Build-A-Bear (BBW) Earnings Call Transcript

Motley Fool Transcribing, The Motley Fool

Thu, March 12, 2026 astatine 9:50 AM CDT 42 min read

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Thursday, March 12, 2026 astatine 9 a.m. ET

• President & Chief Executive Officer — Sharon Price John

• Chief Operations Officer (incoming CEO June 11, 2026) — Christopher Hurt

• Chief Financial Officer — Voin Todorovic

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Sharon Price John: Good morning, and acknowledgment for joining america for Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc.’s 4th fourth fiscal 2025 net call. In summation to our net release, you whitethorn person work this morning’s announcement concerning my determination to discontinue arsenic President and Chief Executive Officer of Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc., and that long-time Chief Operations Officer, Chris Hurt, has been appointed by the Board of Directors to presume the CEO relation connected 06/11/2026 successful accordance with a multiyear planned succession process.

Given his instrumental interaction connected some the company’s turnaround and existent success, Chris has proven to beryllium an invaluable spouse implicit the past 10 years, and I americium assured that his outstanding enactment skills, strategical insights, concern acumen, and intimate cognition of the marque and civilization of this iconic institution underscore his quality to instrumentality the enactment to caller heights. With this quality arsenic a backdrop, aft we supply the 2025 highlights, fiscal summary, and the 2026 outlook, we program to stock much astir Chris and the transition, arsenic good arsenic an outline for the go-forward strategical model earlier opening up the telephone for questions.

Fiscal 2025 was a dynamic twelvemonth marked by our continued absorption connected strategical store and planetary marque enlargement portion we besides worked to negociate and mitigate tariff and planetary proviso concatenation disruption. With gratitude to the team, I americium pleased to stock that we yet delivered a coagulated twelvemonth with some pretax income and gross wrong our guidance range. In fact, we deed an important milestone for the institution by delivering much than a half-billion dollars successful yearly gross for the archetypal clip successful Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc.’s history. However, we did not conscionable hardly transverse the people connected the apical line. Specifically, gross deed adjacent to $530,000,000, which represents astir 7% growth.

After accounting for $11,000,000 successful tariff and related costs, pretax income accrued marginally to $67,200,000. We judge this show not lone reflects the company’s proven tenacity and resilience, but, adjacent successful disruption, our quality to proceed to absorption connected the ongoing execution of Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc.’s semipermanent strategical initiatives that we person shared implicit the past respective years: one, expanding and evolving our experiential retail footprint; two, advancing our broad integer transformation; and three, investing to leverage the almighty equity of the Build-A-Bear Workshop, Inc. brand, portion continuing to instrumentality superior to shareholders. With that, I volition crook our archetypal initiative—expanding our experiential retail location—over to Chris.