Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us at Oppenheimer's 25th Annual Consumer Growth and E-commerce Conference. [audio distortion]. I'm a Senior Food, Grocery, and Consumer Products Analyst here at Oppenheimer. I'm happy to introduce our next presenting company, Lifetime Brands. Joining us today are CEO Rob Kay and CFO Larry Winoker. Thank you both for being here. The format of today's session will be a fireside chat, and then we'll move to audience Q&A. If you have questions, please enter them into the question panel below the video. Let's get started. Maybe to kick it off, for those unfamiliar or new to Lifetime Brands, what should people know about the company? Yeah, so just to give you a little history of the company, the company is a consumer durables business. We sell stuff that is used in the home every day. The average ticket of what we sell is $10 and under. We sell like a good, better, best offering in almost all channels. Our idea is to be agnostic where the consumer shops, but where they shop, we want them to be able to buy our product. Just to back up a second, the company was founded in 1945 as a cutlery company, so kitchen knives. If you fast forward to today, if you look at the cutlery category and look at the POS, the Circana data, we have well over 20% market share through a variety of brands, but predominantly our Farberware brands. The company grew, added brands, went public in 1991, and used that to continue to add brands. In 2018, I orchestrated a combination with a private equity-backed company I was running, and we combined those two companies, about a $500 million Lifetime with about a $175 million of Fulfillment Brands. We relaunched the company to focus more on trying to get our story out, be a more visible public company, and also just change the directory more to growth and profitability. We've had a pretty good success on doing that. We're in multiple categories: tabletop, tools, kitchen tools are our biggest thing. Like I said, things used in the home. Rob, do you mind providing a few minutes on your background? Larry, are you able to do the same? Sure, Rupesh. I come out of the management consulting world, but many years ago, actually, when I was 31 years old, I left that to become CFO of a smaller public company. From there, got the opportunity to become CEO of a private equity-backed company that was an industrial roll-up where we made a lot of acquisitions, very high positive free cash flow profile, and had a successful exit from that. Ever since then, I've been involved in the consumer space and consumer durables, building up private equity companies, including Filament Brands, which we bought in 2000 or launched in 2012, which then in 2018, we merged into Lifetime, and I became CEO of Lifetime in conjunction with that. I started as a CPA. I've been with Lifetime since 2007 as CFO. Prior to that, I was also in private equity and held various financial roles. I was controlled by an individual who also controlled Revlon, and I was the treasurer of control at Revlon for five years. Okay, great. Now I want to touch on a few macro and industry questions. First, on the consumer, how would you describe the overall health of your U.S. consumer as you sit here today? What are you planning for on the consumer front for the balance of the year? I preface this as visibility is a little dim, I think, in general. If you look at 2024, the consumer was not necessarily robust. There was a belief that there was pent-up demand coming into holiday season, which started out slow but ended up to be quite accurate with a strong holiday season in 2024. It slowed down then. The consumer slowed down in terms of spending in Q1 a little bit. Of course, now with the trade wars creating uncertainty, both from a retail and supplier channel, as well as from a consumer channel, the consumer has gotten more wary. It has resulted in some slowdown at the retail level. Another trend we are seeing, and we definitely saw this in Q4, is we saw a little acceleration in terms of people buying online. It was driven mostly with the wariness of the consumer. They were delaying spend, and they can still get that gift in one to two days by buying it online. That greatly helped online shopping in Q4 and continues to do so. Okay, great. Now switching to the competitive backdrop, overall, what is your team seeing on the competitive front here in the U.S.? We're seeing a bit of bifurcation, whereas if you look at a lot of people that we compete in, they're small, either private equity-backed or privately owned companies, and a lot smaller than a couple of the larger players like us. In this environment, having the resources to move manufacturing and supply to many different geographies and maintain quality while you do that, using your balance sheet for building inventory, and just having financial stability, you're starting to see some of those companies hit some breaking points. That actually, for us, we believe would be a good M&A opportunity. A lot in the competitive environment has shifted to operational issues, moving geographies and moving out of China where most consumer products are made and focused on repricing product, which has retarded or slowed down a little bit the pace of new product introduction noticeably. From a channel perspective, in the U.S., we have seen, obviously, Amazon, Costco, Walmart with a lot of momentum. Are you seeing any differences lately from a channel perspective? Not really. As I mentioned, there is we've seen a little bit of pickup online over the last six to nine months. The Club channel, driven by Costco, is very, very strong, both in food and non-food. In the Mass channel, particularly Walmart, has done fairly well. The only two other channels to mention have been ups and downs in the Dollar channel, but for us, it's more of a newer channel. We think that still will offer value to the consumer. Off Price continues to do well and grow as a destination for the consumer. Just from an inventory destocking perspective, just overall, what are you seeing from retailers on the inventory destocking front right now? That's being in terms of the overall destocking that happened, particularly a couple of years ago, as retailers changed their footprint to have some buy online and pick up in store. You needed to change your store format and distribution and what you're using, the square footage in the stores to be able to do that. There was a bit of destocking. A, B, when challenging economic times, the larger retailers will shift towards using their vendors' balance sheet instead of theirs because it's just financially prudent. We've seen a little bit of that over the last year or so. The big input in terms of retail's inventory is driven by the tariffs. People were rushing to get pre-tariff inventory in, but particularly when there were 145% tariffs on China, you saw a lot of people that just shut down, including Lifetime, ordering any product from China. When that changed, you saw a lot of people, including Lifetime, dramatically accelerate bringing in product in that window, not knowing what's going to happen. Again, using your balance sheet to buffer the inventory, less so on the retailer, except direct import private label product where they have to buy that directly. Whereas before, they were hoarding and putting up inventory. They've basically been driving that down, and they're not hoarding now, except where they can on their, again, direct import private label product. Okay, that's a great segue into the next topic, which comes up in really all my investor conversations. On tariffs, I have a few questions here. Can you remind us how the company was positioned heading into the new tariff environment, including your China exposure, and how we should think about potential impacts and mitigation efforts from here? To begin with, Lifetime viewed that China, which is traditionally where our products and almost all from Apple to Lifetime and everything in between are made, because it is much more efficient, good quality, good cost, understand how to make product and police against underage labor and other social responsibility issues. It really makes sense for a lot of reasons to make there. We saw a decoupling with China. What we viewed as decoupling between China and the West, and two years ago, brought in our manufacturing base and said, "Look, we need to start moving out of China," of which we have. Our view was to do it on a distributed basis. We are now shipping from Malaysia, Cambodia, Indonesia. We have been in Vietnam for a long time. A lot of metal products, particularly our flatware, have been in Vietnam for well over a decade. India. While we started shifting that in terms of putting the capital, which we are relying on to propagate our asset-light model, we rely on our manufacturing partners to put up that capital to build those plants. We shifted more back in the last year and a half to China on a temporary basis, or an interim basis, I should say, because it was cheaper, and we were offering a cheaper product to everyone. That is one part. In October, before the election, we said, "Look, as a defensive measure, we are going to start buying inventory to buffer if the Trump administration comes in and puts in an increased tariff program." We did not know and expected what happened. That helped us buffer and allows us time to implement the actual moving of more product out of China because we're still where most of our product is made. We're aggressively doing that. By the end of this year, we'll have most of our products manufactured out of China. Now, the other aspect of tariffs is passing on price increases, of which we have done across our complete customer base. A lot of that you don't see yet at retail. You're starting to see the direct import private label because they pay that faster. That will happen in the second half of the year in terms of retail prices. Can you remind us of, as we think about pricing, the magnitude of price increases? Maybe it's still early, but I don't know. Are there any early reasons on elasticities at this point? I'll divide that in two. The tariffs, I don't know what's going to happen tomorrow. It changes all the time. Therefore, it's very difficult to price, and it changes. We've had to be very reactive and working with our customer base to put that in place. We don't pass through 100%. We're looking really to maintain margin dollars as opposed to margin percent as we do that. That's part of our contribution. In terms of elasticity, I think the best thing we could point for in our products is looking at history. If you look at 2008, which was a pretty deep recession, people were still buying our products. We sell about 10 million units of can openers a year, manual can openers, biggest provider. I always like to use that as a good example because in tough times and high inflation times, people do not necessarily open up their toolbox and take out a hammer and screwdriver. They will go buy, and maybe now $9, now with tariffs $11 for that can opener as opposed to using a hammer and screwdriver. Relatively, in many of our bigger categories, inelastic. Certain categories, like particularly tabletop, there is less price elasticity in those categories. I should say there is more elasticity in the majority of our products though. Okay, great. Just switching to Q1 results, is there anything you think is important to highlight for us from your report? I think the big thing in Q1 is, look, there was a little bit of softness that we saw based upon coming off of a strong fourth quarter. The big thing, we really were not tariff impact. Those things did not happen in Q1. Our margin shifted, and that can happen quarter to quarter because margin is a lot driven by customer mix. If you look at the Club channel, great relationships, great customers, very healthy channel, but most of that is direct import. Therefore, look, there is no working capital investment, there is no working capital cost, but it is lower margin. Customer mix and product mix, we do a lot of different products in a lot of different categories, can change things. We saw that in Q1, which had an adverse impact. Sales were good, but margin was not because of the customer and product mix. I'd like to discuss your international segment. How do you think about your opportunities overseas versus here domestically? We do not have enough time. Look, when I relaunched the company in 2018 and took it over, we inherited an international business that was several acquisitions. Most of it was in the U.K. It was losing a lot of money, well in excess of $10 million. Also, we were selling products once we got a handle of that business, which we did not have. We were selling products at negative margin, no right to win. We completely restructured that business, shut down a lot of facilities, eliminated a couple of hundred heads, changed the product offering, and changed our go-to-market strategy. As I mentioned, mostly in the U.K., it was working for us. From losing a lot of money, we got the business to break even pre-Brexit. Brexit hit, which had a significant impact on the end markets that we were in in the U.K. It took our infrastructure. We could not fund the infrastructure and put it another way. We started losing money. In 2024, last year, we lost $9 million there. That is why we talked about Project Concord, which is designed to restructure that business, further integrate it because it was really kind of run as a standalone into the U.S. business, take advantage of that infrastructure, which allows us to streamline the cost, to get that to break even as a business on a run rate in 2025. We are seeing good progress on what we call Project Concord, which is that project. How focused are you today on growth? What initiatives are top priority for your team? Look, we're always focused on growth, but in this environment, we're taking a more defensive posture because there's just so much noise out there until we settle everything going on with all the macro and political issues and any impact that has on the consumer, which drives our economy. We're more defensive and less growth-oriented than we've been in terms of investing that. We'll shift that back once we see the opportunity. We're not ignoring growth. If you look at the launch of our new Dolly Parton line last year, it was over $6 million of incremental revenues last year. We're more than double that this year. There's a lot of new product. We're taking Dolly Parton into other, away from Dollar General, not away. It'll double in Dollar General, but we'll bring it into other retailers. We're also growing Dollar General with other brands. There's good growth. We continue to invest in our food service initiative, which will grow on a percentage basis significantly this year. It's going to hit critical mass and start contributing a positive contribution margin next year. We've talked about the addressable market there being over $2 billion. We see this as a $100 million ultimate opportunity. We're a little less than $30 million, so we're focused on $60 million first. Okay, great. What is the latest on Project Concord? What should investors keep an eye out for in the remainder of 2025 and into 2026? Project Concord, which is bringing the U.K. business and the international business to a break-even level of run rate, there's cost to getting it. You're not going to see an immediate impact because there's cost to achieving that, which has to run through the income statement as well. We are on plan. It's just execution now. We've developed and are working on many, many different pieces of that project and are very pleased with the progress that we're making. Are there updates on the relocation of the East Coast distribution center and how should you think about the benefits of this relocation? We're moving our large Robbinsville, New Jersey distribution center to Hagerstown, Maryland. We are on plan and on schedule. We've broken ground. We will not own it. Trammell Crow is building this for us. It's built to suit. What the driving factor for that move is if we stayed where we were with all the different inputs and you worked out what that meant in terms of economic impact, our cost over the next couple of years would have increased significantly. By executing this move to Hagerstown, Maryland, our cost will not increase. It's more cost avoidance than pocketing $20-$30 million of savings. This will cost capital. It's an asset-light model. This will cost capital, but we're also getting $13 million in subsidies primarily from the state of Maryland. Okay, perfect. I'm going to wrap up with two final questions. Just going back to your FY 2025 guidance, your team has not provided annual guidance at this juncture. At what point would you feel comfortable actually providing guidance for FY 2025? When there's clarity in the trade wars and the tariff regimes, not elimination, just clarity, stability in that. As that is stabilized, then would be the time to issue guidance. Okay, great. Maybe one final question just on M&A. Can you remind us of your acquisition criteria? What does your ideal target look like? Yeah, so Rupesh, I won't say an ideal target because in M&A, it takes two, right? We may totally want to see this as the perfect acquisition opportunity, but if it's not available, we'll never do it, right? In general, we're looking for either margin expansion, new product category, growth opportunity within our core markets. That's our driving factor. In food service, which is a very attractive opportunity for us to acquire, our speed to grow our market position through an acquisition would make it highly attractive, right? There's a different criteria that we're looking in that area. Then folded acquisitions are immediately accretive. There are opportunities, particularly in this environment that we see, that are more transformative that give us much more critical mass, which we think is important for us as a public company and to provide more liquidity and other size benefits by being able to do that. Okay, great. Thanks, Rob and Larry, for joining us today. Thank you. Appreciate the opportunity to be.