Carter's, Inc. Stock

Welcome to Carter's Third Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On the call are Sharon Price John, Chief Executive Officer and President; Richard Westenberger, Chief Financial Officer; Allison Peterson, Chief Commercial Officer; and T.C. Robillard, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please note that today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to T.C. Robillard.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Earlier today, we issued two press releases, the announcement regarding the evolution of our leadership structure and our third quarter 2026 earnings. These releases as well as the earnings presentation materials for today's call are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.carters.com.

Note that statements on today's call about items such as the company's expectations and plans are forward-looking statements. For a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to vary from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please see our most recent SEC filings as well as the earnings release and presentation materials posted on our website.

In these materials, you will also find reconciliations of various non-GAAP financial measurements referenced during this call. After today's prepared remarks, we will take questions as time allows. I will now turn the call over to Sharon.

Thank you, T.C. Good morning, everyone, and welcome to our call. I'm pleased to be here with you. And while this is my second earnings call with Carter's, it is actually the first one where I've served as the CEO for the entire period. During the last four months, I've continued to learn about this remarkable company while spending time with our talented and dedicated team. I believe we have made significant progress analyzing, clarifying and prioritizing potential strategic initiatives by using our rich data and consumer insights.

All of this work reflects the vision to drive profitable sales by leveraging our core competencies and key assets, which include the strength and equity of our branded portfolio, the trusted relationship we have with our consumers, the stability of our balance sheet and cash flow, the significant breadth of our distribution as well as the diversity and agility of our supply chain. I look forward to sharing more with you about our go-forward plan after the first of the year.

Now regarding the business at hand. Carter's third quarter results exceeded our outlook even as we navigated continued uncertainty and choppiness in the macroeconomic environment, which has resulted in some shifts in consumer confidence and spending. As we highlighted on our last call, we believe the delivery of our third quarter would largely hinge on the month of September. September plays an important role for us even beyond Labor Day and back-to-school because, as you may know, it is also known as Baby Month. This is because it is historically the largest birth month of the year, which in turn makes it historically one of our biggest months.

With that in mind, even as we experienced some softness in July and August, which, as we mentioned in the last call, was partially driven by the pull forward of Prime Day. Unfortunately, as early September rolled in, that softness persisted. While the unseasonably warm weather was certainly not helpful in the marketing of back-to-school apparel, we quickly refocused to drive efforts through strategic investments using marketing insights, crisp promotions and targeted merchandising. This ultimately shifted our trend for both the month and the quarter, reversing the negative traffic and delivering improvements across numerous metrics, including net sales, retail comps and operating income while simultaneously increasing brand engagement.

Importantly, these efforts included the multi-touch point introduction of Carter's new comprehensive branding initiative, marking the first reimagination of the look, feel and promise of the brand in a quarter century. This fresh approach was developed with proprietary consumer research and insights that was designed to appeal to the changing sensibilities of today's generation of new parents. However, the execution was balanced with the understanding that we must also maintain the appeal to multiple generations, including a more nostalgic grandparent cohort who are the main drivers of our important gifting segment.

So while I would not want us to trap or narrowly define Carter's as simply a heritage brand, it is without a doubt, a brand that enjoys a rich history of delivering quality and value to 7 generations of parents and children, which is how we have earned high marks for arguably the most important consumer metric, trust. With that in mind, we landed on embracing an elevated brand promise more aligned with today's parenting intentions to let every child's light shine.

This is not just a tagline. This suddenly shifts Carter's positioning to more purposely be about a broadened, rightful opportunity for us to be seen as a trusted partner for parents as they navigate the beautiful, sometimes precarious journey of childhood versus just being seen as an apparel brand or based on the consumer feedback, a brand that has slowly lost some of its emotional connection and relevancy with today's moms.

I also am happy to share that the brand promise of allowing kids to shine, which is reflected in the shooting star element featured in our new logo treatment is not only resonating with consumers, it is also inspiring our entire organization from product to merchandising to promotions and was the guiding light, if you will, for the 2 key initiatives that positively impacted the outcome for the quarter.

#1, the launch of our comprehensive Stellar Sleep system, a new approach encompassing all of our ages based on consumer feedback that moms find navigating the pajama purchasing process confusing. It is supported with dedicated long-term merchandising and informative signage that is expected to drive our share in sleepwear, which is one of the largest kids apparel categories. And #2, we evolved our annual baby sale offering to a branded 5-star baby event, focusing on core baby items, which not only delivered a margin-accretive promotion for Baby Month, but helped expand consumer interest, sales and quarterly share in our total baby offering.

Importantly, even in the brief time since the new branding launch, the results of the messaging have been impactful. In less than two months, our campaign has generated over 1.6 billion media impressions, a meaningful shift in positive sentiment across social media, higher unaided brand awareness and increased purchase consideration, including nearly 20% growth in branded search versus the time period before the launch. All of this, including welcomed cooler weather in the last weeks of the quarter, ultimately delivered strong sales and profitability in the month of September, which positively impacted our quarterly results.

Although Richard and Allison will take you through more details of our performance, some financial highlights from the third quarter include net sales of $752 million were essentially flat compared to prior year, inclusive of the negative revenue impact from the net closure of more than 30 locations in our North American fleet as a part of our real estate rationalization. Adjusted operating income of $57 million, an increase of 45% with adjusted operating margin expansion of 240 basis points, driven by healthy gross margin expansion, the benefits from our ongoing productivity improvements as well as the closure of unprofitable store locations and positive comparable store sales for U.S. retail, aided by the team's delivery of double-digit retail comp growth for the month of September despite the soft start.

As noted, while there were some challenges, I believe this quarter's performance reflects well on the ongoing potential of the company in both broad-based and fundamental ways, ranging from the positive early campaign proof points, noting our ability to quickly recapture brand affinity and simultaneously connect with multiple generations of caregivers to seeing the organization's dedication and agility to turn short-term setbacks into quarter impacting opportunities.

And while agility is a critical skill that we should continue to nurture, our long-range goal is to be both agile while operating in an evolved structure to support improved processes reflecting our stated strategic intent of becoming a more consumer-centric brand-building, data-driven company that is focused on the consistent delivery of profitable growth and the creation of value for our shareholders. With that strategic intent in mind, we are pleased to have shared earlier today an evolved organizational structure designed to better align our leadership responsibilities with both longer-range planning and business opportunities.

Briefly, this includes the previously vacant position of Chief Product Officer will be filled by Maria Gemzell, who we will welcome early next year when she joins us from her most recent position at the Swedish headquarters of one of the world's leading fashion companies, H&M, after having held multiple senior positions in relevant areas. The Chief Marketing Officer role will be broadened to overtly incorporate a comprehensive branding function and retitled as Chief Brand Officer, led by Sarah Crockett to reflect the importance of leveraging and monetizing our valued brand assets.

The Chief Strategy Officer role will be expanded to Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer led by Emily Evert to create a sharper focus on identifying and driving incremental profitable business opportunities while also consolidating our research and data areas to enable improved visibility to consumer and sales insights. We will be establishing a stand-alone role and conducting a search for a Chief Operating Officer in light of the expected late first quarter 2027 retirement of Karen Smith, our current Chief Supply Chain Officer.

And we are creating a new Chief Commercial Officer role to bring together the power and synergy of our more than 1,000 door vertical retail business, e-commerce channel and 20,000 location wholesale division, which will be led by Allison Peterson, who most recently has been successfully driving our North American retail organization. The overall goal is to effectively position the company across our brands, relationships, scale and infrastructure to service today's multigenerational consumers with seamless shopping experiences that are enhanced by continuous engagement opportunities across channels, ages and markets to create an emotional connection and increase lifetime value.

We believe this structure, in conjunction with improved processes will be conducive to identifying synergies across consumer and market data, product innovation and design, brand and marketing initiatives as well as merchandising and promotional planning with the goal of driving profitable outcomes. Although we are energized by our future with the early success of this brand relaunch and the emerging strategy, along with the anticipated organizational changes and the delivery of a solid third quarter, we also remain cognizant of the continued uncertainty in the macro market environment, especially with some of the softness we have seen in our fourth quarter-to-date sales.

Considering this as well as the historical tendency for amplified consumer concerns in election years, we have decided to take a prudent approach with a slight downward adjustment to our fourth quarter revenue outlook, which Richard will speak to in his remarks. Even with this adjustment, however, our full year 2026 numbers will continue to deliver from an expectations perspective, improvements on numerous key metrics, including net sales growth, inclusive of last year's 53rd week and our store rationalization, a positive U.S. retail comp and expansion of our operating margin.

The team, therefore, remains highly focused on successfully delivering the year, especially given how overweight the impact of the fourth quarter and the holiday season are on both our top and bottom line. In the meantime, we also expect to continue to make progress on our growth strategy, improving our processes and identifying new opportunities, inclusive of the expansion of the total addressable market, ranging from age expansion to socioeconomic expansion to asset-light global expansion, and we look forward to sharing more with you in the coming months. Now I'll turn the call over to Richard.

Thank you, Sharon. Good morning, everyone. We're looking forward to updating you on the business today. We will recap our third quarter performance and share our latest outlook for Q4 and how we think the year may finish up. As always, our objective is to provide a balanced update. We'll share what's working and where perhaps we have some reasons for caution. For the quarter, we achieved our net sales forecast and exceeded our expectations on profitability.

Our teams are continuing to do a good job navigating the various challenges across the marketplace. We're grateful for their resilience and resourcefulness and their openness to change as we continue to transform and strengthen the company for the long term. Our comments this morning on our third quarter performance and our outlook will track along with the presentation posted to the Investor Relations portion of our website.

Turning to our presentation materials. On Page 2, we have our GAAP basis P&L. As Sharon mentioned, net sales in the third quarter were $752 million. Reported operating income was $56 million and reported earnings per share were $1 compared to $0.32 last year. On Page 3, we have our GAAP basis P&L for the first nine months of the year. On year-to-date net sales of more than $2 billion, reported operating income was $224 million, which included the benefit of the tariff recovery in the second quarter as well as the impact of several other nonrecurring charges. Year-to-date reported earnings per share were $4.27 compared to $0.75 in 2025.

On the following page, we summarized our non-GAAP adjustments. In the third quarter, we recorded approximately $1 million in charges related to intellectual property litigation. Year-to-date, our results included several nonrecurring items, the most significant of which was the roughly $130 million recovery of previously paid tariffs and related interest. We also recorded approximately $7 million in charges year-to-date related to costs associated with leadership transition and litigation. Last year, both our third quarter and year-to-date adjustments primarily related to operating model improvement costs, organizational restructuring and leadership transition costs.

Today, our comments will speak to our performance on an adjusted basis, which excludes these unusual items. Our third quarter adjusted P&L is on Page 5. As mentioned, our Q3 net sales were $752 million, down less than 1% versus last year. Sales were roughly comparable year-over-year in our U.S. Retail segment, down in U.S. wholesale, and we posted growth in International. Adjusted gross margin expanded 200 basis points in Q3 over last year to 47.1%.

The improvement in gross margin was driven by a higher year-over-year mix of U.S. retail sales and higher realized pricing, which offset higher tariff costs and investments in product make. On a consolidated basis, AURs increased mid-single digits, while units decreased mid-single digits. In U.S. Retail, third quarter AURs were up low single digits over last year, and we also improved realized pricing in our U.S. Wholesale and International segments. Allison will comment further on U.S. retail and wholesale trends in a moment.

For the quarter, adjusted SG&A decreased nearly 2% versus prior year to $303 million, with benefits from our productivity initiatives, including store closures, more than offsetting incremental investments in marketing and year-over-year inflationary pressures in wages and rent. Spending is an area we've managed well throughout the year. Year-to-date adjusted SG&A is essentially flat with the prior year, and we've achieved 150 basis points of leverage. On a rate basis on roughly comparable sales in the third quarter, we achieved 30 basis points of SG&A leverage.

Our third quarter adjusted operating income was $57 million at an adjusted operating margin of 7.6%, an improvement of 240 basis points over last year. Below the line, net interest and other expenses increased over prior year, driven by higher interest costs from last year's refinancing of our senior notes. Our effective tax rate for the third quarter was 24% compared to 22% last year. The higher rate this year was the result of a higher proportion of U.S.-based income, which included the tariff recovery. For the full year, we're forecasting an effective tax rate of approximately 23%.

The net of all this to the bottom line, third quarter adjusted earnings per share were $1.03, an increase of nearly 40% over last year's $0.74. On Page 6, we have a summary of our third quarter performance by business segment. As I mentioned earlier, net sales were roughly comparable year-over-year in our U.S. Retail segment, down in U.S. wholesale, and we posted growth in International. Of particular note, each of our business segments posted improvement in operating income and operating margin in the third quarter. Now our newly named Chief Commercial Officer, Allison Peterson, will provide some additional perspective on our retail and wholesale businesses, beginning on Page 7.

Thank you, Richard. I'm thrilled to be stepping into this expanded role of Chief Commercial Officer at such an exciting time for our business. The structure we announced today creates an important opportunity to build on our strong foundation, accelerate growth and strengthen our position as the market leader. Together, we plan to advance our go-to-market strategy, deepen our connections with customers and consumers and deliver elevated experiences at every touch point. I believe in our ability to translate these opportunities into sustained growth, driving meaningful value for our business.

Now turning to our U.S. Retail segment results. Third quarter net sales were comparable to prior year, while operating profit nearly doubled. Higher realized pricing and the benefits from our productivity initiatives, including store closures, drove a 250 basis point increase in our operating margin for the quarter. Comparable retail sales increased 0.4% over last year, with AUR up low single digits. This built on last year's 2% comp growth and mid-single-digit AUR increase. For the quarter, units were down low single digits versus prior year.

We saw continued growth in our baby and toddler business with our most important baby segment delivering its eighth consecutive quarter of comp sales growth, driven by destination categories like body suits and sleepwear. Our older kids business was slightly down versus last year. Performance across both stores and e-commerce was comparable to prior year. We saw continued strength in average transactions driven by growth in both AUR and UPTs.

While traffic continues to be strong on a 2-year basis, and we are pleased with the returns of our paid media investments, traffic decelerated from Q2 due to uneven product acceptance of our older kids back-to-school seasonal assortment. Additionally, we saw a softening of traffic to our stores as the average consumer continued to face higher gas prices as well as other inflationary pressures, a trend that is in line with other reported retail traffic trends in the industry.

As Sharon mentioned, Q3 sales were expected to be weighted to the month of September, and that's exactly how the quarter unfolded. In July, comps were largely on plan, reflecting typical seasonal clearance activity. August trends were weaker than planned as warmer weather impacted much of the U.S. Although key back-to-school categories like denim and uniform showed strength, our older kids seasonal assortment fell short of our expectations as consumers are being more strategic with their spending and delaying purchases closer to need, a trend we believe have continued into the fourth quarter.

While Labor Day was softer than expected, as reported across much of the retail industry, we quickly pivoted our marketing and merchandising efforts from focusing on the entire collection to wear-now key items that were resonating with the consumer and saw the back-to-school business rebound. Knowing September was a must-win month, we also positioned the Carter's brand to resonate with new and existing families in a differentiated way. We took this important commercial time frame to lean into our most iconic baby products and create relevancy with the next generation of families.

Through elevated storytelling, updated merchandising, personalized experiences and compelling value, September comps were up double digits and exceeded our plan. During this time frame, we saw outsized growth in our Baby segment, where we hold the #1 market share position and acquired new consumers to the brand, including Gen Z. Another driver of our strong September performance was the launch of our new branding campaign, which can be seen on Page 8. For the first time in 25 years, we've reimagined the Carter's brand. As you can see, the brand has a new look and feel, a new logo and an elevated brand promise, let every child's light shine.

On Page 9, you can see some of the other ways we are bringing the new Carter's branding to life. Our intention is to increase the appeal and relevance of this great brand to a new generation of parents while maintaining a nod to Carter's rich 160-year heritage. While this is a multiyear strategy, we are encouraged with the early results as unaided awareness and consideration are increasing. Engagement is also meaningfully up across our website and social media platforms, signaling that the content is resonating with our target consumers. We'll continue to build on our momentum with new brand moments in Q4 as we move through the key holiday period.

Turning to Page 10. We have reimagined the way consumers shop sleepwear, launching our Stellar Sleep shop featuring our Not-So-Scary Monsters collection. We saw a big opportunity to gain share in the important sleepwear category and connect with a new generation of consumers through new products, updated merchandising and enhanced marketing. This category, which historically generates a high lifetime value, delivered double-digit unit and dollar sales growth in the quarter.

We expanded the role Carter's plays in sleep by moving beyond product and into bedtime routines as a way to keep Carter's top of mind and be of service to our consumers. In Q3, we launched our free Bedtime Monster Scanner as part of the Carter's app to help parents and kids quell the anxiety we know is associated with the bedtime routine. Not only did we see great adoption within the app, but it drove double-digit conversion improvements to users who engage with this feature. Finding new ways to expand the role Carter's can play in families' lives continues to be a focus for us as we elevate our brand in the minds of our consumers.

Turning to the performance of our U.S. Wholesale segment on Page 11, third quarter net sales for our Wholesale segment decreased 4% versus prior year, which was better than expected, driven by earlier demand for fall products from key customers. As many of you know, our wholesale business can vary quarter-to-quarter due to shipment timing, and that has certainly been the case this year. On a year-to-date basis through Q3, net sales are up approximately 2% over prior year.

For the third quarter, pricing increased over prior year due in part to higher product costs. However, this is more than offset by a decline in units. Sales of our exclusive brands decreased mid-single digits versus last year in the quarter, driven by earlier fall shipments that benefited our Q2 results. Year-to-date, exclusive brand sales are up high single digits over last year, driven by Carter's Child of Mine and Just One You. Wholesale operating profit for the third quarter increased 11% over prior year, and operating margin expanded 230 basis points. From a margin standpoint, higher realized pricing, favorable customer mix and productivity initiatives more than offset higher tariff and product costs. I'll now turn the call back to Richard.

Thank you, Allison. Turning to our International segment. Our businesses outside the United States continued to perform well in the third quarter. Total reported international net sales increased 4% over last year with growth in all parts of our international business, Canada, Mexico and with our wholesale partners outside of North America. In Canada, the largest component of our international business, net sales increased 4% over prior year in the third quarter, driven by a 2% increase in retail comp sales and growth in the Canadian wholesale channel.

In Mexico, comparable sales increased 8% over the prior year, which was led by our stores. Our team in Mexico drove a nice lift in units per transaction through some creative new merchandising and promotional initiatives, which resonated well with consumers in the quarter. Third quarter sales in Mexico also benefited from new store openings. In the first nine months, we've opened 6 new stores in Mexico. We continue to see strong momentum in the performance of these new store investments in this market.

International operating income increased 28% over last year to $12 million, and segment operating margin increased 180 basis points to 10%. The improved profitability was driven by higher realized pricing, productivity savings and FX benefits, partially offset by higher product costs. Turning to Page 12. We have some balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Our balance sheet remains very strong. We ended the quarter with significant liquidity, including cash on hand and short-term investments of over $525 million. Net inventories at quarter end were $587 million, 11% lower than prior year.

Our inventory position at quarter end was a bit lower than we had planned, in part due to some delayed delivery of product from port congestion and container availability issues. To date, these disruptions have not had a meaningful impact on the business, but our supply chain team is monitoring the situation closely. Year-to-date, we've generated operating cash flow of more than $100 million compared to a use of cash of $136 million last year. Our improved cash flow was driven by tariff recoveries and improved working capital, including lower inventories.

We've also had good performance on a free cash flow basis, generating $72 million versus negative free cash flow of nearly $180 million in the first nine months of last year. On returning capital to shareholders, we paid $27 million in dividends through the first nine months of the year. Overall, we believe our strong balance sheet and free cash flow generation are differentiating and strategic advantages for Carter's. Pages 13 and 14 summarize our adjusted P&L and segment results for the first 3 quarters. This information is provided for your reference.

Year-to-date through the first 3 quarters, net sales increased 4% with growth in all 3 of our business segments. Q3 year-to-date adjusted operating profit increased 20% and adjusted EPS increased 7%. As you will recall, the difference between operating income growth and EPS growth reflected higher net interest expense from last year's refinancing of our senior notes. Turning now to our outlook, beginning with the fourth quarter on Page 16. Fourth quarter is obviously very important in our business, not just in retail, but also in wholesale, where we have significant shipments planned, including product for the upcoming spring 2027 selling season.

November and December have historically been the largest months of the fourth quarter and of the entire year for that matter. So we have some big weeks and months ahead of us. Our teams are focused on finishing the year strong, continuing the progress we've achieved this year. As we said in our discussion of Q3 results, we have to acknowledge some slowing of demand relative to earlier in the year. Given the various pressures which our target consumers are facing, this isn't overly surprising.

As such, we've updated our outlook for net sales for the balance of the year prudently, we believe, to reflect an expectation for more moderate demand than in our previous forecast. Specifically, we've adjusted our assumption in our U.S. retail business to reflect current trends. In U.S. wholesale, we've also moderated our forecast for replenishment demand to better align with trends in the business. Over the past several years, we've seen a compression in the Q4 shopping period as consumers shopped much closer to the holidays.

This has resulted in a corresponding acceleration in our business in the last 6 weeks or so of the year. It seems possible we may see a similar consumer behavior this year as well. It's also worth a reminder that last year included an extra week, which we've estimated contributed approximately $37 million in net sales. For the fourth quarter, we're forecasting net sales in the range of $860 million to $880 million or mid-single-digit lower sales than last year's fourth quarter using the midpoint of the range. For adjusted operating income, we're forecasting a range of $74 million to $83 million, which compares to $89 million a year ago. And for adjusted fourth quarter EPS, we're forecasting a range of $1.37 to $1.55 versus $1.90 in Q4 last year.

Our outlook for the full year is included on Page 17. We're now expecting full year net sales in the range of $2.910 billion to $2.93 billion. At the midpoint of the range, this represents growth of approximately 1% versus prior year or 2% growth, excluding last year's 53rd week. Over the past few quarters, we've been able to offset lower-than-planned demand and additional promotional cadence to manage through some underperforming products with the benefit of lower-than-planned tariff costs and prudent expense management.

As such, we're maintaining our previous outlook for full year adjusted operating income growth in the low single-digit to mid-single-digit range. We're also maintaining our outlook for adjusted EPS to decline in the high single digits to low double digits. Again, as a reminder, the delta between our forecast for adjusted operating income growth and lower adjusted EPS is the higher interest costs related to last year's debt refinancing. Even with the moderated outlook for the top line, achievement of our forecast would cap a good year for Carter's, delivering growth in net sales despite the net closure of nearly 40 stores in last year's 53rd week and posting meaningful improvement in operating profit.

As also summarized here on Page 17, we expect to have a good year on cash flow with an outlook for operating cash flow in the range of $240 million to $250 million, reflecting the net tariff recovery and favorable movements in working capital. As we finish the year, risks we're monitoring include consumer sentiment and spending given the ongoing pressures of persistent inflation, including the price of gas. We've also seen some impact on demand in past election cycles, including related inflation in the cost of media.

So the upcoming midterms are on our radar. Given geopolitical uncertainty around the world, it's possible there may be some additional disruption to the supply chain and the delivery of product. And finally, we'll be carefully monitoring and reacting to the overall promotional intensity of the market, particularly around the holidays. With these remarks, we're ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question is coming from the line of Jay Sole with UBS. Your line is now open.

Sharon, if you had a chance to really dig into the business over the last quarter, can you just maybe just talk about how you feel about the interplay between the wholesale channel for Carter's and the U.S. retail channel? Is there one channel you need to prioritize? And how do you think you're going to -- what's the best way you think you have to improve the traffic into the U.S. retail stores?

Yes. Thanks, Jason. Appreciate the question. That really leads back to some of the organizational changes that we just spoke about. You just heard Allison speak, and she's been leading very strong results over the past few -- well, quite a few quarters at this point in U.S. retail. And we also saw an opportunity, therefore, to combine the entire commercial area under her as the Chief Commercial Officer, inclusive of both wholesale, retail and e-com.

So the first thing that I would note is what we see is an opportunity to drive synergy over that entire area, recognizing trends more quickly, recognizing consumer insights pushing them across all the different areas and then working much closely with now a branded organization, not just a marketing organization to create proper segmentation on how consumers see, particularly the Carter's brand from our own retail channels through our partners, through our exclusive brands with some of our biggest customers.

And that segmentation is going to be critical for us to maintain a position that separates us from our own inner brands, including Little Planet or, as I say, some of the exclusive brands that we have across some of our largest retailers and the experience that you would have at Carter's. So in a Carter's store, you'll likely see us to start working toward, as we've mentioned, higher engagement experiences to drive traffic with not only an elevated brand promise as we spent some time on, but then delivering on that promise through more integrated solutions, like I just mentioned on the Stellar Sleep program, where we also had a free app for the Monster Scanner, which everybody needs, by the way.

If you don't have a Monster Scanner, you should get it. I haven't found a monster yet. We have no monsters reported. But it helps integrate us into the bedtime process. This is just a singular example of how Carter's, as I mentioned, is elevating itself beyond an apparel brand. We have every right to do that with 160 years of heritage and the highest trust members in the space. So that's the store experience. And we'll be looking through.

We're looking at testing and management and insights on how to arrange that store in a way that highlights our businesses, our brands as well as gives us that permission -- discretion to the older consumer, which we have also mentioned and the gift-giving grandma and grandpa. So look for the Carter's business, and it will take us a minute. We have over 1,000 locations. But I think you're going to start to see a different kind of approach on the integration between e-com and the stores and the elevation of the experience inside of a Carter's store to drive that lifetime value.

Now the good thing about that, it's a little bit of a long answer, but that was a very broad question. That will also -- we understand basically that our consumers also co-shop all over the place. So that is not -- would not be an exclusive advantage to just the Carter's world, that also benefits our very valued big retail partners and all of our retail partners, we mentioned 20,000 doors that we have.

And so we see that, that kind of approach then can be executed with -- in partnership with our retailers, sort of like one partner at a time, building that relationship and that partnership more than a buyer-buyee kind of relationship or purchasing buying kind of relationship to assure that the company that owns the #1 market share in baby with such an iconic brand is positioned in a way that it should be in every location where a consumer can find children's apparel.

Got it. That's helpful. If I can follow up. You announced a new organizational structure. I'm interested in the position of Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer. Can you just talk about -- I know it's early, but just some high-level ideas that you may have for finding new revenue streams for Carter's. I mean you touched on becoming a bigger part of the sleep time, I think, moment with. Just give us a sense, where can this brand go beyond what we're used to seeing from just baby and young children's apparel?

Well, first, thank you for that because I think that it's important to focus on not just strategy, but then how do you execute that strategy, right? It's great to have all this information, but what are we doing with it? How are we executing? How are we pushing it across the organization? To find continued value and new opportunities. Yes, Stellar Sleep is one of those. As I noted, it was a proprietary research that provided the insight that moms just find the whole -- how you buy for sleep confusing.

And we're like, wow, first of all, sleep it stretches across all the ages. It has a very high lifetime value connection. And if you -- if we solve whatever might be the challenge for the parents with that type of thing where you're like engaged in an experience, they're generally going to stick with you, right? So you go from a 1 child household to a multi-child household. So sleep was a really great place for us to start. And that solution that we've come up with, of course, we've also spoken with to our key customers about this.

You can actually see that solution being pushed out across numerous retail outlets where we've started and tested and proven the concept in our own stores. So that's a really important model to keep in the back of your mind as we move forward, consumer insights driven into broader consumer touch points. That's #1. #2, as I mentioned at the tail end of my script today and have spoken to some of you guys at the most recent Goldman conference, we're looking at the purposeful expansion of the addressable market across 3 different vectors.

That first vector is aging up the consumer. And I know you've heard this over and over again. But we have a lot more data now and a lot more insights about how to do that in a meaningful way, not just from design and development, but all the way through how our stores look and how engaging those stores are for a -- and when I say an older consumer, I'm talking about a 6-, 7-, 8-, 9-, 10-year old, right? So don't get too old on me, but that type of consumer as well as aging up the -- excuse me, pushing up the socioeconomic strata, which we've been able to prove our ability to do so with our sub-brand Little Planet.

So while early, it's showing us that, that consumer is absolutely willing to be engaged and involved in a sub-brand of Carter's for a much more elevated look, feel and approach with a bigger promise that's linked to sort of the environmental concepts of some of the things that, that particular consumer is looking for today. And then finally, on the third vector is the expansion into an -- more of an international approach. We're already a global brand. We have just not really had a consistent strategy on how we're rolling out across the globe.

And we have a lot of good touch points and a lot of good success in some of the markets that we're in. So we are looking at an asset-light approach to a very systematic execution as we look toward that. And in fact, one of the reasons we've created this role beyond pulling together all of our consumer insights, which will drive this across many of our categories and consumers. The international team will report into the Chief Strategy and Business Development Officer as we work toward a strategic approach to evolving in that area.

Our next question in queue coming from the line of Kelly Crago with BMO Capital Markets. Your line is now open.

I just want to dig into the U.S. wholesale business a little further. You're guiding it down quite meaningfully versus prior expectations in the fourth quarter. So in last quarter, you sounded very positive on the retailer reception of your product and pricing. So just curious if you could dig into what's really changed there and provide us with any sort of color on how you are seeing order books shaping up for U.S. wholesale into next year?

And then secondly, on pricing, obviously, taken a lot of price this year. Just curious what you're thinking on the pricing dynamics into next year given some of the cost headwinds we're anticipating.

Kelly, I'll start and my colleagues may want to add some thoughts. As it relates to the revision in revenue outlook, I would say the majority of that relates more to the U.S. retail business than it does to wholesale. We had revised wholesale down in our previous forecast. I think we've further refined our outlook for replenishment demand, which is a component, obviously, of the wholesale revenue stream. So the more significant component would be U.S. retail as opposed to wholesale.

So wholesale on balance, there's lots of moving pieces, as Allison said in her remarks. And so we had some volume that had been previously planned for the fourth quarter that moved forward and benefited Q3. That happens all the time in this business. I think if you look at our revised forecast, it implies kind of flattish to down slightly for the full year segment results for wholesale. So I think we're going to cap a good year in wholesale overall.

We had good demand for the order book for spring 2027. The challenge with that is not all that comes next season. So we actually have more of that going in the fourth quarter. Spring preships are up about 30% in the fourth quarter. So that will benefit the fourth quarter versus early next year. We haven't done sell-ins yet for fall. That will take place as we exit the year here. So on our next call, we'll probably have better line of sight to that.

Our next question in queue coming from the line of Ike Boruchow with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

I was hoping you could talk about AUR and gross margin specifically for the fourth quarter, what your expectation is and how you kind of see the trajectory of AUR into next year?

Sure. Again, I'll start out there. So we had a nice lift in AUR in the third quarter. I think that's a testament to how the retail team came together and developed that compelling late September promotional drive, which was accretive overall to margins and profitability. So we do have pricing planned up, I'd say, low single digit in the U.S. retail business in fourth quarter as well, a little less than perhaps what we achieved in Q3, but Q4 is naturally a bit more of a promotional period than Q3 is.

So sequentially, you lose a little bit of that. So still planning higher prices. I think we've been able to maintain those reasonably well. I think we've sold in at this point, spring 2027. So that pricing is kind of known at this point. We have yet, as I mentioned, to sell in the fall assortment for the second half of the year. So more to come on that.

And I'd like Allison to add color to this. But as we noted in the remarks, we recognized and actually shared in the last call the importance of September and had that soft start in Labor Day, which apparently from some of our research was reflected in a lot of different sectors of the marketplace. But I was really proud to see the team double down on how to approach September and come back with a winning strategy to end up with a double-digit comp in September that clearly positively impacted the quarter overall. And it was a very scaffolded approach to the way they attacked this opportunity. And ultimately, that too was a protectant of the AUR being positive for the quarter.

Yes, absolutely.

I think the team has done an excellent job surgically optimizing price across the assortment to deliver a low single-digit AUR increase in the quarter, and that was on top of a mid-single-digit AUR increase last year. So the teams are definitely taking price where they can.

And that is even with us considering some of the product headwinds that we talked about. So we are really seeing the teams lean in, in a very strong way and taking price and realizing price in our destination categories in our most important baby business, in our sleep business, and we're really seeing the benefits of that flow through to our gross margin, as Richard mentioned.

Got it. And as a follow-up, on the gross margins, can you just quantify what was the lower tariff rate benefit to gross margin in the third quarter? And what kind of a benefit do you have baked in on the fourth quarter, just so we can kind of separate the core versus the tariff rate noise?

Yes, I would say in the third quarter, gross margin expanded by about 200 basis points. About half of that expansion had to do with just higher mix of the gross margin-rich U.S. retail business. So we had a higher proportion of U.S. retail sales. The balance would be improved pricing largely. Tariffs were not as meaningful of a year-over-year driver in the third quarter. We get more of a benefit, Ike, in fourth quarter from tariffs. From memory, it's $10 million or $11 million of lower gross tariff burden in the fourth quarter because last year, we were selling through product that we had imported under the much higher IEEPA tariff schemes.

Our next question in the queue coming from the line of Jim Chartier with Monness, Crespi, Hardt & Company. Your line is now open.

I wanted to talk about the marketing spend. How does this year's marketing spend compare to years past? Given the strong response that you've seen to the initial brand relaunch, is there an opportunity in the near term to lean into marketing in a bigger way to drive the business? And then where do you see kind of total marketing spend going over time?

Well, this has clearly been an area of investment for us, Jim, and one that we're really pleased by. We felt like the benchmarking that we had done indicated that we under-indexed other good branded companies in terms of what we spend on marketing overall. So we're spending about $20 million more on demand creation this year versus a year ago, and that's across a range of areas. But paid media, in particular, has proven to be a very good area for investment. One of the things I like about our colleagues in marketing, they're very rigorous in measuring the return on that investment. We do believe it's driving traffic for us. We'll continue to do that. And I don't think we're at the point of inefficiency yet with spending. So we're going to -- we're kind of stepping our way into more spending over time.

Yes. I would also add that our marketing investment is intentionally balanced across really two priorities, which is delivering results today while investing in the long-term relevance of our brands. And you'll see that show up in the work we're doing around reimagining the brands, and that is a strategy that we expect to pay off over a longer-term horizon. We do continue to see, as Richard mentioned, marketing contribution to retail sales grow year-over-year, and our increased spend is proving effective and efficient. And although we are starting to feel, as the team mentioned, more pressure in our efficiency due to rising media costs, we're very pleased with the efficiencies we're seeing and the effectiveness we're seeing in terms of marketing contribution to our total business.

Yes. And I would want to note that the change of the Chief Marketing Officer to Chief Brand Officer is not just in name. It's a very important concept of how we feel we can drive value across the organization with our iconic brands. And that combination of upper funnel marketing with a branded engagement to push us up in the top-of-mind awareness and high to drive that affinity, combined with the scaffolded approach to promotions and occasionally marking down versus marketing and its most specific approach is a very dynamic way to drive business over time.

And I would suggest that we're would hope to see much more of that as we move forward, particularly with the positive impact of this branded initiative that we've launched. So while our marketing as a percent of sales, as Richard mentioned, has been comparatively low and frankly, still is comparatively low to like companies. We will likely -- as long as that ROI maintains some consistency, we will likely see a greater expense in marketing. But of course, that's with the objective to drive profitable sales.

Our next question in queue coming from the line of John Keypour with Goldman Sachs. Your line is now open.

Just a quick bookkeeping question to start. If you could give us the quarter-to-date comp, please?

It's down, John. We're actually going to move away from providing the intra-quarter data point. We had a lot of lessons in this last quarter about how that can move around as you get to the higher volume periods. And so we are running down month-to-date, but the bigger volume periods, November and December are still ahead of us. So we're focused on delivering those.

Okay. Totally. And then if we could just talk about SG&A a bit and maybe, actually, let's start with gross margin. If you could give us a picture of what you're expecting in terms of freight and cotton and how the tariff lapse should influence margins next year?

Yes. So I'll start near end. Gross margin for the fourth quarter, we are expecting expansion again year-over-year in Q4, not to the same extent that we saw in Q3. You don't have quite the same mix benefit. You do get a bit more of a tariff benefit in Q4, as I just mentioned. Cotton is clearly up in the marketplace. It's up about 20%. Just a reminder, we don't buy raw cotton. We buy finished goods. And so our vendors buy cotton on our behalf. They're buying all across the time continuum on our behalf. So the more expensive cotton is really more an issue for our second half product costing in 2027.

At this point, we've costed our assortments for the first part of next year. So I don't expect cotton itself is a huge inflationary pressure. I do think we're seeing other sources of inflation in transportation costs with the cost of oil being what it is. This year, we're probably incurring another $4 million or $5 million of incremental freight surcharges just from our carriers because of the price of oil.

So too early to probably be more specific on 2027. I do think that we're seeing a trend towards inflation in our product input costs, probably more second half phenomenon. And then tariffs to your question, I think that's anybody's guess. I don't think we're out of the woods as it relates to tariffs. The administration clearly has a preference for this as a policy matter. I think the more recent tariffs have obviously been much more benign than the IEEPA-level tariffs. But my personal opinion is we're not out of the woods as it relates to potential further changes there. So we're mindful of what may happen.

And our last question will come from the line of Tom Nikic with Needham & Company. Your line is now open.

I want to ask about some of the leadership changes and obviously, a lot of folks moving into new roles and things like that. Sharon, can you give us any sort of time line as to how long it will take for the new leadership structure to really impact the business and to kind of get operating at the level that you're hoping to see?

Yes. Thanks for that. And well, we do have a lot of the key executives already in place. It's just an elevation and expansion of certain roles. So this is a really concerted approach to some consistency in key seats while adding newness in other areas, inclusive of the Chief Product Officer, which, as I noted, had been vacant and the time period of that vacancy has been since August of last year, not August of this year, August of 2025.

So when you think about the kind of impact of someone coming to us from such an iconic company like H&M, who's managed across multiple areas of apparel, including kids, of course, that could have quite a strong impact on the way we think about the business. And in regards to many of the strategic initiatives that I've mentioned, particularly expansion of the addressable market. So we expect her to be able to start in January-ish after the first of the year, we'll see.

And the other opportunity is with the Chief Operations Officer, which we will be searching for. So that's really hard to say. But I'm quite hopeful that a company like Carter's, a Fortune 1000 organization with 160 years of history and iconic brands in a situation where we have so much opportunity ahead of us, I certainly hope that, that will attract the top talent as it has in other areas. So we -- it will come in phases to be truthful.

And in some cases, the work that will be done of creating more synergy across the organization and pulling up consumer insights and brand earlier into the process of the development of our products and driving insights across the entire organization all the way to the execution of the stores. The strategic insights of that will happen fairly rapidly, I would assume, but the ongoing execution of that will hit the market in different phases as we move forward.

Even with that note that we have already in the first four months, launched an entirely new brand, look, feel and logo for Carter's, which we've already driven 1.6 billion impressions and a very positive response from the consumer. So some things can go fast and some things might take a minute.

All right. Very helpful. And if I could squeeze one in before the call ends here. There was a comment about monitoring and reacting to the promotions in the marketplace. Have you seen anything from the competitors out there that gives you any concern heading into the holidays?

Thank you for the question. We saw competitors raise prices on all products until Labor Day when they pivoted to deeper discounts and increase their promotionality for the month kind of given what Sharon spoke to, which is a challenging Labor Day period, which we perceive happened across the market.

Coming out of September, we have seen competitors pull back on promotions, but we are absolutely anticipating the promotional environment will intensify with heavy discounting in November and December as many brands and retailers are talking about taking their tariff relief and potentially repurposing it back into price. So we have considered and contemplated a more aggressive promotional environment in our forecast.

And that being said, just recall the last two months of the year are the most important months. We are completely focused on driving profitable sales through the end of the quarter. And we are constantly monitoring the competitive environment and the consumer. But as Richard noted earlier, this compressed time line between those holidays is something to just keep in mind as we completed 2026 with an expectation of positive results across all of the key metrics. And with that, we'd like to thank you very much for joining us today and look forward to updating you on our progress in the next call.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, that does conclude our conference for today. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.

you I'm sorry. T.C. Robillard, Vice President, Investor Relations. Please note that today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to T.C. Robillard.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. We issued our second quarter 2026 earnings release earlier today. The release and presentation materials for today's call are available on our investor relations website at ir.carters.com. Note that statements on today's call about items such as the company's expectations and plans are forward-looking statements. For a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to vary from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please see our most recent SEC filings as well as the earnings release and presentation materials posted on our website.

In these materials, you will also find reconciliations of various non-GAAP financial measurements referenced during this call. After today's prepared remarks, we will take questions as time allows. I will now turn the call over to Sharon.

Thank you, T.C. Good morning, everyone, and welcome. I'm delighted to be here with you for my first earnings call with Carter's. The team did a great job in the second quarter, delivering solid results against the backdrop of a complex macroeconomic environment. Richard and Alison will walk you through our performance in more detail, but at a high level, we exceeded our second quarter outlook. Net sales grew for the third consecutive quarter, up 5% over prior year, and adjusted operating profit increased 54%.

We continued our positive momentum in U.S. retail, delivering comparable sales growth of 5%, and we continued to add new consumers, including the important Gen Z demographics, which grew mid-teens in the quarter. Having spent essentially my entire career in the children's market, I have enormous respect for Carter's. I want to thank the team and the board, not only for the opportunity to lead this historic company to new heights, but for the foundational work that's been done, including research, strategic evaluations, and key transformational initiatives.

While there is still more to be done as we move forward, this has allowed me to hit the ground running. In fact, over the past 6 weeks, I've been digging into the business and getting to know the key leaders, and it's strengthened my conviction about what initially attracted me to this role, namely that Carter's is a well-established company with a solid foundation for expansion. And in my view, we have significant opportunities that can contribute to generating consistent profitable growth. These opportunities include a number of powerful assets that I believe we can further leverage to continue to elevate the business, as well as expand the brand promise and footprint, which in turn should create value and generate consistent long-term shareholder returns.

These include iconic brands, great consumers, the leading market share position, a multi-channel business model, and a passionate, driven organization. Touching on each of these briefly, first, we have a number of the strongest brands in our space. Our namesake Carter's brand, as well as OshKosh, have high awareness, consumer trust, and a deep heritage that's been woven into the fabric of families' lives for generations. We also have additions to our brand family that are filling other consumer needs, such as Little Planet, which focuses on natural, sustainable fabrics.

Second, we have great consumers. We hold a unique position in their lives, sitting at the intersection of caregivers and children, while being present for every single moment through their early years. Being able to serve both moms and kids is a special responsibility, and we do not take that earned trust lightly. When we can deliver products and exceptional experiences that improve their life, we create an emotional bond between our brands and our consumers. Third, we're the market share leader in our industry, including the most important segment, baby, essentially from their very first day. We begin our all-important journey with our families that often lasts a lifetime, even evolving into a multi-generational relationship when grandparents become gift givers.

Fourth, our multi-channel business model has diverse revenue streams, including an emerging global footprint, multiple brand and product segments, as well as extraordinary distribution breadth. Families can buy our products at over 20,000 global points of presence that span multiple consumer tiers from department stores to mass stores to our own omnichannel solution consisting of our high-touch specialty retail stores and carters.com. Being available where, when, and how our consumers want to shop is an important competitive advantage.

And finally, we have a lot of talented people located around the world at Carter's, from our headquarters to our distribution centers to our associates in the field, and we have a culture that's passionate about our brand and our consumers. Equally as important, there is a general recognition and willingness internally of the need to evolve as an organization so we can meet our consumers where they are today, as well as adapt when their needs change. As you can see, this is a powerful confluence of assets. And as I mentioned earlier, this is what attracted me to Carter's, and it's what gives me so much confidence in our future.

At its simplest level, our objective is to deliver consistent, profitable growth. And while early, we intend to start with the following tenets. We will become a company that is consumer-centric and data-driven, recognizing that we have multiple consumers, from the caregiver to the gift giver and the child. This will be the heart of everything we do, from designing products to providing engaging, memorable shopping experiences to creating impactful marketing, all aimed at building relationships and expanding the total lifetime value. We will be brand building, leveraging our assets in a manner designed to monetize the enormous equity, name recognition, and important trust of our portfolio, especially for our namesake brand, Carter's.

Through proper brand building, we can strengthen our relationship with consumers, increase our market share, optimize our total addressable market, and improve our profitability. To do this, we will need to consistently evolve to meet the needs of the marketplace as change is happening even faster. We are the market leader, it is fitting that we also lead change within our industry. In closing, it's an honor to be leading Carter's through this next chapter in its storied history. I believe we have significant opportunities to unlock value, drive profitable growth, deliver top tier shareholder values, and I look forward to getting to know each of you over the coming months. With that, I'll turn the call over to Richard.

Thank you, Sharon, and welcome to Carter's. We're very happy to have you here with us. I'll speak for the rest of our leadership team in reporting that Sharon has jumped in with both feet and is off to a strong start. Good morning, everyone. I want to begin by also thanking our thousands of employees for their resilience, commitment, and teamwork. Over the last 18 months, a period marked by a range of challenges and a significant amount of change, our team has remained focused on execution, has helped to stabilize the business, return to top line growth, and deliver another quarter of strong performance. As Sharon has already experienced, our team exhibits tremendous passion and dedication, and we're very grateful.

This morning we will give you a recap of our second quarter performance, which exceeded our previous outlook. Overall, we delivered growth in both sales and earnings in the quarter, and our balance sheet and liquidity strengthened significantly through the recovery of approximately $130 million of previously paid tariffs and related interest. Consumer and retail businesses like ours are operating in a continued challenging environment. Overall, our business has performed well amid this backdrop for the first half of the year. The children's apparel market has proven resilient in the first 6 months of the year, with total sales up about 2%. In this same time period, our overall share of the age 0 to 10 market has remained stable, with share gains in baby and kid offset by a decline in toddler.

In discussing our second quarter performance and our outlook, our comments this morning will track along with the presentation posted to the investor relations portion of our website. Turning to our presentation materials, on page 2, we have our GAAP basis P&L. Net sales in the second quarter were $615 million. Reported operating income was $140 million, inclusive of the tariff recoveries, which I'll discuss in a moment, and our reported earnings per share were $2.87. Our first half GAAP basis P&L is on page 3. First half net sales increased 7% over the prior year to $1.3 billion. The recorded operating income for the first half was $168 million, which included the tariff recovery as well as other non-recurring charges. First half reported EPS was $3.26 compared to $0.43 in 2025.

On the following page, we summarized our non-GAAP adjustments. We had no adjustments to our reported results in the first quarter, so our second quarter and first half 2026 adjustments are the same. A significant adjustment to our reported results in Q2 related to our recovery of previously paid tariffs and related interest. In the second quarter we received $132 million back from the U.S. government. $128 million benefited gross profit and $4 million was recorded as interest income. These tariff recoveries and interest are taxable. As such, we recorded a tax provision in our Q2 reported results, roughly $30 million, which we will pay in September.

We also recorded approximately $6 million in charges in the quarter, the majority of which related to our recent leadership transition. Last year, we had adjustments related to operating model improvement costs and leadership transition costs, which reduced our reported profitability. Our comments today will speak to our performance on an adjusted basis, which excludes these unusual items. On page 5, we have our second quarter adjusted P&L. Our Q2 net sales of $615 million represented growth of $30 million or 5% over last year. Adjusted gross margin on these sales was 46.3%, a decrease of 180 basis points compared to prior year.

As expected, tariffs pressured our gross margin rate in the quarter with a gross impact incremental to our historical tariff baseline of $28 million. Investments in product make also pressured gross margin compared to prior year. These headwinds were partially offset by increased pricing as well as tariff mitigation actions and productivity initiatives. On a consolidated basis, AURs improved in the mid-single digits and units were up low single digits. U.S. retail second quarter AURs were comparable to prior year, and we improved realized pricing in our U.S. wholesale and international segments. Alison will comment further on U.S. retail pricing trends in a moment.

Second quarter adjusted SG&A of $270 million decreased 1% versus prior year as the benefits from our productivity initiatives, including store closures, more than offset incremental spend on marketing and year-over-year inflationary pressures in wages and rent. On a rate basis, we achieved nearly 300 basis points of SG&A leverage in the quarter. Second quarter adjusted operating income increased 54% to $18 million and adjusted operating margin increased 90 basis points to 2.9%. Higher sales and lower spending led to this operating income performance, which was above our previous outlook. Below the line, net interest and other expenses increased over prior year, driven by higher interest costs from last year's debt refinancing and a foreign exchange loss due to the strengthening of the U.S. dollar since the end of the first quarter.

The effective tax rate for the second quarter was 23% compared to 74% last year. This year's tax rate was largely driven by our tariff refunds, which were taxable, as I mentioned. This Q2 effective tax rate was not comparable to last year's rate, which was negatively impacted by stock-based compensation and a lower level of pre-tax income. For the full year, we're forecasting an effective tax rate of approximately 23%. All of this netted to second quarter adjusted earnings per share of $0.26, an increase of 53% over last year's $0.17. A summary of our second quarter business segment results is on page 6. In the second quarter, net sales grew in each of our segments, with U.S. wholesale contributing the majority of year-over-year growth. The year-over-year expansion in operating income in the quarter was pretty evenly driven by wholesale and international. Alison will now provide some additional perspective on our U.S. retail business, beginning on page 7.

Thank you, Richard. Our U.S. retail business continued its momentum, delivering another strong performance in the second quarter. Total U.S. retail net sales grew 2% and operating profit increased over prior year. We delivered sales growth across all of our core age segments, with our baby products continuing to be the primary driver. Comparable retail sales increased 5% versus last year, the fifth consecutive quarter of comp sales growth. Comps grew in both channels during the quarter. For the first half, comp sales increased 8% over last year. Similar to the first quarter, we saw the consumer focus on value. When we delivered the right balance of newness, style, and quality at a great price, the consumer responded well. We continued to see good returns on our marketing investments.

That said, we did see a divergence in channel performance relative to Q1. Within the e-comm channel, growth accelerated in the quarter. We believe this is a combination of our outsized opportunity to win with the consumer online as well as the benefits of our investments, which I'll touch on in a moment. In our stores, traffic was comparable to prior year. While this slowed from the first quarter, we believe our marketing investments are working as our traffic performance outpaced the industry and accelerated on a 2-year basis. With respect to our comp performance, the growth in the second quarter was driven by units as AUR was comparable to prior year. We experienced higher clearance in the quarter related to soft performance of select seasonal product offerings, which weighed on AUR and gross margin.

As we enter the second half of the year, we're comfortable with our inventory position having cleared through these seasonal goods. Conversely, we are encouraged by the consumer response and our success in driving higher realized pricing in our key destination categories within our baby business. On the following page, we highlight some recent enhancements in our e-commerce experience, which is a key part of our omnichannel portfolio. As I mentioned earlier, e-comm growth accelerated in the second quarter, building on the momentum we've seen over the past several quarters. E-comm comp sales increased double digits, our fourth consecutive quarter of growth. This growth was driven by strong traffic and was profitable. Our marketing investments have been very effective at bringing Gen Z families to our digital platforms.

They are engaging with the website and app and they are also gravitating to our higher AUR products. We're benefiting from the investments we've made in our platform and user experience, which are delivering improvements in the consumer journey and increased site engagement. We've launched several new features, including enhanced outfitting functionality, AI-optimized product reviews, and passwordless login. For consumers that engage with these features, we're seeing increased visits, higher conversion, and more units per transaction. We've also enhanced the user experience with a new and improved AI consumer chat. This functionality now manages 1 third of our contacts, allowing us to reinvest the productivity gains into premium high-touch care for our best consumers. We're pleased with the response to these new capabilities and the returns they're driving.

Turning to page 9. Over the first half of the year, we continue to see our marketing performance improve, driving measurable gains in marketing's contribution to the business. Our marketing investments are intentionally balanced to drive near-term performance while strengthening the long-term relevance of our brand. As I mentioned earlier, we are seeing the success of these efforts increasing customer acquisition through the partnerships we choose, the cultural moments we engage in, and the stories we tell. A great example is our collaboration with Umbro, which we launched during the second quarter to participate in the excitement surrounding the World Cup. This initiative was integrated throughout all of our consumer touch points and included activations like jersey personalization events in World Cup markets.

The products associated with this cultural moment drove strong engagement with our brand and over-penetrated with Gen Z as well as the growing multicultural market. Those who purchased Umbro products bought higher AUR items and added more units to their transaction. As we move into the back half, we are excited about Q3 for several reasons. As we have previously shared, we will continue to invest in marketing given the strong returns we are seeing. This will help to increase our share of voice with the consumer. We are continuing to build new ways to improve the consumer experience across all of our channels. And finally, we feel good about the way our assortment is positioned based on the current signals we are seeing in the business. For example, we will lean into our strength in baby, our position in opening price points, OshKosh denim for back to school, and the importance of sleepwear that begins building in Q3 and increases in relevance throughout the back half of the year. I will now turn the call back to Richard.

Thank you, Alison. Turning to page 10 for a summary of our U.S. wholesale and international segment performance. In U.S. wholesale, we had strong growth in the quarter. Net sales increased 12% over last year, with growth in both AUR and units. These sales were higher than we had previously forecasted, with the upside largely driven by earlier demand for fall product, primarily with mass channel customers, exclusively in Just One You. We also saw good growth in both Little Planet and our Skip Hop business. Wholesale operating profit increased 10% over prior year, while segment operating margin was roughly comparable.

From a margin standpoint, higher realized pricing, tariff mitigation actions, and expense leverage essentially offset higher tariff and product costs. Turning to international, total reported international net sales increased 3% over last year, which was also above the outlook we provided on our last call. Reported sales growth in the quarter benefited from favorable movements in currency exchange rates on a constant currency basis. International segment net sales were comparable to last year. Within our international segment, we had sales growth in Canada and Mexico, which offset lower sales in our international partners business. In the largest component of our international business, Canada, net sales increased 1% over prior year in the second quarter, driven by a 1% increase in comp sales.

Net sales in Mexico increased 22% over last year, driven by favorable movements in exchange rates, timing of shipments within the wholesale channel, and the benefit of new store openings. Comp sales were essentially flat in Mexico in the quarter. Q2 comps were affected by the shift of Easter-related volume into March and traffic slowed in late June, in part due to consumers focusing on the World Cup. Our year-to-date comp in Mexico is up 9%, and we've seen demand rebound strongly post-World Cup in July. International operating income increased 50% over last year to more than $5 million, while segment operating margin increased 180 basis points to 5.7%. The improved profitability was driven by productivity savings as well as lower product costs, resulting from favorable changes in FX rates.

On page 11, we have some balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Our balance sheet is in very good shape. We ended the quarter with significant liquidity with cash on hand of over $650 million. Our cash balance was boosted by the receipt of the tariff recoveries as mentioned earlier. We're projecting good liquidity over the balance of the year. Our cash balance is expected to decrease in coming months as we purchase inventory for the second half, pay taxes, including those due on the tariff recoveries, and make the first accrued interest payment on the senior notes which we issued last year. Net inventories declined 7% compared to prior year to $578 million. Inventory units were 9% lower at quarter end and our inventory quality is strong heading into the second half of the year.

For the first half, we generated operating cash flow of over $200 million compared to a use of cash of $8 million last year. This improved cash flow was driven by the tariff recoveries, improved working capital, including a lower inventory balance, as well as favorable timing of interest payments versus the prior year. We've continued to return capital to shareholders in 2026 and have paid $18 million in dividends in the first half. Pages 12 and 13 summarize our first half adjusted P&L and segment results. This information is provided for your reference. Turning to our outlook for the balance of the year beginning on page 15 of our materials, it's worth a reminder that fiscal 2025 included a 53rd week, which does not repeat this year. The additional week contributed an estimated $37 million in net sales.

Our plans for 2026 reflect growth in net sales and operating profit on top of this 53-week performance in the prior year. While there have been puts and takes relative to our expectations, we've had a good start overall to the year. We've incorporated our learnings from the first half and our best read on the market environment in updating our outlook for Q3 and Q4. The second half has historically represented the majority of our annual sales and earnings, and we expect the balance of the year will be equally significant this year. Turning to our outlook for the top line, we've narrowed our outlook for full year net sales a bit from low to mid-single digit growth previously to a revised projection of 2% to 3% growth. This revision reflects 2 key factors.

First, we expect second half wholesale demand will be a bit lighter than we had originally planned. Q2 wholesale sales included some pull forward of sales initially planned to occur in the third quarter. Additionally, certain customers have adopted a more conservative outlook on second half inventory commitments. We're expecting full-year wholesale net sales growth in the low single-digit range, with growth in our flagship Carter's brand, the Carter's exclusive wholesale brands, and Skip Hop. Second, we've moderated our AUR assumptions for the second half a bit. We're still planning for improved year-over-year realized pricing in U.S. retail, which would build on the gains we've made in pricing in the second half last year. Data from the broader market in second quarter indicated some price resistance from consumers with an accompanying loss of unit velocity.

We think it's prudent to plan for a more value-conscious consumer. We continue to plan for growth in U.S. retail with full-year sales up in the low single-digit range and full-year comparable sales up in the mid-single-digit range. These are obviously planning assumptions at this point. We aren't deep into fall selling yet. We'll continue to read the business, evaluate our performance, and adjust accordingly. In international, our outlook for full-year net sales is unchanged at mid-single-digit growth over last year. On profitability, as indicated in our press release this morning, we have reiterated our previous guidance for adjusted operating income growth in the low to mid-single digits over 2025. In maintaining our operating profit outlook, we've assumed that our higher than planned clearance activity in the second quarter and our more modest outlook for second half wholesale demand and retail AUR will be offset by lower than planned tariff costs.

Last week brought additional news on the tariff front. The Section 122 tariffs, which implemented an incremental 10% above our historical tariff baseline, had been in place since the Supreme Court's February ruling, which invalidated the previous [ IEPA ] tariffs. These Section 122 tariffs expired last Friday and were replaced with new Section 301 tariffs, which reflects an incremental 10% to 12.5% tariff above our historical baseline. If these new tariff rates remain unchanged on our balance of year imports and all other factors remain constant, we may have some upside to our earnings outlook. It is possible the administration will raise these new tariff rates. For instance, some of our sourcing countries are currently subject to ongoing Section 301 overcapacity reviews. As we've discussed in the past, changes in tariff rates do not have an immediate impact on the P&L. Tariffs become part of inventory costs on the balance sheet and flow into cost of goods sold when items are sold.

Below the line, we have improved our outlook for interest income based on our better than planned cash balance. This has allowed us to improve our expected adjusted EPS outlook to a more modest decline of down high single digit to low double digits as compared to last year. As discussed on previous calls, higher interest costs from our senior notes refinancing will weigh on full-year EPS by approximately $0.30 per share. Also, with our net tariff recovery and an improved outlook for year-end inventory, we have increased our expectation for operating cash flow to a range of $230 million to $240 million. We've also revised our expectation for CapEx downward slightly and are expecting to spend approximately $50 million this year, mostly on enhancements to our distribution centers and on strategic technology initiatives.

Our outlook for the third quarter is summarized on page 16. Third quarter net sales are expected to be approximately $750 million comparable with a year ago. By segment, we're expecting U.S. wholesale sales down high single digits in part due to the earlier demand for fall product, which benefited this year's second quarter, low single-digit growth in U.S. retail, and mid to high single-digit growth in international segment net sales. We're expecting third quarter gross margin expansion driven by a greater mix of higher margin U.S. retail sales and the anniversary of higher tariffs, which began in the third quarter of 2025. We're forecasting adjusted operating income of approximately $50 million compared to $39 million a year ago, and adjusted EPS of approximately $0.85 compared to $0.74 in Q3 last year.

It's worth noting the historical significance of September in our business. September is expected to represent the majority of third quarter sales and is typically one of our largest volume months of the year. We expect that September will be similarly significant to this year's third quarter and annual sales. With our first half performance in the books and these updated guidance elements for Q3 in the full year, it's possible to infer our assumptions for the fourth quarter. Again, fourth quarter comparisons will be affected by the absence of the extra week we had last year. Adjusting for the 53rd week, our outlook implies low to mid-single-digit growth and consolidated net sales for the fourth quarter. Risks we're monitoring include the level of promotional activity across the marketplace, especially during the upcoming holiday season, the level of consumer sentiment, particularly in the context of sustained higher gas prices and persistent inflation across many important consumer purchase categories. And with these remarks, we're ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question for today comes from the line of Paul Lejuez from Citi. Your question, please.

Hey, thanks guys. First one, I just wanted to understand the wholesale dynamic a little bit better. I'm curious just if you could help connect the dots between wholesale partners wanting product earlier and your comments, Richard, about them being more conservative. So, if you could maybe just help with that. And then second, I wanted to understand the, just the tariff refund, what the accounting for that was. Was there a reduction in inventory that was tied to that tariff refund? I know that I saw on your slide that you had $18 million in inventory from higher tariffs, what was that $18 million from? Is that the 10%? Or was there still something in there in the inventory balance tied to [ AIPA ] tariffs? Thanks.

I'll start with the tariffs. So the accounting did not reduce inventory. At this point, we have sold through the goods that were brought into the country and tariffed at the higher level of tariff rates. So since late February, we have been importing product at the, primarily the plus 10% rates. And so at this point, our assumption is that we have sold through those previous goods. So there is some portion of year-over-year balance in inventory that relates to higher than historical tariffs, and that would be related to the plus 10% tariffs that were put in place after [ IEPA ] left.

As your question on wholesale, I would say in general, a few things are at work. One, we have had good reception for fall product. The reception to the fall line was improved over the spring assortment, so we were encouraged by that. And given our broad customer portfolio, different customers are at different points in terms of how they feel on their own businesses and their outlook for the second half. So it's not unusual for us to have some puts and takes in terms of demand, I think that's what we're seeing here. I feel good about the forward demand. Fall bookings were up year over year. Winter bookings were up even more than that. And then the demand for early spring '27 demand was notably above a year ago. So I think the forward profile looks good. I think as a starting point coming into the year, we had an aggressive plan and we just not seen all of that demand materialize, but we're still going to have good growth in the fourth quarter in particular and full year growth will be up as I said in that low single digit range. So I think the outlook for wholesale is good overall. You just have some puts and takes by customers.

Got it. And then maybe Sharon, just one for you. Just kind of curious what your first order of business would be. What's first on your list? Something you can get done this year to impact the organization and same question for '27.

Yes, thank you so much. Clearly, there's still quite a bit to sort through on what all the opportunities are for Carter's. I tried to outline much of what we'll be focusing on from a strategic perspective in the remarks, and we'll be sharing a lot more about what our expectations are and how we plan to look toward the future and monetize so much of this extraordinary brand equity that Carter's has and all of these assets that we have available to us on future calls and as we go. But clearly, my first order of business is outlined, as I spoke, to get to know the leadership team, understand what's going on from a financial perspective, understand our customer base and where we stand and look to where our core competencies are, our brand that assists from a consumer perspective, and find those intersections and build a strategy to be able to optimize those opportunities.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Jay Sole from UBS. Your question, please.

Great. Thank you so much, Sharon. I'd love to ask you more about what you just said. Can you sort of define what you think success will look like for yourself, for the organization, as you come in as CEO. Give us a little bit idea of what your ambition is, took the job, you know, in terms of like some financial outlook and just goals that you have even more qualitatively. Thank you.

Thanks so much. Well, one of the reasons I took the job and I tried to cover some of that in the remarks is I've spent basically my entire career in the youth and kids business and that's I almost hate to say it, 30 years at this point. And it is an extremely important consumer base. It's my favorite consumer base, I'd have to say. And in my opinion, the most important consumer base, the service of kids and their caregivers. So I believe there's a tremendous amount of opportunity and when you combine that with the enormous brand awareness and more importantly in some ways, the trust that Carter's has and OshKosh has, there's a lot of value to unlock.

At least what I found in the past working on a lot of other historic story brands with high brand awareness and trust, when you can get the business model, which by the way the operational structures here are very strong, I've been very pleased to see some of that. When you can get the company to operate on multiple cylinders, understanding, putting the consumer in the center, which it's difficult sometimes, because the consumer evolves so rapidly in this particular type of marketplace and different generational aspects of the way the consumers work. And that we're dealing with multiple generations in the way we have to think about things.

I mentioned this on the call as well. From the new mom to the mom of second and third kids to the grandparents, as well as in some ways shifting a little more kids focus. We have multiple ways to engage with this consumer, leveraging this trust, leveraging this operational expertise. So all of that is to say, back to your original question, clearly our objective is to drive shareholder value. We're going to focus on profitable growth. And that's not growth for growth's sake, but it's also not always entirely focused on the bottom line, because we believe that market share is going to be a very important part of how we win in the long run, not just in the markets that we're in, but even at some point when it's right, and we're ready to look at this on a more global basis.

Got it, that's very helpful. Maybe if I can just follow up on that one other one. What's the biggest thing you think you can do different? You know, from what maybe Carter's was in the past. Like where's an opportunity, maybe an out-of-the-box idea that you have that you think can really work and unlock some of that profitable growth you're talking about?

Well, I think that some, what's going to be a little bit interesting here is some of the words that we're going to say, like consumer-centric, brand building, data-driven, are going to be similar words. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that strategy. In fact, when you can find the appropriate convergence of these things and you can understand not just where the consumer is that where we expect to see them going, if you can find the interlink of what our brand means and what it can mean to the consumer, find a way to service their needs in a as well as drive ongoing relationship, the engagement piece is important. I'm not so certain that we've optimized that opportunity.

Some of that has to do with the advancements that we've made in our communication strategy, our marketing strategy, our loyalty program, and always thinking about that what's next, the anticipatory aspect of being a great brand, as well as the fact that we have, again, this great infrastructure and organizational structure. I believe that we have to look at that intersection of all three of those things. So where's the big idea? Although a lot of that language is there, it's not just the what from a strategy, it's the how. And the magic is often in the how. And just, you know, weeks in, haven't sat with the board yet. I'm going to be a little bit reticent to sit and start laying out my very next step, but we definitely have some great ideas on how to work with all of these extraordinary assets, as I mentioned, to drive this business.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Ike Boruchow from Wells Fargo. Your question please.

Hey, good morning. Welcome, Sharon. Can I ask about the gross margin specifically? Can you quantify the clearance activity that you guys took in the second quarter, just how much of a drag was that to either the retail gross margin or the total gross margin of the company? And then for Q3, you said gross margins up. Could you give any more detail there and what the drivers are and then kind of similar question to 4Q. Like, should there be a lot of variability? Should they both be up by a decent amount? Just kind of curious if you could kind of give us a little bit more detail there. All right. Thanks.

Good morning. I'll give you some generalized feedback, given that I've only been here 5 weeks, but I'm going to let the experts in the area answer that question. But, you know, obviously, like many, many companies going into the quarter, we still are holding on to some of the pricing increases and as we were responding to the marketplace, we did modify some of those that in certain sectors of the business, not across the board approach, including some seasonal items that Alison mentioned. So that, of course, would impact our gross margin in the quarter, but I'll hand that over to both Richard and Alison to give you a little more color.

I think that's a good overview. There are a lot of moving pieces in gross margin in the second quarter. It was probably 80 or so basis points worse than our forecast. I think the additional discounting in U.S. retail was a portion of that. I think also just having a higher balance of wholesale sales given the pull forward of volume we saw there. So some portion of those two factors drove some portion of that 80 basis points. I don't know that I'll parse it out beyond that. We do have gross margin expansion planned in Q3.

I'd say a considerable amount, just under 200 basis points by our forecast. That has a lot to do with anniversarying the tariffs which began, the [ IEPA ] level tariffs which began in Q3 of last year. We're lapping that now. Obviously with the plus 10-ish percent tariffs versus what was put in place a year ago. That's a major benefit. We're forecasting improved from retail, continued gains in pricing, as Alison said in her remarks in Q3. We do have expansion planned in fourth quarter, I would say, much less than what I just articulated for Q3. And again, mix has a major element to it of that as well. We'll have a bigger proportion of wholesale volume that typically happens in the fourth quarter. So you have a bit of a mixed dynamic shift between Q3 and Q4.

Thanks, Richard. If I can just sneak one more in there. We've heard a lot about volatility across retail in the month of July. Obviously, you guys have been comping very nicely for the last year plus. Can you just comment, quarter to date, anything that stands out at you. Any more detail there might be helpful. Thank you.

Hi, it's Alison. Thanks for the question. I would say that we are seeing flat comps on the month of July, which is very much in line with our expectations. Don't forget though, when you think about the quarter, it's a back-end weighted quarter for us. July is a difficult month in terms of the in retail to make any reasonable projections. So September has an over-weighted position. So I wouldn't really, you know, we just, this is a wait and see kind of thing, and it's usually discount months.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Tom Nikic from Needham. Your question, please.

Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking my question. And, Sharon, welcome aboard. Looking forward to working with you. So I want to ask about U.S. retail. So it sounds like e-commerce accelerated while store traffic decelerated. Do you think that's a function of the inflation in gas prices and people kind of trying to not wanting to kind of hop in their car and make a trip to the mall or a trip to the outlet center or whatever and then just kind of staying home and shopping online and I'm just wondering if that dynamic is part of your thinking for 2H as well.

Yes, thanks for the question. I think we are, as we mentioned in our remarks, we are seeing growth in both channels, and we are feeling good about the traffic outcomes, even though we did see a decel in stores quarter over quarter. Even though we saw that decel in stores, as I mentioned in my remarks, we did outpace the industry significantly from a traffic perspective in stores. So we definitely saw there was something happening with the consumers more broadly in terms of where they were choosing to shift or choosing to shop, which I think is kind of the crux of your question. I do think we believe that part of inflation and some of those pressures are people wanting the convenience of e-commerce and the ability to, yes, just order it online, pick it up in a store, have it shipped directly to them.

So, yes, I think that is part of what we're thinking. We also see that in some of our omnichannel metrics, which is buy online and pick up in store was up from a year ago, year-over-year perspective. So I do think that there is some consumer behavior to the convenience of the online channel and potentially not needing to get in their cars and drive. Now that being said, we still saw very strong performance in our outlet stores, which are generally those stores that people are driving the farthest to get to. I think it's important to understand.

Part of this is reflective of the underlying power of having an omnichannel strategy. We are, as I mentioned in the remarks, our objective is to be there with the consumer when they want it, how they want it, under the circumstances that they want it. And having a robust e-comm organization allows us to be there if the consumer wants to shift the way they want it, they want to shop. Also, as we work on this with our enhancements on the loyalty program and some of the things that we've done, we know that the consumer that shops in both of those channels, both of our high touch retail as well as Omni, those are more valuable consumers to us.

So it's great when we see somebody that may have originally engaged in a store and then wants to shop online, does that because we're going to end up in statistically greater lifetime value and greater AUR with that particular consumer. So it's good for us when consumers move from one channel to the other and basically we're fairly agnostic on how they shop from the direct perspective. On the macro front, this category tends to be pretty resilient. I mean, clearly there isn't a category that's completely resistant to economic volatility. They just keep growing. So we're here for them.

Very helpful. Thanks very much and best of luck in the second half of the year.

Thank you. And our next question comes from the line of Kendall Toscano from Bank of America. Your question please.

Hi, thanks for taking my question. I'm curious if you could just remind us how margins compare between stores and e-commerce and how sales are shipping to e-commerce would impact your overall margin rate? Thanks.

Well, I would say they tend to be lower gross margin sales because you've got the shipping cost to the end consumer, but it's a very good operating margin business for us. We often hear that from folks when we comment on it that they're surprised by it, but we typically it's a bigger basket size online than it is in store. People are buying multiples to leverage the shipping and also we have a very low return rate and a very highly automated efficient distribution operation, so all of which combine to give us, I think, a better than average operating margin profile for the e-commerce business.

Thanks, that's helpful. And then also just as a follow-up, I'm curious if you haven't already quantified this, just how much potential EPS upside exists if tariff rates remain unchanged through the year end, and also what the plans are for using the cash or getting some tariff refunds. Thanks.

Well, I have. I'm not going to share with you, Kendall, what I think the upside is. It's just too early in the year, and we've given ourselves some room here. There is clearly some opportunity, upside relative to the original tariff assumptions that we entered the year with. I think we articulated that the gross tariff amount was something like $200 million over our historic baseline. We think that's probably lower to the extent of something along the lines of $75 million. Now, we've used some portion of that with the lower wholesale volume that we're projecting and the additional discounting that we've done to clear some. But beyond that, there is still some portion of that that we've not flowed through yet. That would be the amount that's upside to the year, hopefully all other things being equal.

As it relates to the cash, we're certainly happy to receive the refunds back. There was some speculation in the market that the government was going to resist that and not return that money, so we're thrilled to have it back on our balance sheet. I think there is still continued uncertainty, though, that we have to consider. Certainly from a tariff point of view, as I mentioned, the senior administration officials multiple times have said that their intention is to return the tariff rates to that [ IEPA ] level, if not higher. So we're cautious that we're out of the woods as it relates to tariffs. Second, the lion's share of our business is ahead of us. It's a very uncertain market.

To maintain more liquidity in this environment is absolutely the prudent thing to do. We have a long record of, I think, maintaining a very efficient balance sheet. I have no interest in having an inefficient balance sheet. We are also in our planning season with a new leader. And so as we go through the coming months here and lay out our plans for the coming years and we'll have a better line of sight to the investment needs for the future, we business, I think that's the time to perhaps do something with the cash. But at the moment, running with a bit more liquidity I think makes a lot of sense.

Thank you. This does conclude the question and answer session of today's program. I'd like to hand the program back to Sharon Price John for any further remarks.

Thank you all so much for joining us today on this morning's call, and we look forward to giving you an update on our progress on the next call.

Thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect. Good day.

Welcome to Carter's First Quarter Fiscal 2026 Earnings Conference Call. On the call are Richard Westenberger, Interim Chief Executive Officer and President, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer; Allison Peterson, Chief Retail & Digital Officer; and T.C. Robillard, Vice President, Investor Relations.

Please note that today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to T.C. Robillard.

Thank you. Good morning, everyone. We issued our first quarter 2026 earnings release earlier today. The release and presentation materials for today's call are available in our Investor Relations website at ir.carters.com.

Note that the statements on today's call about items such as the company's expectations and plans are forward-looking statements. For a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to vary from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please see our most recent SEC filings as well as the earnings release and presentation materials posted on our website.

In these materials, you will also find reconciliations of various non-GAAP financial measurements referenced during this call. After today's prepared remarks, we will take questions as time allows.

I will now turn the call over to Richard.

Thank you, T.C. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining us on the call this morning for an update on our business, and I'm pleased to have my colleague, Allison Peterson, who leads our North American direct-to-consumer businesses, joining me today to provide her thoughts.

As usual, we have a lot going on here at Carter's. As I'm sure many of you saw, we announced a leadership transition last week. Doug Palladini has departed as our CEO. We have continued progress to report today, and I'd like to thank Doug for his leadership and contributions over the past year. Anyone who met Doug quickly appreciated his passion for our brands and our mission of serving families with young children, and we wish Doug all the best.

We are looking forward to welcoming Sharon Price John as our new CEO next month. Sharon has a rich background in the children's industry, having held senior leadership positions at several outstanding companies in our space, and she has a demonstrated track record of driving transformation and growth.

Now turning to our first quarter performance. The year is off to a good start. Our first quarter performance, both sales and earnings exceeded the expectations we shared with you on our last call. We saw higher year-over-year demand for our brands across all of our channels in the first quarter. The Easter holiday came a bit earlier this year, which benefited demand. Our sense is that consumers were out shopping broadly in the first quarter. Earnings, although above our expectations were impacted by a number of factors, including the net negative impact of higher tariffs, spending and interest costs. Areas of progress that we'll highlight today include continued positive comparable sales in our U.S. retail business, driven in part by the success of our investment in demand creation in driving higher traffic to our U.S. stores and websites. We're also continuing to attract new consumers to our brands, including Gen-Z. Balancing out these encouraging green shoots are multiple and continued uncertainties in the marketplace, including the evolving tariff landscape and questions about the resilience of the consumer in the face of ongoing inflation and other pressures.

And we remain on our journey to improve the profitability of the company. We know we have continued work to do on this objective in particular. Today, we'll share our thoughts on these matters and how we're thinking about our business over the balance of the year. In reviewing our first quarter performance and our outlook, our comments this morning will track along with the presentation posted to the Investor Relations portion of our website.

Turning to our presentation materials. Beginning on Page 2, we have our GAAP basis P&L for the first quarter. Our net sales were $681 million. Our reported operating income was $28 million compared to $26 million last year, and our reported earnings per share were $0.39 compared to $0.43 in first quarter last year.

On the following page, we've summarized our non-GAAP adjustments. We had no adjustments to our reported results in the first quarter of 2026. Last year, we had adjustments related to operating model improvement costs and leadership transition costs, which reduced our reported profitability. Our comments this morning will speak to our performance on an adjusted basis, which excludes these unusual items in the prior period. Our first quarter adjusted P&L is on Page 4. Our net sales in the first quarter of $681 million represented growth of 8% over the prior year. On these sales, gross margin was 43.1%, a decrease of slightly more than 300 basis points compared to prior year. As expected, year-over-year, our gross margin rate was pressured by tariffs, a gross incremental impact of roughly $50 million in the quarter. This negative impact was partially offset by improved pricing, other supply chain mitigation initiatives, a higher mix of U.S. retail sales and the benefit of our productivity initiatives.

On a consolidated basis, AURs improved in the high single digits and units were up low single digits. In U.S. Retail, first quarter AURs were up low single digits, and we achieved higher pricing gains in our U.S. Wholesale and International segments. First quarter adjusted SG&A increased 3% over prior year to $270 million. The increase was driven by incremental investments in demand creation and general inflationary pressures in wages and rent, which were partially offset by the benefits from our productivity initiatives. We do believe our productivity initiatives are delivering as expected, roughly $6 million in cost reduction in the first quarter between the cost of goods sold and SG&A lines of the P&L. These savings are helping to fund our investment agenda, including the incremental spend on demand creation.

While spending was up in dollars, we achieved 180 basis points of leverage in the quarter. First quarter adjusted operating income was $28 million with an adjusted operating margin of 4.2%. While ahead of our expectations, this profitability was lower than last year. Clearly, we're focused on delivering growth in both the top line and operating earnings. And to this end, we have operating income growth planned in the second half of 2026.

Below the line, net interest and other expenses increased over prior year as expected due to higher interest costs and a higher debt balance related to the refinancing of our senior notes in fourth quarter last year. Our effective tax rate was approximately 28% in the first quarter, up 60 basis points compared to prior year, which was driven primarily by the new higher minimum tax in Hong Kong, which we highlighted last quarter. For the full year, we're forecasting an effective tax rate of approximately 22%. The net of all this on the bottom line, first quarter adjusted earnings per share were $0.39 compared to $0.66 last year. The impact of our debt refinancing on first quarter 2026 EPS was approximately $0.08 per share.

On Page 5, we have the details of first quarter performance by business segment. As mentioned, consolidated net sales grew roughly $50 million over last year's first quarter or by 8% with growth in each of our business segments. Adjusted operating income declined $7 million, resulting in the adjusted operating margin of 4.2%, which I just mentioned. We achieved meaningfully higher profitability year-over-year in our U.S. Retail and International segments. However, these gains were more than offset by lower profitability in our wholesale business, which can be attributed to the net negative impact of tariffs. Corporate expenses for the first quarter were comparable to prior year. And Allison will now provide some additional perspective on our U.S. Retail businesses beginning on Page 6.

Thank you, Richard. Our U.S. Retail business delivered strong performance for us in the first quarter, continuing to build on momentum we've seen over the past several quarters. Total U.S. retail sales -- net sales grew nearly 13% in the first quarter. Comparable retail sales increased over 10% versus last year and nearly 5% on a 2-year basis. This was our fourth consecutive quarter of comp growth, and we continue to improve our comp trend on a 2-year basis. This quarter, performance was strong across both stores and e-commerce with strength spanning all product age segments.

Our baby assortment remained the primary driver, while we also delivered growth in toddler and kid. We do believe an earlier Easter contributed to business in March as we expected. We estimate the earlier and stronger Easter selling period likely contributed about 2 points of comp in the quarter. Comps were strong in both retail channels driven by higher traffic and higher average transaction values. We are seeing some increased penetration of our opening price point product and clearance sales were up in the quarter. We think this reflects a consumer who is more focused on price. This makes sense to us in the context of higher gas prices and volatile consumer confidence, likely in part due to continued persistent inflation across the economy and the unsettled global situation. Despite these factors, we successfully increased AURs by low single digits in the first quarter while also increasing units by double digits.

As Richard mentioned, in addition to the benefit of our demand creation investments, improving traffic across our retail channels, we're also seeing good progress in growing our consumer file. Our active consumer count continued to grow in the first quarter, and we added new Gen-Z consumers to our business who are gravitating to our higher AUR products.

Despite the negative net impact of higher tariffs, the strong comp sales performance and benefits from our productivity initiatives led to good improvements in Retail's operating profit and margin in the first quarter.

On Page 7. During the first quarter, we launched a collaboration between Disney and our OshKosh brand featuring Winnie the Pooh. This initiative was seamlessly integrated across our digital and physical touch points through distinct and compelling consumer experiences. Consumers love the unique product, which leveraged OshKosh iconic denim. While not a material contributor to sales in the quarter, it was a highly successful collaboration, which brought new consumers to our portfolio of brands and overpenetrated toward Gen-Z. Notably, the average AUR of this special product was more than double our U.S. Retail average.

On the following page, as we've shared previously, continued investment in marketing is a very important element of our growth strategy. We saw strong results from our marketing investments in the quarter, resulting in increased traffic to our channels and growth in our consumer file. We have added tactics to connect to consumers in the places where they are spending significant time discovering brands. Social media and connected TV are 2 great examples of channels where we are seeing increased engagement while leveraging content creators and influencers for their authenticity and high credibility with consumers.

I'll now turn the call back to Richard.

Thank you, Allison. Turning to our performance in U.S. Wholesale and International on Page 9. In U.S. wholesale, net sales were up slightly over last year. Although we improved pricing in response to tariffs, this was offset by a reduction in unit volume. Exclusive brand sales grew versus last year, driven by the Child of Mine and Just One You new brands, while sales of Simple Joys were comparable to prior year in the first quarter. This is an improvement in recent trend for Simple Joys. As expected, profitability in wholesale was lower than a year ago. Virtually all of this decline can be attributed to the net negative impact of the incremental tariffs.

As we mentioned on our last call, we expected first quarter wholesale sales to be softer and that tariffs would meaningfully affect this segment's profitability. As we look to the second half, we believe we're well positioned for sales and operating profit growth in wholesale. Our customers have responded well to our fall and winter product offerings, which has driven sequential improvement in our seasonal order bookings.

In addition, the net impact from tariffs tapers meaningfully beginning in the third quarter. Our businesses outside the United States have continued to deliver good performance. Total reported international net sales increased 14% over last year and by 8% on a constant currency basis. Growth in the quarter was driven by our businesses in Canada and Mexico. The largest component of international, our Canadian business posted strong total and comp sales growth, similar to the U.S. business likely benefited from the earlier Easter holiday, and we saw strength across both our stores and e-commerce channels.

Demand in Mexico was particularly strong in the first quarter. Easter is very important in this market, and our Q1 business reflected strong holiday demand. Total net sales grew over 40% in Mexico with $3 million of the growth attributable to better exchange rates. Our team delivered a plus 21% comp in Mexico in the first quarter. Last year's business had been negatively impacted by some distribution center disruptions, which benefited this year's comparison somewhat, but the underlying trends and demand profile of our business in Mexico continue to be very strong. We're continuing to pursue door growth in this market with plans to open 12 new stores this year. International operating income was approximately $4 million in the first quarter compared to roughly breakeven performance last year. The improved profitability was driven by productivity savings as well as lower product costs resulting from favorable exchange rates.

On Page 10, we have some photos of a new store in Mexico. Our team in Mexico has done a great job taking our successful co-branded store model from here in the U.S. and deploying it across the market in Mexico. On Page 11, we've provided some balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Our balance sheet is in good shape, and we ended the quarter with substantial liquidity. Net inventories were $466 million, down 2% compared to prior year and down over 14% from year-end. First quarter inventory units were 9% lower than a year ago. The amount of ending inventory value attributable to the incremental tariffs at the end of the first quarter was $26 million. Excluding this amount, inventory dollars year-over-year were down 7%. We generated positive operating cash flow of $6 million in the first quarter compared to a use of $49 million last year. This better result was due to improved working capital and favorable timing of interest payments versus the prior year. And in the quarter, we paid $9 million in dividends.

Before I cover our expectations for second quarter and the balance of the year, I'd like to summarize some of our thoughts on tariffs, which can be found on Page 12. The impact of tariffs on our results is a complicated topic and made even more so by the developments in the courts and ongoing uncertainty about the future direction the administration may take. For context, we've always paid import duties at Carter's. Tariff rates have typically differed somewhat by country of origin. But in total, we historically paid a little over $100 million annually to bring our products into the United States. This represented a historical effective tariff rate of roughly 13%. The imposition of the additional IEEPA tariffs was estimated to add over $200 million of incremental tariffs to this historical baseline, bringing the effective tariff rate above 35%. Our plans for the year were developed assuming these IEEPA tariffs would be in place for the entire year. Given the Supreme Court's recent decision, the overall tariffs were reduced to a 10% additional tariff rate for all countries, also an additional incremental tariff rate in India related to Russian oil purchases was eliminated.

As a reminder, for financial reporting purposes, tariffs become part of inventory costs when product is received. These costs are added to the balance sheet value of inventory. Any changes in tariff rates, including reductions, are not an immediate benefit to the P&L. That benefit occurs over time as products are sold and their cost, including tariffs become part of cost of goods sold. Our guidance reflects the benefit of the lower 10% incremental tariff rate on imports through the second quarter and the elimination of the India Russian oil-related tariff for the balance of the year. We've assumed the higher IEEPA level tariff rates incorporated into our original plan remain in effect for product imported through the second half of the year. We maintain this assumption for higher-than-historical tariff rates based in part on comments from the administration that they intend to reimpose higher tariff rates at least commensurate with what was implemented under IEEPA beginning midyear. If this does not happen or if tariffs return entirely to their historical baseline rates, we may have some upside to our outlook, all else being equal.

Needless to say, we expect changing tariff rates may impact the marketplace conditions, especially pricing, which makes it difficult to call significant changes to our previous outlook for the year right now.

Turning to our outlook for 2026 on Page 14 of the presentation materials. As we indicated in our press release this morning, we are reiterating our full year sales and earnings guidance. The year is off to a good start, and we're certainly pleased by that, but the lion's share of our year is still ahead of us, and we're mindful of a number of uncertainties that complicate projecting too far out into the future right now. The consumer continues to spend, but as we noted earlier, has become more value focused as of late. We believe fluctuations in consumer confidence and inflation may continue to affect demand for our brands. We're watching the marketplace closely. Some competitors may begin to take their prices down, and we may need to respond accordingly to ensure we're as competitive in our pricing as needed.

To this end, we may need to reinvest some portion of potential upside from lower-than-planned tariffs into sharper pricing in certain parts of the business. It's certainly our intention to hold on to the pricing gains we've achieved to the greatest extent possible. And as I said earlier, we're cautious that we're out of the woods when it comes to tariffs, it's possible that new tactics could be employed by the government to reinstate the previous IEEPA level tariffs or an even higher level of tariffs on imports across a range of our sourcing countries.

To reiterate our expectations for the full year, we're expecting net sales growth in the low to mid-single digits over 2025. This growth reflects anniversarying the extra week in 2025's calendar. We're expecting growth in each of our business segments. In our U.S. retail business, we're planning low single-digit sales growth with comp sales up in the mid-single digits. In U.S. wholesale, we're planning net sales up in the mid-single digits. And sales in our International segment are also planned up in the mid-single digits, reflecting growth in each of the principal components in international, Canada, Mexico and international partners.

On profitability, we're expecting adjusted operating income will also grow in the low to mid-single digits over 2025. We continue to forecast that more of our profit growth will occur in the second half of the year. In part, this is due to the higher year-over-year investment spending and interest costs in the first half of the year versus the second. As we indicated on our last call, we're also expecting a smaller net negative impact from tariffs in the second half of the year as tariffs become more comparable and a more significant benefit from pricing as planned in the second half versus the first half of the year.

2026 earnings per share are expected to be down low double digits to down mid-teens over 2025's adjusted earnings per share of $3.47. Our outlook for operating cash flow in the range of $110 million to $120 million remains unchanged. Also unchanged is our forecast for CapEx of approximately $55 million in 2026, with investments in new stores in Mexico, distribution center upgrades and technology initiatives accounting for the majority of planned spend.

Our expectations for the second quarter are summarized on Page 15. Second quarter net sales are expected to increase in the low single digits compared to last year. By segment, we're expecting in U.S. retail growth in the low single-digit range with comparable sales planned up mid-single digits. As expected, we saw some softening of demand trend in April. In part, we think given the strength of business in late March in advance of Easter, April comparable sales in our U.S. retail business were down just under 4%. On a combined March and April basis, comps were up in the high single digits. In U.S. wholesale, we're planning net sales up in the mid- to high single-digit range. In international, we're planning net sales roughly comparable to a year ago.

We're planning second quarter gross margin down approximately 100 basis points over last year, principally due to the net unfavorable impact of tariffs, offset somewhat by higher planned pricing, supply chain mitigation actions, a higher mix of U.S. retail sales and productivity improvements. We're planning second quarter adjusted operating income in the range of $11 million to $13 million. Second quarter adjusted EPS is projected in the range of $0.02 to $0.06.

Before we open it up to questions, I'd like to thank our thousands of employees across the globe who work tirelessly every day and exhibit such passion for our brands and the families we serve. We are extremely grateful for their efforts. And with those remarks, we're ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Paul Lejuez with Citi.

This is Brandon Cheatham on for Paul. I just wanted to touch base on the SG&A change. I think previously, you were looking for that to be roughly flat year-over-year, and now you're looking for a low single-digit increase. I was just hoping that you could unpack what changed there.

Sure. So try to give you a little color on that. Well, first, I would say it's expected to be up very low single digits. So it's not something that I'm viewing as an enormous reset to our expectations. A couple of things contributing to that. First, we've had a handful of our intended store closings that are pushing out a bit in the year. They're just going to happen a bit later for a variety of reasons. That is additive to the SG&A line. Also, we've made a decision to spend a bit more on marketing. We feel like we're generating very good returns from those investments. So there's a modest uptick in the spend on marketing, driving very good returns. That's also additive to the SG&A line.

Beyond that, I would say there's a couple of areas that are running a little bit hotter than planned. Professional fees are a little higher, perhaps a little bit more incremental impact from inflation across wages and rent. Those are the primary drivers. But we have a good record of managing spend pretty tightly here, and my expectation is we'll continue to do that.

Got it. And just as a follow-up on the tariff assumption. So you're assuming that you have a 23% effective rate for basically 4 months and then we return to the 36% rate. Can you just help us like what are you assuming the impact is on gross margin for the balance of the year? By my calculation, it seems like the effective tariff rate that you're assuming before was 36% goes to 32%. Just help us how much of that is flowing through on gross margin in your guide.

Yes. I would say it's a difficult question to answer with a lot of precision around just what may happen in the landscape. I think we've given ourselves a little bit of room in terms of what may happen from a marketplace pricing point of view. We obviously held our full year guidance. To your point, we've assumed those tariff rates go back up to the IEEPA level for the second half of the year. The upside that we've reflected in having the benefit of the lower 10% rate and the elimination of the India specific tariff is about $30 million, but there is still considerable gross margin pressure in our plan in the second half. Now there's a higher benefit from assumed pricing in the second half as well. So -- but it is still dilutive on the gross margin line for the year.

But all else equal, you're assuming that $30 million flows through to gross profit or you don't anticipate maybe raising prices as much in the second half?

Yes. I think we've just given ourselves a little bit more room, a little bit more flexibility on that pricing and gross margin line of the P&L. So we have not flowed it through. We've held the full year guidance, but that's the benefit of all things being equal, if we're able to achieve our planned pricing and given the reduction in the tariff rates that we will realize in first half imports and such, that's the amount that would flow through. But again, we're not flowing it through because there's just too much uncertainty in the marketplace right now.

Our next question comes from Jay Sole with UBS.

Richard, I'm curious what initiatives maybe that have been going on for the last couple of quarters that were maybe started with Doug in his tenure will continue versus like what stuff might kind of be paused as you wait for Sharon to come in and put her stamp on the business. Can you give us a little sense of that?

Sure. Well, as you know, Jay, having followed us for a long time, we have a number of things underway here that we think are generating good returns for us. I think, first and foremost, the investment in demand creation really is -- has been an inflection point for us in terms of driving improved traffic, both to the stores and to the website. That has been an issue in our U.S. retail business for a couple of years prior. We felt like we under-indexed relative to some of the better brands out there, our peers in the industry. So I think we will continue to ramp that up, and we're watching for any signs of inefficiency in that spend. We've not reached that point yet. So that certainly will continue.

I think the overall emphasis just on brands and product. This is a product-centric company. And so we continue to work very hard on our assortments to make sure that we've got the most compelling product that attracts and motivates today's generation of parents. That's an evolving landscape. And so I think the attention around the product side of things, in particular, will continue. I think the emphasis on productivity, and that's a broad range set of initiatives, starting with our store fleet. So as you know, we have pruned a number of unproductive low-margin stores. If you're going to have stores, they need to be special, they need to be productive. And so all the efforts that are looking at improving the productivity of our retail store fleet. We've got initiatives also around the e-commerce side of the house. So enhancements are being made to the website that has a lot to do with just the experience for the consumer online, more branding stories. We have a great transactional website. We think there's an opportunity again to have the power of the brand shine through a bit more distinctly. And so our teams -- our great e-commerce teams are working on that.

So I would say more will go forward versus stopping or pausing. Sharon certainly will come in, and we expect her to put her fingerprints on the organization and on the strategy. Fortunately, she's been read in on a number of the things that we have underway here, and I think that was a point of attraction for that we're not starting over. We're not starting from blank slate. There's a lot of good things that are underway here, and I would expect most of those to go forward.

All right. That's super helpful. Maybe if you can also give us a sense of what do you think the children's apparel industry grew during the March-April period? I mean you believe you took share? I mean, how do you think about that?

Yes. I don't know about the March-April period specifically. For the first quarter, our data suggests that the market was up just under 5% year-over-year. So there was healthy growth, and that's on top of considerable growth in the market in the fourth quarter. So the consumer does seem to be outspending on their kids. We think that's a healthy backdrop for our business. Our data suggests that we've maintained our share overall.

Our next question comes from Jon Keypour with Goldman Sachs.

I have 2 questions. One of them is very quick. The first is just what can you tell us about tariff refunds you anticipate getting, timing and potential use of those funds? And then just on advertising as a percent of spend, I think historically, you guys have been around 3%, and you have mentioned some willingness to pick that number up to 5%. It sounds like acceleration on the advertising is going to be part of the SG&A increase in the guide.

I'm just wondering, it seems like the ROI is very good or the ROAS is very good on the advertising piece, not to put an even more pointed kind of focus on it, but like why not more, I guess? At what point do you feel like you can really accelerate and get up to that 5 and how it still be incremental and still get the right return?

Right. Jon, thanks for the question. First, as it relates to tariff refunds, there's about $130 million of incremental IEEPA tariffs that we paid between last year and early this year before the Supreme Court's decision. That is the amount that we have filed for refund with the government. So our claims have been entered into CBP's portal. We do see some progress. We've been tracking this pretty closely as everyone in the industry has. It does look like there is some progress and an intention to start disbursing those funds. We're not counting on that. We're not recognizing that until the cash hits the bank account.

But we're in line for our refund, and we're monitoring it closely. As it relates to use of the funds, capital allocation is something that we talk about with our Board all the time. We'll continue to do that. We're not necessarily in a liquidity crunch. We're not constraining investment right now based on not having that tariff money. Our first preference would be to put the money back to work in the business. And so we're actively looking for opportunities to accelerate the growth of the business. Again, we're not capital constrained, where we have good investment cases for investment, we're continuing with that work.

And marketing is a good example of that. I would say we're stepping up the investment by a little over $20 million this year. So that 3-ish percent number will start to inch up a bit. I think we're stepping our way into it and monitoring it and measuring it to make sure that we're getting the kind of returns that we should and that make the investment justified.

To your point, we might be able to go faster, but I think $20-plus million investment is significant for us. We want to just make sure it's generating the right returns, and we'll continue to spend as we start to see these -- the benefits in the business.

Our next question comes from Jim Chartier with Monness, Crespi, Hardt.

Richard, just curious what gives you the confidence for second quarter comp sales to be up mid-single digits given the softness that you saw in April?

Yes. Thanks, Jim. I think that the April softness wasn't entirely unexpected, just given the strength of business in March. I think Easter was probably a bit more pronounced of a benefit than we had planned. From the commentary that I've read, others in the industry saw their businesses soften a bit in April. That combined number of high single-digit comp was terrific. We've already -- we're only a few days into May. We've started to see business turn solidly positive again from a comp point of view in our U.S. retail business.

And then the compares become a bit easier. May and June are easier compares than April was a year ago. So I think we feel like we've got good momentum in the business. I think, again, the marketing investments appear to be successful in driving traffic to both channels. So that's what gives us the encouragement that we'll achieve that result. Allison, anything that you would add to that?

The only other thing I would add is that as we continue to see our consumer file grow, that gives us some momentum with bringing new and returning customers back to the brand.

Great. And then can you talk about the Umbro collaboration? What are you seeing with that? And then how are you thinking about collaborations going forward? Is that something you think you want to increase the number as you go forward? And what does the pipeline look like?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think we are feeling very bullish on collaborations. We've spent some time on the call talking about our collaboration with Winnie the Pooh and OshKosh, and we're very, very happy with the results we saw from that collaboration.

Umbro has also started out strong. We are seeing, as with most things, people excited to purchase the baby products first as it relates to the size offerings, and we see toddler and kid a little bit purchase closer to the time of the event, so knowing that the World Cup is up and coming. We anticipate that we'll still see some nice demand. I would say from an experience perspective, we're very excited with how the Umbro collaboration has come to life across all of our channels, very similar to what we saw with Winnie the Pooh. And we do feel pretty confident about our collab pipeline for the rest of the year.

Jim, I think the collaborations have been a good way for us to introduce something new, some newness in the assortment, which is a bit of a spark again on that traffic front, brings the consumer in, they find something new and different relative to their expectations. So we'll do it selectively, I think, going forward where it makes sense for our brand and then obviously, whoever we're collaborating with. But there's a place for it in our business in a more meaningful way than we've done historically.

Our next question comes from Ike Boruchow with Wells Fargo.

Richard, 2 for me. I guess the first question is, I know the Q will come out later, but can you share, at least at a high level, the gross margin details, the decline in the first quarter at retail and what it was at wholesale in the first quarter? I guess I'm asking because it seems clear there's a much larger decline in wholesale. And I kind of just want to ask why you're not able to mitigate the pressure in one channel versus the other?

And then the follow-up to that is to stay with wholesale is that the wholesale margin run rate now looks like it's come down to more like a mid-teens versus the low 20s a few years ago. Do you expect that to regain that lost margin in '27 and beyond? Or do you kind of view this as the new normal with some structural changes in that channel and DTC kind of is the margin opportunity for the consolidated business going forward?

Right. Yes. So good questions. I won't comment on the specific gross margin changes by channel. Those are in the Q. And to be honest, I don't have them right in front of me, but I'll speak at a high level. The wholesale business, for sure, has been more impacted by tariffs, and that's for a variety of reasons. We are much more in control of our destiny in our U.S. DTC business than we are with wholesale. And we plan that business collaboratively with our wholesale customers. And this has been an evolution. The landscape has been evolving as it related to the tariffs being put in place and how the industry has responded. I'd say there's been good partnership and collaboration with those customers, more of a sharing convention of the cost of the tariffs as we've kind of stepped our way into them. I think we've made more progress as we've gotten into 2026, but that coverage was less than what we had achieved in our U.S. retail business, where we just obviously control much more of the various levers in the business, pricing units and so forth.

So it was expected coming into the year that we would not fully cover all of the costs of tariffs in the wholesale channel. And that has had, to your second question, the flow-through impact on wholesale segment profitability. And there's other things that have affected it as well. We've made some make investments in the product itself, which we felt like we had to make from just a competitiveness of the assortment point of view, and that has caused the margin to run down a bit. It's been a very margin-rich business over the years for many years. I think the mix has also changed pretty considerably over the years as it relates to the customer profile. So the department stores, which are the best margin part of that business have just continued to decline. And I think that's more structural as it relates to the industry, nothing to do with their regard for Carter's or the demand for our products. It's just that as a channel has not grown and has been contracting a bit. Business is more concentrated in the mass channel than it had been. Target and Walmart continue to be very good margin businesses for us, but probably not quite at the rate that those department stores have been over time.

So I think for the next little bit, the margins will be lower than they've been historically, but our internal plans show margin expansion over time. That's an important objective for all of us that every part of this business is expected to grow its profitability over time. And that's how we're approaching it. But certainly, the impact of tariffs cannot be underestimated in this part of the business. It's also the part of the business that I think will benefit most directly if tariff rates come down more permanently. So most impacted on the way in. And as tariffs go out, hopefully, this is part of the business that should recover more dramatically and more rapidly.

And Richard, you mentioned competitors that may look to take prices lower and you may have to adjust your business. Is that a comment that's more related to your direct-to-consumer business? Or is that more related to the wholesale business?

Well, I think it's a comment about the marketplace more broadly. I think tariffs have been an industry issue. So our wholesale customers have faced it with developing their private label assortments with everything else that they're buying in other national brands as well, certainly in our DTC business as we look at other near-end competitors, we're watchful of what they may be doing as well. There's other challenges as it relates to inflationary pressures as well, which may provide the industry some motivation to keep pricing. So as we look into early next year with what's going on with oil prices and commodity costs, we're seeing a bit more inflation than we had originally planned for early next year product deliveries.

Transportation costs are going up. We're seeing some additional fuel surcharges. We have an awesome supply chain that does a great job. So we're not disadvantaged in any aspect of how we procure our products, but the entire marketplace is going to see these pressures, including the cost of bringing the goods over to the United States. So tariffs are one element of the cost structure, but I think we have to look at all the other input costs as well.

Our next question comes from Tom Nikic with Needham.

I've got 2 hopefully quick ones. First, question, Richard, I apologize if you said this already, if I missed it, but did you say anything about store openings and closures for this year?

I don't know if we commented on it specifically, Tom. The plan is to close about 60 locations across North America, most of those here in the U.S. As I mentioned, there's a handful of stores that have pushed out timing-wise, probably a bit more into Q4 versus Q3 as originally envisioned. There's -- from memory, we closed about 10 stores in the first quarter, though, another 20 or so that we will close here in the second quarter. And then we have a handful of new store openings. Those are really just stores that were planned originally as part of last year. They've kind of locked over the calendar year-end date, and they'll happen now in 2026.

Got it. Okay. And then on the wholesale channel, I believe you said that the Amazon business was flat this quarter. Is that sort of a sign that, that business has now stabilized and maybe the declines there are finished? Or was there anything kind of onetime there or anything timing related on the Amazon front?

Tom, I would say on Amazon, we actually had growth in the Amazon relationship in the first quarter. And my comment was specifically that Simple Joys volume was comparable in the first quarter, which is an improvement over where we've been. We do have Simple Joys planned down a bit this year, not at the same rate that we've seen over the last couple of years, and we're starting to see the ramp-up of the sale of our flagship brands, for Carter's, OshKosh, Little Planet. They exhibited some growth in the first quarter. There's stronger growth that's planned in the second half for those brands, which we intend to offset Simple Joys being down. So we've planned growth with Amazon for the full year.

Our next question comes from Kendall Toscano with Bank of America.

I just had a follow-up on tariffs and just to make sure we're thinking about the timing correctly. But assuming it takes until July to sell through the inventory, you brought in at the 36% rate. So starting around August, you'll start to see some benefits from the lower rates that have been in effect since February 24. I guess how long would you assume it reasonably takes to sell through this inventory that you've been bringing in at lower rates for the last 4 months? Would it be through the end of the year? And I'm just kind of curious how should we think about -- if you're assuming then that the back half of the year, tariffs jump back up to a higher rate, assuming the incremental IEEFA tariffs, when does that hit the P&L? Is it during 2026? Or would it be beyond?

Yes. Thanks, Kendall. It would be a mix. I would say, on balance, our turn assumption, which drives the -- how inventory cost bleeds into the P&L is kind of 4 to 5 months. It depends a little bit on the sales rate of product. But the assumption is that we're going to see higher tariffs again and that those will be implemented midyear. And so to the extent we import product beginning in that kind of midyear time frame, those would go into our inventory costs. And we'd be selling that product over the balance of the year and into early next year. We start to sell kind of spring product. There's pre-ship product for spring '27 that we would sell in the fourth quarter. So all of that in our current hypothesis would be subject to the renewed higher tariff rates. I hope it doesn't happen. I hope they find a different path forward and we go back to where we've been historically, but we'll see.

That's helpful. And then one other question I had was just on unit growth versus AUR. Obviously, specifically on the U.S. retail business, you had a pretty nice acceleration in units to up low double-digit percent this quarter. Curious how you're thinking about the balance of the year and whether you'd expect unit growth to remain as strong?

Yes. I think unit growth may be at the high watermark as it relates to Q1 as we plan the business. I think it will moderate a bit in Q2 and then it will moderate further in the second half where we have more benefit from pricing planned in. That's just how we've planned the business. There's historically been a pretty elastic relationship as you take prices up. Now we've been benefiting, I would say, from a little bit more stickiness, a little bit more inelasticity, particularly among the baby category where we have the most equity with consumers. I would say, among some of our higher-priced, higher AUR goods where the aesthetic, the benefits, the features are a little bit more apparent to the consumer, that has shown some greater inelasticity as well. But pricing is a bigger part of the calculus in the second half and the units won't be as strong, at least as we're looking at it today.

Our next question comes from William Reuter with Bank of America.

So you mentioned that you have kind of made the assumption that these 301 tariffs, the U.S. trade representatives will indeed move forward with those. Have you talked to your wholesale partners in terms of Walmart and Target or in the event that they do not put 301 tariffs in place if they expect that you will reduce prices based upon the fact that prices have been set based upon IEEPA tariffs from last year?

Bill, I won't comment on specific conversations with specific customers. I would say that we plan the business collaboratively with our wholesale customers. They've been good partners as we have faced this issue as an industry. And I would expect that if we get relief on tariffs that, that would be the spirit of conversations going forward as well. But obviously, we have an interest as an industry to see these costs go away. This is a value-oriented product category. Even small cost increases have been historically difficult with pricing increases over the years to cover. So we'll face those conversations when that situation emerges. I hope that situation emerges where tariffs have gone away, and we're looking at a nice benefit to potentially be discussing together.

So does every analyst that's been calculating this for the last couple of years. The second part of my question, you mentioned that good sell-through of winter products has resulted in stronger spring order books, maybe than you've seen in a little while. I guess how much visibility do you have into your order books for the remainder of the year? Any way you can give some context for what types of increases we might be seeing? And I guess, how much remains kind of uncertain, meaning I'm not sure what level of communication from your wholesale customers they provide at this point?

Yes, Bill, I would say we've sold in the fall and winter at this point. So I think we have pretty good visibility to the majority of, I would say, seasonal product shipments for the balance of the year. Now an order doesn't necessarily mean that it wouldn't change over time if conditions change, there is some history that orders could be canceled, but that's -- we don't have a long history of that.

So I would say reaction by the wholesale customer set to our product itself with the various meetings we have to show them the line and such. And again, we plan the business collaborative with them. We get their input on the kind of products that they're looking for has been extremely positive and more positive than in recent seasons. So that translated to an improved order profile for the second half of the year.

The other component that is a little bit more of a game time read on business is just what happens with replenishment. Replenishment is between 30% and 40% of the business at wholesale, and that depends on how the register is ringing. And so if consumer demand continues to be strong, that's potentially some upside to the forecast as well. But I would say we have good line of sight to seasonal bookings, and that's been an improving outlook for us.

That 30% to 40% number is very helpful.

This concludes the question-and-answer session. I'd now like to turn it back to Richard Westenberger for closing remarks.

Well, thank you very much for joining us this morning. We appreciate your participation in the call and your questions and your investment in Carter's, and we look forward to updating you on our next call. Goodbye, everybody.

Thank you for your participation in today's conference. This does conclude the program. You may now disconnect.

Welcome to Carter's Fourth Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call. On the call are Doug Palladini, Chief Executive Officer and President; Richard Westenberger, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer; and Sean McHugh, Treasurer. Please note that today's call is being recorded. I'll now turn the call over to Mr. McHugh.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our fourth quarter 2025 earnings release earlier today. The release and presentation materials for today's call are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.carters.com.

Note that statements on today's call about items such as the company's expectations and plans are forward-looking statements. For a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to vary from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please see our most recent SEC filings and the earnings release and presentation materials posted on our website. In these materials, you will also find reconciliations of various non-GAAP financial measurements referenced during this call. After today's prepared remarks, we will take questions as time allows.

I will now turn the call over to Doug.

Good morning, and thank you for joining us as we share our fourth quarter and full year 2025 results. We're also going to offer some guidance for the year ahead. And while we believe the recent news regarding tariffs will be net positive for Carter's, it will take some time for the proper level of detail to fully emerge. So our comments today will exclude that potential tariff impact.

As I approach 1 year in role in April and reflect on 2025, it's becoming clear that several of the themes I've consistently highlighted are coming to life. As Carter's returns to growth that is long-term, sustainable and profitable, we continue to experience momentum in our business, doing what's right for our brands and consumers, which is yielding improved financial outcomes. As I characterize the kind of quality growth we want at Carter's, I'm specifically talking about decreasing promotional activity over time, growing our ability to price up and to sell higher-priced products overall and balancing our transactional messaging with more emotion-driven product and brand storytelling that builds consumer connectivity and loyalty.

We're creating new products that are truly resonating with consumers across all 5 brands, led by the Carter's namesake, embodying holistic value, including style and quality, not just price. In Q4, among our DTC channels, all apparel brands and all age segments grew versus last year. Our brands are increasingly attracting new consumers, particularly among Gen Z and millennial families with new fans leaning into our better and best product offerings with higher price points, we're validating what we believe are the equity and pricing power of our brands.

Importantly, these newly acquired consumers are demonstrating the potential for higher lifetime value, an essential building block towards sustained positive results. Productivity has also been a consistent theme. We've taken necessary and decisive actions to rationalize our store fleet, rightsize our workforce and reduce complexity throughout the organization. As we recognize the benefits of enhanced productivity, we've returned to investing where we can generate the greatest returns, including in product make, which provides the design and style consumers expect and appreciate and in demand creation to drive store and e-commerce traffic.

For the first time since 2021, Carter's grew year-over-year revenue, even excluding the 53rd week of sales. We also executed our third consecutive quarter of retail comp growth, and we did so with higher AURs and less promotion. Consumer counts also continue to grow as we attract new Gen Z fans who are selecting from our best product assortments at higher rates than existing consumers. These are all strong signals that our actions are generating results.

We'll continue to build upon our top line momentum and profitability is expected to expand commensurately as productivity initiatives and demand creation investments generate returns. In 2026 and beyond, I believe both revenue and operating income will grow. We'll get into the details around these things shortly.

But first, let's hear about 2025 results from Richard.

Thank you, Doug. Good morning, everyone. I'll cover our fourth quarter performance, and then we'll share some perspective on 2026, including our outlook for the first quarter.

Obviously, the developments over the last week have introduced new uncertainty regarding the topic of tariffs. There's a lot left to play out on this subject, including the potential to recover the significant additional tariffs we've already paid to date. Fourth quarter capped off a significant year at Carter's, one which included leadership transition, initiation of significant transformation and productivity initiatives and response to the imposition of historic tariffs. As Doug said, while we have much work to do, there are many reasons to be encouraged about our path forward. Overall, we delivered good fourth quarter results. Sales, operating income and earnings per share all exceeded our prior forecast.

Industry data suggests that with a good holiday season for many companies, the consumer was clearly out shopping. We saw broad-based demand across our business in the fourth quarter and achieved sales growth in each of our business segments. While we saw growth in sales, earnings were still down year-over-year, although at a lower rate than we saw through much of 2025. Improving our profitability remains one of our overriding priorities as a team. Now turning to the details of our fourth quarter and full year performance. My comments this morning will track along with the presentation materials posted to the Investor Relations portion of our website.

On Pages 2 and 3 of the materials, we've included our GAAP basis P&Ls for the fourth quarter and fiscal year. On Page 4, we've provided a summary of our non-GAAP adjustments for the fourth quarter and full year 2025. We had considerable non-GAAP charges last year, the most significant of which related to our operating model improvement work, organizational restructuring, leadership transition and termination of 2 legacy benefit plans. In the fourth quarter, we also had charges related to our recent debt refinancing. At present, we do not expect any unusual charges in 2026.

This morning, I'll speak to our results on an adjusted basis, which excludes these adjustments. On Page 5, we have our fourth quarter adjusted P&L. Fourth quarter was our largest quarter of the year with net sales of $925 million. We posted 8% growth in net sales over last year's fourth quarter. 2025's fourth quarter benefited from an additional week in the fiscal calendar, which contributed approximately $37 million in net sales. On a comparable 13-week basis, which excludes the additional week, consolidated net sales for the fourth quarter increased 3% over last year.

On our over $900 million in net sales, gross margin was 43.2%, which was in line with our previous outlook. This represented a decrease of 460 basis points over last year's fourth quarter gross margin. As expected, our gross margin rate was pressured by tariffs, a gross impact of $40 million, which was roughly double the impact we experienced in the third quarter. Product costs were also higher due to investments in product make to improve the competitiveness and relevance of our product assortments. We continue to make progress on improving realized pricing, particularly in U.S. retail and international.

Fourth quarter AURs were up low single digits on a consolidated basis and up mid-single digits in U.S. retail. Fourth quarter adjusted SG&A increased 5% over last year to $315 million, driven by costs related to the 53rd week as well as incremental investments in demand creation and improving consumer experiences in our stores. We also had higher costs related to inflationary pressures in wages and rent in addition to higher provisions for performance-based compensation. As expected, growth in adjusted SG&A moderated in the fourth quarter from second and third quarters, and we achieved 90 basis points of spending leverage. Fourth quarter adjusted operating income was $89 million with an adjusted operating margin of nearly 10%.

Below the line, net interest and other expenses were comparable to the prior year. Our effective tax rate in the fourth quarter was lower than we had forecasted at 15.4%, 340 basis points below last year. This lower year-over-year rate was broadly driven by a higher mix of our worldwide income outside the United States and to a lesser extent, the delayed implementation of a new higher minimum tax in Hong Kong. The net of all this on the bottom line, fourth quarter adjusted earnings per share was $1.90 compared to $2.39 last year.

On Page 6, we have a summary of our fourth quarter performance by business segment. As mentioned earlier, consolidated net sales increased over last year in all 3 of our segments. Adjusted operating income declined $26 million, resulting in an adjusted operating margin of 9.7% versus 13.4% last year. Our overall decline in profitability was driven by our retail and wholesale businesses, offset partially by lower corporate expenses and slightly higher profitability in International. For both the U.S. Retail and Wholesale segments, the lion's share of the decline in operating income was driven by the net negative impact of higher tariffs as well as higher product costs related to investments in product make and spending deleverage.

Also negatively affecting wholesale's profitability were higher inventory provisions and a higher mix of excess inventory sales versus last year's fourth quarter. International maintained its operating margin reasonably well in the fourth quarter with higher product costs and spending deleverage that was offset by an improvement in product mix and higher pricing. Our lower corporate expenses compared to prior year were driven by lower charitable contributions and lower professional fees.

Now turning to some additional perspective on our business segment results, beginning with U.S. Retail on Page 7. We're encouraged by the continued momentum in our U.S. retail business. Retail net sales grew 9% in the fourth quarter. Comparable sales increased 4.7%, our third consecutive quarter of comp sales gains. Comps were particularly strong in our e-commerce channel, driven in part by a double-digit increase in traffic in the quarter. We saw broad-based product strength in the quarter with sales growth across Baby, Toddler and kid. All of our apparel brands also posted comp sales growth in the fourth quarter. Baby continues to be the strength in our product assortment. Q4 marked the sixth consecutive quarter of growth for Baby.

As we've said, AURs improved in the mid-single digits in the fourth quarter. Roughly half of this improvement was driven by reduced promotions, while the other half was driven by less clearance activity and increased penetration of the higher-priced portions of our product assortment. Our active consumer count continued to grow in the fourth quarter, building on the success we've had in this area earlier in 2025. Retail profitability was lower in the quarter for the reasons mentioned earlier, higher product costs, reflecting incremental tariff pressure and product investments, which were partially offset by higher pricing.

On Page 8, we've summarized the fourth quarter performance in our U.S. Wholesale and International businesses. In U.S. wholesale, net sales increased 3% over last year. Wholesale benefited from the additional week in the calendar, which contributed $12 million in net sales. Exclusive brand sales increased year-over-year based on continued strength at Child of Mine and Just One You. Sales of Simple Joys were down year-over-year in the fourth quarter, continuing the trend we've spoken of on previous calls. As I mentioned previously, profitability in the Wholesale segment was impacted by higher product costs, reflecting incremental tariff pressure and product investments, partially offset by higher pricing.

We expect these pressures on wholesale profitability will continue through the first half of 2026, especially the impact of incremental tariffs, which became effective around midyear in 2025. Operating margins are projected to be more comparable in wholesale year-over-year in the second half of 2026. In International, reported net sales increased 10% over last year and by 8% on a constant currency basis. Our growth outside the United States was driven by our businesses in Canada and Mexico. Comps in Canada were roughly even. Last year's fourth quarter benefited from a government tax holiday, which did not repeat this year. Our team in Mexico continues to drive strong performance with net sales growth of nearly 30%, driven by contributions from new stores as well as another quarter of double-digit comp sales growth. As noted earlier, International operating profit increased slightly over the prior year.

On Page 9, we've provided some balance sheet and cash flow highlights. Our year-end balance sheet was very strong. We ended the year with continued strong liquidity of more than $1 billion, consisting of just under $500 million of cash on hand as well as the significant borrowing capacity available to us under our credit facility. In the fourth quarter, we extended the maturity of our debt through the issuance of $575 million of new 5-year senior notes with 7.375% coupon. This new debt replaced our previously outstanding senior notes. We also replaced our previous cash flow revolving credit facility with a new $750 million asset-based revolving credit facility, which also has a 5-year tenor.

Net inventories at year-end were $545 million, up 8% over last year. Year-end inventory units were 4% lower than a year ago. Incremental tariffs continued to have a meaningful impact on inventory value, increasing year-end inventory by $50 million. Excluding the impact of higher tariffs, inventory dollars decreased 2% compared to last year. Exiting the year, our inventory quality was high with an improved seasonal mix compared to last year and lower overall excess inventory levels. We generated positive operating cash flow in the quarter and for the full year. Operating cash flow for 2025 was $122 million. The year-over-year decline in operating cash flow was due to lower earnings and higher inventories in part due to the impact of the higher incremental tariffs. We continue to distribute capital to our shareholders in 2025, paying $56 million in dividends. On Pages 10 and 11, we have our full year 2025 adjusted P&L and business segment summary. This information is included for your reference.

And now I'll turn it back to Doug for some thoughts on our business drivers for 2026.

Thank you, Richard. I'll spend a few minutes highlighting the direct actions we're taking to return Carter's to growth in both sales and operating income in 2026, then hand the call back to Richard to wrap up our prepared remarks with guidance for Q1 and the fiscal year.

Our primary goal in 2025 was returning to top line growth, which we accomplished, and this is growth we intend to sustain as we progress. In 2026, our objective is to grow both sales and operating income as we build on top line momentum from last year and realize the benefits of productivity and cost savings initiatives. I believe Carter's possesses all the necessary building blocks to inspire consumers and reward shareholders. These elements include leading awareness and market share in children's apparel, iconic brands that are deeply trusted by families raising young children, a unique multichannel market model with best-in-class availability and a talented and experienced team.

We're organizing our efforts around 3 strategic pillars, consumer-led, brand-focused and D2C first. We believe renewed consumer connectivity, brand revitalization and emphasis on a strengthened direct-to-consumer model will enable us to achieve our growth objectives in 2026 and beyond. We will continue to be focused on 2 key areas to drive our performance in 2026, demand creation and productivity. As it relates to delivering top line growth, we plan to continue to invest in demand creation. These investments are driving traffic to our stores and digital platforms, and we believe they're also helping us move the consumer past price-only messaging through product and brand engagement.

Results continue to show this is a high ROI investment. Our share of voice is expanding, and we're experiencing measurable demand and retention gains. We also saw evidence of demand creation impact in Q4 as traffic to our U.S. stores and websites grew year-over-year with both channels delivering notable improvements in the second half relative to the first. Traffic is a vital metric for us from a sales perspective and is also an important factor in improving productivity and margin in our direct-to-consumer business. Our demand creation efforts alongside product newness that is truly connecting with both new and existing consumers, enabled us to grow our active consumer file in the U.S. in 2025, our first year of growth since '21.

Regarding productivity, we're addressing our cost structure across several fronts. On our last earnings call, we announced a portfolio optimization strategy to improve fleet productivity, including plans to close approximately 150 lower-margin stores in North America through 2028. Last year, we closed approximately 35 stores. And in 2026, we intend to close roughly 60 stores. We believe these closings will reduce our fixed structure cost of cost with the benefit of sales transfer to other stores and our websites and be accretive to our profitability.

In Q3 of last year, we took action to rightsize our office-based workforce, which we believe will yield approximately $35 million in cost savings this year. Along with additional savings from discretionary spending reductions for 2026, we intend to maintain a disciplined focus on further cost containment, which frees up additional investment capacity. We're leveraging improvements to our operating model to drive productivity, including a 3-month faster development cycle and a 20% to 30% reduction in product choices, largely within Carter's and Oshkosh as we align to more global, consistent brand lines. We're already seeing results with greater adoption of mainline product and reduced reliance on wholesale exclusives. We believe these actions will improve speed to market and assortment productivity, supporting both sales and margin.

Our wholesale channel is expected to return to growth in 2026. Current sell-through rates across key accounts as well as sell-in demand signals for future seasons are strong. We plan to remain highly disciplined on capital investment and spending overall. We'll focus on what we have the most control over, discretionary spending and hiring. We've largely halted deploying capital to adding new stores in our current format, but we are continuing to test new store concepts and experiences with the goal of attracting new consumer segments and driving loyalty.

In that context, we are incredibly proud of the efforts demonstrated by our store associates as they continue to deliver engaging experiences and expertise that increase consumer satisfaction and differentiate Carter's stores as true destinations. This is just one example of myriad initiatives that will further improve store-based productivity. We're also leveraging technology to drive the next phase of productivity and efficiency gains, including leveraging AI to pilot and test new consumer and product insight tools and bringing a proprietary real estate market planning platform online this year to better guide fleet optimization.

We're still very much in the middle of Carter's transformation and meaningful work remains. I remain confident that our talented and dedicated teams are focused on and aligned with the right things for Carter's to generate durable growth and lasting success.

Richard will now walk you through the details of our outlook for the first quarter and full year 2026.

Thanks, Doug. Turning now to our outlook for 2026 on Page 13 of our presentation materials.

As Doug said, we intend to build on the progress we achieved in 2025. It continues to be a challenging time to forecast the business. Consumer spending appears to have held up well while other macro indicators such as consumer confidence and overall inflation are less positive. Tariffs continue to dominate the headlines. Our teams did a very good job in 2025, responding to and largely mitigating the new tariffs, which were implemented. As we're still digesting the significant tariff news from last week, there continues to be a great deal of uncertainty about where all this will settle.

In our outlook commentary today, we have not incorporated any developments related to last week's Supreme Court decision and subsequent action by the administration. In other words, our forecasts reflect the projected full year impact of the significant additional tariffs implemented last year. It's also worth noting that tariffs become part of inventory cost when inventory is added to our balance sheet. The inventory we're selling now reflects the higher tariffs we have paid on these products. So it will be some time before lower tariffs on new inventory receipts become a benefit to our P&L. Recall that the gross impact of higher tariffs on our P&L in 2025 was approximately $60 million. In our 2006 assumptions, this gross impact grows to over $200 million.

We are assuming significant offsets to this increase in product costs from higher pricing, particularly in our U.S. retail business and the benefits of other supply chain mitigation actions and our productivity initiatives. Overall, we're planning good growth in the top line and in adjusted operating income in 2026. We're expecting net sales growth in the low to mid-single digits over 2025. This growth reflects anniversarying the extra week in 2025. We're expecting growth in each of our business segments. In our U.S. retail business, we're planning low single-digit sales growth with comp sales up in the mid-single digits. In U.S. wholesale, we're planning net sales in the mid-single digits, driven by growth across most of our customer segments.

Sales in our International segment are planned up in the mid-single digits, reflecting growth in each of the 3 principal components in our international business, Canada, Mexico and international partners. On profitability, we're expecting adjusted operating income will also grow in the low to mid-single digits over 2025. A few comments on our outlook for operating income in 2026. First, our plan is back-end weighted with first half profitability planned down and adjusted operating income and adjusted EPS planned to grow in the second half of the year. This planned pacing reflects in part the negative impact of tariffs in the first half of the year. Tariffs overall are not comparable in the first half as the higher incremental tariffs were implemented midyear in 2025.

Additionally, pricing is planned to be less of an offset in the first half, particularly in U.S. wholesale, in part due to the timing of sell-in of first half commitments in our wholesale business. First half profitability will also be weighed down by the timing of investment spending and higher interest costs due to our debt refinancing. In the second half, we plan for far less net impact from tariffs driven by additional planned progress in pricing and product and customer mix improvements. Spending is also planned roughly comparable in the second half versus 2025. All of this nets to our full year assumption that gross margin rate will decline somewhat versus 2025 and full year spending will be roughly comparable to up slightly.

We're expecting that our productivity initiatives, including store closures, will contribute strongly and will largely offset our investment in demand creation, select technology investments and other cost inflation across the business. Below operating income, we expect net interest expense of just under $40 million. This increase reflects the higher interest and other costs associated with our debt refinancing late last year. The impact of higher interest costs on 2026 EPS is approximately $0.30. Our effective tax rate for 2026 is planned at approximately 22% compared to 19% in 2025. This increase reflects the implementation of a new global minimum tax rate in Hong Kong and our plan to generate a greater proportion of our worldwide income in the United States.

The impact of these higher interest and tax effects results in adjusted earnings per share, which are expected to be down low double digits to down mid-teens over 2025's adjusted earnings per share of $3.47. We're expecting good operating cash flow in 2026 in the range of $110 million to $120 million. We're planning for CapEx in 2026 of approximately $55 million with investments in new stores in Mexico, distribution center upgrades and technology initiatives accounting for the majority of planned spend. Our expectations for the first quarter are summarized on Page 14.

First quarter net sales are expected to increase in the mid-single digits compared to last year. By segment, we're expecting in U.S. retail growth in the high single-digit range with comparable sales planned up in the mid-single digits. Easter falls earlier this year compared to 2025, which we expect will benefit the first quarter. First quarter-to-date sales in retail have been strong, up in the mid-single digits. The outcome of the quarter will be heavily influenced by business in March, which is historically one of the largest volume periods of the year and represents about 50% of planned first quarter U.S. retail sales overall. In U.S. wholesale, we're planning net sales down in the low single digits. We're expecting good growth with the exclusive brands, offset by continued pressure in the Carter's brand with department store customers.

In International, we're planning double-digit net sales growth, driven by growth in Mexico and Canada. We're planning first quarter gross margin will be down approximately 400 basis points over last year, principally due to the net unfavorable impact of tariffs, offset somewhat by a higher mix of U.S. retail sales and lower sales of excess inventory than a year ago. Spending is planned up about 3% due to investments in demand creation, technology initiatives and higher wage and rent costs. We're planning first quarter adjusted operating income in the range of $12 million to $15 million. Below the line, we're expecting net interest expense of approximately $9 million and an effective tax rate of approximately 37%. This effective tax rate is much higher than typical, driven by some negative tax effects related to stock-based compensation in the first quarter.

As mentioned, we're planning a full year effective tax rate of approximately 22%. First quarter EPS is projected in the range of $0.02 to $0.08. While we're projecting lower profitability in the first quarter, we are planning growth in adjusted operating income in each of the subsequent quarters of the year. Risks that we're tracking include overall macroeconomic conditions as employment and consumer confidence metrics signal caution. And of course, there remains the potential for continued changes in tariff policies, which may significantly affect our business.

That wraps up our prepared remarks. Before we open it up for questions, I want to take a moment and acknowledge Sean McHugh. Sean is retiring today after 15 years as our Treasurer and Head of Investor Relations. Sean has been a terrific leader here at Carter's and a strong colleague to quite a number of you on the street. Sean, thank you for everything. We wish you and your family all the best in your retirement. And I'd like to also welcome T. C. Robillard, who is joining us on the call today as our new Vice President of Investor Relations. T.C., welcome to Carter's. Glad to have you with us.

And with all that said, we're ready to take your questions.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question comes from Paul Lejuez with Citi.

Can you maybe talk more about your full price realization, if there's any quantification you can give around that within the Retail business? And maybe could you quantify the drag from tariffs specifically that you build into your gross margin assumptions? It would be really helpful if we could get a sense of that by quarter, even beyond 1Q. And maybe just along those lines, any other big moving pieces within the gross margin line and how that might look different in the first half versus second half?

I'll start and then Richard can jump in. Thanks, Paul. I would say, first and foremost, on full price realization, we are selling more clean ticket product than we have and have less product on promotion than we have traditionally. If you look at emerging brand like Little Planet, if you look at our best-in-class sleepwear, which we call PurelySoft as part of the Carter's line, those are great examples of where we're pricing up in AURs and more of that is selling out on less of a promotional cadence.

Also, as you look at our AUR increase in D2C, you'll notice that about half of that is being driven by less promotional activity as well. So we believe that over time, we can move our model along from a purely price-oriented transactional messaging to more let the quality, the style and the total value of the product speak for itself, and we're seeing that. We're also seeing that especially with the traction of new consumers. So as we bring new consumers into the fold, they are mixing into these better and best buckets at a higher rate and accepting the higher AURs.

And I'll turn it over to Richard for further quantification.

Yes, Paul, a lot in your question as it relates to the impact of tariffs. And so just a few thoughts on that. So recall, and I think our last call, we referenced that we thought the potential of the higher tariffs would put us in a range of a gross effect of $200 million to $250 million. We're at the lower end of that range. So for the full year, we're expecting the gross impact to be somewhat over $200 million. Now that compares to the $60 million that we incurred on a gross basis before pricing benefit in 2025. So that's about $150 million of an increase that will hit gross margin across the year.

I don't know if I'll go quarter-by-quarter, but by half, it's reasonably comparable. The gross effect is a bit more weighted to second half, but they're more even than not. And then offsetting that are significant assumed pricing increases across the business, across all of our channels as well as other supply chain mitigation actions. Our supply chain team has done an extraordinary job using whatever levers they have, moving production around, negotiating with our vendors. Pricing is the most significant offset to the planned tariffs. So I think from a full year gross margin point of view, the overall gross margin is planned to be more comparable in the second half, as I mentioned, down in the first quarter, down to a lesser extent in second quarter, but we're showing more stability in the second half of the year. n

As I think about the full year, because of the presumed success with pricing and the proof points that we've had in recent quarters have given us some confidence to Doug's point around our brands are worth more, the consumer is recognizing the value. And so far, we've not seen resistance to the price increases that we've advanced. On a full year basis, we more or less offset the impact of tariffs and what flows through are some other things such as the investment in product make, which we think is going to be important to continue to improve the competitiveness of our assortments, particularly in the wholesale channel. And we've got some other benefits as well from our productivity initiatives that those cost centers are planned in gross margin. So we would have had to price up even more to hold the rate, but there is substantial pricing that is reflected in this plan. So hopefully, those comments are helpful.

They are. And then just a follow-up on the Little Planet and PurelySoft, what is the percent of sales that those represent right now? And how much of a driver is that do you bake into the F '26 growth rate?

Little Planet just had an important milestone. It crossed over $100 million in sales. So it's still relatively small, but it's growing off a small base rather rapidly. So we do have good growth planned. I don't know that I have that stat right in front of me, but we do have growth planned in wholesale and in our retail channel for Little Planet for the coming year.

Our next question comes from Jay Sole with UBS.

Richard, I have 2 questions for you. One is, can you give us a little bit more detail on the U.S. wholesale margins in Q4? Maybe talk about the inventory provisions. What component of that was the 810 basis point change in the operating margin? And then just on the guidance for SG&A for fiscal '26, can you give us a little bit of a bridge like how much of a benefit is the store closures in addition to the $45 million cost saving program you outlined last quarter versus maybe other things that you're investing in to get to what looks like flat SG&A dollar growth for the year?

Right. So Jay, on wholesale margins, the most dramatic driver and the most significant driver was the net impact of tariffs. So that was on a gross basis, probably $20 million of the $40 million that I referenced. There was less of a pricing offset there. So in terms of just basis point decline, that was the majority of it. We did have an opportunity just opportunistically to move some excess inventory coming out of the mass channel. That was 40 or 50 basis points of the rate deterioration in wholesale. So it wasn't the most significant, but it was above what we had initially thought we would do for excess inventory, but it was good to move that inventory.

So I would say the headline really on wholesale profitability is just the net impact of the tariffs. Recall that when the tariffs were implemented, we had already sold in fall, the goods have been ticketed. It was -- we certainly had good partnership on the part of our wholesale customers, but it wasn't our intention to be able to cover all of that. So that price coverage of tariffs in the wholesale channel improves over time. As I said, once we get past the first half, there's more significant benefit of pricing in the wholesale channel, but it will weigh us down. It weighed us down in the fourth quarter. It will weigh us down in the first half as well.

On your question on SG&A, we have planned SG&A more or less flat for the year, perhaps up slightly. There is a significant benefit from productivity that's coming through the P&L. About $40 million, I would say, on the SG&A line. There's some portion of our productivity initiatives, the $35 million that Doug referenced from organizational savings. A portion of that comes through SG&A and a portion comes through gross margin. We have some cost centers that are reported as part of gross margin. But about $40 million in total of productivity benefit coming through. And an element of that is the SG&A savings from closing stores.

So if I had to parse it out from memory, it would be about $25 million of the organizational savings in SG&A and about another $13 million, $14 million from the store closures. We are using that -- those strong benefits from productivity to offset the investment spending that's in the plan. So the items that we've talked about, marketing is a big headline. We felt like we have under-indexed in the investment in marketing relative to other good brands. And so we've made a conscious decision to ramp that up. We do have some select technology investments. I think we've done a good job focusing the investment on the areas that we think are going to be the highest impact and help us drive the business.

And then you have some other costs coming back into the business just with growth plans. So variable expenses are up, merit and wage costs are up. So those are kind of the puts and takes. Good benefit from productivity, but a good amount being invested back to drive the business for the long term.

Our next question comes from Jim Chartier with Monness, Crespi, Hardt.

Can you talk about when the pricing at wholesale takes effect? Are you going to see the full benefit of price increase at wholesale in first quarter? Or does that come later in the quarter? And then at retail, how does the 53rd week last year impact kind of sales by quarter? It looks like it's a benefit to the first quarter.

Well, pricing is planned up, I would say, across the year in each of our segments. It's planned up in wholesale, including in the first quarter. We just had much more of a benefit offsetting the tariffs in the second half of the year versus the first half. So again, our spring sell-ins took place at a time where we just didn't cover as much of the pricing as might have been desired, but that's kind of where we are and it improves over time. The 53rd week is only a benefit and really a comparison issue in the fourth quarter. It was about $8 million of sales from memory.

And to be clear, the new wholesale pricing is in effect.

Okay. It looks like you're guiding for retail sales low single digits for the year despite a mid-single-digit comp. But I think for first quarter, you said high single-digit retail sales growth on a mid-single-digit comp. So what's the delta there then, if it's not the shift of the weeks in the quarter due to the calendar -- the extra week in fourth quarter?

We have the benefit from pricing coming through, and we have the store closures, which is driving a delta as well, Jim.

So those just come later in the year. It's more impactful later in the year, the store closings?

Well, and we also have good e-commerce growth that's planned as well. That may be part of the difference. And just to correct my comment on the 53rd week, it was worth about $12 million at Retail, Jim.

Okay. And then just in the fourth quarter, wholesale pricing was down low single digits despite higher realized pricing. Other than the excess sales, any other drivers that impacted the pricing in wholesale in fourth quarter?

Yes, it was down low single digits in the fourth quarter, Jim. I think that clearance activity did have some impact on the realized pricing in that segment. And also, while we had raised some prices in the fourth quarter in wholesale, it just -- it was not enough to cover the tariff impact. So -- but the clearance activity definitely had an impact on driving the AUR down a bit.

Our next question comes from [ Ken Luscano with Bank of America.]

Curious, so while guidance today obviously doesn't assume any tariff benefits. Curious if the new 15% universal rate [ were it ] to hold, how should we think about the benefit to your business compared to the rates you're seeing today? And also how -- what would you expect from the broader marketplace and your ability to take price?

Yes. So we're not going to offer much conjecture on what could happen. We're going to wait and see, get the details and then talk about them once we have the facts in front of us. Beyond what we've already said about, we believe the total impact could be positive based on what we know today. I think that's work to come. So please be patient while we sort through and get the details of what we need.

Okay. That's fair. Another question was just on sales. Curious on the guidance for full year up low to mid-single digits. What's the assumption on AUR growth as you lap pricing from the prior year? And especially against the extra week last year and planned reductions in the store footprint, what are kind of the key drivers underpinning your confidence in the guide?

Yes. The assumption is for a mid-single-digit increase in full year pricing. So we started raising prices more meaningfully in the second half of 2025. So we have to comp up against that. But for the entire year on a consolidated basis, it's up mid-single digits. Some puts and takes by business, but that's what it is overall.

Our next question comes from Ike Boruchow with Wells Fargo.

And Sean, it's been a pleasure working with you. Best of luck. Welcome, T.C. Two from me. I was going to start with retail. Maybe, Doug, is there any chance you could give us or Richard, some kind of read on just your comps have obviously been getting better for the last couple of quarters. Any commentary quarter-to-date? Curious how weather and storms have impacted you? And then along with that, could you quantify the benefit that the early Easter is going to give you and conversely, how that should hurt you in the second quarter?

Yes, I'll take the first part, and Richard can take the second part. I would start by saying that we just -- we're not going to worry about the weather. It affects everybody exactly the same. It's winter. There's going to be storms. Some days are better than others. So we're just in line with the rest of the retail community when it comes to our stores and the weather. But what I would say is that, look, we are seeing the impact of better product focus on newness, on style, reinforcing the quality of what we make. We're seeing the benefit of demand creation, driving traffic and really bringing new consumers to the table.

So more people coming in the stores, a better in-store experience, more product that is resonating with consumers, and that's elevating our ability to get price to discount less and to get more repeat traffic, I would say as well is very important. The one thing that we're seeing is that we're ratcheting up our ability both in demand and retention as we develop the equity for these brands. So that, I think, is what's most important to reflect in those retail results.

And quarter-to-date, we're running a positive mid-single-digit comp in U.S. retail. I'd say sometimes it's hard to draw a lot of conclusions on business in January and February. It tends to be a clearance period. As we said in our remarks, it's all going to be about March. March is a Kahuna month, and that's where half the volume will be for the quarter.

I think the earlier Easter historically, that has been worth a point or 2 of comp when it's come earlier. So that would be kind of my best guess on that. I don't want to minimize just the strength of our e-commerce business at the moment as well. That was a real driver in the fourth quarter. I think some of the investments we've made in demand creation have kind of naturally drive traffic to the e-commerce business, which has continued to be strong. We have good positive comps planned for second quarter. An element of that would be the pricing. So it might affect perhaps some of that early April business, but we have good growth planned in second quarter comps in the U.S.

Got it. Super helpful. And then just a follow-up on wholesale. So first quarter down low single, full year up mid. Is there something -- is there a timing or some issue in the first quarter to call out? Also, could you quantify the Simple Joys headwind and how that should play out? And I guess my main question with all that is why the channel's growth rate is planned to improve so much out of 1Q, especially with the Amazon changes kind of taking place?

Yes. I would say there's multiple things at play here. There certainly was some timing. We did have some earlier demand for spring product that benefited fourth quarter that is pressuring a bit of the growth rate on first quarter wholesale volume. I think also we've been conscious in our comments to talk about the investments in product make. We think that there's been room to improve the assortment, the appeal. We planned that business collaboratively with our wholesale customers. So they provided very good input.

To Doug's point, the reception to what we've been showing them for fall already has been tremendous. And so we've got more growth planned, more volume planned in the second half. That helps the kind of the wholesale sales and profitability equation as we get into the second half as well. So I think multiple things at work there. Spring bookings were not as strong as we might have hoped. I think a number of our customers are understandably being cautious in this tariff environment when they're facing price increases as well across probably everything in their assortment. We saw those commitments come in a little lower than we anticipated. The bookings profile and the demand profile improves as you get later in the year.

And I'll talk about Amazon for a minute and give everybody an update. You'll recall on the last call, we talked about moving out of Simple Joys over time as the business model there has shifted and moving into featuring our own brands led by Carter's on the Amazon platform. That is happening already, and you're seeing the shift is underway. You will see Simple Joys as a percentage of our total sales there come down over time, not disappear, but come down. And you would see -- you will see sales of our existing brands come up. That will be reflected over time in growth in both revenue and profitability on that platform.

Our next question comes from John Keypour with Goldman Sachs.

I was just wondering if you could fill us in on a cadence of marketing and demand build investments. How is that being spent specifically and where you might be seeing early green shoots in the returns? And then also in terms of the new customers you're acquiring, I guess, from maybe a demographic or like an income cohort perspective, if you could help kind of fill in the gaps about where that -- like are you -- because you guys mentioned pre-ICR that, that was coming from a higher income cohort. I'm just wondering how much that's continued or accelerated since the last comments.

Yes. Thank you, John. Yes, the first part on marketing cadence, I would say that as our renewed investments have kicked in, we have seen our ROI increase. And again, as I mentioned, that's happening both in terms of demand and retention. Specifically, the outsized impact is coming from places like paid social, and you're seeing those gains in share of voice and our equity rising. We do, as you know, have a pretty significant incremental investment planned in 2026.

We're still fairly vis-a-vis our competitive set humble as marketing as a percentage of total spend. So there is a lot of upside for us as we move forward in how much we invest. That said, we are going to measure along the way. So we are -- as long as we are continuing to see the kind of ROI that we're seeing today, we will keep leaning in and investing, but we're going to be careful and make sure that we measure the results every step of the way. On new consumers, yes, we are seeing -- continue to see acceleration in acquisition of new consumers. And what we know is that they tend to come from higher income than our existing consumer base, okay? So they are above the -- if you just look at U.S. household median income, they're above that median, which is interesting and new for Carter's.

And also, I think, speaks to when you see the AUR increases, when you see better selling in our better and best buckets of product, you're seeing that relative spending power come into the brand. I also just want to make it clear that, that -- our intention is not to replace our existing consumer. We want to serve all of our consumers. And if you come in the door of a Carter's store and immediately ask where the clearance rack is, we're going to take great care of you. And so if you're a more price-sensitive consumer, we have great value for you. We have great style, quality and at a great price. So we are going to take care of those people as well. But as we bring new consumers in, we know that they're coming from higher income brackets, and they also potentially show higher lifetime value as a result. Hope that helps, John.

Our next question comes from William Reuter with Bank of America.

On your price increases at wholesale, has this resulted in any changes to your shelf space? And are your wholesale customers asking for you to demonstrate how the product may be improved or offering greater value versus previous offerings?

So the answer to the first part is no. And the answer to the second part is that there's no surprises there because we work very closely with them to deliver exactly what they expect from us. So we come in with a clear point of view about what we think is working for our brands and we work very collaboratively with our wholesale partners to ensure that we're delivering exactly what they expect. We're in a very fortunate position that we are the #1 national brand in most, if not all, of our key wholesale accounts. And so they are reliant on our continued improvements in what we make, and we are leaning in there to make sure that we continue to show up as the primary brand on their floors.

Got it. And then just as one follow-up, I know that a handful of years ago, you took some price increases. You then were kind of forced to push down prices a little bit subsequently because the feedback wasn't great. What are you seeing in terms of private label competition? What is the spread in your current pricing versus where the private label options are?

I would say we're seeing prices go up in the marketplace. Historically, Bill, we've been kind of in that 15% to 20% range. That's kind of a good sweet spot for us to sit next to private label. I think the wildcard is just sort of the state of the economy. And if things are a little shaky, does the consumer have more propensity to trade down to private label.

Today, we haven't seen it. Private label has picked up some share broadly in the market, I would say, over the last year. But we think prices are going up kind of across the marketplace. And a lot of the private label brands that you see in the market, we're in the same factory. So I don't think we're disadvantaged from a cost structure or a sourcing point of view.

Yes. I think we're very comfortable being the premium national brand in our key accounts, but we do want our pricing to remain competitive. So when we talk about being competitive, we're talking about it remaining relative. So yes, we can price up. We can come across the leading national brand, but it still has to be in the context of what we're selling by product category, and we take that very seriously, and we try to make sure that we are competitive everywhere we're on sale.

Got it. So I guess, Richard, it sounds like the pricing gap with your products and private label, they're pretty similar to what they've always been on a percentage basis. Is that fair?

Yes, I think so, Bill.

I'm not showing any further questions at this time. I'd like to turn the call back over to Mr. Palladini for any further remarks.

Thank you, everyone, for joining us this morning. As we said earlier, we are pleased with the progress we're making against our core initiatives, but also recognize that there is much work to do to achieve our goal of sustainable and profitable growth over time.

We look forward to updating you on our progress on Carter's next quarterly call. Thank you, and goodbye.

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, this does conclude today's presentation. We thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect, and have a wonderful day.

All right. We're going to keep on moving. Thanks, everyone. So my name is Ike Boruchow, Softlines analyst at Wells Fargo. I'm here with Carter's, CFO, CEO, Doug Palladini, Richard Westenberger. So thanks for being with us. A lot to talk about.

I think I'll start at the highest level, Doug. I think you were named CEO in March. So almost 12 months under your belt.

Getting there.

So maybe just let's talk about the biggest positive surprises you've seen since you took the job. What's kind of been the most pleasant surprise to kind of once you've been to the new company and what you've learned?

Yes, the inherent value of the brands for sure, which is one of the reasons I took the job, Ike. I know we know each other from the Vans and VF days. But I love heritage brands. I love brands that have really organic stories to tell.

Now this is a company that was started 160 years ago. The OshKosh brand 130 years ago. So there is a tremendous amount of latent equity built over all that time and just understanding the best way to unlock it and how to do that in a way that really resonates with consumers, that's what it's all about. So that's been the highlight.

There -- we also have a tremendous talent base in our organization. I have a great leadership team that Richard is on with me, and we have some real bench strength in leadership at Carter's as well. So it's about unlocking the talent, unlocking the equity in the brands. It's all there. It just needs to be directed.

Yes. No, that makes sense. I mean, look, it's one of the most recognizable brands out there. Your share in the category is super high. But clearly, the last couple of years have been a little volatile. Maybe just to take that question and flip it, what are the biggest challenges that you noticed when you started, and I'm sure you're already making progress on those. But what do you think the biggest hurdles are to kind of get the company back to the successes that it's seen in years past?

Yes. We have to invest. We have to invest in the products. We have to invest in the design intent to make the fabrication of the products to make sure that we are really in step with today's young consumer, the Gen Z parents that are starting families that are so valuable in our economy, and we need them to choose our brands first. And we haven't invested appropriately to do that.

And the second thing on the investment front, I would say, Ike, is that we need demand creation, not just in terms of more of it, but we need demand creation that talks to the quality and the style of our products, the equity, the power of our brands, like I talked about unlocking that and is less driven by the transactional mindset that you've seen where it's all about price, price, promotion, price.

So -- and then maybe to you or Richard, just to that point on reinvestment, so how do we think about that? Is that just demand creation? Is that something within the stores? How do we think about what exactly that means?

Yes. I think the demand creation area is a great example where we are going to spend more. Our benchmarking indicates that we well index other well-branded companies in terms of what they invest in marketing. And so we've started to make those investments. We're starting to see some of those returns here in our fourth quarter performance, and we'll do more of that next year.

We're going to test our way into it. We're going to step our way into it. We're not going to spend it all on day 1. We have -- Doug and I had a great partner in our marketing organization, particularly our new CMO, very analytically based. As the cold-hearted CFO, I want to make sure that we're going to get a good return on that investment. And so we're going to step our way in. But that's a great example. There are no big looming investments that we haven't made in terms of infrastructure or technology.

We've been making investments over the years. Always more to be done there. But I think the marketing investment in particular, is a great example where we've under-indexed. But it's really about driving more productivity throughout the organization, particularly in the store base. So you've heard us or have seen us pull back a bit in terms of new store openings. It's all about driving more productivity, more traffic to those existing retail stores, and I think that will be a good answer for us.

As you've kind of dug into that topic of reinvestment, are there things that you've been kind of more focused on or as you're digging into, is it social engagement? Is it the stores themselves? Is it attracting new customers? How do you get the new mom? Maybe it's a little bit different, the tactics you would use versus several years ago? Like what are some of the initial learnings that you might be able to share?

I think the lessons are that she -- our target customer gets her information in a very different way than she did in the past. I think social media, influencers, all those things have been new channels of engagement for us with consumers. That's where a lot of the decision-making and discovery takes place. We want to play in that space as well.

Yes. Well, Doug, so Richard mentioned the holiday. You guys put out some results for us on Friday. Can you elaborate a little bit? I mean it looks like your DTC business was very strong. Your wholesale business was much stronger than planned. Maybe just anecdotally, like what you saw through the holiday period, what the customer reaction was, just things that maybe learn -- helped you learn a little bit more as you're kind of going into this turnaround?

Yes. A few things that really stood out to me. First of all, the fact that we have sort of diversified our attack. Our offense is really diversified. We performed beyond our expectations in each of our channels, wholesale, international, retail. Every age category outperformed our expectations. So I love the breadth and that it's all moving forward in the right way. I think that's a great place to start.

The second thing that really stood out to me is that there's been a lot of questioning of whether or not we're going to be able to maintain our momentum while we have raised prices. We have. Fourth quarter, our third consecutive quarter of comp store growth, we are able to maintain higher prices. higher AURs, less promotion without the unit degradation that has traditionally come with AUR increases in our business. So I think that bodes very well. But again, the equity is there in our brands. We just have to unlock it. Now we talk more about our products and our brands and less about the price, that is, I think, also a very powerful reason to believe from holiday.

Is there anything to draw from that? I think like in the past, your customer had been somewhat more price sensitive, and it looks like your AUR came in well above what you had planned it and also the sales were there. So anything different that you saw with your customers' response to pricing in general versus like what you guys are doing underneath that?

You know what, there are consumers who come in the door of the store and the first thing they say is, where is the clearance rack. That's okay. We love those people. We're not trying to trade them out for somebody else. We're trying to add a new segment. And what we are finding is the new consumers that we are attracting, they come from a higher household income, and they are much more open to newness and to higher prices, okay?

We are also mixing into better and best product buckets with them at a higher degree than our existing consumer base. So they are much more open and interested in the higher levels of make that come in some of our products.

The final thing I would say is we have several places inside of our store where you will find clean ticket worlds. Little Planet, which is our eco-friendly sustainable, just beautiful clothing, all very organic in nature. Otter Avenue, which is our new toddler-specific brand, even PurelySoft, our sleepwear that comes within our Carter's brand. Those are all fairly clean ticket in our world, and those are growing exponentially for us as well.

So this new consumer returning to growth in revenue also meant returning to growth in the number of consumers in our file, our known consumer group, and they are mixing into this better and best bucket, which has been great for us.

So then it all kind of ties back together. We need to acquire a new consumer who's not shopping only the clearance. We have to spend money to get the new consumer in. Is that kind of how this flywheel starting to develop?

And in all fairness, it's also consumers that we've lost. I think we have lapsed consumers that have questioned whether we were the right brands for them, and we are working hard to earn back their trust and respect as well, which I think we're being successful doing, too. So it's existing consumers, it's lapsed and then it's net new that we're focused on all 3 of those areas.

Can you give a little bit more context around pricing maybe at a higher level, like what kind of price or AUR have you seen or did you see, I guess, in '25? What's the expectation for '26? I mean you elaborated some of these things on the last call. I'm just curious, can you talk about that at a higher level?

Sure. Well, okay, the captain obvious statement, everything went up in price. Everybody raised prices. There's no place to hide from that. And we were the same. Our key accounts were the same. Our peers were the same. There's really 2 worlds that are most important to us to live in when it comes to this higher price environment. The first is to retain the value for which we are known.

Value for us has 3 components. It's price, but it's also style. And most importantly, it's quality that we're known for. That's part of our equity. So maintaining that value equation is most critical to who we are, but it's also vital that we remain competitive. And when we say competitive, every day, we're looking at a group of similar brands and similar products and making sure that we're within a tolerance range in pricing, irrespective of channel that we are priced within that range.

As long as we stay within that range, we know we'll be good. So if tariffs went away, which is I know one of the questions you had for us, right, what happens to pricing? Well, what's more important is that we remain competitively priced and that we maintain that triumvirate of value that's so critical to who we are.

Got it. Yes. I mean the tariff one seems obvious given I feel like you guys are one of the companies that's been hit hardest on margin from that. So look, I know that's out of your control, so we'll keep our fingers crossed.

Well, let's talk about the parts of it that we do have control over because I think that's -- those are important. The pricing, again, we're all in the same boat. I really want to give a shout out to our supply chain team because what they have done to diversify geographically our sources and be as flexible as possible to move when we had to move.

Where you're in India one day, you're not the next, then you may be able to go back in. China is the most expensive, then it's maybe not. Their flexibility has been outstanding, and they have saved us a tremendous amount of money. Our COGS, our FOB, those savings as an offset to the incremental tariff expense have been meaningful. And so it's not just price. There's other things that our team has done that I think that helps lessen the pain that we've all had to endure.

Okay. Let's talk about stores. I feel like you've, in your first 12 months have talked about something that I think investors have talked about for a few years, which is the brand just might have a fleet that needs a little bit of pruning. And I think you mentioned about 100 stores that you've identified for closure over the next couple of years.

Can you kind of give us some more insight into what drove that thought? Maybe some -- like what are the stores you're looking at that you want to close? Or what are the hurdles in this? How do you kind of see the DTC channel evolve as this kind of takes place?

Yes, it's actually about 150 stores that we've highlighted for closure. Those -- not so geographically focused as much as our lowest margin stores. We want these changes to be accretive to our business. There will be a revenue hit that comes from closing the stores, but we also believe we will transfer a healthy amount of that revenue to other places as these stores close. So about 30 last year, about 70 this year, about 50 next year is the cadence that we're thinking about. Again, lower margin in terms of what they deliver to us.

We want our stores, we want anything that says Carter's above the door, whether that be in a virtual door or a real door to be the best expressions of our brand. And over time, some of the locations our stores are in are just -- aren't relevant anymore. The world that consumer shops in today is so different than it was before the pandemic. These are all 10-year leases. So it was just time to update. So closing 150 stores, yes.

Critical to remember, that's only one of the levers we can pull because we're not going to cut our way to growth. We're going to grow by doing the right thing for our consumers and by making these retail stores the best expressions of our brand. We can remodel them. We can relocate them. And we can open new stores where it makes sense to be as close as possible to our consumers. That's what we're focused on. So a more informed, deeper data set of where we should open stores and why based on our consumer trends, then where do we relocate, where do we remodel on top of that to create the sense that these are the best possible expressions of our brand, the true destination where you're going to get this level of service that you would expect from a specialty retailer.

Is there any more detail you can share on those stores, meaning either the revenue or the 4 walls? Like I assume the 4 walls are obviously below. But are they losing -- are any of these stores losing money? Are the majority losing money? Do they underperform on volume? Just kind of curious if there's anything else you can share.

Richard answers this tough question. I'll defer to him.

So across those 150 stores, it represents around $110 million of revenue. And I would describe them as marginally profitable, some losing a bit of money, some making money on, in total, marginally profitable. And so we have a lot of experience with closing stores over the years. Historically, 15% to 20% of a closed stores volume will transfer to a nearby location. So the flow-through then of those saved sales, those recovered sales is actually very, very high from a profit point of view because you're already leveraging the existing cost base that's in place.

We also have a terrific e-commerce business. We think there's an opportunity that some of those customers are going to be retained from a digital point of view. So it should be accretive. That's how we're modeling it, that we'll lose the revenue, but it's going to be a good answer from a profit point of view.

And like how does e-com kind of play into all of this? Do you assume your -- I assume your e-com mix goes up at the end of year 3 of this. I mean, is that fair? And then overall direct-to-consumer margins 3 years out should be inherently higher based on like the revenue that you're losing versus what you are growing?

Yes. We're reasonably penetrated today with our e-commerce operations. It's about 1/3 of our U.S. retail revenue, which is pretty well penetrated. We have a terrific e-commerce business. We are very well integrated across the U.S. DTC business today. We have all the omnichannel capabilities.

I think that's the way the consumer is shopping with us today. They expect a seamless experience across all the channels in which they're engaging with us, and we see that continuing. Margin expansion in the retail business is an imperative for us. We have got to drive more productivity. The company will not be successful in growing its operating margin if we're not able to improve the profitability of retail. So it's a high priority for Doug and myself.

One note I would add, just in terms of consumer trend and the way consumers are using our platforms, much more research, price comparison, looking for what they want to find online, yielding the final transaction in the physical store. That's been a major trend this year. So it's been -- and it's been a major traffic driver for us. So it's a plus.

And then wrapping that into wholesale, again, wholesale business looks pretty solid for holiday. How do we think about your distribution footprint? What's the plan? Are there any big changes coming over the next couple of years? And then maybe to that point, elaborate on what you guys said on your last call, which was your Amazon business kind of transitioning from Simple Joy to branded, just curious how that fits into that.

Maybe I'll start and then you can jump in, Richard, if that's okay. I've had the good opportunity now to meet with most of our key accounts on the wholesale business. That group has changed so fundamentally since COVID, right? Department stores have really moderated, obviously. You have mass grabbing a lot of that share. And then the upwelling of what's going on in off-price has been remarkable. The T.J. Maxxs, the Burlingtons of the world. It's been incredible to see. So we are going to continue to serve department stores. They're great like lifelong partners of ours, but they're not opening doors anymore. Who is?

We're going to grow with the accounts that are growing. And we are positioning ourselves continually as the #1 national brand in those places. We want to be a destination. What we're hearing from the accounts is that consumer, the new parents are gold, the lifetime value of the new mom of a Gen Z mom, wow, they really want to attract them.

What is the so what of that? The so what of that is that the footprint dedicated to our space in these retail environments are growing. So the opportunity for us is growing commensurately as the #1 national brand. And where we're positioned as a premium to their private label, it's very powerful for us. So we have a very good relationship with our key accounts, our wholesale team, it's almost like the symbiotic relationship is a daily thing, right? It's powerful. I've seen the way that we work together. And I think as we -- as they see the value in those consumers, we are poised to grow with those accounts.

And the lumpiness of some of these things you have going on, just to go back to the Amazon, like is that -- is lumpy the right word? Does that create some volatility? I guess can you walk us through the next 12 months of how the wholesale business should kind of come together?

Sure. So wholesale in the U.S. for us is about $1 billion of our $3-ish billion of revenue. About half of that business is what we term as our exclusive brands business. So these are brands that we've developed for the principal mass channel retailers, it's Target, it's Walmart, it's Amazon. Of those 3, Amazon is the newest relationship, and it's also the smallest of the exclusive brands.

We created Simple Joys for Amazon a number of years ago at a time where that was the right answer for us. Since then, I think Amazon has meaningfully changed in terms of how it manages brands. And so that we were at one point kind of their private label kind of their house brand, which meant that we participated in promotions differently. We had different visibility on the site. For a lot of different reasons, Amazon has changed that. And so we think the right path going forward is to offer more of our core flagship brands, so Carter's, OshKosh, Little Planet. We think those are going to be the growth vehicles over time.

So I think you'll see Simple Joys kind of wind down over some period of time. We're going to do that thoughtfully. We still -- it's still a great brand, still drives a tremendous amount of business for us and for Amazon. But we think the bigger opportunity over time is to grow those core brands. And I agree with Doug's characterization of the rest of wholesale.

Wholesale is a terrific business for us. It's a high-margin business. It's still an enormous number of points of distribution for us. But I think the portfolio is going to evolve over time. I think you're going to continue to see the traditional department stores are going to continue to be served in a different way. And I think that's a customer set that's still important to us. But the business -- the shift that we've seen over the last number of years, the shift to the mass channel has been dramatic. And so I think the exclusive brands will continue to be the engine, but there's great opportunities in the clubs business.

And to Doug's point, the off-price or the promo channel represents a considerable opportunity for us. That's where she's shopping today. That's where my family is going to shop. And so we want to make sure we have a presence there.

And I think the last topic for both of you to bring up is, I think 3 months ago before you even had the upside in holiday that you had, I think you were comfortable to say you're expecting growth in sales and earnings in '26.

Anything else you can elaborate on? I mean that's -- for a company to do that would be a good thing, especially as you battle tariffs and you're shutting stores and you're dealing with some of the things you just mentioned on wholesale. So I guess just how do we get there? What are the building blocks? I mean, that you're to share with us at this time?

Yes. No crystal ball predictions, but of course, that remains our expectation. That is what the objective is that we have set for ourselves. When I started, I said '25, we're going to grow again. That was important to do. We did it. Now we've had 3 consecutive quarters of comp growth in retail to back that up as well.

'26, I'm saying the objective remains the same. We have a lot of work to do, to get there to make that possible. You'll remember from last Q that we really rethought what productivity meant to our company, just a smaller company, and we had to respond to that. We had to respond to that from the number of people that work there, from the number of styles that we manufacture every way, every which way, we had to think about stripping complexity out of our business so we can focus on what's really.

What is most important to us is growth that is long term, sustainable and profitable, not growth driven by discounts, not growth that's driven by onetime events that you're then unable to anniversary the next year, but growth that is long-term, sustainable and profitable. That is how we are going to begin to return to the shareholder value that our shareholders deserve. That is first and foremost.

Second most important thing to me is a brand focus. We have not spent enough time talking about each of our brands. Again, how is that so -- how do you miss something so obvious? But what is existential and most parents may have noticed, as kids get older, they love denim. Our overall, our denim jacket, our jeans, those are icons. Those are cherished. Those are things that parents put away after the kids are grown. We need to lean into what that means for OshKosh and what it could be, right? That's very different than what Carter's should be.

We just launched a toddler-specific brand in Otter Avenue. That's a very powerful opportunity for us as well. So each of our brands has to have a chance to become what it fully can be irrespective of the other brands in our portfolio. And I don't know if we've always done that. Sometimes we've said, well, it worked for Carter's, let's do it for OshKosh as well. I don't know if that's necessarily the best thing. So allowing each brand to develop its own identity, I think that's another thing that will be a major unlock for us for future growth.

Yes. Well, no denim cycle for newborns.

No. Yes, good learning.

Well, look, we appreciate it. Congrats on the holiday success and into '26. Thank you, Doug. Thank you, Richard.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ike. Thanks for having us.

Welcome to the Carter's Third Quarter Fiscal 2025 Earnings Conference Call.

On the call are Doug Palladini, Chief Executive Officer and President; Richard Westenberger, Chief Financial Officer and Chief Operating Officer; and Sean McHugh, Treasurer. Please note that today's call is being recorded.

Call over to Mr. McHugh.

Thank you, and good morning, everyone. We issued our third quarter 2025 earnings release earlier today. The release and presentation materials for today's call are available on our Investor Relations website at ir.carters.com.

Note that statements on today's call about items such as the company's expectations and plans are forward-looking statements. For a discussion of factors that could cause actual results to vary from those contained in the forward-looking statements, please see our most recent SEC filings and the earnings release and presentation materials posted on our website. In these materials, you will also find reconciliations of various non-GAAP financial measurements referenced during this call. [Operator Instructions]

I will now turn the call over to Doug.

Thank you, Sean, and good morning, everyone.

Now almost 7 months into my role as Carter's CEO, our business transformation has accelerated as core tenets of new strategies take hold. Consumer response to new products and stories are strong and engagement levels are rising as a result, most notably among young Gen-Z families with whom we must win. That said, our current results don't represent my ambition for Carter's nor where I believe where we can be. There remains meaningful work to be done to eliminate costs, enhance productivity excise non-value add complexity and exhibit consistent growth in revenue and profitability.

I'll share some of what we're doing against these objectives shortly. But first, let's get an update on Q3 results for Richard.

Thank you, Doug. Good morning, everyone. I'll cover our third quarter performance and then a bit later, I'll provide some thoughts on our outlook for the business over the balance of this year and into 2026. My comments this morning will track along with the presentation materials posted to the Investor Relations portion of our website.

Beginning on Page 2, we have our GAAP basis P&L for the third quarter. On third quarter net sales of $758 million, our reported operating income was $29 million and reported earnings per share were $0.32 compared to reported EPS of $1.62 last year.

On Page 3, we have our [indiscernible] basis P&L for the first 9 months of the year. On year-to-date sales of nearly $2 billion, our reported operating income was $59 million, which represented a 3% operating margin. And year-to-date earnings per share were $0.75. Our third quarter and year-to-date results included a number of significant onetime charges, which we've summarized on Page 4. These charges have been treated as adjustments to our reported results.

In the third quarter, we completed the termination of our legacy OshKosh B'gosh pension plan and recorded a noncash after-tax charge of approximately $7 million. This final charge is in line with the amount we previously disclosed on our second quarter earnings call. We also terminated our deferred compensation plan in the third quarter, and as a result, recorded a onetime incremental tax charge of approximately $800,000.

Finally, our third quarter reported results included a charge related to organizational restructuring of approximately $6 million for severance and other employee separation benefits. We expect to record an additional charge of up to $5 million in the fourth quarter related to this organizational restructuring. These charges largely represent cash severance, which we expect to pay to affected employees throughout the first half of fiscal year 2026. We will talk more about our organizational restructuring later in today's call.

On a year-to-date basis, we've incurred approximately $13 million in costs, including just under $4 million in the third quarter, relating largely to third-party professional fees in support of improving our product and brand development processes. These costs are a continuation of previously announced initiatives to improve our operating model capabilities. We have been transitioning the work related to these initiatives from external consultants to internal resources and estimate we'll incur additional related charges of less than $2 million in the fourth quarter. Our year-to-date results also included approximately $8 million related to our leadership transition earlier in the year, including approximately $500,000 in the third quarter.

With all that said, my comments this morning will speak to our results on an adjusted basis, which excludes these meaningful charges.

On Page 5, we have our third quarter adjusted P&L. Third quarter net sales were $758 million comparable to a year ago. Third quarter is historically our second largest of the year, surpassed only by the fourth quarter. I'll cover more detail of our business segment performance in a moment. But at a high level, relative to last year's third quarter, we had net sales growth in our U.S. Retail and International segments and lower sales in U.S. wholesale. On the nearly $760 million in net sales, our gross margin was 45.1%, a decrease of 180 basis points versus last year. This lower gross margin rate was largely due to higher product costs, including higher tariffs and additional investments in product mix to improve the competitiveness and relevancy of our product assortments. The gross impact of tariffs on gross margin was $20 million in the third quarter. On a consolidated basis, we made good progress in raising prices, which were up in the low single digits, but this higher pricing did not fully offset the higher product costs in the quarter. Our U.S. Retail business made particular progress in raising prices. Third quarter AURs in U.S. retail increased in the mid-single-digit range over last year.

Third quarter adjusted SG&A was $308 million, up 8% over last year. The drivers in the quarter were similar to what they've been throughout 2025, namely higher store-based expenses across our North American store portfolio, higher marketing and higher provisions for variable compensation. The growth rate in spending in the third quarter was less than in the second quarter, and we're planning for a lower growth rate in total spending in fourth quarter and into 2026.

Adjusted operating income in Q3 was $39 million compared to $77 million a year ago. Below the line, net interest costs were comparable to last year, and our effective tax rate was 21.8%, up 430 basis points versus last year. We've planned our full year effective tax rate at approximately 24% versus 19.6% in 2024 due mostly to the implementation of a global minimum tax in Hong Kong and stock option expirations earlier this year. With all that on the bottom line, third quarter adjusted earnings per share were $0.74 compared to $1.64 last year.

On Page 6, we have a summary of our third quarter performance by business segment. As mentioned earlier, consolidated net sales were comparable to a year ago. The roughly $15 million in growth between U.S. retail and international was offset by a similar decline in sales in U.S. wholesale versus last year. Adjusted operating income declined just under $40 million with U.S. Retail and U.S. Wholesale contributing roughly equally to the decline. Profitability in our international business declined slightly versus a year ago.

Now turning to some additional details of our third quarter performance in U.S. Retail on Page 7. Our net sales in retail grew by 3% in the third quarter with a positive 2% total retail comp building on the similarly positive comp, which we posted in the second quarter. Our objective is to return to consistent growth in comparable sales, so we were pleased with this result. We had comparable sales growth in both channels in the quarter, stores and e-commerce, and anniversaried last year's successful Labor Day period with good performance in this year during this key promotional period. As I noted earlier, consumers accepted higher prices in the quarter, our mid-single-digit increase in AUR, resulted in a low single-digit increase in average transaction values. From a product point of view, baby continues to be a key driver. It's our largest product category, and we posted sales growth here for the fifth consecutive quarter. We also saw good growth in toddler, which represented our strongest performance in this A segment so far this year. Relative to last year, we grew share in both the baby and toddler categories U.S. Retail also benefited from an improved inventory position versus the first half. We ended the third quarter with less carryover of prior season goods, helping new seasonal product to perform well. In general, consumers continue to respond well to newness and the better part of our assortments.

Our inventory investment in the bigger kids size segment also helped us to post sequential trend improvement in this part of our business, and we had a strong back-to-school selling season. We did invest in incremental marketing in the third quarter. We're seeing good indications that our relevance with consumers is increasing with unaided awareness of the Carter's brand up significantly year-over-year, and the continuation of progress in acquiring new customers, driven by the strength of our baby business. Retail profitability was lower in the quarter for many of the reasons already cited higher product costs, partially offset by improved realized pricing the investment in marketing and expense deleverage despite the positive comp in the quarter.

Now turning to some additional detail on our third quarter performance in U.S. wholesale and in our International segment on Page 8. U.S. wholesale sales were down versus last year, driven by lower sales in the Simple Joys component of our Exclusive Brands business. Demand for our Simple Joys brand on Amazon has been down this year. Simple Joys was a successful brand launch back in 2017, and this business grew rapidly as Amazon treated Simple Joys as effectively as private label brand in the young children's apparel space. In recent years, Amazon has changed its approach to how it manages brands. And as a result, we've seen more pressure in this part of our business. We're in process of executing a new strategy in collaboration with Amazon. We envision that our core Carter's, OshKosh and other brands, such as Little Planet and [ Otter Avenue ] will grow in prominence in this important channel of distribution and Simple Joys will reduce in significance over time.

We will look forward to sharing more about our growth plans with this important customer. Elsewhere in the customer portfolio sales with department store customers for the flagship Carter's brand were lower than a year ago, continuing the trend we have seen over an extended period. Our department store customers booked us down for fall, so this result was not a surprise to us. Department stores are projected to represent less than 20% of our overall wholesale channel sales for the full year. Profitability in the Wholesale segment was impacted by the factors listed here. including higher net product costs, including higher tariffs and expense deleverage. We had a good third quarter in international. Total sales were up 5%. We had lower comps in Canada, which we attribute to strong first half performance that likely pulled some volume forward into Q2 when the business posted a positive 7.6% comp as well as a lower level of clearance inventory in the third quarter. We continue to see strong performance in Mexico, which achieved a plus 16% comp with strong total sales performance given the contribution of new stores in this market. We saw strong growth in our International Partners business in the third quarter sales to these customers, which operate in a large number of international markets around the world were up 10%, and we continue to see particular strength in demand from our partner in Brazil, Riachuelo. Overall, International segment profitability was down in the quarter, but achieved a high single-digit operating margin of 8% in the third quarter.

On Page 9, we have some balance sheet and cash flow highlights. We ended the quarter with continued good liquidity. Cash on hand was $184 million, and we had virtually all of the borrowing capacity under our credit facility available to us. Net inventories at the end of the third quarter were $656 million, up 8% versus last year with units flat year-over-year. The impact of higher tariffs on ending inventory was meaningful, approximately $34 million, excluding the impact of higher tariffs, net income increased by 2% versus last year. The quality of our inventory heading into the fourth quarter was high with excess inventory down meaningfully versus a year ago. The decline in cash flow was due to a combination of lower reported earnings and higher inventories, again, in part due to the impact of tariffs on our quarter end inventory balance. We historically generate the majority of our annual cash flow in the fourth quarter, and we're planning for strong operating cash flow for the fourth quarter, which is expected to yield positive operating cash flow for the full year. We've paid $47 million in dividends year-to-date. We had no share repurchases this year compared to about $50 million year-to-date last year.

Maintaining a strong balance sheet has always been an important priority for us, and it's more important than ever given this highly uncertain environment. Our current credit facility matures in spring 2027. We've begun the process to put in place a new credit facility. We are pursuing an asset-based loan or ABL type facility, given its favorable pricing and flexibility relative to our current cash flow structure. To date, we have received commitments from our bank group members for a new 5-year $750 million credit facility. We're planning to have this new facility in place in the coming weeks. Additionally, we're evaluating opportunities to refinance our existing $500 million in senior notes, which also mature in spring 2027. Conditions in the high-yield debt market are favorable right now. Carter's is an experienced issuer in this market, and we'll share more details on our path forward here when appropriate.

On Pages 10 and 11, we have our year-to-date adjusted P&L and year-to-date business segment summary, and this information is included for your reference.

I'll turn it now back to Doug for some additional thoughts.

Thank you, Richard.

I'm encouraged by several aspects of our third quarter performance. As we continue to fuel progress and momentum across our brands, I see more reasons than ever to believe we are returning to long-term sustainable and profitable growth. While we are studying our business in 2025, there's still meaningful work to do for Carter's to unlock its full potential in terms of exceeding both consumer and shareholder expectations. We're actively managing Carter's in a highly uncertain world and marketplace, particularly as it relates to tariffs. We look forward to sharing more of our long-range plan in 2026, but closer in, we're focused on what we think is possible over the near term based on what we can control. To manage tariff impact, we've taken 2 primary actions: First, we're mitigating what we can through our supplier base where Carter's world-class supply chain team has realized meaningful duty reductions of more than $40 million. Second, we've raised prices where necessary, while striving to maintain Carter's exceptional value proposition. To date, D2C consumers are accepting higher prices while we have continued to grow our business. As Richard mentioned, Q3 is our second straight quarter of positive retail comp growth and AURs are up mid-single digits, with average order values up low single digits. Taking price will continue to be a critical component of tariff mitigation moving forward. As we continue down the road of our ongoing transformation, it's imperative that Carter's deliver near-term profitability, which we can achieve most impactfully by reducing our cost base as growth initiatives build returns over time. We're rightsizing our company as well as preparing for our next phase of growth by optimizing our organization, infrastructure, processes and tools. In doing so, we're taking several difficult but necessary decisions and have identified $45 million in gross savings for 2026.

We will also continue to identify additional sources of productivity going forward, and we expect our assortment rationalization initiatives to have a sales and margin benefit over time. It's crucial that Carter's enhance our performance-driven culture in which fewer people have greater ownership and accountability. To accomplish this, we plan to reduce office-based roles by approximately 15% and between now and year-end 2025, saving roughly $35 million of the gross $45 million per year beginning in 2026. We believe these actions will streamline processes and decision making at Carter's. The remaining $10 million in 2026 cost reductions will come through lower SG&A across multiple spending categories. These savings are expected to fuel near-term profitability while focusing Carter's on what really matters.

Now moving on to Carter's stores. As we've discussed previously, our physical store fleet must be honed. We are now targeting 150 North America door closures. Most of leases expire up to 100 of which we expect to exit by the end of 2026. Closing these stores does result in short-term revenue loss, but historical perspective suggest there will be offsetting sales transfer benefits by leveraging Carter's digital platforms, existing stores and nearby wholesale partners. These closures will also allow us to free up SG&A associated with the fleet, one of our largest fixed assets. While we're pausing any further expansion of the current U.S. store model, the roughly 4,000 to 5,000 square foot co-branded format we've been opening for several years now. We're investing in new store type testing in-store experiences and real estate strategy development as we see greater fleet productivity as well as differentiated consumer experiences as distinct specialty destination staffed by experts. A core tenet of our transformation is to put the Carter's consumer at the center of all we do. So we are removing internal complexity to bring our brands closer to market and deliver more of what our fans want. We're eliminating 20% to 30% of product choices in creating a more unified global product assortment across all our brands. We're leveraging a faster, more responsive design and development process that has excised a full 3 months from our product development calendar. Regular price sell-throughs have improved, demonstrating a sharper point of view in product design that truly resonates with consumers. Underpinning each action is the broader organizational objective of ensuring that our makeup from personnel to infrastructure to systems and processes reflects the agility necessary to both confront challenges and seize opportunities in a dynamic marketplace. A portion of these savings will be reinvested in our brands where we believe Carter's can generate the greatest return on invested capital.

In 2026 and beyond, we plan to spend more on demand creation, driving traffic and consumer loyalty beyond promotion and price. We're already investing here. In Q4 '25, our media spend is up 11% from last year, the results year-to-date show a strong correlation between marketing investment and increased sales.

In 2026, our plan is to increase demand creation spend almost 20% or $16 million. Of course, we will manage this spend carefully to ensure maximum returns. Ongoing investment also applies to Carter's U.S. e-commerce, where the business is back to growing with our Q3 comps up as well as AURs. As we moderate promotional messaging in favor of brand and product storytelling, our brands are resonating more deeply with consumers online, especially young Gen Z families with whom we have seen 17% growth in consumer counts year-to-date. IT investments fostering growth and productivity such as digitization of product design and development, leveraging AI models and cloud migration are being prioritized. We'll also focus on foundational simplification by consolidating systems and platforms.

And with those comments, I'll turn it back to Richard to talk about our expectations for the balance of this year and into 2026.

Thanks, Doug.

Returning to our presentation materials on Page 19. We continue to monitor the situation with tariffs and the considerable impact they have begun to have on our business. As we all know now, over the past number of months, significantly higher tariffs have been implemented affecting imports from most every country, including those from which we source the majority of our products. These pull reciprocal rates are much higher than those which have been in place historically and higher than what we have modeled and discussed with you all previously. The tariff rates now in effect, bring our effective duty rate into the high 30% range versus about 13% historically. On a gross pre-mitigation basis, we've updated our estimate of the annualized incremental impact of the higher tariffs and now estimate that to be in the range of $200 million to $250 million.

For 2025, we've estimated the net impact of additional tariffs on operating income to be in the range of $25 million to $35 million. As Doug mentioned, we've been pursuing tariff mitigation strategies across multiple fronts, the most material of which are the planned pricing increases across our assortments. We're also closely watching recent news reporting regarding current trade negotiations involving countries where Carter's production has been most affected by the higher tariffs. The situation remains very fluid, and we're tracking the updates in real time. And if there is relief ultimately provided by the Supreme Court, on the overall issue itself of higher tariffs, we will obviously seek to recover the significant amounts already paid and additional tariffs to date.

Turning to Page 20. As noted in today's press release, we have not reinstated sales and earnings guidance given the ongoing and significant uncertainty regarding tariffs. We're still in the early days of gauging consumers' response to higher prices and seeing how our peers and the competition will deal with the challenge of tariffs. But I'll try to be helpful in providing some perspective on how we're thinking about the fourth quarter. Historically, the holiday season has been a strong period in our business as our products are a natural fit for this time of year as families with young children gather and celebrate together. Our teams, particularly in U.S. retail are focused on continuing the momentum we've experienced over the last couple of quarters and delivering a strong finish to the year. And we think our product and marketing initiatives supported by a meaningfully improved inventory position versus last year, provide good support for a strong finish to the year.

In our U.S. retail business, the combined November and December period has historically represented about 75% of our fourth quarter retail sales volume. So the lion's share of our quarter is still ahead of us. We're planning a low single-digit comp in U.S. retail in the fourth quarter, which compares to a down 3% comp last year. We're planning continued progress in increasing AUR, although at a rate less than what we achieved in the third quarter, in part due to the more promotional nature of the fourth quarter generally. In last year's fourth quarter, we had particularly strong performance in late October over the Black Friday promotional period and during Christmas week. Our teams have put together a good promotional plan to comp our good performance in the holiday selling period last year, supported by this meaningfully improved year-over-year position in inventory and our increase in paid media. Comparable sales so far in Q4 are off to a good start our quarter-to-date U.S. retail comps are up about 7%. We're planning wholesale sales down in the low single digits in the fourth quarter, largely driven by an expectation for continued lower demand with Simple Joys. We planned sales in the balance of our U.S. wholesale segment up in the fourth quarter. And we're expecting sales growth in the international segment driven by Canada and Mexico to cap off what has been a good year in this part of our business. We're expecting gross margin rate will be down year-over-year in the fourth quarter, more so than what we had posted in the third quarter in the neighborhood of 43% due to a larger gross impact of tariffs, investment in product mix and somewhat less of an offsetting benefit from pricing. As I said previously, our current estimate for the net impact of higher tariffs on fourth quarter earnings is in the range of $25 million to $35 million. Spending is expected to increase at a mid-single-digit rate in the fourth quarter. This would be less than the rate of growth in SG&A in the third quarter. Below the line, we're planning for higher net interest costs and a higher effective tax rate than a year ago. As it relates to 2026, we're still developing our plans for next year, but on a preliminary basis, we're planning growth in both sales and earnings. Our sales growth will be planned higher than in a tip of the year given the price increases we're putting in place in response to tariffs. Gross margin rate will likely be lower due to the net unfavorable impact of tariffs and changes in the mix of customers within the U.S. wholesale channel. We're expecting a substantial benefit in 2026 from our productivity initiatives, but the entire estimated $45 million in savings will not simply drop to the bottom line. These savings will help offset the significant impact of the higher tariffs other inflationary pressures across the business and will help to fund investments we're planning, including marketing, as discussed. We'll have more to say about our expectations for the new year on our next call, which will incorporate the perspectives from the holiday season and our latest read on the outlook for the consumer and broader marketplace. We're tracking a number of risks, including the persistence of inflation throughout the economy and its possible impact on consumer demand across a wide range of purchase categories. We're also watching the overall level of consumer confidence and employment data with both metrics showing some deterioration in recent months.

With those remarks, I'll turn it back to Doug.

Thank you, Richard.

This next step in our journey comes at a pivotal moment for Carter's. While our transformation is still underway, we're seeing clear proof that our strategies are working and gaining momentum, and we must feed that inertia where we can yield the highest returns. I am sincerely grateful to all Carter's employees for their ongoing dedication to our business and creating this acceleration. We're also making deliberate tough choices to strengthen our business and our profitability. There's much more to come, and we look forward to providing additional detail as we progress into 2026.

Now I'll turn the call back to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] Our first question will be coming from Paul Lejuez of Citi.

This is Kelly on for Paul. First one on -- I have 2 questions, 1 in the wholesale channel, 1 on the retail side. First one U.S. wholesale. I guess could you speak to a little bit more about what's happening with the Simple Joys brand exactly like kind of what's the go forward? I think you mentioned you're going to maybe reduce that brand. But so what's going to come that place exactly? And then if you could just elaborate on the pricing that you're seeing in the wholesale channel. I think you mentioned pricing AUR is up mid-single digits in 3Q in retail. Just curious where that is on the wholesale side, and how that's looking for the spring? And then just 1 follow-up on retail.

Sure, Kelly, I will start on on wholesale, and I know Doug wants to add some comments as well. So Simple Joys is the newest component of the exclusive brands portfolio. It's also the smallest part of that business. So that brand launched back in 2017. It really was kind of a different time period. We had considered for a number of years, offering the flagship, the core brands, Carter's, Oshkosh B'gosh on Amazon had, for a number of reasons, chose not to do that back in that era. And so Simple Joys is really was a terrific choice for that particular moment in time. We were treated extremely well by Amazon and really treated as their private label, which led to really rapid growth in the brand. I think we've just entered kind of a new phase with everything that they've had going on as a company and some choices that they've made around how they manage brands. We think probably the better path forward is now revisit that decision around the core flagship brand. So that -- I think that's going to be the path going forward is taking the Carter's brand, the OshKosh brand and other brands that we may have in the portfolio. And Amazon continues to be certainly a super important channel of distribution for us.

Yes. We're already building the framework necessary to lean into the Amazon mode with all of our brands. So I am confident that we will be able to build a much more meaningful lasting business beyond Simple Joys with all the Carter's brands. To touch just briefly on the rest of the wholesale business, what I would share is that we have gone deep with our key accounts to really understand what unlocking future growth is. The back and forth on the right products to make, the right assortments to offer has led to meaningful change in how we operate with our key accounts and the results that we're seeing through H1 sell-in. So we don't have any sell-through on higher prices in wholesale yet. That won't impact us until January. But on sell-in, we are seeing very positive results that lead us to believe that these higher prices will be accepted. I think it's also really important to keep in mind that the value proposition that we offer remains widely intact even with higher prices, right? So the style, the quality, the price that we offer our product at will continue to be a distinct competitive advantage for Carter's moving forward, even with the impact of higher pricing due to tariff mitigation.

Kelly, your question on wholesale pricing in the third quarter, roughly comparable, which is kind of in line. We have more degrees of freedom in our own retail channel, and that's where the improvement in realized pricing occurred in Q3.

Got it. And then I just wanted to ask about the store closings. And I think you said that you would expect once the 150 stores are closed for that to be accretive to profitability, and there's a sales transfer assumption there. I guess, could you elaborate on what you're kind of assuming for the sales transfer there? And just any other color you could provide on how you've seen this play out.

Sure, sure. So as the release indicates, it's about 150 stores that's across North America. So it includes some stores in Canada and Mexico. To Doug's comment, the plan is to close the majority of those stores at lease expiration. There are a handful that we think may be subject to the kickout clauses and would close before their natural lease expiration, but I think that would be in the minority. On a last 12 months basis, those stores did about $110 million in revenue. I would say they were kind of marginally profitable. And our history over time shows that there's about a 20% transfer rate to nearby stores and to our e-commerce channel. So leveraging the fixed cost and the asset base that's already in place, those tend to be pretty high margin flow-through. So we would expect this at the end of the day to be accretive to operating income relative to the small margin that those stores are generating today.

And our next question will be coming from Jay Sole of UBS.

I'd love to ask about your preliminary 2026 view on sales growth being higher than a typical year given that like you just said, you're closing 150 stores. The wholesale business has been on declining trends. I think, Richard, you mentioned some of the indicators -- macro indicators are looking a little bit weaker over the last couple of months. Just tell us what do you exactly do you mean by sales growth higher than typical year? Can you give us like a general number or a range? And then just the algorithm to get there, how do you expect to do that?

Jay, I don't know if I'm going to be much more specific on it. It's unusual for us to be commenting on the new year on this call. So that's more typically the February year-end earnings call. So I think I'll stick to that discipline. I will say, though, the reason I commented on it was that we're expecting more of a benefit from pricing because AURs are going to go up and they're going up meaningfully across the assortment. That's what we need to do with a tariff challenge that represents that gross number of plus $200 million. So more will be driven by pricing in 2026 and less by units. We do still have some unit growth planned. I think an important macro assumption is that this is an industry issue that we think everyone in the industry is going to be raising their prices. So we don't believe we're going to be an outlier. I think our teams have done a good job maintaining our competitiveness with the market. We have some really good rigor organizationally and process-wise here internally that looks at that common basket of goods to make sure that we're not out of bounds with our primary competitors where she's shopping most typically. So we don't want to have that spread widen out. That tends to be when our business has dropped off a bit. So we're assuming that we're swimming in the same pool with everyone else that everyone else is raising their prices, but more of the revenue gains next year will be driven by price than units.

Okay, I understand. Richard, that's helpful. Maybe, Doug, if I can ask you just one question. On the rightsizing organization initiatives, you're talking about meaningful reduction in course in office-based roles, a disciplined spending management across the organization. The company historically always been pretty tight on controlling SG&A. How do you get comfortable that you can drive these savings and be able to offset the cost of tariffs, but not necessarily lose something important in terms of company's operational ability and just the ability to execute and serve the consumer the way you want and the way the brand wants to?

Yes. Thanks, Jay. There's really 2 things happening there. The first one is the one you called out. We're trying to take cost out of the business and have a meaningful impact on our near-term profitability, that's happening. The part you didn't mention that is equally important to me is to take complexity out of our system. We simply need fewer people having greater ownership and accountability for us to get where we need to be. Clear ownership in the most important processes across the most important growth vectors for our business and then accountability on the results of those opportunities is really how we are going to show up going forward. So yes, cost savings, important part, but removing complexity and fewer people with greater ownership and accountability are equally important here.

And our next question will be coming from Ike Boruchow of Wells Fargo.

A couple for me. First, quick clarification. On the Q4, the wholesale down low single, is that with -- you guys do have an extra week, just to clarify that. So is that with the extra week, and if so, what's the organic number?

That's correct. The 53rd week is worth about $30 million in total.

Okay. Is that split pretty evenly between wholesale and retail?

Well, we'll dig that up for you. I don't know off the top of my head, but we certainly will take that up for you.

Okay. On the store closure plan, I mean, just for round numbers, are you effectively saying that you expect to end next year in the U.S. with roughly 700 stores and then roughly 650 stores in the out year? I just know you've been opening a few, and you're talking about maybe a few more openings. So I'm just trying to make sure I know what the number is going to be going to.

I think that's directionally correct.

Okay, okay. The Simple Joys, I think Kelly had asked about it. Is there any way you could kind of just give us a little bit more detail there? What's the size of it today? It sounds like you're kind of saying you expect to replace it with your core branded business. Is there any more detail you can give us on the sizing? And is that a headwind? I mean you called it out as a headwind in 3Q and 4Q. Is that a headwind we should be expecting to kind of continue into next year? Just any more detail there?

Yes. I don't want to comment too much. It's unusual for us to comment on individual wholesale customer relationships. So -- and we've certainly got to some length not to size those. As I said, it is the smallest part of the exclusive brands, which in total represent about half of our wholesale segment sales. So it is a bit of drag on revenue. That's -- we called it out because it was material enough to the segment results and to the company results to do so. It will be a bit of a drag, I would think, into next year, but I think we're excited about the opportunity of what the core brands could mean on the Amazon platform over time.

It's a bigger opportunity. Our own brands are a bigger opportunity than what we're winding down with Simple Joys is how I would answer the question.

Got it. Understood. And then just the last one for me. I know Jay tried to talk about the top line, and I appreciate, Richard, you don't want to go there. But if we just leave top line aside, could you just help me understand a little bit better? You've laid out the productivity initiatives, which makes sense in our materials, so roughly $45 million. But the tariff headwind on the wraparound is decently more than that. You're also saying you want to invest in demand creation and then you also lose a week and there's some other little things in there. But I guess just where is the confidence coming from that you guys have to call out earnings growth into next year just because it seems like you've got the right strategies in place. It just seems like you still have more pressure coming next year to kind of deal with. So I don't know if there's anything else you could share to help us understand where the confidence comes from?

Yes. I would say a couple of things in response, Mike. One, we are seeing some progress and some acceptance from the consumer in raising prices. That needs to be a key element. There needs to be more of that, that happens in 2026 to cover the bigger gross tariff exposure. So we are assuming that we have success in raising prices and the consumer broadly accepts that without tremendous pushback. I would say also, we are expecting the benefit of the productivity initiatives. And we're also assuming good return from the marketing investments as well, the demand creation investments. We've seen some of those proof points start to come through our business. Some of the work we've done over the last number of months have indicated we clearly under-index the peers relative to the peer set relative to what we spend on marketing. So we've been stepping into that, I think, with some good returns. And so we're expecting to see more of that. So we think that marketing investment actually is accretive to the top line and bottom line next year. So you put all that together with the productivity savings with the ability to cover most, not all, but a good portion of those gross tariff exposures, it leads to positive growth in operating income. And just to follow up on your question on the 53rd week, it's worth about $5 million at wholesale.

And our next question will be coming from Chris Nardone of Bank of America.

So just a couple of follow-up questions. So going back to the sales growth expectation for next year, is there anything different in your business today versus the prior period of price inflation that's giving you more confidence that you can grow sales, both maybe AUR and units? And then can you just give us an update what you're seeing from your competition so far? Are they increasing pricing at a similar level? And how are you planning for the promotional environment into the holidays?

Yes. I'll just talk about a few reasons to believe in our current business that gives us faith going forward into 2026, Chris. The first thing I would say is that we are seeing growth in our better and best categories of business. That by nature is higher AUR business for us. The second thing is that our brands are bringing in more new consumers. So our consumer base is growing as our market share returns. And we are seeing a lot of the newness in consumers coming from those younger Gen Z families. And so there's a lot of opportunity there and reasons to believe our business is getting better there as well. I think it's across our brands, too. It's not just Carter's. We're seeing growth in Oshkosh. We're seeing growth in Little Planet. We're seeing the launch of our toddler-specific Odor Avenue brand growing as well. And so there are meaningful growth vectors across our brands, across ages, across product categories. And in those better best buckets, bringing in new consumers on top of that, we believe that bodes well for what's coming down the road in 2026.

Richard?

Yes. And Chris, on pricing, just in general, I would say we are the market leader, so we intend to exhibit market leadership here. And in the past, when we've needed to raise prices because there's been some sort of an external shock to the system years ago when cotton doubled in price in a fairly short order, we had to raise prices meaningfully. We were able to do so. So I would say that the offset could be some loss of unit velocity. That's something that we're continuing to work through. I think our operational and our inventory teams have been really thoughtful where we think we may lose some unit intensity. We're reflecting that in our inventory commitments. On balance, in our retail business where we control more of our destiny, I think we've made a bit more of an investment in units to be able to do the business. There's probably a bit more at wholesale that you would expect that perhaps you could lose a bit of unit velocity there. But I think we're being really thoughtful about it. And I think, again, this is an industry issue. We're in a lot of the same factories as our wholesale customers, we see their product and we go to visit those vendors. So this is not a situation where our cost structure or our supply chain is somehow disadvantaged versus the industry. If anything, I think we have better cost than a lot of our peers in the industry. This is something that everyone is going to have to face. And so our intent is to do so thoughtfully and continue to watch our competitiveness, as I mentioned earlier, but those are our plans to raise prices across the assortment.

Understood. That was very helpful. And just a quick follow-up on margins. So I appreciate the intro color for 2026. But as we think about the tariff impact maybe into the first half of next year relative to the $25 million to $35 million rate for 4Q, should that actually improve as you kind of ratchet up the mitigation, or could that actually be more of a pressure point as you really are baking in the new rates into your inventory for first half? And then sorry to also fill this in, but is there anything else on the gross margin we should be thinking about into next year, even directionally as it relates to labor, cotton costs, freight costs, anything worth calling out directionally?

Well, I would say cotton has been a bit of wind in our sales. It's been remarkably stable and actually down year-over-year. So we're not particularly concerned about cotton inflation. So I guess I don't want to be too specific on what we think the net impact will be. I think our teams have done a good job mitigating to date. And here in the second half of the year, it was never our intention to fully cover the cost of tariffs here in the second half of '25. It was too fluid of a situation. As we approach next year, we've had more time to absorb this. We've had more time to think about reticketing goods, which really hasn't been practical here in the second half of of '25. It's been more of a response in ratcheting back promotional intensity in the business. So we have more of a pure kind of ticketing and pricing opportunity next year. It is our intent to cover the vast majority of this incremental tariff impact. Now it's a bigger gross impact than we had estimated before. So that is certainly a challenge. So pricing is a more significant element of it. And as Doug said, there are other things beyond pricing that we're doing with our supply chain team in terms of working with our vendors, moving production. All of those are benefits in terms of reducing that gross tariff impact as well. So we're not entirely reliant on pricing to be the only weapon that we have here. It is the most significant. It is the most material, but it's certainly by no means the only thing that we're doing to mitigate the impact here.

And our next question will be coming from Jim Chartier of Monness, Crespi and Hardt.

Could you just let us know what is the gross impact from tariffs in fourth quarter?

Estimated to be about $40 million, Jim.

Okay. And then in terms of kind of October to date, what have you seen with pricing and AUR so far?

Pricing continues to be up so far. We just closed the month of October. It's up kind of in the high single-digit range from memory.

Okay. And so the expectation is just that holiday gets more promotional and the AUR gains is about half of what you did in third quarter. Is that right?

Yes. I don't know if I'll say half as much. Just the holiday season is more promotional in general. So I expect we to give back some of that AUR gain as we get to the more promotional part of the quarter.

Okay. And then the tax rate, is 24% a good number beyond 2025 as well?

Yes, I think that's probably a decent planning assumption.

And our next question will be coming from Paul Kearney of Barclays.

I'm just curious on the top line, if you're able to speak to the level of incremental price increases you're expecting for the retail channel for the first half? And I have a follow-up.

For the first half of next year, no, I think probably too soon to comment on that, Paul.

Okay. My next question is on the SG&A reductions and the cost savings and the reinvestment. I'm curious if there's anything we need to consider in terms of timing of some of these of when the savings flow through, when the reinvestment is expected? And then also, you spoke to improving returns on kind of the media spend. I'm curious if we can just drill down on that. What are you seeing in terms of the media spend thus far? And how is it being spent differently into next year?

Yes. So on the SG&A savings, I would expect that it's January 1 when we're starting to realize the benefit of the run rate savings that we've articulated. So the reduction in force will be largely complete by the end of this year, so we'll start to get the organizational savings as we move into next year. The offset would be some of the demand creation investments that we articulated. That's about a $16 million. That's a full year number for next year. And Doug will offer some comments as well just in terms of the proof points we're seeing around marketing and the returns there. But we're going to step our way into it. We're going to continue to measure it rigorously. We're not going to write a check for that full amount, the first pay. We're going to just make sure it continues to generate the kind of returns that we anticipate.

Yes. So in terms of what's going to be different from a demand creation investment perspective, the first thing I would say is that there are 2 things that we are focusing on, driving traffic to our owned platforms where we see outstanding results for every point we gain in traffic across our fleet on our website, there's meaningful top and bottom line results. Second, consumer loyalty. And that has a lot to do with the experiences that we have on our sites and in our stores, on our apps with our loyalty program as well as the stories we tell about our brands and our products. Traditionally, over the past many years, Carter's messaging has been very focused on price and promotion. What you're already seeing is a lot more storytelling around product newness, product innovation and what each of our brands has to offer, which drives much more affinity and loyalty with consumers as well. So we will be tracking very closely against increasing traffic and increasing our resonance with consumers through loyalty.

.

And our next question will be coming from Janet Kloppenburg of JJK Research Associates.

I wanted to ask if I got this right, Richard, you comps are up, and that's being driven by price. And is that against high promotional levels last year, which are not happening this year?

In general, yes, Janet. So it was the second half of last year that, if you recall, we made a pretty considerable investment in increasing the promotional intensity of the business, also adding some marketing, but it was a significant reset in pricing a year ago. So we're up against that period this year, which is why we're encouraged by the gains in AUR and the positive comps.

And you spoke about Amazon. What about your other exclusive brand partners? Are they accepting the price increases as you implement them?

Yes. Again, I don't know if I'm going to comment specifically on those 2 customers. I would say we've had very constructive conversations with our wholesale customers, and they certainly are facing the same tariff and cost pressures that we are. So those have been good discussions. It's never easy to raise price in the wholesale channel, but I would say we've got a great level of partnership with all of our wholesale customers.

And can you discuss how much your clearance -- where your clearance inventories are year-over-year?

I would say on balance, in an improved position year-over-year exiting the third quarter. That was an issue year ago as well with some of the price that we were taking at retail was to clear through some of, in particular, spring season goods that had carried over into this early fall time period. We did not have that issue this year. And I would say inventory balance is much more oriented around current and future seasons than it is past season. So I think inventory quality is very good at the moment.

And for Doug, you just touched on this a minute ago, but do you think some of this response on a high single-digit price increase, a healthy response from the consumer is coming from merchandising initiatives, and perhaps you could discuss those for us?

Yes, I do. As I talked about, we're seeing our better and best categories perform better as a part of the total mix than they have in the past. And much of that is also being fueled by new consumers coming into the store. So we're gaining market share back that has been lost previously, and that is coming through these higher AUR products. As Richard talked about, one of the investments we have made is putting make back in our product. That means our design intent is stronger than it has been in many years, and we believe that trend will continue well into 2026 and beyond.

Okay. And you're not contemplating any slowdown in the moderate to lower consumer target market that you address? I'm not suggesting you should. I just wondered how you thought about that.

We're not -- we're definitely cognizant of the macro and what's happening in the world. Inflation is real. As Richard mentioned, there are forces that are beyond our control. I can answer for what is within our control, and that's what I just told you.

And I would now like to turn the call back to Doug for closing remarks.

Yes. Thank you, everybody, for joining us today. As you can tell, we are making progress against our core initiatives. We are seeing reasons to believe in our business. There remains a tremendous amount of work for us to do, and we look forward to sharing more of that as we move forward. Thank you for being with us today.

And this concludes today's conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.