Destination XL Group, Inc. (NASDAQ:DXLG) Q1 2023 Earnings Conference Call May 25, 2023 9:00 AM ET

Company Participants

Shelly Mokas - Investor Relations

Harvey Kanter - President and Chief Executive Officer

Peter Stratton - Chief Financial Officer

Conference Call Participants

Jeremy Hamblin - Craig-Hallum Capital Group

Michael Baker - D.A. Davidson

Raphi Savitz - Private Investor

Operator

Good day and thank you for standing by. Welcome to the Destination XL Group Incorporated First Quarter 2023 Earnings Conference Call. [Operator Instructions] Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Shelly Mokas, Vice President of Financial Reporting SEC. Please go ahead.

Shelly Mokas

Thank you, Norma and good morning everyone. Thank you for joining us on Destination XL Group’s first quarter fiscal 2023 earnings call. On our call today are our President and Chief Executive Officer, Harvey Kanter and our Chief Financial Officer, Peter Stratton.

During today’s call, we will discuss some non-GAAP metrics to provide investors with useful information about our financial performance. Please refer to our earnings release, which was filed this morning and is available on our Investor Relations website at investor.dxl.com for an explanation and reconciliation of such measures.

Today’s discussion also contains certain forward-looking statements concerning the company’s sales and earnings guidance and other expectations for fiscal 2023. Such forward-looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those assumptions mentioned today due to a variety of factors that affect the company. Information regarding risks and uncertainties is detailed in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Harvey Kanter. Harvey?

Harvey Kanter

Thank you, Shelly and good morning everyone. I am grateful for the opportunity to speak with you today about our first quarter results and our thoughts on how our business is developing this year. We posted a comp sales increase for the first quarter of plus 0.6%. While our overall growth has slowed from our record-breaking double-digit comparable sales increases of the past 2 years, we remain encouraged by our ability to deliver our ninth consecutive quarter of comp sales growth.

On our last earnings call in March, we talked about how our comp sales expectations for the full year was to be somewhere between flat to plus 5%. But for the first half of the year, we expected to be closer to the lower end of that range. As most of you have already seen, first quarter sales results for most apparel retailers had been affected by broader macro challenges. Our slowing comp store growth was in line with what we expected and the question we have been trying to answer is what should we expect for the remainder of the year?