My name is Dylan Carden. Thanks for being here. I cover National Vision here at William Blair. Alex Wilkes, CEO, Chris Laden, CFO of the company. I'm required to let you know that there are disclosures from a compliance standpoint as relates to this discussion that you can find on our website. To start, you guys put out an 8-K. Can you sort of walk through what was in that? We can talk about that a bit and then sort of get onto the good stuff. Absolutely. Well, I think the 8-K is some good stuff too. Yeah. We were happy to reiterate our guide for the year in our 8-K published this morning, which at the midpoint is about a 4.5% comp and about a point of operating margin expansion for the year versus prior year. We disclosed that we did buy back $20 million of our $50 million share buyback authorization. That was done in May. Just over a million shares were purchased after our Q1 earnings release. We had said that when we talked in Q1 earnings that we were in low single-digit comps quarter to date. We said the same thing through today and expect to land Q2 in the low single-digit comp range as well, while still reiterating our guide for the year. The whole impetus for all this was the replatforming of the website. Can you speak to the initial disruption and what you've seen more recently coming out of this that sort of give you confidence that there is, bless you, some recovery? Right immediately after go live, which was the first week of April, we saw our acquisition costs essentially double from our historical norms because we had a lot of marketing inefficiencies as we were reconnecting the pipes between our e-commerce site and Google, Meta, and Microsoft. As a point of reference, about half of the eye exams that we see at America's Best and Eyeglass World come through the online channel. Half of the almost 7 million exams that we see on an annual basis are booked on America's Best or eyeglassworld.com. Our entire lower funnel marketing ecosystem is really pointed at driving highly qualified traffic from online to book an exam and then ultimately matriculate in an eye exam in the store. We had some disruption of that ecosystem. We had disruption and inefficiency between the data that was going back to Google, Meta, and Microsoft in terms of what good customers look like to serve us more well-qualified leads. We saw a high degree of marketing inefficiency, and we actually decided to throttle back our marketing spend during that time period because of the inefficiency attributed to that. As we reconnected the pipes between our site and search, as we re-indexed our site so the campaigns matched our content, we started to throttle back up on our marketing investment. Now where we sit in the quarter, we've seen our acquisition costs return to historic norms. Something I think we responded well to a situation that was a bit beyond our expectations in terms of marketing ineffectiveness during that time period. Now we've returned to where we expected to be. From a booking standpoint? Yeah, from a booking standpoint, we're also seeing our bookings return to our historic norms and kind of what we experienced in Q1. We did see negative bookings as we started the quarter, and now that's returned to more of our expectations. Just, I know they're sort of early days here, but why do this? Yeah... [crosstalk] Apart from the fun of it. When Chris and I came to the company in 2024 and 2025, we found a company that was in need of rapid modernization of both our commercial model and our technology infrastructure. We were ill-prepared, and frankly, incapable of participating in agentic commerce with our existing e-commerce platform. Not only were we not capable in participating in something as disruptive as agentic commerce, there was basic things we could not do around scheduling patients for an annual eye exam and then recalling them through email. There's the immediate pressing need of just getting some simple, better CRM capability in place. Our site wasn't optimized for mobile, where the vast majority of consumers go book. Those are all of the near-term reasons to do this. The longer-term reasons is we just weren't positioned to participate in commerce where we think the consumer is going to go long- term. We didn't just take a step forward. We actually are now leapfrogging the category in terms of what our martech capability will bring. Yes, it brought some pain in Q1, but I've said publicly, I've said privately that I think it is the pain of investing into the growth and the long-term aspirations of the organization. Great. That's all for the transcript for those out there that needed that. Let's take a step back. You've been to this conference several times. I think most people know you if they haven't picked up on now they sell eyeglasses and the basic... [crosstalk] Some contact lenses. Some contact lenses. Can you sort of walk through where you are in the ecosystem, your competitive advantage, the scale of the business [crosstalk]-- Yeah. --kind of get into what's changed in the most recent period? We have 1,270 locations across three primary banners. America's Best is our largest banner. We have Eyeglass World. We are proud to operate the optical centers inside AAFES. We have a great partnership with the Air Force and Army Exchange, which we actually just expanded to take over all of their locations. We have 70 locations on AAFES. We see across all of our platform, again, close to seven million patients a year. We employ over 2,000 optometrists in our network. We are proud to be an obvious destination for value in the optical category. It is a highly fragmented category still. About half of the U.S. optometric market is owned by independent optometrists, and there's been some degree of private equity consolidation in that space. Still a highly fragmented category with great opportunity for businesses like ours. As far as where we were, where we're going, just some background. Yeah. The strategic positioning as far as the value player that's evolved. Let's start there. There's a lot to unpack in all this. You've been at it. There is. No, I like... [crosstalk] Is that the right place to start? [crosstalk] No, it's a great place because historically, National Vision, and predominantly our America's Best banner, was an analog replicator of a very simple business model, which was offer a bundled offer of two pair of eyewear and an eye exam for $79, $89... [crosstalk] $69. $69 when it started, and just replicate that 1,000x over. For 20 years, that model worked really, really well. It was a highly predictable business. The thing that changed in the entire category, and it became especially more prevalent post-COVID, is managed care started to proliferate. More consumers started to be covered by an insurance benefit. Even those who weren't, their optical needs started to evolve and change, and our analog simple replicator model did not keep up to where the consumer was going. The unintended consequence of, for 10 years, shouting a message of value in the category is that we actually started to capture a lot of other consumers that weren't just the historical cash pay, lower income customers. We weren't serving those consumers well with our model. Over the last 18 months, we've worked on bringing a more premium assortment to our stores. We've worked on teaching lifestyle selling to our store associates. We started to introduce technology at the storefront to help our associates navigate the consumer journey and introduce them to the benefits of things like anti-reflective lenses, Transitions lenses, premium progressives. We started to introduce more premium frames, and in particular, those premium frames are of a high degree of desire for managed care members who have a benefit of somewhere between $130 and $150. We started to refine the model to meet where the consumer actually was that was shopping with us. We're still, as we step through 2024 and 2025, a bit of an analog replicator of this model. I think about our business in terms of the evolution from 2024 through 2028 and 2029. In 2024, we started to take some no-regrets retailing decisions that we just had a high degree of confidence. Look, make some changes to price, no regrets pricing changes, start to premiumize the assortment. As we moved into 2025, we started to focus more on lenses and lifestyle selling and expanding our offering to the consumer. As we moved into 2026, we started to introduce even more premium frames and brands that both the managed care and the cash pay consumers value. We're introducing Nikon Eyes, which is a tier 4 progressive lens that has the highest degree of differential value to the managed care consumer, but also offers the highest degree of visual acuity and performance for a progressive wear. We're evolving and enhancing our experience, our products, our assortment, but while still maintaining our position as the obvious destination for value in the category. We're not walking away from value as a lead reason to believe and a differentiator for our brand. However, what value is and how it's portrayed is being just categorized differently now than it was a number of years ago. I think the other thing I'd mention is our capital allocation strategy has also evolved over that same time period. Whereas we were rapidly growing store footprint as the primary capital allocation priority for years and years, really starting in 2024 and 2025, we throttled back. Still a net new grower of stores, but throttling from 60- 70 stores a year down to 30- 35, and redeploying that capital towards some of the technology investments and processes that Alex mentioned. We talked about the e-commerce platform. We also launched a new Oracle ERP in early April of last year. Late last year, we launched a new Adobe CRM platform, and really the e-commerce platform is the last leg in the three-legged stool to set the right technology foundation. As we have been making these fairly mechanical changes in terms of introducing new selling strategies, I'd say some point-in-time technology solutions to support the sales team, we've also been building this more solid foundation to enable, I'll call it, a more sophisticated retailing and customer experience environment for the future. Yeah. I'd say that the evolution over four phases has been sophistication on pricing, sophistication on assortment, sophistication on segmentation, which is coming next for us, then the fourth phase in this is how do we unlock a unified commerce experience more holistically for the consumer through the tech stack that we've built. Once we have those four pieces in place and put our foot back on the gas of store growth, we'll have a much stronger foundation to get a better return and a faster payback period from the stores that we invest in. I mean, to jump the gun, which is when store growth re-accelerates, when that capital's freed up, is that [crosstalk]-- Yeah. --kind of leading the puck here a little bit? Yeah. We expect to open about 30-35 new stores this year, last year, in 2027. 2028 is really when we think we'll have these puzzle pieces in place to then re-accelerate store growth to 60+ new stores a year, and keep that pace for several years. What we mentioned in our investor day last year is net over a five-year period, about 240 net new stores opening over that five-year period, with the majority of the acceleration happening in the last three years of that timeline. Yeah. We have just hired a new head of real estate for the organization with a brief to get us ready and the playbook done for 70+ stores in 2028, which we have to start working on now. How much of the team have you changed over? Quite a bit [crosstalk]-- Yeah. --of the management team at the senior level, probably 75%. Yeah. Of the level below that, which is our group vice president level, probably 50%-60%. Interesting. Well, I want to talk about cultural changes, which sort of speaks to that, right? Just to really put a finer point on it, there is this perception that you're just trying to change your stripes and move upmarket. Right? You sort of mentioned that you're redefining value in a certain way. Can you speak to the fact you have not abandoned [crosstalk]-- Yeah. --that you're still priced competitive against a Walmart, against a Costco, and the discovery of who your actual customer was as far as who you're selling to now? For sure. I actually think we were, this is maybe a bit of a harsh term, maybe even a little bit patronizing to the cash pay consumer and the historical consumer that we built our business on, and that got us to that point... [crosstalk] Not asking if they had insurance. Not asking if they had insurance and limiting the assortment to what we perceived was their power to spend, versus making products available that people actually wanted and they desired. That's actually one of the most interesting things we've seen as we've stepped through 2025 and 2026, is that even that cash pay consumer has adopted our more premium offerings at a faster rate than the managed care customer. I know I can speak for Chris on this. If we were putting our chips down on the table to bet on something we would be most surprised by, that was actually probably one of the things that we've been most pleasantly surprised by... [crosstalk] That the cash pay has been the one that's yielded up. That the cash pay average transaction value has accelerated the fastest of our customer cohorts. It's predominantly, as we've seen them opt into better frames as we've introduced them into the assortment, and we're just getting started there. We have, like as we said historically, we've moved upmarket on our frame assortment, but in the back half of the year, we're introducing customer segmentation across our network of stores, where a good majority of them are going to start to see even more luxury products introduced. Micro assortment [crosstalk]-- Yeah. --inventory store based on local income levels. That's exact. Local taste, local sell-through of specific SKUs. We've identified 5 types of consumers. We've customized an assortment for each of those 5 types. We've bought the inventory, and the great thing, now let's talk about some of the great things that historically the company built. We run a showroom-type model, which is a unique model in this category, where if a consumer comes in, tries on a pair of eyewear, they're not buying out of store inventory. That eyewear goes back on the frame board, and we pull stock from our central inventory, and it's manufactured. That gives us a tremendous amount of agility to change out assortments. We're not holding two, three SKUs of backstock in a store because we're showrooming one piece of eyewear at a time. We could move to this tailored market assortment model in a really efficient way, from a working capital perspective with our inventory. Yeah, it is a micro assortment strategy, that will be implemented in the back half of the year with the intention of serving the consumers better with the products that most resonate with them. Yeah, culturally, how do you do this? What has shifted as far as, you've said some pretty compelling things to me, I think it would be important to repeat here [crosstalk]-- Yeah. --downselling. Yeah. It started too with setting a different tone with our selling organization. One of the newer leadership team members is a super charismatic sales leader who has set a different culture and a different tone to the regional vice presidents, to the district managers in the stores. I'll tell you, just last week, we were in Dallas for our annual general manager conference. Last year, I think those guys were kind of looking at us like, "All right. What are these new guys bringing in? We're a little apprehensive." This year they were all in. As we talked about the journey and the things that we're layering on top of it, you could feel the genuine enthusiasm of 1,800 people in a room who are just so bought in to what we're doing. It's showing, right? We're seeing our conversion rate from exam to purchase hold. We're seeing every single measure of quality of sale increase through Q2. In a world of a pretty choppy macro backdrop, we're seeing consumers opt into more premium frames, more premium lenses, buying more anti-reflective, buying more Transitions, buying more premium progressives. We're selling Meta amongst EssilorLuxottica's top retail accounts globally. All of the quality of sale metrics that we look at on a weekly basis, not only are holding, they're accelerating. We're seeing our NPS scores increase. All of our leading indicators are pointed in the right direction. That, coupled with the qualitative sense of enthusiasm that we see in the stores, is what gives us all the confidence that we're on the right track with our strategy. As we're seeing this growth in average ticket, right, what highlighted is where the team is not undergoing a strategy of aggressively upselling. It's more about making products available and informing the consumer in a better way of what their choices are. Even as we see our average ticket grow, we know that our average ticket is still significantly lower than category averages, especially for national retailers, which gives us confidence that, hey, we can continue to move upstream and we still have years of pricing sophistication, merchandising mix evolution to happen. Even after that journey is complete, we still believe there will be a material gap between our average ticket and the average ticket for some of our competitors. In terms of your question on help us think about this destination of value and are you abandoning your kind of core consumer? What I'd call out is I look at it as just a reallocation of org. We talked about capital allocation. In terms of resource allocation, right, we had a team that was almost entirely pointed its human capital, its marketing assets, its marketing messages towards a primary offer of two pair and a free eye exam, which has some unintended consequences, right? That is not a message that is compelling to a managed care consumer who already gets "a free eye exam" through their insurance product. If they're coming in with a prepaid benefit for frames and we don't have the frames there that even maximize their benefits, they actually leave feeling like they left something on the table. The idea isn't we don't talk to that consumer or we don't have that offer anymore. We certainly will, and we'll certainly embrace that consumer with open arms. It's just we don't need to spend the vast majority of our organizational assets pointed at that one destination. How do we reproportion our messaging, our marketing, our store experience to better meet the needs of progressive consumers as well as managed care consumers, as well as outside Rx consumers and the cost-conscious, value-seeking consumers as well? It's not leaving this group. It's more of just, hey, let's spread our resources across the consumers who are coming through the doors today and make sure we're best serving each of those customer cohorts. Aperture. Totally. It's widening the aperture to the consumer, and frankly, what we talked about earlier around our unified commerce ambitions, that's widening it even further because we know we can unlock the lifetime value of a consumer through having more frequent touch points with them, not just in an in-store channel. In this category, you're getting in-store interactions once every two years, once every 18 months on average for a managed care member. Through sharper CRM, sharper e-commerce, we know that there is a way to interact with those consumers on a more frequent basis, especially the managed care customers that have benefits that renew on a more frequent cycle. Is that what it is? You're just sort of hitting people for every year that they have the benefit, or? Yeah, I mean, think about this. Chris loves it when I say this. I'm like, imagine a world where [crosstalk]-- [inaudible] --where you have a managed care patient that comes into one of our stores, gets an eye exam, and buys a pair of clear glasses, Ray-Bans. We know that that customer has not used their second pair 50% off benefit on sun. We can now retarget that customer in six months when it's sun season to say, "Hey. Hey, Dylan, you haven't used your benefit on sun yet. Wouldn't this be a great time to do that since you bought Ray-Ban last time? Here's what the Ray-Ban collection looks like." That's part of a use case that we can activate in this world. We're not just widening the aperture of the consumer. We're changing [crosstalk]-- [inaudible] --how we can interact with them intra purchase cycle, which is, I think, frankly, the big unlock for us. Just one other point real quick on culture. We're changing the culture of the organization and the selling team without taking any draconian changes to performance management or compensation structure. Actually, our comp structure, our commission structure actually worked quite well, but we just weren't arming the teams [crosstalk]-- [inaudible] --with the right tools to maximize their earnings potential. 10% of the assortment was above $100, right? Oh, it was very, very limited. Yeah. It was very limited. It was especially on the lower end. We were so under index. I think the number was 80% or so of our frames were below $100. We had this huge wall of frames of just very low cost product because we didn't evolve, and we weren't keeping up to the consumer. We're changing that. We're embracing our teams. We're enabling them to sell better product, but we're doing it through a really kind of positive cultural transformation at the store and district manager level. I think that's true at the home office as well. One of the behaviors that Alex instituted shortly after joining is just about curiosity and sweating every nickel. We [crosstalk]-- [inaudible] --we took $12 million of cost out of the business in 2025. We said that, hey, we found another $20 million of cost out that's going to come out, $10 million this year, $10 million next year, annualized, compounding on top of one another. That discovery came through the empowerment of the team to be curious, to ask questions, to collaborate and to understand, and frankly, be empowered to go back to some of our longtime suppliers and strategic partners and say, "Guys, we're undergoing a different growth path. This is where we want National Vision to be in the next five years. If you want to come along that journey with us, we have to come along in a way that's economically viable for both of us. Yep. We saw a great response rate from the management team, from the home office, from the stores, and from our strategic partners in helping uncover these savings. You're jumping the gun on a lot of my questions there because we're going to get to margins. All right. Yeah. Put a pin in that. On the positive metric side, managed care going from 30% to 40% on the way to 50%. Right. That gives you opportunity from a CRM standpoint to your point, right, hitting them more times a year. On the negative metric side, the fixation with traffic here, right? Yeah, the fixation with traffic. I mean, that is... [crosstalk] Does it bleed into a conversation too in and around the industry? Because there's all sorts of mixed signals in the industry as well. I guess the dynamics of where traffic is and isn't showing up in the business. Yep. At what point traffic, we either need to ignore it or rethink it, or it takes care of itself... [crosstalk] I think in terms of our business, it needs to be rethought. Okay. On an aggregate basis, we are growing eye exams. This is such an, like retail, everything's around comp. We're building stores, we're getting inorganic growth. The category is growing 1% per year in eye exams, and we have been outstripping the category in total eye exam growth... [crosstalk] At what? Have we given the specific number? We haven't. [crosstalk] I wouldn't... [crosstalk] High single- digits, yeah. Yeah. We are growing from an aggregate eye exam basis faster than the industry. By definition, we're taking share. We get, I think, penalized for this traffic conversation, even though we're growing eye exams at a faster clip than the category. We are growing with the right type of traffic with managed care and progressive and outside Rx customers that are, in our model, worth a multiple in terms of profit contribution versus our historical cash pay target. There's this fascination with the aggregate traffic number, and internally, it's far more important to me and to us. Are we growing total eye exams with our business faster than the category? If the answer is yes, over a sustained period of time, I'm sleeping well at night. Are we growing with the most valuable consumer segments faster than the category, and are they contributing to our bottom line? If the answer is yes, I sleep well at night. If the aggregate of what we're seeing in cash pay atrophy of people who participate in the bundle, and Q1 and Q2 is negative, I sleep well at night because we've actually built a healthier business. I think that's a bit of this nuance to our business in particular, especially for those who are traditionally versed on retail investing. You say, "Okay, well, traffic is a sustainable, durable metric that you look at." Got it. In this category, and especially for the history of this business, I think it's a bit more of a complex and nuanced explanation. I think it goes back to the conversation of reproportioning the organizational's focus, right? It was an expected outcome that as we took the vast majority of our resources and started redirecting them away from just the primary bundle offer, and again, reset our marketing message, our marketing dollars towards a broader array of consumers. Those other more valuable consumers are a little bit harder and more expensive to capture, but we don't need to capture them on a one-for-one basis. Yeah. from a traffic comp perspective to be a more profitable company. I hate because I think I'm going to jump ahead to your question on margins well, also from a marketing dollars perspective, our goal is not to grow traffic at all costs. We need to be wise about levering our marketing dollars as efficiently as possible. As we redeploy our marketing assets towards more valuable consumers, I'm not going to go and dump seven or eight figures more in marketing just to arbitrarily keep that traffic comp number positive if I'm going and attracting those less valuable customers. If it's a better financial outcome for the business and our investors to have an aggregate low single-digit traffic decline. Again, when you double-click, we're seeing growth in the profitable segments. That's actually a more favorable outcome for our stakeholders. Not total traffic, right? We're making investments in a new brand campaign for America's Best to attract more customers. We're making investments in a new identity for Eyeglass World to attract more customers. We're making an investment in CRM and e-commerce to attract more customers. To Chris's point, it's not customers at any cost. We do have, at the end of the day, a finite resource in doctor capacity. If we're driving lower return, lower margin contributing customers into a Saturday at noon appointment slot, that is [crosstalk]-- Underutilization. --that is not maximizing the asset that we have in our employed doctor network. It's an LTV play. Because to your point, everything you're doing is traffic driving by nature. Marketing is a traffic driver. For sure. Yeah. New platforming, retail expand, whatever it is, it should be traffic driving. At what point does your comp? Yes, you do have a finite amount of capacity. 80% of glasses are sold to an exam. Is there a period here in the next year or so where you should see more balance between? I mean... [crosstalk] That's a concern, right? For sure. It's not that it doesn't contribute, it's just that it's not as healthy of a comp because it's a pricing trip. No... [crosstalk] An affordability. In our world, it's actually our ticket expansion is disproportionately coming from mix shift. Right. It's mix shift of both the consumer and the products that we're selling. It's not necessarily just price taking. It is c onsumers volunteering themselves into better products. It's more valuable consumers disproportionately coming into our stores versus our historical base. Yes, there's some pricing elements and pricing tailwinds that we're getting to. As we've talked over the last two years, pricing was not even a mechanism or a muscle that the organization had in 2024 until we started to build it out. Getting the brand assets and the campaigns right, getting the assortment right, getting the segmentation right, getting our tech stack right, those are the priorities for us in the near to midterm before we start to re-accelerate our store growth in the 2027, 2028 time period, which then you naturally get more traffic because as you start to build 70 stores on a base of 1,270... [crosstalk] You got your ramp. Exactly. You get the ramp in the comp. Margin. Everything you're doing here and around, I think it naturally bleeds into it. Higher quality customer, better marketing leverage, more efficient marketing. It would stand to reason that your profitability should be. It's still below where you were pre-pandemic, that you should get to, if not exceed, where you've been historically. Yeah. Build your way to that, and then build your way above that, I guess. For sure. Look, our aspirations are to grow operating margin between 50 and 150 basis points every year through 2030. We certainly think that's feasible. On a top-line profile of? On a top-line profile of high single-digit revenue growth and mid-single digit comps. Where we're going to see that operating margin expansion is going to be through SG&A. As we move upstream and more premium on frames, on lenses, you'd expect to see more gross profit dollars flowing through, but at a potentially lower rate, right? I think the easiest example that people can get their heads wrapped around is this group can imagine what my input costs are on a Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses versus, let's say, a typical plastic branded frame from East Asia. I think to be expected, but at the same time, we've got that we'll be seeing some of that dilution in gross margin. We should also be better levering our doctor costs, which sit in gross margin. As we kind of play out the next five years, our focus is not necessarily on driving gross margin percentage expansion. It's about, hey, some years could be nominally larger, nominally smaller, but really, it's how do we lever the fixed cost and the SG&A of the business where you don't necessarily need to invest in significant more store labor hours to sell a more premium frame or more premium lens, right? It is our job to make sure that that consumer experience is as seamless as possible, which also makes the store associate experience more seamless, as we focus on different product categories, right? Contact lenses have a lower gross margin percentage than, let's say, frames and lenses. As we get towards 2027, 2028, 2029, and start to focus more on that product category, again, some things that are diluted from a gross margin percentage perspective, but certainly additive to a customer lifetime value. Yeah, I'd say the expectations for us is that we're going to continue to see margin expansion through SG&A for the next five years, and you might see some nominal wobble in gross profit in any given quarter or year as these different initiatives come into play. The focus area, we are not judging our internal scorecard by did we win by growing gross margin as a percentage. Excellent, and apologies, I took us over. That's on me, I'm sorry. Everyone, the breakout is going to be in Janie A. Jenny A. Great [crosstalk]-- Thank you everyone for coming. Thanks, Dylan. --thanks.