Ed Thomas
Analyst · ROTH Capital. You are now live
Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us today. Both our top line and bottom line results for the first quarter of fiscal 2019 were on the higher side of our outlook ranges. After a slow start to the quarter due to unseasonably poor weather and the late Easter shift this year, our business rebounded during April to produce a positive 2.4% total comp in earnings per share of $0.02 for the quarter. Footwear was again our strongest performer with a low double-digit percentage comp sales increase over last year. Men's accessories and Boys were all up low single digits. Girl's and Women's were down mid to high single digits with weakness in fashion tops and dresses. Fashion bottoms and swim were also weak within Women's. Turning to real estate, we opened one new full-size store in Chico, California and closed our original RSQ pop-up store in Dallas upon lease expiration during the first quarter. In the second quarter, we will open one new full-size store at Natick, Massachusetts in mid-June and have just closed our Cerritos, California RSQ pop-up store due to landlord recapture. We currently expect to open up five new full-size stores during the third quarter and up to six during the fourth quarter, bringing the total number of new store openings for the year up to 13. 5 of these 13 new stores have fully executed leases as of today. Given that, we expect to open full-size stores in both King of Prussia and Del Amo later this year. Our remaining two RSQ stores will close upon the opening of the new full-size stores in those properties. We've also completed negotiations for just over a quarter of the nearly 80 lease action decisions to be made this year, which we anticipate will continue to improve our occupancy cost structure going forward. At this time, we have no additional known store closures although a few may still occur as we finalize negotiations on our various lease actions. Despite the expected closure of our initial four RSQ pop-ups, we've learned a lot from them and are actively working on establishing RSQ as a permanent concept. We do not have any signed leases as of today, but we have received meaningful interest from certain members of the retail landlord community about adding RSQ stores to their properties. We believe that this can be a growth vehicle for us to complement our traditional full-size stores, while also strengthening our proprietary brand recognition. Next, I'd like to discuss our continued focus on customer engagement, brand awareness and driving store traffic. We formally announced our new partnership with the High School Esports league in mid-April. This league is the largest Esports league at the high school level in the country, encompassing approximately 1,500 schools nationwide. We're excited about the opportunities this partnership may provide to bring step -- to bring new eyes to Tilly's and inspire creative fun experience for our customers to help drive in-store traffic. Additionally, we're working on several other promising efforts to improve brand awareness and customer engagement for the remainder of the year. While we are not ready to go into detail on any of these items at this time, all are aimed at continuing to improve customer engagement and brand awareness for our company. Turning to technology, we expect to launch an expanded loyalty program and enhanced mobile app during the second quarter. We also expect to be able to go live with a buy now pay later program during the second half of the year, likely, in between back-to-school and holiday season, holiday shopping seasons. We remain committed to investing and our customer facing technologies to further strengthen customer engagement and provide convenience to drive sales. Turning to the second quarter, we are off to a slow start across almost all geographies and all spring summer products. Total comp sales were down 6.6% through Memorial Day weekend, consistent with store traffic thus far. We believe this deceleration is mostly weather-related given the cool and wet weather patterns we've experienced across much of the country, particularly, here in California where 95 of our 228 stores reside. It is essentially the same assortment that produced a positive 2.4% comp in the first quarter that have suddenly decelerated in May. In Florida, and in the Northeast where weather turned quite warm last week, we posted positive comps. This gives us some confidence that our results will improve from where they are currently. By the time, the quarter is complete assuming more normal weather patterns occur from here. Michael will now provide details of our first quarter operating performance and introduce our second quarter earnings outlook. Mike?