Party City

Party City suggested it would hike prices through the holidays

Party City’s CEO said the company was “exercising our pricing power in the celebrations market by expanding our already strong understanding of where the consumer is receptive to increased prices.”  “BRADLEY MORGAN WESTON, PRESIDENT, CEO & DIRECTOR, PARTY CITY HOLDCO INC.:Given the still dynamic operating environment, we will remain flexible and agile with our learnings from this year, which gives us increased confidence in the trajectory of our business as well as our inflation mitigation strategy. To that end, as we sit here today, we anticipate supply chain headwinds to persist into 2022. Importantly, we are heavily invested in delivering an improved customer experience as well as exercising our pricing power in the celebrations market by expanding our already strong understanding of where the consumer is receptive to increased prices. We have seen success already on this front as reflected in our strong recent results.” (Q3 2021 Party City Holdco Inc Earnings Call, 11/3/2021)

Party City said it planned to keep increasing prices through the rest of the holiday season and into 2022. “KARRU MARTINSON, ANALYST, JEFFERIES LLC, RESEARCH DIVISION: Supply chain starting to normalize as we come up for the seasonally slow first quarter, do you see yourself catching up at that point? And how would we think about pricing going into ’22? BRADLEY MORGAN WESTON: Yes. So supply chain — regarding the supply chain disruptions, I think we all know that it’s pretty broadly discussed issue in the industry. And what we see is the bottleneck really created by the pandemic. So it will subside eventually. The big swings in supply and demand kind of need to smooth themselves out in each of the touchpoints and the logistics process. It’s hard to say exactly how long it will last. However, we’re making supply chain investments to help partially mitigate the impact and the teams are doing an excellent job of navigating the difficult supply chain environment. And as Todd mentioned, as we sit here today, we anticipate supply chain headwinds to persist into 2022. And we continue to use price to mitigate those headwinds. We started that price work in Q3, which had a positive impact on netting those mitigation costs down. We’ll see additional impact through price in Q4, and that will increase as we move into ’22.” (Q3 2021 Party City Holdco Inc Earnings Call, 11/3/2021)