It’s been a warm fall, which is great if you’re trying to stretch out summer, but not so great if you’re a company that sells fire pits. Solo Brands, the parent company of Solo Stove, obviously fits in the latter category.
Besides trying to fit all their selling in a shortened season, they’re also going through a strategic rebuild. They’ve changed over their leadership team, have focused on innovation for 2025, are building their retail sales channels, and are rationalizing their brands.
IcyBreeze is Going Out of Business
IcyBreeze sells coolers that use the ice and water in the cooler as a portable air conditioner. They’re meant for those long days at kids sporting events, or relaxing in the backyard on a hot summer day.
Solo Brands bought IcyBreeze for $30 million as they looked to expand their business. Just over a year later, they’re shutting down the brand. They say that there will be a new cooler under the Solo Stove brand launched in 2025.
We have raised the standards of product quality that reflect the brand attributes of Solo Brands. Having said that, we made the decision this quarter to wind down our IcyBreeze reporting unit.
While we believe in the market opportunity for outdoor portable cooling, the new products launched under IcyBreeze this year did not meet our standards. Therefore, we have decided to move quickly and decisively to take a non-cash charge to write-down the inventory and related goodwill and intangible assets this quarter.Chris Metz, CEO of Solo Brands
While we are disappointed with our performance and execution of IcyBreeze, we still own the patents and plan to relaunch cooling products under the Solo umbrella brand, starting in 2025.
There are coolers still for sale on the IcyBreeze website that are marked down by 50%. Chris Metz’s quote above though isn’t exactly a ringing endorsement of the product.
New Categories
Solo Stove didn’t release much this year outside of the Surround Lite and a neat grill conversion kit, but they have a more robust pipeline next year. It won’t just be focused on fire pits and pizza ovens either, as we mentioned last quarter, they plan to move to other new categories.
We also plan to enter into 3 new near adjacent categories that will significantly expand our TAM. When I started earlier this year, we began a thorough consumer research study to inform us of this opportunity. We surveyed 1000s of our customers, and we believe they have given us permission to enter into these new categories with products that will be very innovative with unique features.
Chris Metz, CEO of Solo Brands
Focus on Retail
Solo Brands was originally focused on being composed of direct-to-consumer (DTC) brands, hence their stock symbol DTC. They have done a complete 180 on that though as DTC revenue continues to fall and wholesale revenue climbs.
They revealed this quarter that their data indicates that 50% of their customers look to purchase their products in store. It’s a channel that Solo Stove is still working on growing to meet those customers.
We continue to see strong momentum in our retail channel.
Moving forward, we are in discussions with and plan to open up new doors with several key retailers.
In fact, we have 130 store test with a significant national retailer for Solo Stove that will begin in Q4. We’re also bringing a much more strategic go-to-market approach to our retail partners.Chris Metz, CEO of Solo Brands
We have brought in talent to build out our retail organization that can go after opportunities by retail segment such as marketplaces like Amazon, to club channel and big box specialty, which should help maximize our opportunities of retail.
We are underpenetrated in this channel, and believe we have a long runway of growth ahead of us. I’m pleased that retailers are valuing our partnership, which is bringing newness and excitement to their product assortment.