Citi Trends, Inc.

Thank you for joining us on CityTrend's third quarter 2025 earnings call. On our call today is Chief Executive Officer Ken Seipel and Chief Financial Officer Heather Putino. Our earnings release was sent out this morning at 6.45 a.m. Eastern Time. If you have not received a copy of the release, it's available on the company's website under the Investor Relations section at www.citytrends.com. You should be aware that prepared remarks today made during this call may contain forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Management may make additional forward-looking statements in response to your questions. These statements do not guarantee future performance. Therefore, you should not place undue reliance on these statements. We refer to you to the company's most recent report on Form 10-K and other subsequent filings within the Securities and Exchange Commission for a more detailed discussion of the factors that can cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. I will now turn the call over to our Chief Executive Officer, Ken Seiple. Ken?

Thank you, Neetha. Well, good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for our third quarter earnings call. I am pleased to report another quarter of consistent performance, demonstrating disciplined execution and progress across every area of our business. Our transformation strategy is gaining significant momentum, our operational capabilities are advancing, and our customer connection is strengthening. As I shared at a recent investor conference, we're in the early stages of what I believe will be a compelling transformation for CityTrans. We've established a clear line of sight to achieve approximately $45 million of EBITDA in 2027, which represents a $60 million increase from the 2024 levels. The substantial growth trajectory will be driven by our continued focus on consistent, comparable store sales performance, gross margin expansion, operating expense leverage, and strategic new store expansion. Today, I'll walk you through the drivers of our third quarter results and provide additional details on how we're executing against this exciting long-range roadmap. Turning now to our results. In the third quarter, we delivered comparable store sales growth of 10.8%, which represents a 16.5% growth on a two-year basis. This marks our fifth consecutive quarter and 15th straight month of strong comp growth, with total sales up 10.1% as compared to last year in the quarter. Consistent with our year-to-date performance, the majority of our Q3 sales results were due to increased customer traffic. We began the quarter with a strong back-to-school season, and we finished the quarter with an equally strong late fall fashion and pre-holiday product performance, with particular strength in children's, men's, and basic apparel categories throughout the entire quarter. Our Q3 performance brings our year-to-date comp to 10% or plus 12.3 on a two-year basis. We're seeing positive sales increases across all store volume groups and geographies. as well as across all product categories, underscoring the breadth of the top-line improvement across the business. Plus, I am pleased to report that our holiday is off to a good start and our strong two-year stack sales momentum has accelerated into the fourth quarter, where we are poised to generate our sixth consecutive quarter of year-over-year growth. Gross margin rate in Q3 was consistent with the operating plan expectations and year-to-date 2025 performance. Our merchants have done a nice job of managing product costs while delivering amazing prices in the ever-changing landscape of tariffs. Due to the macro disruptions, the off-price deal flow continues to be robust, which allows us to have confidence in continued margin performance in the foreseeable future. I should also note that we made a tactical decision to pull forward some of the product originally expected in early Q4 into late Q3, which created a purposeful shift of freight expense from Q4 to Q3 this year. And as noted in our press release, the prior year gross margin rate results in Q3 2024 were artificially high last year due to Q2 strategic inventory reset activity, actions that ultimately jump-started the company's top-line turnaround last year. SG&A leveraged 130 basis points compared to last year, which includes the incremental funding of performance bonus program for employees this year. We're making good strides in improving execution consistency in all areas of the business, which in turn is having a positive impact on expense control. Looking ahead, we're focused on efficient execution to enable us to continue to leverage expenses as we grow the top line. As a result, we achieved better than planned EBITDA in the quarter, giving us confidence in raising our EBITDA guidance for the year. Now turning to customer dynamics. Our turnaround is rooted in a clear, unwavering focus on the needs of our African-American customer, who's at the center of everything we do. As I mentioned on prior calls, I believe the primary reason for the quick turnaround in our business is our laser focus on the needs of our African-American customer and our highly differentiated competitive advantage of neighborhood-based locations. Our stores are embedded in communities that we've served for years, and proximity, combined with word of mouth, serve as powerful traffic drivers. CityTrans has built a truly differentiated competitive position in this high-performing off-price retail sector. We're really the only off-price retailer specifically focused on the African-American consumer, delivering styles, brands, and trends at compelling prices that resonate with this underserved demographic. Our cultural relevance is a significant competitive advantage. African-American consumers are trendsetters and early adopters, and understanding this dynamic allows us to curate assortments with immediate appeal to our core customers. We also know that our customers are discerning. They understand that value is not just about price. They're willing to spend more when the style is for them, the fashion is on trend, and the quality is right. Our consistent strong traffic and basket performance in the third quarter provides clear evidence demonstrating the strength of our uniquely loyal high-frequency customer base. We continue to strengthen this connection by elevating cultural relevance of our assortments and refreshing the shopping experience to better align with our brand voice. Our brand promise says it all. Styles that see you, prices that amaze you, and trends that tell your story. This holiday, We are launching and have launched the rebranded City Trends Joy Looks Good On You holiday campaign with updated social media presence under the We Are At City Trends tagline. We've also implemented city bus ramps and shelter marketing in key markets to strengthen our local presence. All of this reflects a more refined, culturally relevant, modern brand voice. Looking forward to further enhance our customer relationships and drive deeper engagement, we're making strategic investments in our technology infrastructure, including the design and implementation of a new CRM and loyalty platform. This work will deepen our interaction with our most frequent customers and enhance long-term customer value. While we're in the early stages of this initiative, we're excited about the opportunity to create a more meaningful brand interaction with our best and most loyal consumers. Before diving into this quarter's product performance, let me briefly remind you of our three-tiered product strategy. What's important to understand is that we're serving customers across all income levels, and we have a significant portion of average and higher income customers, which creates tremendous opportunity for our assortment of recognizable brands at exceptional prices that align with their style and trend preferences. At the opening price point, we offer value-focused basics through our City Score program for budget-conscious customers. The core of our business is our Better tier, typically priced between $7 and $12, which offers broad selection of on-trend styles that drive loyalty and consistent performance across women's, men's, kids', footwear, and home categories. At the top end, we're expanding our Best tier through two distinct approaches. First, trend-relevant, fashionable styles priced well below specialty retail, and second, extreme value opportunities featuring well-known brands at steep discounts, often up to 75% off MSRP. We're targeting this extreme value segment to represent an incremental 10% of total sales, as these branded treasures drive both traffic and basket growth while delivering strong margins. With this strategic framework in mind, now let me walk you through our Q3 product performance, which was broad-based and balanced in all categories. Strong results were driven by both apparel and non-apparel categories, and all divisions posted increases. But first, I'd like to congratulate our children's team on their strong double-digit growth in back-to-school and throughout the quarter. As our children's team continues to improve style curation and product in-stocks, our customers continue to respond positively. Children's is a cornerstone of our business and a model of consistent execution this year. Equally, basic product for kids, men's, and women's had a strong quarter driven by better styles and improved inventory position in store. Our men's division had another strong quarter of growth reflecting the team's work to increase trend for our younger male customer, while also tending to the fashion sensibilities of our mature male consumer. We're excited about this more comprehensive approach to our male customer, and based on the positive initial customer reaction, we have significant growth ahead in this particular category. We also saw momentum in women's footwear, which is an area we've been working to regain lost market share. There's still more work to be done in this category, but we're encouraged with Q3 results and customers' response to our branded product at extreme values. Looking ahead in product, we're focusing on strengthening our product offering in all categories. Our creative director has significantly raised the bar and is focused on curating trends to ensure our product is always trend right. From the opening price product to our best branded fashions, our merchant team is finding ways to elevate trends and styles at amazing prices. In Q4, we're repositioning the men's store presentation to highlight increased emphasis on young men's trend apparel. while maintaining our core and classic portions of the assortment. We're in the early stages of repositioning our women's area to better reflect the style, trend, and sizing opportunity that we see for the business and plan to introduce an improved assortment to our customers in Q1 of next year. As I've mentioned before, we're continuing our focus on growing our intensification classifications, which includes big men's, plus sizes, and family footwear, all of which have significant upside potential in the future. Turning now to operations. As I've discussed in the past, our transformation is guided by a three-phased framework designed to deliver sustainable, profitable growth. In the repair phase, we focused on restoring fundable business practices to ensure a strong foundation for growth, including sharper clarity around our African-American consumer, our three-tiered product assortment, and implementation of AI-based allocation software to improve in-stocks, reduce markdowns, and accelerate inventory turns. We are now firmly in the execute phase, focused on implementing best practices across all areas of the business to improve productivity and enable SG&A leverage. This includes increasing supply chain speed, reducing working capital costs, and aligning our teams around KPIs and performance link compensation to drive continuous improvement. From an operational standpoint, we made continued progress on these phase initiatives in the third quarter. I want to congratulate the entire team, specifically our senior leaders for improved business execution in Q3. One of the keys to our success was consistent execution of a detailed plan that emphasized tactical excellence to win the quarter. We continue to improve our inventory efficiency, supporting a 10.8 comp with overall 3% less inventory than the prior year. Due to speed improvements in our supply chain, We were also able to execute a 4.5% higher average in-store inventory. In the supply chain, improved work processes, productivity standards, and day-to-day leadership enabled us to efficiently reduce in-process inventory. This improved efficiency drives working capital optimization and provides flexibility and speed to react to sales trends while protecting gross margins. In the quarter, we finalized implementation of our AI-based allocation system across all merchandise categories, and we remain pleased with the results. We're now turning our attention to an AI-based planning system to help streamline sales and inventory planning processes for our merchant teams. As I said before, retail is detail, and execution without measurement is just guesswork. Our use of KPIs and dashboards across all key functions provides the visibility that helps our team stay on track and drive continual operational improvement, which is the core element of our execute phase strategy. Looking ahead, while we've made good operational progress, as I said earlier, we recognize a significant opportunity remains to improve execution in many areas of our business. As we advance through our execute phase and improve consistency, we expect continued SG&A leverage to enhance flow-through of sales to profit. Now turning to our growth strategy, we remodeled 24 stores in the quarter, including 15 high-volume stores. Year-to-date, we've remodeled 62 locations and now have about 30% of our fleet in an updated format. These refreshed stores inspire our teams, elevate brand perception in the community, and send a strong signal that we're investing in local neighborhoods. In the third quarter, we opened three new stores in Jacksonville, Florida, Columbia, South Carolina, and Bainbridge, Georgia, bringing our store count to 593 locations across 33 states. In addition, we remodeled five stores in Columbia, South Carolina, and four stores in Jacksonville, Florida, And in support of these new stores and remodels, we added local marketing, which included wrapping city buses with a CityTrends brand message. These openings are part of our pilot market backfill approach, which we are opening new stores in conjunction with remodeling existing locations to increase market share by strengthening our store presence and reinvigorating our brand. In the first few weeks of business, the new stores and markets have responded above expectations. I look forward to giving you a more thorough update on our next call after we have a full holiday season of results in these markets. These market investment tests will inform our approach as we accelerate growth in 2026, when we plan to open about 25 new stores, followed by at least 40 stores per year in 2027 and onward. This expansion strategy will take our store count to around 650 stores by the end of 2027, focusing on backfilling existing markets where our brand awareness and performance are proven, while selectively entering new markets with strong demographic alignment to our customer base. Our positioning of CityTrans for strategic new store growth is guided by a disciplined data approach. Our new store expansion combines advanced AI-driven analytics, local market expertise, and strict financial criteria. Using AI tools, we have analyzed three years of actual transaction data from every store location, combined with comprehensive geolocation studies to understand the specific market characteristics that drive our success. This data-driven approach has demonstrated about 90 percent accuracy in predicting sales, helping us identify and replicate our most successful store profiles while minimizing risk. We're applying disciplined financial hurdles to every new store decision, targeting mature store averages of about 1.5 million and mid-teens four-wall contribution. Looking ahead, we continue remodeling about 50 stores per year as a part of our ongoing fleet maintenance and market investment strategies. This disciplined approach allows us to progressively upgrade our store base while achieving planned returns on invested capital and positioning us to expand intelligently while maximizing return on investment. Longer-term growth. In early October, we had a chance to share our multi-year growth plan at an investor conference. The presentation we shared is available on our investor relations website, but I do want to take a minute just to review some of the key objectives of our long-range plan. The first objective is to grow sales to $900 million or more in fiscal 2027 with consistent comp store sales growth, plus the addition of about 25 new stores in fiscal 2026 and 40 stores in 2027. We plan to achieve a gross profit rate of 42%, a 400 basis point expansion compared to fiscal 2024, and we plan to leverage expenses by 200 basis points to a rate of approximately 37% or less. Resulting EBITDA is expected to be $45 million or more in fiscal 2027, a $60 million improvement to 2024, and an EBITDA margin rate of approximately 5%. These are not distant goals. They're achievable outcomes driven by the actions we are actively executing to drive the turnaround of this important business and with our fiscal 2025 results today. I think it's fair to say that we're off to a pretty good start. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Heather to discuss our financial performance for the quarter in more detail and our outlook for the fourth quarter. I'll return after Heather for some closing remarks. Heather?

Thank you, Ken, and good morning, everyone. I'm pleased to walk you through the details of our third quarter performance, which demonstrates, once again, the consistency and effectiveness of our transformation strategy. That clear strategy, plus the foundational improvements made to date, have created remarkable momentum across the business, and we are delivering measurable progress across key operational metrics. Starting with the top line, Q3 total sales were $197.1 million, up 10.1% compared to Q3 2024. Comparable store sales increased 10.8%, 16.5% on a two-year stack basis. Ken said this already, but it's so good it warrants repeating. Our Q3 performance marks our fifth consecutive quarter and 15th straight month of strong comp growth, a remarkable feat, particularly in the current retail environment. We delivered strong comps in each month of the quarter and saw consistent year-over-year growth in both traffic and basket as our revised merchandise assortment, including off-price deals and more branded extreme value products, continues to resonate strongly with our customers, enabling us to gain market share. We also saw positive results across all climate zones, across all store volume groups, and across all product categories. demonstrating the broad-based nature of our improving results. Third quarter growth margin was 38.9%, while 90 basis points lower than Q3 2024, these results were in line with our expectations. Recall that in the second quarter of last year, we incurred significant markdowns from our strategic inventory reset, allowing us to exit aged and slow-moving products while freeing up open to buy for our revised product strategy to fuel our top line growth. As a result, markdowns and shrink in Q3 of last year were unnaturally low, creating an unfavorable comparison for the current year period. As Ken mentioned, early in the third quarter, we decided to shift inventory and related freight expense from Q4 into Q3 to better manage freight flow for the distribution centers. Doing so drove additional freight expense in Q3, about a 40 basis point impact to margin rate, while accomplishing the smoothing we wanted to achieve, protecting the holiday and delighting our customers with earlier access to holiday goods. Importantly, product margin was consistent with results from the first half of the year due to the hard work of our merchant teams, as Ken remarked on earlier. Third quarter adjusted SG&A expense totaled $79.5 million compared to $74.6 million in the prior year period. The increase to last year was driven by $3.2 million of higher incentive compensation accrual and store in DC expenses to process higher sales. As we've shared in previous calls, we reinstated an incentive compensation accrual at the beginning of this fiscal year after incurring very minimal related expense in fiscal 2024, causing the bonus to no bonus comparison again in the third quarter. In addition, due to improved expected financial results for the year, we set the bonus accrual to the max payout, driving a catch-up accrual in the third quarter. On a rate basis, Q3 adjusted SG&A was 40.4%, 130 basis points lower than last year. Adjusted EBITDA for the quarter was a loss of $2.9 million in line with management expectations and better than a loss of $3.3 million a year ago. Before turning to the balance sheet, let me provide a few details on our performance through the first nine months of fiscal 2025. Comparable store sales for the first nine months increased 10% with a two-year comp stack of 12.3%. Comps were driven by a 6% increase in transactions. This is the metric we're most proud of, as it is evidence that our loyal customers are responding positively to the changes we've made in our assortment strategy and to the in-store experience. Adjusted nine-month EBITDA was a loss of $0.1 million, an increase of more than $21 million to last year. EBITDA growth was driven by more than $47 million in incremental sales, 290 basis point margin rate expansion, and 100 basis points of SG&A leverage, so improvement across the board. Now turning to the balance sheet. Total inventory dollars at quarter end decreased 3.1% compared to last year, with average in-store inventory up 4.5% as we strategically positioned ourselves for holiday sales. including the pull forward of inventory receipts from Q4 into Q3. As Ken mentioned, our success in driving double-digit sales increases with a modest increase in in-store inventory reflects our work to improve inventory efficiency through higher turns and improvements in supply chain speed. As we enter the important Q4 holiday selling season, we remain pleased with our inventory level, composition, and freshness. At the end of the third quarter, we remained in a healthy financial position with a strong balance sheet, including no debt, no drawings on our $75 million revolver, and $51 million in cash. This financial strength continues to give us the flexibility to invest in our growth initiatives while ensuring operational stability throughout our transformation. Now turning to our fiscal 2025 outlook. Based on our results through the third quarter, and our confidence that the effectiveness of our turnaround plan will continue through the fourth quarter, we are pleased to update our outlook for 2025 as follows. With sales momentum of the first nine months of the year continuing into early Q4, we now expect full-year comp store sales growth of high single digits at the high end of our previous outlook. We now expect full-year gross margin expansion of approximately 230 basis points versus 2024 also at the high end of previous outlook due to continued progress on inventory efficiency and planned supply chain improvement. 2025 SG&A is expected to leverage approximately 90 basis points versus last year, reflecting continued expense control. Once again, this is at the high end of our previous outlook of 60 to 90 basis points leverage versus 24. With these updates, we now expect full-year EBITDA to be in the range of $10 to $12 million an increase to the $7 to $11 million range in prior guidance. The revised guidance is $24 to $26 million above fiscal 2024 results. There is no change to our expected effective tax rate of approximately 0% for the year. For the year, we will open three new stores and will remodel 62 locations. Both of these targets have been achieved as of the end of the third quarter. In addition, we are planning to close four stores in the fiscal year just above our previous guidance of three closures. And finally, full year capital expenditures are now expected to be approximately $23 million at the lower end of our previous outlook of $22 to $25 million. While we don't provide quarterly guidance, given where we are in the fiscal year, we want to offer thoughts on our expectations for the fourth quarter. Q4 comps are expected to be up high single digits with a two-year stack in the mid-teens. Q4 growth margin is expected to be in the range of 40% to 41% up to prior year. SG&A is expected to be approximately $82 million. And Q4 EBITDA is expected to be in the range of $10 to $12 million. Before I turn the call back to Ken, I want to emphasize that our third quarter results reflect more than just three months of strong execution. They demonstrate the durability of our business model, the effectiveness of our strategic initiatives, and most importantly, are a continuation of the improvement we've achieved across the last several quarters. As we look toward the fourth quarter and into fiscal 2026, we remain committed to our disciplined approach while maintaining the flexibility that has served us well throughout this transformation. The foundation we've built gives us confidence in our ability to deliver sustainable, profitable growth while continuing to create shareholder value. I'm excited about the opportunities ahead as we continue to execute against our strategic plan. With that, I'll turn the call back to Ken. Ken?