1-800-FLOWERS.COM, Inc.

Excuse me, this is a conference operator. Thank you for your patience. The call will begin shortly. Please continue to hold. Thank you. Thank you. Good morning and welcome to the 1-800-Flowers.com fiscal 2023 fourth quarter and year end earnings call. All participants will be in 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 touchtone phone. 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 Andy Millivoy. Senior Vice President, Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Good morning and welcome to our fiscal 2023 fourth quarter and year-end earnings call. Joining us today are Jim McCann, Chairman and CEO, Tom Hartnett, President, and Bill Shea, CFO. Before we begin, I'd like to remind you that some of the statements we make on today's call are covered by the Safe Harbor disclaimer contained in our press release and public documents. During this call, we will make forward-looking statements with predictions, projections, and other statements about future events. These statements are based on current expectations and assumptions that are subject to risks and uncertainties, including those contained in our press release and public filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. The company disclaims any obligation to update any of the forward-looking statements that may be made or discussed during this call. Additionally, we will discuss certain supplemental financial measures that were not prepared in accordance with GAAP. Reconciliations of these non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in the tables of our earnings release. And now, I'll turn the call over to Jim.

Thanks, Andy, and good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you today. Many of you know me, and for some of you who I don't know, I look forward to getting to know you as well. Since our last earnings call, we announced that my brother Chris was stepping down as CEO for personal health reasons. I wanted to take this opportunity to thank Chris for all of his contributions to our company over the many years that he and I have worked together. Chris played an integral role in overseeing our rapid growth and enhancing our market-leading position of the company. He always looked beyond the shoreline to see what's next, where the consumer was going, and ensured we always embraced the coming waves of technology. whether it was expanding our business from a 1-800 flowers phone number to the internet, to mobile commerce, to social commerce, and now the AI technologies. Chris made sure we were ahead of the curve. We as a company have a rich history of innovation in embracing new technology and will continue to play a vital role in solving the relationship needs of millions of customers. We're grateful that Chris, who is currently taking a leave of absence, remains on our board of directors And after his leave of absence ends, we expect him to return in a new capacity to help us navigate the coming waves of innovation. I want to take this opportunity to highlight the depth of our talent bench and the role that Tom Hortnett has played in our organization. Tom, who many of you know, has been with us for over 30 years and was promoted to president of the company just last year. Tom has played a critical role in overseeing the successful execution of our strategic initiatives and leads our talented management team as we collectively continue to execute our strategy to be a top destination for our customers' celebratory and gifting needs. In a moment, I'll turn the call over to Tom, who will provide a business update. But before I do that, let's take a moment to look at where we've been and where we are and where we're going. Over the past couple of years, we, along with many companies, faced numerous challenges, beginning with operating a business during the pandemic, then significant disruptions in the global supply chain and labor shortages, followed by inflationary pressures and meaningful change in consumer behavior. This significantly affected many aspects of our business, but in particular, our gross profit margin and profitability. Over the past fiscal year, we saw an improving macro environment on several fronts, including ocean freight rates that have approached their pre-pandemic levels and certain commodity costs that have come off their highs. These macro forces combined with our own efforts to increase efficiencies, including our automation investments and logistics optimization efforts, led to the margin improvement we began to experience in fiscal 23. As the pendulum continues to swing back in fiscal 24, we expect to continue to benefit from the lower ocean freight costs, commodity costs that continue to revert closer to the mean, and our efforts to improve efficiencies. As we look a little further down the road, say the next year, two or three, we expect our gross margin to continue to benefit from these factors and return to its historical 10-year average of approximately 42%. which we experienced prior to fiscal 22. This is sort of a story of a reversion to the mean. While it is very difficult to predict precisely when we will see more favorable environments for consumer discretionary spend, we believe that with regard to revenue growth and margin recovery, it's a question of when, not if. The actions we have taken to enhance the customer experience, improve margins, and optimize expenses combined with an improved consumer environment, will enable us to achieve our historical sales growth, gross profit margin, and EBITDA margin rates. For these reasons, we remain very optimistic about our prospects and are confident that we are positioned well to perform and grow our company while building shareholder value. I'll now turn the call over to Tom for an update on the business.