Lands' End, Inc.

Good day and welcome to the Land's End Third Quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in list only mode. After the speaker's presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star then 1 on your touchtone telephone. If anyone should require assistance during the conference, please press star then 0 to reach an operator. As a reminder, this call is being recorded. I would now like to turn the call over to Bernie McCracken, Chief Accounting Officer, you may begin.

Good morning, and thank you for joining the Lands End earnings call for a discussion of our third quarter results, which we released this morning and can be found on our website, landsend.com. On the call today, you will hear from Jerome Griffin, our Chief Executive Officer, and Jim Gooch, our President and Chief Financial Officer. After the company's prepared remarks, we will conduct a question and answer session. Please also note that the information we're about to discuss includes forward-looking statements. Such statements involve risks and uncertainties. The company's actual results could differ materially from those discussed on this call. Factors that could contribute to such differences include but are not limited to those items noted and included in the company's SEC filings, including our annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. The forward-looking information that is provided by the company on this call represents the company's outlook as of today, and we do not undertake any obligation to update forward-looking statements made by us. Subsequent events and developments may cause the company's outlook to change. Of note in this respect, the COVID-19 pandemic continues to have an impact on our business and its duration can materially alter our outlook. During this call, we'll be referring to non-GAAP measures. These non-GAAP measures are not prepared in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. A reconciliation of non-GAAP financial measures to the most directly comparable GAAP measures can be found in our earnings release issued earlier today, a copy of which is posted in the investor relations section of our website at LandZen.com. With that, I will turn the call over to Jerome Griffin.

Thank you, Bernie. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us today for a discussion of our third quarter results. Our performance this quarter demonstrates the strength of our offering and distribution strategy that creates our dynamic operating model. The flexibility of our model enabled us to mitigate much of the macro challenges and achieve adjusted EBITDA at the high end of our guidance. Despite these headwinds, we delivered 4% top-line growth, contributing to our 22% growth year-to-date, and achieved 129% adjusted EBITDA expansion year-to-date. We're extremely proud and grateful for our team's ability to execute at an exceptional level as we navigate this challenging operating environment. We're very pleased with our sales over Cyber Week, where we saw strong online and in-store traffic. Sales during this period were up high single digits year over year as a result of strong demand and improvement in stock positions in time for early holiday shopping, as Jim will discuss shortly. We believe that the strong operating platform we established, combined with our ongoing progress across four strategic growth pillars, including product, digital, unit channel distribution, and infrastructure, set us up for long-term success. Our commitment to operating a digitally-led business is driving our customer growth, which we expect will expand by approximately 6% to an all-time high of over 7 million customers this year. And we still see a long runway ahead. We are optimistic about our future and look forward to sharing updated long-term goals with you in January at the ICR conference. Now I will provide some brief highlights from the quarter before turning it over to Jim to discuss our performance in more detail. Starting with product, we remain focused on emphasizing our successful let's get comfy positioning as we continue to capitalize on the strong casualization trend even as people return to the office. Our one closet messaging, versatility of our product offering, as well as the consistency and inclusivity of our fit continue to resonate with our customers. According to TrueFit, Land's End is ranked as the number one favorite fit with customers ages 55 to 64 and is ranked number six in fit overall. For those of you who are not familiar with TrueFit, it is an industry-leading software service that decodes fit and size across retailers to help consumers identify correct sizings. We will continue to expand and amplify our messaging on our extensive fit capabilities, which is being met with strong response as part of our efforts to reach new customers. We saw strong customer demand across a number of key categories during the quarter. The hybrid in-office, at-home flexible work approach continues to support our comfort-first aesthetic, as demonstrated by the strength in our khakis and wovens categories. Transitional outerwear also outperformed, as customers favored lighter weight items with a warmer start to fall. Sleepwear remains strong this quarter, building on the momentum that we saw last year. We also saw better-than-expected results in swimwear, with the category extending beyond its historical selling season as we expanded our offering of more versatile products. Turning to marketing investments, we continue to drive customer engagement through social media channels, refining search, and improving the effectiveness of our catalog. Year-to-date, our new customers increased 11% and our total global customers expanded 7%, putting us on pace to deliver a record customer database, as I just mentioned. During the third quarter, our global new customers were comparable to 2020 and increased approximately 50% from 2019, demonstrating the success, the strategies we've deployed over the last few years. Marketing remains a key investment in building our brand and business. Both our paid social media and search engine optimization are highly productive marketing vehicles. and we will continue to leverage our data analytics to evolve our strategies. Turning now to our third-party partnerships, our performance at Kohl's remains strong again this quarter, and we continue to build on our early successes. We've built a solid foundation and are proud of our achievements over the past few years. We have a strong and flexible operating model and see significant opportunity for the long term. We're strategically positioned to deliver profitable growth, and we will continue to invest in our proven strategies to capitalize on the shift in consumer behavior to e-commerce. I will now turn the call over to Jim.