Well, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you very much for joining this group one-on-one session with Five Below. So I am Brian Nagel from Oppenheimer. Again, thanks, everyone, for attending. So the format of this session is gonna be a little bit different. I'll go through this quickly, but so if you're an attendee and you have a question, because we're gonna structure this primarily as an open Q&A, raise your hand. We're watching. Me and the team here are watching the attendee list. So raise your hand, and then we'll announce your question. Then, before you actually answer your question, please introduce yourself, just so we know who's in line. We'll do that. But before we turn it over to Joel, the CEO, Joel Anderson, the CEO, Kristy Chipman, CFO, for some opening comments, Investor Relations, Christiane Pelz wants to make a few, a few comments. Thanks, Brian. Hello, everyone. I just want to give our typical disclaimer, where we will refer to our Q1 2024 call for commentary regarding forward-looking statements. With that, I'll turn it over to Joel. Thanks, Christiane. Hey, and thanks, Brian, for having us. Just a couple opening comments for everybody, and I, I'm sure many of you will wanna ask us some questions about our Q1 in the short term. But I think it's also important we don't lose sight of the long term and the Five Below growth story, and that remains solidly intact, and there's several components to it. One, it's all about a strong new store growth pipeline, which we reiterated several times on our call. It's about the Five Beyond expansion continuing, and reaching upwards of 80% by the end of this year, and it's about positive comp store growth. That's all in the environment of a balance sheet that has no debt on it, and that's important to note because it gives us the flexibility to continue to make long-term decisions for Five Below. As for the short term, I don't wanna, you know, circumvent that either. We have 2 issues we're dealing with at Five Below. One was identified last fall, and that's around the topic of shrink, and that's also one I gave an update on, and we are very pleased with the progress we've made in playing offense in a very short period of time, 9 months. We've been able to start to see that turn the other direction. The teams have been diligently working on new ways of interacting with our customers as we shift self-checkout to associate checkout. The second one has been the consumer pullback, which appeared suddenly faster than we expected in Q1, and that was also went through very deeply in the Q1 call. That also is something like shrink. We are playing offense and are actively pursuing to change and expect to begin to see some inflection points on that as we set back to school. We have guided such to you that we've established a bar that we believe we can achieve that doesn't require any heroic changes in our trajectory, and then from there, we build back. But the long-term growth of Five Below is something I'm very excited about, and we continue to pursue. With that, Brian, I'll turn it back over to you to open it up to any questions you might have. Well, thank you, Joel. Again, thanks, everyone, for attending. So, you know, like I said, from Five Below, we have Joel Anderson, as well as Kristy Chipman here. So like I said, if you have a question, just raise. I see a question starting to come in now, so just raise your hand, and we'll call on you. Interestingly, the first two questions are both from Zachs. So I'm gonna go to Zach Gresser at Lone Pine first. So I think, Zach, I think your line is open now. Yeah. Can you guys hear me? Yes. Yep. Awesome. Thanks for doing this. I guess I just had two. You know, you guys highlighted, you know, the dynamic with, you know, the low-end consumer, but I just wanted to poke a little bit on some of the merchandising now, because I guess, you know, we have Squishmallow, and we've seen trends come and go here before, and you never know when the next one's gonna come. But then I also think about the licensed content, and obviously, that's been, like, the slate's been a little bit weaker there. Can you just dimensionalize for us, like, historically, when you have a trend like that, as well as just, like, the licensed content, how important is that to driving store traffic? Just, like, where, you know, I obviously don't necessarily know today what the next big trend is gonna be or how the slate could improve, but, like, how do you dimensionalize that as a potential headwind versus what you guys might be seeing out of, you know, just the low-income consumer? Yeah, it's a good question, and I think of driving traffic in a couple of ways. One is certainly what you just talked about, trends and licenses, and you nailed it perfectly. We are in a period right now where there aren't very many. But the other side of how we drive traffic is through our Now section in the stores, and that comes at different inflection points throughout the year. We're in a period of time when the Now section probably drives the least amount of, you know, must-go to Five Below right now, once we pass the Easter time period, and we're about to enter a time period where the Now section drives more of that, "I've got to make a separate destination to Five Below." It begins with back to school, continues with Halloween, and finishes with holiday, and with some minor little holidays in between all that. But this period of time, from post-Easter to back to school, has historically been a time period where trends certainly make it up. We have seen a shift in the business since COVID, where summer seasonal is different than it has been in the past. People are spending more time on travel and things like that. So that is a business that we are actively in the process of reinventing. I think it'll always be a part of our business, but it is something that needs to take a different direction. The example I would give you is, in January, we used to always rely on fitness only, and several years ago, we transformed fitness to wellness. And so while we still sell fitness, we sell a lot more now in HBA and beauty and the like. So we'll take that same approach. Michael and the merchants are working on that for next year. Just on the license piece, like any dimensionalization of just how much you think that might—like, what% of the traffic that might represent, like, annually? You know, it's hard to say what percent. You know, it is a business that, for us, fluctuates always from, you know, low double digits to high double digits, and so that's the kind of range we see it go. Each trend, each license has a different attribute to it. Squishmallows was something that really drove a cult-like behavior, where people actually waited in lines to get in our stores. Licenses, on the other hand, tend to be something that gets inflected with a movie and is a day-to-day purchase that people do. We're continuing to see, as the movies are starting to come back, and I think I called this out last year, that licenses are actually starting to reappear, but there hasn't been any one strong license yet, like our days past with things like Frozen and the like. But I think most of those headwinds are beginning to subside. The highest penetration of Squish for us last year was Q1, and then Q2 takes a step down, and then Q3 and Q4 go even further. So, I can't answer your question specific, 'cause each trend takes on a different attribute, and different, you know, consumers react differently to whether it's a trend or a license. But the main part of the headwinds are slightly behind us now and continue to decline. Got it. Sorry, the second question I had was just around. Now, the stores have obviously gotten larger with Five Beyond. I know you guys don't really report square footage, but it feels like we've had a couple of years of kind of stagnant sales per foot. I don't know if you guys kind of think of it more in the sales per box kind of context, as opposed to sales per foot. I'd just be curious how you think about that, and then when you guys think going forward on store size, is 9,500 still the right way to think about here for the rest of the growth that you guys see in front of you, or might that take some tweaking? Yeah, I think that's a good number to look at. In many cases, we actually go even a little lower than that. I think the only reason sales per square foot can be deceiving is, a lot of times we'll take a bigger box because, you know, the majority of our new stores are retrofits, not built from scratch. And because of that, you know, landlords will work special deals with us. We'll mothball certain square footage, but we make it work, you know, that the total rent we're paying per box makes sense to our economics, and I think the better way to look at it is AUVs going forward. Got it. Thank you. Yep. So, Zach Velasquez, why don't you go ahead? Hey, guys. Thanks for the question. Just two, two quick questions. Just maybe the first one on pricing. I know you guys are rolling out the pricing test. Can you give us more color on what that could look like? You know, is it part of the store? You know, and then there's the potential rollout. You know, how would that, how does that reconcile with some of the Five Beyond stores that you guys have and that big push there? And then I have a quick one on shrink mitigation efforts. So here's what I would tell you about that, is I, I could spend the next 15 minutes and justify 100% of what happened in Q1 as solely macro. At the same time, it is our responsibility as a, a strong operating management team, that we need to look at ourselves and say: What can we do better? How do we ensure this was only macro, and it wasn't something we did? And so part of the way you earn that right is you look at everything. And you mentioned pricing. We're also testing a marketing test, where we're nearly doubling the spend. We're testing us putting more labor back in the stores. And so every aspect of our operating unit, we're currently re-looking at to ensure it wasn't something we did that caused what happened in Q1. Pricing is the one... If you ask my personal opinion, I don't think it's gonna make a difference, but it shouldn't be my opinion versus some other executive's opinion. We need to know the customer's opinion. And so with that, we have, you know, taken roughly 100 stores and are experimenting with reducing prices to see if that has an impact on their perception of our store. Does it increase the value aspect of the store? Especially in the front of the stores, where customers' first perception of Five Below is. And so more to come on that, but we are not ruling out any aspect of our business and ensure that it's not something we did to the business. Right now, it feels very macro-driven, feels very driven towards the low-end consumer running out of money with the tax refunds ending and Easter ending. Understood. And just quickly on that, is there any locations that you are focused on the pricing, like maybe more rural or urban areas? No, we look, we isolated different formats. We looked at urban, we looked at, you know, suburban for sure. That's where the bulk of our stores are. And, you know, we'll then test that up against a like set of stores, but it's not concentrated in any one area. We wanna make sure we're looking at this objectively. Kristy's finance team measures the results. It takes the emotion out of the merchants, it takes the emotion out of, you know, anybody that might, you know, have a different opinion on. This is strictly fact-driven. Understood. And then just quickly on shrink, I know there's a push to have the associate lead checkout, you know, to mitigate some of the shrink. So I'm curious to where is this labor coming from? Is it an incremental labor investment? Any more color you can give on shrink? Yeah. I mean, Kristy, if you got anything to add, please do. But, you know, for the most part, it's been self-funded. As we've driven, you know, continued investments in the business, where they typically in the past been productivity gains, we are keeping that labor in the store. We've, you know, got labor in these first half of the year that we were redeploying towards that. But, for the most part, it wasn't a very large incremental. Having said that, in some of our higher shrink stores, we have invested more labor in... And again, the idea is, can you reduce shrink faster than the expense-related aspect of, you know, labor increase? So it doesn't do me any good to reduce shrink by 50 basis points, but have to put 100 basis points of labor back in the store. So net-net, we're, you know, really chasing effectiveness right now, and then, you know, we'll make sure we follow that up with efficiency. But we are we are seeing positive results in the, in the stores we're testing in. Understood. Thank you, guys. Yep. So, Jared Bauer. And just as a reminder, when we ask your questions, just state your firm, too. But, Jared, you're up next. Hey, guys. Thank you so much for the question. Jared Bauer, Suvretta. I'll, I'll throw out two. One is just, what happens in, like, a scenario where the White House changes hands and there's a small tariff, you know, call it 10% to 15%, something more normal? And then a long time ago, there was that 60% tariff headline out there on Chinese goods, that I don't think any of us are actually think is gonna happen in practice, but, you know, it's out there. Just if you could dimension what would happen there. And then also, if you could just talk a little bit more about where the cost cuts are coming from, that you announced on this call. Thank you so much. I'll take the first part, and then Kristy can jump in on how we're thinking about cost cuts. Look, this is very different five years later from the original tariffs. The original tariffs, we were really blindsided with, and, had to scramble. The team did an amazing job. That's actually how Five Beyond was born. But, the first wave of tariffs actually largely got, you know, funded by the vendors as we went back and really pushed on, you know, a different type of cost structure. As the tariffs went up, you know, 25% in some cases, we actually then began to, you know, looking at raising rates and, and, or raising retails, which we did do. This is different because, A, we know how to—we have a playbook from the past, is one. B, we now are in India with our own offices there, and that allows us the opportunity to shift countries much quicker than we could have even considered last year. We've built out Vietnam, and we're entering some other countries as well. So we have much more flexibility this time than we did five years ago, and I, I believe that's gonna, you know, give us many more options than, than we did before. And look, China's not gonna wanna lose a bunch of our business, and so they're, they're gonna be willing to make concessions. They, they saw it last time, and we'll continue to push there. But I, I think we're, we're prepared should that come to fruition. And then, Kristy, you wanna talk about cost cuts? So on the cost optimization front, and we mentioned this, is both capital expenses, looking at, you know, cost of building stores as well as OpEx, and that's across, you know, corporate, our supply chain, and even our stores. And it's focused on a few things. One is consumption management and making sure that we are, we are careful in how we are utilizing different goods that we need throughout all of that. It's focused on vendor renegotiation, and in some cases, bundling of vendors, so making sure that we have the appropriate number of vendors given our scale, not too many, not too few. You know, we were a $2 billion business, top-line business in 2019. We're now $4 billion. Going back and looking at every one of our contracts to ensure that for our size and scale, we're getting the best cost structures that we can negotiate. We've been really focused on growth and have done a great job of that, and we've done our best on an individual basis to negotiate contracts, but now we have a dedicated team that is focused on negotiating these contracts and making sure that we're getting the benefits of scale. Yeah, great examples, Kristy, and, you know, I even think about the new store team. We've had a great prototype and, you know, never waste a good crisis, and, you know, they've gone back and, you know, really optimized the prototype. So going forward, that'll help, doesn't help looking backwards, but that's just one example that, you know, whether it's capital or OpEx, you know, how do we run this business more efficiently, to drive better results in 2025 and beyond? Thank you. Thank you. Jason Brown? Can you guys hear me? Yep. Yes. Hey, it's Jason from Viking. Thanks, thanks for taking the time. Thanks for all the color on the call about kind of the macro. I guess, do you guys have hypotheses for why, like, now, like, kind of why post your guide, things slowed so much for it's really just kind of you and Dollar Tree, you know, where other people didn't really see it. So you guys had sort of managed all the discretionary pressure better for a while. Just kind of curious, like, is there something about your customer base, or was it, like, a timing thing? Just, it's just, yeah, any hypotheses on, like, why now, and sort of how permanent you think it could be, this sort of, you know, step down in your consumer? Yeah, look, it's a good question, and I think, you know, obviously, we were a little surprised, too, or we wouldn't have certainly guided to you, you know, a 0 to 2 and resulted in a -2. But if you actually study a lot of people's scripts, there was several retailers calling out their discretionary businesses were negative comps. I think Dollar General, even some believe it's in the, you know, high single digits. So theirs was offset certainly by their non-discretionary pieces of the business. So that's one piece of it. And then you asked, you know, how long would it last? I think every time we've seen our customer face a reset, they take a pause, and then at some point in time, as they've re-evaluated what they have left over for a discretionary spend, we enter back into that equation. As we move towards the back half of the year, I alluded to this in the beginning, we move into a more need state, with specific buying opportunities like back to school, and I called out Halloween, and then holiday, our whole store becomes a need state. So, while we certainly didn't earn the right to put forth a guide for you that says immediate return to positive comps, there are certainly signs out there that this shouldn't be long term. We certainly don't think it's structural at all, or we wouldn't be continuing on our growth. And as we further understand the low-income customer, I think what is, you know, our responsibility is make sure we get the value message out to them. We are starting to see the trade-down happen in the higher income. It's just we don't have enough of those high-income customers to make a material difference, but it does present an opportunity to, as more of the higher income customers are looking for value, the Five Below should be part of that equation. So, a lot more to come on it, but I think as we begin to see these inflection points of a need state, a defined timeline, and back to school is a weird one because it rolls across the country. In Texas, they're going back in August first, and the Northeast here, it's after Labor Day. But we feel like we've identified the issue sufficiently and fully understand what's at play, and now it's our opportunity to, you know, go chase it with marketing. We have a new product line set here in about four weeks, et cetera, et cetera. I don't know, Kristy, anything else to- No, I mean, I think one of our hypotheses was around, you know, did people receive their tax refunds and use them through the Easter time period- Yeah ... and then kind of hunkered down again because there's no extreme need to come to Five Below, it's more on a, on a want level. And yeah, it was, you know, really started in, you know, week seven, eight, that we started to notice any sort of difference. And we were in the market buying back shares, right, right up until that. Like, we guided right in the middle of where we were at the point in time we were doing Q4, and so it really hit really quickly. And so one of those hypotheses being, you know, tax refunds finally received and quickly spent or saved and not using it in our stores. Okay. Thanks for that. So Joel and Chris, I have one question that was emailed to me, so I'll throw it out there quickly. So it says that the question is basically, you know, Dollar Tree bid on a lot of the 99 Cents Only s tores, but Five Below did not. You know, can you explain why you stayed away from that bidding process? Yeah, it's what people have to remember is, they think we stayed away, but that's just in the bidding process. A lot of those are going back to landlords now, and we are actually having several conversations with them. So many of those 99 Cents Only stores, in particular, were just too large for us. And they're, you know, in the 20,000 sq ft range, and so they require a breakup. And so, Dollar Tree was willing to, you know, take that whole square footage. They have a prototype that goes bigger. Dollar Tree's approached us since then, asking if they wanted to split the store up, would we take some? So it is coming back, Brian, to us. It just comes in a different form than the public bidding process that everybody saw. 'Cause conversely, when Tuesday Morning was going through that process, we picked up a lot of Tuesday Morning stores. That was more in our wheelhouse. You know, should Kirkland's go formally, they announced some strategic alternatives this week, and that'll be a store that's right in our square footage range. So it was more size than anything, Brian. Right. So Sully, I see, you have your hand raised. I want you to go ahead. Hey, thanks a lot for taking the question. Sully from Cadian Capital. You know, one of the things I just wanted to ask was a clarification on merchandising. I know we've sort of talked about there being some staleness in merchandising, especially on the trends and licenses business, but I wonder whether that's been the case over the last several quarters or the last couple of quarters in your Now section of the stores as well. And part of the reason I ask that is, you know, do you feel better or worse about where your merchandise is, or what the merchandise pipeline looks like as we get into, you know, more of these seasonal and event-driven purchase windows? Yeah. I, I happened to just this week see the final formal set for back to school, and I thought it looked fantastic. The messaging around value, we've obviously dialed it up even more, given, you know, the current environment for our consumer, our customer. But I, I feel really good about back to school and what we'll be putting forth here in about a month. And Halloween, it also looks amazing. I've seen bits and pieces of holiday. We'll be pulling that all together formally here pretty quick. But it looks really good. Look, trends are what trends are, and when they come, things take off, and when they go, things subside. And it just happened to be that this dearth of trends happened at a time when our customer ran out of money. Having said all that, when we deliver something the customer needs, they're in our store buying, and well, it'll start with back to school 'cause they need to buy for back to school. But I feel really good about the merchant assortment, the newness that's coming. We've got to figure out spring, summer, no doubt about it. That customer has changed, and it changed since COVID. You know, it wasn't, it was non-existent in 2020. Everything was shut down, and it wasn't there in 2021 'cause, you know, things were slowly reopening, and then it never came in 2022. You know, I've had deep conversations with some of the sell side analysts about this, and I think now we just have to recognize we have to go rebuild that business. But that aside, the rest of the new and newness feels great. Did you feel that same way about the Now section and event-driven merchandise, like, even at the start of this year? You know what? I think if we made any mistake, we didn't accept that summer seasonal wasn't gonna come back to the way it used to be. And so we certainly probably didn't have enough change in that summer seasonal after recognizing last year's business. But I'll tell you what, we had a great Halloween business last year. We had a great holiday Christmas business, and what the teams are doing this year looks even better. So, you know, people sometimes forget, like, last year was a very consistent, right around 3 comp, you know, and when we have a 3 comp in Q4, that's a great quarter for us. So y es, I felt really good about last year, and we delivered really well. I think the miss was fully understanding summer seasonal, and then, of course, seeing the consumer impact post-Easter certainly confirmed that. Thank you. Joe, why don't you go ahead? Hey, guys. Can you hear me? Sorry. Yep. This is Joe Sinopoli with Citadel. I just had a question on your income demographics. I think the 0 to 50K bucket has really ramped over time, and I think the 100,000 plus bucket has sort of come down over time for you guys. I guess, what do you, what do you think drove that, and was that intentional? Or I guess just curious for comments on that. Yeah, it certainly hasn't gone down in numbers. It's just the, you know, the 0 to 50 is, you know, it's roughly about 50% of our business. And, you know, I think the only thing that's really caused the number to grow and change is, you know, our push into other demographics that were lower household income. But if you look on a, you know, on existing stores, we haven't seen much of a change from where it was. And in fact, I think what's been surprising here in the last, you know, let's call it 8 weeks is starting to see, you know, growth in the over 100,000 numbers. Just, it's not a big enough piece that it's had a material move on it, but we're, we're about 50% under, aren't we about 50%, 0% to 50%? About 50, 0 to 50. Yeah. Right. Yeah. Yeah. 25 to 100,000. Yeah. You good, Joel? I guess we lost Joe Brian. I, hopefully, I answered his question. So I have a couple more that just got emailed in to me. So, I'll throw these out just kind of piece by piece to make it simple. But, and I think this may have already been addressed, but I'll ask it again. So just with regard to the price tests. Yeah You know, the question, early learnings, you know, what are you looking for to drive traffic, you know, to enhance the value proposition, you know, to have EBITDA accretion? You know, what are the key area, what are the key product categories you're testing, you know, consumables, electronics, et cetera? Yeah. The key one we're testing is, you know, the primary one, I should say, we're testing is really the new and now sets. And looking at that perception of the front of the store, if that can really drive, you know, more sales, we're studying elasticity of items. And it's not only at the $5 price point, it's at, you know, the $1 and $2 price points. But that's the main focus of where we're looking, Brian. Just, what's the timing of those tests, Joel? They just kicked off right now. I think we're a week into it. And we're pretty good at this. I mean, no different than, you know, we're coming off of two years of an inflationary environment, where we actually tested the other way of raising prices, and there were certain things we backed off on, and we didn't raise the price on. And then there were some where the elasticity was such that it made sense to, you know... That's the place we could, you know, offset the inflationary environment we were in. So now you go back the other way. Even though we're not in a deflationary environment, it doesn't mean we can't see if we can drive more value to our customer from that. But it's about, we're about a week old on it, Brian. Simeon, why don't you go ahead? I saw your hand get raised there. Hey, how's it going, Joel? Thanks for doing this. Good. I think across retail, we've seen the shopper generally move their purchasing to windows around events and key selling seasons, and that's a trend that I you know, I think benefited you guys very well in the back half of last year. Yeah. You know, as we move one, is that a trend that you're seeing accelerate year to date? You know, how are you thinking about that with your guidance and outlook as you, you know, go into the back half with confidence around back to school and Halloween? Yeah. It has accelerated. We are seeing, you know, even in micro holidays like Columbus Day or Veterans Day, a very close right by around that time. And in that case, it may just even be a, you know, a day off from work. The other event that we are seeing a more pronounced change in behavior is the end-of-the-month payment cycle. It's getting actually back closer to the way it was back in 2019, but, you know, it's more pronounced as we get to the end of the month, sales slow down, customer reloads their wallet, and then sales pick up in the beginning of the month. So you put all those days together, it looks fine, but that is a more pronounced cycle than it was a year ago. But it does look more like it used to for us back in 2019. So we're, in some ways, we're getting back to the way it used to be, but that closer to the event, we're definitely seeing. In terms of the way we guided, you know, if you do the numbers and you just take the midpoint of our guidance, you know, you would expect us to be around a -5 for Q2 and around a -4 for the back half of the year, and that would land you right smack in the middle of our guides for the quarter and the year. And so you can see, while we feel really good about the progress we're making, until we actually hit those events, I think the prudent thing to do was to give you some guide that you can 100% get behind and believe in, and then there's room and opportunity for management to chase those guides, either into the high end of them, vis-a-vis, either continued improvements and shrink, or starting to really get sales coming back as we head into more need state environment. Understood. And as you look back on Easter, did you see that same sort of accelerating trend there? I know one of your competitors cited that it was actually below expectations due to weather and timing as it related to other holidays. Yeah, I mean, look, Easter, it was a soft Easter. Early Easters tend to be soft. You, you layer in the weather, and it was, you know, even softer. But, you know, I was more talking to you about first half, second half of the quarter. And, you know, the first half between tax refunds and Easter was a much stronger half than the, the second half, and that's where we saw the real falloff happen. But that's pretty typical for an early Easter. Great, thank you. Do we have time for one more? There's one more question in the queue. I know we're a little bit over time now, but if we still have time, I'd love to let it in. Yeah, let's squeeze one more in. Okay. Josh Sun, go ahead. Hey, this is Josh from Atreides. Thanks so much. I know it's early days, but as you guys test these $1 and $2 price points, I guess I wanted to ask the margin implications of that. Like, is that a tailored assortment where maybe it's margin neutral because of the item that you're putting into that price point? Or is it intended to be lower margin, but you get it back, hopefully, through the rest of the basket, and it drives traffic? No, this will be margin neutral for us. I mean, it's all planned. And it, you know, mixes out nicely. But this is all a plan. I think the pricing test I spoke to was, that's a whole different thing, and whether that test is wildly successful or wildly unsuccessful, it's not gonna have any impact on our overall P&L, because it's not a big enough impact. But I'm more referring to is, as we go to market with back to school, is, you know, getting that dollar price point more out in front, first thing the customer sees, focusing on the $5 price point and the $4, and nothing above $5. So some of it's making sure the customer is reinforced the strong value equation at Five Below, but there's no margin implications other than the way we've guided it for you. Great, thanks. You bet. Thanks, Josh. Joel, Kristy, Christiane, thank you very much for your time. We very much appreciate it. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, everyone, for joining us. We appreciate it. Thank you.