Educational Development Corporation

Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for participating in today's conference call to discuss Educational Development Corporation's financial and operating results for its fiscal fourth quarter and fiscal 2023 year-to-date results. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to your host, Mr. Stephen Hoosier, Investor Relations. Please go ahead, sir.

Thank you, Jenny, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Educational Development Corporation's fourth quarter and fiscal 2023 year-to-date earnings call. On the call with me today are Craig White, President and Chief Executive Officer, Heather Cobb, Chief Sales and Marketing Officer, and Dan O'Keefe, Chief Financial Officer. After the market closed this afternoon, the company filed an 8K and scheduled a press release announcing its results for the fourth quarter and fiscal 2023 year-to-date. The release will also be available on the company's website at www.edcpub.com. Before turning to the prepared remarks, I would like to remind you that some of the statements made today will be forward-looking and are protected under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those expressed or implied due to a variety of factors. We refer you to Educational Development Corporation's recent filings with the SEC for a further detailed discussion of the company's financial condition. With that, I'd now like to turn the call over to Craig White, the company's president and chief executive officer. Craig?

Thank you, Stephen, and welcome everyone to the call. I will start today's call with some general comments in regard to the quarter. Then I will pass the call off to Dan and Heather to run through financials and provide an update on our sales and marketing. Finally, I will wrap up the call with some comments on strategy and 2023 outlook. During the fourth quarter, we had several one-time events that impacted our results. First and foremost was the rebranding of our direct sales division to Paper Pie. This planned rebrand was part of our updated Usborne distribution agreement that we executed last June. And with great efforts from our marketing and sales team, Heather and I were able to formally announce the new direct sales division named Paper Pie at the NASDAQ closing bell on December 28th. This rebrand was a significant achievement, but also created some disruption to our fourth quarter sales. Also during the fourth quarter, we introduced our first 10 products of our recent addition, Smart Lab Toys. I am pleased to report that since January, we have sold over 90,000 units of these products, generating over 2 million in gross sales. We introduced three additional products in March and have plans to introduce many more over the next two years. These STEAM-based toys are a great addition to our product suite, and we are encouraged to see additional progress each quarter and a full impact of Smart Lab toys once the full line of toys have been released. There were also several one-time cost and expense incurred during the quarter that contributed to our quarterly and total loss for the year. Many of these costs will be beneficial in the future as we return the company to profitability. I will cover those more in more detail later in the call. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Dan O'Keefe to provide a brief overview of the financials. Dan?