American Outdoor Brands, Inc. (NASDAQ:AOUT) Q4 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Matthew Koranda: Hey, guys. Good afternoon. Just wanted to see if we could start by connecting the dots between sort of the near-term growth outlook that you have for fiscal ’24, which is in the low single-digits. What do we need to do? What environment do we need in place to get back to sort of the longer-term growth algorithm? I think you guys have highlighted, which looked like it was more of a mid-teens sort of overall growth rate. Maybe you could just highlight some of the things that need to happen to kind of get back to that level?

Brian Murphy: Hey, Matt, this is Brian. So in terms of connecting the dots between the two, the near-term outlook and the capability we outlined in our Investor Day of getting to 400 over the next four to five years, really the backbone of that success and driving towards that larger number over that time period is based on new product launches. So you see at the end of this last fiscal with like the Smart Fish Scale, which hopefully enjoyed me going on and on about that product. And the Claymore, the X-10, I mean, those are like the most recent ones. But you can quickly — you start adding those up and layering them on top of each other. And when you already have an existing base of business that is going to grow and it’s going to perform well.

And it’s complementary. But you have these WOW products that we’re introducing that have been in development for several years, and they begin stacking, they individually can become very meaningful parts of the business. So we see like we talked about the successful line review season that we had this last fall and us taking share as a result of that in the back half of this next fiscal year. A big part of that is also new product placement and those are those WOW products that we talked about and getting those on shelves, which is just the building blocks continue to stack those over time, which will — which is our plan. And then you look beyond that to by geography, by channel, and you’ve got a nice, I think, pathway to be able to reach that number we put out there.

So we’re still very bullish on that. I think you’re probably looking at the full year and saying, look, first half you said that you could be down even in the first quarter, but second half is looking strong. And we have all indications that that’s going to be the case, which will give us a nice tailwind heading into next year.

Matthew Koranda: Okay. All right. That’s helpful. And I think it dovetails well with my other question, which was just any change in expectations around the percent of sales coming from new products this year it sounds like we’d expect that to tick up, all things being equal, relative to kind of the 25% step that I think you guys put in the release this last fiscal year.

Brian Murphy: Yes. It’s Brian again here. I think it’s possible. I do. Yes, I think we’ve got, again, tremendous success plan for these new products. And so I think it is possible that, that percentage ticks up this next year.

Matthew Koranda: Okay. And then just any other commentary on the Smart Fish Scale launch? Just curious if there’s any early reads you might be able to share with us in terms of sort of the success of that product and the app sign ups and whatnot?