Good day ladies and gentlemen and welcome to your first quarter fiscal 2009 earnings webcast. (Operator Instructions). I would now like to turn the program over to Mr. Jeff Unger. Please go ahead.

Thank you Mary. Good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for Casual Male Retail Group’s First Quarter 2009 Earnings Call. Today’s discussion will contain certain forward-looking statements concerning the company’s operations, performance and financial conditions including sales expense, gross margins, capital expenditures, earnings per share, store openings and closings, other matters. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results to differ materially from those assumptions mentioned today, due to a variety of factors that affect the company, information regarding risks and uncertainties are detailed in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. Our complete Safe Harbor statement is available at www.casualmalexl.com. On our call today is David Levin, our President and CEO and Dennis Hernreich, our Chief Financial Officer, Chief Operating Officer and Executive Vice President. I’d like to turn the call over to David.

Thank you Jeff. This morning we announced the results for the first quarter of 2009. Our performance exceeded our planned expectations. For the year, we anticipated that business would continue to be challenging and planned the year at a negative 10% comp which was consistent with our performance in Q4 of last year. We reported a minus 10.7 for Q1 of this year. What we have encountered has been a stabilization of the business which has been a positive for the company and that we have a better sense of how to react in this difficult environment. Our management group has been proactive in adjusting how to operate with the shortfall in top line sales. Our operating results for the quarter pretty much sum up how effective these adjustments were. With a $10 million drop in sales for the quarter, we managed to actually earn $336,000, which was slightly better than last year. Dennis will review in detail how this was accomplished, but needless to say, it took a lot of discipline to get there. What excites me the most, however, is knowing that when business does stabilize, our earnings power will be greater than we’ve ever envisioned. Going into this year, our strategy was not to try and drive top line sales in this type of economy. Our focus was to improve cash flow, continue to lower our inventory levels, reduce our debt and improve our gross margins. All these metrics are forecasted to improve throughout the year even with the negative comp performance. At the expense of some top line sales, we’ve significantly reduced our marketing spend by $13 million in 2009. Most of the reduction has come from prospecting for new customers. We’ve eliminated our television spend for the year – a $5 million expenditure in 2008.…

Thank you David and good morning to you all. Thanks for joining us as we describe our first quarter business results. In our last earnings call in March, when we ran over the company’s fourth quarter and the 2008 performance, we described in detail the company’s primary financial goals for 2009, the highlights of which were; optimizing cash flow by reducing SG&A by 9% to an expected level of $162 million for 2009, reducing capital expenditures to less than $5 million, improving merchandise margins by 225 to 275 basis points from 2008 by appropriately managing fashion inventory levels to minimize clearance mark downs, the source of which, the source of over ¾ of CMRG’s total mark downs and reducing inventory levels by approximately 10% by the end of 2009. And thereby producing free cash flow of 2009 in the neighborhood of $15 million with the plan to reduce bank debt to between $30 to $35 million inclusive of the term-loan. While we are still expecting an approximate 10% decline in CMRG’s sales volume for the year, we have made some significant improvements to our expected earnings performance that David alluded to. The Q1 update of our 2009 financial goals is as follows. We further reduced SG&A cost to 2005 levels and are now expecting a total reduction of 15% in expenses in 2009 to an approximate level for the year of 151 million representing a 11.5 million improvement from our last guidance. Capital expenditures are still planned to be less than $5 million consistent with our last guidance. Merchandise margins are expected to improve by 275 to 325 basis points over 2008 merchandise margin levels as a result of further reducing less productive promotions in the latter part of the year. This represents a 50 basis point improvement from our…

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Scott Presley

Hey guys, the question on that Casual Male business, you know you acquired Rochester and you entered these direct businesses sort of to diversify revenue avenues and deter the leverage of fixed cost, but at the end of the day, I guess the issue at Casual Male is that you weren’t driving enough traffic to the store to really increase the store productivity and get higher profitability there so, even once the traffic flattens out overall and we hit bottom here, how do you improve that core Casual Male business?

I think we are going to win on conversion, and that continues to improve. So, we believe with our existing customer base we could still get a lot more dollars out of them. Again, it is very fragmented even within our best customers they still spend money in other channels and other retailers. And we have been, that has been our strength, it’s been the ability to convert customers into a transaction to try and get a higher AUR, but we certainly are backing off of trying to generate new customers at our stores like we have in the past, because again it is a very expensive proposition and we are more concentrated on the bottom line than we ever have been

So, basically traffic is going to be where it is going to be if you get 2 customers an hour, so be that if you train yourselves people to up sell and sell more stuff at the roads to higher sale. Is that correct?

That is correct, we are going to that direction

Okay. And then there have been talks in the past, do the hybrid stores ultimately work? Are there more opportunities for that sort of - I know you are not through with the conversion yet, but what is the thinking maybe 6 or 12 months down the road?

If these hybrids perform up to our expectations, we’ll change in some energy in our real estate. I think that major markets like Chicago or San Francisco type of markets but St Louis, Minneapolis, Kansas city but we may have 6 or 7 Casual Male stores to populate one hybrid in each of these markets then that would kind of be a super store of more productivity, because we believe in each one of these markets there is a big and tall guy that wants to wear Polo or Calvin Klein, but it would never happenwithout the full fledge Rochester store, if it can’t be [culminated] but having one big store in the market, very effective.

And then I may have missed your comments in the prepared section, but what is your thought on clothing from Casual Male stores, you know further relocations given that the declining traffic transition

We will continue to if that is. We always have business as usual on that front, Scott.

Is there, there is a lot more popping up on the screen that maybe we should have taken effect in the first time round?

No.

Okay, good.

We judiciously closed 70 stores in the last few years and every year, every time a store comes up it starts doing well. So I think I may have said in the last call, but 97 % Casual Male stores are casul.

Okay. Good stuff. Thanks.

[Operator Instructions] Our next question comes from Tom Filandro

Thank you. A couple of quick ones, first congratulations, good job in controlling the expenses guys. Can you give us a sense of the inventory positioning by brand and also in the quarter, Dennis maybe can you give us the comp metrics by brand as well.

The inventory levels in each of our brands are really down a little bit more on Rochester as you would expect and a little bit less so in Casual Male, but both double digits. As I said that the only metrics we care to share here today Tom, is the fact that our comps are consistent with our traffic. In all the other metrics, conversion is up. Average ticket is down slightly and that is how it’s looking for pretty much both businesses.

Hey Denis, are the inventory levels at Rochester in particular, are they where you want them to be or do you still need to see a reduction?

They are precisely where we want them to be

Okay, so they are more in line with the sales trends?

Definitely

Okay and can you just give us a view on how IMU should play out for the balance of the year?

IMU is generally slightly up, our sourcing group has done a good job. We are working hard with our vendors on the costs, we’re not seeing any cost pressures there, we’re constantly reviewing our retail pricing. Generally IMU is steady, to up slightly

Okay. And then one final one I guess this is to either Denis or David in terms of these hybrids, as you move to the convergence of these stores, can you help us understand where you are in terms of your systems and ability of doing that, having any issues or concerns or any risks of managing the inventory as you convert these two concepts?

No, I don’t see any risk Tom, we are – obviously when we set up Rochester with Casual Male we didn’t anticipate mixing the two at the time. So we’re having to do some tweaks to our applications to allow Casual Male and Rochester merchandisers to see – have vision within Casual Male store. All that is set to go, expected to be ready sometime in the second quarter at which point we will convert the five stores into hybrids.

A final one. Any updates on [living] BNT shoes on either online businesses?

Making money

As a group?

As a group

And directionally we should expect that to continue to be a positive contributor for the balance of the year?

Yes. Sales are down but they are profitable.

Okay. Thank you very much gentlemen. That’s the lot

Our next question comes from Garry Giblin

Yes. This is Garry Giblin. Hi. Good morning David, Denis and Jeff. In the release you talked about improved supply contracts, is that buying your merchandise or is that …?

They are more on the servicing side, Garry. And we’re constantly reviewing our merchandise cost, but we’ve taken perhaps a bit more dramatic steps on certain larger service contracts that we have with our partners.

You mean, service partners, not merchandise partner?

Service partner.

With then begs the question of you know, in this environment do you have room to push back on your merchandising forces?

I think that’s in constant motion Garry

Okay. Sounds like you got that in motion. And then, in the last couple of conference calls you said the sales somewhat correlated regionally with weak housing areas of sales, weaker sales but there’s been a few companies saying that Florida is beginning to improve and California definitely is improving and the general economy. So, are you finding that corresponding to your business?

I think it’s been consistent what we’ve said before. Florida has come back somewhat, California, I would say would be our toughest market right now.

Okay, California seems not to be coming back from the Casual Male side or as Florida is?

I would say it’s been consistent with the last two months. It’s stabilized. It hasn’t gotten any worse.

And it is moderating as time goes on, I mean, that’s what we’re seeing. Still down a little more than the average store in the chain, but it’s not declining at the same slope as it was before.

Okay great. And then, I mean amidst this bad economy, what are the merchandise categories of greatest strength? I mean I imagine maybe accessories, but you know you could express that a little bit.

You mean, you are asking what categories are performing?

Yes, what are the good performing categories?

Seasonal stuff is doing quite well. Our biggest growth category has actually been Screen T-shirts, we’re doing phenomenal in that category. We’re having a very good short run right now which is encouraging because we really haven’t had the best of weather yet, so those businesses are pretty healthy and everything else is pretty well consistent with where it’s been before – but those two areas are by far our strongest performers.

I mean, would those three areas correspond to lower than average IUR’s just by virtue of this nature of these items?

I don’t think so.

I mean our Screen Tees are $25-$30, our shorts are $45, so we haven’t seen that.

That’s really the product.

The AUR is notI didn’t mean to imply it was. IUR’s is not down at all Garry, it’s probably more on the units per transaction is slightly down.

Yes I know that was my own inference that I was wondering about on the IUR, but, okay thank you very much guys

Okay

If you do have a question please press the 1 key

Okay, it doesn’t sound like there’s any further questions, so we appreciate your phoning in today and we look forward to some good results in Q2 also. Thank you very much.

Ladies and gentlemen that concludes today’s program, you may now disconnect and have a wonderful day

Thank you, Mary

Thank you