Ollie's Bargain Outlet Holdings, Inc.

Good morning and welcome to OLLIS Bargain Outlet's conference call to discuss financial results for the first quarter fiscal year 2026. Please be advised that this call is being recorded and the reproduction of this call in whole or in part is not permitted without the express written authorization of OLLIS. I would now like to introduce our host for today's call, John Rulon, Managing Director of Corporate Communications and Business Development for OLLIS. John, please go ahead.

Thank you, Carmen. Good morning, everybody. We appreciate your time and participation. Joining me on today's call from OLLIS are Eric Vandervalk, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Robert Helm, Executive Vice President and Chief Financial Officer. Following their prepared remarks, we will open the call for your questions and To ensure that everybody has an opportunity to participate, we ask that you initially limit yourself to one question. For additional questions, please feel free to reenter the queue. Finally, let me remind you that certain comments made on today's call may constitute forward-looking statements, and these are made pursuant to and within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 as amended. Such forward-looking statements are subject to both known and unknown risk, and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from such statements. Those risks and uncertainties are described in the company's earnings press release and filings with the SEC, including the annual report on Form 10-K and quarterly reports on Form 10-Q. Forward-looking statements made today are as of the date of this call, and the company does not undertake any obligation to update these statements. On today's call, the company will be referring to certain non-GAAP financial measures reconciliation of the most closely comparable GAAP financial measures to the non-GAAP financial measures are included in the company's earnings press release. With all that said and out of the way, it's my pleasure to turn the call over to Eric.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us today. We are pleased with our first quarter results and the outstanding performance of our team. We delivered strong earnings growth driven by solid top line results and unit growth. robust margins, and disciplined expense control. These results underscore the durability of our business model, the strength of our value proposition, and our ability to execute through a challenging consumer backdrop. Sales and traffic trends were strong across the board early in the quarter. As the quarter progressed, we began to see divergent trends across our different regions. The combination of unseasonable weather and surging fuel prices put pressure on a few key categories, such as lawn and garden and summer furniture. With our stores being located in more rural and suburban areas, we also think the rapid spike in gas prices led to some trip consolidation, which impacted traffic. Rob will speak to this in a few minutes. But the areas with more favorable weather significantly outperformed those with unseasonable weather. As we move through the second quarter, we think there is the potential to benefit from pent-up demand in weather-sensitive categories. Touching on the consumer for a moment, customers are shopping closer to need more than ever before, but also remain resilient. In the first quarter, the environment shifted very quickly with surging gas prices impacting shopping patterns with a focus on trip consolidation. This primarily impacted the lower income consumer, particularly those driving longer distances to the store. We saw further strengthening of trade down, But typically in these moments of economic stress, lower income consumers trade out more quickly than upper income trade in. Our continued focus on productivity and efficiency initiatives throughout our model gives us the flexibility to strengthen our value proposition when the consumer needs it most. As we move forward, we will further reinforce our strong value proposition with a renewed emphasis on exceptional deals that are extremely relevant in this moment. This fuels the closeout market and our business model. We benefit from disruption of volatility, and we are seeing this in both the quantity and quality of the deals. Our deal flow has been extremely strong, which gives us an additional opportunity to further strengthen our value proposition and invest in price. Outside of this, we are focused on controlling what we can control and executing against our strategic priorities. We remain on target to open 75 stores this year including having opened our first store in the great state of Minnesota, and we are growing rapidly in the Midwest. Our next priority is growing Ali's Army Loyalty Program. These are our best customers who account for more than 80% of our sales. Our focus here is attracting new members to the program and retaining them through a variety of marketing channels. Growth in our loyalty program was again strong in the quarter, increasing 13% to 17.5 million members. Our Ollie's Army members receive special access to various events, deals, and discounts. One of these events is Ollie's Army Night, which we hold twice a year. These exclusive shopping nights celebrate our best customers. The next event will take place on Sunday, June 14th from 5 to 9 p.m. The date is one week earlier than last year, which was moved up due to the Father's Day shift. We will also be running our annual Ollie's Days event in the second quarter. America loves a bargain, and we could not think of a better way to celebrate our country's 250th birthday than with a blowout event. We invite you to join us and see the amazing deals for yourself. If you're already a loyalty member, you will be hearing more about these events in the coming weeks. If you're not a member, why not? Signing up is free and easy. One other note on event cadence. We routinely make adjustments based on timing of key events throughout the year. We are shifting one flyer event out of the third quarter and into the second quarter from August to July. On the top of things we can't control is optimizing category mix to drive sales productivity. We went after the seasonal decor category last year with great success, and we continued to build on that success in the first quarter. Even with the headwind of an early Easter, seasonal decor was one of our top performing categories. We also shrank our wall-to-wall carpet offering and replaced this with a limited assortment of living room furniture. This proved to be a good swap with the added furniture business improving sales productivity by over 100% in the same floor space. We are excited by these early wins and will apply our learnings to other areas of the store. We are working on right-sizing and optimizing the assortments of other downtrending categories such as books and flooring. For competitive reasons, we're going to be a bit guarded in how much we share publicly. Most importantly, I'm excited we have built the framework and a test and learn process that leverages data to make more informed merchandising decisions to drive productivity. On the supply chain side, we are reinvesting in our distribution centers to drive throughput, productivity, and capacity. We completed the replacement of the warehouse execution system in our Texas DC early in the quarter. This was our last remaining DC to receive the upgrade, and we are seeing productivity benefits across the network. The expansion of our Texas distribution center is progressing as scheduled and should be completed early in the third quarter. Later this year, we will begin expanding our Illinois distribution center. The two expansions will increase our network capacity to over 850 stores. On top of all of this, we bought back $53 million of our common stock in a quarter. We are an opportunistic retailer. Our business model thrives on buying good stuff cheap, this quarter that included our own stock. Everyone loves a bargain, and so do we. On that note, I'll turn the call over to Rob, who will take you through our financial results in more detail. Rob.