Sharon John
Analyst · SCC Research please proceed with your question
Thank you, Allison. Good morning, and thanks for joining us today. We are pleased to announce another strong quarterly performance for Build-A-Bear. Following the most profitable year in our company's history, we have built on that performance to deliver an all-time high for total revenues and profitability for the fiscal first half of 2022. We believe that our strategic plan, which capitalizes on our powerful brand executed with discipline and agility is the primary driver of our results.
This morning, I will begin with some highlights of our second quarter, followed by an update on the progress of our strategy that focuses on continuing our digital transformation, accelerating our store evolution and leveraging expanded omnichannel capabilities while utilizing our solid balance sheet and free cash flow to support key business initiatives intended to drive further profitable growth. Combined as noted, these initiatives led to a solid second quarter and record-breaking first half even as we navigated continued freight cost pressures and supply chain disruptions.
Our overall sales trends and traffic patterns at retail have continued to be positive as we start the third quarter. And while we are mindful of the macroeconomic uncertainties, we have demonstrated an ability to remain nimble and adapt our more diversified business model to navigate challenging circumstances and had already anticipated these supply chain issues and inflationary pressures. Therefore, we are reaffirming our annual guidance. Now let me turn to some highlights of the second quarter and first half.
Total revenues were $100.7 million, an increase over our strong top line results in last year's period. For the first half, total revenues were $218.3 million, a record-setting performance for our company's first half, representing a 17% increase over the prior year. pretax income was $7.6 million for the fiscal 2022 second quarter and includes the impact of approximately $4 million of incremental freight expense.
For the first half of fiscal 2022, pretax income was $25.8 million, an increase over the record-setting results of 2021. EBITDA was $10.7 million for the fiscal 2022 second quarter, again, including the impact of incremental freight expense. For the first half of fiscal 2022 EBITDA exceeded $32 million. And subsequent to the end of the second quarter, we completed the $25 million share repurchase authorized by our Board of Directors in November 2021.
And as announced yesterday, the Board has authorized a new program, which Voin will cover in more detail. Let me now turn the discussion to our pillars for growth, which include: one, accelerating a broad-reaching and comprehensive digital transformation; two, continuing to evolve our retail experience and footprint while taking advantage of our expanded omnichannel capabilities; and three, leveraging our solid financial position to invest in initiatives intended to drive growth and return value to our shareholders.
First, we are confident that our multiyear comprehensive digital transformation is providing benefits to our entire organization and driving positive results. A key to our success has been to bifurcate our digital shopping options and our retail store experience. Rather than solely focusing on digitizing the store experience that families love, a strategic and disciplined shift to diversify the consumer base has contributed to strong e-commerce demand, which is up triple digits compared to 2019 prior to the implementation of some of these initiatives.
Online, we over-index with teen and adult consumers, many of whom grew up with our brand. We drive engagement with this segment by offering a curated merchandise assortment that features licensed affinity products, adult centric fashion and accessories and broad-based gifting programs. Our store experience remains the entertaining hands-on step-by-step process that we're famous for and over-indexes with kids and their families and often leaves lasting memories that become a basis for a lifetime of engagement with our brand.
Interestingly, as we've continued to refine our communications and product assortment for older consumers, we've seen this demographic also return to our stores for the experience they know and love at increasing rates. We feel this evolved business model is creating synergy across channels, which is providing stability and resilience for all of our business. The initiatives to diversify our consumer base have contributed to growth in guest acquisition and retention and have positively impacted our database of first-party context.
As you know, we gained capabilities, which allowed us to accelerate our business makeshift to more efficiently reach an expanded addressable market as we enhanced resources, evolved our talent and improved our digital proficiency. This includes the implementation of select salesforce products, and I think it's notable that Salesforce has chosen to recognize Build-A-Bear as the marquee Dreamforce customer at their upcoming conference, one of the largest global tech events of the year, indicating the scale of what we've achieved in this space.
We are proud of our team and its accomplishments, which has also been recognized as one of the America's fastest-growing online shops 2022 and America's best trending online shops 2021 by Newsweek and Statista. In addition to the accomplishments in e-commerce, we believe that our digital marketing campaigns are contributing to sales growth in our retail stores by reaching more consumers and driving traffic in brick-and-mortar stores that continues to be positive and is outpacing reported national retail traffic.
We have also seen increased website traffic and engagement related to Build-A-Bear shopping trips, including our plan to visit and find the store pages. These 2 areas combined represent the second highest entry point to our site, only behind our homepage. In addition, traffic to the section to book a party and get details on our Count Your Candles birthday treat their program, which is only offered in stores is also significantly up over the period of the prior year.
To be clear, we have been building a diversified yet integrated business model of continuous engagement where each consumer interface with our brand is designed to support, enhance and drive sales through another consumer interface. For example, as noted, our website is designed primarily to drive e-com sales through exploration of our core products, gifting and collectible selection, but also while encouraging users to plan a store visit or an in-store party.
Store visits and the memory making engagement and roll our talented bar builders play is designed primarily to drive store conversion and dollars per transaction while also encouraging a visit to the website or a suggestion to watch Sayer Honey Girls film on Netflix. And our expanded digital content, including films, social media, TikTok, digital marketing, our Build-A-Bear Radio is designed primarily to engage consumers while also driving yet another visit to the store or to our website.
We've also been adding other digital capabilities to enhance testing to allow us to improve user experiences, more efficiently manage product information, improve site analytics and track users across applications and other sites, all with the goal of driving profitable growth. In addition, we have expanded our e-commerce reach internationally through a relationship with Global-e currently focused on the markets of Canada and Mexico with plans to add other areas in the future.
Separately, as we previously reported, we have been in the process of planning for an update to our website for nearly a year, which remains on track for a third quarter release with redesigned site components that are expected to phase in on a cadence basis. With the support of Deloitte Digital, these upgrades are intended to modernize the site, gain efficiency and optimize traffic through improved interfaces to ultimately drive conversion and sales. Given the vast majority of traffic to our site comes through a mobile device, a mobile first design has been a priority during this development process.
Activity has included behind the scenes testing as well as the recent upgrade to new tools such as Google Analytics and intelligence module that provides consumer tracking across applications, software and websites, providing data to improve conversion. Given that it takes time to feed the intelligence algorithm is not uncommon to see some bumpy e-commerce sales during the learning cycle. This process, along with some challenging coms to the prior year, which benefited from the strong launch of a key license product collection, negatively impacted our year-over-year e-commerce trend for the quarter, which we anticipated.
On an annual basis, digital commerce is still expected to deliver growth, which is reflected in our reaffirmed annual guidance. I do think it's worth noting that our first half e-commerce sales were up 180% compared to the 2019 period, which as noted, was prior to the implementation of key digital initiatives. Also notable, penetration of digital demand and our net retail sales, which includes e-commerce, has more than doubled for the year's first half compared to 2019.
We also are elevating our consumer retention initiatives and believe the recent launch of the Salesforce loyalty module gives us tools that can advance our efforts to increase average annual purchases from the millions of members in our robust and growing Bonus Club as well as leverage our tens of millions of first-party data contacts. Turning to our second pillar, which is continuing to evolve our retail experience and footprint while leveraging our expanded omnichannel capabilities. Year-to-date, 12 new Build-A-Bear retail workshops have been opened, demonstrating the progress we are making to reach our previously announced goal of opening approximately 20 new locations through a combination of corporately managed and third-party retail this fiscal year.
We expect to finish fiscal 2022 with a net increase in the number of stores in North America, inclusive of third-party retail sites and have fewer locations in Europe. Combined across geographies and business models, we plan to have more total locations at the end of this fiscal year compared to the end of 2021.
We have made a concerted effort to shift to non-traditional locations, including family-centric tourist sites and now have approximately 35% of total retail locations in non-traditional settings. As consumers have embraced their return to physical and in-person experiences in travel, in general, key metrics in our non-traditional sites have continued to outpace traditional retail locations.
As a reminder, our third-party model in which our other companies operate Build-A-Bear Workshop stores, including providing labor and purchasing inventory on a wholesale basis is heavily weighted to the hospitality industry, primarily in amusement parks, resorts and with multiunit partners such as Carnival Cruise Lines, Great Wolf Lodge and Landry. This model is capital-light for Build-A-Bear and an efficient way to leverage our partner's real estate positioning to expand in diverse areas and associate with other premium brands.
Third, we remain intent on leveraging our solid financial position to invest in growth while generating sustained profitability. We continue to take advantage of our financial stability to make strategic investments with the goal of driving further profitable growth and directly enhancing shareholder value through the recent completion of our previous buyback program and with plans to buy back additional shares through a newly authorized purchase program announced yesterday, which demonstrates the confidence our Board of Directors continues to have in our strategy and our future. We remain energized as we look forward to the balance of the year and the all-important holiday season with exciting plans, including an early launch of Halloween and seasonal products as consumer demand has continued to lean into these purchases earlier in these categories.
The celebration of our 25th anniversary in October, which has been highlighted all year long to drive interest, engagement and revenue, while our -- also shining a spotlight on the Build-A-Bear Foundation and the difference it makes in the lives of kids in need. In addition to the release of a nostalgic collection of Furry Friends, we've seen positive reaction to licensed collectible 25th anniversary product and are highly anticipating the release of upcoming anniversary versions of Fighter Man and Hello Kitty.
We also plan to launch a bear to support childhood literacy in September as a part of our National Teddy Bear Day activities. And a portion of the sales of each of these bars known as Reed Teddy, will support Build-A-Bear Foundation to reach its declared anniversary goal of donating at least 125,000 books. Through first book, an organization committed to providing equal access to quality education for kids in underserved communities. And Build-A-Bear has plans to enter the metaverse with the introduction of our first NFTs as a part of our 25th anniversary celebration, leveraging our brand strength in a totally new way.
This launch is supported by a relationship with Web3 firm suite, which specializes in global brand NFT experiences, and we believe it further positions on plan and in the culture zeitgeist and allows us to capture the interest of our expanded and passionate Gen-Z and millennial consumer segments who have grown up with Build-A-Bear. Speaking of the Metaverse, we are also pleased to announce that we recently engaged with a digital game development firm to bring a Build-A-Bear experience to a leading gaming platform.
Video and online games have been successful for us in the past, and we expect expansion in this highly popular space to give us another key consumer interface to drive engagement with kids and bring brand awareness top of mind, which can in turn, lift our retail store and online sales. Separately, as previously highlighted, we plan to launch products tied to a number of films and the series, including Lord of the Rings. In addition, as we advance our new innovative gifting options, we plan to introduce new brand leveraging product line of family matching pajamas that will be sold online in the soon-to-be launch Build-a-Bear Pajama shop.
Matching family Pajamas are on trend, particularly around the holidays and as a trusted, high-quality brand, we believe this category is a natural extension, especially since our teddy bears often are in the arms of children as they fall asleep. Finally, we are also excited to announce the first ever Build-A-Bear Pet toy product line, which is planned to be released through a licensed agreement with a leading industry manufacturer for the holiday season. The pet products are scheduled to be featured in over 1,600 PetSmart store locations and through their e-commerce site.
In summary, we are proud of our strong second quarter and exceptional first half performance and the progress we are making to maximize the opportunities ahead of us. We believe that we have become a fundamentally different and evolved company with multiple competitive advantages, starting with a strong balance sheet, a powerful and leverageable brand, enhanced digital capabilities and a business model that features expanded consumer segments and product categories, including toys and gifts that have historically shown resilience through uncertain economic periods. Lastly, I want to acknowledge and offer gratitude to our associates, suppliers and other business partners that work with us to forge ahead on this successful path.
I would also like to congratulate Build-A-Bear Entertainment and the entire cast and crew of the music-driven live action film Honey Girl for recently winning 3 2022 Leo Awards from the British Columbia film industry. And we are also looking forward to the silver celebration fundraiser Gala that the Build-A-Bear Foundation is planning to commemorate our 25th anniversary and honor our founder, Maxine Clark, in late October. Again, we want to thank our many sponsors that are supporting that event. In closing, we believe we are in a strong position to achieve further growth and increase value for our stakeholders as we take our first steps into our next 25 years as a more diverse, digitally focused company that is poised to leverage and profitably monetize our iconic and powerful brand going forward.
Now I would like to turn the call over to Voin to provide more details on our year-to-date performance and outlook for the fiscal year.