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Destination XL Group (DXLG) reported its first-quarter 2025 earnings, revealing a notable miss on both earnings per share (EPS) and revenue compared to forecasts. The company posted an EPS of -$0.04 against an expected $0.055. Revenue came in at $105.5 million, falling short of the anticipated $116.58 million. Despite these results, Destination XL’s stock price showed resilience, increasing by 5.05% to $1.24 in pre-market trading. According to InvestingPro data, the company’s market capitalization stands at $66.37 million, with analysts setting price targets between $1.75 and $2.50.
Key Takeaways
- Destination XL missed both EPS and revenue forecasts for Q1 2025.
- The stock price rose by 5.05% in pre-market trading despite earnings miss.
- New brand launches and technology innovations were highlighted as strategic focuses.
- The company plans to open six new stores by the end of 2025.
Company Performance
Destination XL Group faced a challenging Q1 2025, with net sales declining to $105.5 million from $115.5 million in the same quarter last year. The company attributed this decline to a 9.4% decrease in comparable sales and a challenging economic environment impacting consumer spending on discretionary apparel. Despite these hurdles, the company remains debt-free and continues to invest in strategic initiatives, including new store openings and technology enhancements.
Financial Highlights
- Revenue: $105.5 million, down from $115.5 million YoY
- Earnings per share: -$0.04, missing the forecast of $0.055
- Gross margin rate: 45.1%, down from 48.2% YoY
- EBITDA: $100,000, compared to $8.2 million YoY
Earnings vs. Forecast
Destination XL’s actual EPS of -$0.04 was significantly below the forecasted $0.055, marking a notable miss. The revenue also fell short of expectations by $11.05 million. These results reflect the company’s struggle to meet market expectations amid a tough retail environment.
Market Reaction
Despite the earnings miss, Destination XL’s stock rose by 5.05% in pre-market trading, reaching $1.24. This increase suggests that investors may be optimistic about the company’s strategic initiatives or see potential in its long-term growth plans. The stock is trading above its 52-week low of $0.896 but remains below its high of $3.93. Based on InvestingPro’s Fair Value analysis, DXLG appears slightly undervalued at current levels. InvestingPro subscribers have access to 14 additional exclusive insights about DXLG, including detailed valuation metrics and growth projections. Discover comprehensive analysis in the Pro Research Report, available with your subscription.
Outlook & Guidance
Looking ahead, Destination XL anticipates gradual sales improvement, with single-digit negative comparable sales expected in Q2 2025 and positive comp sales projected in the second half of the year. The company plans to continue expanding its retail footprint with four additional store openings planned for 2025, bringing the total to 18 new locations.
Executive Commentary
CEO Harvey Kanter stated, "We are managing our business through an economic down cycle," highlighting the company’s resilience. CFO Peter Stratton emphasized the strength of their balance sheet, noting, "Our fortress balance sheet gives us the ability to weather the short-term economic challenges." Kanter also expressed optimism about the potential of FITMAP technology to enhance the retail experience.
Risks and Challenges
- Economic environment: Continued consumer spending pullback could further impact sales.
- Competitive pressures: The big and tall market faces softness, challenging growth.
- Supply chain disruptions: Potential tariff impacts and logistical issues may affect margins.
- Market saturation: Expansion plans may be hindered by existing market conditions.
In summary, while Destination XL Group did not meet its Q1 2025 earnings expectations, the company’s strategic initiatives and strong balance sheet provide a foundation for potential recovery and growth. Investors appear cautiously optimistic, as reflected in the stock’s positive pre-market performance. InvestingPro data reveals management has been actively buying back shares, and the company maintains a healthy gross profit margin of 46.51%. For deeper insights into DXLG’s financial health, valuation metrics, and growth potential, explore the comprehensive Pro Research Report, available exclusively to InvestingPro subscribers.
Full transcript - Destination XL Group Inc (DXLG) Q1 2026:
Conference Operator: Good day, everyone, and welcome to the Destination XLGU, Inc. First Quarter Fiscal twenty twenty five Financial Results Conference Call. Today’s call is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the call over to Ms. Shelby Mokus, Vice President of Financial Reporting and SEC Compliance at DXL.
Please go ahead, Shelly.
Shelby Mokus, Vice President of Financial Reporting and SEC Compliance, Destination XL Group: Thank you, and good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us on Destination XL Group’s first quarter fiscal twenty twenty five earnings call. On our call today are our President and Chief Executive Officer, Harvey Kanter and our Chief Financial Officer, Peter Stratton. During today’s call, we will discuss some non GAAP metrics to provide investors with useful information about our financial performance. Please refer to our earnings release, which was filed this morning and is available on our Investor Relations website at investor.dxl.com for an explanation and reconciliation of such measures.
Today’s discussion also contains certain forward looking statements concerning the company’s strategic initiatives and marketing strategies, expectations for comparable sales, potential impact of current tariffs, and other expectations for fiscal twenty twenty five. Such forward looking statements are subject to various risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those assumptions mentioned today due to a variety of factors that affect the company. Information regarding risks and uncertainties is detailed in the company’s filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. I would now like to turn the call over to our CEO, Harvey Kanter. Harvey?
Harvey Kanter, President and Chief Executive Officer, Destination XL Group: Thank you, Shelly, and good morning, everyone. As always, we appreciate all of you joining us today for an update on our business, specifically about how we are navigating in this challenging environment and hearing about our performance in the first quarter. On our last earnings call in mid March, I shared how through the first six weeks of the quarter, our comp sales were down 12.5% and projected that quarter would likely end down in a low double digit comp decline. I am pleased to report that sales performance in the first quarter improved, and we ended up with a comp sales decline of 9.4%. This is a small improvement from our thinking in mid March, but we are encouraged by the implications, which we believe at least partially stem from the initiatives designed for greater consumer engagement with the focus on creating greater value and in all cases, this is meaningful.
We are beginning to see a small improvement in sales from a combination of these strategic initiatives designed to drive value and capture a greater share of demand. In addition, we expect to benefit from easier comp comparisons later as we move through 2025. We expect comparable sales to continue to gradually improve over the year, delivering a single digit negative in the second quarter and a return to a positive comp result in the second half of the year. There are several topics which I want to update you all on today, but I thought it was important starting with our comp sales performance as we work feverishly to regain our trajectory and ultimately sales growth. A second topic that I expect is at the top of everyone’s mind these days is the impact of reciprocal tariffs on our business.
As we know, the situation with tariffs is incredibly fluid, volatile and something we continue to monitor in terms of policy changes. However, right now, assuming the current global tariff rate policies and applications do not change for the balance of the year and no new tariffs are added, we estimate the impact to add less than $2,000,000 or approximately 40 basis points to our costs this year. We are leaning into our relationships with our vendors and suppliers around the world, and we are working hard to mitigate the impact of those tariffs. So far, our discussions with our private label vendors have been very productive. On the national brand front, we are also having dialogues with our national brands, but unfortunately, we are still in a holding pattern.
Approximately 80% of our private label imports are sourced from Vietnam, Bangladesh, and India. Less than five percent of our imports are sourced in China, and we continue to examine our country of origin sourcing strategy and what changes can be made to secure the best quality product and at the lowest possible cost. At this point, we have not yet taken any price increases, but that is still possible. We are continuing to assess whether there is enough price elasticity of demand to take market share by keeping constant prices at lower margin versus passing on the impact of those tariffs to the end consumer to maintain our margins, but risk losing share. We know there is a sensitivity to price and we are trying to be smart about how we strike the right balance.
As I said, the situation is very fluid and we will continue to update you as policy develops, but as of this moment, we have not yet made any changes to retail pricing. For the agenda today, there are two major topics that I want to talk about. First, I want to cover our first quarter results. As I noted earlier, our first quarter sales performance, while softer than we would have liked surpassed our expectations from the beginning of the year. Our comp sales decrease for the first quarter of 9.4% was driven primarily by lower traffic levels to our stores.
In the direct business, traffic became more of a challenge this quarter, while conversion was relatively flat. More broadly, average order value was pressured in both sales channels. As we said before, we believe our customer continues to be pressured and he is just not prioritizing spending on big and tall apparel. With that said, I will get into more of the details behind our first quarter performance in a few moments. Second, I want to update you on the initiatives and tactics we are chasing to address the consumers focus in making purchases and likewise, our attempt to improve traffic.
As I mentioned on our Q4 earnings call back in March, our strategic focus in 2025 is to stabilize our business and drive the path back to growth. That means focusing on our customers, carefully controlling our costs and being very prudent with how, where and when we invest our capital. More than anything else we are trying to remain flexible and agile. We have a proven process structure and discipline in our execution across all our operating channels, which has led to improvements to inventory turnover, careful consideration of promotions and our fortress balance sheet that gives us the confidence to weather the difficult environment. So let me start by getting right into our first quarter results.
Comp store sales for stores were down 6.6%, while direct was down 16.2%. Comp sales by month improved each month with February down 13.9%, March down 8.2%, and April down 7.2%. An element of the March April results was clearly being the Easter shift. For the first three weeks of May comparable sales are down just under 10% and consistent with our first quarter result. We believe we are currently managing our business through an economic down cycle.
The imperil environment continues to be challenging and our performance does not reflect the opportunity in our total addressable market or the longer term potential for our brand. We believe the broader macroeconomic challenges and consumer sentiment is pushing our customer to hold very tight to his wallet. We have observed many guests who come into our stores being more careful with what they are buying, but they still hold a strong affinity for our brands, our fit, and the DXL experience. The arrival of fit exchange by DXL and Heroes Discount have been a valuable help in building greater affinity for DXL and amongst more price sensitive shoppers. We are seeing less price resistance than we have in the past and are offering our guests even greater value with these initiatives.
We continue to hear from customers that they value our quality, fit, and services in our stores compared to other big box and off price retailers. Our net promoter score continues to shine and is touching just over 80 in our stores. While he may be trading down from national designer brands, he is pushing more of his spending into essentials, which means lower average price points. We still have a lot of work to do, but our customer surveys and the reactions to our marketing initiatives have been positive. I’m going to come back to marketing in a few minutes.
In merchandising, the overall sales penetration between designer collections and private label brands has shifted as we’ve seen the customer trading down across both categories. Historically, our sales penetration into private label ranges on average between 5055%. Last year in Q1 private brands accounted for 55% and this year that rate moved further to 57%. We have more control over our private brand label pricing and supply chain, and typically earn higher margins on private brands and national brands. And that shift in mix has helped to offset an increase in markdown rates from select promotions and our marketing initiatives.
We experienced a slight uptick in markdowns as more customers gravitated to our two for pricing offers. We also utilize new markdowns as a result of driving new traffic initiatives, such as FinExchange and Heroes discount. And lastly, clearance markdowns came in higher as a result of shifting the March clearance event into April to align with the Easter calendar shift. We have some bright spots in the assortment, most notably in our Oak Hill and Oak Hill premium, and specifically in the Oak Hill tech pant and tech shorts, as well as our five pocket cargo pants. Knits and casual shirts had a tougher start to the first quarter, but have recovered well as we start the second quarter.
Our inventory is in great shape. Fresh spring receipts have been flowing into the stores and are available on our website, which is setting us up for a great experience with our customers as we approach Father’s Day. Inventory management continues to be a shining star and highlight and is evidence of our operating discipline. Compared to last year, our quarter end inventory was down $5,800,000 or approximately 6.4%, while our inventory turnover rate has improved by over 30% since emerging from the pandemic. Clearance levels of 9.5% at the end of the first quarter are in line with our long term expectations of 10%.
Last quarter, I also talked about our updates on opening price point strategy. We have developed a more comprehensive opening price point assortment driven by the strategic intent to lower barriers of entry rooted in our consumer research, brand tracking, and real time shifts in buying behavior. Our goal is to enhance value with our offering and the perceived overall value of DXL for consumers. Lower prices address the entry barrier by expanding our range of merchandise and opening price points across items relative to our assortment. Last month, we launched Dickies and Hager.
So far results for Dickies have been in line with our expectations and Hager has exceeded our expectations. We are supporting both brands with targeted marketing messages, including homepage, email, and social content. And we have also expanded our big and tall essentials offering online, as well as just launched Perry Ellis last week. In stores, the narrative from fiscal twenty twenty four has continued into the start of 2025. Traffic to stores accounts for approximately 90% of the comp sales decline.
I’m happy to report that we opened two more white space stores in the past quarter with new stores in Roseville, California and Salt Lake, Utah. Our third and fourth store opened in May in Syracuse, New York and Hanover, New Jersey And this brings the total number of new DXL stores that have opened in the past three years to 14 new markets. Finally, expect to open four more stores later this year, bringing our total to 18 before we pause new store openings to focus on stabilizing our core business and preserving cash flow. Performance in our new stores has been challenging, similar to what we are seeing in our existing store business, we believe the low awareness of our brand is creating greater short term challenges in successfully ramping traffic to the newly opened stores. New stores have not seen the level of traffic we initially expected, but we believe there is still much room to grow.
We believe it is more appropriate to resume store development when we can support it with a brand awareness campaign. While opening the new stores in a down cycle has been difficult in time and with more brand awareness, we still expect these stores will be able to achieve their potential. I now want to touch on marketing strategies, initiatives and tactics that we’re chasing to correct the traffic decline. Three initiatives and projects are aimed at enhancing our market position and delivering exceptional value to our customers, and I will talk you through each and they include the role of strategic promotion, our new loyalty program and the early results, and the replatforming of our commerce operation. First up is our use of strategic promotion.
Given the sector softness that persists, we believe that to garner a greater share of the big and tall market, we must continue to leverage promotion to entice new customers, incentivize current customers to shop more often, and finally reactivate those who have not shopped with us for some time. We are deploying a two pronged approach that we believe addresses these objectives. The first pillar in our strategy is always on value. This includes everyday value driving initiatives targeted at specific customer cohorts that can be used when they are ready to shop. We are purposely trying to avoid store wide and site wide promotion and instead are deploying strategic offers intended to increase customer acquisition, drive frequency of visits and provide customers with a higher degree of assurance they’re getting a great value when they shop at DXL.
In March, we introduced our Heroes discount, an active military first responder, teachers, and veterans program that celebrates their service to our country and our communities and rewards them with a special offer. The Heroes Discount is attracting new customers and reactivating last customers at a greater rate than transactions without the offer. Additionally, customers using the offer are spending almost 10% more than average AOV in the company. Second, in response to research, we conducted on GLP-one usage and insights around the challenges the big and tall man faces both on and off his weight loss journey, we introduced the FinExchange by DXL in early Q1. Fin Exchange facilitates the in store charitable donation by our customers of clothing which no longer fits to help others in need.
In return, the customer receives a 20% discount on his in store purchases on that visit. Our own primary research showed us that fifty percent of men using GLP-one drugs prefer to donate their old clothes, which no longer fit. The results to date have been very strong, and we are excited to see the response. Customers utilizing the fit exchange program are shopping 51% more often and delivering an AOV at 39% higher along with a 29% higher UPT versus the company average. Additionally, these customers are spending more year over year than they did in the previous twelve months.
And finally, 26% of the customers in this program were new to file and reactivated customers. Finally, we introduced the price match guarantee program late last year, providing our customers with peace of mind that they will always get the best price at DXL, leading to a 12 improvement in value perception that was confirmed in the latest brand tracking study survey. The second pillar involves the surgical use of targeted promotions by leveraging our customer segmentation data. We continue to mine actionable insights from our DXL database regarding the customer segments, helping to further define shopping behavior and how to further craft unique tactical elements of promotion. This will enable us to deliver more personalized communication, focus on specific brands and categories to those customers who want them.
To better engage our best customers and drive greater spending and repeat traffic, we launched our new loyalty program in Q1. We believe this program can deliver a meaningful impact leveraging insights by customer type, while also incentivizing greater acquisition for the program. Early returns have surpassed expectations with membership acquisition ahead of our Q1 forecast by 46. Sales per member are impacting our old program and outpacing it, and we are seeing strong sales per certificate dollar redeemed at 88% on a year over year basis. This metric gives us much to be excited about as the program continues to ramp with new members.
And finally, as you may recall, one of the drivers of the new program was to have healthier distribution of customers across the different tiers to balance spend. We are achieving this with our best customers in the top tiers and most of the membership in the base tier. Next, I would like to provide an update on our website replatform project. If you recall for the better part of the past year, we have been migrating our site from ATG to commerce tools. This migration was completed at the March and we remain focused on enhancing the site experience during the balance of 2025.
Initiatives will include easier shopping enabled by AI, easier payment with additional buy now pay now later options, as well as evolve product search and discovery with increased personalization. We believe all this work, coupled with greater agility and capability of the new platform, will benefit our customers and improve the site experience and conversion. Before I turn it over to Peter, let me give you a quick update on Nordstrom’s marketplace. We first went live on Nordstrom’s online marketplace back in June of twenty twenty four. We now offer 37 brands and over 2,200 styles to choose from, and our assortment continues to expand with new arrivals added frequently as fresh inventory flows in.
We are excited for Q2 as we have finalized our marketing plans in collaboration with Nordstrom. We are optimistic that this marketing boost will help customers discover our big and tall assortment and added exposure will be key to driving demand. The plan supported by Nordstrom’s includes personalized content, email campaigns and in store training to direct customers to our online presence of the big and tall assortment. Key merchandise drivers of the business include Polo, as well as private brands such as Harbor Bay and Oak Hill, but we have also started to see some traction with Vineyard Vines, Brooks Brothers and Reebok. DXL will also participate in the Nordstrom anniversary sale, which will be a key event for exposing more Nordstrom customers to the DXL big and tall brand.
I also want to mention the collaboration we recently launched with Travis Matthew, like what we did with untuck it and fit by DXL. Travis Matthew is a brand and collection that is inspired by Southern California’s laid back yet active lifestyle and with each design driven to achieve the perfect balance between innovative design and superior style, and now DXL offers this exclusively for the big and tall consumer. The offer will maintain our fit by do excel unique sizing to provide superior comfort and sportswear capable of fitting in while standing out. And that is what we’re all about fit. I’ll close out my comments with a few words about a topic that is creating a lot of buzz in our organization.
We have licensed proprietary and exclusive technology which we named FITMAP. We believe fit map has the potential to redefine our retail experience. Guests at DXL can scan their body measurements are come off using an iPad in the dressing room and then use those measurements to secure a better fit. Our ambition and ambitious vision for fit map is to elevate the big and tall shopping experience by enabling our guests to use their DXL digital body scan across various platforms. We are committed to integrating fit map technology into our everyday practices both in store and online while forging new strategic alliances with other leading retailers allowing the guests to easily access and shop for DXL products and obtain perfect sizing.
Our fit map customers also have the capability to order custom suits and sports coats specifically designed for our big and tall customers. So far we have scanned over 20,000 guests and implemented fit map technology in 52 stores with a plan to end 2025 with 85 stores and do further expand this to as many as 200 stores by the end of twenty twenty seven. Our exclusive rights to this technology lasts until 2030 which is a big win for DXL. Our store associates have adopted this technology to size guests accurately and fit them into our ready wear apparel. Our data shows that scan guests tend to have a higher average order value, greater customer value and shop more frequently.
I will talk more about fit map on future calls, but safe to say this is something we truly are very excited about. And with that, I’m now going to turn it over to Peter for a review of our financials. Peter.
Peter Stratton, Chief Financial Officer, Destination XL Group: Thank you, Harvey, and good morning, everyone. I’ll start with some additional color around our first quarter financial performance. Net sales for the first quarter were $105,500,000 as compared to $115,500,000 in the first quarter of last year. The decrease in net sales was primarily due to a decrease in comparable sales for the first quarter of 9.4%, partially offset by an increase in non comparable sales from new stores. As Harvey noted, sales trends improved month over month with comparable sales down 13.9% in February, down 8.2% in March, and down 7.2% in April.
Overall, the first quarter decline was consistent with the sales trend in fiscal twenty twenty four as customers continued to pull back on discretionary spending and shifted toward our private label merchandise and value driven brands, which sell at lower average unit retails but generate higher margins. Our gross margin rate, inclusive of occupancy costs, was 45.1% as compared to 48.2% in the first quarter of last year. The three ten basis point decrease was primarily due to a two eighty basis point increase in occupancy costs as a percentage of sales due to the deleveraging from lower sales and increased rents from new stores and lease extensions. Merchandise margins decreased by 30 basis points as compared to the first quarter of last year, primarily due to an increased markdown rate from the promotional offers and marketing initiatives that Harvey spoke about, partially offset by the benefit from the shift in product mix towards private label. In response to the tariff situation, we accelerated some of our inventory receipts to get them on the water before the tariffs took effect.
We feel very good about our inventory position, both in terms of total inventory balance at the end of the quarter and in relation to our turnover rates as well as our clearance levels. We continue to prioritize inventory management, which is a critical element of providing the best big and tall shopping experience possible. Moving on to selling, general and administrative expenses. Our SG and A as a percentage of sales increased to 45% as compared to 41.1% in the first quarter of twenty twenty four. The deleverage in rate was based entirely on our lower sales levels as on a dollar basis, SG and A expenses decreased by $100,000 as compared to the first quarter last year.
The dollar decrease was primarily due to a decrease in marketing and incentive based compensation, partially offset by an increase in store payroll and health care costs. Our add to sales ratio for Q1 decreased to 6.1% from 6.3% in Q1 of last year. For the full year, we expect to spend 5.9% of our sales on marketing costs. As a result of the foregoing discussion, the decrease in sales had a significant impact on our EBITDA for the quarter, which came in at $100,000 as compared to $8,200,000 for the first quarter of last year. I’ll finish up with a few notes on liquidity.
We continue to feel very good about the overall strength of our balance sheet. We finished the quarter with cash and short term investments of $29,100,000 as compared to $53,200,000 a year ago, with no outstanding debt in either period and availability of $77,100,000 under our revolving credit facility. The decrease in cash from a year ago includes the repurchase of 13,600,000.0 shares of stock over the past twelve months. With the seasonal build of inventory and payment of prior year incentive accruals, Q1 is typically a quarter with a net cash outflow. This quarter, our free cash flow, which we define as cash flow from operating activities less capital expenditures, was a use of $18,800,000 of cash as compared to a use of $7,000,000 in last year’s first quarter.
Most of that decrease was driven by our lower earnings and the timing of payables associated with the acceleration of inventory receipts in the first quarter. We continue to keep our excess cash invested in short term U. S. Government treasury bills to earn interest while preserving liquidity. Our fortress balance sheet gives us the ability to weather the short term economic challenges we are facing.
We remain focused on executing our growth strategies and executing our business with a high level of operating discipline. I’m now going to turn it back over to Harvey for some closing thoughts. Harvey?
Harvey Kanter, President and Chief Executive Officer, Destination XL Group: Thanks, Peter. I’ll close with this statement. And while it may seem like a broken record, our team and the people of DXL are part of our secret sauce. Given this, as always, I remain energized by the dedication and the passion of the entire DXL team to serve the underserved big and tall consumer. None of this would be possible without the hard work and dedication of all of our people in the stores, in the distribution center, in the corporate office, and the guest engagement center.
It is because of this talented team and the culture we’ve created that I want to get up every morning and keep moving on this journey. Thank you for all your hard work and commitment in pursuit of serving big and tall men and making the excel the place where they can choose their own style and wear what they want. And with that operator, we will now take questions.
Conference Operator: Thank you. If you would like to ask a question, please press 11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To remove yourself from the queue, please press 11 again. We also ask that you please wait for your name and company to be announced before proceeding with your question.
One moment while we compile the Q and A roster.
Harvey Kanter, President and Chief Executive Officer, Destination XL Group: Operator, if there’s no questions, we will wish everyone on the call a good summer and look forward to regrouping with everyone in August, late August when we have our next quarterly earnings call.
Conference Operator: We do have one question. It is coming from the line of Will Forsberg of Craig Hallum. One moment. And thank you. And now there are no more questions in the queue.
I would like to turn the call back over for closing remarks.
Harvey Kanter, President and Chief Executive Officer, Destination XL Group: We appreciate everyone’s interest in DXL and look forward to a wonderful summer and continuing our move to back to growth and look forward to talking to you all in August. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful summer.
Conference Operator: Thank you all for participating in today’s conference call. You may now disconnect.
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