American Outdoor Brands, the parent company of Grilla Grills, reported their earnings for the quarter ended in July, and a main focus was around innovation. They view innovation as a key pillar to growing distribution and growing financially.
Innovation
Compared to four years ago, our new products have generated over $60 million of incremental organic revenue and 169 new patents, reflecting innovation vitality and the creation of a deep moat designed to protect our future revenue.
Brian Murphy – President and CEO of American Outdoor Brands
The importance of innovation for driving sales is a key theme that we’ve heard from manufacturers and retailers in this selling environment. Consumers are buying less, but they are still willing to pay for innovation.
Grilla Grills has seen that with their Mammoth vertical smoker. That’s their latest product innovation, and one that they were having trouble keeping in stock.
Acknowledging how important innovation is for the brand, Grilla Grills plans to roll out more new products this year.
…we have some very key innovative new products that are coming out later this year under Grilla.
Brian Murphy – President and CEO of American Outdoor Brands
Retail
Grilla has traditionally been a direct-to-consumer (DTC) brand. That’s in the process of changing though as they are looking for the right retail partners for their products.
Yes, the rollout to retail, like we said, at the end of last year, was really preparing the market for a Grilla entry. And we have been sort of testing the market in certain ways. We do have Grilla, some of the products on Amazon, and they’re doing well there. But we want to make sure, and it’s very strategic, the products that we have on there. But of course, we want to make sure that it’s complementary with what we’re doing direct-to-consumer with that brand.
Brian Murphy – President and CEO of American Outdoor Brands
Piggybacking on their product roadmap later this year, they want to make sure their retail partner is aligned with displaying their innovations.
…we want to make sure the partner that we have when we go into traditional retail is going to be able to represent those products. So we haven’t disclosed who those partners are just yet, but we’ve got some really neat things planned for the rest of the year.
Brian Murphy – President and CEO of American Outdoor Brands
Mergers & Acquisitions
American Outdoor Brands mentioned in a previous quarter that there were some acquisition opportunities out there in the outdoor lifestyle side of their business. They didn’t mention anything on the horizon, but they have a robust pipeline.
Outdoor lifestyle is actually getting pretty robust. We’re not seeing very large companies or large brands come to market. I would say that most are sort of sub, call it sub 30 or 40 million in revenue, with quite a few that are kind of in that $10 million range. But certainly we’re seeing more and more come to market, and they’re much higher quality.
Brian Murphy – President and CEO of American Outdoor Brands
Grilla Grills Store
Last year American Outdoor Brands consolidated Grilla Grills locations into their headquarters in Columbia, MO. This meant closing their Michigan store, where Grilla Grills was founded. Now that the consolidation is complete, they are opening a factory location in Columbia, MO.
We’re building out a new store here, a factory store. We shut down the store that existed in Michigan for Grilla last year, which was part of a comp that we saw here in the current quarter. But we’re very optimistic about that. We’re in arguably the barbecue capital of the world on one of the most traveled interstates in the United States. And so we’re optimistic that we’ll see some nice traction from that store here at the later half of this year.
Brian Murphy – President and CEO of American Outdoor Brands
I’m going to have to agree to disagree that the barbecue capital of the world is Columbia, MO, but nonetheless it’s good to see that Grilla will have a new store.