Savers Value Village, Inc.

Good afternoon and welcome to Saver's Value Village conference call to discuss financial results for the first quarter ending March 30, 2024. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Later, we will conduct a question and answer session and instructions will follow at that time. Please note that this call is being recorded and a replay of this call and related materials will be available on the company's investor relations website. The comments made during this call and the Q&A that follows are copyrighted by the company and cannot be reproduced without written authorization from the company. Certain comments made during this call may constitute forward-looking statements which are subject to significant risk and uncertainties that could cause the company's actual results to differ materially from expectations or historical performance. Please review the disclosure on forward-looking statements included in the company's earnings release and filings with the SEC for discussion on this risk and uncertainties. Please be advised that statements are current only as of the date of this call and while the company may choose to update these statements in the future. It is under no obligation to do so unless required by applicable law or regulation. The company may also discuss certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of each of these non-GAAP measures to the most directly comparable GAAP financial measure can be found in today's earnings release and SEC filings. Joining for management on today's call are Mark Walsh, Chief Executive Officer and Euron Tanyas, President and Chief Operating Officer.

Mr. Walsh, you may go ahead, sir.

Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Appreciate you joining us today. We started 2024 on solid footing, underpinned by secular trends, a growing loyalty program, and an underlying value proposition that is driven by our unique product selection and shopping experience. We have a number of areas that we want to discuss today, namely our first quarter results, our strong new store performance and pipeline, an opportunistic acquisition of a small thrift chain in the southeast that establishes a beachhead for accelerated growth in a key geography where we have considerable white space. The investments we are making to differentiate ourselves and support accelerated growth, chopper trends, and finally, the CFO transition we announced this afternoon. I'll start with our results. Overall, we are pleased that our first quarter results were in line with expectations we provided on our last earnings call. In Q1, we delivered 354 million in sales and 60.3 million in adjusted EBITDA, representing growth of 2.5 and 2.1% respectively. One theme which we will be discussing today is the divergence in the trends between the U.S. and Canada. Specifically, while our comparable sales on aggregate were 0.3%, the U.S. grew by 2.3%, while Canada saw negative comparable sales of 2.6%. Notably, on a two-year stack basis, our aggregate comp store sales increased 7.5%, with the U.S. up 7.9%, and Canada up 6.4%. As I will discuss in a bit, we are facing more difficult macro conditions in Canada than what we are currently seeing in the United States. Moreover, given our existing established presence in Canada, where we already are considerably more penetrated and where thrift is already more widely adopted, the macro pressures have tended to be more impactful to our results. In the U.S., consumers also remain cautious with the discretionary dollars, but thrift exploration and acceptance continues to grow. As we have referenced, 85% of consumers have interacted with Thrift as a shopper or a donor, and one in five indicate they will increase their spend over the coming years. While we are facing some macro headwinds in Canada, we continue to invest to drive accelerated unit growth and sales. As you will recall, we opened 12 stores in 2023 and are pleased to report that we are on track to reach our 22-store opening target this year in 2024. with 21 leases already signed. As Gibran will discuss shortly, with seven additional stores in the southeast via our two peaches acquisition, we expect to add a total of 29 stores this year, representing 9% growth of our consolidated store base at the start of the year. More importantly, the performance of our newly opened stores has demonstrated strong unit economics, with a targeted return on investment north of 20%, and are performing in line with our underwriting model. We continue to expect a back-end weighted opening schedule this year and a more balanced quarterly cadence opening schedule next year, resulting in significantly more new store openings in the beginning of 2025 on a year-over-year basis. The investments we have made in the real estate development team are powering the new store growth engine, and we are well positioned to accelerate this growth given the significant white space opportunity we have in front of us. I'll now turn the call over to Gibran to discuss our recent acquisition and our exciting plans for the Southeast. Thanks, Mark.