Savers Value Village, Inc.

Thank you for your attendance and your interest in Savers Value Village. My name is Mark Walsh. I'm the CEO. To my left is Michael Mayer. He's our CFO. For those of you who are unfamiliar with our business model, it is quite unique. And humbly, I think we have a very good story to tell. 25 minutes is not a lot of time. And Michael and I will try to hit some highlights. To start, though, we have a short introductory video.

our Sabres Value Village. And we are Thrift Proud.

Proud of our mission to champion reuse and inspire a future where secondhand is second nature. Proud treasure hunters, value seekers, style makers, earth-conscious shoppers, thoughtful closet cleaners. Proud to provide one-of-a-kind clothing and home goods. From t-shirts to teapots, we extend the life of household items. We're redefining the future of thrift for a new generation. Fast fashion? Nope. The world wants budget-friendly, planet-friendly options, and we deliver. We're proud to have an immediate impact on the planet, keeping clothes and household items out of landfills. Through community donation centers and GreenDrop locations, we pay our nonprofit partners for donated secondhand goods. friendly retail, and fast, easy drop-offs, so thrifters and donors keep coming back. We are proud to be a part of the reuse economy and the future of sustainable retail, supporting people, planet, and profit. And that's our triple bottom line. We're proud to do it all. Over 21,000 team members strong. So join us in the millions of people giving reusable things new life, local communities more love, and the planet less waste.

Savers, kind of love this place.

We are Savers Value Village, and we are thrift proud.

So let's start with the basics. Savers is the number one for-profit thrift retailer in North America. As of today, we've got 351 stores. excuse me, principally in the US and Canada with a handful in Australia, which I'll actually be there next week. Those stores principally operate under two brand names, Savers and Value Village. We have Second Avenue and Unique. Those were regional brands that we've acquired over time. The company was founded in San Francisco in 1954. So we have a rich 70-year operating history. We have a very active and loyal database, customer database, with close to 6 million members. Trailing 12-month sales through December were approximately $1.5 billion. And Michael will talk about this later, but we reaffirmed our 2024 adjusted EBITDA guidance of $290 to $300 million. Okay. We do, as the video alluded to, we do operate as part of the circular economy, and our mission is clear, to champion reuse and inspire a future where secondhand is second nature. Every one of our stores is partnered with a nonprofit organization, and we pay these organizations for every item donated. These are longstanding relationships with nonprofit organizations, impactful charities like Big Brothers Big Sisters of America, American Red Cross, and Diabetes Canada. From 2019 to 2023, we paid over $530 million to our nonprofit partners. And these funds are non-restricted, and our partners get to use those funds to fulfill their missions and causes. By taking in and reselling secondhand goods, we are extending the life of these items, and therefore we keep them out of landfills. And in that same window of 2019 to 2023, we estimate that we diverted close to 3.2 billion pounds of goods from North American landfills. Pretty impressive. We have a number of investment highlights we hope come through in this presentation. First, Thrift is a very unique business that combines elements of value, the circular economy, and individual expression. As a result, there are some very powerful secular trends driving our business and the industry. The industry has been around for a long time, but we're using data analytics and innovation to reinvent the thrift experience. The key to what we do is really our vertically integrated model. As you will see in a few minutes, this allows us to control the flow of goods and optimize our supply chain, which in turn leads to strong profitability and cash flow. Being the largest for-profit thrift operator, we're using our size and scale to invest in people, process, and systems. to further differentiate us from our competitors. And last but not least, there's a tremendous amount of white space, which I'll detail later, open up new stores that deliver very compelling union economics. I mentioned how we are reinventing the modern thrift experience, and really that starts with our stores. One of the biggest compliments that we constantly receive from investors and customers alike is your stores look like off-price retail. Our stores are large. They have an expansive selection, including men's, women's, kids, home, and books. We turn our inventory over 15 times a year, and the average store puts over 30,000 new items on the floor every week. And in an average unit retail price of $5, we're offering tremendous selection and value. And the treasure hunt sort of adds excitement to the shopping experience and encourages our customers to visit frequently, which you can tell from that growing 6 million customer loyalty database. Great, fresh merchandise is the key to our success. Unlike a traditional retailer, we do not pre-order our products from a manufacturer or supplier. All of our merchandise comes from donated secondhand goods. And we receive these goods principally through two channels. The first channel is direct from the donor. at our store-operated community donation center, as you saw in the video, or at staffed mobile GreenDrop donation centers conveniently located typically in higher traffic parking lots of retail strip centers. In either case, Saver's Value Village makes it easy for the consumer to drive up and drop off secondhand goods. We accept these goods on behalf of the charity partners, pay our partners for these items. The second channel is what we call delivered supply. These are secondhand goods that are collected by our nonprofit partners. Our partners collect these goods through various methods, and they deliver these goods to our stores, and we pay for these goods in a similar fashion as we pay for the goods directly donated to us. As you can see from the charts on the slide, donations received directly from our donors accounted for nearly 77% of our total supply, and this continues to grow as a percentage of our supply mix. This trend is being driven by growing awareness in the circular economy and secondhand goods, and our efforts to make the donation experience fast, friendly, and convenient. While the majority of our stores contain a donation center and an area where we sort and process goods, we are also investing in larger facilities and innovative tools to strengthen our supply chain and merchandise capabilities. Two good examples of this are our centralized processing centers and automated book processors. Our central processing centers are large, 50,000 ish offsite warehouses that combine proprietary equipment, technology and conveyors to sort and process goods. These CPCs as we call them have proven to be a critical unlock for new store growth because they allow us to supply stores with merchandise from a centralized location. CPCs help power our growth because it allows us to be more opportunistic with real estate and select sites that would not accommodate onsite processing. We currently have five of these centers operating, and we're looking to open up our sixth in California later in 2025. Automated book processing is a proprietary piece of equipment that utilizes AI technology to identify and price used books. Used books are a gateway category for us, and they are often that first thrift experience for many of our customers. Our automated book processors allow us to process nearly 12,000 books in eight hours. This saves labor and ensures a more consistent pricing and merchandising experience for our customers in our stores. Breaking down our revenue by country reveals a sizable Canadian business, which is unlike many businesses that you'll hear about here in this conference. While the two markets have similar number of stores, the US business generates more revenue and the Canadian business is slightly more profitable. Looking at the two regions a little deeper, they are very different in terms of the consumer maturity and growth opportunities that are presented. The U.S. market, compared to Canada, is relatively immature in terms of thrift. Awareness is growing, and that is driving strong donations, retail trial, and acceptance, and ultimately comp store trends. We believe that we are tapping into a more socially and environmentally conscious younger consumer that loves to thrift, along with that value sensitive consumer. And again, that $5 AUR helps us drive great value to stretched and pressured consumers. By comparison, Thrift in Canada is a little more developed and more mature. The Value Village brand is widely recognized with over 90% brand awareness. We're basically part of the mainstream retail landscape in Canada. Currently, the macro economic conditions in Canada are very challenging and this has pressured the consumer as well as our business in Canada. We're not standing still and we believe our efforts to rebalance our production levels, tighten our price value proposition have contributed to sequential improvements in our trend quarter to quarter. While improvements have been made, we continue to evaluate different levers to further optimize our value proposition. Looking at our store fleet across the U.S. and Canada, our white space is significant, and we remain much smaller than traditional off-price. We're significantly under-penetrated in the U.S., and frankly, we don't even operate in many states in certain regions that are highly attractive to us and our long-term growth propositions. We have announced a plan to open 25 to 30 stores in 2025, and believe that we have a very long runway. The US will be our primary focus of new store growth in the future, and our new store classes of 23 and 24 are generating really solid returns. And with that, it's a perfect time for me to turn it over to Michael, our CFO, who will dive a little deeper on new store economics and some other financial highlights. Michael?

All right, thanks, Mark, and good morning, everyone. So as Mark indicated, our new store unit economics are quite strong, generating returns well in excess of our cost of capital. We typically spend around $1.5 to $2 million in net capital to open a new store. And in their first year, new stores average around $3 million in sales and are slightly unprofitable. They're profitable by their second year of operation. And we target an average of $5 million in sales by year five with a four-wall EBITDA margin of approximately 20%. Our stores typically continue to grow beyond year five, albeit more gradually as they approach fleet averages for four-wall profitability. Now we opened 12 new stores in 2023, 22 new stores in 2024, and we expect to open 25 to 30 new stores in 2025. Most of the 2024 new stores opened in the second half of the year. So that means based on the typical year one dynamics, the 2024 and 2025 new store classes will generate losses for most or all of 2025. And as a result, 2025 will be an inflection year in our sales from new stores, but not EBITDA growth from new stores. We expect the inflection in earnings to begin in 2026 as the 2023 to 2025 new store classes drive positive contributions that more than outweigh the EBITDA drag from new stores we open in that year. All right, now I want to briefly touch on some recent financial highlights. As many of you may have seen, on Friday we reported preliminary sales for the fourth quarter. Our net sales increased 5% over last year, and on a constant currency basis, sales were up 6%, with the U.S. up double digits and Canada roughly flat. Comparable store sales were up 1.6%, with the U.S. up 4.7%, and Canada down 2.5%. Our Q4 comp sales were at the high end of our outlook range, but total sales were closer to the middle of the range due to the weaker Canadian dollar. Given our sales results, we continue to expect full year 2024 adjusted EBITDA to be in the range of $290 to $300 million. Finally, I want to briefly preview a couple of reporting changes that we will be making in 2025. Beginning with our Q1 earnings report, we will update our definitions of comparable store sales and adjusted EBITDA. Comparable store sales will include sales from stores open for all or part of at least 14 consecutive months versus our previous definition that required a store to be open for all or part of two consecutive fiscal years before being included in comps. Our adjusted EBITDA calculation will be streamlined and will no longer exclude non-cash occupancy costs, pre-opening expenses, or store closing expenses. Finally, and not on this page, we'll be making a technical change to our calculation of the tax impact of adjustments to arrive at adjusted net income. These changes will better reflect the impact of our accelerating new store growth on our sales and profitability. They'll also increase consistency with standard peer company practices. To be clear, we will report our fourth quarter 2024 using the old definitions for the final time, and we'll begin applying the new definitions in Q1 of 2025 with prior periods recast for comparative purposes. But just for context, had these changes been effective in 2024, our comp sales would have been roughly the same. while the second change would have reduced our adjusted EBITDA by approximately $23 million. We'll be filing an 8K later this week with more detail on these changes to our reporting, including a recast of historical periods using the new definitions for comparative purposes and to help you update your models if you're so interested. That concludes our presentation. Thank you for your interest in Savers, and we look forward to seeing many of you later today and tomorrow and answering your questions.