Value Village

I'm Judy Shaw for NYSE Floor Talk. Joining me today is Mark Walsh. He is the CEO of Savers Value Village. Mark, it's wonderful to have you here. Thank you. An exciting day. Congratulations. Such an exciting day. Thank you. IPO on the NYSE. Yes. Just opened for trading. Just opened up 33%, very happy. So tell me, how are you feeling right now? A little overwhelmed. It's a bit surreal. Yeah. But it's a wonderful outcome after a long process. So couldn't be happier. I'm a little speechless, which is hard for me to even imagine. Well, congratulations. Thank you. So let's talk about Savers Value Village. Tell me about the company and what makes you different from other thrift operators? Well, we are nine times larger than our next closest for-profit thrift competitor. Our Canadian business has 93% brand awareness, which is really remarkable. To be able to take a billion pounds of raw, unsorted donations, move that through a vertically integrated process, and end up with a $300 million EBITDA, that's the secret sauce. That's what makes us proud. But that is a highly data-driven, data-intense model. I think the other thing that makes us special is our connectivity to our nonprofit partners. We have paid our nonprofit partners for the donations we accept on their behalf, almost 99% of the goods that we sell. Those are donations that we accept on our nonprofit partners' behalf. We've paid those nonprofits $580 million over the last five years. And we've kept 3. 2 billion pounds of goods out of landfills. So it's a pretty amazing ESG story. And were sort of ESG before that was an acronym. It was a thing, yes. So now the second-hand market in the U. S. has shown impressive growth potential. Yes. How do you envision capitalizing on this market expansion in the coming years? Well, clearly for us it's a store expansion opportunity. We're only 150-plus stores in the United States. We have basically the same amount of stores in Canada. Canada has a 30 million piece of population. We're at 300 million here in the United States. Plus, there's obviously just the easy math says there's a lot of growth available for us. So we're going to grow thoughtfully. We're going to walk before we run. But we've got a great business model that we think is going to really take hold as we expand within the United States in the footprint. Now you mentioned ESG. Cons Right. How do you align these preferences and how do you plan to take advantage of this trend? Well, the cons 90% of those individuals say they're going to interact with thrift on a more ongoing basis moving forward. And then you add to that what we're seeing in our loyalty member database is a skew towards younger cons So we're definitely seeing the trend of youth entering our environment more and more frequently. All right. So you are a publicly traded company now. Tell me what's next. Mindful growth. Focus on creating shareholder value. But again, sticking to our mission. Our mission is to make second hand, second nature. Five or 10 years from now, if we can have an impact on improving the circular economy, providing people a place to shop and capitalizing on that reuse, that's a pretty powerful, that would be a pretty powerful metric, along with obviously delivering outside shareholder return. All right. Well, congratulations again and welcome to the NYSE family. Thank you very much. Appreciate the time. Thank you.