Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome back to Sidoti's June small-c ap conference. My name is Daniel Harriman, and I'm an analyst here at Sidoti. This afternoon, we're gonna hear from Brilliant Earth Group, that's ticker BRLT. The company's Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Kuo, will be presenting to us. We also have Colin Bourland, the VP of Strategy and Business Development, as a point of contact moving forward after the presentation. We're gonna give Jeff about 20 minutes to go through the slides and share the story of the company, after which time I'm gonna open it up to Q&A for about 10 minutes at the end. If you do have any questions at all during the presentation, I encourage you to type those into the Q&A box, and I'll get to as many as I can, time permitting. Please join me in welcoming Brilliant Earth Group to Sidoti's conference. Jeff, thank you for being here, and I'll turn it over to you. Great. Thanks very much, Daniel, and thank you, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here at the Sidoti Small Cap Conference, and appreciate you taking the time to meet with us. And then before we proceed, we'd just like to highlight briefly our safe harbor language regarding forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. You can also read these in the presentation that has been posted to our investor relations website. Brilliant Earth is the next-generation jeweler for today's consumer. We were founded in 2005 with a mission to create a more transparent, sustainable, and compassionate jewelry industry, and we're transforming the industry with a combination of an authentic, mission-driven brand, really beautifully designed, trend-leading proprietary products, a seamless omni-channel experience across our 37 and growing number of showrooms and our digital platform, and an asset-light and data-driven business model. This is all translated into our ability to profitably grow and gain share in the large, $300 billion jewelry industry, large and fragmented $300 billion jewelry industry. This timeline page walks you through some of the highlights of our company history from our founding in 2005, and it really showcases our leadership in areas like product innovation, media engagement, partnerships, including our recently announced partnership with Jane Goodall, some of our financial milestones, as well as examples of how we give back to our communities. There are a number of points that's helpful to keep in mind as we think about Brilliant Earth and our opportunity. One is, as I mentioned, it's a vast industry that has a lot of opportunities for disruption, including the fact that it's fragmented, that we have an agile business model that can swiftly adapt, and that includes being very asset-light and having very efficient working capital. We actually have negative working capital. We don't hold excess inventory. We have a light inventory footprint compared to the industry as a whole. We use data throughout the business to inform our decisions, and we also have an omni-channel model that I talked about briefly, that provides a joyful, seamless experience however you choose to engage with us, whether it's in our showrooms, on our digital platforms. If you wanna call in or chat with us, we really try and make that experience as seamless as it can be. Then this is all underpinned by our authentic, mission-driven brand and values that strongly resonate with our customers. This page provides a little bit of recent financial history back to 2020. You can see here that we have been growing and gaining share. We've reached $446 million in 2023 Net Sales, and we also have made significant increases in Gross Margin, reaching a Gross Margin of 58% last year. We've been able to do so while delivering positive Adjusted EBITDA, balancing making investments both for near-term growth and long-term growth with driving efficiency and profitability. You'll hear us talk about that often. It's that balance between making the right investments to capture growth in the large industry while still keeping our eye on being profitable and driving those efficiencies. I'd like to highlight now some of the recent performance from Q1 of 2024. We drove $97.3 million in net sales in Q1, and that was approximately flat year-over-year. Then we had a strong order growth of 14% year-over-year in Q1, and an even higher repeat order growth of 20% year-over-year. That really demonstrates the resonance of the brand with our customer base and the ability to drive people, not just to come to us, but to come back to us, and I think we're proud of these results that we were able to drive in Q1. We had average selling price, or ASP, that was up year-over-year in Q1 across our product lines, including engagement rings, wedding bands, and fine jewelry, and that speaks to also the customer resonance, as well as the premium brand positioning that we have. We had a gross margin of 59.9%, which is a 500 basis point expansion versus the prior Q1, and this, as well as our discipline in managing OpEx, led to an adjusted EBITDA of $5.1 million for Q1, which exceeded our expectations, and that was our 11th consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA that we reported as a public company. Also, on the balance sheet side, we have inventory turns that are significantly higher than the industry average. And then we were able to, on a year-over-year basis, increase our cash balance by $1.5 million year-over-year in Q1, even after considering capital investments in things like our showroom footprint and reducing our debt principal balance. Just already covered these points, so I think we can move on to the next page to talk a little bit about just orders and AOV. So here, just, I think, helpful to highlight, you know, a couple of things. One is that just that strong order growth really does demonstrate our effectiveness in acquiring and retaining customers and the resonance of the brand with our customer base. Also, helpful to highlight that our ASPs, as I mentioned, were all up. If you're looking at engagement rings, wedding bands, or fine jewelry, all of those were up year-over-year in Q1. We do expect that the AOV overall, on a blended basis, will moderate, as fine jewelry becomes a bigger part of the product mix. I'll talk a little bit more about the fine jewelry opportunity, but that is a strategic initiative for us. It's a growth opportunity. It does have lower price points than our overall AOV, so it does bring the blended AOV down, but this is a strategic area that we're excited to see growth in. We've had continued success in terms of growing the brand, and some of the examples are here. We are really honored to launch our partnership with Jane Goodall in support of the Jane Goodall Institute, which we announced recently. We executed a Real Love campaign featuring some of our customer love stories, and that resulted in over 50 million media impressions. We drove our strongest quarter ever in social engagement, with 100% growth quarter-over-quarter in social media engagement, really showing how our customer and fan base are engaging with us. We've had continued red carpet success, including Sydney Sweeney wearing Brilliant Earth at the 35th annual GLAAD Media Awards. We have a collection of beautifully designed proprietary products across our assortment, and, you know, you can see some of the examples here. We had a very strong fine jewelry performance with 45% year-over-year growth in the 2 weeks prior to Valentine's Day. Now, this is a big opportunity for us in that we are majority bridal, engagement rings, and we do have the opportunity to grow in areas like fine jewelry. Fine jewelry is the majority of the industry as a whole, and so there's a big opportunity for us to grow our footprint there, and as we do so, do things like capturing additional share of wallet, growing repeat purchase behavior, capturing additional customer lifetime value. So we're excited about the opportunity. We've been demonstrating success in fine jewelry, and we're looking forward to being able to continue to outperform there. We also had a double-digit year-over-year growth in Q1 in wedding and anniversary rings. Then on the engagement ring side, you know, we're leading in terms of diamond origin transparency, with more than 10,000 blockchain-enabled diamonds, where customers can leverage blockchain to have additional visibility into the origin of their diamonds. I want to spend a little bit of time here on our business model and the efficiency of it. So we do have very efficient inventory turns and actually a negative working capital model. So look at the industry as a whole. Inventory turns are in the 1-2 times range. Our inventory turns, as most recently reported, were a little bit under 5, and so I think that's a significant excess of our inventory turns really allows us to keep the balance sheet light, working capital efficient. It reduces our price exposure to commodity price risk and allows us to adapt much more quickly to changes in the industry and consumer demand. And it's a real competitive advantage that pairs well with things like our price optimization engine, where we can take that inventory light model and then pair that with the ability to price dynamically according to things like market conditions, input costs, and customer demand. It allows us to really be agile in terms of how we serve the market. So this design-your-own model allows us to have a vast virtual inventory of hundreds of thousands of natural and lab-grown diamonds, offering a breadth of selection to our customers, while reducing that risk. Then it's efficient for our working capital in that we're able to initiate production and bring in products for this portion of the business after we've received an order with some portion of payment, which then reduces our risk. It keeps the inventory on our balance sheet on a more transient basis, and on the other side, we have payment terms with our suppliers. This all leads to helping us keep our working capital cycle very efficient. I think a couple of proof points that's helpful to keep in mind on the balance sheet side are that our inventory ended on first quarter less than 3% higher year-over-year, even considering that we grew our fine jewelry assortment and expanded our showroom footprint by over 30% year-over-year, and if you're looking at just the cash balance, our quarter-end cash of $147.5 million at the end of Q1 was $1.5 million higher year-over-year, even after expanding the showroom footprint and reducing the debt principal balance. So I think both on the P&L side and on the balance sheet side, there are a lot of really attractive characteristics to how we operate the business. Spoke briefly about our omni-channel model, and just wanted to touch here. You can see here our showroom footprint, which as of right now, is 37 showrooms across the country. We've talked about opening 3 others so far in 2024, with 2 in Boston and our first street-level location in New York City in Nolita. Really, these showrooms allow us to unlock demand in metros where we open them and capture uplift in additional revenue when we open showrooms. We continue to see, even as we, for example, open more than one showroom in a given metro or clusters, we continue to see positive incremental growth in those metros. This really couples well with our strong digital platform and allows customers in a large range of the country to engage with us in our showrooms. And you can also, you know, all across the world, engage with our digital platform and talk with us in our channels, email us, and so we really cater to being able to meet customers where, when, and how they want to shop. Moving on a bit to our 2024 priorities and outlook, wanted to touch briefly upon a few areas. So really, for 2024, we're continuing on our path to become the premier global jewelry brand for today's and tomorrow's consumer. Focusing on also continuing to expand and refine our distinctive proprietary product offerings, expanding and elevating the omni-channel experience, and investing to drive operational efficiencies and long-term sustainable growth. So in terms of what this means for guidance, for the year, our guidance is for net sales between $455 million-$469 million, which is approximately 2%-5% year-over-year growth, and an adjusted EBITDA for the year of between $14 million and $22 million. We believe we're well-positioned to drive share gains, to maintain strong gross margins, and to manage operating expenses in a disciplined fashion. For Q2, our guidance includes an expectation of robust order growth and strong momentum in fine jewelry, in wedding and anniversary bands, offset with a softer environment in engagement rings as the industry continues to face some headwinds along the gradual path to normalization. We expect Q2 net sales to be down in the low- to mid-single-digit percent year-over-year, and we expect to continue making investments in Q2 to set the stage for long-term growth while still delivering profitability and sequential revenue growth. We expect Q2 Adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the single-digit percent range as a percentage of net sales, as we dynamically manage operating expenses, including marketing spend, to deliver profitability while making strategic investments in the business. Then, as we continue to progress through the year, we expect our growth rate to increase as we progress through the year, as we anticipate that engagements will continue to normalize. And then we also expect other key drivers will include realizing uplift from the opening and growth of new showrooms, continued strong performance of fine jewelry, and the fact that seasonally, Q4 is the biggest quarter for fine jewelry sales. For the second half, we expect that growth will be Q4-weighted, with a low single-digit percent net sales year-over-year growth rate in Q3, and a higher year-over-year net sales growth rate in Q4. And then looking a bit further out, also thought it would be helpful to talk through our medium-term targets and how we're thinking about things through 2027. So for net sales, you know, we anticipate net sales growth accelerating from the low- to mid-single-digit percent growth this year to a low-teens% growth rate in 2027. We expect this to be driven by the gradual normalization of engagements over the next few years, growth from existing showrooms, a measured acceleration of new showroom openings compared to 2024, continued outperformance in fine jewelry and other non-engagement assortments, as well as growth of our overall brand awareness. We expect our gross margin to remain in the high 50s% through 2027. While we don't expect the same pace of annual expansion that we've achieved in recent years as we strike a balance between driving top-line growth and margin expansion, we do see further opportunities to increase gross margin through our premium brand or proprietary product collections, our price optimization engine, procurement efficiencies, and our warranty program. And then on the expense side, from 2025 to 2027, we do expect to increasingly drive leverage in marketing costs compared to 2024. We expect that growing brand awareness, increased conversion from our showrooms, and then continued success in fine jewelry are all gonna contribute to driving increasing leverage in marketing costs from 2025 to 2027. Then we anticipate the combination of these factors will drive us toward an Adjusted EBITDA margin, reaching double digits in 2027. So that's a bit of how we're thinking about the picture for the next few years after this one. I think that covers the materials, and I'd, again, like to thank you for taking the time to hear from us today, and I'd be glad to answer questions that you might have. Awesome. Jeff, thank you so much for that overview of the company and your strategy. As a reminder, if you do have any questions, please feel free to type them into the Q&A box, and I'll get to as many as I can. Jeff, we've got a few in the queue, but I just wanted to kick things off talking about your brand and how you see the brand as a competitive advantage, and how well it resonates with, you know, Millennials and Gen Z. Yeah, we do have that authentic, mission-driven brand that's underlying how we operate as a company. And I think that today's consumer is, you know, very attuned to authenticity in the brand, and we've, you know, operated with our brand principles, you know, since our founding. And I think another thing to highlight is that we are a premium brand, and so we're not discount-oriented. We're thoughtful about how we continue to cultivate that brand, and that's the positioning that we have, and that allows us to do things like have ASPs that are growing year-over-year, like we saw in Q1. It contributes in a meaningful way to how we're able to drive strong gross margins, and so I think that's a little bit of color about how we think about the brand. Perfect. Then you and I were briefly chatting about your, you know, omni-channel approach and also the showrooms, and I've got multiple questions that have come in on that topic, so I'll try to hit them as quickly as I can. Just generally, what is the typical cost of a new showroom, and what is the average payback period for new locations? Yeah, so we haven't broken out, you know, the specific cost, but I will say that we have an... You know, we have an efficient approach in terms of our overall CapEx, you know? So I think that, you know, one way that you can look at is the amount of CapEx, you know, that we had, for example, last year. So we had a little under $12 million of CapEx- Right ... you know, so as a percentage of sales is, is not, you know, not particularly high. You know, our overall, overall approach in terms of building out the showrooms is both in the build-out and the operations. A lot of efficiency in how those are operated. For example, our staff in our showrooms, they can serve customers across different channels, even if they're not with someone in an appointment. As in contrast with a traditional model, where you may just have showroom staff that are waiting for customers to come in, we're able to allocate efficiently and use that showroom staff in a way that is able to serve our customers and efficient from an OpEx perspective. Perfect. And then staying on this theme, can you talk about showroom penetration and saturation and where you are in that journey? And then, more generally, is there a target number of showrooms that you're trying to get to? We think that we can achieve coverage of our customer base with an efficient showroom footprint. So would say that our showrooms tend to be destinations, so people are aware of us, and they, they're coming to us to shop, and so we can get coverage in a metro area without without looking to build out thousands of showrooms across the country. We do think there is still opportunity for us to add additional showrooms, including clusters, and this includes, as you may know, we've added formats recently, including our first mall-based locations, outdoor centers, ground floor. This is a nice complement to the appointment-driven model, where we're able to serve customers with the appointment-driven model, but also create the opportunity for discovery and getting to know us on a walk-in basis, and to just experience more of the brand and more of our product assortment. Perfect. And then last one on showrooms. What percent of sales come from your showroom setting versus other channels? We haven't broken that out specifically, and how we think about that is, it is a true omni-channel experience, where this is a considered purchase, and it's a higher price point purchase. And so oftentimes, customers will engage with us through multiple channels. You may discover us on the website, then speak with us, you know, on chat or on the phone, come in to see us in a showroom, or the order could be reversed or some combination of that. But it is an omni-channel purchase, and that's why we—when we open showrooms, we think about things like the incrementality. So it's not just, "Hey, something is being credited to the box." We really want to be driving incrementality in uplifting the entire metro. Perfect. And then I'm gonna try to combine a couple, but it seems that there's a tremendous opportunity for you in fine jewelry, and I understand that right now the majority is bridal. But I wanted to give you a little bit of an opportunity to talk about what opportunity you see in fine jewelry, and I'm also curious if that's potentially a point of differentiation between you and the competitors that may be out there. There's enormous opportunity for us in fine jewelry. We have a bridal heritage, but the industry as a whole is majority fine jewelry, and we've been driving success and outperformance in fine jewelry overall. And, you know, you see that, for example, in the results that we had in the couple weeks leading up to Valentine's Day. I think with our both timeless staples as well as trend-leading designs, we are really able to offer a compelling assortment to customers. And what this does is this allows us to engage with customers at more different points, whether it's anniversaries, special events, self-purchase. There's many opportunities for people to engage with and purchase from Brilliant Earth, and we're excited about the opportunity and the success that we've been driving there. Perfect. And then just some general questions: How sensitive would you say your business is to the economy? And obviously, we've had some retail companies report recently that they're seeing some, you know, lower consumer discretion in terms of spending and also kind of a weaker macroeconomic environment. Yeah, we are cognizant of the economy and things like the current engagement environment. I would say, though, that we are agile and better placed than most of the industry to adapt to changes, and I think that comes down to a few different things, like the strength of our brand, the agility of our business model, and being asset light with our balance sheet. We just have less exposure than others who have heavier balance sheets to things like commodity price changes or buying things at the wrong time or at the wrong price. We're able to see and adapt to changes in consumer demand in the market quickly, and so we're able. And then underlying all of this is our technology and data platforms that allow us to use data to make intelligent decisions and just be fast and efficient. And so we think that in a variety of different environments, we are really well-positioned to react faster and react better than the industry as a whole and continue to gain share and grow profitably. Perfect. And then one question came in about your sales goal for 2027, and it says: "To get to your goal of low teen sales growth for 2027, how should investors think about order growth versus AOV? Yeah, so I would say embedded in how we're thinking about the getting to the midterm model is continued, you know, continued growth in areas, including outperformance in fine jewelry. And so we've had an outperformance there and in other non-engagement assortments. So we haven't provided specific numbers in terms of AOV and order growth, but we do expect that AOV would continue to moderate as fine jewelry becomes a bigger part of our business, and that's something that is intentional and strategic, and we're glad to see that. Perfect. We're running up on time, Jeff, but I just wanted to close by asking you if there's anything else you'd really want to share with those in the audience and also the investor base? No, I don't think so, besides saying thank you to everyone for tuning in and spending this half hour with us. It's a pleasure to be here, and thank you for having us at the Sidoti Small Cap Conference, and hope that everybody has a great rest of their afternoon. Well, Jeff, on behalf of Sidoti and those that are in the audience, we really thank you for your participation here and your willingness to answer all the questions and go through the company background and also where you see it's going. For those of you in the audience, thank you so much for your participation and your questions. I'm sorry that we weren't able to get to all of them, but I think Jeff did a really great job of answering those that were asked. We hope everybody has a wonderful afternoon, and thank you again for joining the Sidoti June conference. Thank you.