Boot Barn Holdings, Inc. Goldman Sachs Global Consumer and Retail Conference

Yeah, just taking one step further back from there, this was a recap. We are almost through our Q2, but we kicked off the year with a +5 comp in our first quarter. Business then was flat in July and we put out the release looking at all of August and the first three weeks of September, where in both August and September, we saw comps improve to a +2. We expect to hit the high end of our guidance from a total sales standpoint and from an EPS standpoint and be within guidance from a same-store sales standpoint. We feel great about Q1 and where we are with Q2 with just a couple of weeks left.

Yeah, sure. That ironically gave us a little bit of confidence in July that it was so broad-based in Western, yet not in work. Our work business held up nicely during that July timeframe when the overall comp was flat. As we moved into August and September, we are still softer on women's boots, and women's boots is roughly 11% of our business. It is smaller than men's apparel, work boots, men's Western boots. The merchandising team is working on improving the women's business, getting freshness in for the holiday season, both from third party and exclusive brands. We are excited with what we have coming for the holiday season in the women's business.

Outside of that, we haven't given an update by every other merchandise category, but suffice it to say, it was broad-based, and work continued to perform very nicely in August and September, both work boots and work apparel.

Yeah. July was, we believed, and we saw that stadium tours were down in July, and the day after we reported, Live Nation came out and said attendance was down, I think it was 14% domestically, to kind of reinforce our theory on what was going on with stadium concerts during that time. If we look at the concert activity, I'd say we're normalized right now. It's not a catch-up. We're not going to get what was perhaps lost during summer, but everything feels very normalized and big announcements already starting for next summer. Kenny Chesney just announced a massive stadium tour for next summer. So we're seeing those already begin, looking forward a little bit.

As we got into August and September, the only thing, and we don't talk about this often, but we live in Southern California, and the weather was incredibly hot across the rest of the country, and we tend to do better when the weather is cooler and wetter. But it was a record-breaking heat that we normally don't see in Southern California and in other parts of the country as well.

Yeah. First of all, our core consumer is really what drives our business. We very much are a replenishment business, whether it be boots or apparel. Many of our top-selling denim styles have been in the line for several years, 5 plus years in some cases. Much of our business is driven by whether it is a traditional blue-collar tradesman on the work business, or if you look at our Western business, working in agriculture, ranching, farming, those sorts of things. That has always kind of been the core of our business.

As we look to open the aperture 4 or 5 years ago, we came up with another segment, we coined our Country Lifestyle segment, and that customer is someone who is perhaps never worked on a ranch, never ridden a horse, never been around cattle, but wears a baseball cap instead of a cowboy hat, drives an F-150, listens to country music, enjoys hunting and fishing and a rural lifestyle. That is where we looked at additional apparel, additional entry points from a Western boot standpoint, and started marketing to that sort of consumer that is not a core Western guy, but loves a rural lifestyle coupled with country music and a pickup truck.