Sharon Price John
Analyst · Stephens. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Allison. Good morning, everyone and thanks for joining us today. The fourth quarter represented a solid finish to another productive year. Since my rival in 2013, the company has been keenly focused on achieving and sustaining profitability by driving operational improvement across a number of functional areas. We are pleased to note that fiscal 2015 marks our third consecutive year of margin growth, profit expansion and positive consolidated comparable sales. Furthermore as our recent guidance suggests, given the impact of the fundamental changes we have made from infrastructure to talent. We expect to report our fourth consecutive year of consolidated comparable sales and profit improvement in fiscal 2016. We believe this consistent performance demonstrates our ability and potential to increasingly monetize our powerful Build-A-Bear brand to the evolution of our business model. The objective of this evolve model is to diversify and developed More Consumers categories and locations by leveraging a number of additive revenues streams that takes Build-A-Bear beyond its traditional mall retail focus. Internally, we simply refer to this effort as our More strategy, as it reflects our goal to systematically and profitably build the business by appealing to More People with More Products made available through more places. As noted, over the past few years we've been in the process of improving both the effectiveness and efficiency of our infrastructure while securing a talented leadership team to execute our plans. With many of these important initiatives behind us we believe our company is well positioned to begin generating sustained profitable growth. Many thanks to our thousands of employees across multiple countries for their valued contributions through this transition period. As we previously reported our fiscal 2015 fourth quarter results include a decline in consolidated comparable sales of 5.6% which follows a 9.8% increase in the fourth quarter of 2014 delivering a positive consolidated comp on a two year basis. Merchandize margin expansion of 50 basis points and pretax income of $9.9 million as compared to $12.6 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2014. The majority of the year-over-year decrease was due to widened less weaker sales compared to fiscal 2014 which included a 53 week that was reported in the last year's fourth quarter. In the quarter and in a difficult macro retail environment, our sales started slowly but gained momentum throughout the period culminating with our best sales occurring during the weeks of Christmas and New Year. Top Stories included our proprietary Merry Mission offering which appealed to our broad consumer base during its limited eight weeks holiday periods. As you may recall, we had strong sales when we originally introduced Merry Mission in the fourth quarter 2014 as the first development of our own intellectual property that was supported with a downloadable app and game. To build on an initial success, we enhanced the story in 2015 adding our new snowy white Glisten character and launched the story with a fully integrated marketing program including in-store, TV and direct mail similarly to our successful 2014 campaign. This approach propelled Glisten to this particularly popular with girls to our number one selling items for the fourth quarter in both units and dollar volume. And on the whitening theme front, we successfully introduce our new Frozen Fever collection to continue to leverage the strength of the property to support our young girls business and to help offset the high impact in the initial Frozen launch in the fourth quarter of 2014. To drive the boys business, we introduce our Star Wars line, we significantly gain momentum as the quarter progressed, especially as excitement heightened for the December 18, movies release of the Force Awaken. Star wars was our number one boy business and significantly contributed to our teen plush consumer sales as expected. Ecommerce revenue including mobile grew double-digits in the quarter driven by an upgraded platform, improvement in our online marketing precision and exclusive product offerings. For example, we developed merchandize to drive our teens plus gift giving infinity consumers including an online only gift box in a Pikachu bundle that including our own exclusive Pokémon collector card, which launched in mid December and sold out in 10 days. As a part of our real estate evolution, we benefitted from the introduction of our new discovery store format that I will expand on in a moment, and we also added sales to the continue diversification away from traditional mall by successfully opening six stores in our first ever value driven outlet concept in both the U.S. and the UK. Separately, we once again extended our holiday presents with seven shop-in shops with key [90] (Ph) flagship doors. As we established it, we also established a relationship with Gaylord Hotel by opening our first seasonal store in their popular Ice Exhibition in Orlando. As in 2014, these incremental revenues streams broaden our reach to a wide variety of holiday shoppers in large urban markets at this critical high traffic time period. For the year, we achieved consolidated comparable sales of 1% growth on top of 1.7% increase to prior year. Merchandize margin improvement of 150 basis points, which drove our gross margin to 47.1% our highest rate since 2006, and pre-tax income of $17.9 million up 11.7% from 2014. From a strategic perspective in 2015, we successfully extended our for consumer engagement with a roster of relevant licenses and new intellectual properties such as Honey Girls and Promise Pets, enhanced by Play Beyond The Plush related apps, games, music and videos, drove ecommerce sales by expanding our teen plush segment by leveraging gifting, licenses and collectable to appeal to this generally less price sensitive demographics. That is more likely to purchase online and launched a number of outbound Build-a-Bear license program across a variety of categories, while signing new agreements with partners like Spin Master, a top-five global toy company and Frankford Candy the largest licensed candy manufacturers in the United States. Additionally, we deployed capital to further diversify our real estate portfolio with our compelling discovery format. Opened new value outlet stores and increased shop-in shop presence with seasonal pop-up location to evolve our international strategy including the conversion of the franchise store in Denmark at Copenhagen popular Tivoli Garden’s tourist location to an owned and operated location. To invest in updated and adding critical new IT systems including TST retail and end-to-end merchandise planning tools design to improve our ability to manage inventory, which we expect to result in continued margin expansion and to repurchase 1.7 million shares of our common stock for an aggregate amount of $26 million. All while posting our highest units per transaction since 2008 at almost four units and achieving the highest dollars per transaction in our history slightly over $44. Overall, we are pleased with this year’s accomplishment and believe that the disciplined approached to executing our More strategy has been instrumental to our delivery of three consecutive years of consolidating comparable sales and profit improvement and believe that the investments we have made will enable us to transition to sustain profitable growth. With that in mind, we intend to continue to focus on our More strategy in 2016 with specific objectives designed to deliver against our More Places, More People and More Product platforms. Including More Places, the keystones to this initiative is the diversification, expansion and upgrade of our real estate portfolio. Since 2013, we have been in an active process of evolving our presence beyond traditional malls by closing unproductive stores and opening new permanent stores in a variety of locations as well as adding shop-in shops and pop-ups in high traffic seasonal and/or tourist site. One of the most important efforts to-date in this comprehensive multiyear initiative has been the introduction of our new format called the Discovery Store. If you may know, we recently launched this new format in one of flagship doors in the Mall of America a highly popular tourist destination. We ended the year with 11 locations representing a combination of in-place remodels, remodels within the same mall, but with an improved position and completely new stores. In addition to refreshing our aging brand look, our objective for the new design is to drive both overall sales and sales per square foot. To do this, we rethought practically aspects of the store from a consumer centric and business building perspective, including the creation of a focal point using our most unique selling proposition, the stuffing process and Heart Ceremony. In fact the front and center placement of our new high impact stuffer versus the previous back of the store position at the low profile stuffer is creating least line theater and drawing in traffic, while opening up valuable wall space for merchandize without the need for additional square footage. As we have noted, we're pleased with the performance of the remodeled doors, which have delivered double-digit growth versus the norm driven by a substantial increase in traffic, combined with above average dollars per transaction and unit for transaction. Based on this initial positive result, we have now aggressively value engineered the new format to create standardized build out models for a variety of store types and sizes including allowing us to accelerate our plans to open new Discovery Stores in 2016 and beyond. With that in mind, we plan to end the year with 45 to 55 newer remodeled discovery stores including flagships at Myrtle Beach, Navy Pier in Chicago and the previously mentioned Denmark Store in Tivoli Garden all of which generate several million dollars in annual sales. We also expect to open a new flagship stores in China this June in Disney Town at the Shanghai Disney Resort. Importantly, we expect to pay back for this new format to be less than two years and we have a four-wall contribution margin goal of over 20%. This goal was above our current contribution margin, which has already more than doubled the average of the fleet when our real estate initiative kicked off in 2013. Consistent with our retail diversification strategy, we expect to open additional stores in our outlet format in the year and offer a brand experience with Carnival Cruise Lines and the number of their ships starting in the second half of 2016 using a wholesale model. Finally, on the international front, during 2015, we focused on evolving the overall franchise model while updating critical processes in system including the initiation of a new global product ordering tool. As a result of these efforts and the initial results of the discovery format we expect the franchises to open an estimated 20 to 25 new royalty generating stores by the end of the year. On the More People front, we are focused on further enhancing our business with our key consumers segments including girls, boys and our teens plush consumer. Important efforts to deliver this goal in 2016 include, driving our younger girls business with a continuation of important license property like Frozen while attracting older girls with the launches new concept tied to some exciting films that will be premiering later this year. We will also build on our existing proprietary properties such as Honey Girls with a refreshed story line and new characters. Strengthening our boys business by driving our key properties including Power Patrol and the Star Wars line, with a introduction of new characters, as well as launching a number of products associated with a variety of movie releases throughout the year and continuing to attract new teen plush consumers with our roster of best-in-class affinity and multi-generation license properties, while appealing to the large gift market during the traditional high traffic seasonal timeframe of Valentines, Easter and Christmas with our own proprietary product. For example, our recent Share Your Heart Valentines program offered a number of add-on for the gift giver, including Build-A-Bear branded conversation heart candies with our licensed partner NECCO, premium branded chocolates from PRAIM, plush roses and our reported down stuffer that enabled consumers of all ages to create a one of a kind Valentine's gift with a personalized message straight from the hearts. Concerning on More Products strategy, we continue to expect to offer new and different ways for our consumers to engage with our brand through our Play Beyond the Plush program offered for existing intellectual properties such as Promise Pets, Honey Girls and Merry Mission. With the generation of approximately 10 million digital interfaces from these supporting apps, games and music videos, we clearly extended the lions share and consumer engagement with these popular collection and with our brand overall. Separately as mentioned, our outbound licensing program is in the marketplace across a number of categories and we are pleased to be working with Spin Master to make market and distribute a line of Build-A-Bear branded toys. The new toy line is schedule to launch in mass-market retailers this fall and is expected to be both top line and margin accretive while significantly increasing our brand. As it relates to our use of capital and align with our overall strategy, we expect to focus on the following areas. The continued the pacification and expansion of our real estate portfolio, they continue to upgrade in addition of infrastructure and opportunistic repurchase of our stock. Thus far, in the first quarter we are posting positive consolidated comparable sales. Significant contributors include the continued success of our key license products our slumber party offering which was introduced post Christmas and designed to appeal to the large number of girls that received gift cards in their holiday stocking, as well as our previously mentioned valentine’s Share Your Heart campaign, which include a successful cross marketing partnerships with Save The Children. Separately, we are excited about our new proprietary Easter offering that has an innovated advertiseable feature products fall Hide & Go Beep. Note that Easter falls on March 27 and will again be reported in our first quarter results. Overall, we now have a proven strategy in place that is driving results and the right team to execute our plans and deliver our revenue and profit goals in 2016. Now I would like to turn the call over to Voin to review our fourth quarter and full-year financials in more detail.