Sharon Price John
Analyst · Jefferies. Please proceed with your question
Thanks, Allison, and good morning, everyone. For the start of the year, we noted and anticipated headwinds from the negative impact of the changes in revenue recognition, the significant comparative challenge of the January closure of our most productive store in Anaheim and continued traditional traffic declines in traditional retail. In addition to these anticipated hurdles, the quarter saw what we believed to be a short-term negative impact from the liquidation sale Toys“R”Us, which seem to exacerbate the traffic situation in the quarter. These factors combined, some anticipated and some not, resulted in first quarter sales and profit which trailed the prior year's quarter and fell below expectations. In contrast, the quarter showed positive results across key operational metrics including improved conversion, dollars per transaction and units per transaction even with simultaneous disciplined management of expenses and inventory. Additionally, the ongoing engagement and consumer affinity for our brand is demonstrated through the sales growth in our proprietary products although not enough to overcome the comparative double digit decreases in licensed movie sales versus last year when we were enjoying carryover success of properties that excelled against our core growth segment and had broad appeal, which aids in capturing traffic from nontraditional guests. These shifting dynamics plus the Toys“R”Us liquidation, which by the way we believe to be a positive for us in the long run led to a larger than expected double-digit traffic decline in the first quarter. With that, our goal is to stay focused on advancing our strategy to evolve and transform our business model away from primarily being an in-line mall-based retailer to becoming a more diversified multi-faceted consumer brand. To that end, notably, we recorded a double-digit increase in e-commerce and growth in franchise revenue which was buoyed by the exciting addition of our recent China franchisee to our roster. Before I go into some more specifics about our key initiatives to address traffic trends and progress on strategic programs, let me highlight some of the first quarter financial results. Revenue totaled $83.2 million reflecting an 8.8% decrease. While traffic decline pressured our topline, it's important to note that approximately one-third of the $8 million revenue declines in the prior year was due to the adoption of the new revenue recognition standard and closure of our top performing location at Disney Anaheim. Merchandise margin expanded 30 basis points. SG&A declined by almost $3 million, and consolidated inventory declined by over 10%. Also, we remain debt free as we invested in supporting business evolution to drive further future growth and utilize $5.3 million in cash to repurchase over $600,000 common shares since the end of fiscal 2017. As noted, although these financial results did not meet our expectations, we continue to make improvements on many of our more direct controllable including, generating the aforementioned increases across operational metrics including improvement in conversion and achieving the highest dollars per transaction in units per transaction in the company's history, delivering positive results in e-commerce as we leverage our recently upgraded Web platform and started to roll out new capabilities, increasing revenue from our diversification initiatives including international franchising and outbound licensing, and continuing to evolve our retail store footprint prioritizing new openings in tourist locations and smaller alternative formats that generate higher sales productivity and stronger four-wall contribution margins. While we are aggressively taking action to evolve our business model to be able to more predictably and successfully operate in today's economy, it is critical that Build-A-Bear Workshop’s retail locations remain a popular destination for kids and families to make special memories. This fundamental tenet is the basis for us to continue to advance our efforts to become a multi-dimensional brand that can be monetized in a variety of ways beyond the very retail experience that created it. So, while we expect to benefit from our overall diversification efforts in a variety of ways, we are acutely aware of the importance to ensure that our stores are as productive as possible even as the broader strategy continues to be executed. We strongly believe that continued improvements in our core store operations, plus a more efficient retail footprint will bode well for Build-A-Bear Workshop in the long run. We also believe there are opportunities on the traffic front, and we are taking action to implement a variety of initiatives in an effort to increase both trial and repeat purchases at our store. These efforts include, one, we intend to leverage the existing traffic as much as possible. In fact, even though we have already seen strong conversion improvements over the past few quarters due to our extensive training efforts, we recently implemented a successful test of a real-time conversion tracker and reporting system to further enhance these new skills at the store level and just completed a rollout of this valuable tool across the balance of the chain. Second, we intend to improve traffic trends to both consumer acquisition and increased repeat purchases. In addition to the ongoing effort to elevate the use of our data driven systems to both find and remind consumers about Build-A-Bear, we are elevating our efforts to drive core Girls business and reinvigorate our overall party and birthday business. On the Girls front, although we've recently enjoyed broadening consumer appeal, Girls remain our single largest consumer group. As such, given the anticipated comparative decrease in key girl-focused license movie partnerships this year versus prior years, we developed a pipeline proprietary product offering for our various girl segments to be strategically rolled out throughout the year. In mid-March, we successfully introduced our Girl Scout line and recently launched the new Beary Fairy collection. This will be followed by an enhanced assortment of our popular Rainbow Friends line in the second quarter and an innovative new anime inspired collection targeted to older girls that is slated for a launch in July. That offers an expanded merchandise selection including non-plush toys, a graphic novel, and gaming platform within the dedicated app. Importantly, the new partnership with the Girl Scouts in North America leverages our exclusive S'mores Campout Bear to actively build both the girls business and the party business. Girl Scout troops around the country look forward to planning a fun and engaging event at Build-A-Bear, it's a way to celebrate and utilize their hard earned cookie money. Since the launch, we have seen a significant increase in Girl Scout party bookings which has contributed to an increase in total party bookings across the chain. Speaking of parties, these important in-store celebrations not only serve as a powerful way to drive margin accretive revenue with higher dollars per transaction, but also as a mechanism for consumer trial as invitees are often first-time guests. And, although, we're currently enjoying exciting results from the Girl Scout party effort, our number one reason for parties has always been and remains to be birthday. In fact, our data indicates that our birthday business including a birthday party or a birthday of one, represents up to a third of our revenue with kids visiting our stores three times more often for their birthday than any other known occasion. Although our total reported birthday business remains strong as a percent of sales, our birthday parties, which we defined groups of six or more, has seen some softness in recent years likely due to increased party competition and a reduction in overall birth rate. Research, however, tells us that a visit to Build-A-Bear Workshop is practically synonymous with childhood, revealing that parents think that Build-A-Bear is a rite of passage for kids. Because dollars spent on birthday party celebrations for kids is on the rise and Build-A-Bear provides the perfect millennial mom, social media shareable moment, we believe there is an opportunity to more proactively take a larger share of the total kids birthday business. With that in mind, this summer, we are planning to introduce an exciting new program designed to drive both our birthdays of one and birthday parties with the goal of positively impacting a number of key areas of opportunity throughout the remainder of the year including improving overall traffic, driving new guest acquisition, and increasing total revenue. As you may recall, at the end of last year, we noted that our strategic goals for 2018 were to continue to diversify our retail store base to focus on places where families are increasingly going to shop or going for an entertainment and making memories, continue to diversify our revenue base by both growing our existing franchise partners and adding new international franchisees while further expanding our outbound brand licensing, and continue to grow e-commerce sales. Let me give you a quick update about where we are on these goals. As to the effort to diversify our retail footprint to reflect where families now go to shop or for fun in entertainment or memory making, we've been actively identifying and securing more tourist locations and are pleased to share that we have now opened new Build-A-Bear Workshops at Pier 39 in San Francisco and the Inner Harbor in Baltimore. We also have a number of additional tourist location deals in advanced stages that we expect to be able to announce in the coming months. Successfully executing this strategy takes tremendous planning and time, but it is important as Build-A-Bear Workshop tends to over index on key metrics in tourist locations where we are able to take advantage of natural traffic that these areas generate, as well as the increased tourist mindset that drives the higher than average dollars per transaction in in-stores. Our destination specific procure products for these stores makes Build-A-Bear a great souvenir in addition to being a fun family experience. Given that, locations such as these also tend to outperform our average annual store sales volume of around $1 million with some of these stores already generating or expected to generate multiple millions of dollars in revenue each year. For clarity, our tourist location definition not only includes standalone stores in places like New York City, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, or Pigeon Forge, Tennessee, at the foothills of the Smoky Mountains, but locations like Mall of America. Although technically a mall, we count it as a tourist location given the composition of the consumer base. So, we are especially excited to announce the planned opening of a new Build-A-Bear Bakeshop in Mall of America to complement the flagship Build-A-Bear Workshop also located there. Therefore, we will soon have three locations in Mall of America given that we also operate a concourse shop. As I alluded to earlier in the comments, we have continued to optimize our real estate by remodeling and relocating existing stores to be a more profitable and highly productive concourse shop. In 2017, we added 23 concourse shops to our mix. As a reminder, these 200-square foot standalone locations require a significantly less capital, operate on shorter lease terms that are generally percent based and generate comparatively high dollars per transaction or excuse me dollars per square foot. Additionally, concourse shops can be easily relocated providing higher flexibility to effectively react to the changing traffic environment. We expect to have 40 to 45 concourse shops open by year-end. Finally, as it relates to our real estate evolution, we continue to carefully evaluate the fleet as a substantial portion of our leases come to an end. Each one of these natural lease events provides us with a moment to make the best decision possible for that location. First, in certain more favorable mall locations, the cost of our new discovery format tends to outperform heritage stores on key metrics. We expect to selectively invest in remodels throughout the balance of the year. Separately, we also expect to continue to operate certain heritage locations as is by extending the lease on a shorter term basis with more favorable terms. Although in these heritage locations, we believe it is possible that traffic and sales could continue to show some erosion. Given that the location is fully depreciated combined with these new terms we expect to be able to generate meaningful profitability, which is in part enabling us to self-fund our transformation. If we open these new more diverse locations albeit smaller foot plants, we are making meaningful progress in repositioning our experience on retail stores to be higher productive locations in a range of formats. As we roll-out these sites, we expect to have more total locations and less total square footage. Initially, much of the volume from these stores is expected to replace the lost revenue from both the recently closed Anaheim door and the impact of anticipated continued softness in total traffic in traditional retail locations. On the e-commerce front, historically, we have under indexed in dot com sales as a percent of brick-and-mortar sales when compared to industry norms which we believe provides tremendous opportunity for growth. Accordingly, many of the changes we've been making as a company are designed to allow Build-A-Bear to more fully participate in the digital economy in an additive way. Our goal is to continue to optimize our new Web platform to drive online sales by adding new features and capabilities while identifying and driving sales opportunities that are not as reliant on, nor cannibalistic to our experience of retail model. As an example, late in the first quarter, we launched a dedicated gifting section on our website directed to the adult gift giver as we called the Build-A-Bear gift shop. The gift shop is our first step in a comprehensive plan to participate in a larger and growing online gifting business. As we believe our wide offering of personalized and affinity selections from sports licenses, to collector driven movie properties provide unique gifts for a wide variety of recipients, from new graduates to new babies. Separately, far from grandparents can also send the gift of our in-store experience. They have an option to ship an unstuffed furry friend so that the recipient can take the product to a store near them and engage in all the fun Build-A-Bear has to offer. Of note, this type of transaction often generates additional in-store sales that are incremental to the original online sale. On the international franchise front as noted, we are very pleased with performance over a new China franchise partner who currently operates two locations with up to 10 more planned for this fiscal year. We expect to add a number of new territories that have been in development for some time as we finalize agreements from current LOI status and secure additional commitments from other parties. And on the outbound licensing front, have signed new agreements designed to expand the consumer reach of Build-A-Bear both categorically and demographically. These new licenses bring our total to 13 license arrangement with more in the pipeline across nearly 20 categories, thereby extending our ability to bring our brand to existing and new consumers while adding margin accretive revenue to our company as 2018 progresses. As a reminder, we intend to use total revenue and profitability as a key measurement as we expect to see ongoing choppiness in comparable store sales, while we aggressively evolve our real estate footprint and portfolio. In closing, I remain confident and encouraged about our ability to deliver sustained long-term profitable growth. Our iconic brand remains at the center of this effort, giving us the permission to not only deliver a great retail experience, but to leverage the power of the brand to create new, more profitable revenue streams. With that in mind, we are committed to delivering our stated goal of transforming this multigenerational company from a retailer that happened to build a strong brand to a global branded intellectual property company that happens to have vertical retail as one of its channels. Now, I would like to hand the call over to Vojin to provide some more details on the financial side.