Boot Barn at TD Cowen Conference: Strategic Growth and Cautious Optimism

On Wednesday, 04 June 2025, Boot Barn Holdings Inc (NYSE:BOOT) presented a strong strategic outlook at the TD Cowen 9th Annual Future of the Consumer Conference. The company highlighted robust growth across all categories and regions, driven by effective merchandising and operations. While Boot Barn remains optimistic about its long-term strategies, it approaches the second half of the year with caution due to potential macroeconomic challenges.

Key Takeaways

• Boot Barn is experiencing broad-based growth, attributing success to strategic initiatives rather than macro factors.
• The company plans to leverage exclusive brands and digital prowess to increase market share.
• Cautious guidance for the second half of 2025 reflects concerns over macroeconomic headwinds and pricing impacts.
• Boot Barn aims for a 15% EBIT margin despite challenges like tariffs and increased occupancy costs.

Financial Results

• Q1 2025 Guidance: High end of same-store sales growth is 6%, with current growth at 10% for the first nine weeks.
• Full Year 2025 Guidance: Second half of the year is guided at flat comp sales due to macro concerns.
• Exclusive Brands: Accounted for 38.6% of sales last fiscal year, with an additional 100 basis points growth expected.
• Marketing Budget: Approximately 3% of sales, totaling over $60 million.
• Supply Chain Efficiencies: Achieved a 100 basis point improvement in the last year.

Operational Updates

• Store Expansion: 200 of 465 stores opened in the last five years, with plans to open 65-70 new stores annually.
• Pricing Strategy: Price increases on third-party brands in July; exclusive brand pricing reviewed in August and October.
• Marketing and Advertising: Focus on storytelling and separate campaigns for exclusive brands.
• Sourcing: New head of sourcing hired to enhance team for exclusive brands.

Future Outlook

• Strategic Initiatives: Focus on same-store sales growth, new store openings, margin expansion, and omni-channel presence.
• Exclusive Brand Penetration: Aim for 50% penetration over the next five to six years.
• Margin Architecture: Optimizing margins for exclusive brands.
• EBIT Margin Target: Targeting a return to a 15% operating margin within five to six years.

Q&A Highlights

• Elasticity: Boot Barn expects decent elasticity with price increases.
• Tariffs: Vendor price increases due to tariffs expected in mid-single-digit range.
• Market Share: Plans to leverage scale and digital presence for market share growth.
• Full Price Selling: Historically operates as a full-price business with low markdown inventory.
• Buying and Occupancy: Continues to be a pressure point with new store openings.

For further details, readers are encouraged to refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - TD Cowen 9th Annual Future of the Consumer Conference:

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Alright. Thanks everyone for joining us this afternoon. Next, I am pleased to host the Boot Barn team. This afternoon, we’re joined by CEO John Hazen as well as CFO Jim Watkins. We have a buy rating on shares and a $185 price target.

Also investors, the Xcel poll recently haven’t been kicked off, we would appreciate a five star vote for T. D. Callan if you found our work helpful to your investment process over the past year. With that, John and Jim, thanks so much.

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Hey Max, good to see you.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Glad you guys made it. Hey Max. So first and foremost, congrats on nice acceleration. Our results

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Thank you.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Seem to be going quite well. Business is gaining a lot of momentum. So I know we just spoke after earnings, but any updates on sort of what’s driving the acceleration? What are you guys seeing in the business?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Yeah, it’s been really, it’s been encouraging. It’s been broad based across all major merchandise categories, all geographies. When we look at it by customer, we looked at the customer intra quarter to see if there had been any change in frequency, any change in basket size, and it is very, very consistent. The customer across Western, Work, Just Country that had been shopping with us is shopping with us at the exact same rate. So it’s just broad based customer growth and transaction growth which is nice.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: So do you think it’s more of weather breaking, more across the country or sort of what do you think is potentially driving that?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: You know we’ve always been kind of a mid single digit comping business and we’re a little bit better than that now. Yeah. So I don’t think it’s weather breaking. Think I’ve been in 40 plus stores in the last six The stores just look incredibly well merchandised.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Yeah.

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: We’re not seeing that same macro growth from other public companies in the Western space. And so I think I’ve got to give credit to the team on the merchandising side and the store operations side that it’s the execution more so than anything macro that’s driving it.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: And it’s really all transaction driven, would imagine.

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Absolutely, yeah. It’s all transaction driven right now. We looked to see if there was any pull forward, anyone worried about tariffs, any increase in basket size and we just didn’t see anything to that effect.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Interesting, well that’s great. Obviously, implies underlying momentum. And then also, congratulations, you were recently promoted to Thank you. What’s been the biggest learning for you in the past sort of what six, seven months now since you were first appointed as interim CEO? You’ve been with the company for a

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: long time, but obviously it’s a very different seat. Sort of what have been the biggest learnings? And then as you get more comfortable in the seat, where is your focus gonna lie? Yeah, the biggest, I think the biggest surprise to me was in the last six months, again, I’ve been in so many stores and to see our partners and how much they live the lifestyle, the passion they have for the brand and for the brands that we carry was surprising. Again, I had been in many stores over the years but not to that level over that short period of time.

And the partners’ excitement around myself coming in as CEO despite my digital background, they were excited to hear that we are gonna continue to be a store’s first organization was great to hear. And yeah, it was spending time in the field and meeting with the team, hearing about product, I have a passion for product and that was probably the biggest change from what I was doing as Chief Digital Officer. Yeah, and you touched on some

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: of the things on the call, but you know, where could we see pivots on the strategy side?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Yeah, so we have our four strategic initiatives that are gonna continue to stay in place. Same store sales growth, new stores, margin and exclusive brands and omni channel. So those will not change. But slight adjustments under the cover of those four initiatives. For myself, the biggest one is, one of the biggest ones is going to be focusing on our exclusive brands, our biggest exclusive brands.

Prior to Boot Barn, spent much of my career or my entire career really working for brands and not for a retailer. And so I’m always focused on brands and how we can do a better job storytelling around those brands. So we’re gonna be launching separate websites for some of our exclusive brands, campaigns around those brands, not to drive e commerce sales, but really to have a place or an avenue to tell the stories of Hawks and Cody James and Cheyenne and some of our other exclusive brands. Yeah. The second big one for me is around sourcing.

You know, we have grown our exclusive brands to 38.6% last fiscal year. We are guiding an additional hundred basis points of growth this fiscal year. And the team has done just an incredible job. This is almost an $800,000,000 business at retail in exclusive brands, and we’ve done it with a very, very tiny team. It’s almost astounding how well they’ve done, and so we’re gonna focus on building up that sourcing team.

We’ve recently hired a new head of sourcing that’s come with fifteen years experience at Eddie Bauer, joined the team a few weeks back. And we’re gonna look at the margin architecture of Exclusive Brands now as the growth will continue but at a slower pace than some of the larger increases we’ve had over the last several years.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Right, right. And we’ll get into EVs in a little bit, but Jim, I wanted to bring you in. So obviously really nice acceleration over the past handful of weeks, really the entire, all year we’ve seen it for the most part, yet you kept the 1Q guide intact. So just curious, how are you thinking about sort of balancing the acceleration the business has continued to see thus far in the quarter versus sort of the shape of the year and how things could play out?

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: Yeah, the guide at the high end of the range for the first quarter is a 6% same store sales growth as we’re nine weeks in and sitting on a plus 10 that is beginning to look conservative for the first quarter. So we haven’t updated that guidance, but we we like the the really strong start to the quarter obviously. As we look to the rest of the year, we also have an updated guidance for for the balance of the year, particularly the the second half of the year where we’ve got that guided at the high end of the range at a flat comp. And that’s really focused on the macro environment and what would have been probably a plus 3% comp guidance for the back half of the year we brought down and there’s a little bit of art and science to how we got to the flat comp. But a lot of that is really focused on the impact we think that some pricing increases will have on the consumer, not just on at Boot Barn and price increases we have, but just generally the consumers wallet being stretched a little bit further as they see price increases other aspects of their lives.

So I think we feel confident about the flat comp for the back half of the year and we’re holding that, that’s still the guide but it’s always great when you start the first two months of any year with a plus 10 comp.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: So it’s much more about macro than micro in the second half of the year. Yes. So with that, I just wanna talk about how you’re thinking about elasticity. The brand historically has really stood for function, very little fashion risk. So just how do you think about the elasticity?

I’m sure you’ve done a lot of analysis over the years. Which categories do you think are more versus less elastic as you think about second half?

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: Yes, it’s great question and our merchants are constantly looking at pricing within their categories and their areas of ownership and playing with pricing and trying to always maximize margin, but also give our customers a good value. And so we do sell a very functional product. It’s a replenishment product in most cases and our customers need that to go to work every day. And so we wanna we wanna give them a good value proposition. But as far as the elasticity goes, we’re gonna try to to hold pricing as much as we can, particularly around our exclusive brands and and work with our third party vendor price parties to to try to keep the pricing as low as we can there also.

But where we have price increases, we’re going to raise prices around the third party product.

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Yeah.

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: And we expect to see a decent amount of elasticity, but it’s going to be an interesting test for us. We normally have price increases in the low single digit range every year and that seems to be par with inflation and just what we see generally and the customers tend to be okay with that as we raise prices mid single digits on many of the product. We expect to see some of that demand drop a little bit as we talked about earlier.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Yeah, so maybe let’s just stay on tariffs. Obviously we spoke a few weeks ago but there’s been several updates since then. So just curious, what have conversations with your vendors been like? Obviously, in China, Thirty Percent is at 145%. So has there been much progress?

Is the mid single digit price increase on your national brands still the right number to think about or potentially could it be a little bit lower?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: I think it’s still going to be mid single digits from most of our vendors. What they did is they took the tariffs and looked at what they could absorb, what the factories could absorb and what they could pass on. And they really spread that out across their entire product line. So maybe it comes down a little bit, we have not seen that yet. But I expect it to still be a mid single digit price increase for most of our third party vendors.

And what comes in conjunction with that, or in tandem with that rather, is that they raise the MSRP’s and their MAP pricing or their minimum advertised pricing policy. So all of the retail industry, the western retail industry will increase their price at that same cadence so we won’t be uniquely disadvantaged as you think about that elasticity equation, at least with third party vendors. We will all be selling that next boot or that next shirt or that next jacket all at that same price, given the MAP policies of the industry, which overall are a good thing. It keeps the industry fairly rational and not a race to the bottom in terms of promotions and prices.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: So when we think about your scale and your digital prowess, it really should give you an opportunity to pick up some outsized market share during this period. Where do you think that we could see it? Because pricing to your point, it’s mostly MAP pricing so everyone’s going up the same amount. So is it better sourcing? Is it having more product?

Where could we see your scale really play to your advantage?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: I think it’s a couple of places. One, we tend to lean in and be a little more opportunistic when there’s a situation that causes most to be a little more cautionary. Think COVID and the fifty four percent comp we had during those post COVID times. So we’ve looked at inventory and made sure that we have the right inventory levels going into the holiday season, and perhaps the mom and pops or some others may not have reacted as quickly or has been as opportunistic to be positioned for holiday. The second piece is with our exclusive brands.

We are going to hold pricing lower for longer on exclusive brands and tying that back to elasticity again, there’s an opportunity for us to perhaps gain penetration growth above the 100 basis points we’ve guided for fiscal twenty and have exclusive brands grow given the quality and the build of our exclusive brands is not that of a house brand or a private label, it’s as good as our third party vendors.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Yeah, so just maybe switching to EB’s for a second here, but the 100 basis points was lower than what we’ve seen historically. And to your point, you’re not increasing price, therefore there should be an advantage there. So sort of what drove that 100 basis point initial guide? Because it feels like you probably can overshoot that here in the near term.

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: In the end, we’re going to let the consumer decide or the customer decide. And we had had several years of outsized exclusive brand growth, some of that driven by being leaning in or being opportunistic in terms of inventory buys when everybody else was pulling back post COVID during all the the supply chain dislocations that were happening. And so it it felt like a time we we believe, I believe that we can still get to 50% exclusive brand penetration over the next five to six years. And it’s not entirely linear every year. It’s 100 to 200 basis points.

It tends to go in little kind of minor step function increases. So it seemed like this year, a hundred basis points given last year’s performance seemed like a reasonable goal for the year. Again, there may be opportunity with holding price lower for longer on EB, but I don’t think it’s, you know, doing the math, it’s not 200 points a year every year for the next five years.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: And as we think about the incrementality on the EB side from here, is it more about continuing to increase the mix or is it really about gaining better product margins on that side?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: I think we’ll continue to again march towards that 50% EB penetration as long as the customer decides that they like the product and we love the product and we love the brands and we’re gonna lean into the storytelling of those brands. But there is an opportunity on the margin architecture. We’ve spent so many years growing the volume and growing the size of our exclusive brands that now we’re gonna take a moment to look back at the margin and the sourcing strategy and try and optimize that architecture for the margin. So I think it’s a mix of both, but I think more of the opportunity will come from margin over the next several years versus penetration, although the penetration we expect to continue to Really

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: the exclusive brand sits under our merchandise margin growth category, Or one of the four pillars that John alluded to. And whether it’s growing the penetration or actually growing the margin rate within that category, they both serve the same purpose. And so we’re kind of entering into phase two a little bit of the program.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Right, that makes sense. And just going back to the price increase on the national brands, when do you intend to begin to take prices? And is it going be sort of all at once or over a period of time? And just how are you thinking about being able to do that in the least disruptive way?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Yeah, there’s only several windows as we think about holiday coming up on us. It’s closer, in retail it’s always closer than you think. We are gonna take the price increases on third party brands over the month of July. So that’s the optimal time to do it. It’s one of the slower months of the year.

That’s when the price increases come into effect and the MAP policies come into effect. So we really, we have to do it during that And then as we look at exclusive brands, we’ve got two other windows in August and October where we’ll decide whether looking at the penetration of EB post increases of third party vendors, we’ll decide when and if we take those price increases during those windows.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Got it. Okay. Let’s switch gears maybe a little bit. So at an industry level, where do you think we are as far as the Western trend is? You know, every time it feels peak ish, there’s something that suggests we’re actually potentially still on the ascend.

I’m sure you’ve gotten this question often, you know, where do you think we are now?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: You know, if we go back all the way to the IPO ten plus years ago, ten and a half years ago, we’ve been on average a mid single digit comp business. And there have been many different things over those years that people would coin a trend or a moment for Western. And maybe there’s lots of small moments in there, but I don’t think it’s a Western trend. I think we have a nice business that comps in the mid single digits, that’s what we continue to do. And again, given some of the fluidity of tariffs and the consumer macro sentiment for the back half of the year, we’ve guided the back half flat this year.

But otherwise, we would have guided a plus six and then a plus three the Q2 and plus three for the back half of the year. So I think it’s, you know, the last ten years are a testament that it’s not a trend and we’re in a business where we can be a mid single digit comp grower.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Even if the industry were to slow, you have a history of still being able to put off at least a low to mid single digit comp. Correct. And how

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: do you, go ahead. One other point would be that if you look at some of those other public companies, they aren’t necessarily seeing the same performance we are. So I think it’s again a credit to the entire Boot Barn team on our performance versus the macro in the industry itself.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Yeah, and part of that is you guys have spent a lot of money cumulatively over the years on advertising. Obviously, you’re now taking a fresh look at it. So how are you approaching advertising and specifically top of funnel and building awareness as it does feel to be quite the large opportunity? Are you changing any of

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: the strategies as you look ahead? Yeah, we’ve always, our marketing budget has always been roughly 3% of sales. So if you kind of rewind the tape ten years and look at our marketing budget, it’s gone from 7 or 8 or $9,000,000 to 60 plus million dollars at this point. We feel great about our content creation. Our marketing team is incredibly talented and they’ve gotten to a level where we have enough creative to do everything we need to do.

So as sales grow by, you know, $200,000,000 between comp stores and new store growth, and add another 6,000,000 to the coffers from a marketing standpoint, those dollars are gonna be spent against distribution. Really every incremental dollar at this point on a go forward basis is gonna be spent against the distribution of that marketing content. And Boot Barn was the first retailer I had worked at. I spent my entire career on the brand side, companies like True Religion, NikeHurley, and so we’re gonna be doing a lot more storytelling with those marketing dollars. More top of funnel around both Boot Barn as a retailer and our exclusive brands, whether it be Hawx or Cody James or Cheyenne, and telling those stories with with their own marketing campaigns separate from Boot Barn.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Got it. And maybe switching over to margins, I think something that’s still pretty underappreciated is that being a softlines retailer, you guys do drive essentially a totally full price business. Something that you’ve been able to do over the entire public history of the company. Where do you think we are today? Because every time it sort of feels peak ish, you guys do continue to pull pull promos and your full price selling mix continues to increase.

How much room is there to go? What are some of the strategies that you’re using? And then if the environment were to soften a little bit, like do you think that on the margin we could see a little bit more promotions to drive sales? Or how do you think about that?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Yeah, this business is a very, the rationality in how rational the western retail business is compared to many others is refreshing. It is not a very promotional business. Traditionally never has been. The competitive set all kind of reacts well to the ebbs and flows of the business and so you don’t have some of the challenges you have in other retail businesses.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Almost all

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: the promotions we have at this point are against our markdowns which are at really historic lows outside of COVID. So we’re in a very, very good position in terms of markdown inventory. And when you see a Father’s Day or a Labor Day or Memorial Day promotion, that’s really what we’re talking about is trying to increase the velocity of some of that markdown inventory. So I think we’re going to continue to be a full price business. I think there’ll always be some level of markdowns we’re trying to move through.

And yeah, there’s always room if there is a softening, but I don’t think this business traditionally gets very promotional even during the most, you know, the holiday time frame where everyone tends to get very very aggressive in those promotions, we tend to hold the line both online and in stores, gives us a lot of latitude.

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: Yeah. I think this year may be the year where the lack of a markup is considered a promotion.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Fair enough. And Jim, you guys have done a really really nice job over the past couple of years of getting back to trying to leverage your new scale to drive better supply chain and sourcing efficiencies and really work with your vendors to get the margins that you probably have deserved for quite some time. So as we think about your supply chain efficiencies, how much room do you think that you’ve got left despite all the progress that you’ve been making more recently?

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: Yeah, think the team has done a really great job in negotiating with our vendors and we have great vendor partners. So around the supply chain, particularly the last year we saw really outsized increase getting close to 100 basis points of improvement on the supply chain efficiencies. And that was renegotiated contracts with some of our freight and shipping providers as well as some efficiencies in new Kansas City distribution center. And so we we expect those to continue to be with us and and and kind of permanent mark margin improvements. Yeah.

But we’re not expecting this this upcoming year to have, you know, it’s really not baked into the the the margin guide for the year. And so we’ll continue to work with those those providers and and look for those, but there’ll be little wins here here and there as as we work through that. I think as we’ve guided this year, the merchandise margin flat at the high end of the range and that’s close to a hundred basis points of improvement in the first half of the year and some absorbing the tariff expense in the second half of the year, you know, putting some pressure and and turning that negative in the second half of the year. But we we think we have the the continued margin drivers of exclusive brand penetration growth. Really, the buying economy is a scale getting getting more and better volume discounts and vendor discounts as we’ve been able to grow with our vendors and increase the purchases they’ve offered us more more discounts and and we’ve been working

So I think that stays with us. And then John mentioned some of the sourcing efficiencies that we expect to see more longer term, maybe starting in late fiscal twenty seven, but really fiscal twenty eight as see what kind of margin benefit we can get on the sourcing side around the exclusive brands. So lots of margin drivers ahead of us we’re excited about and that’s on top of more than 600 basis points of merchandise margin expansion over the last six years from you know, that you talked about the supply chain efficiencies but also full price selling improvements as well as exclusive brand penetration growth among other things.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: And I think the guide as well, a hundred basis points of merch margin upside in 1H and then down in second half, Is that

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: right?

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: Then sticking with gross margin, know a question that we get often is just the leverage point around buying and occupancy. Obviously it’s quite elevated. How should we think about that line item longer term? It probably does come down maybe on the margin, but it’s still it’s going be probably quite high versus the business becoming a little more mature and potentially not being able to comp above maybe a mid single. So like as you think longer term, merch margins are going to be a good guy, but do you think buying an occupancy probably remains a small pressure point or how should we think about that?

Right now the leverage point on buying occupancy and distribution center cost is, it’s a plus seven comp, right?

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: And so on a low to mid single digit same store sales growth and that’s going to be a drag for us as long as we continue to open 15% new units. It probably goes down to a 6% in a couple of years as we cycle kind of the ramp up from a plus 10% unit growth to a plus 15% unit growth. And so I think that’s with us and it’s really, we’ve opened 200 stores, 200 of our four sixty five stores or so have have opened in the last five years and so when you open a new store at 75% volume as a mature store, it really puts some pressure on that occupancy rate. So unless we stopped opening new stores, I think that pressure is going to be with us, which we’re we’re finding those stores are making some nice generating some nice profit dollars for us. And and I think really the the number to focus on this this year is is the the 3% comp needed to leverage the EBIT rate.

Mhmm. And and with this year’s guide even with a flat merchandise margin, that does put some pressure on gross margin. But we’ve got some really nice leverage even at a flat comp, we can get leverage at SG and A this year. And so as we move forward in the next couple of years, SG and A leverage point being at roughly a probably a one and a half percent comp at a low to mid single digit same store sales growth, gonna get to see some nice benefit to EBIT

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: SG and And on SG and A, you guys have historically done a really nice job of watching expenses, keeping that line quite tight. Do you see any sort of major opportunities around SG and A? I know you guys are doing some things on AI, but ultimately is it more just about maintaining where you are, potentially finding small pockets here and there? Or are there bigger sort of cost buckets we should monitor in SG and A?

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: I think we’re going to continue doing what we’ve done. We have a lot of our SG and A expenses is variable, probably about two thirds of that just in store labor and credit card fees and marketing that John mentioned. And so really, how can we leverage the fixed costs and the best thing that that we’re doing is trying to keep those costs as low as possible while opening this year 65, 70 new stores that all generate profit dollars to spread those fixed costs among. So I think that’s the biggest driver of us leveraging those SG and A costs.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: So maybe putting it all together, we’ve spent several years now talking about 15% EBIT margin as sort of the North Star. Obviously with tariffs there’s a lot of incremental costs. Do you still think that 15% over some period of time is feasible or is that just going be more challenging to achieve?

Jim Watkins, CFO, Boot Barn: Yeah, you don’t like having a year where you don’t make progress on that goal, I think as we look to the next five or six years marching back to that 15% operating margin target, it’s within reach and there’s a path to get there with the drivers that we talked about and at low to mid single digit same store sales growth. Once we get out of this year, I think we’re right back there driving some EBIT margin expansion each year.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: And so John, on store growth, you’re very quickly becoming one of the fastest growers in all of retail which is quite impressive. How do you balance customers clearly demanding for you to build stores with making sure that you’re not stretched too thin, you’re able to hire a top notch talent, and that the business overall can support an ever increasing number of store openings?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Yeah, we have a great team internally to both find the right real estate and then build out that store and get that store open. We have roughly 40 district managers who help us open those stores and we’ll move them around and each of them will have to open a store or two a year, which is something they can do quite handedly. But the focus is always on finding the right real estate. We’re gonna open the right stores in the right location and we’re not gonna open a store for the sake of opening stores. There’s always stores that open better, stores that open softer, and we learn from every single one of those store openings.

But the internal team, both from the deal making side and finding the right real estate, as well as the store operations team all the way down to the store managers of visual merchandisers and everybody who helps open that store have gotten very good at managing the load of opening sixty, seventy or 80 stores a year.

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: And just on the new stores, you know, seems like their momentum and what they do in year one sales is very similar to what you see in regions that you’ve been in for many, many years. So is that a surprise to you? Did you expect stores in sort of the Northeast and say the Mid Atlantic to do quite as well as your core regions?

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: It’s not a surprise any longer but if we rewind the tape five or six years, when we first started opening stores in places like Pennsylvania, we really thought we were gonna see more of a work customer. We thought lace up work boots, less western, less cowboy hats, less traditional exotic boots, not what we would sell in Texas or Arizona or California. And that simply hasn’t been the case. Those stores index as western as our typical West Coast stores or Arizona stores. And in some cases, given the lack of mom and pop or specialty competition, index even more Western in some cases.

So it was surprising several years back, but we’ve gotten used to it as we opened more and more Northeast or East Coast stores. Awesome. That’s

Max, Analyst, T. D. Callan: great. It’s all the time that we’ve got. Thanks a lot gentlemen for joining me.

John Hazen, CEO, Boot Barn: Thank was great.

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