Educational Development Corporation

Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Educational Development Corporation's second quarter fiscal year 2025 earnings call. At this time, all lines are in reason-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, October 10, 2024. 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 today to 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 Stephen Husser. Please go ahead.

Thank you, operator. And thank you, everyone, for joining today for Educational Development Corporation's first second quarter 2025 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, the company issued a press release announcing its results for the fiscal second quarter and year-to-date results. The release will be available on the company's website at www.edcpub.com. As the operator mentioned, we will make forward-looking statements, and I suggest that you take a look at our forward-looking documents. 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. We appreciate your continued interest. I will start today's call with some general comments regarding the quarter. Then I will pass the call over 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 an update on our progress of the sell-leaseback of our headquarters, the Healthy Complex, and provide some comments on strategy and the remaining fiscal 2025 outlook. During the second quarter, we ran recruiting promotions to increase our brand partner levels and offer discounts to customers, both in an effort to increase sales and generate cash flow. These strategic decisions are necessary to address the covenants of our bank agreement related to our current inventory levels, coupled with the challenging macro economic environment, as higher inflation is reducing the discretionary spending levels of our customers. Although these higher than historical discounts increase our sales in the short term, it also negatively impacts our gross margin percentage and our pre-tax profits for the quarter. While we have been making these strategic decisions to focus on sales stability, our priority is focused on improving our overall operational efficiency and reducing costs. I will talk about some of these changes at the end of the call. With that, I'll now turn the call over to Dan O'Keefe to provide a brief overview of the financials.