Wolverine World Wide, Inc.

Greetings, and welcome to the Wolverine Worldwide Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. If you would like to ask a question, please press star and the number one on your telephone keypad. As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Jared Filippone, Head of Investor Relations. You may begin.

Good morning and welcome to our fourth quarter fiscal 2025 conference call. On the call today are Chris Hufnagel, President and Chief Executive Officer, and Taryn Miller, Chief Financial Officer. Earlier this morning, we issued a press release announcing our financial results for the fourth quarter and full year 2025 and guidance for fiscal year 2026. The press release is available on many news sites and can be viewed on our corporate website at wolverineworldwide.com. This morning's press release and comments made during today's earnings call include non-GAAP financial measures. These non-GAAP financial measures, including references to the ongoing business and constant currency revenue growth rates, were reconciled to the most comparable GAAP financial measures in attached tables within the body of the release or on our investor relations page on our website, wolverineworldwide.com. I'd also like to remind you that statements describing the company's expectations, plans, predictions, and projections, such as those regarding the company's outlook for fiscal year 2026, growth opportunities, and trends expected to affect the company's future performance made during today's conference call are forward-looking statements under U.S. securities laws. As a result, we must caution you that there are a number of factors that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. These important risk factors are identified in the company's SEC filings and in our press releases. All revenue growth rates will be cited on a constant currency basis unless otherwise stated. With that, I will now turn the call over to Chris Hufnagel.

Thanks, Jared. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for joining us on today's call. the fourth quarter marked the conclusion of a good year for Wolverine Worldwide. We made substantial progress in advancing our strategy and further transforming the company while delivering solid financial results in the process. We delivered high-quality revenue growth in line with our value creation model led by Merrill and Saucony, our two biggest brands. Merrill drove high single-digit growth for the year while Saucony posted a record year with a 30% increase compared to 2024. I'm pleased with how our global teams NAVIGATED A TURBULENT YEAR, EXECUTED OUR STRATEGY WITH PACE AND DISTINCTION, AND DELIVERED TOP AND BOTTOM LINE RESULTS THAT EXCEEDED OUR EXPECTATIONS, HIGHLIGHTED BY ANNUAL ADJUSTED EARNINGS PER SHARE UP OVER 50% COMPARED TO THE PRIOR YEAR, AND FURTHER PROGRESS IN STRENGTHENING OUR BALANCE SHEET. AS WE TURN THE PAGE TO THE NEW YEAR, I BELIEVE OUR BRANDS, COMPANY, AND TEAM ARE BETTER AND STRONGER. BRAND AWARENESS AND AFFINITY ARE TURNING POSITIVELY FROM MERRILL, SAUKINY, Sweaty Betty, and Wolverine. We've taken market share in important categories. We've made encouraging progress in our DTC business. And we have well-defined plans in motion to again deliver mid-single-digit top-line growth, supported by a current order book, while continuing to expand profitability in the year ahead, even with tariffs, and as we continue to responsibly invest in product innovation, demand creation, and modern tools and capabilities to drive the business this year and into the future. I want to start this call with an update on our biggest brands, their recent progress, and their plans for this year. Beginning with Merrill. Merrill remains focused on modernizing the outside, developing more athletic, style-led, versatile performance and lifestyle footwear while elevating the brand around the world. In the fourth quarter, Merrill grew revenue 5% with balanced growth across regions and channels. Notably, DTC inflected the growth with revenue up mid-single digits, even as we were less promotional in stores and online. The brand once again took market share in the U.S. hype category. Underpinning these results, we saw increases across key brand health metrics to finish the year, a positive indicator for the work we're doing to build better brands. Merrill's key performance franchise, the Moab Speed II, nearly doubled sell-through year-over-year at U.S. retail in the quarter, while the Moab III also continued to deliver solid growth. The Agility Peak 5 contributed good growth in trail running as well. Similar to key performance franchises, the brand's latest expression of versatile lifestyle footwear, the Wrap Collection, continued to grow rapidly, with the iconic Jungle Moc also delivering solid growth. In 2026, Merrill plans to deliver newness across its key performance and lifestyle franchises, including fresh colors and materials, seasonal energy drops, and new styles to bolster the collections. Just a few weeks ago, the brand launched the new Agility Peak 6, delivering better fit, stability, and traction within the trail run category. Early sales are tracking very well relative to our expectations. Merrill also expects to introduce the new SpeedArc Peak layer this summer, leveraging the brand's highly innovative and visually disruptive SpeedArc technology to further strengthen its trail run offerings. With positive momentum and a strong product pipeline, Merrill's entering the new year with an enhanced marketing strategy and demand creation plan for record investment to further elevate the brand. Next week, the team anticipates launching a new global platform, unifying its storytelling under one umbrella and advancing the brand's powerful purpose, to share the simple power of the outside with everyone. To entrench the brand's role in outdoor performance footwear, Merrill has secured title sponsorships of the SkyRunner World Series and SkyRunner National Series in the US, encompassing more than 20 of the most elite trail running races globally. In addition, the brand plans to build on its key city strategy in Tokyo and Paris, adding London and New York to the focus plan of integrated events, activations, and retail presentations. Merrill celebrates its 45th anniversary in 2026, and we expect this to be a milestone year for the brand. Shifting to Saucony. Saucony is uniquely positioned as a disruptive challenger brand at the intersection of the two of the fastest growing categories in the market, performance and lifestyle running. To conclude the brand's record year in 2025, Saucony drove broad-based revenue growth across categories, regions, and channels, a total increase of 24% in the fourth quarter. Performance, the majority of the brand's business, was up over 20%, with lifestyle growing even faster. In the biggest quarter for DTC, the channel grew mid-teens. And importantly, Saucony saw further increases across brand health metrics, especially with runners. The brand continues to lead with pinnacle innovation with an endorphin collection for elite runners, which again drove strong growth year over year at U.S. retail in the quarter. The brand's core four franchises, the Ride, Guide, Hurricane, and Triumph, being squarely at the broader casual running opportunity, continue to contribute good growth as well. On the lifestyle side, Stockton continues to inject energy into the brand around the world. This past fall, the brand launched collaborations with J-Tips and Engineer Garments, among others. In December, Saucony partnered with culture-shaping powerhouse Westside Gun and influential retailer Kith to release a very special collaboration at Art Basel. The drop, featuring the ProGrid Triumph 4, garnered global attention and drove record traffic to Saucony.com and sold out in minutes. The brand continues to have a voice in the cultural discourse, in addition to innovating and performance running, and has strong plans in place once again for 2026. This year, Saucony expects to deliver new iterations for each of its core four franchises, starting with the Ride 19 launch last month, which has immediately become a top seller on Saucony.com. With this year's updates, the Triumph 24 and Hurricane 26 are both slated to get new proprietary Incredilex foam, a high-end compound that delivers a luxurious ride with enhanced energy return, cushioning, and durability. Just 25 days ago, Saucony brought to market what we expect to be its biggest debut launch of all time to date, the all-new Endorphin Azura, fueled by a fully integrated global activation plan. The Azura is a lightweight super trainer with innovative geometry and advanced energy return foam to help the runner go fast every day and delivers all this innovation for $150. The shoe represents a meaningful incremental opportunity for the brand and has been highly anticipated and well-received by the market and consumers. At this early stage, demandatsogne.com is already far ahead of forecast and sell through our retail, both here and abroad, has been exceptionally strong. On the lifestyle front, the ProGrid Omni 9, Ride Millennium, and other key silhouettes are planned to see fresh colorways and materializations this year. The brand once again anticipates an impactful lineup of collaborations, including additional drops with West Side Gun, Mid-District New York, Engineer Garments, and others. In addition, Saucony anticipates reducing archived styles like the Grid Paramount, Kinvara 1, and Gripper at tier zero retail to continue to drive newness and influence at the very top of the distribution pyramid. To capitalize the momentum we built, we plan to step up Saucony's brand building efforts in 2026, making our largest annual marketing investment ever in the brand. Saucony plans to continue to sponsor key events like the London 10K, the Shortage Half Marathon, the Eiffel Tower 10K, and new this year, the Berlin 10K. and coming stateside with the Philadelphia Love Run Half Marathon in March, as well as organize its own events like the Maze, a series of exclusive run club races with recent installments in Seoul, New York City, and London. In addition, the brand anticipates expanding its key city strategy from Tokyo and London into Paris, with continued events and activations and the planned opening of a new Pioneer store in Paris later this year. While we're investing in growing awareness and fueling brand heat, we continue to strengthen the brand's ground game as well, driving sell-through with point-of-sale and co-op activations and enhanced field support. Saucony possesses a significant global opportunity and continues to see momentum around the world. Grant has been able to marry performance and culture in a unique and compelling way, and we expect another year of double-digit growth in 2026. I now like to spend a few minutes on Sweaty Betty and Wolverine, two brains that grant gain traction as we close the year, starting with Sweaty Betty. The brand is focused on solidifying its positioning as one of the original activewear brands centered around empowering women through fitness and beyond. The brand drove mid single-digit revenue growth in the fourth quarter, completing a full year of quarterly sequential improvement in year-over-year revenue performance. 2025 was a pivotal year for Sweaty Buddy as we reset the brand strategy. Encouragingly, the brand has built momentum in the UK, enhancing our product offering with more newness and driving the acceleration of DTC growth in the critical fourth quarter. We also made progress on expanding the brand's distribution outside of the UK with priority retailers and partners across Europe and into Asia Pacific. Importantly, we successfully strengthened the brand in its positioning, seeing meaningful gains in the fourth quarter across key brand health metrics, especially with younger consumers, the fifth consecutive quarter of improvement. Looking ahead to 2026, 20Betty's product line continues to get stronger, powered by increased newness, better category diversification in outerwear and new bottom silhouettes, and a more focused strategy to go to market with greater impact. The brand's storytelling continues to become bolder and more distinctly Sweaty Betty as well, in part with the launch of its new Born Sweaty campaign just last week. Finally, the brand is making good progress in evolving its global distribution footprint to scale more effectively and more efficiently over time. As a result, Sweaty Betty is well positioned to build on momentum in its home market and is seeing early benefits of expanding its international partnerships while the U.S. reset that we initiated in the third quarter of last year remains a near-term headwind as the brand establishes a healthier foundation for future growth. Finally, closing with our namesake brand, Wolverine. The Wolverine brand finished the year a little better than we anticipated, entering the fourth quarter, down approximately 11%. As we shared in November, the brand's performance has taken longer than anticipated to turn around. However, I believe we diagnosed the challenges and appointed the right leadership to effectively run a better brand and business moving forward. I'm encouraged by both the progress we've made recently and the very early results we're beginning to see in the marketplace. The product pipeline, which can't really have become tired, has improved. The team focused on developing more trend-right silhouettes to resonate with evolving consumer preferences, boosting innovation to strengthen more premium product offerings, and architecting better segmentation in the marketplace. The Rancher Collection, with the Rancher Pro at a premium price point, has enabled the brand to capture opportunity in the important Western work category, and drove significant growth at U.S. retail in Q4. The Infinity System, the brand's pinnacle expression of its performance comfort technology, launched mid-year and performed well in the back half of the year. As a result of both new innovation and newfound strength in core offerings, the brand began to take back market share and work boots in the fourth quarter, our strongest quarter of share gains in nearly five years. In 2026, the team plans to build on this momentum, bolstering the brand's premium assortment further with the Loader franchise, extend its Western work offering into lifestyle with the new Wheatland collection, and expand its affinity system technology with new iterations of the Alpha Infinity. Wolverine is stepping up its demand creation as well, investing up and down the marketing funnel. To expand reach, the brand partnered with country music star Jordan Davis throughout 2025 and was an exclusive presenting partner for season two of Paramount Plus' hit series, Landman. The partnership helped deliver tens of millions of impressions for the brand and drove new consumers to Wolverine.com. The brand also enhances presence in social media. We're actively collaborating with influencers to support programs like the launch of the Infinity System and Landman, and has initiated a host of additional in-store Landman activations with key retailers. Encouragingly, the brand saw increases across key brand health metrics to close the year. With the product beginning to check and marketing efforts amplified, Wolverine's focus is now on recalibrating the marketplace, balancing inventories at retail, and better aligning distribution to the brand's more premium leadership positioning. We expect this recalibration will take a couple of quarters, but we're seeing good progress as we enter the new year and anticipate Wolverine will deliver flat revenue in 2026 compared to 2025. Now, I'd like to hand the call over to Taryn Miller to take you through our results for the fourth quarter and full year, along with our outlook for 2026 in more detail, before I provide some key takeaways to close our prepared remarks. Taryn?