care rising and dupe brands like E.L.F. crushing earnings leads me to believe BBWI is going to kill earnings.
Position – 20k in stock and 8k in various calls expiring this week and next week.
I have been stalking local Bath and Body Work stores for 5 months and believe they are going to crush earnings.
byu/SDF_IT inwallstreetbets
Posted by SDF_IT
27 Comments
Well tell us what positions
This is the dumb shit i love
What amount do you need to make to make this worth your time
Position screenshots please. This is good daddy-DD btw, great use of your pat leave
https://preview.redd.it/bj0rb6blcd4d1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=4de6f3161ed57b5313e8d6d66e8d41b47d3d0798
Positions for you untrusting folks out there.
Finally some good DD
Have you considered that everyone in your town might just smell really bad?
Bath and Body works will crush because the main generation buying a bunch of shit (mine: millenials) used it back in the day to smell good to attract people and right now their hormones are going buck wild to encourage kids.
The teenager and younger 20s will follow us because, for some fucking reason, post GFC is in now and all the millenial shit is in this pseudo revival of “the good times”
Dipping my toes with two calls.
I don’t understand…has the number risen or changed? You started counting on date X, it’s now date Y – do you see growth? Otherwise, isn’t store volume count already a known entity? Also, isn’t there seasonality and other variables in play?
Similar situation, the stink of this place causes my little one to scream … but often the crowds spilling into and out of this place prevent us from quickly passing it.
I would never shop here myself, so no position, but something’s driving people crazy about this place.
getting rich from bath products seems lame, i’m in 
I am reading wsb regularly. This is the first time I am tempted to trade on any post. I might actually try this shit. It sounds so stupid but also genious at the same time that it might work.
In for 2500 shares
I get dragged to this store every time I’m at the mall, always packed.
this level of regarded analysis is unlike ive ever seen before…
I don’t know why it’s popular, I’ve gone a few times in the middle of the weekday and there quite a few people shopping.
Look up when you walk into that store again. There is a customer traffic counter in the ceiling. I work for that company. We have this data in 1 minute increments for every single one of their stores in addition to 100s of thousands of stores around the world.
We also sell this data to institutional investors.
There is always someone smarter on the other side of the table.
My regards.
One of their major competitors, The Body Shop, unexpectedly closed all US stores in March or April of this year. E-commerce for TBS also closed down. All those customers are going to be snatched up by Bath and Body Works.
I’m not gonna lie. It’s probably going to beat earnings estimates and then tank on guidance.
https://preview.redd.it/dkvsv9k4qd4d1.png?width=750&format=png&auto=webp&s=5dca0afadb4f6a0581227dd5e2940609b3c37608
Heard 🫡 lmao
To the moon 🚀🚀🚀
I appreciate the work OP, I’m in for a few calls
This is basically what Peter Lynch used to do when he was crushing it with Magellan.
I’m joining you OP, your work will not be in vain.
What an unbelievably thoughtful post. Excellent due diligence.
Opening puts. Thanks
Girl goes to the mall.
Sees people shopping in a store.
Recommends people to buy calls.
No analysis on the company or its financials
You can’t make this shit up.
But it’s a 50/50 shot i guess. Stock might go up or down. Good luck