Academy Sports & Outdoors - Q3 2024

Transcript

Operator (participant)

Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and welcome to the Academy Sports and Outdoors third quarter fiscal 2023 results conference call. At this time, this call is being recorded, and all participants are on a listen-only mode. Following the prepared remarks, there'll be a brief question-and-answer session. Questions will be limited to analysts and investors. We ask that you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. To ask your question during the call, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you require any operator assistance during the call, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. I would now like to turn the call over to your host, Matt Hodges, Vice President of Investor Relations for Academy Sports and Outdoors. Matt, please go ahead.

Matt Hodges (VP of Investor Relations)

Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining the Academy Sports and Outdoors third quarter 2023 financial results call. Participating on the call are Steve Lawrence, Chief Executive Officer, Carl Ford, Chief Financial Officer. As a reminder, statements in today's earnings release and the comments made by management during this call may be considered forward-looking statements. These statements are subject to risks and uncertainties that could cause our actual results to differ materially from our expectations and projections. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the factors identified in the earnings release and in our SEC filings. The company undertakes no obligation to revise any forward-looking statements. Today's remarks also refer to certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations to the most comparable GAAP measures are included in today's earnings release, which is available at investors.academy.com. I will now turn the call over to Steve Lawrence for his remarks. Steve?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Thanks, Matt. Good morning, and thank you for joining us on our third quarter earnings call. As you saw from the results we announced earlier this morning, we had a challenging quarter, with sales coming in at $1.4 billion, which was down 6.4% in total and translated into a -8% comp. Based on these sales, adjusted earnings per share for the third quarter was $1.38. Several of the key themes we saw emerge in the first half of the year carried through into Q3. The customer is clearly under pressure and is being careful about when they decide to shop and how they want to spend their money. We've also seen a continuation of the trend, with customers coming in during the key shopping moments on the calendar and then retreating during the lulls.

Another key theme continues to be customers looking to expand their buying power by focusing on the value offerings in our assortment, such as our private brand merchandise, the promotions that we run, or in clearance events that take place at the end of each season. Similar to prior quarters this year, we also continue to see customers gravitating towards new and innovative brands and items in our stores and online. Breaking the quarter down by month, August sales were down mid-single digits. As we discussed on our Q2 call, we saw good momentum early in the month, driven by our back-to-school business. Once we got past Labor Day and into September, we saw a slowdown in sales that lasted the entire month, resulting in a low double-digit negative comp.

We attribute the softness in September to the lack of a natural shopping event on the calendar, coupled with much warmer-than-average temperatures, which suppressed early sales on fall seasonal categories. This trend carried forward into early October, but we did see an uptick in sales later in the month that we believe was driven by a combination of some cooler temperatures, coupled with increased sales in our outdoor business. The end result was that we saw a sales improvement versus the September trend, with October coming in at a negative mid-single-digit comp. Looking at the results by division, our best performing business for Q3, Sports and Rec, which ran a 2.7% decrease. Declines in fitness and bikes were partially offset by continued strength in outdoor cooking and furniture, as well as our team sports business.

Our outdoor division ran down 6.9% for the quarter, but as I mentioned earlier, we saw this business pick up towards the end of October as we approached hunting season, started to lap softer comps from last year. Our apparel and footwear businesses started out strong during back to school, but then tapered off as we moved into September. Apparel ran a 6.9% decrease for the quarter, was slightly better than footwear, which was down 8.2%. We believe the primary driver of the soft business was caused by the above-average temperatures we experienced in September and early October, which tamped down demand for fall seasonal items. Moving to gross margin, the quarter came in at 34.5%, which was a 50 basis point erosion versus the prior year.

This was primarily driven by our merchandise margin coming in 49 basis points below last year. We believe that the warmer temperatures we experienced during the quarter resulted in softer sales versus last year and the high margin fall seasonal products. Customers instead gravitated towards the lower margin summer clearance, which mixed our margin down. Promotional activity for the quarter was in line with our expectations, and our gross margin rate through three quarters sits at 34.7%, which is above our annual guidance, continues to remain roughly 500 basis points above our pre-pandemic levels. Now I'd like to give you a couple of updates on our progress against some of our long-range plan initiatives, starting with new stores. During the third quarter, we opened five new stores with locations in Virginia, Indiana, Missouri, and Texas.

During November, we opened up our final seven stores for the year, bringing our total to 14 for 2023. The November openings represent the largest number of new stores that we've ever opened in a single month, with five on a single weekend. This is a huge accomplishment for our company, and I want to take a moment to recognize all of our team members that helped make this possible.... As we open new locations, we continue to gain insights into what factors ensure a successful launch of a new store, and we're getting better with each grand opening. While the sample size is still small, as we analyze and learn more from our new store openings, what is becoming clearer is that stores open in legacy markets, where we have a high brand awareness, as a group, are on track to meet or surpass three year comp sales targets.

What has also started to become apparent is that stores open in newer markets outside our current footprint will need additional time and investment to build brand awareness and therefore will likely take longer to ramp to sales maturity. After we get through this year, we'll have more data on the sales ramp and stores that open up in 2022, as well as additional data on traffic, ticket, and conversion for both the 2022 and the 2023 stores, will be used to refine our expectations for future store openings. As we look forward, we're excited about the pipeline that we've identified, and we'll give guidance around the number of new stores that we plan to open in 2024 during our next earnings call. Another one of our growth initiatives is to accelerate the growth of our dot-com business.

While this channel has faced the similar challenges that our brick-and-mortar customers are feeling this year, we've made some meaningful advancements in the third quarter that we believe will help drive growth in the future. During last quarter's earnings call, we announced our new partnership with Fanatics. While it is early days, we've dramatically expanded our offering in NCAA with this partnership, offering over two times the number of styles for customers we started the quarter with, just in time for the holiday gift-giving season. We will continue to leverage their extensive catalog and add more SKUs as we start each league's new season. Over time, our online offerings will be significantly larger, allowing us to greatly expand our reach and help best service a much wider fan base.

In addition to SKU growth, we've also been working hard on expanded functionality, such as adding Sezzle, a new payment option that supports additional categories such as hunting. As we head into the holidays, we believe with this expanded assortment and additional capabilities, we're well positioned to capture the surge in demand from all the key online shopping events, including Cyber Week and Green Monday. A third initiative that I'd like to update you on is our new customer data platform. During our last call, we discussed adding this new tool to our toolbox at the end of Q2. The team has spent the last quarter fine-tuning our customer segmentation work, along with developing playbooks to help drive greater traffic and increase spend from our various customer segments.

We have two main focuses in our CDP work: improving customer identification and increasing engagement, both of which will help us build a deeper connection with our customers and drive incremental sales revenue. While we've just begun to leverage some of our new capabilities for this tool, our initial marketing tests have yielded promising results. First test was to grow our addressable customer file in order to help expand the reach of our various marketing channels. During Q3, we mounted a reactivation campaign that helped us increase the number of customers we're reaching with our emails by 25%. Another example of how we're leveraging our customer data platform, the small test that we ran with a focus on increasing both frequency of shop and spend with a subset of our best customers.

We sent targeted offers to this group, managed to drive an incremental trip at a higher basket size. What was exciting about this use case was that we saw continued growth with this group after the initial discount we offered had lapsed. While we don't expect all the tests we're running to have a huge impact on Q4 results, we do believe we'll be able to start scaling these learnings, and they will start moving the needle in 2024 and beyond. The final initiative I'll touch on is the work we're doing around improving our supply chain. The team has been working hard on getting ready to install and roll out our new warehouse management system, planning to go live with our Georgia DC in the spring of next year.

This implementation is a key enabler of many of the supply chain efficiencies that we're anticipating in our long range plan as we continue to open new stores. Now I'd like to turn it over to Carl Ford, our CFO, to walk you through a deeper dive of our Q3 financial performance, along with an update for our 2023 guidance. Carl?

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Thank you, Steve. Good morning, everyone. We appreciate you joining the call. Let me walk you through the details of our third quarter results. Net sales were $1.4 billion, a 6.4% decline compared to the third quarter of 2022, with comparable sales of -8%. The decline in sales was driven by an 8.1% decline in transactions, partially offset by a slight increase in ticket size. Consistent with overall sales performance, we experienced pressure in our e-commerce channel. E-commerce sales represented 9.4% of total merchandise sales, compared to 9.5% in the prior year quarter. As Steve mentioned, our gross margin rate for the third quarter was 34.5%, compared to 35.0% last year.

The margin decline was due to a 49 basis point decline in merchandise margins, driven by an increase in planned promotions and a higher mix of clearance sales. Higher overhead costs, lower vendor allowances, and a slight increase in shrink were offset with freight savings. As a company, we continue to operate at substantially higher gross margin rates than pre-pandemic, demonstrating that the operational changes made to the business over the past few years are structural. During the quarter, SG&A expenses were $345.9 million, or 24.7% of net sales, an increase of 170 basis points compared to the third quarter of 2022. As consumer demand remains challenging, we are focused on optimizing profitability through expense control and investing in our future. We reduced our variable operating expenses versus last year...

While more than 100% of the increase in SG&A was driven by the investments we are making in areas that support our long-term growth initiatives, such as new stores, omni-channel, supply chain, and customer data. Net income for the quarter was $100 million, or 7.2% of net sales, resulting in GAAP diluted earnings per share of $1.31. Adjusted diluted earnings per share were $1.38. Our balance sheet remains strong, with $275 million in cash and no outstanding borrowings on our $1 billion credit facility at the end of the quarter. Our inventory balance was $1.49 billion, which was flat compared to last year in both dollars and units. On a per store basis, units declined 4%.

Heading into the remainder of the holiday season, we believe that our current assortment and level of inventory is appropriate to support the business. During the third quarter, Academy generated $57.5 million in net cash from operating activities. This is a 13% increase compared to last year. We continue to execute our capital allocation strategy by self-funding our growth initiatives and returning cash to shareholders. During the quarter, we repurchased approximately 864,000 shares for $44 million and paid out $6.7 million in dividends. As of the end of the quarter, we had approximately $100 million available on the current share repurchase authorization. On November 29, 2023, the board approved a dividend of $0.09 per share, payable on January 10, 2024, to stockholders of record as of December 13, 2023.

Demonstrating the commitment to our capital allocation strategy, the board also approved a new three year, $600 million share repurchase authorization. Together with our remaining $100 million, the company now has $700 million of share repurchase authorization available for the next three years. Year to date, the company has spent $152 million on capital expenditures. For the full year, we expect to spend between $175 million and $225 million. Shifting now to guidance. Based on our year-to-date results and current expectations for the fourth quarter, we are narrowing our fiscal 2023 net sales guidance from the previous range of $6.17 billion-$6.36 billion to $6.1 billion-$6.17 billion. This translates to a revised comparable sales range of -7.5% to -6.5%.

Our full-year gross margin rate is expected to finish between 34.0%-34.2%. GAAP income before taxes is now expected to range from $670 million-$680 million, and GAAP net income between $520 million and $530 million. GAAP diluted earnings per share are now expected to be $6.70 per share to $6.85 per share, and adjusted diluted earnings per share are expected to range from $7.05 per share to $7.20 per share. We now expect to generate $300 million-$350 million of adjusted free cash flow in fiscal 2023.

The earnings per share estimates are calculated on a share count of 77.3 million diluted weighted average shares outstanding for the full year and do not include any potential Q4 repurchase activity. As far as providing guidance beyond fiscal 2023, we plan to give fiscal 2024 guidance in March on our year-end call. I will now turn the call back over to Steve for some closing remarks. Steve?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

As you can tell from our commentary today, the third quarter was challenging for us. That being said, we've seen the customer come out and shop during the key moments on the calendar, and there is no bigger moment than the upcoming holiday season. The team has been preparing for Q4 all year. We're off to a solid start in November. As we expected, we saw traffic patterns return to a more normalized pre-pandemic pattern, with less pull forward of demand during the early part of the month. We put together a strong set of promotions for Thanksgiving week, and we saw a strong reaction from the customer, yielding one of our biggest Black Friday events ever. We still have a lot of business ahead of us. Success for our Thanksgiving promotion helped generate some momentum as we head into December.

Looking forward into the remainder of holiday, we have a strong promotional cadence supported by an aggressive marketing spend, which should help us deliver outstanding value to our customers. Our inventory is in the best position we've been in over the past three years, with a focus on the key giftable categories, along with new brands and innovative items customers have been voting for all year. I've been in all three of our DCs and a lot of our stores over the past quarter, and I can tell you that teams are ready and excited for customers this Christmas. With that, we will now open it up for questions.

Operator (participant)

The company will now open the call up for your questions. To ask your question, please press star one. We will pause for a minute to wait for the queue to fill. Our first question comes from Brian Nagel with Oppenheimer. Please proceed with your question.

Brian Nagel (Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Consumer Growth and eCommerce)

Hi, good morning.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Good morning.

Matt Hodges (VP of Investor Relations)

Morning.

Brian Nagel (Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Consumer Growth and eCommerce)

My first question, you know, looking at the results here and, you know, over the last few quarters, we talked about, you know, kind of the top line, the top line weakness. Look, recognizing you, you're, you haven't given guidance for 2024, and you, you plan to do so early next year. But I guess the question I have is: as we think about this comp trajectory and kind of the moving pieces, what are the, what are the puts and takes as you look at the business to get back to positive comps for the company?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I'll start, and Carl may jump in, but you know, what, you know, when we thought about this year, and I think we shared this on our last call, coming off the pandemic, having two back-to-back, you know, double-digit comp years, we anticipated 2022 is gonna be kind of a year of reset. Thought we'd get back to growth this year. Clearly, the thing that is challenged this year is the customer's under pressure, so we feel like we don't have a challenged strategy, we've got a challenged customer. So the things that we've been focusing on, as we move forward, you know, is managing through the short term, making sure we're delivering against the things the customer is looking for. Customer is voting for value, so we're delivering value a couple of different ways.

First, our everyday value proposition; second, the promotions that we run during key time periods during the year; and third, the clearance events that we run at the end of each season. And then on the other end of the spectrum, we're seeing customers gravitate towards newness. So we're also focused on delivering a steady diet of new brands and new ideas. That being said, you know, another drag on our comp has been our outdoor business, which through the first couple of quarters, was down double digits, and we've seen that business start to get better as we started lapping softer comps. And so I think as we move into next year, and we're... You're right, we're not ready to give guidance for next year.

I think the focus on value, newness, leaning into our initiatives, you know, longer term, in terms of opening new stores, the growth we think in that we have in dot com, and getting more predictability out of our existing base of stores. We think all of those things are the key ingredients to returning back to positive comps. You know, that being said, when the customer's health turns around a little bit, that we can't determine. What we can focus on are the things that are within our control, and that's what we're focused on.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Yeah, Brian, the only thing I would add there, you know, to the initiatives that Steve walked through, there's a big comp sales waterfall embedded within them. You know, he mentioned new stores and omni-channel. I would also say our customer data platform. You know, we got it up and running in July. We're running a lot of tests associated with it. They're positive out of the gate. I think as we ramp our maturity, working with the tool and getting more customer data, I think that's a tailwind for a long time.

Brian Nagel (Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Consumer Growth and eCommerce)

Now, that's it. Look, it's very helpful. The second question, and again, I know we're dealing with a, you know, very fluid demand backdrop in, you know, in a relatively short amount of time. But, you know, as you look at your business, you know, particularly relative to all the, you know, the internal initiatives you've done with merchandising, are you capturing... Do you think you're generally capturing share across the board, or, are there parts where you potentially could be losing share here?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, you know, I mean, listen, we look at market share first on a broad basis, and we look at it over a longer horizon than just a month or a quarter. You know, we look at it on a yearly basis. We know we're picking up a little bit of share when we look at it on a longer-term basis. We're very happy with that. If you look at our sales versus 2019, you know, we're still up about 25%. So broadly, we believe we picked up a lot of share over the past four years, and we're holding on to that share. Beneath the surface, there's always puts and takes here and there, but we believe we've picked up share and are holding on to it.

Brian Nagel (Managing Director and Senior Analyst, Consumer Growth and eCommerce)

All right, guys. I appreciate all the color. Thank you.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Michael Lasser with UBS. Please proceed with your question.

Michael Lasser (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Good morning. Thank you so much for taking my question. With your gross margin down 44 basis points, how are you looking at the need to continue to make these types of discounting and other promotional investments in order to drive the top line?

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Yeah, yeah, from a gross margin standpoint, you referenced the 44 basis points. You know, I would harken back to kind of some of the structural improvements that we've made. We're up about 500 basis points to FY 2019. I think about the early initiatives that we talked to you about around power merchandising, and the things that we've done there have a lot of lasting power, and I just want to run through some of them. We exited a bunch of categories that weren't really synonymous with sports and outdoors: toys, luggage, electronics. We implemented season codes, systemically driven clearance lifecycle management. We've really optimized buy and overall inventory management with a pretty upgraded open-to-buy process. We've made allocation, replenishment, system enhancements, and those are learning. They continue to get better and better.

Pricing system updates with reg price optimization. I really feel like we've done a good job there. And then to your last point, you know, just managing promotions, but managing them from a position of inventory strength. And so the 50 basis point decline was really driven by planned promotions and our customers gravitating towards that value side of our offering. It was included in our guidance. We are going to continue... Like, we're an everyday value provider, so you're gonna see every value every day. We're really only gonna promote during those key shopping moments, and we've embedded that within the guidance. And so I do wanna reiterate, our fourth quarter gross margin last year in the fourth quarter was 32.8%.

The high and the low range that we put out there in this guidance, on the low, it's a little bit worse than that. On the high, it's a little bit higher than that. We're planning on promotionality, and we've got some tailwinds with the supply chain costs.

Michael Lasser (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)

My follow-up question is, as you look to next year, how much more room is there to reduce SG&A without impacting the customer experience, and how are you thinking about that in the fourth quarter? Thank you.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I won't, I won't get into next year's guidance, but I will say,

... from an expense standpoint, you know, this third quarter, SG&A was up about $3 million to last year. That was more than that was our strategic investments around new stores, omni-channel, customer data, supply chain. We're flexing our variable costs really well, and we kinda keep a gauge on that by looking at our customer satisfaction scores, and we continue to be really proud of those. So if you think about the long-range plan that we put out there, we had about 200 basis points of deleverage in SG&A along the span of this. Now, that was offset by gross margin improvements, largely driven by supply chain. The guidance implies about 200 basis points of SG&A deleverage in this year. The fixed cost deleverage associated with the sales is the issue right now.

We remain committed to those strategic investments, and we're flexing in a healthy way in our variable, and our customers is telling us they're still happy with our performance.

Michael Lasser (Managing Director, Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Okay. Have a good holiday. Thank you so much.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Will Gaertner with Wells Fargo. Please proceed with your question.

Will Gaertner (Equity Research Analyst)

Hey, guys, thanks for taking my question. Just wanted to touch on first the lower free cash flow assumption. It looks like you cut it by $100 million, you know, reduced CapEx by $25 million, reduced EBT by $38 million. Can you elaborate on that reduction?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, absolutely. From a free cash flow standpoint, your $100 million at the low is correct. You know, the bulk of that is the reduction in the overall net sales on the low end. There are some timing things that come into play associated with year-end, and that made up the balance of it. You know, Will, I do just want to reinforce, if you look at our Q3 cash flow from operations, you know, we're up 13% to last year on down 6% for sales. You know, year-to-date, on sales down 6%, cash flow from operations is down 2.6%. We really feel good about our cash flow as a rate to sales. You know, on the investing side, on the what we're committed to, it's new stores, it's omni-channel, it's customer data, and it's supply chain.

We think, done well, we will have no regrets investing into those four initiatives. So inventory management stays really good. You cannot manage your cash flow without that. We're really proud of our merchants in the open-to-buy process, but the leading causes for the decline are really sales, top line in nature, and then just some year-end timing stuff.

Will Gaertner (Equity Research Analyst)

That's great. And just one more for me. Just, can you, I know you hit on this a little bit, but this Customer Data Platform, what benefits are you beginning to see? What benefits are you expecting to see? And how does this, I know you talked about it benefiting comps, but will this also benefit merch margins? And if so, how?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I'll, I'll take that one. So, you know, how we've likened this before is, in the past, we had pretty blunt instruments to understand what was going on with our customer file. We had data in a bunch of different places. You know, we couldn't always tell the same customer shopping us online and in store, so we installed our new Customer Data Platform in the second quarter. Now what we have is a holistic view of our customer. We've started doing some preliminary work around segmentation, and so now what we can actually see as we're looking at it on a weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, there's movement, you know, even within segments.

So in some cases, we can see certain cohorts within a certain segment, maybe spending a little bit less per trip, or we can see other cohorts maybe shopping less frequently. And so what we started testing is different triggers to get them to react differently. So, what I talked about on the call was we had one test with some of our best customers who maybe their spend was down a little bit year-to-date, to try to incent them to upspend. In another case, we had some customers who were shopping a little less frequently, and the goal was to get them to make one extra trip.

In both those cases, you know, they're small cases, use cases at first, because they're tests, but we saw an uplift in sales, and we saw the behavior that we triggered with the promotion continue after the promotion. So longer term, what we would see is this can be a much more robust tool for us to use across all of our different customer segments. From a margin perspective, I think what it's gonna do is it's gonna make us a lot more precise and targeted with our markdowns versus having broad-based promotions. I think you're gonna see, you know, a continued pullback on that and more focused, targeted promotions that are individualized to the customer.

I'm not sure there's a huge margin uplift from it, but we do think there's an offset by pulling back on company-wide promotions to fund those targeted promotions.

Will Gaertner (Equity Research Analyst)

Got it. Thank you. Good luck during the holiday, guys.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Robbie Holmes with Bank of America. Please proceed with your question.

Maddie Checkon (VP, Equity Research Analyst)

Hi, this is Maddie Checkon on for Robbie Holmes. Thanks for taking our questions. Just first, can you talk about how Black Friday looked compared to your expectations? You said one of your strongest ever. Are there any categories to call out that performed well for Black Friday? And are you expecting holiday to be concentrated around the big buying events like Black Friday, Cyber Monday? Thanks.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah. So I'm not gonna get too granular in terms of category performance. What I will tell you, and I said this on, in the prepared remarks, is, you know, what this year feels like is kind of a return to kind of pre-pandemic shopping patterns. You know, we saw the customer, you know, as we came in October and early November, moderate spending and, you know, wait for the discounts. And then as I said on the call, the event was one of our best events we've ever run, so that can give you a sense of how good it was.

You know, that being said, there's still a lot of time before Christmas, and so we're excited about the momentum that came out of that event, you know, and that we've seen continue into the early part of this week, but it's way too early to make the call. We still got about three weeks before Christmas. And as you know, this year, there's one extra day between Thanksgiving and Christmas, and that gives us one extra weekend. And so, we do expect at some point there to be a little bit of a lull, decrease in after we get past this week, and we expect that last week to be really strong. So yes, we think that the behavior we've seen happen all year of the customer aggregating their shopping around these key moments will continue.

You know, fortunately, we got the biggest moment of the year ahead of us, and I think we've really prepared ourselves for this. Our inventory is in the best shape it's been in all year. We've really been thoughtful about how we've constructed our promotional cadence and our marketing cadence, and I think we're really well prepped to have a great holiday season and to take advantage of the customer who's willing to be out there and shop.

Maddie Checkon (VP, Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you. That's helpful. I just also wanted to ask a question on the hunt business. What were the trends you saw in 3Q? Are you seeing any stock-up or surge behavior? And do you expect the hunt and ammo momentum to continue through 4Q?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I mean, we talked a little bit about this in the prepared remarks. You know, definitely that business has been one of our more challenged businesses. You know, through the first half of the year, it was down in the mid-teens. We certainly. It was kind of, it performed down in the mid to high single digits in Q3, which would imply it got better than the first half trend. And if you track it through the quarter, it definitely got better towards the end of the quarter, both in, you know, the major categories of firearms and ammo. It feels like, you know, we're starting to lap some softer comps. If you remember, we talked a lot about different surge activities that happened last year and certainly through the pandemic.

It feels like we're lapping a lot of those, and the business is starting to get more normalized. And our belief and hope is that that business will start to stabilize from this point forward.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Maddie, one thing I'd add there is it was a little bit, little bit warmer than average, and so that, that hunter that likes to get outside and mess with his lease prep activities and get ready for deer season didn't see that amplification. And now that it's gotten a little cooler here, we're starting to see that turn on a little more.

Maddie Checkon (VP, Equity Research Analyst)

Okay, great. Thank you. Best of luck this holiday season.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Thank you.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Anthony Chukumba with Loop Capital Markets. Please proceed with your question.

Anthony Chukumba (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Good morning. Thank you so much for taking my question. We just wanted to get an update on some of the product newness. I know you guys have been excited about some of the new products that have come in recently and have been expanded, like, you know, the OOFOS recovery sandals and BOG bags and Birkenstocks and Shadow Systems. So I just wanted to see if you had any update there. Thanks.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Well, you listed a couple of them-

Anthony Chukumba (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Yeah.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Anthony, thank you. You know, certainly, what we've seen this year, and we talked a little bit about it, that the customer is gravitating towards newness. You know, so the categories you talked about are all categories that we're well positioned in for this holiday. We've seen them continue into holiday. Other areas, you know, we talked about our outdoor grilling business being really strong. There's certainly a trend being fueled there by Blackstone and that flat grilling. That continues to be a great category for us. We talked in our last call about the addition of L.L.Bean. So we're really excited about that and the addition to our assortments for this holiday.

And when you think about it, I mean, that, that product's really strong in kind of fall, heavier weight products, so the, the weather's getting right for that right now, just in time. So we're excited about that. But yeah, generally across the board, newness working for us. You call out several of the brands, and there's other brands out there that are also working.

Anthony Chukumba (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. And just one quick follow-up on newness. Any update in terms of potentially getting on or Hoka for the footwear business?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

At this point, you know, it is not in our plans in the next year. We continue to talk to them and work with them on getting access to those brands, but at this point, it's not, you know, on our roadmap. That being said, we've got a lineup with the best brands in footwear. You know, we've got a premier position with Nike, who's our biggest brand across the total company as well as in footwear. Strong businesses with, you know, brands like Adidas and Under Armour, new brands like Birkenstock that you mentioned. Hey Dude doing really well for us. Crocs doing really well for us. Merrell doing really well for us.

You know, our goal and what we're focused on is winning with the brands that we have and being very successful with those.

Anthony Chukumba (Managing Director and Senior Research Analyst)

Got it. Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Chris Horvers with JP Morgan. Please proceed with your question.

Christopher Horvers (Senior Analyst)

Thanks. Good morning, guys. So my question is on the strength that you saw at the end of October and quarter to date. I guess, how much of that do you think was helped by the Rangers-Astros World Series? Is that something that, you know, we need to contemplate as we look to the back half of 2024? And, you know, as you think about the guidance for the fourth quarter, can you share anything about what's going on quarter to date? It seems like you're bracketing about a down 6%. You know, are you trending in line with that? Are you expecting, you know, that extra day and that late surge to get you to that level? You know, anything there would be really helpful.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I'll answer the second part first. You know, the performance we've seen quarter to date is embedded in the guidance that we gave. And I'll refer you back to the commentary I gave you around November and Black Friday, and you can make inferences from that. In terms of the Astros versus Rangers, believe it or not, it actually was more of a negative to us than a positive to us. If you look at our store count and what the Astros mean as a percentage of our business and license relative to the Rangers, the Rangers business is smaller. So lapping the Astros World Series last year with the Rangers was actually a negative to our sales trend early in the month.

Christopher Horvers (Senior Analyst)

Got it. And as you think about, you know, the hunt business has really been such an indicator of the overall trend in the business. You think about the start of-... rifle season for deer in November first in Texas, obviously a big event. Carl, you talked about, you know, some shift of the weather. As you peel back, you know, what you saw over, let's say, the past two months, you know, how confident are you that that business is actually bottoming? Because it's, you know, sort of easy to focus on, like, hey, here's what just happened when it got cold and the season started and blame the weather earlier. Like, I guess, what's your degree of confidence, and how is it different from the last time you spoke to us in August?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I think what I would tell you is this business is a cyclical business. It always has been, and it is sometimes driven by external events and, and impacted, you know, by those maybe more so some of the other businesses we had. What we shared with you in the last call, which, you know, we also believe is we're seeing right now is, what gives us confidence that it's starting to kind of level out a little bit, is that the volume is becoming fairly predictable on a weekly basis. You know, if you go back, there were huge spikes in the last year, driven by external events, and as we got through this year, ammo on a weekly basis has settled into a pretty normal cadence. The firearms business has settled into a pretty normal cadence.

So really, the negative costs we're experiencing wasn't as much about the fluctuation in this year's business as it was the fluctuation in last year's business. As we get into Q4 and beyond, that starts to level out quite a bit, and that's what gives us confidence that it's stabilizing. That being said, it's gonna have ups and downs, right? I mean, it's like any business that's driven by some external factors, but the kind of noise in the last year is starting to die down a little bit.

Christopher Horvers (Senior Analyst)

Got it. Have a great holiday and Christmas season. Thanks.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Oliver Wintermantel with Evercore ISI. Please proceed with your question.

Oliver Wintermantel (Managing Director)

Yeah, thanks, and good morning. I had a question. You mentioned new markets and legacy markets in your prepared remarks. Could you maybe a little bit expand on what you learned there about the cadence of when you open into stores until maturity, and then maybe add a little bit on full-year EBITDA? Thank you.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I'll tackle the first part. I'll let Carl tackle the second. You know, so, we're now two years into our new store openings. We opened up nine stores last year, 14 this year. I would tell you last year, a lot of the stores were weighted more heavily to new markets, and we tested a lot of different ideas. You know, we were testing how do we do in a more urban, dense population versus a more suburban population. We were testing some different new markets. This year, we applied a lot of those learnings to the, you know, that we had from last year to this year's new stores.

When you look at the 2 years of vintages that we're seeing, and we called this out on the call, the stores that are within, you know, kind of our core geography or footprint, where we've had existing stores for a while, get off to a much faster start, and they're beating or surpassing the plans that we put out there. On the flip side, as we go into a newer market, you know, maybe in the north, northern Midwest, in Indiana or maybe even Illinois, starting out a little bit slower. But when we go back and we look at historical ramps, and, you know, one of the things that's also a little tricky is some of the new stores opened from 15 and prior have some effect of the pandemic, in them, right, in the later years.

We're trying to go back and look at ramps before that to see what that curve looks like. You're seeing those probably have a slower ramp. And so we wanted to call that out, and just to give you guys some color around that. And certainly, as we get into 2024 and give guidance, we'll give you, hopefully, a better idea of how we're seeing these new stores ramp and give you a little better guidance around that.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Yeah, and I'll take the EBITDA. You know, I think similar to what Steve talked about, within our markets where there's high brand awareness, EBITDA rates are higher, even in year one versus in year in other markets where the brand awareness isn't as high. We've had to invest a little bit more from a marketing perspective for that local customer to get to know us. You know, the things, the things that we talked about, positive EBITDA as a cohort in year one, we saw that, still committed to a ROI hurdle of 20%. Learned a lot coming out with FY 2022. I'll just reiterate some of the commentary that we talked about. Tested a lot of new things, went into two new states, did our first retrofits as a company.

We've done build the suites, you know, historically for as long as... even before Steve and I were here. You know, tried some new things, learned a lot, feel like the FY 2023s are benefiting from those learnings, and we'll update you more in March.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, to Carl's point, one of the things I left out at the end is we're actually seeing the 23 vintage get off to a faster start than 22 because we applied those learnings. So what was really interesting is some of these newer markets, actually, over Black Friday, were some of our best markets. So that gives us a lot of confidence that people are trying, you know, the brand who maybe hadn't tried it before, and that it's starting to break through a little bit.

Oliver Wintermantel (Managing Director)

Thanks for all the color. I just had one follow-up. There was a previous question about the reduction in CapEx to $175-$225. Looks like the cadence of store openings in the fourth quarter stays the same. Is that CapEx reduction, are you signaling something about next year's store openings gains?

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Oh, no, not at all. This has more to do with when we revised our guidance, any discretionary expense we pulled out, any discretionary capital we pulled out, we've been efficient. I'm gonna reiterate our commitment to those four kind of initiatives that we talked about. From a new stores, omni-channel, customer data, supply chain standpoint, there's been none of that CapEx pull down has anything to do with that. It's just, you know, we're getting closer towards the end of the year. I'm willing to refine kinda our guidance range, just like we did on the top line and in EPS. It's just coming in at a little bit lower.

Oliver Wintermantel (Managing Director)

Perfect. Thanks for the clarification. Thank you.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

...Our next question comes from Daniel Imbro with Stephens. Please proceed with your question.

Joe Enderlin (Senior Research Associate)

Hey, guys, this is Joe Enderlin on for Daniel. Thanks for taking the question. Just kind of piggybacking on the last question there, could you give any additional color on what early learnings you're taking from the 2022 vintage to the 2023 one that you think are driving the most improvement within those stores?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I would say there's several. You know, Carl hit on one. You know, we went in with a marketing plan in terms of how we're looking at the new stores that were both in heritage and new markets. And, you know, there's probably more distortion that we need to make. We probably can spend a little bit less in the heritage markets, a little bit more in the new markets to drive a little more brand awareness. You know, the last two vintages have been more back half loaded. We're seeing stronger performance in stores that open up in spring. So we think moving more to the first half of the year is the right thing to do.

So you're gonna see us start slowly moving to have a better balance across the years, having a better balance between new markets and existing markets, having a better, you know, improved localization strategy. We you know, I think we've done a lot of work over the past four or five years in terms of being smarter with our localization strategy, but even as we're opening up some of these new markets, we're having even more learnings. You know, we opened a store in Florida, and we gave it our best assortment of saltwater fishing, and we thought we were giving it, you know, an A-plus assortment. And then as we're down in the market looking at it, found that we probably need to do even more than we're doing.

So now we've built an A-plus-plus assortment, and then we're gonna use that to apply to all the Florida stores that we open on the Gulf Coast going forward. So it's an iterative process. It's, you know, we're taking the learnings from each one and applying to the next. It's broad-based across merchandising, across marketing, across operations, across how we inventory the store. I can just tell you that each one is getting better and better, and that's our expectation as we move forward.

Joe Enderlin (Senior Research Associate)

Got it. That's helpful. Thank you. Just as a follow-up, warmer fall weather seemed to influence sales across the industry. Does this influence how you look at the sales opportunity in 4Q at all? Do you think that initial deferral of cold weather items in 3Q could be made up in 4Q, to any, to any extent? Thank you.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, you know, that's the big question is, you know, if it gets cold, how long it stays cold, etc. I think one of the things that we're happy about is that our inventories are under control, right? And candidly, it feels like the industry is in a better place today than maybe it was a year ago at this time. And so, you know, we saw promotions elevate a little bit over Black Friday, but still seem well within control and lower than where they were, you know, pre-pandemic.

We've got obviously increased promotions built into our forecast moving forward, but I don't think we're counting on a big return of business that was missed, but I also don't think we have an overhang of inventory that we're gonna have to address or deal with either.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Yeah, the only thing I would add there is that supply chain normalization. It might not be between Q3 and Q4, but it might be intra-quarter, where parents might have been buying a holiday gift, and they bought it early, you know, because they were worried about it being there. I think the consumer is confident that, you know, at least looking at our inventory position, we're gonna be in stock more frequently. And so I think some of that stuff that may have occurred in the third quarter in yesteryear, a parent or someone will have more confidence buying that closer in.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

I think when you look at our business, you know, candidly, Q3 is usually a wild card, right? I mean, it's in our geography, it can be warm. Occasionally, get a cold snap in October, it helps out a little bit. Generally, our geography gets colder in Q4, and it's been fairly consistent year-over-year, and that's where we sell the bulk of our seasonal product. And so I think we're gonna see that same pattern hold true this year.

Joe Enderlin (Senior Research Associate)

Got it. That's super helpful. Thank you, guys.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Thanks, Joe.

Operator (participant)

Our next question comes from Simeon Gutman with Morgan Stanley. Please proceed with your question.

Jackie Sussman (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Hey, guys, this is Jackie Sussman on for Simeon. Thank you so much for taking our question. Just on the 34.5% gross margin for the quarter, I think you mentioned in your prepared remarks, shrink. How are you handling shrink relative to prior quarters? How has it evolved throughout the quarter? Are things, you know, getting sequentially better? And anything to call out in terms of Q4 data on that would be really helpful. Thanks.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Yeah, Jackie, that's a good question. You know, shrink was a big topic of discussion in the second quarter. We still see it as an issue. Our shrink rate was up 12 basis points to last year in the third quarter, and when I talked about some of the muting of the tailwinds from freight, you know, shrinks in play. Look, I don't think you know, we do year-round. We talked a little bit about this at the last quarter. We do year-round physical inventory, so we started to see shrink top in the third quarter of last year. We were up 36 basis points in shrink in the third quarter of last year, so this is 12 on top of that.

It's better than, you know, the second quarter and way better than the first quarter trajectory, but I do think it's because we got an earlier read on this and began to react to it, maybe just a little bit quicker. I'll walk through some of the things that we're doing without getting into kind of too much detail associated with what we're doing. We've made investments in the team. We've made investments in internal analytics to help us see patterns, both internally and externally, quicker. We've done a number of technology solution tests and subsequent rollouts, really beginning in the third quarter of last year, that aids on the prevention side, as well as on the detection side.

We've got really strong partnerships with local law enforcement, so on the detection side, the things that we can do to aid them, like, they, they don't like seeing this happen, and the tools that we can help them with, they appreciate. You know, we've seen, sort of from a federal standpoint over COVID, you know, there wasn't as much, federal participation in kind of like these local, organized crime rings that we were seeing. I feel really good about what we're doing. We've led a couple of those discussions here, and we talked about one of the ORC busts that we saw in the Houston area that was a long-running thing earlier. And lastly, you know, we don't want to lock up all of our product.

We don't want our customer to have a negative experience, but we test and we learn a lot. So we've done some test and learns with some baseball equipment that made a lot of sense, and we put the customer call button right next to where we might use a peg lock for expensive glove, the A2000, specifically, and some of the bats. That business is turning on so well associated with those premium baseball bats. We wanna make sure that that inventory is there for the customer when they come in. So that big mix of things is what we're doing, but it's a retail-wide issue problem. It's a nationwide problem, and our shrink rate was up 12 basis points this quarter.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, I'll just, I'll just emphasize one point that I think was embedded in what Carl said. You know, probably one of the best things that we can do to help combat this, because he's right, it is a problem that everybody's facing, is to staff our stores and make sure we've got people there who are helping out the customers, who are around. And that's something we've been committed to, and I think that's been a help as we've been navigating, you know, some of these shrink trends that people have been fighting against.

Jackie Sussman (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Got it. Super helpful. And speaking of staffing stores, you know, as you start the holiday season, are you seeing just any pressure on wages or labor hours? How are we thinking about that in terms of, you know, potential SG&A spend in the quarter relative to, you know, your pre-COVID trends? Thanks so much.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, certainly, if you look at our hourly wages versus pre, pre-COVID, pre-pandemic, I mean, they're up, they're up for everybody. We feel like we've done a really good job of keeping pace, if not maybe doing a little better in terms of the increases. We're not having any trouble getting help, candidly. We've got a really good, energized team of people that are out there. We feel like we're appropriately staffed. But yeah, definitely wages are up versus where they were pre-pandemic.

Jackie Sussman (Equity Research Senior Associate)

Great. Thanks so much.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Thank you.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Thanks, Jackie.

Operator (participant)

Our next question is from Seth Basham with Wedbush Securities. Please proceed with your question.

Nathan Friedman (Wall Street analyst)

Yeah, hi there. This is Nathan Friedman on for Seth. Thanks so much for taking my questions. I think you mentioned that your average ticket was trending higher year-over-year in this quarter. And I know that you mentioned being more promotional and having some higher clearance, but just curious what kind of trends you're seeing. Is there, like, any evidence of trade down within your category, categories? Any color here would be appreciated.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

I'll start with the trade down question. You know, we haven't seen.... That's one of the things we talked a little bit about in last quarter's call was, you know, last year, last quarter, we thought we saw a little bit of trade down from our lower-end consumer, into maybe, you know, a lower-end retailer in terms of trip consolidation. We haven't seen that this quarter. Conversely, we also haven't seen any trade down, we think, from other retailers into us. So I don't think we're losing customers. I don't think we're necessarily gaining any trade down. That being said, one of the things that I think is helping us with that is we've done a really good job over the past four or five years, in regards to building out our better, best center of our assortment.

So what that really allows the customer to do is to trade down within our store. So building out, you know, the higher-end bats and gloves that Carl was just talking about. If the customer doesn't want to spend $300-$400 for a Marucci bat, we have other options for them to trade to versus having to go to another retailer. So we think that's helping us on that front. In terms of, you know, AUR average ticket, you know, our biggest challenge was more traffic. The average ticket was basically flattish, up slightly, for the quarter. You know, we continue to see AUR growth year-over-year and over a multi-year period. You know, we anticipate that that's going to continue. It's not huge. It's low single digits. We think that'll continue into Q4.

The promotional activity that we think is going to impact that we have baked into our guidance.

Nathan Friedman (Wall Street analyst)

... Perspective. And my second question is, you mentioned some things associated with supply chain and vendor allowances that offset the 12 basis points of shrink this quarter. I guess that would suggest that your supply chain tailwind benefits may be slowing down as you start to lap these tougher comparisons. One, is that true? And second, how are you thinking about the puts and takes here in fourth quarter with supply chain and as your tougher, sort of tougher merchandise margin comparisons, as well? Thanks very much.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Yeah, it's a good question, Nathan. So first and second quarter, freight benefit was on around about 90 basis points each, each quarter. And we'll have more detail in our 10-Q, but in the third quarter, it's about an 80 basis point tailwind for us. So a little bit of lessening there. You know, we talked about. We didn't really start to see that benefit from a freight standpoint until the first quarter of this year. So we're expecting tailwinds within the forecast, the guidance that we put out there. We're expecting tailwinds from a freight standpoint in the fourth quarter.

But I think what you're starting to see just beginning in the third quarter with that 10 basis point kind of drop-off, going from 90s in first and second quarter to 80 in the third quarter, it's a tailwind, but it's beginning to lessen, but we really didn't start to see the full weight of freight savings until first quarter of this year.

Nathan Friedman (Wall Street analyst)

Appreciate the time, and happy, happy holidays.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

Thank you.

Operator (participant)

We have time for one more question. Our next question comes from Cristina Fernandez with Telsey Group. Please proceed with your question.

Cristina Fernández (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Good morning, and thank you for taking my question. I wanted to see if you can clarify on the sales guidance. You kept the comp range within the prior range, but lowered the total sales outlook. So is that performance of new stores, the timing or the 53rd week? Can you clarify why that's lower?

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

It was primarily a reflection of what we're seeing happening with the new store openings. You know, we've had some, we've lost some sales where they've slid out a week or two here or there, so that certainly impacts a little bit. Also, what we discussed on the call in terms of the performance of the kind of the legacy heritage markets, new stores versus kind of the newer markets. So that's a combination of those two things which drove that delta.

Carl Ford (EVP & CFO)

But Cristina, I saw some of the early print that came out associated with comparing our fourth quarter of this year to the fourth quarter of last year. I know all of you are aware of that. This is a 53rd week, fourth quarter. There are 14 weeks of sales in it. That has always been in our guidance, but I saw some early reads that I just looked at quickly associated with, like, the amplification to last year's fourth quarter. I do want to remind you, there's a 53rd week.

Cristina Fernández (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Yeah. And then the second question I had, with the sales coming a little bit lower, how are you thinking about inventory for the year? And related to that, with the consumer shifting more to value, does it make you change, you know, the buys you have, leaning more towards that lower price or lower ticket assortments, focusing more on clearance activity? Any color there on inventory and buying would be helpful. Thanks.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Yeah, you know, I would say one of the kind of strengths that we've shown, I think, over the past four years is strong inventory management disciplines. I think that's continued through to the past quarter. Inventories are flat on a total basis, down about 4% on a store-per-store basis from a unit perspective. So we feel like the inventory is in a good position on a TYL life basis, but we also feel like the content beneath the surface is much better than where it was a year ago, and stocks are, you know, the highest they've been since the pandemic started. So we don't anticipate any sort of overhang of inventory coming out of the holiday. In terms of how we're structuring our buys, yeah, I mean, the customers gravitated towards value.

We see that expressed several different ways. You know, we talk a little bit about sometimes a private label mix. Private label business was a little better than some of our national brand business, which we infer as a flight to value there. So certainly that's a growth initiative. We've talked about how over time we want to grow that business from around 20 or 21% of the business to 25%. You'll see us continue to lean into that and grow that business. You'll see us continue to lean into our everyday value proposition, you know, and really highlight those and feature those in marketing. And you'll see us, you know, use promotions around the key, you know, must-win shopping moments on the calendar to make sure that we're driving traffic into our store and winning that driveway decision.

And then at the end of the seasons, clearance is another way to deliver value. So all those things are parts of our playbook. We're definitely leaning into them at the appropriate time to deliver value to the customer. We think our position as a value leader in the space, you know, gives us a really good position to be in as the customer is under pressure.

Cristina Fernández (Managing Director and Senior Equity Research Analyst)

Thank you, and good luck the rest of the holiday season.

Steve Lawrence (CEO)

Well, thank you. Okay, so that was our last question. I just want to say, from a recap perspective, you know, our approach over the remainder of the year is going to take the appropriate actions to navigate the short-term softness in customer demand. You know, with really a focus on delivering new and innovative products, offering compelling value, in order to help our customers stretch their holiday budgets, while also thoughtfully managing expense and inventories. On a longer-term basis, we believe we've got a unique concept that resonates with active young families. We believe our model is scalable and transportable, and we're going to continue to make investments in our future growth so we can enable more people to have fun out there by shopping Academy.

In closing, I want to thank all 22,000 of our Academy associates for all the hard work and efforts they put in, and will still put in this holiday. You know, our employees are kind of a key ingredient of our secret sauce, and I know that every one of our team members is going to give it their best during Q4 and in the future. So thanks for joining us today, and have a great holiday, everybody.

Operator (participant)

Ladies and gentlemen, this call is now concluded. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect your line. Thank you.