Ladies and Gentlemen, greetings, and welcome to the Kontoor Brands Q3 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. A brief question-and-answer session will follow the formal presentation. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, this conference is being recorded. It is now my pleasure to introduce your host, Michael Karapetian, please go ahead.

Thank you, operator, and welcome to Kontoor Brands third-quarter 2024 earnings conference call. Participants on today's call will make forward-looking statements. These statements are based on current expectations and are subject to uncertainties that could cause actual results to materially differ. These uncertainties are detailed in documents filed with the SEC. We urge you to read our risk factors, cautionary language, and other disclosures contained in those reports. Amounts referred to on today's call will be in constant currency unless otherwise noted, and often on an adjusted dollar basis, which we clearly define in the news release that was issued earlier this morning. Our outlook is presented on an adjusted dollar basis. Additionally, participants should note that comparability with prior periods is impacted by the previously disclosed $13 million out-of-period duty charge recorded in the third quarter of 2023. Accordingly, in our following comments, comparisons to 2023 gross margin, operating income, and EPS do not include the impact of the 2023 duty charge. Reconciliations of GAAP measures to adjusted amounts can be found in the supplemental financial tables included in today's news release, which is available on our website at kontoorbrands.com. These tables identify and quantify excluded items and provide management's view of why this information is useful to investors. Joining me on today's call are Kontoor Brands President, Chief Executive Officer and Chair, Scott Baxter, and Chief Financial Officer, Joe Alkire. Following our prepared remarks, we will open the call for questions. We anticipate this call will last about one hour. Scott?

Thanks, Mike, and thank you to everybody, joining us on today's call. Our third quarter results exceeded expectations driven by accelerating revenue growth, improving profitability, and strong cash generation. We anticipated a top-line inflection starting in the third quarter and I am pleased to share we delivered. Our investments in product innovation and demand creation are driving continued market share gains and a strong foundation for future growth in what remains an uncertain environment. Our strategies are working and we are executing at a high level. With that, let's discuss highlights from the quarter. Wrangler revenue grew 4% including 5% growth in the US, and 10% growth in global D2C. There are several exciting wins from the quarter, but I want to start with an important milestone. In our core bottoms and shorts business, Wrangler gained 90 basis points of market share in the US according to Serkana. This marks our 10th consecutive quarter of market share gains in our largest market. It takes more than one thing to drive this level of consistent performance, but it starts with our people and our incredible product stories that are resonating with our consumers. Let's get to a few of those now. Starting with outdoor, during the quarter, we launched our Cliffside utility pant and outdoor chino and both are off to a strong start. We continue to advance our product development capabilities that are driving increased penetration in this large and growing category, as well as expanded distribution opportunities within sporting goods retailers. Year-to-date, outdoor has grown 12% and we continue to expect double-digit increases for the year. Turning to bespoke, our new female fit innovation, as I shared in prior quarters, early market response was very encouraging. Today, I am pleased to share demand exceeded our high expectations. We launched…

Thanks, Scott and thank you all for joining us today. Our third quarter results were stronger than expected as our business fundamentals continue to strengthen. As expected, revenue growth inflected positively in the third quarter, driven by new product innovation, distribution gains, and accelerating POS. We also delivered stronger profitability and returns on capital as gross margin expansion was higher than anticipated as a result of lower product costs and supply chain efficiencies. When combined with our focus on networking, capital management and driving further reductions in inventory, we generated significant cash from operations supporting our capital allocation framework including 40 million of share repurchases and a 4% increase in our quarterly dividend. We are pleased with our strong execution and performance year-to-date and momentum in the business is building as we close out the year, but more on that in a bit. Let's review our third quarter results in more detail. Global revenue increased 2% and exceeded our expectations. Relative to our prior outlook, we saw modestly stronger results in the US with Europe and Asia performing largely as anticipated. I-brand Wrangler Global revenue increased 4%. Growth was broad-based driven by strong POS and market share gains with continued momentum in distribution and category expansion, including 10% growth in DTC, 10% growth in female, 7% growth in outdoor and 16% growth in tops. In the US, revenue increased 5%, supported by increased investments in demand creation, product development, and our digital platform. Revenue growth was balanced as DTC increased 10%, including 13% growth in digital, while wholesale revenue increased 5%. During the quarter, we were encouraged by the strength we saw in POS with trends accelerating through the quarter, including 6% growth in September, the strongest performance we've seen all year. While retailers are in a conservative posture and…

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, we will now be conducting a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions]. The first question is from the line of Ike Boruchow with Wells Fargo. Please go ahead.

Hi, guys, good morning. Scott, Joe, Mike, congrats on the quarter. I guess maybe for Joe, maybe also for Scott, just wanted to kind of dig in a little bit more on the 2025 commentary and specifically just drivers of revenue that gives you the confidence in that 4% in the first half. And then just my follow-up is based on the commentary, is it fair to say that you're basically expecting the revenue growth weighted to the first half, but due to the timing of Genius and some saves, maybe margin expansion weighted to the back half. So just kind of curious if you could comment on the shape.

I'll go ahead and start and kick it over to Joe. But I think for us really, I could boils down to, as we kind of discussed a little bit, but consumers are choosing our products and the way that we look at it is through and since POS, our performance in POS has been really strong. It's been broad-based. Our performance with our own D2C has been really good. Our digital platforms across the globe have been really strong. We've had 10 consecutive quarters of growth and market share gain with Wrangler and that is really significant. I mean, that's 2.5 years and we continue that, expect that to continue as we move forward. But we're making really significant investments in our talent. We've never had a more talented team. We've upgraded the talent over the last year and a half significantly. You're seeing the results from that. Investments that we're making in product, in innovation, they're all starting to pay off. So we've got really good momentum as we head into the second half year and as we head into next year too. And I think the thing that's really important for us, helpful for us as we look into 'twenty 5 is we know what we have out there from a new business standpoint and we have things like outdoor, which I touched on a little bit, but a lot of tops business that we've grown, our Lee-X line, which is coming out here in the Q4 and then Lee-X lite in the Q1 next year is exceptional. I'm really looking forward to that hitting the marketplace and see how it does. But again, we have really strong collaborations from our team and our new distribution. So all of that kind of roll together with the positive momentum we have right now with the team that we have behind that puts us in a really good spot. Joe?

Yes. Hey, good morning, Ike. So, yes, we're not providing the specifics of 2025 at this time. But look, we thought it would be helpful to at least provide our initial perspective on 2025 and how we see the business evolving into next year and really to underscore the confidence we have in the trajectory of the business as well as highlight the strength of our fundamental profile. The profile we're delivering in the second half, low to mid-single-digit growth, gross margin expansion, strong operating earnings growth, cash generation. We see that continuing into next year and the building blocks to drive another year of strong growth and return. So we've got Project Genius that will fuel the investment capacity. We've got a strong balance sheet, a lot of dry powder and flexibility to drive additional layers. So, yes, as we look into next year, we're fairly confident. We'll give you more specifics as we get to February.

The next question is from Jim Duffy with Stifel. Please go ahead.

My compliments on execution across the year. I'm very interested in Project Genius opportunities. I'm hoping you can speak in more detail on the mechanics of Project Genius and how that translate to both strategic opportunities on the top line and then the P&L impact of how that plays forward in the first half and second half of '25, and then into future years. Thanks.

Jim, I'll start and then I'll kick it over to Joe. Genius for us has been an all-encompassing project. We've got a terrific team working across Genius and putting in a lot of long hard hours. So we're much appreciative of that, but it's going to break down into 3 very specific categories. It's our global supply chain transformation. It's the back-end efficiencies that we need to do a better job, which we're going to have capturing and also strategically thinking about moving forward, and then it's our commercial optimization. Let me take you through a little bit on how we're thinking about those and then Joe can kind of fill in the blanks. But if you think about our sourcing transformation, when we spun off, we were a complete clown and go from our parent company before. So we were just a denim supply chain and just a clown from where we were and where we are and where we're trying to progress to now. So, you think about our business and how it's changed and you think about the outdoor, you think about some of the different products that we have, you think about our tops, just all those different things that are making our supply chain a little bit different now and we've got to grow and change and become more efficient when it comes to that. So we're spending a lot of time working on our product portfolio and how we can customize the supply chain for what we're going to look like in the future. We've got to drive big efficiencies with our current source vendor network, which is really important. And then one of the things that we needed to do another, another example of where we needed to grow and evolve as a…

Yes, Jim, just financially, we expect 100 million of savings at full run rate. We said 50 to 100 million, roughly a year ago. So we've gravitated to the high end of that range. We've got certain work streams that are in the execution phase, other work streams that are continue to move along, from a planning perspective. We'll share more specifics in February but assume we're pretty confident in that 100 million. The savings will be more gross profit driven versus SG&A, I think we've said that before and I would think of it as roughly two-third, one-third. So the way this will evolve, it'll be a gradual build. We will start to see the SG&A savings in first half of '25 and the gross margin savings will begin to work their way into the P&L, into the back half, just given the lag of when they'll start to show up. So look, overall, we're really excited about the program and what we think we can deliver in terms of freeing up investment to accelerate growth, improve profitability and returns on capital.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Bob Drbul with Guggenheim Partners. Please go ahead.

Two questions, really. I think the first one, can you spend some time just on the performance improvement at Lee? I think definitely seems like there's a step change there. And just love for you if you expand on that a little bit. And then Joe, you talked about sort of in the '25 product cost inflation. Can you expand on what you guys are seeing there and sort of when exactly it sort of flips? Because I think you're seeing some product cost benefits right now and sort of surprised to hear that into '25? Thanks.

Bob, I'll go ahead and start with Lee. I think the single most important thing for me from a Lee perspective is the leadership that we've put in the Lee team. So we've got Tom leading it. We've got Jenny and Holly and Tom that team working together with the Lee team right now, looking at all aspects of the business, looking at design, looking at product, looking at go to market, looking at all those things and bringing that kind of story together and that started a little while back as you know, and we've started to see some really interesting green shoots specifically around our female business and you heard me talk a little bit about some of the really big wins that we've had in female, whether it would be bespoke and some of the other things that we've done there, but it's been significant and we're really happy with that. But we've got a long way to go. We've got a lot more coming. We've got Lee-X and we've got Lee-X Lite here coming in the men's area, which is really important. But I want everyone to know that behind the scenes, we've really, really dug into this in a pretty significant way. It's still early on, which is fairly encouraging because of all the good things that are yet to come as we move forward. But yet we're seeing some really good things that are really helping the business. And I think the other thing too, Bob, it's really helping the morale of the team around the globe to seeing these early wins, seeing that they can really contribute to the rest of the organization in a significant way and the leadership has really brought everybody in this and everybody is in this together. So really pleased with what we're seeing here with the team, how they're thinking about it, how they've torn this whole thing apart. I think there's a lot for us to talk about going forward and we'll spend some time. We've talked about our Investor Day. We'll get that date nailed down and we will really dig into this at Investor Day and have some of our big leaders from the lead team there to participate and share with what they're doing. But a lot more to come, but encouraged with where we are right now, ahead of what and where I thought we would be when we made those changes and started to move this forward.

On the product cost front, look, I mean, it's been a more volatile supply chain environment more recently. One, I think that our supply chain is well suited to navigate. As we look at next year, we expect to see a neutral product cost environment overall. Certainly, there are some puts and takes to that. We're seeing increases in labor certainly freight rates have elevated more recently, but we've got supply chain efficiencies and some other things that'll help us. You'll have a first-half, second-half dynamic. We are starting to anniversary the lower product cost that we started to see last year. So that benefit will become smaller and smaller as we move into the first half and then we'll have more modest product cost inflation as we get to the back half. And then I think for us, we've got certainly our structural mix that will continue to benefit us and then we've got Project Genius. So we'll lay that out in more specifics in February, but big picture, that's how we see things evolving.

The next question is from the line of Mauricio Serna with UBS. Please go ahead.

I would like to focus on your commentary about the incremental supply chain and inventory actions. I'm curious to hear like it seems like you raised the gross margin outlook by 30 basis points despite this impact that you are highlighting in the release. Maybe could you talk about like the puts and takes there? That would be very helpful, thank you.

So, yes, the actions that we talked about were worth about $6 million in terms of operating profit, about $0.08 of EPS impacting really the third quarter and the fourth quarter. These were proactive actions that we took from a position of strength really to secure inventory to support growth initiatives as we round out this year and move into next year and further improve the strength of the balance sheet as we move into next year. So on the supply chain side, really expedited freight, somewhat of a precautionary measure just given the recent supply chain volatility to ensure that we can continue to service growth with our largest accounts. Nothing material to the business, but we have seen some delays given some of the volatility, Bangladesh port strike and the like. On the inventory side, this is really an evergreen process for us. We saw an opportunity to be more aggressive, clearing excess inventory, and improving the composition and quality of our inventory, and freeing up cash to reinvest in other areas of the business. So absolutely the right thing for us to do. In terms of the outlook, we raised the full-year gross margin guidance by 30 basis points. That does include about a 20 basis point impact from these actions. And from an EPS standpoint, we raised the full year by $0.03 including the $0.08 from these actions. So said differently, excluding the $0.08 impact, we would have likely raised our outlook by about $0.11.

And then just on the Project Genius initiatives. So is it fair to assume that you're going to get like a big portion of $100 million savings in fiscal year '25 and then just the rest is in '26 or how should we think about those savings flowing through? Thank you.

This will be a gradual build. So quantitatively we'll be back in February. Certainly, appreciate the question, but we'll see modest benefits in the first half. Really from an SG&A perspective, the gross margin benefits will start to unfold in the back half but gradually scale. And as I said, as we move into '26, we'll be pretty much at full run rate and expect to reinvest a portion of those savings to further support growth.

Thank you. The next question is from the line of Paul Kearney with Barclays. Please go ahead.

With the operating margin target of over 15% well in sight and an additional $100 million of savings on Project Genius. How are you thinking between reinvesting the savings for growth versus flowing through to earnings and then related to that, there's an acceleration of repurchases in the quarter. How should we think about your capital allocation strategy going to next year? Thank you.

I'll take these. So look, Paul, we laid out financial targets in 2021 that reflected a gross margin of 46% and an operating margin of 15%. Now, that was pre-significant supply chain disruption, inflation, everything that you know. I'd say the incremental for us is really, Project Genius, we're on a nice glide path to achieve the prior targets. Where we go from here, we haven't declared. We'll do that in the context of our new long-term plan. But safe to assume, with Project Genius, we see a path to these targets moving higher. From a capital allocation standpoint, look the priorities are unchanged. Certainly, reinvest in the business. We've demonstrated the appetite to do that. We will continue to do that. We've got a strong commitment to growing the dividend and then you've got share repo and M&A. We've certainly been more active on the repurchase front. Cash flow for us has been really strong. Cash is building, the balance sheet is strong. Our net leverage is starting to move toward the low end of our targeted range. So we've got a lot of optionality, a lot of flexibility and we'll be nimble here.

The next question is from Lauren Vasilescu with BNP Paribas. Please go ahead.

This is Lia Yang on for Lauren. Thanks for taking my question. So on gross margin, I think you guys adjusted the gross margin by nearly 50 bps year to date. So could you help us to unpack what's driving those adjustments and should we expect those adjustments to continue in 4Q?

Yes, I'll take that. So there have been some adjustments on the gross margin side really related to the ongoing supply chain transition that's further supporting the gross margin expansion that we see. Adjustments from here will primarily be project Genius related, which we'll lay out in the full context of our forward outlook.

Got you. And then on Project Genius, could you provide us with some preliminary thoughts on how much the Project Genius will cost and how much do you expect to reinvest?

Yes, sure. So, we'll provide those specifics in February. We've said previously that we do expect some one-time adjustments as we transition. The returns we see on the overall program are a multiple of the costs that will require to achieve those, but we'll get into the specifics in February.

Thank you. As there are no further questions, I would now like to hand the conference over to Scott Baxter, President, CEO, and Chair of the Board for closing comments.

So before I say goodbye and thank everybody for being on the call, I wanted to make sure that everyone has had a chance to see our new campaign. We kicked off a global Wrangler campaign that Holly and her team have done and real proud of the group because they did the entire campaign almost entirely in-house so that we could use more funds to go ahead and get the word out as you can imagine but it's really a terrific spot. We're going to see a lot more of it now as the election weighs down and then we can go ahead and be out there. We wanted to make sure that we got it at a point where we had more visibility. But if you have a chance, please go ahead and take a look or look it up or get with one of us, get with Mike and we can send it to you too, if that would even be easier for you but it's just a terrific spot. And I think it has a lot to do with the fact that the brand has so much momentum. The company has momentum. But I think there's also another piece here from a cultural standpoint. I think our organization is real proud about how this company is doing, real proud about how the brands are performing. And when the entire company see something like this in a global ad campaign, our first one is Kontoor Brands. There's a lot of pride in this and a lot of pride from all of us in the entire organization about how well we're doing and how hard we're working to make things really good for our shareholders. So wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to see that. So with that, thank you for your participation today. We'll look forward to hearing from you again in February, wishing everybody a happy and wonderful holiday season and we'll talk to you all soon. Thanks, everybody. Take care.

Thank you. This concludes today's teleconference. You may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation.