Boot Barn at William Blair Conference: Strategic Expansion and Growth

On Tuesday, June 3, 2025, Boot Barn Holdings Inc. (NYSE:BOOT) presented at the 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference, highlighting its robust fiscal year 2025 performance and future growth strategies. The company emphasized its strong sales growth and ambitious expansion plans, while also addressing challenges such as online sales decline and tariff impacts.

Key Takeaways

• Boot Barn reported a 15% increase in sales, reaching $1.9 billion in fiscal year 2025.
• The company aims to expand its store network to 900 locations nationwide.
• Same-store sales grew by 5.5%, with a positive trend continuing into the new fiscal year.
• Exclusive brands account for 35% of sales, supporting margin growth.
• Boot Barn plans to raise prices on third-party brands to mitigate tariffs.

Financial Results

• Sales increased by 15% to $1.9 billion, a significant rise from previous years.
• Comparable store sales rose by 5.5%, building on a 54% increase from the prior year.
• Merchandise margin improved by 670 basis points over six years.
• Earnings per share (EPS) reached $5.88, nearly tripling over four years.
• Average unit volumes increased from $1.8 million to $3.2 million.

Operational Updates

• Boot Barn operates in 49 states, recently expanding into New Hampshire, Maine, Vermont, and Alaska.
• The company plans to open 70 new stores this year, with current stores totaling 467 and expected to reach 524-529 by year-end.
• Online sales penetration decreased from 17% to 10%, attributed to new store growth.
• 70% of online returns are processed in stores, and 10% of online orders are picked up in-store.

Future Outlook

• Boot Barn is revisiting its store count target, considering an increase beyond 900 locations.
• The company anticipates further sales volume growth through store and same-store sales expansion.
• Merchandise margin is expected to grow through full-price selling and supply chain efficiencies.
• Prices on third-party brands will increase in the coming months, leveraging market share gains from exclusive brands.

Conclusion

For a detailed understanding of Boot Barn’s strategies and performance, please refer to the full transcript below.

Full transcript - 45th Annual William Blair Growth Stock Conference:

Dylan Huggins, Analyst: Dylan Huggins, analyst here that covers Boot Barn, one of my favorite companies, tangible growth, low competition, well run. John Hayes has been in the seat about seven months, know, kind of getting started on all this, the whole circuit, so I’ll leave it to you. Alright.

Oh, our disclosures from a compliance standpoint are unbelievable.

John Hayes, Boot Barn: Thank you, Dylan. Appreciate it. Good morning, everyone. So for those of you new to the brand, welcome, and I’m excited to share our story with you. And for those of you familiar with the Boot Barn story, you’ll probably hear some of the information you’ve heard before repeated, but looking forward to sharing the latest on our performance.

We are a retail brand rooted in the heritage of the American West and have been since 1978, and we serve our customers with a new a unique blend of Western, work, and everyday lifestyle product, which we’ll talk about. We’ve had a strong record of growth, expanding our store base over the last several years, and that increase the store base and that in in excuse me, continues to grow, and a powerful exclusive brand portfolio. We believe Boot Barn offers a compelling long term investment opportunity. So let’s take a look at what’s driving our performance and why there’s so much runway ahead. So starting with our TAM.

So our total addressable market, we at the time of our IPO back in roughly ten years ago, we had a TAM of $20,000,000,000 made up of work and western customers. And we had gone out and done a study, and we thought that that was roughly, at the time, the size, and and we thought we could open three to 400 stores at that time. As we went back and revisited that TAM a few years back, we looked further beyond the traditional Western customer to what we call the just country customer or the country lifestyle. So I’ll start on the left of the page with our Western customer. Customer is someone who lives a core Western lifestyle.

So imagine someone who wears a cowboy cowboy hat, they have cowboy boots, they work with livestock, they may ride a horse, they work on a farm, and and that is as close to our core customer as you could get. They participate in rodeos, they attend rodeos, and and that is their lifestyle. If you take one step to the right, we have customer, and with the Boot Barn work customer, that customer is across all different aspects of blue collar work. Whether it be oil and gas, roofing, asphalt, any type of construction work, we have a traditional blue collar workman or tradesman that is our customer. And so that was our 20,000,000,000 TAM, and then as time went on and we revisited who we could sell to, we looked at this Just Country customer.

And I’m sure many of you know somebody who kind of fits that just country customer profile. This is someone who drives a pickup truck. They listen to country music. They enjoy fishing, hunting. They may not attend a rodeo.

They may have never ridden a horse. They like motocross, NASCAR events, and kind of live a more rural lifestyle. Don’t necessarily own a cowboy hat, might have one or two pair of cowboy boots that they might wear, but they are not a core Western customer. And as we expanded and looked at that customer across the country, and that’s not just in Texas and not just in California or not just in Arizona, It’s you get 10 miles inland from California or you get 10 or 20 miles outside of the city, and you’ll see customers like this across the country listening to country music with a backwards baseball cap and a pickup truck. And that added about $15,000,000,000 to our TAM.

Coupled that with some organic growth, and we got to that $40,000,000,000 TAM that kind of makes up what we think our potential customer and opportunity is today. We are the industry leader. We are the national brand. There is no other national western retailer brand. We have four sixty seven stores today, and we have some competition both from a regional, a very strong regional player that we respect greatly, Cavenders.

They have 104 stores today, and then the larger competitor is the mom and pops or the specialty retailers. There’s many stores that have one or two locations. It was always a very highly fragmented industry, and those continue to operate across the country today. The other piece is the Farm and Ranch channel. So Farm and Ranch Tractor Supply is probably the best known Farm and Ranch retailer, 2,300 stores.

These stores sell everything from they sell everything from feed to tractors to home and garden supplies. They sell baby chickens in many of their stores during baby chick season, and they sell apparel and footwear. The apparel and footwear side of their business makes up roughly 10 to 15% of their business. So while they overlap with us in some areas, that is not their core business. Their core business is broad range of outdoor living products.

And then, of course, there’s the online competitors. We have some disruptors, as you like to call them, the Warby Parker of cowboy boots with Takovis and other folks who sell directly online, whether it be our third party vendors who we buy from or there are some brands that sell solely on Amazon. So that’s kind of the breakdown of the industry and the competition. One thing to note about the competition in this industry sorry guys, we’re crackling up here. One thing to note about the competition in this industry is it’s very rational.

So unlike many other industries where there is a race to the bottom in terms of pricing, the Western industry via MAP policies, via how the competition generally promotes during holiday and during other promotional seasons. It’s a very rational and kind of margin accretive strategy, and it’s not like what you might see in traditional general merchandise retailers. So it’s something we like greatly that the third party vendors have these advertising policies in place and it’s generally a very, very full price business across the board and and it’s not folks trying to undercut each other. So today, we’re going to talk about Barn’s story, where Boot Barn has been over the last year and the years prior to that, our four strategic initiatives that have been in place for twelve years, and the future growth potential for the business. Starting with our fiscal twenty five results, it was a fantastic year for us across all major metrics.

Sales were up 15% to $1,900,000,000 It’s a billion dollars more than just four years ago. We had a year, which we’ll talk about in a little bit, post COVID where the business jumped 54%, and and you take that and add in the the years that then passed, and we got to a $1,900,000,000 business, a billion more than just four years ago. Our comp sales were up 5.5%, building on that plus 54% comp year I just mentioned from a few years back, showing the sustained growth that we have had over the years. And we’ve continued to be a full price retailer, as I just mentioned, in somewhat rational industry with merchandise margin up six seventy basis points over the past six years. We’re continuing to expand that margin going forward and we expect that we had EPS or earnings per share of $5.88 nearly three times higher than our earnings just four years ago.

Historically, if you look at our same store sales growth, we are very consistent as a mid single digit comp store grower. We were on average, if you look at the years pre COVID, we comped a 5.5% same store sales on average. We had the huge outsized growth that happened during COVID. We were a plus 54 comp during the year post COVID, and it was a combination of a few things. We we saw mom and pop and specialty retailers go out of business.

We stayed open when others closed their doors, mall based retailers and others. We were a needs based business and sold to first responders, so we were open more than most during that COVID time frame, and we think new customers found us, and we leaned into inventory during that time where other folks were cutting back, so we were opportunistic and took market share during that first supply chain crunch that occurred post COVID. And other folks saw similar growth during that time frame. Right? There was some dislocation in terms of what people were doing.

They weren’t going on vacation overseas. They were behaving a bit differently, and that happened for a point in time, and then they gave that business back. And as you can see here, there were a couple of bumpy years post COVID,

Dylan Huggins, Analyst: but

John Hayes, Boot Barn: we are back to that five point five percent comp that was the average of the years prior to the COVID bump coming into play, so we have regained and held on to that growth that occurred during the post COVID time frame where our average unit volumes jumped from $1,800,000 to $3,200,000. We’re a national retailer at this point. We are in 49 states. We opened this year in New Hampshire, in Maine, in Vermont, just South of Burlington, in Anchorage, Alaska, and we think there’s white space to open stores across the country. If I look at our pipeline of new stores that we’re going to be opening, that pipeline includes stores in legacy markets such as Texas, California, Arizona, as well as new markets such as New York, New Jersey, Maine, and New Hampshire, and Alaska.

And so we think we have an opportunity to continue to open stores at a 15% clip across the entire nation. And if you look at that sales growth over the last ten years or more, that comp growth and new store expansion have resulted in just remarkable sales growth. Year after year, including that big bump during the COVID time frame that you can see on there, we have grown sales, and we’re estimating that we’re going to do $2,150,000,000 or almost $2,200,000,000 of sales in this fiscal year that started at the April. Our current same store sales trend turned positive as we got into the start of this fiscal year, and we suddenly felt more confident in our trajectory after those lumpy years that I mentioned post COVID. In FY 2025, we comped positive in all four quarters, a plus 1.4 in Q1, ’4 point ’9 in Q2, a plus 8.6 in Q3, and a plus six in Q4.

And that momentum has carried us into fiscal twenty six, which started at the April. There’s some new news in here. We have updated this from the earnings call where we talked through the first six weeks of q one. Now we’re through the first nine weeks of our first quarter of fiscal twenty six, and our preliminary same store sales are coming in at a plus 10 against our guide of a plus six. And we’ve got four weeks left to go, and we’ll see how it plays out, but it has been a nice consistent outsized growth in the comp through the first nine weeks of the year, and it’s been broad based across all major merchandise categories and across all geographies.

We looked at the customers, we looked to see if it was pull forward due to tariffs, we looked to see if there was some other outsized driver of that comp and there just was not. It’s across major merchandise categories and all geographies, so very, very nice to see. If we look at the breakdown of the business, the sales mix of our customer, we’re going look at it by product, we’re going look at it by customer, and we’re going look at it by online versus and we’re gonna look at it in the past going all the way back to 2018 and where we are today. And and the short answer is it’s very consistent. We get the question often, are you a fashion business?

Is there a trend? Is the business changing? Is the customer changing? It simply is not our boots business versus apparel and accessories, roughly half the business in each of those two sides. Shifted a little more into apparel with how strong we have been performing in denim.

We believe we’ve come become a bit of a denim destination, but all in all, our customer and what we sell from where we were and where we are today is very, very consistent. And that’s true of our customer as well. Our customer looks very much the same way they did several years ago. Everyone asks the question, are you getting a new customer? Is this a country music trend?

Is country music changing? Who’s coming into the stores? And the short answer, it very much is not. The customer looks the same way it has for years. The penetration of just country versus western versus work versus our by gender, the income cohort, all incredibly consistent.

Other brands have talked about how the higher income customer has been supporting the comp. That has not been the case with Boot Barn. It is the same customer we had last year and the year before. And then if we look at the online penetration, we are, despite my digital background, we will continue to be a stores first organization. Our penetration has dropped from 17% down to 10% of our overall sales online, and that’s been driven by our new store growth as we continue to add stores across the country, and our e commerce business, which is a very nice business and comps in the high mid single digits or in the low double digits, simply can’t keep up with that new store growth.

We’re going to add close to 70 stores this year with an average unit volume of $3,200,000 That’s the equivalent of a BootBarn.com in just new store growth in this particular year. So we think online will continue to hover in that 10% range with the stores business being at 90% of our sales. And every time we get the chance to turn an online customer into a stores customer, we take that opportunity. 70% of our online returns happen in stores. 10% of our orders bought on bootbarn.com are BOPUS orders.

They’re picking those orders up in stores. And another 22% of our customers on bootbarn.com have a choice to ship their order to their home, to their office, or their place of work, or to a Boot Barn store, and they choose to ship their order to a Boot Barn store versus their home or their office, and it’s because they enjoy the Boot Barn store experience. So, we are going to continue to be stores first. Stores are 90% of the business, and e commerce will continue to hover in that 10 range. Jumping ahead to our four strategic initiatives, these will not change.

They are going to they have been in place for twelve years and they will continue to stay in place. I will make some small adjustments to what those initiatives do and adjustments under those umbrellas, but the initiatives are consistent and will continue. Our store growth and long term potential. Over the past three years, we’ve grown our store count continuously from what was a historical 10% unit growth to 15%, and we expect to grow by 15% new units again this year. We ended the year with four fifty nine stores and we expect to end this year with somewhere in the range of five twenty four to five twenty nine stores.

We had a study several years back that said we could get to 900 stores nationally and double our store count from where we are today. That study still holds, but we are going to be revisiting it and seeing, given the Just Country customer and the, you know, a little bit of a leaning into realization, is there an opportunity for that study to be looked at, dusted off, and perhaps more opportunity from perspective, but right now, we have a store count that we are confident that we can double where we are today to 900 stores. And our sales and profitability have exceeded expectation across all new and existing markets. Many very often, we get the question, how do the stores in Pennsylvania, New York, New Jersey, Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, how do those stores look compared to the stores in Arizona, California, and Texas? And the answer is they look very, very similar.

Many years ago, we thought those stores were going be more work focused. They were going be selling more lace up work boots. They were going to be selling more wovens, more outerwear, more Carhartt, and less cowboy hats, and less exotic cowboy boots, and that is not the case. They are as western as the stores that we’ve opened back out West. Many years, there was a thought we couldn’t open stores West Of The Mississippi, and and we’ve proven that simply is not true.

Here are some pictures of our new store format. We have 150 of these stores right now. Our latest store fan format was really it it really was a step up in in the store experience and and and growing and and bringing in new customers without losing what makes Boot Barn special. We didn’t want to alienate our existing customers. If you think to that core Western customer in the cowboy hat who works on a ranch, who works with livestock, he needs to be just as or or the work customer.

They need to be just as comfortable coming into a Boot Barn store as someone who might be coming in to buy an outfit to go to a concert or they’re a just country customer, and this is kind of just their daily wear. And we’re very, very happy with this new store format. That’s the barn element that is the center of the store, and the new format really keeps with our authentic Western roots while modernizing the layout and the lighting. And and I have been in over 40 stores in the last six months, and I can’t tell you the number of times people walk in and go, I I I could just shop here as my as a regular store, not a core western store where you’re coming to pick pick up just one or two products. Couple other examples.

There’s a women’s section of that new format store that we now have 150 of. Here’s our cowboy boots in the same store. One of the unique things about Boot Barn, if you’re new to the story, is how we assort our boots. Many other footwear retailers, if you think about going to a Nordstrom or a Foot Locker, keep most of the product in the back. They have one product or one sample out on the shelf of each.

Do you have this in a size eight? Do you have this in a size nine? We put all the product out on the shelf and the customer can look at all the styles in open stock and find the product for them. So there is very little inventory kept in the back of house and everything is displayed in the stores and ready for the customer to touch, to try on, and compare the product. The same applies to our hats.

Our cowboy hat wall is typically at the front of the store, very hands on approach to cowboy hats. It’s not just about selling the product itself but really selling the experience. Every Boot Barn store has a steamer and a hat shaping station where team members or partners at Boot Barn can shape that hat for you right in front of the customer. So the new store metrics. So our new stores on average do $3,200,000 and pay back in a in a year and eight months one point eight years rather, and and we’re very, very comfortable with our new store metrics.

This was a step function increase to where we were in the pre COVID time frame, and these metrics are consistent across all of our markets. Again, I say this over and over again, but what’s true in California, Texas, Arizona is also true in the new markets on the East Coast. Jumping to our second initiative, same store sales. This is a repeat of the slide from earlier, but as we covered on the slide at the start of the presentation, Boot Barn has historically had positive comps. Rarely do our comps go negative, and we have comped the comp year after year, including getting through that very large plus 54% comp of that COVID year, and we are back to a positive 5.5% comp for the fiscal year that has just ended.

When you look at the product assortment, what we’re selling in our stores, it is broad based, it is not fashion driven. We get the question often, are you a fashion driven company? Even what we might be considering fashion at Boot Barn is not fashion by a traditional retailer standards. We might have a little more embellishment on a pair of jeans. We might have some boots that are a little more timeless or a little more classic from a fashion standpoint.

But much of what we sell is consistent core Western wear. The boot on the top and the boot on the bottom in the center of the screen, that’s a men some of our best selling men’s and women’s cowboy boots. Most of them are brown, functional boots that people use in their everyday lifestyle. And there’s no singular trend driving the business. There’s no huge pickup in one particular category.

The growth has been broad based across all major merchandise categories. This includes boots, work boots, denim, cowboy hats, western shirts, all have been comping positively, so it is not, again, a fashion trend. If you think about the marketing campaigns that drive that same store sales, we focus on partnerships in all of the different marketing segments that we talked about. So if you think about our Just Country segment, we have partnerships with artists such as Jelly Roll, Riley Green, Ian Muncic. We have partnerships with NASCAR and sponsor, Austin Dillon’s NASCAR races.

We sponsor country music festival festivals. That one in particular is Morgan Wallen’s Sand in My Boots Festival that was in Gulf Shores, Alabama just a few months back, and that is Corinne Leon, a very, very popular Hispanic music artist that we partnered with this year. So we use all these different partnerships to drive home the Boot Barn brand. Our marketing spend. So if we look back to FY ’13, we spent $7,000,000 on marketing.

Our marketing formula is very simple. We spent 3% of sales on marketing, but a function of opening all these new stores at a $3,000,000 average unit volume and the comps that we have on top of that, this results in a marketing budget that has grown massively over the years. We are up to a $65,000,000 marketing budget, and we are spending more and more of that budget on distribution. We’ve got to a great place from a content standpoint, and we don’t need to create any more content. So we’re now pursuing, you know, 7 figure campaigns that talk about the brands that we sell inside of Boot Barn and pushing the brands on top of Boot Barn advertising.

So it’s a distribution first strategy now that we have reached a a level of content creation that we’re comfortable with. We’ve got traffic counters that we’re adding to our stores. This is something we’ve never had before, allowing us to figure out what is what is driving traffic into a set of stores. So when we do targeted digital or analog marketing campaigns, we can measure the traffic even if those folks aren’t converting on visit one. At least we got them into the store.

And we can also look at our stores and figure out why certain stores are doing better than others. We’ve always used transactions as a proxy for traffic, and doing so, you can’t measure conversion. Now, we’re going be able to look at our top forty, fifty, 60 stores. Why are those stores converting so much better than the stores that are at the bottom of the list, and how can we take the learnings from a store ops and a training standpoint and get the lower performing or lower converting stores to convert in line with the chain or exceed as the top stores do. So, very excited to have traffic counters.

The last of them are going into our stores this week and all new stores will have traffic counters. Jumping ahead quickly to our third strategic initiative, omnichannel, we have BootBarn.com, our digital flagship, 75% of the business. Sheplers is where we compete on price. Country Outfitters is where we test and target different new strategies. It’s where we launch TikTok Shop first before moving it to Boot Barn, and we use Scheplers business on Amazon to drive exclusive brand exposure.

And then the brands you see on the right hand side of the page, they just they make up less than 1% of the online sales, but it’s about branding for Hawks, for Idlewind, for Cody James, and then experimenting in the TikTok and some of the other marketplaces that are out there. We’re pushing AI heavily in stores and online. We have an online assistant. One of the toughest thing for new partners to do is to sell work boots. Work boots have a lot of functional and technical specifications to them.

If you’re going to be working in roofing, if you’re going to be working in oil and gas, what sort of boot do I need? What sort do I need a metal toe versus a comp toe boot? So our AI tool, Cassidy, is going to help the store partners learn how to sell very technical boots to our customers. The assistant, Cassidy, will also exist on the website so customers can interact with her, and customers will also be able to bring Cassidy up in the store and look at the inventory only in the store they’re standing in and interact with her on products, on styling recommendations, on what sort of work boot they should buy. Lastly, on exclusive brands, merchandise margin and exclusive brands, these are our largest exclusive brands.

Cody James on its own would be one of the largest brands in Western. It is a proper brand. Let me be clear. These are not house brands. These are not private labels.

These do not have a lesser build than the than the brands that we buy third party. These brands are as good as any other brand that are out there, and we’re very, very proud of our exclusive brands and how we market them. These six brands alone make up 35% of our sales. It is not a price point play, and our top two exclusive brands are Cody James on the men’s side and Cheyenne on the women’s side as you see up there. We want these brands to stand on their own.

Here’s an example of a stage at Sand in My Boots music festival with Morgan Wallen where we had a stage named after one of our exclusive brands or private label brands, Cody James. So we’re not we’re not only marketing the Boot Barn brand, we’re marketing Cody James and our exclusive brands as well. Boot Barn has has consistently increased our merchandise margin rate, and we have multiple levers for that growth. One of the newest ones that we’ve been focused on is sourcing. So for many years, we’ve grown exclusive brands so quickly, and we’ve had other margin drivers such as buying economies of scale and and and others that we haven’t focused on trying to drive the margin margin architecture of exclusive brands.

So one of the things that I’m focused on is building a sourcing department here at Boot Barn. We have not had one in the past. We’ve had three people who, God bless them, have done the most incredible job to drive an $800,000,000 business without a real sourcing department. We’re going to help those folks out, and we’re going to build the sourcing department. We’ve recently brought on a new VP of Sourcing, and we’re going to be focused on how we can improve the margin architecture of those exclusive brands.

Tariff mitigation strategy, I’m sure everyone’s thrilled to keep talking about tariffs, but I’ll quickly walk you through our strategy as we’re running short on time here. What we are going to do is raise prices on all third party brands going into July and August. There are price increases coming from all of our third party vendors, and along with those price increases come an increase in the MSRP that will be applied to all the retailers in the business. So we will not be uniquely disadvantaged. Prices are going up across all of the Western retail business.

What we will do is hold price lower for longer on our exclusive brands and see if we can grow penetration of our exclusive brands beyond the hundred basis points we have guided for fiscal twenty six. It really is going to be a fairly large price elasticity test to see if we can gain market share with our EB brands as prices go up across the entire industry. And an important piece to note on exclusive brands is most of that product has already been bought for this year. Our fiscal year ends at the March, and so we believe given where we are with product already in house, in country, and the holiday season approaching us, price increases happening across the industry, there’s an opportunity for that market share gain, as I just mentioned. So what’s the growth potential?

Where do we go next? What’s the opportunity for Boot Barn? To summarize the future from all the slides we’ve just gone through, it’s four sixty seven stores roughly, headed to 900, and that may change as we reengage the consulting firm to re examine the segments and the opportunity for the number of stores we can open across just The United States. Those new stores alone would add $1,400,000,000 in future sales, never mind the comp sales that would be possible. Including comp and those new store sales, we feel there is significant room to grow and increase our sales volume.

On top of sales growth, we believe there is further room to expand merchandise margin through the levers we just mentioned, full price selling, buying economies of scale and supply chain efficiencies, as well as the sourcing initiative we just walked through. Combining all these pieces together, store expansion, comp sales stores growth, margin growth, and our lean organization, we believe we can drive earnings far beyond today’s levels. Thank you.

Dylan Huggins, Analyst: Great. And, Richardson for the breakout.

John Hayes, Boot Barn: Thank you, guys.

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