Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us. My name is Ashley Owens, and I cover Soft lines in internet retail here for KeyBanc. We're thrilled to be joined today by Genesco, which is a footwear-focused specialty retailer whose portfolio of brands includes names like Journeys, Schuh, and Johnston & Murphy. Across these businesses, Genesco serves a wide range of consumers, from teen fashion to premium casual to performance and work, supported by strong vendor partnerships and a growing emphasis on product innovation and digital experience. With us this morning is President and CEO Mimi Vaughn and Sandra Harris, Chief Financial Officer. If at any time during the fireside presentation someone has a question, there should be a feature located in the Zoom call at the bottom of the screen to write in. With that, Mimi, Sandra, thank you for joining us today. Ashley, thank you for having us. Pleasure to be here with you. So to kick it off, I would love to get a deeper insight into the overall state of the consumer and any trends you have identified. I know you've talked about peaks and troughs within the shopping season, and then if you could give us insight into product category trends as well. Yeah, absolutely. It's a great place to start. So the consumer environment, we've talked about peaks and troughs, and when there's a reason to shop, the consumer comes out and shops, and they pull back in times when there isn't a reason to shop. And this trend for us in the footwear category became even more pronounced during back-to-school. Our Journeys business had a record back-to-school double-digit comps on top of double-digit comps in August last year, and real demand for what we were selling, real demand for must-have product that our consumer wants. And what we're seeing is that the consumer is stretching up to buy what they want. We've seen some nice growth in overall ASPs. We're well assorted in product that the consumer is interested in, and so when they come out to shop, we get our fair share and then some. When you turn attention overall to the product categories, in our Journeys business in particular, and I'll talk about Journeys and Schuh together, we sell across casual, athletic, and canvas product, and we are the go-to place for the teen consumer to buy whatever is most relevant in fashion, and a lot of the work we've been doing in Journeys, I'm sure we'll talk about, but it's to have the right depth and the breadth of what's relevant for our consumer, and so the product trends that we saw in the third quarter, and I'll give you a bit of an update on November so far since we are broadcasting this, but in the third quarter, we saw growth in our casual brands and also in our athletic brands, but much more pronounced growth in the athletic brands, and our consumer has just been gravitating toward wearing athletic more year-round. We saw some nice early indications of pickup in boot trends, which we continued to see through the course of the third quarter, but it's very brand-specific. We don't sell fashion boots per se. The boots that we sell are brand-specific, so we saw that as well. And moving into November and the fourth quarter, we saw our business ramp up as we went through the weeks of the month, and had a nice Black Friday where we've seen the consumer shift into even more of the casual side. Boots continue to perform within November, and we're right in the middle of the holiday season with some big days ahead of us. Great. Thank you so much for that intro there. Maybe just to kind of circle back a little bit and talk about the recent earnings report. So you took annual guidance down due to volatility seen in overall consumer trends as well as headwinds that you're currently facing within Schuh. First and foremost, how are you planning promotions and pricing for 4Q to balance that traffic and margin? And then further, any similar plans to balance traffic mix at Journeys coming out of the holiday season and to combat some of those consumer trends that you observed? Sure. So just to give a recap of the quarter for those who didn't get the summary there, but we delivered very solid performance in the quarter, in a really important Back-to-school quarter for us. Journeys was the star of the show and achieved a 6% comp in Journeys with more than a 50% growth in overall operating income. That really big pickup in profitability for Journeys was offset to some extent by the exit of licenses in one of our businesses, the impact of tariffs, and then more promotional activity in Schuh. And so your question, Ashley, about just promotional activity in general, I'm going to separate the United States and Journeys, and then I'm going to talk about Schuh because they're very different dynamics in the market. We, in general, are not a promotional retailer. We sell highly allocated product, and our overall positioning is that not other people do have what we sell, but not everybody has what we sell, and by definition, allocation means that we will run out at a point in time, and so the strength of our assortment within Journeys meant full-price selling in the third quarter and also means full-price selling in the fourth quarter. Some of the athletic retailers within the market in the United States are quite promotional, but they're promotional more around the men's assortment and around apparel, and we have a sharp point on that female consumer, and so even in the course of the holiday season, we are not looking to be promotional to drive business in the United States. We will be selling, even right now, we are clearing product that doesn't have a sell-through that we'd like it to have, but it's a very, very small part of our assortment. So we plan to full-price sell, really be ready for those peaks when they come, and just weather those valleys when they're there as well. Over in the U.K., it's been a different dynamic where, because the consumer environment is even less robust than it is in the U.S., GDP growth has been less, that consumer demand for the footwear category has been less, and as we've come into the back part of the year, our competition has put product on promotion, and so we have been matching that product. We've been matching the pricing on that product, and so we do anticipate a more promotional environment in the U.K. in the fourth quarter. We built that into the guidance. It's the primary reason why we have adjusted our guidance for the year. Into next year, we are hopeful that the rest of our competition are going to right-size overall inventories to be able to meet the demand in the marketplace, and that as we go into next year, that it serves us all well to be fuller-priced sellers and not be competing based on price, but being competing based on strength of the assortment. Then maybe on consumer preference, we'll touch more on the assortment positioning later, but any commentary about trends you're seeing in the business from silhouettes that are maybe more structural versus seasonal? Sure, for sure. As I said, we're seeing our consumers wear athletic a bit more on a year-round basis. What is interesting is that they're shifting out of wearing white athletic shoes to brown as the color of the season. And so you'll see consumers wearing mushroom and brown and all different shades and forms of brown. So I think the two things I'd say is just the shift in the colorways on athletic and then interest in specific boot brands. I think that others who sell fashion boots have been talking about a potential pickup in the fashion boot category, but that's not necessarily what I'm talking about. I'm really talking about that we've got strength in some of the boot brands that we sell in the fourth quarter, and it's been a couple of years that boots as a category haven't represented. So it's nice to see some of that very specific interest on the part of the consumer. Additionally, if we could just talk about tariffs really quickly, I know this was a bit of a headwind during the quarter, but if you could give any color on an update to your mitigation strategies and what we could expect for 4Q? I'm going to hand it to Sandra, but 80% of our business is we sell other people's brands. And so the way that we see that is it's passed through just based on price increases. For the other 20% of our business, it's our brands like Johnston & Murphy and Genesco Brands Group. And so that's where we have been spending, and our teams have been spending a tremendous amount of time and effort on mitigation strategies. So Sandra, I'll hand it to you. Yeah. So Ashley, in the quarter, you're correct. Our branded businesses have the largest impact for tariffs. And in the third quarter, we still were having some initial cost and advance of price increases for Q3. But overall, for the quarter, the largest impacts on our margins really were related to the promotional cadence at Schuh as well as the exit of the licenses. So it definitely did impact our margins in the quarter. As we look forward, we're constantly looking at where we're sourcing product from, how we're doing price increases, and continuing to work on mitigation efforts as we go forward for tariffs. Great. So let's transition a little bit now and hone in on the Journeys business and some of the key strategies that you have been working on. You have three pillars you've outlined in your investor deck that I would like to walk through at this time. So maybe starting with unique consumer positioning, could you elaborate on the evolvement of the assortment and how you're thinking about using premium product and incubation of new models to really drive growth within Journeys? Great. That's a great question and a great place to start in the talking about Journeys, and our broader plan absolutely centers on Journeys' unique positioning, which is to address the underserved teen girl in the mall, and when you think about all of the choices that that young girl has for apparel, I can think of 10 competitors that I can name off where she can go and shop, and I was out over Black Friday, and it was incredible. Every one of those locations was quite busy. When you think about where to go in terms of buying footwear, particularly fashion footwear for that teen girl, we do think that there is a great opportunity for us as Journeys because of our positioning to be able to grow as a result of that. And so we have expanded our overall target markets based on research that we did at the beginning of the work we did in Journeys' strategic growth plan. And so we've sharpened our brand positioning to reach a wider teen market that's six to seven times bigger than the market that we have traditionally served. And teens are interested in expressing themselves in different ways. They use footwear across athletic, casual, and canvas in order to do that. And the diversification of trends is the thing that I would call out right now that teens don't want to be pigeonholed into surf or skate or grunge or preppy or any of those looks that they have gravitated toward in the past. So it's really a diversified set of looks that they are interested in, which plays into our sweet spot. And the market is segmented between athletic and casual, and we really play across all with that spotlight focus on the teens. So we are style-led with everything that we do. So at the core of this is to be assorted with the right brands. And what we have been working on over the course of the last year to a year and a half has been expanding our leadership position in all the relevant brands across all of those different categories of footwear. And so it's the breadth and depth of the brands that we've been working on, and we've had room to grow on the athletic side in particular. And so we have been adding a number of different brands on the athletic side. But the key here is that we have relationships with each of the relevant brand partners that we are the number one or number two to most brands on the casual side with people like UGG and Birkenstock and the like that are relevant for our teen consumer. And we've built strength across athletic. And of course, we've had great strength across canvas as well. And so the notion here is the target market, a lot more sharpening of the target market. It's the thinking about what we need to be assorted with in order to serve that market. And we're serving that customer with a more premium assortment. And so it's the best of the best within each of those categories, and many other of the elements of the plan then reinforce what we start with, with a customer and with a product. Maybe a two-parter to follow up on that. So you did note that you have been introducing new brands into the assortment as part of that refresh. Just how has that broadened mix changed what consumers are coming in for? And are you seeing any meaningful shifts in traffic, discovery, or attachment as those new products take hold? And then additionally, I did want to call out that you did make the introduction of Nike into Journeys as of recently and highlighted it as a growth lever. It is, again, a brand you've never carried before, but I know it's early on, but would be curious how this has been impacting some of that category mix and engagement you've talked about with your target market. Sure. We're super excited about Nike, and I think it's been since we introduced Nike on November the 12th. So it's been not quite a month that we have been carrying Nike, but I'll just go back to why do we introduce new brands. I just want to be clear that we're constantly introducing new brands even well before other people have heard about them because they are relevant for our consumer. So I'm just going to talk about a few just trends. Like when retro athletic was popular, that was led by the Superstars and the Stan Smiths, but FILA became part of our mix and blew up into our top 10. Then when that overall trend was over, we moved out of that. There are other, like when preppy was important, we were into Sperry and then came out of Sperry. So we're constantly chasing into brands that are relevant for our consumer. Of late, some of the brands that we have pursued have been because running and retro running has been important to our consumer. And I should say both retro and running in terms of athletic footwear have been important to our consumer. And so the brands that we have been introducing have been based around those overall trends. Nike and our relationship with Nike has been such that we wanted to get product that was really relevant for our consumers. So we've got Vomero, P-6000s, but we've also got some staples like Air Force and Dunk product that's relevant for our consumers. So we entered Nike at the right point. We're excited about the relationship. Like all other brands, we start small, Ashley, somewhere between 50 and 100 stores. We're never dependent on new brands in order to meet our sales plans, but they are nice parts of our assortment that we will cultivate over time that will go from 50 to 100 doors to 200 to 500 to all doors if it really makes sense. Understood. So moving to the second pillar, which is investing, we've talked about re-energizing the Journeys brand and shifting to more of a branded house strategy, broadening segmentation and investing in social as well. Could you just walk us through what the transformation looks like in practice and any color on early signals that the changes are really resonating with your consumer base? Sure. You had asked me about how do we know what's working in terms of a product? And I think the biggest drivers have been both conversion. We've seen some very nice pickups in conversion, and we've also seen some very stout growth in average selling price. And that's a measure of the fact that we have been introducing more premium price and that the consumer is really going for it and that they're converting quite nicely. And so the part that we're talking about has been just building brand awareness. And the part, so step one is get the assortment right. Step two is to this broader base of consumers that is six to seven times larger. How do they know about this fantastic product that is being sold at Journeys today? And so that next lever about investing in the brand starts with what is Journeys all about? And we've been a positive, inclusive force that we in youth culture, we invite everybody in, and we have excellent vendor relationships to be able to offer to our teens, and we're talking about that. So we've got to be a leading brand in addition to the brands that we sell across social, online, and stores. So that's been our areas of focus. We've increased investment in brand marketing and top of the funnel. We launched the Life On Loud campaign, and it's just a great remix of a 90s classic that was shot in a mall. We have introduced Jazmine Bigfoot, which has been a long-form video, and long-form, I mean like 60-90 seconds to build overall awareness. And I think our objective here is that we got to be top of mind for consumers to come shop with us. It's primarily through social, but it's through digital altogether, and ultimately building footwear demand creation capabilities and the measure of success that we've had here. And we're in earlier days here, and we've got long legs, we believe, through this initiative, but it is to attract new customers. We've seen new customer growth, particularly within our 4.0 stores, which we'll talk about, and also just really being able to measure overall top line and comp growth. And so those are the couple of areas. It's the new customer growth. It's the comps that we get, particularly around the new segments of customers that we're serving. And then, last but certainly not least, to roll over to the 4.0 conversation. On the customer experience side, you have been refreshing touch points across the store, web, social, and then the rollout of these 4.0 stores, which you alluded to. I believe you've added 80 of these refreshes, or you will have added 80 of these by the end of the year. What changes within the 4.0 concept do you believe are resonating most with the consumer, and how are you measuring whether this is driving better discovery and conversion within the teen girl? Yeah. Great. So the 4.0 is behind the shoulder. And if you haven't seen it, definitely go out into a store because it is the best manifestation of all the changes that we have made within Journeys. And we're really excited about this element of the plan because with our new positioning and our product assortment, we need a way to create an aspirational and even more aspirational environment to showcase this premium product. And so it's a cleaner environment. It absolutely showcases our brands. It's a more neutral aesthetic, but it retains the energy and the excitement and the individuality of the Journeys brand. So very much the DNA feels like a Journeys store. We remodeled the first group of these stores starting in October of last year. We've just anniversaried one year, and we've had 25% plus pickup in overall sales in the stores that we've remodeled. And it's not just a measure of the look of the store. It's the fact that we've put great product in there that we've really worked on upgrading what we've been known traditionally for, which is great service, but we've taken that up a few levels. And we're just seeing well above average performance for this group of stores. We haven't yet completed 80, but we will by the end of the year. It is more traffic. It's better conversion. It is higher transaction size. And all of those elements are coming together. And ultimately, we are attracting more new customers to these 4.0 stores. It is even early days because of the purchase cycle of footwear. This is an element of our strategy that we'll roll out 80 this year. We'll do another 80, call it 10% of our fleet. We've got some built-in comps for a number of different years, but even more importantly, attracting new customers into the mix is going to be an important part of Journeys' growth in the quarters to come. All things considered, there's a lot going on at Journeys and showing improvements to the underlying business. I believe you called out that you're clumping positive comps again this quarter. When we think about a more medium-term algo for comp growth, how confident are you that the improvements you've made are sustainable? Yeah. So we're confident because of the strategy. It's not that we're just putting new product in and that you get a one-time hit from the new product and that you're off to the races. It really is the intent that it starts with our positioning. And while a lot of people sell shoes, we have such sharp positioning around this teen customer and this teen girl. And I think that the relationships that we have with brands will just build over time because we've got unique insight into this customer that the brands want. And so continuing to cultivate the branded relationships, continuing to build on our overall marketing strategies to build awareness among this much larger addressable market, and then, of course, built-in improvement because of the success we're having with the 4.0s. And I think that just builds upon itself. These strategies should come together to provide several quarters and years of positive growth because of the size of the market that we're aiming to serve. Great. Moving on to Johnston & Murphy. You've mentioned the pivot there into casual and comfort styles and some of the repositioning actions. Would just be curious as to how the uptake has been there. And then I think just to round everything out on Johnston as well, you did have a new collaboration with Peyton Manning, which has been very exciting. Would love to hear any read-throughs on how this partnership's been doing for the brand. Yeah, for sure. We are super excited about Peyton. And so I won't start with Peyton, but I'll certainly talk about Peyton. So we've had a great opportunity in Johnston & Murphy to reposition the brand. It's a 175-year-old brand that's been known for its dress shoes, but really known for serving a professional customer and really having beautiful quality product. The big change that we've made is we've built a lot of technology into the product, and we have sold a lot of hybrid product as a result of it. But technology really defines the offering, is that we've got not just beautiful product, but it's comfortable, it's moisture-wicking, it's waterproof. There are a lot of great elements of that. In addition to that, we have introduced other categories. So we're now 50% non-footwear. We've really built a true lifestyle brand. And so coming out of the pandemic, that repositioning served us really well. In recent quarters, we've been working on two things. One is that we have been continuing to evolve the overall assortment and the product offering. We have a feeling, and others have said as well, that people are dressing up a little bit more. And so we can now navigate between the spectrum of more casual product and dressier product. And so we've got lots of flexibility to be able to do that around the hallmark of serving an accomplished, confident, successful person. And so we continue to work on delivering freshness and newness because that is what the customer is looking for these days. And the second part of growing the Johnston & Murphy brand is being able to increase awareness. Our awareness, even for a 175-year-old brand, is lower than we'd like it to be. I think that around a third of our target customer group are really aware of the brand. Interestingly, when we surveyed how many of our target customer group knows Peyton Manning, it's like 95% of our customer group knows Peyton. And so he was a great match for us in that he authentically wore our product. And so we spotted him on golf courses and doing the ManningCast, wearing our clothes. And so he was a great choice for us. We have just launched the campaign with him starting in October. We got it together pretty quickly. We got 84 million impressions in the first few months. We were on ESPN, on USA Today Network. He's in our stores. He's on our website. We have Manning Picks and the like. And so we've just seen, and this was much more top of the funnel, new customer attracting types of marketing, but it's the best campaign launch that we've ever had. We got great PR coverage. We saw increased foot traffic into our stores. We are looking for this type of initiative to have impact over the longer term, that we had a lot of people come to our websites, a lot of people walk into our stores to just check it out. Over time, as awareness builds and as our relationship with Peyton continues, we see that this is a major initiative to be able to just drive awareness, and that new customer acquisition, conversion, and comps follow that. Quickly on Schuh, I know you touched on it a little bit just going through a 3Q recap, but could you discuss some of the trends being seen within Schuh in the U.K. and what you think is causing some of that pressure in the market? Any actions you're taking to mitigate headwinds? Yes. So again, for folks who are not familiar with Schuh, it is very much what we did. We acquired Schuh when we went to open stores for Journeys in the U.K. So it serves the same young customer with a sharp point, the female girl. Nine out of the 10 brands, top 10 brands overlap. Schuh has their own Schuh branded product, which is really the only difference. The trends happen in general in the same way, but not always in the identical way. So we have different businesses to serve the different geographies, but Schuh outperformed despite a tougher economy. There's a backdrop of higher inflation in the U.K. and less robust GDP. GDP growth has been quite anemic. Through the course of this year and a couple of quarters that we started last year and the first part of this year with positive comps, we saw the market really deteriorate quite a bit in the May and June timeframe when there really wasn't a reason to shop, and so we and the rest of the market really took a more promotional stance to clear through product and keep inventory clean. We thought that we would have a better opportunity in the back part of the year with cleaned-up assortments, but we have seen that the market is split toward people who are either looking for must-have product or they're looking for a deal, and so a lot of the competitive stance has been to make a deal and to promote product that normally wouldn't be promoted. And so we are hands-on, really working to do all that we can to pull forward product to get above the fray to keep our inventory clean in this back half of the year. And it is a very large part of the reason that we adjusted our guidance. However, going forward, we're going to take a lot of the elements of the Journeys plan, sharpening Schuh's marketing, market position even more aggressively, going after our relationship with brands to be able to aggressively change the assortment and take some of the same actions that we took in Journeys. The efforts to improve the promotional posture will happen throughout the year next year. It starts with having the right-sized inventories as we enter next year. We will amp up our marketing and the positioning of Schuh to communicate it to our employees, but we're going to really start with product and looking to do some of the same things we did with Journeys to Schuh to improve the overall positioning. So we think there's real opportunity here to build back into Schuh as we've recently done with Journeys. Understood. Sandra, on the P&L, I'd be curious as to where you're seeing the most meaningful efficiencies today and where you still have room to take costs out as you scale. And then just further, how are you thinking about balancing these savings with the need to reinvest behind some of these growth initiatives that Mimi's outlined? Yeah, actually, as we said in the quarter, we leveraged our SG&A over 140 basis points, and we're expecting that we'll do that 100 basis points for the year. And so it really shows the power of our model when our stores are comping positive. And it also shows the great work we've done over the last few years in really optimizing our stores and making them more productive. And also the operating cost initiatives are starting to show through that we've been working on over the last few years across the portfolio and leveraging that power of the portfolio. As we look forward, we have plans to continue the efforts to make our stores more productive with a lens largely on Schuh. So we'll look toward next year on doing some of the similar things that we've done in our Journeys business on optimizing our store fleet and continuing to work on what makes our stores more productive. To your question on investments, we shifted our investments this year and also increased our investments this year for important investments like the 4.0, which really do help to drive those comps, which really does help to leverage our SG&A. Then looking into 2026, what would you say are the biggest priorities for Genesco? Also curious, we're hearing from other companies that tariff impacts could be greater next year. So we'd be curious to hear about your expected impact from tariffs and even price plan increases on the overall margin structure for own brands like Johnston & Murphy. Yeah. So priorities, I'll talk about priorities and then let Sandra talk about the rest, but absolutely continue at Journeys, do turn around at Schuh. Really continue to work on growth for Johnston & Murphy. We think there's a lot of upside. With a small amount of growth this year, 2% top line leverage a lot. So Sandra made that point. We think there's really great earnings potential under the covers of our business because we've bought back a lot of shares, and even to get to a 4% operating margin is $5 or $6 of additional EPS, and so it's a lot of opportunity here, and so we're working to grow the top line and manage expenses in a way that we can deliver that and unwind some of the gross margin hits we've taken this year. Actually, I would just add that this year, we're seeing about 100 basis points of margin compression. As we look into that, 50 basis points of that we relatively expected with our Genesco Brands Group in addition to our tariffs. About 40 of that is related to our promotional cadence issues. As we look forward, we have opportunity to definitely work on gross margin. We will have some headwinds as we continue to navigate through tariffs and the consumer response to those. We do have line of sight to how we can improve that gross margin. Great. We're in the last few minutes of the fireside. So, I think just to close out, would love to hear what you think is the most underrated or overlooked part of the Genesco story at this point? Yeah. Look, I think it is the opportunity for the upside that I just talked about, that small improvements in our business just because of the leverage in our model can have really big results. And I think we demonstrated that through Journeys through the course of the year this year. And we had the same opportunity in our other businesses to do that as well. And it's quite accretive to the bottom line and quite accretive to EPS as we accomplish that. Great. I think that puts us just at about time. Mimi, Sandra, thank you again for being a part of this morning. Best of luck for the holiday season. Thank you, Ashley. Appreciate you hosting us. Thanks.