Lisa Harper
Analyst · Baird. Please proceed with your question
Good afternoon everyone and thanks for joining us for a discussion of our first quarter results. I’d like to start by saying that I’m very pleased to be hosting my first call today as the CEO of Torrid. I have a long history with the brand serving on the board of directors for the past 14 years. I also served as the CEO of Torrid and Hot Topic from 2011 to 2016. I’ve been incredibly proud to see the growth and evolution of Torrid over the last decade and I believe there’s tremendous opportunity for us to continue that growth. A large part of our success comes from the remarkable team behind the Torrid brand and I want to personally thank Liz for serving as our CEO for the past four years. Liz and I have worked together for more than a decade. She has an incredible passion for our product, customer and our brand and has played an integral role in getting the business to where it is today. I’m thrilled that Liz is taking on the role of Chief Creative Officer, where she will continue to lead division for design, product development, merchandising, and creative marketing. As for me, I bring a strong background in business strategy and operational oversight, and I will lead the brand’s overall vision and direction. Based on early observations, I’ve determined where we need to strengthen our focus and my top priority is to provide direction to the team that will drive sustainable and profitable growth. Before I share this action plan, I want to take a moment to briefly highlight our first quarter results. Net sales were $328 million, exceeding our high guidance of $305 million despite being up against stimulus from last year. This was an increase of 1% compared to last year and 30% compared to pre-pandemic 2019. Our results for the quarter were impacted by an estimated net 5 percentage points on a year-over-year basis due to shifts in event and shipment timing. Adjusted EBITDA came in at $52 million, exceeding our high guidance of $48 million with adjusted EBITDA margin of 15.8% of sales. Our gross margin rate was slightly below our expectations primarily due to higher promotional activity. Looking ahead, we believe we can manage gross margin more proactively while executing a plan that will continue to drive a long-term profitable growth. This brings me to my three main priorities for the business. Number one, enhanced promotional and marketing strategies to better balance margin and sales growth; number two, drive growth across multiple opportunities, including our curve concept; and number three, develop a more efficient and effective organization by realigning resources. We have a significant opportunity to refine our promotional and marketing strategies to drive sales at higher margin rates by reducing our reliance on site wide promotions, focusing on product franchises and launches and better balancing retention, reactivation and acquisition activities within our customer file. We also plan to enhance our marketing strategy with better storytelling around our unparalleled fit and compelling assortment rather than the primary focus being the discount. In the past, our promotions have been largely broad based offers to all customer and across categories, which was anchored heavily on percentage discounts. Going forward we plan to take a more surgical approach to promotions by closely aligning them with our merchandising and marketing strategies and our inventory investments. It will take time to refine these strategies and we will maintain site-wide promotions in the near term, while we test and react into more targeted promotions. I’ll keep you updated on our progress in revising our promotional tactics as we learn more from these tests. We will create a more balanced approach to our marketing investments to drive stronger conversion of lapsed customers and improve customer retention and frequency while maintaining a focus on acquiring new customers. Once we get customers into the funnel, the foundation of our highly successful unified commerce model is built on migrating single channel customers become Omni where they spend over three times their single channel counterparts and deliver exceptional lifetime value. Stores continue to be the number one vehicle for acquiring customers, so we are expanding our efforts to drive traffic to our high conversion store environment. We will continue to advance our growth strategies in both our core Torrid business, as well as Curve. We remain committed to expanding Curve with an emphasis on sustainable and high quality growth. While we continue to believe in the ultimate growth potential, we have seen growth in this business normalize and no longer expect to reach $500 million in sales by 2023. We are reevaluating our approach to the business, still believing that it will deliver substantial growth over the next three to five years. Our previously discussed plans for Curve this year remain intact and we will be opening up to 10 standalone Curve stores this fall, expanding the Curve assortment up to a third of the store fleet and launching a tabbed experience on our website. We’ll keep you informed about the results of these initiatives and we’ll plan the future expansions of Curve based on these learnings. We are also focused on a balanced approach that ensures the continued growth of our core business. Our renewed focus on innovative product launches and building franchises such as our Studio and Lovesick assortments in apparel and our wire-free and t-shirt bras in Curve will support compelling storytelling to the customer. Fit specific products like bras and denim, continue to drive the results for customer acquisition in the stores. And we’re seeing positive traffic trends in that channel. My third priority will be to develop a more efficient and effective organizational structure by realigning resources to focus on the most critical tasks. We plan to put more rigor around our resource allocation, to support long-term, scalable growth. This will include thoughtful investments in technology to support the business such as the e-Comm site enhancements, while also increase capacity for our e-Comm order fulfillment in Q2, which will improve productivity and throughput to better support our growing business. As part of realigning resources to focus on critical areas we are also making organizational changes such as the recent promotion of Vivian Alhorn to SVP, Chief Digital Officer. Vivian has been with the business for almost a year and previously ran the e-Comm business at the Banana Republic and Pottery Barn. She brings strong leadership to our digital teams and will drive the initiatives in developing the customer file. We are continuing the search for a permanent Chief Financial Officer, and will meanwhile leverage the expertise of our interim CFO, Tanner MacDiarmid and our strong finance team until a replacement is found. Looking ahead, I am confident in our ability to continue to derive sustainable and profitable growth. Torrid has exceptionally strong brand equity, and we are uniquely positioned to serve our existing and new customers during this changing environment, by focusing on what is most important to our customers’ unparalleled fit. I’m excited to be working with a talented, passionate, and innovative team that is energized by the opportunities that lie ahead for our brand. And with that, I’ll now hand the call over to Tanner to provide more detailed financials on the quarter and updated guidance.