Mark A. Sarvary
Analyst · KeyBanc Capital Markets
Thanks, Mark. Good evening, everyone, and thanks for joining us. Today, I'll provide an overview of our performance in the second quarter, and then discuss the progress we're making on our key strategic growth initiatives in 2014. I will then turn the call over to Dale, who will provide details on the second quarter financial results and 2014 guidance. Our second quarter turned out largely as we expected. Sales growth accelerated slightly more than we had planned, but we invested heavily in new products, advertising and in-store marketing support, and earnings were approximately in line with our plan. In total, our second quarter sales were $715 million, and adjusted EPS was $0.39. Tempur North America returned to growth with sales up 10%. Our new TEMPUR-Cloud and Contour beds have been well received by consumers and retailers, and sell-through momentum is building. Demand for our TEMPUR-Breeze beds and the new adjustable bases were also higher in the quarter. Tempur International's performance was in line with our expectations with solid sales growth in Europe, Asia and Latin America. Sales were up approximately 5% on a constant-currency basis, with direct sales driving a majority of the growth. Sealy's performance was also consistent with our expectations. Strong demand for the new Stearns & Foster offering and continued growth of Posturepedic led to double-digit growth in the U.S. Sealy also saw improved performance of Optimum, adjustable bases and Sealy-branded products. Sales outside the U.S. declined slightly, with both Canada and South America slightly below last year. Now, I'd like to discuss the progress we're making on our 4 key strategic growth initiatives in 2014. The first initiative is product innovation. Our goal is to provide our consumers the best bed and the best sleep of their life, and to provide our retailers a complete range of brands, products and price points that meet the needs of every consumer who comes to their store, and thus drives their growth. We've talked a lot about the importance of investing in product innovation to drive growth. When the competitive environment changed in 2012, we said we needed to increase the scale and pace of our investment, and to work with retailers to provide unique and consumer-valued products that allowed them to improve their average retail selling prices. In the past 2 years, we have delivered on this, systematically overhauling our Tempur North America offering with innovative products that command considerably higher average retail selling prices, as well as a much higher adjustable base attachment rates. Today, nearly all of Tempur North America's sales are from products introduced in the last 24 months. Through this heightened focus and investment in innovation, we have returned Tempur-Pedic to a position of strength in the marketplace. The benefits of innovation are not isolated to Tempur. During the second quarter, we completed the rollout of our new Stearns & Foster collection, with 15% more placement than last year. Feedback on sell-through and consumer acceptance has been excellent overall, and in particular, for the upper end Lux Estate and Lux Estate Hybrid Collections. At its current pace, Stearns & Foster will eclipse the previous annual sales record. We also completed the rollout of our new Optimum in the second quarter. Customer response remains very good and sales trends are improving. We also continue to see strong growth from our Posturepedic innerspring and hybrid collections even though they are now in their second year. We're encouraged by this and are optimistic that it shows the potential for lengthening the product refresh cycle. Frequent refreshes are a significant cost burden to both manufacturers and retailers, and are often of very little benefit to the consumers. Internationally, we continue to roll out TEMPUR-Breeze beds in several European markets, and will launch Breeze in Asia during the third quarter. Overall, Breeze has been very successful, and word has been launched that it has quickly become a strong seller. But to date, it has been more cannibalistic with existing Tempur mattresses than we had originally anticipated. At next week's Las Vegas Bedding Show, we plan to introduce a new line of Sealy-branded value products. We have streamlined the collection and significantly enhanced its design and construction. We're also introducing new Tempur-Pedic pillows to North America. We expect both introductions to drive sales improvement in the coming period. In addition to product innovation, we're also very focused on improving our marketing effectiveness, which is our second strategic initiative. This includes advertising, as well as in-store marketing and direct sales. In the second quarter, our advertising investment grew by 7%, primarily driven by an increase in Tempur North America. TV ad impressions grew at an even faster clip, as we reinvested the synergies realized from the combined media buy. We began airing new TV ads nationally, featuring real Tempur-Pedic owners and our new mattresses and adjustable bases. While it's still early, the initial response has been quite good, with key metrics such as store-locator visits improving markedly. We're also supporting Stearns & Foster, Optimum and Posturepedic with consumer advertising including TV, digital and print. Our in-store marketing investments were elevated in the second quarter as we rolled out new point-of-purchase displays to support all of our new product launches in North America. These investments were planned and they will be lower during the remainder of the year. So as you can see, we're very committed to innovation and marketing and we'll continue to make decisions that ensure our investment dollars in these areas are maximized. And that ties to the decision we made last month to exit our U.S. innerspring component business and to sell the related assets. The transaction will provide us greater flexibility to invest in innovation and brand-building in the future. Our third strategic initiative is new market expansion, including our expansion into new international markets. During the second quarter, we completed the acquisition of Sealy brand rights in continental Europe. And during the balance of the year, we'll be rolling out a number of Stearns & Foster and Sealy hybrid products to retailers in several key markets. As Dale will discuss in a moment, while we don't expect much contribution from this acquisition in 2014, the growth opportunity is significant, and we anticipate greater contribution in 2015. We also completed the acquisition of Sealy brand rights in Japan in early July. We absorbed a small amount of ongoing business, as well as integrated certain sales and marketing functions of the former licensee into Tempur Japan. Transition of customer relationships and integration has been in line with our expectations. We see many long-term revenue synergies from this combination. Sealy's customer relationships and distribution footprints are highly complementary to Tempur Japan and this has already resulted in some early wins where Tempur has secured new distribution through leveraging Sealy's existing relationships. We are also advancing several other initiatives across the world and will be sure to update you at the appropriate time. And lastly, our fourth strategic initiative is our commitment to building a world-class supply chain that is easier to do business with. We continue to improve our distribution and warehouse network, and are capturing greater cost synergies as a result. Equally important, however, we are also improving our customer service levels, specifically, order management and delivery performance. We announced shipping Tempur and Sealy products together on Sealy trucks in 4 U.S. markets, and plan to layer an additional market in 2014 and beyond. We're also making good progress with our category management initiative. Because of the breadth of our portfolio, we're in a unique position to use data and analysis to help our retailers optimize their merchandising and promotion to maximize their sales and profitability. Before turning the call over to Dale, I'd like to make just a couple of closing comments. Q2 turned out largely as we expected. Our plans called for growth to accelerate, and this occurred across our segments. We are pleased with the trends we are seeing, and we're very focused on executing our strategy to build on this positive early momentum. That said, our plans for the balance of the year call for our growth on a consolidated basis to continue at rates similar to the second quarter, and the market environment globally is still far from robust. Traffic continues to be fairly stagnant in the U.S. and demand remains uneven in parts of Europe, and particularly challenging in Germany and Benelux. We look forward to providing you an update on our progress when we report again in October. With that, I'll now hand the call over to Dale.