Edgewell Personal Care Company Barclays 19th Annual Global Consumer Conference

Yeah. Thanks, Lauren, and great to be with you here today. Look, one of the things that I think happens more often than not is when a company separates itself out, as we did from Energizer in 2015, and became two separate independent, publicly traded companies, you don't always have everything you need to win and be successful in that moment. When I joined, part of the journey was to create a company that could stand on its own, win and compete, and be successful against some of the best players in the world, which we go against every day. It's taken a while, but I think we're there now in terms of having what we need to compete and be successful. I'd point out a couple of things, maybe two or three things, that matter in terms of what we've put in place and done.

The first is people. When I arrived, the positivity engagement score was 59%. So four out of 10 were actively or passively disengaged and not interested in what we were doing. That doesn't work. Today, that is north of 80. So we're at 82% last year, positive engagement, and so we've got a fired up, motivated team who cares about what we do. We've got a new, it's not new anymore, but we've put in place a new purpose, values, and behaviors structure to the company. The purpose is make useful things joyful. We have four values. It's in the lexicon of how we talk to each other, and run the company. So it's pretty cool that we've got that embedded. That's a big part of the foundational work.

The other thing we've done is we have upgraded the leadership teams, not only the leaders that lead each of the units, but the teams underneath with a significant talent infusion. So the first thing is this whole thing around having great people who are highly capable and can win, is the first thing I'd call out. The second thing is a consumer focus. The company historically ran with global teams. It became kind of the United Nations, if you will. It sounded good. You theoretically had some scale, but you didn't really resonate locally with the messaging and the way we were building the brands with any local consumers anywhere. By putting the consumer at the center of everything we do and then localizing how we go to market and basically eliminating the global teams, has been a big enabler.

That'd be the second thing I'd call out. Then the third thing is the portfolio. We've done a lot of work on the portfolio. We have a significantly better portfolio today. We divested an infant care business, Diaper Genie, Litter Genie, and all of that in 2019. We divested our Feminine Care business. As you know, this year, we closed the deal. Fran led that deal, closed it in February. Sold it at a premium valuation to the total company, despite it being growth dilutive, margin dilutive, and capital intensive and not fitting. That was a big deal for us, to monetize that and frankly, sell it to Essity, who's a much better parent for that business.

In the meantime, we bought four separate businesses, Bulldog, Cremo, Jack Black, and Billie, which are now a key part of the portfolio, all growing nicely and a real part of the growth program going forward. So people, consumer focus, and portfolio are the things I would point to.

Yeah. I think about this all the time, and I think in some respects, a company our size is always going to be in transformation of some sort. Things are moving so fast around us. The capabilities you needed in the past to win are not the capabilities in the future. I've mentally set myself towards we're always going to be doing something and needing to do something. The transformation phase we're just completing is, I talked about the portfolio sale of Feminine Care. We're still running a TSA on that. That's about done. We've got a plant consolidation program in our shave network, going from four shave plants to one here in the Americas. We're midstream on that, and the North American turnaround has been a big part of the transformation for us. That's been the focus. As I look to the future and we get that all behind us, we're a more capable company that can grow and win with this work, but we still have a big gap in front of us.

We've been put together via a series of acquisitions over the years, so our systems aren't harmonized. In some cases, our hierarchies don't align, and the work we do every day is too manual in nature. The next phase is going to be not only a structure and process way of working simplification, but a technology enablement to automate more of how we run the company. No better time than today to get on the AI train, and in some cases, accelerate that technology transformation than in the past. Would have taken years. There's some ways to cut the cycle and move faster.

I would say, simplification enabled by technology is the next journey of transformation we're looking at.

Yeah. Look, we were declining in North America for the better part of the last two years, a little over two years. Not only were we declining in our organic net sales, but we were coming off a period where we had lost market share for the previous four or five years, kind of over that time period. As we came into this year, we put a guide out there, and I think you and some others were, I'm not saying you were skeptical, but people were skeptical, could we step up and deliver the second half inflection that we're doing right now? What was underlying that was the North American step-up from decline into growth. North America grew 3% in the quarter that we just reported, the first growth quarter in that way in a couple of years.