Jon Barker
Analyst · Goldman Sachs. Please proceed. Okay, I think we lost him. Our next question will be from Seth Sigman with Credit Suisse. Please proceed
Thank you, Rachel. Good morning, everyone and thank you for joining us today. I will begin by reviewing the highlights of our first quarter and then discuss the progress on our key strategic initiatives. Kevan will then go over our financial results in more detail and review our outlook, after which, we will open up the call to your questions. We are very excited with the start to the fiscal year as our top and bottom line results for the first quarter came in at the high-end of our expectations. Our topline was driven by strong new store performance and comp growth of 3.4% which when combined with consistent gross margins and disciplined cost control resulted in bottom line performance at the high-end of our outlook. We're also very pleased to announce today an amendment and restatement of our credit agreement which we expect to reduce our interest expense by approximately $4.5 million on an annualized basis. Turning to our results. For the quarter total sales grew 14.8% to $180.1 million versus the first quarter of fiscal 2017 and same-store sales increased 3.4%. As a reminder, we now include e-commerce in our same-store sales. Drilling down further on the composition of comparable sales for the first quarter, firearm units on a same-store sales basis were up 14.9%, as we continue to gain market share in the states we serve. Firearm revenue increased 17.5% on a same-store sales basis for the first quarter, a significant improvement from the fourth quarter largely driven by an increase in traffic as a result of recent policy changes by our competitors. We have a diverse mix of product and the recent changes in the competitive landscape are driving more customers into Sportsman's Warehouse. This is creating market share opportunities by allowing us to engage with a broad range of customers from first-time users to seasoned hunters and shooters. Ammunition increased 9.3% in Q1, also an improvement from Q4’s 4.7% decline. We are very encouraged by our performance in the firearm and ammunition categories in the first quarter that are reflective of solid market share gains. Our non-hunting categories decreased 0.5%, a sequential increase from Q4’s 3.2% decline with the primary improvement driven by our fishing and clothing categories. For the quarter, clothing increased 7.1%, given the strong performance from workwear and camouflage items. Fishing increased 3.7% as we anniversaried a weaker fishing season in Q1 of last year. Our gross margins were relatively consistent, down 10 basis points year-over-year in Q1. Given the mix shift headwind resulting from strengthening firearm and ammunition sales, we were particularly pleased with a solid gross margin performance. During the quarter, we began our planned investments in our e-commerce platform, while taking a measured approach with these expenses. Our strong topline growth combined with relatively steady gross margins and disciplined cost control drove by flat year-over-year earnings performance. Kevan will go into the Q1 financial performance in greater detail in a moment. Now I'd like to spend a few moments highlighting the progress we've made against key strategic priorities for 2018. As a reminder our priorities are omnichannel growth strategy both in-store and online, customer acquisition and engagement, and merchandising assortment. Starting with our comprehensive omnichannel strategy, which includes the growth of brick-and-mortar, as well as e-commerce. Looking at brick-and-mortar we opened two new stores in the first quarter as planned in Sheridan, Wyoming and Walla Walla, Washington for a total of 89 stores at the end of the quarter. We are pleased with the early performance we've seen from these new stores. We plan to open two more stores in the second quarter as we make progress towards our five targeted store openings for the year or 3% square footage growth over fiscal year 2017. As a reminder, this prudent moderation from 2017's 12 store openings will allow us to allocate more free cash flow to pay down debt this year which remains a priority for us. On the e-commerce side, we remain focused on improving our front end experience to interact with customers online in a more engaging way that better reflects our category expertise. 2018 is an investment year for e-com as we outlined on our year-end call. In the first quarter we formally kicked off our re-platforming process by utilizing both internal and external resources, and we're on track both from an investment and timeline perspective for rollout of initial improvements to be visible to the consumer in early fiscal 2019. We also continue to increase our online product assortment by growing our drop-ship program vendors. In the first quarter, we filled several key roles on e-commerce team and are very excited to announce that Jared Tanner joined Sportsman's Warehouse in April as our new VP of Marketing and E-commerce. Jared was most recently at Academy Sports leading their omnichannel efforts and has significant industry and omnichannel experience. Jared has hit the ground running with a focus on organizational structure and leading the new platform installation from a customer-centric perspective. I'm excited to have Jared as a partner and he will be instrumental in the execution of our omnichannel strategy. In terms of customer acquisition and engagement, we are pleased with the continued growth of the membership in our loyalty program which grew 27.3% versus Q1 of 2017. We now have more than 1.6 million members and we continue to deploy targeted and personalized test and learn marketing strategies to engage our loyalty members. Customer response to these test-and-learn efforts have been strong, and we will continue to utilize these marketing strategies around specific items and promotions for our loyalty customer base going forward. We believe segmented marketing will allow us to further strengthen our engagement and grow the percentage of sales generated by our loyalty members from its current level of over 45%. In addition, as we capitalize on the increased market share opportunities available to us given the changes in competitive dynamics, we look forward to acquiring new customers and bringing them into our loyalty fold. Turning to merchandising. We continue to strengthen and leverage our relationship with vendors through cooperative merchandising efforts. Increased participation from vendors related to in-store visual merchandising improvements, opportunities at first to market goods, allocation increases on high demand products, and increased partnerships on vendor-managed inventory. As an example, we completed the reset of 20 store within a store concept shops with a key tactical clothing brand during Q1 which better showcases the product offering from this brand and provides a more engaging shopping experience for our customers. In addition, we have successfully expanded our online assortment in multiple categories through drop-ship programs with current vendors with additional vendors coming on in the next quarter. We are pleased with our private-label performance in the first quarter. We are excited about our high quality, high-value private label expansion one of our core camping categories that will be in stores this coming quarter. We're also expanding the Killik brand into outdoor focused casual clothing. In 2018, we will continue to focus on filling the gaps within our good better best branded product offering and building on the strong value proposition that we provide to our customers. So in summary, we are pleased with our strong start to the year and the progress made against each of our strategic initiatives. We look forward to building on this progress throughout fiscal 2018 and strengthening our competitive positioning. Before turning the call over to Kevan, I want to thank all of our team members for their hard work and dedication that contributed to the successful first quarter. With that, I'll turn the call over to Kevan to discuss our financials.