Clarus Corp Q1 FY2021 Earnings Call

Thank you. Please note that during this call, the company may use words such as appears, anticipates, believes, plans, expects, intends, future and similar expressions, which constitute forward-looking statements within the meaning of the Safe Harbor provisions of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Forward-looking statements are made based on the company’s expectations and beliefs concerning future events impacting the company and therefore, involve a number of risks and uncertainties. The company cautions you that forward-looking statements are not guarantees and that actual results could differ materially from those expressed or implied in the forward-looking statements. Potential risks and uncertainties that could cause the actual results of operations or financial condition of the company to differ materially from those expressed or implied by forward-looking statements used in this call include, but are not limited to, the overall level of consumer demand on the company’s products; general economic conditions and other factors affecting consumer confidence, preferences and behavior; disruption and volatility in the global currency, capital and credit markets; the financial strength of the company’s customers; the company’s ability to implement its business strategy; the ability of the company to execute and integrate acquisitions; the impact that global climate change trends may have in the company and its suppliers and customers; the company’s exposure to product liability or product warranty claims and other loss contingencies; disruptions and other impacts to the company’s business as a result of the COVID-19 global pandemic; and government actions and restrictive measures implemented in response; stability of the company’s manufacturing facilities and suppliers as well as consumer demand for our products in light of disease, epidemics and health-related concerns such as COVID-19; changes in governmental regulation, legislation or public opinion relating to the manufacture and sale of bullets and ammunition by our Sierra segment and the possession and use of firearms and ammunition by our customers. The company’s ability to protect patents, trademarks and other intellectual property rights; the ability of our information technology systems or information security systems to operate effectively including as a result of security breaches, viruses, hackers, malware, natural disasters, vendor business interruptions or other causes; our ability to properly maintain, protect, repair or upgrade our information technology systems or information security systems or problems with our transitioning to upgraded or replacement systems; the impact of adverse publicity about the company and/or its brands, including without limitation, through social media or in connection with brand damaging events and/or public perception; fluctuations in the price, availability and quality of raw materials and contracted products as well as foreign currency fluctuations; the company’s ability to utilize its net operating loss carryforwards; changes in tax laws and liabilities, tariffs, legal, regulatory, political and economic risks; and the company’s ability to maintain a quarterly dividend. More information on potential factors that could affect the company’s financial results is included from time to time in the company’s public reports filed with the SEC, including the company’s annual report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q and current reports on Form 8-K. All forward-looking statements included in this call are based upon information available to the company as of the date of this call and speak only as of the date hereof. The company assumes no obligation to update any forward-looking statements to reflect events or circumstances after the date of this call. I’d like to remind everyone this call will be available for replay through May 24, starting at 8:00 p.m. Eastern tonight. A webcast replay will also be available via link provided in today’s press release as well as on the company’s website at claruscorp.com. Any redistribution, retransmission or rebroadcast of this call in any way without the expressed written consent of Clarus Corp is strictly prohibited. Now, I would like to turn the call over to the President of Clarus, John Walbrecht. John?

Thank you, Cody, and good afternoon, everyone. I hope that everyone is staying healthy and active in the outdoors. It is great to be addressing you today and speaking about the strong results we announced earlier this afternoon. The first quarter was another quarter where we not only achieved what we set out to do, but we also exceeded our expectations. These results were driven by the continued execution of our brand to playbook. This playbook focuses on our innovate and accelerate strategy, which calls for investing in R&D to drive innovation in both existing and new product categories, driving brand awareness all while being easy to do business with and staying relevant to our core consumers. We believe that the super-fan brands excel within our Clarus strategy, making the execution of this playbook more seamless. Total sales were up 41% as we experienced accelerating growth in both our Sierra and Black Diamond segments, as well as robust demand across each of the product categories. We substantially improved gross margins and earnings. Thanks to the strength of our brands, our capabilities to fulfill demand and our consistent pricing strategy. This marks our third consecutive quarter of revenue expansion, and we generated $10.6 million in adjusted EBITDA for the quarter representing a growth of 191%. These strong results, as well as our continued momentum have us raising our full year financial outlook. Aaron will address the details of this shortly. Across Black Diamond and Sierra, we continue to outperform the market as we executed our playbook, in particular with our key account relationships via higher levels of product availability in support of our increasing brand presence and accelerating demand amongst the core consumer. In Black Diamond sales increased 13% as we’ve benefited from the recovery in the outdoor market and reduced inventory volatility at retail, which allowed us to accelerate our growth, particularly with some of the key retail accounts. This is despite continued headwinds from COVID-19 and supply chain challenges. Demand in our bullet businesses continued to surge, and we were able to navigate component shortages relatively well as seen by the 94% and 92% pro forma first quarter sales growth for our Sierra and Barnes brands, respectively. To contend with the supply chain challenges across our brands, we have leveraged our super-fan brand recognition to strengthen our relationships with our key retail partners and our global suppliers. We continue to see evidence that suppliers prioritize the formation of long lasting and productive partners with brands that are best poised for long-term performance. And we believe our brands fit this mold. Building these favorable relationships also benefits the navigation of the current supply chain environment, which is why we believe we’re outperforming our competition in this area of our business in the recent quarters. Returning to our Q1 brand performance. The 13% increase in Black Diamond sales was mostly attributed to surging consumer demand and the recovery from the pandemic. By category Ski was up 23%, Mountain was up 20%, and Climb was up 3%. Hardgoods growth of 16% was driven by solid double-digit growth across the product portfolio in particular trekking poles, skins, headlamps, lighting, gloves, packs, bouldering, and helmets. Our wholesale channel led the way of sales performance in Q1 on the back of solid growth at our specialty retail partners and especially our key accounts. The reopening of markets and broader COVID recovery is certainly a key factor enabling this growth. Our direct-to-consumer channels slowed compared to recent quarters, as we prioritize inventory allocations to our wholesale partners, to ensure their ability to have strong kickoffs to the spring 2021 season. This reinforces our partnership approach and the ease of doing business with mentally. We continue to be excited by our ever-improving digital presence led by launching our new website in January of 2021. This was a major undertaking, especially while most of the team was working remotely during COVID-19. During Q1, we continued to refine our updated platform, driving improved activation with more sophisticated prospecting and retargeting efforts. As we continue to improve our inventory position, develop more refined data driven tools and expand our retail footprints, we believe our direct-to-consumer channel will become the most brand accretive touchpoint of our super-fans. Our North American and European businesses both grew double-digit on the reopening momentum. This group growth was particularly offset by a decline in our international global distributor market due to lingering COVID-19 impacts as well as our transition away from a distributor model into the brand control strategy in Spain in the second quarter. We successfully transitioned in the UK in Q4 and believe this will become one of our top five markets in the region serviced by our Black Diamond European office. In apparel sales, sales remained stable during the first quarter, despite the lower than expected inventory availability due to elongated logistic challenges experienced globally due to shipping delays. Our order books are quickly filling for the second half of the year, due to our wholesale partners regaining confidence as their own customers return. Within our own retail stores, we are also seeing increasing traffic. This traffic is incredibly important as it helps us to gain insights into the brand perception. This is essential for something like our apparel offering. We continue to treat apparel like equipment, employing technical reach features as well as points of differentiation. At our stores, we were able to see and hear firsthand how our consumers use the product and how they can be improved, whether that’s through next generation material innovation or advancement of technical aspects. Speaking of technical aspects of our products, we recently saw that our Black Diamond quickdraws were used by NASA’s SpaceX Crew-1 in their mission back to earth last week from the International Space Station. This is a great example of how our quality products can be used in a variety of ways and shows the importance of our tireless innovation efforts. Continuing on the topics of technical development, specifically in our apparel business unit, we recently hired Tony Rivera who will lead the business unit under our Vice President of Product, Kolin Powick. Tony has extensive knowledge in merchandising and was most recently responsible for driving consumer conversion at Arc’Teryx. He’s a key hire as we seek to expand our growing momentum in our apparel initiative, while inventory is a near-term challenge, we remain optimistic that we will grow apparel into a $100 million business over the long-term. Now, moving to our Sierra segment. We generated sales of $23.5 million or up 103% from the prior year quarter or 94% when excluding Barnes. This performance reflects sustained broad-based sales growth across both bullets and ammunition. We continue to experience strong domestic tailwinds ahead of and following the U.S. election as well as an increased participation in outdoor hunting and indoor shooting ranges. Our bullets and ammunition categories remain impacted by industry-wide supply shortages, as we work to secure enough components to keep our manufacturing on pace with the heightened demand. To successfully navigate this environment, we will continue to seek to utilize our balance sheet to enhance product availability and leverage our strong relationships with our key retail partners. Since October, we’ve leveraged Sierra’s leadership team to support the excellent existing teams at Barnes in order to increase daily output and navigate industry material shortages and effectively lift each brand’s ability to meet and exceed customer demand. Our combined order book of 2021 continues to quickly fill as we get closer to achieving our stated goal of delivering $100 million in sales over the long-term while approximately 30% adjusted EBITDA margins and a high free cash flow conversion. Looking ahead, we will remain cognizant of health recommendations, especially as it relates to the conditions within the retail and supply chain environment that we operate in. While challenges remain, we are confident in our well-diversified super-fan brand portfolio that has served its core users throughout the pandemic. We will continue to execute our strategy and produce strong results despite the dynamic environment. Another important piece to our organic growth plan is our M&A strategy. We have a disciplined acquisition strategy that we believe ensures, we will be able to deploy our “innovate and accelerate” brand strategy. With the strategy we target super-fan brands that may give us a foothold in a new product group or customer channel as we seek to diversify further within the outdoor and consumer markets. We anticipate progress on this end and hope to be sharing further details in the short-term. Lastly, I would like to welcome Susan Ottmann as our Board of Director nominee to the organization. Susan has over two decades of leadership experience within large public companies and academia. She currently works at the University of Wisconsin, in Madison, where she directs online degrees in engineering, professional development programs, as well as teaches courses in technical leadership and technical product project management. Previously, she managed Thermo Fisher scientific global analytical instrument business, a multi-hundred million dollar business, where she managed a team of 770 associates with operations in the U.S., UK, Germany, and China, as well as sales teams worldwide. Susan has also had leadership roles at Danaher and Schneider Electric, where she was pleased to have nominated Susan to our board and believe that her focus on innovation, scaling operations, and her people development skills will be a great asset to our board. With that, I’ll now turn the call over to Aaron Kuehne, our Chief Financial Officer, who will provide some additional commentary on our performance in the first quarter and more details on our increased 2021 outlook. Thank you, Aaron.

Thank you, John, and good afternoon everyone. Diving right into our results, for the first quarter of 2021, total sales increased 41% to $75.3 million. By segment Black Diamond sales improved 13% to $51.8 million and sales in the Sierra segment increased 203% to $23.5 million. Excluding Barnes, which we acquired in early October 2020, our first quarter sales in the Sierra segment were up 94% organically. Barnes continues to outperform our expectations. The performance within Black Diamond was primarily due to the growth in our hardgood products, particularly in Ski and Mountain. This overall demand increase was driven by the continued recovery within the outdoor space. We also experienced an increase in sales at our key retail accounts, as well as at specialty retail. We believe this was driven by the fact that we were the best positioned to fulfill inventory in the current volatile supply chain environment with the core brand that has maintained on price. This growth was partially offset by a decline in our international global distributor market due to lingering COVID-19 impacts as well as our transition away from a distributor model into a brand controlled strategy in Spain. We started selling directly in the UK, in the fourth quarter of 2020, but Spain will transition in Q2 of this year. This transition reduced Black Diamond sales by approximately $1 million in the first quarter, but we would expect to more than make this up in the future once it is fully internalized. The $7.3 million or 94% increase at Sierra was due to continued robust domestic demand for green box, OEM and our new ammo initiative, roughly $1.7 million of this increase was driven by growth in Sierra’s ammunition business. Barnes continues to exceed our expectations, bringing in $8.5 million of sales in the first quarter with domestic black box and ammo leading sales growth. We continued making progress with our integration efforts as we relaunched the brand and began to implement new processes to drive higher levels of output in order to fill market demand. Consolidated gross margin in the first quarter improved 130 basis points to 35.9% compared to 34.6% in the year ago quarter. Improvements in product mix and foreign exchange benefits more than offset unfavorable impacts under supply chain and logistics due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Excluding a fair value inventory step-up associated with the Barnes acquisition, adjusted gross margin in the first quarter increased 180 basis points to 36.4%. During the quarter, we experienced a 100 basis point margin tailwind from foreign exchange. As a reminder, with over 30% of our global sales being denominated in foreign currencies, we attempt to manage our foreign currency risk on that continuous basis through natural hedges and foreign currency hedge contracts. Also at Sierra, material costs such as copper and lead make up 45% of the product costs. We actively manage our costs with our vendor partners because we understand the impact that commodity costs have on our business specifically on gross margins. Through this active and deliberate management, we expect to be able to mitigate risk for a period of six to nine months out. SG&A expenses in the first quarter were $20.9 million compared to $17.4 million in the year ago quarter, primarily due to the inclusion of Barnes, which contributed $1.9 million and an increase in stock-based compensation of $900,000 due to the vesting of certain performance awards. Black Diamond brand SG&A was up 2% and Sierra SG&A was up 9%, which excludes the impact of Barnes; both were up due to the strong sales progression. We remain extremely pleased with our expense management within both segments. Net income in the first quarter increased significantly to $5.7 million or $0.17 per diluted share compared to net income of $40,000 or $0.01 per diluted share in this year ago quarter. The improvement is largely attributed to our profitable sales growth. Adjusted net income in the first quarter increased 280% to $10.2 million or $0.31 per diluted share compared to an adjusted net income of $2.7 million or $0.09 per diluted share in the same year ago quarter. Adjusted EBITDA in the first quarter increased 191% to $10.6 million compared to $3.6 million in the same year ago quarter. Now, shift to our asset efficiency and liquidity. Inventory levels were at $70 million up slightly from where we ended last quarter. We continue to maintain strong relationships with our supply chain partners so that we can adjust the flow of goods in line with expected demand and dynamically manage our inventory levels. Additionally, we remain committed to seeking to increase capacity with our own bullet manufacturing and ammunition loading where possible across our Sierra and Barnes manufacturing facilities in order to keep pace with the elevated demand. At March 31, 2021 cash and cash equivalents were $6.5 million compared to $17.8 million as of December 31, 2020, and $12.8 million in the year ago period. During the first quarter, we utilized free cash flow defined as net cash utilized or provided by operating activities, less CapEx of a negative $3.9 million compared to generating $2.2 million in the first quarter last year. The use of free cash despite strong net income was primarily driven by our continued investments in key inventory items to seek to insulate ourselves from commodity pressures, scarcity concerns, and to satisfy strong consumer demand. Total debt was $28.6 million, and we have remaining access to roughly $49.3 million on our revolving line of credit. Our net debt leverage ratio as of March 31 was 0.6 times versus a covenant requirement of four times. We are comfortable servicing our debt requirements at our attractive rate of LIBOR plus 150 basis points to 225 basis points. Based on our current projections, we expect to be well within our leverage and fixed charge coverage ratio requirements, and in full compliance with our current debt covenants for the remainder of the year. This provides a nice lead-in to some important topics we want to frame related to our capital structure. We are extremely pleased with the direction of our business, which inherently provides us with additional growth opportunities for us to evaluate both organically and through M&A. You may have noticed the recent filings of our S3 and S4, which expired in December 2020. These filings have a shelf life of three years. We believe it is completely natural and good corporate hygiene for us to keep these effective. With that being said, as we have historically shown, we will continue to seek to utilize our balance sheet as the first and foremost way to grow. We have a business with increasing levels of EBITDA and strong recurring free cash flow. We also have great relationships with our banking partners who are extremely supportive of our strategic initiatives. We are owners and operators that are committed to being shareholder friendly and responsible in how we run the business, including the amount of leverage we take on. We believe there’s an optimal balance here with leverage to range between two times to three times. At times, we might extend this a bit higher. However, it will always be with the clear path of how we bring it back to within this range over the course of a 12-month period. There might come a time when we will look to access the capital markets for additional liquidity, but it will be with the expectation of activating what I have just described. In terms of pursuing our strategic initiatives, being shareholder friendly and running a disciplined business with a responsible amount of leverage. With the strong consumer demand across our segments, we continue to believe Clarus is well positioned both strategically and financially to benefit from the tailwinds we are experiencing across our brands. With that context, along with our strong first quarter, we’re pleased to announce that we are raising our full year financial outlook. We are now expecting 2021 sales to grow 32% to $295 million compared to 2020. This is an increase from our previous guidance of $280 million. By segment, we now expect Black Diamond to increase 20% to $205 million and for Sierra, which includes Barnes; we expect actual sales to increase 71% or pro forma sales to increase 26% to $90 million. On a consolidated basis, we now expect adjusted EBITDA in 2021 to grow approximately 70% to $38 million compared to 2020. We had previously guided to $35 million. In addition, we expect capital expenditures of approximately $7.5 million and free cash flow of approximately $15 million in 2021. Across our organization, we remain grateful for our team’s focus and dedication to executing on our strategic priorities in generating the highest possible returns on invested capital. We remain proud of our strong operational and financial foundation that we have built over the years and as we continue in 2021. We will continue to strive for positive results. We have proven time and time again that our innovate and accelerate playbook and our commitment to super-fan brands is important to our success and allows us to prosper no matter the external market environment.

Thank you. Nobody’s called me Jimmy since my mom sometime ago. I hope you guys are doing well.

Yes, we will. Yes, thanks sir. John, I wanted to start on the Sierra and Barnes business. You raised a guide there by about $10 million, really strong results from Barnes in the first quarter, just annualizing the quarterly run rate for Barnes. Should we interpret that the majority of that increase the year comes from Barnes, and I guess related to that expenses are about $115 million in the first quarter, is that maxed capacity on the Sierra business, or is there room to increase at quarterly productivity rate for the Sierra business? So two-fold answer to your question, the first is obviously at both brands, we will continue both from a people perspective, as well as a CapEx perspective, continue to strive for increased capacity to meet our demands. Demands exceed our ability to produce all that the market would want at this point. So obviously that’s the first point and each of those come with their challenges; can you get enough people as soon as you want and train them up? Can you buy the machines in the appropriate turnaround time to be effective immediately? That’s the first piece. The second piece to your question is obviously we continue to see a strong demand book. We are very scrappy or agile, as we say, in regards to chasing down components. We are aware that the market is challenged, where it comes to all the components we don’t produce; brass, primers or propellant. Like I said, we are just as scrappy as anybody can be to acquire those, but we’re also conservative in saying, look, if we can’t get everything we want, despite a very strong order book, we cannot load all the ammo that the market would like or demand from us at this point. And so as always, we are transparent with you. We will absolutely charge forward via scrappy and aggressive in the marketplace in fulfilling demand and supporting our retailers. But we’re also aware that there are challenges in the market. We think we can overcome them, but as we always say, we want to make sure that we are upfront with any and all potential risks or challenges that could happen in the next nine months.

So Jim, this is Aaron. I’ll take the first part. John will take the second part. As it relates to our IGD business or the International Global Distributor business, we actually see that things are starting to break free a little bit for us. And so we anticipate that we should start to see things normalize and return back to a steady progression of growth in the back half of this year. There has been a little bit slower coming out of the COVID situation, as a result there has been the need for inventory levels just to work through the system. However, we are starting to see higher levels of interest as it relates to ASAP or replenishment orders. And all indications are starting to give us some pretty decent suggestions that the back half should start to normalize and get back. As I say to certain levels of growth.

On the second part to your question, as you said, it’s not a demand book and it’s not even a factory book issue. In terms of can our factories meet up with our demand? Have they been given purchase orders? Are they shipping accordingly on time to them? Yes, what we faced, as the whole market did in Q1 was the elongated delays around logistics, which impacted our ability to get all that products through the channel in Q1. And then, a few forward looking questions on the BD business. First the distributor component, what are the sight lines to normalization of demand there, are those distributors sitting on inventory that they need to move through and therefore could be a prolonged impact, or is it merely a matter of reopening and, there’ll be a need of inventory and the demand will turn back on? And then, I wanted to ask if you’re starting to see signs of life in climb, whether indoor climbing is coming back and you’re starting to feel that in the business?

So Jim, this is Aaron. I’ll take the first part. John will take the second part. As it relates to our IGD business or the International Global Distributor business, we actually see that things are starting to break free a little bit for us. And so we anticipate that we should start to see things normalize and return back to a steady progression of growth in the back half of this year. There has been a little bit slower coming out of the COVID situation, as a result there has been the need for inventory levels just to work through the system. However, we are starting to see higher levels of interest as it relates to ASAP or replenishment orders. And all indications are starting to give us some pretty decent suggestions that the back half should start to normalize and get back. As I say to certain levels of growth.

Correct. As you said, it’s not a demand book and it’s not even a factory book issue. In terms of, can our factories meet up our demand? Have they been given purchase orders? Are they shipping accordingly on time to them? Yes, what we faced, as the whole market did in Q1 was the elongated delays around logistics, which impacted our ability to get all that products through the channel in Q1. On the second part to your question, as you said, it’s not a demand book and it’s not even a factory book issue. In terms of, can our factories meet up our demand? Have they been given purchase orders? Are they shipping accordingly on time to them? Yes, what we faced, as the whole market did in Q1 was the elongated delays around logistics, which impacted our ability to get all that products through the channel in Q1. And then, a few forward-looking questions on the BD business. First the distributor component, what are the sight lines to normalization of demand there, are those distributors sitting on inventory that they need to move through and therefore could be a prolonged impact, or is it merely a matter of reopening and, there’ll be a need of inventory and the demand will turn back on? And then, I wanted to ask if you’re starting to see signs of life in climb, whether indoor climbing is coming back and you’re starting to feel that in the business?

So Jim, this is Aaron. I’ll take the first part. John will take the second part. As it relates to our IGD business or the International Global Distributor business, we actually see that things are starting to break free a little bit for us. And so we anticipate that we should start to see things normalize and return back to a steady progression of growth in the back half of this year. There has been a little bit slower coming out of the COVID situation, as a result there has been the need for inventory levels just to work through the system. However, we are starting to see higher levels of interest as it relates to ASAP or replenishment orders. And all indications are starting to give us some pretty decent suggestions that the back half should start to normalize and get back. As I say to certain levels of growth.

Yes, so great questions all the way along. I think one of the reactions when we saw early in March of 2020, the quick promotional pieces, we said then we made it a cognizant strategic decision to not chase price with our product. And in fact go the opposite, continue to innovate our apparel at a pretty rapid rate and all product categories, mind you, but apparel has seen a big growth opportunity and really differentiate our products through our sustainability efforts in the ways in which we were creating product that was really industry leading in that category, but also from a technical features, new materials types of things. And we’re seeing a strong response to that, both in bookings, by accounts, seeing the point of difference with BD now, and it’s really around this activity-based model that what people want from apparel is product that will help them to have their best days in the mountains. And so that’s what we’re really focused on. What should we continue to see that in the right environment, i.e. our own flagship stores, we see, sales of apparel represent in 55%, 60% of our sales were in our traditional wholesale model globally at represent 15% to 18% of our business. So in that aspect continues to prove out. And as we said in the notes, it gives us a great environment to talk with and really learn from our core consumers. What is it that makes BD apparel unique in the marketplace?

Great touch on there. And then it’s just kind of follow-up on that. How do we think about expanding lifetime in distribution and but yet still protecting the brand image and authenticity? Can you lay out maybe criteria or, what I guess, what would make you comfortable align the brand with maybe partner or concepts?

Yes. So obviously we break our accounts into multiple tiers, what we call our national accounts, accounts that represent outdoors and across the whole country, we then have key accounts either in regions or by categories. And then we have a very strong specialty ski avenue, and then obviously our own direct-to-consumer both through e-com and pro segment, but also through the expansion of our retail stores. And we’re really about, at the end of the day, the question is really driven by where does the consumer expect to find BD products? And that really is the driver to it, right? Where is our consumer? Where is our community? And hence you see stores opening in places like Boulder, Colorado Jackson, Wyoming and Oregon, Park City where our consumer resides and plays our sports. In terms of other distribution, currently right now we have a lot of demand within our current distribution. So, I would say we’re tentative on adding a lot of distribution at this moment until we can be, as we’ve said, easy to do business with deliver on time, have good fulfillment and be long-term partners that are the competitive advantages to our retailers. One of the things that we’re seeing and is really promising for BD is that Black Diamond is becoming viewed as a competitive advantage brand to many of our retailers as they either, edit and amplify categories. And BD wins out, given our leading market share, or they edit and amplify brands based on the brand’s ability to prove that it can navigate the challenging times right now and still be a good partner delivering on time.

Okay. Thanks.

Hey guys. Thanks. And thanks for the margin or – sorry, the revenue commentary in 2Q the $65 million to $68 million. I just had a follow up question on that. So, maybe you could – could you help us with the split between BD and Sierra/Barnes, I mean, I guess if I just drag out the run rate in 1Q from Sierra/Barnes, it would suggest pretty big year-over-year acceleration in BD. Is that the message we should be taking away here? Or do we expect to get a little bit more juice out of Sierra/Barnes in the second quarter in terms of quarterly run rates?

No, it’s really going to be driven by the BD business. We would anticipate that the results for Sierra/Barnes for Q2 are very similar to what we saw in Q1. And so that progression is on the BD side and continue to see the recovery, but also the acceleration of that business.

Okay. And then the categories within BD in 2Q, I know that John sort of alluded to them, but maybe John, could you talk a little bit more specifically about where you’re seeing the biggest acceleration? I know you mentioned climb, but maybe you could also talk about apparel versus hardgoods and sort of apparel, I guess it was a little bit of a laggard this quarter. Does that pick up into 2Q given the flow of supply that we have coming on?

Yes. So, I think, what you will see in Q2 is a return to growth, a more significant growth for the category of climb. You will continue to see strong growth in what we call new outdoorism, which is really this trek hike trail run segment, which for us is supported heavily by trekking poles, headlamps, day packs, that type of item. And then you’ll continue to see apparel gain momentum to our goal as we’ve seen it for the whole year, putting apparel growth in high – strong double-digit growth and moving forward like that. So, the seasons shift the biggest impact in Q1 was literally a logistics issue. And so it doesn’t show. And then also the transition between what typically is fall winter, the fourth quarter and the first quarter are heavily driven by Ski and the second and the third quarter are more driven by climb. Yes, it should be noted that climb is coming back as people are returning to gyms, and we expect to see significant improvements there as vaccinations roll out and as market conditions improve.

Hi, thank you. I was just curious on the M&A front; I think you alluded to some activity that maybe you’re looking at things. Can you just talk about, do you find the environment difficult because of the specs kind of going after a lot of deals, some of the companies have said that?

I’ll jump in and Aaron can add to his piece. I think twofold for us. One, we have a very clear view of what we would consider appropriate M&A within the Clarus portfolio. And so it’s we have well-targeted brands that we define as super-fan brands. If they don’t fit in that mix, we typically don’t track them regardless of whether they’re in a process or not in a process. And now a lot of the super-fan brands we work through are not processed oriented brands. They are founder-led organizations that through long-term relationships, we’ve built and understanding that Clarus is the right organization to manage and continue to accelerate those super-fan brands, realizing that those founders want a long-term emotional connection to them and want to be proud of where that brand goes. So, we haven’t been really impacted by the whole spec discussion going on or felt pressured by that in terms of the multiples in the marketplace. I think we continue to look for super-fan brand opportunities, and are very – I would say, disciplined in our approach and as Aaron mentioned in the script ensuring that the way we look at them both from an ability to accelerate through the innovate and accelerate strategy, but then also knowing what it would cost us, and what that impact would be on our leverage within our own situation and the way in which Aaron has managed the financials of the business as allowed us to be or look to be more aggressive in the near future.

Hey, how are you? What’s up guys? I hope so. I am excited, but so I guess just on something on the acquisition kind of topic for a second, maybe just give us some perspective on capacity you may have to look at acquisitions at this point, Aaron, like what do you have kind of firepower at your disposal to look at some of these opportunities that may be out there, just curious?

Yes, so naturally with the pro forma business that we have today and the progression that’s taken place, we have quite a bit of dry powder as it relates to our ability to evaluate, and to be able to fund through our – through the utilization of our balance sheet and partnering with the different bank relationships that we have within our group. I’ll hold off on getting too specific there, Randy, just because, naturally these things take a life of their own, but that’s why we did highlight what we did as it relates to how we think about our capital structure. It’s important for us to maintain a responsible level – a responsible level of leverage. But first and foremost, we will be looking to utilize our balance sheet, our banking relationships, upsize credit facilities, et cetera, et cetera, that would enable us to continue to progress forward with the growth and development of the Clarus Holdings.

Yes, and I’d also add we’re focusing on brands that align with our core strategy and values. We’re interested in companies that can enhance our product offerings, appeal to our super-fan segment, and contribute to our market momentum. We remain disciplined and selective in our approach.

Thank you. We’d like to thank everyone for listening to our call today. And we look forward to speaking to you again when we report on our second quarter of 2021 results. Thanks for following up. All the best to everyone.

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.