Edgewell Personal Care Company Canaccord Genuity's 46th Annual Growth Conference

Thanks for attending our conference. I'm Susan Anderson, one of Canaccord's consumer analysts, and I'm very excited to have with us Edgewell Personal Care, and in particular CFO Fran Weissman and Chris Gough, Vice President, IR, Corporate Development, and Treasury. Fran, I guess I'd maybe like to start off with just a broader question. At the beginning of the year, you laid out a framework that the business would return to growth, and I think there was some skepticism around it. But nine months later, we're here, and we've seen the business return to growth, North America's returned to growth. We've really seen a nice inflection. Maybe if you can talk about the key drivers there behind that improvement and the initiatives that have helped to return the business to growth.

Thanks, Susan, and thanks for having us here this morning. Our framework has been pretty consistent, and I'm glad you mentioned the fact that it's remained largely unchanged from the beginning of the year. We took deliberate steps to really simplify our portfolio and sharpen our focus, and the exit of Feminine Care was an important milestone for that, because it allowed us to focus capital, focus our management's attention, and more importantly, focus our innovation capabilities around categories and a portfolio of brands where we felt we had more of a competitive advantage to win. We were always a back-half story, and a lot of that was driven off of the fact that we started our investment profile over 18 months ago, and we knew that those distribution gains, specifically within the U.S., and planogram resets were more towards the second half.

It's encouraged to see Q3 return to growth, and it's really driven off of North America. What we're seeing is better commercial execution. We're seeing better shelf presence and distribution gains and really stronger brand support across the business. When you look at our focus brands like Hawaiian Tropic, Cremo, Schick, you're really seeing momentum improve, not only in our sales trajectory, but also in our share trajectory. There's still a lot more work to do, particularly in North America to drive consistency of growth, but we really feel like we have the right actions in place to continue to deliver long-term.

Great. I guess, just looking out over the long term, given the improvement we've seen and the optimism there, how are you thinking about the long-term growth trajectory? I think in the past, you've talked about 2%-3%. Is that kind of what we should expect, or can we expect maybe even a little bit higher than that? Also maybe if you can talk about international versus domestic and where you see the differences in growth coming from.