Boot Barn Holdings, Inc. Piper Sandler 5th Annual Growth Frontiers Conference

Great. Thanks for having us.

Yeah, sure. I will rewind the tape just a little bit more. This was an intra-quarter update for Q2. We ended our first quarter with same-store sales up 5%, and we are 11 weeks through our second quarter. We gave the update earlier in the week that we were going to come in at the high end of the sales guidance, high end of the EPS guidance, and within guidance from a same-store sales standpoint. We thought it would be helpful to give that update given at the end of our first quarter and on the last call, we were through July, which was the first month of our second quarter, and business had been flat with a lot of different things going on in July.

I think it most definitely had an impact in July. Ironically, the day after our call, Live Nation reported, and they said on their call that domestically, attendance was down 14% because of stadium availability. They corroborated what we knew and believed to be true around the stadiums. We have already seen announcements start for next year's stadium tours. Kenny Chesney just announced, I think, a 15 or 20-stop stadium tour for next summer. We are seeing those announcements start to ramp up now. I think it was a component of July and August. As the World Cup ended, it took several weeks to unwind what they had done to the stadiums to prepare for the World Cup. I think we saw certain artists, Luke Combs as an example, just decide to tour in Europe versus touring domestically. There were other components. The customer, and we have traffic counters in our stores in July, were distracted by the World Cup.

We do not talk about weather often, and we do not like to blame weather, but it was the hottest July on record in the U.S.

A bit of a wacky month. As we got into August and September, we saw comps improve to a +2 consolidated and saw the business kind of get back to normal after all that noise in July.

Yeah. Many years ago, as Peter noted, we were much more dependent on oil and gas during the fracking boom back in 2016. We still have, I'd say, roughly 10% of our stores are affected by refining and the oil and gas business. But the macro of diesel prices, and if you imagine a Boot Barn customer, they're more apt to own a pickup truck that runs on diesel, and we've all seen what happened with diesel prices. It does put pressure on the consumer. We have not seen it in our data yet, though. Our customer continues to shop both at the low and the high income. We're doing well across price points. We're not seeing any trading down. We run this data once a quarter, so this is all at the end of Q1.

We'll do the same thing at the end of Q2, but everything we've seen has shown our customer to be resilient and not a K-shaped customer, as people refer to.