Restaurant brand’s CEO Michael Skipworth sees potential for hyper-personalized customer experience
Wingstop Inc. is prepared to debut its new proprietary technology stack, MyWingstop, in April, after testing the e-commerce and digital experience in about 150 restaurants, executives said Wednesday.
The Dallas-based fast-casual brand expects to the new MyWingstop platform to help drive ticket totals and traffic domestically, executives said in a conference call with analysts after releasing fourth quarter 2023 earnings.
“We are really excited about MyWingstop,” said Michael Skipworth, Wingstop CEO and president. “It's something we've been working on for the last few years — a big capital investment for us — and it's our investment that we've made in building our own e-commerce and digital experience that's customized specifically for Wingstop’s business.”
Progress has been encouraging in the pilot test, he added, and the company is on track to roll it out in April systemwide.
“Something we're really encouraged by is the ability that it's going to unlock for us as it relates to really leaning into that first-party data,” Skipworth said. “We have in our ability to really create a hyper-personalized customer experience customer journey, which we think in turn will impact conversion over time [and] will impact frequency, and those are things that were in retention those are things we're excited about obviously.”
The ordering experience changes a bit, Skipworth added, “but a majority of this works behind the scenes.” He sees it building on the brand’s journey to digitize every transaction. The brand ended the fourth quarter with 67% of transactions conducted digitally, he said.
Alex Kaleida, Wingstop’s chief financial officer, said the domestic advertising rate will move from 5% of sales to 5.3% — “and the intent of this fee is to cover ongoing operating expenses associated with MyWingstop.”
The rate will be consolidated in Wingstop’s advertising revenue and expense line and remain neutral of the profit and loss statement, Kaleida said.
For the fourth quarter ended Dec. 30, Wingstop reported net income of $18.8 million, or 64 cents a share, compared to $17.6 million, or 59 cents a share, in the same period a year ago. Total revenue was $127.1 million compared to $104.9 million in the prior-year quarter.
Domestic same-store sales in the fourth quarter increased 21.2%, and domestic average unit volumes rose to $1.8 million. For the 2023 fiscal year, domestic same-store sales increased 18.3%, the company said.
As of Dec. 30, Wingstop had 2,214 restaurants systemwide. That included 1,926 restaurants in the United States, of which 1,877 were franchised restaurants and 49 were company-owned, and 288 franchised restaurants in international markets and U.S. territories. During fiscal 2023, Wingstop had 255 net new systemwide restaurant openings.
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