1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to the 1-800-Flowers.com financial results for the fiscal 2022 fourth quarter and full year. All participants will be in a listen-only mode. Should you need assistance, please signal a conference specialist by pressing the star key followed by zero. After today's presentation, there will be an opportunity to ask questions. To ask a question, you may press star then one on your telephone keypad. And to withdraw your question, please press star then two. Please note this event is being recorded. I would now like to turn the conference over to Mr. Joseph Petito, Senior Vice President, Investor Relations, and Corporate Communications. Please go ahead, sir.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today to discuss 1-800-Flowers.com's financial results for our fiscal 2022 fourth quarter and full year. Those of you who have not received the copy of our press release issued earlier this morning, the release can be accessed at the Investor Relations section of our corporate website at 1-800-Flowers-Inc.com. Our call today will begin with brief formal remarks, and then we will open the call to your questions. Presenting today will be Chris McCann, CEO, Tom Hartnett, President, and Bill Shea, CFO. Before we begin, I need to remind everyone that some of the statements that we will make today may be forward-looking within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. These statements involve risks and uncertainties, It could cause actual results to differ materially from those expressed or implied in the applicable statements. For detailed description of these risks and uncertainties, please refer to our press release issued this morning, as well as our SEC filings, including the company's annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. In addition, this morning we will discuss certain supplemental financial measures that were not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the tables accompanying the company's press release issued this morning. The company expressly disclaims any intent or obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements made in today's call, any recordings of today's call, the press release issued earlier today, or in any of its SEC filings except as may be otherwise stated by the company. I'll now turn the call over to Chris McCann.

Thank you, everyone, and good morning. As we noted in this morning's press release, revenues in our fiscal fourth quarter were essentially flat year over year. This reflects the change in consumer behavior that we have seen since last December in reaction to unprecedented inflation in the macroeconomy. Nonetheless, we finished our full fiscal 2022 year with revenues up 4% compared with the prior year. This is on top of more than 40% growth we saw in revenues last year and represents revenue growth of more than 75% compared with our fiscal 2019, which was prior to the pandemic. Our growth for fiscal 22 illustrates our ability to retain and build on the gains we achieved over the past two years, despite the continued macroeconomic uncertainty and the change in consumer behaviors. In fact, it's important to note that we have essentially doubled the size of our company over the past several years. This reflects the healthy growth that we have seen in our customer file, combined with our expanded product offerings and our ever-increasing focus on engaging with our customers through a combination of highly relevant content and unique experiences. As I mentioned back in April during our conference call, We saw our business and the macro economy as having gone through several significant stages over the past few years. Prior to the pandemic or the pre-COVID stage, we made the decision to step up our investments in marketing, particularly in our flagship 1-800 flowers and Harry and David brands to accelerate revenue growth. This enabled us to increase our revenue growth rate from the second half of fiscal 2018 through the first three quarters of fiscal 20 when we went from low single digit to double digit growth just prior to the pandemic. During that period, we also accelerated the growth of our customer file and our celebrations passport loyalty program. These initiatives, along with continued investments in our business platform, positioned us well to respond to the surge that we saw in consumer demand when the world changed dramatically in the spring of 2020 with the advent of the COVID pandemic. Through lockdowns, social distancing, and the shift to remote work, the resourcefulness and dedication of our team helped our customers stay connected with the important people in their lives. With the surge in demand, we saw top and bottom line results and our customer file grow to record levels during the pandemic stage. As the world began to emerge from the pandemic last year, the post-COVID stage or late COVID, we once again saw dramatic changes in the macroeconomy and consumer behavior with increased travel, dining out, group celebrations, and other pent-up activities. We also saw rapidly increasing inflation, unprecedented disruptions in the global supply chain, geopolitical turmoil, and an extremely tight labor market. As a result, we have seen consumer demand moderate, while steep cost increases in everything from labor to shipping to commodities have impacted gross margins. While inflationary pressures remain, we are beginning to see early improvements in certain areas, including fuel prices that have pulled back from their peak highs, albeit still significantly higher year over year, softening in ocean freights, and stabilization of labor rates with some improvement in availability. While we all hope that these positive trends will continue, we have taken proactive steps to address these issues, utilizing our balance sheet to invest in our operating platform, and continue to build for the future. These investments include the automation of our warehouse and distribution facilities, which we've spoken about prior, and which reduces our exposure to the labor front, and buying and building inventories early to get ahead of the continuing global supply chain issues, and implementing logistics optimizing programs to enhance our outbound shipping operations and manage rising rates with third-party shippers. As we continue to ramp up these initiatives, combined with strategic pricing programs across our brands, we anticipate they will help us manage rising costs and gradually improve our gross margins and bottom line results during the latter half of the current fiscal year. We have also continued to invest to expand our product offerings as well as our engagement initiatives. During the fourth quarter, we added to our offering of the multi-brand bundles that our customers have been embracing. For example, pairing Harry and David wine with Sherry's Berries confections and 1-800-Flowers bouquets continues to be a big hit with customers. We combined Cheryl's cookies and Wolfman's bakery gifts to create the perfect brunch bundles. We also began offering same-day delivery of cakes and confections for birthdays and other celebrations, and we expanded our selection of houseplants, a hot category, particularly with millennials, where we saw double-digit growth year over year. Vital Choice, which we acquired last October, also performed well with record-breaking pre-sale demand of our wild-caught Copper River salmon during the fourth quarter. On the engagement front, we further expanded our interactive engagement initiatives to create a true community through a broad range of non-transactional engagement experiences and content, including our popular Celebrations Pulse weekly e-mails, our Chairman's News Celebrations Chatter podcast, Alice's Table virtual workshops for collaborative design and confection of everything from floral arrangements to charcuterie boards, and a growing collection of interactive blogs, including Petal Talk from 1-800-Flowers, Table Talk from Harry and David, Scrumptious Bites from Cheryl's Cookies, and the Vital Choice blog for all things wild-caught, sustainably fond, and organic. These blogs, along with our Connections communities, the Life After Loss event series on sympathy topics, and a growing number of influencer campaigns, enabled us to achieve more than 127 million non-transactional consumer engagements, well past our goal for the year. We know that customers who engage with our content convert 300 to 500 basis points higher than those that do not. In addition, these engagements help us build relationships with our customers beyond the transactions, creating that true community. The combination of these initiatives and our continued product expansion enabled us to attract more than 1.5 million new customers during the fourth quarter and more than 5 million for the year. Existing customers active in the year grew 5.3% to 7.4 million and existing customers represented 70% of total revenues for the year. In addition, our Celebrations Passport loyalty program continued to grow at a double-digit rate during the year, with membership now exceeding 1.4 million. We believe the significant size and robust growth of our customer file and our Celebrations Passport loyalty program, along with our expanded product offerings, positions us well to inspire our customers to give more, connect more, and build more and better relationships and continue to grow our business over the long term. Now let me turn the call over to Bill for his review of some of the key metrics from the fourth quarter and our full fiscal 2022 year. Bill?