Vera Bradley, Inc. (NASDAQ:VRA) Q2 2024 Earnings Conference Call August 30, 2023 9:30 AM ET

Company Participants

Mark Dely - Chief Administrative Officer

Jacqueline Ardrey - President & CEO

Michael Schwindle - CFO

Conference Call Participants

Joe Gomes - Noble Capital

Eric Beder - SCC Research

Operator

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Vera Bradley Second Quarter Conference Call for Fiscal 2024. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. Following the presentation, we will conduct a question-and-answer session. [Operator Instructions] As a reminder, today's conference is being recorded.

I would now like to turn the call over to Mark Dely, Vera Bradley's Chief Administrative Officer.

Mark Dely

Good morning, and welcome everyone. We'd like to thank you for joining us for today's call. Some of the statements made during our prepared remarks and in response to your questions, may constitute forward-looking statements made pursuant to and within the meaning of the safe harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 as amended. Such forward-looking statements are subject to both known and unknown risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those that we expect.

Please refer to today's press release for the company's most recent Form 10-K filed with the SEC for a discussion of known risks and uncertainties. Investors should not assume that the statements made during the call will remain operative at a later time. We undertake no obligation to update any information discussed on today's call.

I will now turn over the call to Vera Bradley's CEO, Jackie Ardrey. Jackie?

Jacqueline Ardrey

Thank you, Mark. Good morning, and thank you for joining us on today's call. We are very pleased with the meaningful year-over-year improvement in second quarter earnings driven by significant gross margin expansion and successful company-wide expense reduction efforts.

As a company, we are doing a better job of being attentive to our cost structure and are being very intentional on how we invest our dollars to drive long term profitable growth. Our transformational efforts continue to bear fruit, and I'd like to thank all of our associates across the country for their contributions to this very important work.

During the quarter, we carefully managed our debt-free balance sheet, adding to our cash position while continuing to strategically improve our inventory position. One of our key goals this year is to stabilize revenues. We are continuing to make progress on that front with second quarter consolidated revenues of $128.2 million, only modestly below last year.