Ed Thomas
Analyst · B. Riley. Please proceed with your question
Thanks Gar. Good afternoon, everyone and thank you for joining us today. First, we hope everyone listening and their families are well. We continue to be in unprecedented times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has had significant health, social, and economic impacts throughout the world. I will spend a significant portion of our time today updating you on how this pandemic has impacted our business to-date. Following my prepared remarks, I will turn the call over to Mike, who will go into more details about our financial results. As previously announced, we temporarily closed all 239 of our retail stores on March 18 and through the end of the first quarter in order to protect our employees and communities from the continuing spread of COVID-19. We also shifted our corporate offices to a work from home status and substantially closed our stores and distribution center. Driven by the temporary store closures, we experienced a 40.7% decrease in total net sales for the first quarter. Net sales in physical stores decreased by 57.5% for the first quarter due to being closed for the final 45 days of the 91-day quarter. Comp sales in stores were up 1% in February, then down 23% during the period from March 1 through March 18 as the impact of the pandemic on our business and the retail industry in general meaningfully began. E-commerce responded very well with a 54.2% increase in net sales for the quarter, accelerating significantly following our store closures. By month, e-commerce net sales increased by 9.6% in February, then by 49.3% in March, and by 90% in April. However, these increases in e-commerce sales were not nearly enough to make up for the loss of store sales in the back half of the quarter. So far in the second quarter, local governments have eased restrictions and have allowed us to reopen a significant number of our stores in the last 3 weeks following the implementation of certain new health and safety protocols, including significant restrictions on customer traffic within our stores. We began the reopening process with our first 25 stores on May 15 and have now reached 160 total stores reopened as of yesterday or 67% of our total 239 stores. Overall, the sales results in the reopened stores have been better than we expected so far, but with a very high degree of disparity between individual stores and market. Generally speaking, reopened stores in California and Arizona have been surprisingly good, while reopened stores in Florida and Texas have been very weak. Mike will provide more details a bit later. We continue to carefully monitor local, state, and federal government orders as well as announcements made by mall landlords to determine when additional stores may be able to reopen after ensuring applicable health and safety protocols are in place. With regard to store leases, as we believe this is the case with many other similar retailers in order to protect our liquidity in this completely unpredictable environment, we elected to withhold payment of our contractual store lease obligation for April and May given that we could not safely operate our stores as originally intended when the respective leases were signed and we did not know when our stores would be able to reopen. For stores that we have been able to reopen, we have paid June rent. We intend to continue to work with our landlords to attempt to find an acceptable solution to address the impacts of the pandemic on our respective businesses. We view these solutions as critical to our long-term well-being of the business as they have a direct impact upon the preservation of our liquidity in this uncertain environment, which in turn impacts our landlords. Our normal cash burn for all of the contractual store lease obligations is nearly $7 million per month. At this time, we have reached compromises with a small number of landlords, but cannot predict with any certainty what solutions will be acceptable to any other landlords if anything at all to help reduce our cash lease cost while stores remain closed or where sales activity remains significantly below prior year levels upon reopening. At this time, we believe the most likely outcome is that we will have to pay these withheld rents sooner or later although we do not believe that the payment deferral alone is an acceptable long-term anthem for us. Moving on to inventory management, upon closing of our stores in mid-March, a significant portion of our total inventory became largely inaccessible to us for several weeks. To avoid creating a bigger inventory problem going forward, we canceled or deferred substantially all orders for new inventory receipts from April through June and significantly reduced future on order for the remainder of fiscal 2020. The only exceptions to this were for items that we considered to be essential to maintain our e-commerce business and key programs for the potential back-to-school season. We have from time-to-time been able to access certain stores to ship small portions of product back to our distribution centers and serve certain e-commerce orders to help supplement our e-commerce business. We ended the first quarter with total inventories up 10.8% on a per square foot basis compared to last year. However, given the amount of order cancellations we have already made, we entered fiscal June with inventories per square foot down 10.5% on a per square foot basis compared to last year. We will continue to closely monitor and adjust future inventory commitments as we determine it to be necessary relative to our expectations for the timing of store reopenings and subsequent sales levels. We expect that industry promotional levels will be well above normal as stores are able to reopen in light of a large amount of inventory that has been idle within closed doors for the apparel industry as a whole. Turning to payroll management, we furloughed approximately 91% of our employee workforce following the closure of all our stores in mid-March, and all corporate management agreed to take a temporary pay cut on a graduated scale according to annual salary ranging from 10% to 50%. Our Executive Chairman, Hezy Shaked, in his capacity as an employee and the independent members of our Board of Directors have elected to forego the entirety of their respective cash compensation until our business substantially resumes. Our weekly cash burn from employee compensation was reduced to approximately 24% of normal resulting in a weekly savings of approximately $1.4 million per week since the first week of April compared to normal levels while stores remained closed. However, as stores have reopened, we have brought back our store teams and portions of other corporate support functions necessary to conduct our business. There can be no guarantee that sales levels will be sufficient to support our corporate infrastructure profitability over the near-term. Beyond compensation, we have implemented policies to reduce or eliminate non-essential expenses when possible while our stores remain closed. This includes all travel, all forms of print marketing all store services typically utilized under normal operating conditions among other expenses. Assuming these policies continue for the remainder of fiscal 2020, we estimate that these reductions will save up to approximately $10 million over the remainder of fiscal 2020. In terms of new stores and other capital expenditures, we have 9 signed new store leases before the pandemic hit us, but we are seeking to defer all new store openings into 2021 given the current market conditions. We continue to invest in IT infrastructure and other customer-facing projects during this time to help enhance our e-commerce business and to promote further improvement of our in-store experience and customer loyalty as stores reopen. We launched Afterpay online during the first quarter, which allows customers to defer payments over several weeks while we receive payment for the purchase within days. We have been very pleased with the results so far. We also just launched a new financial accounting system at the beginning of the second quarter to replace our prior system assuming all new store activity is deferred until 2021, which is not guaranteed as required landlord consent. We would not expect total capital expenditures for fiscal 2020 to exceed approximately $7 million. With no deferral of new stores, we would expect fiscal 2020 capital expenditures to be approximately $14 million. Finally, in order to increase our liquidity in light of the uncertainties caused by COVID-19 pandemic, we borrowed approximately $23.7 million in late March under our revolving credit facility, which was the maximum amount available there under. Turning now to merchandising, I would like to acknowledge the significant progress made on our merchandising initiatives led by our Chief Merchandising Officer, Tricia Smith. Despite the impacts of the pandemic on our business, she has initiated meaningful changes in our merchandising approach that we believe will serve us well to remain competitive during this pandemic and as the environment moves back towards normal. She has worked toward changing our merchandising teams’ mindset towards thinking digital first, which has had an impact on our online business during this pandemic. This has resulted in an expanded selection of merchandise and new categories launched online, which has helped produce higher sales, incremental customers and improved e-comm merchandise margins. Her impact has also helped us attract new brands to our merchandise assortments that we could not get previously. She has only been here for 8 months, but she has made a big impact so far and we are excited to have her as part of our team. That’s our story for now. So much remains unpredictable at this time, but we are excited to be reopening stores and bringing our people back to work. We hope everyone in the Tilly’s family is well out there. We are and have been thinking of all of you every day with every business decision we make. Mike will now provide more details on our first quarter operating performance, balance sheet and liquidity and will discuss certain forward-looking items concerning the remainder of fiscal 2020. Mike?