Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Good morning. Good morning. Welcome to the 25th anniversary ICR Conference. Very excited to be in person this year. Super excited to see many old friends and new friends in person, and I'm honored today to be introducing our first presenting company to open today's event, Chico's FAS. Behind me, Molly Langenstein, CEO, and to my left is P.J. Guido, CFO. With that, I'm gonna lead into the Chico's team, and again, welcome to this great event. We have three full days of public companies, private companies, panel discussions, exciting stuff. Good to see you all. Talk soon. Great. Thanks, Tom. Good morning, everyone. Again, I'm Molly Langenstein. I'm the CEO and President for Chico's FAS, and P.J. Guido, who is with me, is our CFO, and we are delighted to be here with you today. Before I begin, I'd like to point to our safe harbor statement on the screen, which can also be found on our website and filings. Chico's FAS, we're a $2.1 billion vertical specialty retailer with a portfolio of three unique brands: Chico's, White House Black Market, and Soma. Each of our brands has a distinct market opportunity, and through the third quarter, all three continually demonstrated growth faster than the market average. These share gains are just one proof point of the successful turnaround strategy we executed beginning in 2019. New talent on our management team has resulted in world-class merchant and design capabilities, which are enabling us to better connect customer and product. The company has a shared platform, which is compounding the power of this expertise across each brand. We have transformed our supply chain and ingrained new technologies across the organization to increase efficiencies. Through this work, we have also reduced overhead. Today, we are a merchant-led, customer-driven, digital-first company. We are a leaner, faster, and a more flexible company. Chico's FAS is on track for significant sustainable growth. In early 2022, we set three-year targets, including delivering over $2.5 billion in revenues, generating at least 15% compound annual EPS growth by 2024, and producing $400 million in cumulative cash flow. Today, our organization is disciplined, focused on driving sales and profitability, and committed to creating shareholder value in the years ahead. We have four clearly defined strategic pillars that have guided our turnaround strategy since 2019: customer-led, product-obsessed, digital-first, and operationally excellent. We are customer-led, focused on community engagement, creating memorable customer experiences, and increasing customer lifetime value. We are focused on providing innovative solutions through products and personalized service. We wear test our products, and then we vet them through customers to ensure our key franchises are built for growth. We continue to grow our customer base and attract younger customers through the relevance of our product and our marketing. Our recently relaunched loyalty programs also drive engagement and lifetime devotion to our brands. The power of our three brands is driving growth through three powerful platforms, creating long-term connections and enabling our customers to seamlessly interact with us. Our physical stores are community centers where customers experience our products in the most exciting ways. The knowledge and enthusiasm of our stylists and bra experts drive sales and brand loyalty. Digital is often our customers' first impression of our brands, a community hub for content, and a great way to share information and inspire. Our social stylists skillfully connect customers to stores and digital. We are product-obsessed, continually delivering distinctive, premium, innovative, and best-in-class merchandise to our customers while considering sustainability. We primarily serve women 45 and older with a household income of over $100,000, and we believe we are competitively positioned to continue to gain and take market share. Over the last 3 years, we have studied the customer and the product. We've reimagined each of our brands, built numerous successful franchises that are core to attracting new customers. Franchises include single item categories like shirts, denim, or bras, or they are categories around key collections and categories. We also remain focused on the time and the brand expression through the creative storytelling based on new designs over the past 2 years, new and returning customers, and also discovering and rediscovering each one of our brands. At our apparel brands, customers are responding to elevated fashion. We have grown revenues through head-to-toe dressing. Soma continues to make investments in cutting-edge product innovation. This is paying off with continued growth in our foundations business in both bras and panties. Product enhancements and innovation are moving all 3 brands forward. As our higher AUR shows, customers appreciate higher quality and are receptive for paying for value and solutions. We are digital-first, leveraging technology to engage and deliver across channels and brands. We have strengthened our core platform, data-driven insights, and decision-making. We continue to invest in technology and talent and test and modernize our merchandise, e-commerce, and store systems. We have transformed the company into a digital-first organization with digital sales growing by double digits in each of the last three quarters. The connection of physical, digital, and social commerce is key to the growth and the platform we will leverage for community, connection, and collaboration. Each digital touchpoint inspires the customer to find solutions and build her wardrobe across brands. We are driving frequency of online and in-store visits. Our customized digital styling tools, My Closet and Style Connect, continue to drive sales and engagement. These tools nurture and grow multi-channel customers who are so valuable to us, spending more than three times what a single-channel customer does. In the first 9 months of this year, multi-channel customers grew in customer count, sales, and spend per customer. Digital tools are driving higher AOV. They continue to be a catalyst for growth in the company for both digital and store sales. Our social stylists provide real personalized style advice either in person or virtually. Our stylists can live anywhere, bridging the geographic gap between stores and also where we may need more density in a geographic area. Our mobile apps are exceeding our expectations with downloads and engagement growing month-over-month and driving higher AOV and conversion than the site average. We are operationally excellent. We are continually focused on fabric-first mindset, diligently managing our inventory, our cost of sales, supply chain expenses, and real estate, generating healthy cash flow, and delivering a strong bottom line. We are constantly improving our sourcing, logistics, and operational processes to drive efficiencies and lower costs. We have carefully managed our inventory flow by shifting our development calendar 10 weeks to assure product is available to customers in a timely manner to guard against potential supply chain disruptions. At the end of the third quarter, our inventory levels were 9% above last year, delivering a sales increase of 14%. Chico's has a uniquely strong foundation with some of the most loyal and dedicated customers in retail. Let me talk about how we use this loyalty to drive growth over the next few years. At the end of the third quarter, we had 7.5 million active customers, and over the trailing 12 months, our customer count grew by a total of 8%, 11% in Chico's, 14% in White House Black Market, and 4% in Soma. Existing reactivated and new customers were up to the prior year. We continue to attract younger customers through the relevance of our product and our marketing while retaining our core customers. Once customers come to us, they stay an average of 6-12 years, proof that once we get them, we can keep them. Over 80% of our active customers are enrolled in our loyalty programs, and these recently relaunched programs are building stronger customer relationships, and they continue to exceed our expectations in enrollment, customer sentiment, and redemption rates. We are leveraging our customer data platform and technology investments, like our new apps in each brand, to drive higher engagement and increased AOV. Our apps are becoming a key hub for our loyalty programs, and this approach is generating strong results. In the first nine months of this year, nearly 70% of our traffic came through mobile and over 40% of our sales were digital. We also believe there is a opportunity to leverage the unique customers in Chico's and White House Black Market so that potentially every apparel customer can also become a Soma customer. Leveraging the connections of the two apparel customers is an efficient and cost-effective way to acquire new Soma customers, and this represents about a 4 million customer opportunity for Soma. Now let's talk a little bit about each individual brand. Chico's. It's a boutique of solution-oriented products focused on color, fit, and inclusive sizing. Within Chico's, we offer several core franchises such as Travelers, Zenergy, and our No-Iron Shirt franchise. Chico's inspires accomplished women to embrace and express their individuality. She is confident, fun, and creative. She doesn't take herself too seriously. She is magnetic and genuine. Chico's generated a 33% increase for the first nine months of this year and expanded its customer base by nearly 11% on a trailing twelve-month basis. Style, fit, comfort, and solutions are hallmarks in Chico's, and these are driving revenue increases. She is focused on completing her looks with easy care, wrinkle-free ClimateRight fabrics. At White House Black Market, our customers can discover designer details with feminine tailoring focused on our core franchises with solutions. White House Black Market inspires independent women to embrace both their power and femininity. She is accomplished, confident, optimistic, stylish, and social. White House Black Market sales grew 33% in the first 9 months of this year and increased nearly 14% on a trailing 12-month basis our customer count. Versatile tailoring with feminine details and seasonless fabrics is driving the business in key categories, whether she is looking for casual, special occasion, or wardrobe pieces. Soma is our inclusive intimate apparel, a brand that is providing beautiful solutions. Soma inspires all women to embrace the passion for both comfort and confidence. She appreciates fashion as much as function, and she exudes individuality, honesty, and positivity. While still modestly negative, our third quarter Soma comp performance improved compared to the second quarter, and we have built a path to growth with our proven innovations playbook. Our cutting-edge product innovation has paid off with continued growth in our foundations business. In both bras and panties, we continued to take market share through the last quarter in non-sport bras and panties according to NPD. Indicating the overall long-term power of the Soma brand. We have transformed into a digital-first organization through a strategic digital-first roadmap and connecting our customers to multiple commerce channels, and is the powerful outcome of this roadmap. Digital-first does not just mean e-commerce, it's optimizing the use of data and technology behind the digital and physical world. With our focus on enhancing experiences, we are migrating our store customers online and vice versa. Our digital-first strategy has three primary components: connected commerce brought to life by data centricity and technology enablement. Connected commerce means offering a seamless, personalized integration of in-person and digital experiences, allowing consumers to shop when and how they want to shop. It goes much deeper than this. It is delivered each time we touch a customer. We are building an enduring customer relationship model that brings her back more frequently using the strength of our product and by exceeding her expectations with relevant content, experiences, and engagement. Data centricity means enabling every function to quickly make better-informed decisions that drive the business forward. We have three primary focuses areas continuing to drive data centricity: continuing to evolve our targeted marketing, including sophisticated channel attribution and customer segmentation, continuing to advance our personalization capabilities, driving conversion and AOV, and then focusing on data-driven localized assortments to have inventory at the right place at the right time. Technology enablement, along with data, will be the foundation of all we do for our customers. Over the past two years, we have transformed our business model through the implementation of cutting-edge technology. Over the last 18 months, we have had several successes. We launched a best-in-class SMS marketing platform, and we have over 2 million customers enrolled. We have installed a new customer data platform, and we launched our first content management system, and we recently launched a cloud-based omnichannel order management and inventory system. These initiatives reflect the tremendous progress we have made and continue to make on our digital journey. As we innovate, we seamlessly engage with our customers. We will continue to optimize the digital experience to forge deeper relationships, accelerate growth, drive greater share and profitable shares and sales, and gain market share. ESG is integrated into each of our four pillars. We're committed to inclusion and diversity and are proud to have a diverse nine-member board, and that 96% of our company's associates are female. We are committed to sustainability and the environment and are continually looking for ways to care for our planet by sourcing, packaging, and shipping more responsibly and reducing our carbon footprint. I'd like to turn it over to P.J., P.J. Guido, our CFO. P.J. You wanna use this? Thanks, Molly. Thank you, Molly. Good morning, everyone, thank you for your interest in Chico's. I wanted to start by just sharing a few financial highlights on our most recent third quarter, which marked another period of solid sales growth and operating margin expansion. It was our 7th consecutive quarter of year-over-year double-digit EPS growth. For the quarter, we saw 14% total sales growth and a comparable sales increase of nearly 17%. Chico's posted a 29% comp, White House Black Market grew 17%. While Soma comps were down 6%, the brand was up 35% to 2019. Both our store and digital channels have been growing in stride and grew double digits in Q3, with stores outpacing digital. We also continue to leverage our cost structure, our operating margin further expanded by 125 basis points. We generated $32 million of operating income, which was an increase of nearly 45% from last year. Now, shifting to current performance. This morning, we reported holiday sales and updated our fourth quarter outlook. For the 9-week period, Excuse me. For the 9-week period ending December 31st, comparable sales grew 5.3%. Based on this performance, we now expect full fourth quarter total sales to range from $505 million to $515 million, and diluted earnings per share in the range of - $0.02 to flat. Coming out of Q3 and moving into November, performance remained strong through Cyber Monday. As we moved into December, we did start to see a tick down in store traffic that impacted sales relative to our forecast. Our Chico's brand sales remained healthy, and trends at our Soma brand continued to improve quarter-over-quarter. White House Black Market revenues were softer than expected. Certain categories and styles, like party dresses and heavy sweaters, did not sell through as we thought, and we took some price action to clear that inventory. Although our overall performance did not meet our forecast, we feel good about where we are and the health of our brands, and we are on track to post low-to-mid single-digit fourth quarter comparable sales growth. That's on top of close to 30% comparable sales growth in last year's fourth quarter. From an inventory standpoint, we remain very lean and we liquidated slow-moving categories during the quarter. December on-hand inventory was up only 1% to last year, so we will move into 2023 ready to deliver newness to our customers. One other thing to note is that we have seen the benefits of diversification as a multi-brand platform that does not rely on any single brand in any single quarter to keep the growth music going. With a powerful portfolio, strong cash flow, and a rock-solid balance sheet, our go-forward strategy and growth plan is on track. We look forward to providing full quarter results and 2023 outlook on our upcoming Q4 earnings call. Shifting to financial health and profitability, we generated over $40 million of EBITDA in the third quarter and nearly $170 million for the first nine months of this year, which is well above all of last year and more than 2x the full year 2019. In the past three years, our EBITDA margin has risen from 4% to over 10%, indicating the power of our strategy and health of our brand portfolio. Strong cash flow means a strong balance sheet, which provides us tremendous flexibility in navigating the environment while investing in our strategic plan. We ended the quarter with $130 million of cash and nearly $330 million of total liquidity. In a short time frame, we have definitively changed the narrative from recovery to proactive growth with the financial flexibility to ramp up investment. We remain focused on executing our plan despite the macro environment. Earlier this year, we shared our three-year plan that calls for us to reach $2.5 billion of sales by 2024, translating into a 12% compound annual growth rate from our jumping-off point in 2021. Within this overall sales goal, we are targeting $1 billion in digital sales by 2024. Through full price selling, inventory discipline, strategic pricing, and occupancy leverage, we are targeting a 40% annual gross margin, which is a level the company has not seen in over a decade. With increased emphasis on the full PNL and increasing profitability through margin expansion and expense leverage, we are targeting a 7.5% operating margin, which is more than double where we were in 2021. We've also greatly improved cash flow. Our three-year model forecasts over $400 million of cumulative cash flow generation. Our brand portfolio is performing. Our financial metrics are strong. We see a clear path to delivering significant shareholder return through 2024, with a target of at least 15% annual EPS growth and total shareholder return. Based on our year-to-date progress and outlook for Q4 and the full year, we are off to a very good start in the first year of our three-year plan. Our top-line growth this year is tracking to the high teens, well ahead of the annual growth rate needed to hit the $2.5 billion by 2024. Gross margin this year is on track to expand to approximately 39%. We've made substantial progress towards that 40% three-year target. For reference, this would put our margin up over 400 basis points since 2019. With gross margin expansion and SG&A leverage, we are delivering outsized operating income and EPS growth, enabling us to keep investing in the business while also delivering for our shareholders. We expect to generate over $120 million of cash from operations this year and are well-positioned to produce $400 million cumulatively through 2024. That will be available to maintain liquidity and fund our strategic plan. Our first report card in our 3-year plan is shaping up to be a good one, and we will continue to lean into our strategy to get us the rest of the way and beyond. Our capital allocation policy supports our growth path. Firstly, we wanna ensure that we have more than ample liquidity to manage the day-to-day operations and navigate the consistently challenging environment. After ensuring strong liquidity, we expect to invest 3.5%-4% of sales in capital expenditures annually back into the business. We are also using our cash flow to maintain a low-risk capital structure with minimal debt. Our debt to EBITDA stands at about a half a turn, meaning we could repay all of our outstanding debt with less than half a year's cash flow. We believe after covering liquidity, reinvesting, and maintaining a strong balance sheet, we will be able to return excess cash to shareholders to deliver incremental value in the coming years. Capital investments over the next few years will be focused across three major buckets: digital, stores, infrastructure, with roughly a third of our budget allocated to each. The digital investments we're making are high-returning projects that we expect to drive incremental traffic and conversion and build our customer file. For example, in digital, we're enhancing our customer data platform and data science team to drive deeper and more focused engagement with our customers. We're also investing more in our brand websites by enhancing the user experience with upgraded search, browse, checkout functions, as well as adding more engaging content. We are upgrading our order management system to better manage our inventory and align with customer demand. Our goal is to create a world-class e-commerce platform that connects to all our customers across all channels. We are making investments in our stores to drive productivity and expand our footprint in untapped or underserved markets. We are adding select new Soma locations to grow the brand. We are also upgrading the look and shopping experience within high-performing Chico's and White House Black Market locations. We're making the investments needed to increase the throughput and efficiency of our supply chain and call center to keep pace with growth and deliver a great customer experience. I see my shot clock is running out here, so I'm gonna move a little bit quicker. Here's a snapshot of our store fleet. At the end of the third quarter, we had 1,261 stores in the U.S. Our plan is to open up to 30 Somas annually through 2024. We will open 27 this year. Both our Chico's and White House locations are performing exceptionally well, with store comps growing by double digits for the first 9 months of this year. With the improving productivity and profitability of our store base, we are slowing the number of store closures. We originally targeted 40 closures this year, we've re-reduced that number to 26. To achieve our overall goals, we are leaning into the assets and resources that make us a standout in retail. We have a powerful portfolio of 3 distinct brands, each with their own unique opportunity for growth and each gaining market share in their respective space. Our talented leadership team has extensive experience, has successfully orchestrated a turnaround, is now laser-focused on delivering outsized growth. Our customer-led culture and loyal customer base have been nurtured over 40 years. These are competitive advantages that cannot be easily replicated. We have a powerful shared platform serving our brands and unlocking synergies across the company. Our store teams are unmatched in commitment, passion, and experience. We have a strong balance sheet and lean cost structure that will allow us to fuel growth. Thank you for your time this morning. We invite you to join us at our 9:00 A.M. or our 1:00 P.M. breakout sessions.
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