National Vision Holdings, Inc.

conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a Q&A session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising that your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star 11 again. Please be advised that today's conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your first speaker today. Tamara Gonzalez, please go ahead.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Welcome to National Vision's first quarter 2025 earnings call. Joining me on the call today are Ree Fahs, CEO, Alex Wilkes, President, and Chris Layden, CFO. Our earnings release issued this morning and the presentation accompanying our call are both available in the Investors section of our website, nationalvision.com. A replay of the audio webcast will be archived in the Investors section after the call. Before we begin, let me remind you that our earnings materials and today's presentation include forward-looking statements as defined in the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the factors identified in the release and our filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The release in today's presentation also includes certain non-GAAP measures. Reconciliation of these measures is included in our release and the supplemental presentation. We would like to draw your attention to slide two in today's presentation for additional information about forward-looking statements and non-GAAP measures. Further, please note that all financial measures in today's commentary are based on a continuing operations basis unless otherwise noted. As a reminder, National Vision provides investor presentations and supplemental materials for investor reference in the Investors section of our website. I will now turn the call over to Reid.

Thank you, Tamara, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. Last week, Alex and I met with over 1,200 store managers, along with our field and optometric leadership, to ensure that they were all fully enrolled, engaged, and aligned with our transformation strategies and tactics. As so many of the company's leaders were uniquely all in one place, it was an ideal time to share the news of our CEO succession plans, live and in person, that as of August 1, Alex Wilkes will be succeeding me as CEO, and I will be transitioning to the role of executive chair. The board, Alex and I, have done a lot of research and had a lot of mindful conversations about best practices associated with CEO transition. That, combined with Alex and my natural compatibility in chemistry, has helped us to ensure a smooth and orderly transition. As such on this, my last earnings call after 23 years and 30 earnings calls as CEO, I'm pleased to be able to share that the strength of our first quarter results are further evidence that National Vision's transformation is working and should continue to be successful well into the future. Our entire team's disciplined approach to executing on our strategic initiatives was evident in the strong continued growth we saw this quarter in our three target customer cohorts, Managed Care, Progressive, and OutsideRx customers, leading to a return to mid-single-digit comp performance and achieving solid bottom-line performance. We are pleased with the ongoing momentum we've seen and are confident we are headed in the right direction. We believe that our value offering positions us well, particularly in this environment. And the results in the quarter reinforce our confidence in the long-term potential of our go-forward strategy and initiatives. Recall that the national vision transformation began following the many changes in the marketplace and the business that started in 2022. We addressed the emergent optometrist shortage through a variety of efforts, including enhanced flexibility, recruiting improvements, and the implementation of remote exam capabilities. While there remain plenty of opportunities to further optimize the efficiency of the network, we believe we now have a strong foundation of optometric coverage in place. With this foundation, we kicked the transformation into a higher gear last year, which included the recruitment of new leaders with fresh perspectives to help develop and implement a multi-year transformation agenda. That's when we recruited Alex Wilkes, an industry veteran from Essler Luxottica and Cooper Vision, and Mark Banner, who was new to our industry but brought enlightened insights from his analogous consultative selling retail experiences with Sleep Number and Zales. A month ago, we also added Chris Layden to the team as CFO. Chris worked alongside Alex as head of finance during their transformation of Pearl Vision for Essler Luxottica. Most recently, he was CFO of Community Veterinary Partners, a business similar to Optical given its reliance on medical professionals. Welcome, Chris. Last fall, the new team performed a deep dive analysis on our customer and our business and developed a simple by the strategy that we shared with you last quarter. Our new strategy involves tightening our attention to segmentation, personalization, and digitization in our messaging, product, pricing architecture, and customer experience with a special focus on our three target customer cohorts that represent about half of our customers but a disproportionately large percentage of our sales. These segments, while already significant to us and growing faster than the rest of the business, are also segments where we are significantly underdeveloped versus the category. Thus, focusing on them should help to expand our addressable market. Plus, they each in their own way help to insulate us more from the impact of difficult macroeconomic times. We began to see initial evidence of this during the first quarter where America's best saw positive comp and sales from higher income groups offsetting negative trends from lower income consumers. This was true with managed care customers and those self-paying in these income brackets. While these segments are receiving heightened attention, we remain mindful of maintaining focus on the value we provide to our more purely budget-oriented customers, especially in an environment where all consumers, especially cash consumers, are ever more value seeking. The initial program springing from this new strategy helped us to deliver a strong quarter. After I take you through first quarter results, Alex will provide more details on our ongoing transformation programs and progress. With that, I'll turn to the highlights in the first quarter. Sales in the first quarter rose 5.7% to $510 million. Adjusted comparable store sales growth of 5.5% represented the ninth consecutive quarter of positive growth. solidly in the mid-single-digit range, thanks to positive traction on our initiatives, with every brand delivering positive comp growth. America's best comparable store sales were 5.9%, on top of 1.2% in last year's first quarter, and Eyeglass World comp store sales of 3.1%, its best quarter since 2021. All three of our target customer segments delivered double-digit comp, And while strong comp was due to average ticket, we were encouraged to see traffic turn positive for the quarter. Importantly, while we experienced average ticket gains, we continued to see exam-to-eyeglass purchase conversions hold steady and healthy net promoter scores. This is a confirmation that our pricing actions were accepted by customers. Adjusted operating income increased 21.8% to $41.3 million, and adjusted diluted earnings per share increased to 34 cents. As stated previously, exam capacity remains in good shape. Retention remains healthy, and our recruitment efforts are in line with expectations. Remote technology is enabled in approximately two-thirds of the store base and is now embedded in our operations. We are encouraged that this strong momentum continued as we entered the second quarter, which gives us further confidence in our transformation program. And with that, let's turn to guidance. The strength of our first quarter results gives us the confidence to raise our guidance for the year. Chris will take you through our outlook in more detail. While we're confident in our strategy and seeing strong response to our initiatives, we believe in this environment it's hard to predict consumer demand. Thus, our focus on cost efficiency couldn't be timelier. Amidst all this, we feel good about the course we're on and are confident in our future. And with that, I'll turn the call over to Alex.