Christopher McCann
Analyst
Thanks, Bill. Fiscal first quarter includes what it sometimes referred to as the slow summer months, but reality period is anything but slow for us. Across all of our businesses and particularly in our gourmet food and gift baskets brands, our team has been working diligently to prepare for what we expect would be a very successful holiday season. For this call, we are excited by the increasing opportunities we see to engage with our customers and deepened our relationships with them through a broad range of cross-brand marketing and merchandising programs, including our multi-brand website, where we’re seeing steady growth in the number of customers who are engaging with multiple brands to solve their gifting needs for an expanding range of celebratory occasions. While this initiative is still in its early stages, we continue to see incremental improvement in customer behavior in terms of enhanced retention, frequency, and lifetime value. During the first quarter, we added boutique tabs for Harry & David and Wolferman’s to the site, giving our customers even more opportunities for new plant discovery, while providing these iconic brands with exposure to millions of potential new customers. In all of our market initiatives, we’re increasingly leveraging our expanded customer database with millions of engaged shoppings, as well as the new CRM tools designed to help us improve our targeting and enhance the relevance of our marketing communications. In our direct marketing programs, we’ve leveraged to create the talents across the company to develop and begin testing innovative multi-brand gift catalogs. We even have a compelling new catalog specifically designed to feature our expanded range of gourmet gift clubs and subscription programs, including everything from Harry & David’s signature Fruit-of-the-Month Club, the Cheryl’s Cookie Clubs, wine and cheese clubs, Fannie May chocolate clubs, and even a Moose Munch Gourmet Popcorn Club. In retail, we’re testing a new multi-brand kiosk model in several locations around the country, expanding brand awareness and reaching customers who like to do, at least, some of their holiday shopping on foot rather than in online. In mobile, we continue to be the leading innovator in our space, recently launching a new native Android app for 1-800 FLOWERS.COM that includes a streamlined checkout process, as well as easy access to our celebrations rewards program and special offers to returning customers. We’ve also launched a new Tablet 5, that’s fully optimized for large touchscreens, including iPad and Kindle devices. And to paraphrase Jim’s quotes from this morning’s press release, these initiatives and many more like them are helping us to position us to be better than any time in the past to solve for our customers celebratory and gifting need, and thereby deliver a strong holiday season and another full-year of growth. I’ll now turn the call back to Jim for a wrap up thing.