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He comes to us with a wealth of retail financial experience and we are pleased to have him on board and on the call today.
We achieved another great quarter and the momentum continues.
Third quarter earnings per share of $0.15 repr-+esent the companies best third quarter performance since 2016 and demonstrates the extraordinary progress we continued to make in our turnaround strategy.
The return to third quarter profitability was driven by healthy year over year comparable sales growth meaningful gross margin expansion.
In fact, the best third quarter gross margin performance since 2014 and continued diligence expense management.
The robust year-over-year third quarter comparable sales increase of 28% was driven by significant digital and store outperformance across all three brands propelled by the meaningful quality, fit, and fabrication enhancements in our products.
We have continued to significantly drive full-price selling, reduce markdowns and increase gross margin quarter-over-quarter.
Dramatic improvement is continuing at Chico's and White House Black Market as indicated by our third quarter comp sales increase of 23% and 33% respectively on significantly lower inventory levels.
Both apparel brands are driving meaningfully faster sell-through rates, higher productivity, more full-price sales, and better-maintained margins.
Existing and new customers are enthusiastically responding to our updated fabric, fit, and new product offering.
The apparel brands generated their best third quarter gross margin performance in more than five years.
Soma posted a 30% comp sales increase over last year's third quarter on top of an 11% comp sales increase in the third quarter of 2019.
Marking five consecutive quarters of comp sales growth.
To continue driving this business forward, we have invested in the necessary inventory capital and staffing.
Twelve months of trailing data from market research NPD Group shows that solid growth continues to outpace the market in non-sports bra, panties, and sleepwear.
We believe this data along with our recent performance is a strong indication that Soma is well-positioned to continue capturing additional market share on our journey to becoming a billion-dollar brand.
Our third quarter performance highlights the remarkable progress we are making on our five strategic priorities.
Let me take a few minutes to update you on each.
First, continuing our ongoing digital transformation.
Over the last two and a half years we have successfully transformed Chico's FAS into a seamless digital-first customer-led company as evidenced by the trajectory of our digital sales over this time.
Even as store revenues have continued to rebound.
Digital sales have remained very strong.
The investments we have made in talent and technology have paid off.
Our proprietary digital tools continue to gain traction.
And customers using these tools are more engaged and have higher conversion rates and average order value.
These tools continue to drive year-over-year new multi-channel customer growth and these customers are our most valuable spending three times a single-channel customer.
We continue to leverage our online outfitting experiences, style connect in my closet, and customer engagement growth every quarter.
Approximately 3 million customers representing nearly half of our active customer file are now enrolled in file connect.
My closet is a personalized experience enabling customers to augment their closet by coordinating their wardrobe for past purchases.
Generates conversion at four and a half times the site average and significantly higher average order value than those not using the feature.
We are continually enhancing our personalization efforts to drive engagement, conversion, and orders, including our Shop The Look feature launched last year.
After pay allowing for customers to pay for their purchases in installments has also proven to be a terrific UPT and sales driver.
Since it launched about a year ago.
It continues to exceed our expectations.
Buy Online Pick Up in the store has also remained popular and is still growing double-digit.
Second, further refining our product.
On the product front, we are doing two key things at each of our brands to take market share and drive results.
First, leveraging our customer data and insights.
And second, constantly innovating and elevating our assortment.
Customers are clearly responding across all three brands.
At Chico's, denim and our new pant selections are a big hit, which she is pairing with wovens, sweaters, and our great no-iron shirt to make a complete outfit.
She is responding to our elevated fabrics and new comfort features in bottoms.
White House black market continues to benefit from elevated styling and quality improvements as well.
We had an outstanding response to our new denim fit and fabric with year-over-year denim revenues nearly doubling for the quarter.
She is pairing denim with our three new key White House Black Market jackets silhouette that is versatile for every occasion.
Continually creating comfortable beautiful solutions are core to the Soma brand.
We offer a full broad menu of solutions so she can find the absolute right bra for all of her needs.
Year over year bra revenues was up 38% in the quarter boosted by the fact that our customers returned to the stores or in-person fittings.
Sleepwear and panties continue to be strong and drove double-digit growth over last year and 2019 levels.
Next driving customer engagement.
Through enhanced customer data analytics and insight, we have elevated and targeted our marketing efforts, which are driving brand awareness, generating traffic, and acquiring new customers.
We continue to allocate more resources to digital, storytelling influencers, and other social efforts.
We are elevating our content including using more organic and user-generated content.
Our social media customer engagement continues to grow and customers are responding.
For example, our weekly Facebook live selling events are engaging and continue to gain traction and generate sales.
In the third quarter, our apparel brand had over 2.3 million views in social selling live videos and real.
We continue to acquire new customers with the customer count up nearly 8% from the prior-year third quarter.
And their average age continues to trend younger than existing customers.
This data reinforces the runway for all three brands.
Priority for maintaining our operating and profit discipline.
One of our most meaningful third quarter accomplishments was our gross margin performance.
We achieved our highest third quarter gross margin rate since 2014, driven by strength in full-price sales and the corresponding reduction in the promotion, strategic inventory management, and improved leverage of occupancy cost on higher sales.
Continued cost discipline efforts and sales leverage resulted in the third quarter SG&A and rate lower than both the third quarters of 2020 and 2019.
In fact, we posted our best SG&A rate performance since 2018.
And finally, delivering higher productivity in our real estate portfolio.
Door traffic was very healthy and we delivered strong store sales growth during the third quarter.
Stores continue to be an integral part of our overall strategy as data indicates that digital sales are higher in markets where we have a strong retail presence.
Food and store growth for the portfolio brands makes sense where the investment delivers profitable returns.
We have successfully opened 64 Soma shop-in-shop inside Chico's stores, which are exceeding expectations, driving new customers to both brands, lifting store productivity, and further expanding our digital business.
We plan to open nine more shops-in-shop in the fourth quarter.
At the same time, we continue to rationalize and tighten our real estate portfolio as appropriate in order to deliver overall higher store profitability.
We will make decisions to close stores when it is accretive to the overall portfolio.
This remains a dynamic process.
For example, at the beginning of the year, we expected to close 45 to 50 locations.
This fiscal year but have reduced that number to 37 due to a combination of favorable store performance and successful lease negotiation.
I'm excited to be part of Chico's team and look forward to engaging with all of you in the investor and analyst community.
Our momentum continued in Q3 and we posted another quarter of profitable growth with diluted earnings per share of $0.15 for the quarter, compared to a $0.48 loss per share in last year's third quarter and a $0.7 loss per share for the third quarter of fiscal 2019.
I will note that on a non-GAAP basis before onetime charges diluted earnings per share for the quarter was $0.18.
This year's third quarter marks our best third quarter earnings performance since 2016 with all three brands leveraging a shared platform contributing meaningfully to sales growth, gross margin expansion, and significantly higher operating income.
Third quarter net sales totaled $453.6 million, compared to $351.4 million last year.
This 29% increase reflects a comparable sales increase of 28% and is driven by meaningful improvement in product and enhanced marketing efforts, which drove full-price selling partially offset by 31 net store closures in the last 12 months.
At the brand level, Chico's comparable sales grew 23%, White House Black Market comp sales grew 33.4%, and SOMA comp sales grew 30.2% over 2020.
Looking at the third quarter compared to 2019, our comparable sales continue to improve reaching close to 97% of pre-pandemic 2019 levels with Soma increasing 44% in Chico's and White House Black Market down 16% and 5% respectively.
I would note that this level of sales growth was achieved with much lower on-hand inventories compared to 2019 with Chico's inventories down 46% and White House Black Market inventory is down 39%.
Reinforcing the higher productivity achieved by managing inventory with a focus on overall profitability.
The third quarter gross margin was 40.7%, compared to 22% last year, and 35.3% in 2019.
The current year gross margin rate was our best performance in 18 consecutive quarters and reflected higher full-price sales and improved occupancy leverage.
This improvement was achieved despite supply chain challenges and related costs that continue to impact the retail sector.
Moving down the P&L, SG&A expenses for the third quarter totaled $162.5 million or 35.8% of sales, compared to 43.6% of sales in 2020, and 37.3% of sales in 2019.
Continued cross-discipline and expense reduction initiatives coupled with improving sales have enabled us to realize meaningful leverage that would give us more financial flexibility as we continue to grow all three brands.
On a year-to-date basis, I would like to highlight that both profitability and cash flow have improved significantly since last year and 2019.
In addition to giving us much more flexibility, higher free cash flow generation will provide us with fuel to invest behind a strategy that is working.
Fueling growth will be a key capital allocation priority going forward.
On a year-to-date basis, we generated $89 million of EBITDA through the third quarter, which is significantly higher than EBITDA of $65 million for all of fiscal 2019.
For the current year nine months, we posted earnings per share of $0.29, compared to a loss of $2.43 per share in the prior year nine months, and a loss of $0.7 for the same period in 2019.
Now let's shift to the balance sheet.
Our cash position and total liquidity remain strong.
Providing us with the flexibility to manage the business and make investments to further fuel our momentum.
We ended the quarter with cash and marketable securities of $137.5 million.
A slight increase over the second quarter balance even after reducing borrowings on our long-term credit facility by a third with a $50 million debt repayment.
On hand inventories for the quarter remain very lean down 13% relative to 2020 and down 19% relative to 2019.
Our inventory has never been more productive and delivered a very high gross margin for us especially in the apparel brands where on-him inventory was down 38% to last year and down 43% to 2019.
Turning to real estate.
In the third quarter, we continued our lease renegotiation initiative with A&G Real Estate Partners securing incremental commitments of $7 million bringing our total year-to-date commitments to $22 million in rent reductions from landlords.
This is in addition to the 65 million introductions negotiated last year for a total savings of $87 million since we commenced the renegotiation program in 2020.
These renegotiated store leases will provide an occupancy tailwind and further enhance store profitability going forward.
As Molly noted, we are continuing to right-size our store base.
Primarily at leases come due lease checkouts are available for buyouts make economic sense.
We have flexibility with approximately 60% of our leases coming up for renewal for kick-outs available over the next two to three years.
During the third quarter, we closed five stores bringing our year to date closing to 23 and we ended the quarter with 1,279 boutiques.
Going forward, we will continue to actively manage our real estate portfolio to enhance overall store profitability.
Now turning to our fourth quarter outlook, given the strength of customer demand for all three of our brands, we are confident that our momentum will be sustained as we get further into the quarter.
We expect fourth quarter total sales to continue to accelerate closer to 2019 and reach $495 million to $510 million.
We expect fourth quarter gross margin rate as a percent of sales to be a part of 2020 and 2019 and in the range of 33% to 34.5%.
This expectation incorporates continued inventory management with faster sell-through rates and higher full-price sales as well as higher supply chain costs.
We are continuing to manage our expense structure and expect that the SG&A rate as a percent of sales to be in the range of 32.3% to 32.8%.
We expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 33% for the quarter, which will give us a rate of 24% for the full year.
And we expect to deliver dilutive earnings per share a flat to $0.5 for the fourth quarter putting us well above 2020 and 2019 for both the quarter and the full year.
Before we go on to Q&A, I would like to leave you with three key thoughts.
First, our turnarounds have accelerated due to our strategic initiatives and continued cost discipline.
Second, all three of our brands are contributing meaningfully to sales growth and profitability.
And last, we have greatly improved the fundamental operating model of the business and have created a sustainable tailwind that will allow us to successfully navigate the current macro environment and continue on a path of profitable growth well into the future.

user
compname reports q3 earnings per share of $0.15.
q3 earnings per share $0.15.
q3 adjusted earnings per share $0.18 excluding items.
q3 sales $453.6 million versus $351.4 million.
sees consolidated net sales of $495 million to $510 million in q4.

assistant