Steven Woodward
Analyst · Craig-Hallum Capital Group. Please go ahead with your question
Thank you, Cody, and good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be speaking with you all today. And as I announced this morning, I've provided the Board of Directors with notice that I will be retiring from my position at the end of May, and as a result, the board has commenced a CEO transition plan. It's been an honour leading this great organization since 2018. I have respect for our board and all the great colleagues I've served over these past five years. While I couldn't have predicted all the highs and lows we would face on this journey, I knew our transformation plan would take time and patience. The largest and most successful home furnishings retailers in our industry all took decades to reshape their business, build their reputation and capture market share to become the leaders they are today. So we knew this is not going to be an overnight success. In fact, the last several years have truly been some of the most challenging periods I've ever experienced throughout my career. However, I'm proud of our organization's ability to navigate this highly volatile macro environment and the resilience of our team makes me proud to serve alongside them. I firmly believe that this organization has made significant improvements across every facet of the business and is in a better position to capitalize on the opportunities that lie ahead. As our board considers its options for my successor, I will be staying as CEO through the end of May to ensure a smooth transition. Ann Joyce, a member of our board, will be stepping in as the Interim CEO. By way of background, she has served as a senior executive in many senior executive roles throughout the retail industry over the past three decades, including notable brands such as Ralph Lauren, Aeropostale and Chico's. In more recent years Ann has spent most of her time on boards for various public and private companies in addition to running her own consulting practice in which she advises senior business executives and board members. Ann joined Kirkland's board as an independent director in June 2021 and has an extensive view into the challenges we currently face and, more importantly, the opportunity ahead. In addition, we announced the promotion of Amy Sullivan, who currently serves as Senior Vice President and Chief Merchandising and Stores Officer to the role of President and Chief Operating Officer. Amy has been an invaluable member of our leadership team over the past decade and has been instrumental in evaluating the brand -- in elevating the brand to a much improved design and quality that we have today. Amy has more than 20 years of experience in senior merchandising roles across the retail landscape, having worked for Express, Lands' End, Kohl's and JCPenney. With Ann and Amy in these roles along with the rest of our skilled leadership team, I firmly believe that I will be leaving the company in great hands, and I look forward to rooting for their success from the sidelines. With that, let's transition over to our performance as we disclosed in our holiday sales release earlier this year. We stated the fourth quarter. We started the fourth quarter with promising sales trends as the month of November and our Black Friday event was relatively successful. However, soon thereafter, we began to see traffic decline rapidly, both in-store and online, along with experiencing the effects of significant inventory reductions on our merchandise mix, both of which ultimately drove our overall quarterly sales lower on a year-over-year basis. Although disappointing, importantly, we were able to generate over $40 million in operating cash flow, which allowed us to repay $45 million in debt. Even in a volatile customer market with declining customer traffic and a less than ideal merchandise mix, we were able to generate meaningful cash flow and strengthen our balance sheet. But stepping back for a moment, I'd like to provide some perspective on the power of our brand and the potential value that our omnichannel platform can provide shareholders. If we look at our performance from fiscal 2014 to fiscal 2018, our average annual revenue during that five year period was almost $600 million and our EBITDA margin was almost 8%. We were able to accomplish that with an operating structure that was not as well positioned to support omnichannel growth as it is today. There was no direct sourcing program and we had declining merchandise relevancy with outdated design and quality issues. Since then, we've made significant changes to our organization, including digital transformation efforts to create a true omnichannel platform. We removed significant costs from our operating structure, revitalized our brand image with updated logos and refreshed stores, and refined our distribution footprint to provide better coverage across our store and customer footprint. It wasn't that long ago during a heightened customer spending environment that we were able to capitalize on these transformative changes and report impressive financial results. Although unprecedented micro -- macro challenges soon followed and significantly affected customer sentiment, I firmly believe we have the ability to continue positioning our organization for long-term success with better liquidity and an improved merchandise strategy in place. We believe this sets us on a path to stabilize our business in fiscal 2023 and reinvigorate sustainable growth from there. So how do we get to this point? While the transformative changes that we made over the past few years have been beneficial in elevating the quality, design and sourcing of our merchandise, we also recognize that many of our loyal customers who are dedicated shoppers to our value decor and holiday assortments have felt somewhat neglected through this transition period. This customer has been incredibly important for Kirkland's home throughout our history, and we believe there is an opportunity to reinvigorate this portion of our customer base. While we're still planning to provide larger ticket items in categories such as furniture and outdoor, we're going to be working on rebalancing our merchandise assortment with a focus on opening price points, starting in the $20 range and ensuring that our inventory availability appropriately supports customer demand. In fact, we've already begun shifting store layouts to more effectively highlight these opening price point items while still showing how they can be a wonderful accent to larger ticket items. As part of these efforts, we're continuing to push a strong selling culture among our stores level employees to drive improved conversion with this updated merchandise mix. We're also going to be much more calculated with our promotional strategy to ensure we're supporting these value seeking customers, which includes leveraging improvements in our initial mark-up to drive more demand with a higher discount rate. Through this process, we're evaluating the effectiveness of our marketing and going to be a laser focused on improving the ROI on advertising and marketing spend to ensure that our efforts are ultimately resulting in sales dollars. We've developed a very powerful tool with our customer data platform that provides us with ample insight into the customer behaviour and patterns which we will look forward to leveraging in the coming fiscal year to drive these merchandise and promotional strategies in the right direction. In addition to our revised merchandise strategy, we're expecting to see some relief from the supply chain show up in our margin structure in fiscal 2023. We are seeing pricing on shipping containers and rates come back to more normalized levels and expecting to see material margin improvements starting in the first quarter of this fiscal year. While this is welcome news, we remain vigilant on our efforts to tightly manage our operating costs across the organization. We've also amended our existing credit agreement to further extend our credit availability during peak season and strengthen our liquidity position. I'll let Mike dive into the details of the new agreement, but it was important for us to secure the added availability and flexibility at what is the lowest cost of capital available to us. The facility was set to mature in 2024, and this amendment extends the term out to 2028. Overall, I'm very proud of what this organization has been able to accomplish in such a difficult macro environment this past -- as this past year, including improving the quality and design of our merchandise, updating the customer, the company's branding, enhancing the omnichannel experience and optimizing our operating structure with a focus on delivering long-term profitability. We're well positioned to provide our customers with affordable, stylish alternatives and refreshing their homes. I do believe that we are laying a strong foundation to fully unlock the potential of our platform over time. With that now I'll turn the call over to Mike, who will provide detailed commentary on our performance in the fourth quarter and fiscal year along with our outlook. Once again, I'd like to thank our stakeholders for their support over the last several years as we embarked on this journey. Mike, the floor is yours.