Good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Corey Tarlowe. I am Jefferies' Specialty Retail Analyst. And I'm joined today by Dennis Secor and Fabrice Benarouche. Did I say that all right? It's OK. I tried. They are with Guess?, Inc. And then I'll turn it over to Dennis for some opening comments. Great. Thanks, Corey. And good afternoon, everybody. Thank you for joining us. Just before we begin, many of you will know that Guess? has been part of the Los Angeles community for the last 44 years. So many of our associates, and customers, and shareholders, and other members of this community call LA their homes. And we are devastated by the impact that the fires have had on our community and the tragic loss of life and property. So our heart goes out to everyone in that community. And I know you join me in that. So let me just ask you to not now, obviously, but take note of our safe harbor statements that we publish with our filings with the SEC. What I'd like to do, though, is just give a quick overview of the company for those of you who may not be as familiar with our story, share some strategic priorities, and then some recent performance highlights for the company, so Guess? was founded in 1981, and currently, our brands generate about $6 billion in revenues, measured at full retail value, and $3 billion of those revenues sit on our own P&L. We're truly a global company. Three quarters of our revenues are generated from outside the United States, and our products are distributed in 100 different countries, and together with our licensee partners, we bring 25 different product categories to market, starting with apparel, but extending to numerous accessory categories, and we employ about 13,000 associates. We operate over 1,000 directly managed retail stores around the world. When you include our partner stores, that number grows to about 1,600. We also operate e-comm sites in all of our regions. Regionally, our largest segment is Europe, where we operate 556 stores, in addition to literally thousands of wholesale doors. In the trailing 12 months, end of the third quarter, Europe has generated $1.5 billion in revenues for us, our largest market. Our next largest region is the Americas, where we operate 411 stores and work with wholesale partners as well. Our trailing 12 months in the Americas market is over $1 billion. Asia is next, where we operate 90 stores. Trailing 12-month revenues there, $275 million. Finally, we operate a highly profitable licensing business, where we generated roughly $120 million in sales over the last 12 months. That's the footprint of our company. Now, over the last several quarters, Carlos Alberini, who's our CEO, was unfortunately unable to join us here today, but he's outlined six key strategic priorities that are really at the center of everything that we do as a company and how we deploy our resources. The first of those is organization and talent. We want a best-in-class team of engaged and committed individuals capable of leading us to the next level of performance and revenue growth, and we have many key global searches underway right now to complement our existing team, and that includes a search for a permanent CFO. Second is growth. In our 44-year history, we've developed significant infrastructure and core competencies, and we intend to leverage those to drive revenue growth. That will include improving existing productivity, growing organically in existing and in new markets, pursuing brand extensions and category expansion, and considering opportunities that leverage our global infrastructure and network of licensees and wholesale partners. And our recent acquisition of Rag & Bone that we did in conjunction with WHP is a great example of that. Third is brand relevancy. We want to optimize our core Guess brand architecture to be relevant to our three largest consumer groups: Heritage, Millennials, and Gen Z. The addition of Rag & Bone and Guess Jeans, we believe, will allow us to reach attractive new customer segments complementary to our core Guess business. Fourth is customer centricity and digital expansion. We place the customer at the center of everything that we do. We plan to implement processes, tools, and platforms to provide our customers with a seamless omnichannel experience and expand our digital business. Fifth is product excellence. We believe product is key to the success in our business. We strive to design and make great products and will extend our product offerings to provide our customers with products that support the different occasions of their lives. And finally is optimization. We intend to operate at the highest level of efficiency and effectiveness. We plan to invest in our infrastructure and in technology and data analytics to improve our operations and our decision-making. So, as to recent performance, we're not providing any color on our fourth quarter performance today, as is our practice. We will do that when we release our fourth quarter results in March. In November, though, we did update our outlook for the fiscal year. That included full-year U.S. dollar revenue growth between 7.1% and 8.1%, adjusted operating margin between 6.2% and 6.5%, and adjusted EPS in a range of $1.85 - $2 per share. We also reported on our third quarter business, where we grew revenues by 13%, largely driven by the Rag & Bone acquisition, along with a modest level of growth from Guess. Our European business grew 7% in the quarter, fueled by positive retail comps and by wholesale growth as well. Our Americas wholesale business grew 79%, largely driven, again, by the Rag & Bone acquisition, but also because of the internalization of our outerwear business, which previously had been a licensed business. Our North America retail business grew 12%, driven by the addition of Rag & Bone, which more than offset declines coming from our North American Guess retail business. I'll come back to that. In these results, you can see the manifestation of several of those strategic imperatives. Foremost is growth. The Rag & Bone acquisition is providing the lion's share of this year's growth for us. That brand was already on a solid growth trajectory when we acquired it. We're working to leverage our platform to really supercharge that growth. We're already using our existing relationships to quickly bring the brand to market in new markets like Europe and beyond. We're seeding brand awareness in Europe even ahead of distribution. We're opening a store in Amsterdam and are pursuing many different other locations as well. We've already leveraged our licensee relationships, signing an enhanced handbag agreement, and are working with our partners to bring even more categories to the brand. That's a lot of progress in a relatively short period of time. We also highlight our progress with Guess Jeans, a new internally developed brand that speaks to a younger customer. In many ways, we're following a similar playbook. We've already opened three stores in Europe, and we're set to open one in Tokyo and another one in West Hollywood. We talked about North American retail and how our recent results, we believe, do not meet the potential of our brand and what we plan to do about that. We're currently reviewing our pricing strategies in the region, especially in factory stores, to make sure that we're aligned with customer expectations and the competitive environment. Carlos on the call also talked about marketing and how we're challenging ourselves to broaden our marketing capabilities. We conducted a brand review and benchmarking study for Guess. Based on that, we believe that there are opportunities for us to make incremental investments in marketing in areas like social media and others to connect more and differently with our customers. We've engaged an external partner to develop a social media strategy that speaks to all of our customers. If you listen on our future calls, we'll share more about that important initiative. Ultimately, it's our goal to build a powerful marketing engine that can support both Guess and other brands by driving more customers to our stores and websites. I'll stop there and open it up. I know you have some questions for us. There's a lot going on, a lot that we're excited about. Let's take your questions. That's great. Thank you, Dennis. Really appreciate that. I think one of the things that stands out to me when I look at the Guess business is the idea, and this is a relatively new idea, I think, is the idea of Guess as a platform. The company, not just the brand, but the company as a platform. And how do you think about this? And how do you position the business from an operational and financial perspective to then build and grow that platform? So you sort of hit on it in your question, which is you kind of need to separate the company from the brand, and when you do that and you look at the company has been in existence for 44 years, and if you look at the capabilities that we have built, so we have a management infrastructure in North America, very broad across multiple different disciplines. We have the same similar in Europe. We have management infrastructure in Asia, and as I alluded earlier, we operate in 100 different countries, either directly or through our partnerships, so we have access to a lot of the globe, and we have the ability to manage businesses there, so that exists. If you look at our capabilities in terms of distribution, we know we have the internal know-how to operate virtually every distribution model known to mankind. We run our own stores full price and outlets. And partners run Guess? branded stores full price and outlets. We work with wholesale partners from large department stores to the literally thousands that we have throughout Europe. And that's a very different model, working with those big department stores to the mom-and-pops. We have over 25 different product categories that we can bring to market. So what we believe is that we have the capabilities to do what others simply cannot do or what would take others years, significantly more time on their own than they can do on our platform. So we think that we have the ability to take a regional brand and extend it very quickly globally. We have the ability to take a mono brand and, with our product categories, turn it into a lifestyle brand. And when Carlos has talked about this evolution of the company and, to some extent, the evolution in his mindset, he described it as when he came back. Carlos was previously the COO and President. He left in 2010, came back as the CEO in 2019. And he said when he came back in 2019, his mindset was similar to the way he left, that to grow this business, we have to grow the Guess brand. And what's evolved is that we still have opportunities with Guess and parts of the business that aren't performing well that we need to address. But we can leverage all those capabilities and partner with other brands and really grow things much more quickly than those brands could have done otherwise on their own. And Rag & Bone is the first manifestation of that. It's still early innings. We acquired that business in April. We obviously want to do it well and learn from it. But that's, to me, the power of this business model. It has the ability to manage things and grow things that others simply would not be able to do. Anything I missed in there? No, and I think, I mean, you talked about Rag & Bone, but there are other projects internally as well that we have really leveraged the platform that we have. I mean, we've talked about the fact that we are internalizing the outerwear license from one of our licensees in North America because we have developed the capabilities internally to take over that business in Americas wholesale. We took also over the factory franchisee business in Korea because we have the expertise now on how to do it. So Rag & Bone is the continuation of that to a next level, of course, because it's a new brand and it's already a very nice business. That's great. As you think about Guess brand, because we've touched on Guess the company, but the Guess brand specifically, what are some of the investments that you've made recently that you expect should continue to drive growth for the business? How sizable are those investments? And what do you think the impact could be both on an operational perspective and financials as well? Sure. I think we've talked about a couple of those already. I mean, Carlos touched on that during the earnings call in Q3. I mean, the first big one that we talked about is the investments in advertising and marketing, where when we look at our level of investments compared to the benchmark of our peers, we see that we are underinvesting. And if anything, when we look at the peers, we see that over time they have actually increased their level of investments. So that's one area where we think that we should really focus on. And we've started actually to do that in the second quarter. And the objective is to continue to increase the advertising and marketing investment. And it's not necessarily just about doing the same thing. It's looking at how we can be much more efficient in terms of reaching out to the consumer, engage with them in a more efficient way, and I think Carlos mentioned that we have hired some consultants that are specialized in that domain and that are going to run some projects in terms of really developing a full-blown plan in terms of how to really be much more efficient in this area, so that's one of the examples. Of course, Guess Jeans is another big one example in terms of where we are investing. It's a new brand that we are launching that's going to the objective is that brand should really address and talk to a younger consumer with sharper price points, an assortment which is probably leaning toward more basic goods, apparel in terms of design. A high emphasis as well on sustainability, which is very important for that younger consumer, so in there, in terms of investment, of course, we've started to open some locations. I think we mentioned that, so in Europe, we've opened two, three stores, one in Germany, one in Amsterdam, and then another one in Italy. We have launched the business there as well in wholesale. We are in the process of opening a store here in Los Angeles on Melrose, which is going to be a flagship for North America, and of course, kind of in relation with what we are talking about in terms of investment in advertising and marketing, we are also investing in marketing for Guess Jeans to create the brand awareness. For example, we had a big experiential event at Coachella that drove a lot of impressions worldwide, so we are very pleased with that. We keep doing that as well over the globe, actually. We also have some plans to open a flagship store in Japan that we think could be a very good opportunity for that brand. That's really helpful. Obviously, this year, in the wake of you becoming a platform, you've acquired Rag & Bone. So we'd love to just hear a little bit more color on Rag & Bone, what the growth is likely to appear like in the financials and how the acquisition has been going. And any color you can provide would be really helpful. Sure. So I'll take this one. So first, like Dennis mentioned, we are very pleased with the acquisition of Rag & Bone, very pleased as well to have partnered with the WHP Global team. And we think there's a lot of opportunities there in terms of really, again, leveraging our platform. We see very high-level two dimensions where we can really accelerate the growth of Rag & Bone by plugging it on our platform. The first one is really from a geography point of view. In 2023, 90% of the revenues of Rag & Bone, of that $250 million that generated back in 2023, was actually done in the U.S. domestically. And the remaining 10% was generated across Europe and Asia. And like Dennis mentioned, if you take us, if you take Guess, I should say, 75% of the revenues of Guess are generated outside of the U.S. So that gives you an idea in terms of the potential for Rag & Bone. And the thing is, if you think about Rag & Bone, there's very little overlap. There's no real risk of cannibalization between Rag & Bone and the Guess brand. If you look at the aesthetic, the ethos of the brand, the price points, it's very differentiated. And it's really talking to a different consumer. So we really believe we have the ability to leverage our platform, for example, to accelerate the growth in Europe. We talk a lot about Europe, but you don't have to look at as far as Europe. You can also look at Canada, for example, where the brand today has no real representation in retail. And we have a business in Canada or even Mexico, where we have a good partnership with a joint venture partner. Mexico has been a very good market for us, both in retail and wholesale. We believe, along with our partner, that Rag & Bone has very much a lot of potential in that market. Then the second dimension is really more from a product category or product assortment point of view, where I think, oops, sorry, like Dennis mentioned, today we have a very well-diversified product portfolio in Guess. We have 25 different product categories. A lot of the product categories that are apparel are managed internally in terms of sourcing and design. For the accessory categories, such as handbags, footwear, eyewear, and such, we rely on licensing partners with whom we have a lot of we've been doing business for a very long time. If you look at Rag & Bone, the product assortment is heavily today focused on apparel. Yes, there are some accessories. You're going to find some handbags. You're going to find some footwear. But in terms of sales penetration, it's relatively low. And there, again, we believe that we can really help them accelerate the expansion of their product assortment in accessories. And one good example of that is handbag, which has been an amazing and very successful category for us worldwide. And we think we can really help them there in terms of accelerating and expanding. And if you look at the brand and what it stands for and the price points, there's really something very nice we could do there. And that's something that's in the works. So just to talk about that, in terms of much shorter term, in terms of the performance in the third quarter, there were puts and takes across channels. I think when you put it all together, it was slightly below expectations. Some of that was actually because of some wholesale timing of shipments being pushed out in the fourth quarter. Other than that, the business performed relatively in line with our expectations. So we were very pleased with that. I could just add that one of the other things that I think is important for us strategically with this acquisition. I talked about the different competencies that we have as a company. Historically, M&A is not one of them. And this being the first, we want to make sure that we do it thoughtfully and we do it well as we I'll use the word integrate them onto our platform. Maybe the better concept is to plug them into our platform because this was not a synergy play. We did not look at this and identify there's a lot of costs that we can take, organizations that we could consolidate. Although I think there are opportunities to leverage combined buy volumes to get better pricing. But we want to do this well so that we learn how to bring another brand onto our platform so when the next one opportunity comes along, we're able to execute it well. We're not operating to a particular timeline. But we want to make sure that we learn how to do this so that we don't miss the next opportunity. That's very helpful. Could you maybe walk us through how to think about the bottom line growth and the different sort of puts and takes within margin as we look ahead? Yeah. I think there are two things that come to mind as we start to think about probably next year that I think it's important to remember is the first one is currencies. As we've just said, we have a very diversified and global footprint. So our financials are kind of subject to currency fluctuation impacts. And in the fourth quarter, the beginning of the fourth quarter, there was a strong strengthening of the U.S. dollar against a lot of currencies, especially the euros. And that's one of the big drivers that pushed us to adjust our outlook for the fourth quarter. But again, as you start to think about next year, you have to be thoughtful about the fact that this happened just at the end of the fourth quarter. So you have to keep that in mind. And how is currency impacting our financials? There are high-level three different impacts. There's the first one, which is translational, the simple fact that today, if we make EUR 100 of revenues or profit in Europe, it's worth much less in U.S. dollars as we repatriate those euros, if you will. The second one is transactional. In Europe, for example, we purchase a lot of our goods in U.S. dollars. We are hedging some of that. But this is providing us just with basically some protection only for so long. At some point, you're going to feel the impact of that from a margin point of view. And that's going to exactly impact the margin. And the last point is really on the mark-to-market, below operating profit, where we have to basically remeasure some assets and liabilities based on exchange rates. And that has some impact, but below operating profit. So some impact on that and something to keep in mind, both from a revenue trajectory for next year if the exchange rates remain at the prevailing rate when we guide it back at the end of November and then the margin impact. The second one is really around the impact of freight, where, as you all know, I mean, the Red Sea crisis has had some meaningful impact in terms of how goods are flowing, especially into Europe, where now goods are not really able to go through the Suez Canal. They have to go around Africa. And that implies incremental costs and a little bit more delays in terms of how we receive the goods. So it's something to keep in mind. There's been some fluctuation there. And then, of course, the last piece that's been probably on the minds of people in the last few weeks is tariffs. We're all looking at what the new administration is going to do. I think in the past, we've shown that we've been able to rebalance how we source from. Historically, we used to source, like give or take globally, more like 50% of our goods from China. Today, it's closer to like 30%. So there's more to be done. But we've been able to rebalance that over the last few years. That's great. Well, thank you very much for all that color. Any closing remarks? Very good. All right. Thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you.
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