Educational Development Corporation

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Educational Development Corporation's first quarter fiscal year 2024 earnings call. At this time, all lines are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question and answer session. If at any time during this call you require immediate assistance, please press star zero for the operator. This call is being recorded on Thursday, the 13th of July, 2023. Before beginning the call, we 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 the Educational Development Corporation's recent filings with the SEC for a more detailed discussion of the company's financial condition. I would now like to turn the conference over to Jean Marie Young from Three Part Advisors. Please go ahead.

Thank you, JP, and good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for Educational Development Corporation's Fiscal First Quarter Earnings Call. On the call with us 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 issued a press release announcing its results for the fiscal first quarter. The release is available on the company's website at www.edcpub.com. With that, I'd like to turn the call over to Craig White, the company's president and CEO. Craig?

Thank you, Jean, and welcome everyone to the call. I will start today's call with some general comments in regards to the quarter. Then I will pass the call off to Dan and Heather to run through the financials and provide an update on our sales and marketing. Finally, I will wrap up the call with some comments on strategy and fiscal 2024 outlook. During the first quarter, our sales continue to be impacted by high inflation, which we will likely face for the remainder of the year. As we have said on previous calls, our sales results are primarily driven by our active brand partners. This is our key indicator that reflects current sales levels and where we expect them to trend in the future, Our brand partner levels decreased again this quarter. We believe this is for a variety of reasons, like we mentioned, economy, rebrand, et cetera. As I mentioned on the fourth quarter earnings call, some of this was carryover from rebranding, which takes some time to work through our entire network of sales partners. We are still making additional changes to improve our sales to not only make our brand partners more successful, but also entice new brand partners to join Paper Pie. I'll let Heather talk further about that later in the call. On a more positive note, our brand partners at leadership levels remain higher than pre-pandemic numbers, and they are primary drivers for new recruiting and overall sales growth. Brand partner success generates additional brand partners, and that continues to be our number one focus. We will be looking at numbers of our active brand partner count from this summer as an indicator for the future. This is due to the fact that by the end of the summer, based on our definition of active, which hasn't changed, that each of our brand partners will either have joined under the new Paper Pie brand and or made a sale under this new brand. As you will hear Heather discuss a bit more, our marketing promotions and programs are focused on building this number back up to higher levels. Another positive in the first quarter was the continued results from our Smart Lab Toys product line. We introduced 13 new Smart Lab Toys to our publishing and Paper Pie customers and our sales have exceeded expectations. Not only have we received great reception from our retail customers, but we have also picked up some nice international orders as well. Our Paper Pie division continues to drive the total sales for our company and the sales of Smart Lab toys from this division are exceeding our original expectations. During the quarter, our growth sales of Smart Lab Koi products exceeded 1.4 million. We introduced 10 new products in June and have another 15 or so over the next 12 months. Some of these our customers have never seen before, so we've started new development since we've owned them. With that, I will now turn the call over to Dan to provide a brief overview of the financials.