You are given a text that consists of multiple sentences. Your task is to perform abstractive summarization on this text. Use your understanding of the content to express the main ideas and crucial details in a shorter, coherent, and natural sounding text. 
Text: Due to the material impact of COVID-19 on our business in fiscal 2020, we will also include comparisons to our fiscal 2019 results.
Before I begin reviewing third quarter results, I want to remind everyone of Oxford's core operating philosophies.
Our objective is always to deliver long-term shareholder value.
Our strategy for delivering this value is to own a portfolio of powerful lifestyle brands that can drive sustained profitable growth.
And our purpose as a company and in each of our brands is to make people happy.
With that, we're delighted to be reporting record sales and earnings for the third quarter of fiscal 2021.
These outstanding results are directly attributable to the power of our brand portfolio, the strength of our product offerings and our ability to connect with and serve customers across channels, combined with the great work our teams have done to fortify these foundational cornerstones during the pandemic.
As compared to the same quarter last year, our sales increased 41%.
And even more importantly, our sales also increased as compared to pre-COVID fiscal 2019 levels.
Excluding Lanier Apparel, where operations were effectively exited during the third quarter of fiscal 2021, net sales increased 15% over the same period of fiscal 2019.
The robust sales growth that we experienced during the third quarter was driven by 40% growth in our full price direct-to-consumer business, with growth in each of our brands compared to fiscal 2019, including a 13% increase in full-price retail and a 100% gain in full-price e-commerce.
Restaurant sales also contributed to our top-line improvement, growing 14% in the third quarter of fiscal 2021 as compared to the third quarter of fiscal 2019 fueled by strong increases at existing locations, as well as the addition of five new Marlin Bar locations.
At the same time, adjusted gross margin increased an impressive 710 basis points to 62% during the third quarter of fiscal 2021 as compared to fiscal 2019.
Scott will elaborate on all these excellent metrics in more detail momentarily.
But I will mention that they drove record third quarter earnings of $1.19 per share on an adjusted basis compared to an adjusted loss of $0.44 per share last year and adjusted earnings per share, up $0.10 during the third quarter of fiscal 2019.
While our third quarter results no doubt benefited from a very strong consumer market, we believe the primary driver of our outperformance was the excellent execution of our strategy and purpose.
The exit of Lanier Apparel during the third quarter mark an important milestone in our long-term strategy as Lanier was the last of our legacy private label businesses.
Our current portfolio consists of five excellent lifestyle brands: Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer, Southern Tide, The Beaufort Bonnet Company and Duck Head.
These brands are 100% focused on the consumer and making that consumer happy with powerful clear brand messages, exceptional differentiated product, superior customer experiences, including our e-commerce websites, our stores and restaurants and strategic wholesale accounts.
Over the last two years, across our brands, we have redoubled our commitment to delivering our positive upbeat brand messages through beautiful creative content in imagery.
Those brand messages are resonating with our consumers and are a big part of the excellent results that we are delivering.
The predominant mix of direct-to-consumer, which is expected to be over 80% of our business enhances our ability to deliver happiness to our customers.
The direct model gives us significant agility and flexibility in managing the flow of product to our customers.
This flexibility has proven especially useful this year, as industrywide supply chain challenges had required our merchants to be highly adaptable as to what product we are featuring on the floor and on our websites at any particular point in time.
The direct business also provides us with significant margin power and is responsible for a large portion of the gain in gross margin that we achieved during the quarter.
Finally, the direct-to-consumer model gives us the opportunity to deliver an unparalleled customer experience that is consistent with the aspirational positioning of our brands.
And our incredible people have continued to provide that elevated experience through all the challenges of the last two years.
One of our strategic priorities over the last couple of years has been to enhance our digital marketing capabilities by improving our ability to assimilate and analyze data, use that data to develop insights about existing in potential customers, create campaigns designed to reach those consumers and measure the effectiveness of those campaigns with the goals of increasing our customer account, retaining existing customers and driving higher spend across all customers.
I'm pleased to report that on a trailing 12-month basis, customer metrics at the end of the third quarter of fiscal 2021, including customer accounts, rate of new customer additions, retention rates and customer lifetime value were all strong relative to pre-pandemic numbers.
From a product perspective, we continued to see strength in the casual, easy and cozy styles, that are a hallmark of all our brands.
Great examples of this are continued strength in Tommy Bahama knits and shorts, women's lounge and sleepwear, and Lilly Pulitzer's Luxletic athleisure collection.
At the same time, we saw a nice rebound in some of the occasion-driven categories that were most challenged last year including men's pants and woven shirts and women's dresses, as people reengaged in more social events.
As we head into the final stretch of the year, I'm pleased to report that the holiday selling to-date has been robust and I firmly believe that we will deliver a strong finish to a fantastic year.
I'm incredibly grateful to our team, and share their pride in what we have delivered for our customers and our shareholders.
As Tom just mentioned, we had outstanding performances in each of our brands during the third quarter, which resulted in significant sales, gross margin, operating margin and earnings growth to levels exceeding pre-pandemic results.
On the top line, demand for our products remained high and revenue exceeded 2019 at our direct-to-consumer channels and in each of our brands.
Excluding Lanier Apparel where operations were effectively exited during the third quarter of fiscal 2021, consolidated sales increased 15% to $243 million.
We had improvements in all regions, with particular strength in Florida, the Southeast and Texas.
Hawaii has been positive overall with strength, except on the island of Oahu, which is more dependent on foreign tourists, than the other islands.
Our gross margin continued to track significantly higher than 2019.
On an adjusted basis, gross margin expanded 710 basis points over 2019 to 62% in the third quarter.
Driving this improvement was the higher proportion of full price sales, our overall shift in our sales mix to higher margin direct-to-consumer channels of distribution and improved IMUs.
Approximately 270 basis points of higher freight cost, including the use of air freight partially offset some of the margin improvement.
On an adjusted basis, we gained 260 basis points of SG&A leverage in the third quarter, improving from 56% of sales in 2019 to 53% of sales in 2021.
Adjusted SG&A dollars decreased modestly from 2019 levels but decreases in employment costs due to headcount reductions and lower occupancy cost, partially offset by increases in marketing expense.
As a result, our consolidated operating margin expanded 970 basis points from 1% in 2019, to 11%.
Tommy Bahama, Lilly Pulitzer and Southern Tide all experienced operating margin expansion.
Moving to the balance sheet, our liquidity position is strong.
We ended the third quarter with $188 million of cash and short-term investments and no borrowings outstanding under our revolving credit facility.
FIFO inventory decreased 17% compared to fiscal 2020 excluding Lanier Apparel due to higher-than-expected sales during the first nine months of 2021, ongoing enhancements to enterprise order management systems and prudent seasonal purchases.
We believe our inventory is well positioned to meet forecasted demand throughout the remainder of the holiday selling season.
Looking ahead, we are pleased with our holiday season results to-date and are confident we can deliver a solid fourth quarter.
Our outlook reflects our expectation of continued strength in full price direct-to-consumer business.
We expect full price direct-to-consumer sales growth and consolidated gross margin expansion over 2019.
While we raised our outlook for the year, year-over-year improvement in our full price direct business is expected to be partially offset by a handful of specific items in the fourth quarter of the fiscal year.
We expect sales from Lanier Apparel to be approximately $20 million lower than 2019's fourth quarter as we exited the business in Q3 of this year.
In addition, we expect our branded wholesale business to be approximately $15 million lower than 2019.
This is impacted by the shift to certain initial spring wholesale shipments.
These have historically shipped in the fourth quarter, but are expected to ship in the first quarter of 2022, as we reduced our reliance on air freight for warmer weather product.
We also expect the Lilly Pulitzer fourth quarter flash clearance sale, to be lower compared to 2019, due to strong year-to-date full price sales resulting in less available inventory for the flash sale.
For the fourth quarter, we expect sales to be between $285 million and $295 million compared to sales of $298 million in the fourth quarter of fiscal 2019.
Again Lanier Apparel generated $20 million in net sales in the fourth quarter of 2019.
In the fourth quarter of fiscal 2021, we expect earnings of $1.20 to $1.35 per share on an adjusted basis, compared to earnings of $1.09 per share on an adjusted basis in the fourth quarter of 2019.
Our outlook includes strong quarter-to-date results with a solid start to the holiday selling season.
For the full year, we now expect sales in a range of $1.127 billion to $1.137 billion as compared to sales of $1.123 billion in 2019.
For the full year, sales from Lanier Apparel are expected to be $25 million in 2021, compared to $95 million in 2019.
Adjusted earnings per share is expected to be between $7.52 and $7.67.
This compared to earnings of $4.32 per share on an adjusted basis in 2019.
Our effective tax rate for the full fiscal year 2021 is expected to be approximately 22%.
We continue to support our business with investments for future growth.
Capital expenditures are expected to be between $35 million and $40 million in fiscal 2021, primarily reflecting investments in information technology initiatives, new Marlin Bars and retail stores.
We're excited to open our first company-owned Beaufort Bonnet Company store in Grand Boulevard at Sandestin later this quarter.
We continue to generate strong cash flow from operations, including a $157 million year-to-date.
Our capital allocation priorities include investing in our businesses, acquisitions and the return of capital to shareholders through dividends and share repurchases.
We remain in a strong position to return cash to shareholders and are proud of our long history of returning value through dividends, which we have paid every quarter since going public in 1960.
This quarter, our Board of Directors has declared a dividend of $0.42 per share.
Additionally, in assessing our capital allocation plan, our Board of Directors approved a new share repurchase authorization of $150 million.

user
compname reports q3 adjusted earnings per share $1.19.
oxford: strong consumer demand and excellent execution drove record third quarter results, raises full year guidance.
q3 adjusted earnings per share $1.19.
sees q4 sales $285 million to $295 million.
sees fy sales $1.127 billion to $1.137 billion.
sees fy adjusted earnings per share $7.52 to $7.67.

assistant