It's Matt Boss, Retailing, Department Stores and Specialty Softlines here at JP Morgan. I'm happy to introduce Jim Conroy, CEO of Boot Barn, for this year's ICR conference today. Boot Barn is a high-growth retail story, 330 stores today, with the ability to more than triple its store base over time. Boot operates in a highly fragmented $40 billion industry, having comped roughly 10% over the past decade and recently accelerating store growth. As Jim will walk through, Boot has materially expanded its customer base as well as its market share, with multi-year target algorithm of 3%-5% comps and 20% earnings growth unchanged. With that, I'll pass it over to Jim.
Very good. Thanks very much, Matt. Thanks everybody for coming this morning. We're gonna cover two different pieces of the presentation. The first piece is sort of a short-term view on the most recent quarter. Our third quarter is our holiday quarter. The second piece is a much longer-term view going forward of where we think the company should go. Hopefully, you'll stay for both parts. If we look at the most recent quarter, our third quarter, we had a terrific quarter. Our sales growth was about 6%, cycling 61% last year in the same timeframe. We achieved $515 million in sales, which exceeded the top end of our range. We feel really great about our sales line, both in total store sales and in same-store sales.
From a comp perspective, we were down slightly at -3.6%. Our stores business was cycling a +56 and only gave back less than 1 percentage point of that. We continue to try to get people to look at the broader story. Most of the questions we're getting so far at ICR is, "Well, how much did the storm hurt your business?" We approximate the sales loss at the tail end of our quarter to be about $4 million, which would have taken our stores comp to roughly flat. We've continued to open 10-12 stores every quarter and did so in the most recent quarter, and we achieved $1.74 of earnings. If we now kinda take a big picture view of the company, I just celebrated my 10-year anniversary with the business.
When I got here, we were about $200 million in sales. We were growing quite consistently until we got to COVID. We took the position to keep our stores open during COVID. We actually got some growth in the COVID year. At that period of time, we were really transforming the brand and expanding the definition of Boot Barn to go after a much broader set of customers that weren't just Western rodeo cowboys. When we did that and emerged from the pandemic, our business went up to $1.5 billion and $1.6 billion on a TTM basis. If you look at the last 3 years of growth, we've essentially doubled the business in 3 years.
I often quip with my team that if we were a cool digital native business losing money, you'd look at our sales line, you'd multiply by 4, you'd value the company at $6-something billion. The stock would be 4x where it is today. We're not. We have the great misfortune of being extremely profitable as well. Somebody's paying attention. We've had some really nice growth in earnings. In fact, our earnings have outpaced our sales growth, which used to be cool. We have now achieved more than a 10% EBIT margin rate, which was sort of a goal for a long period of time. We're in sort of the mid-teens. The single biggest question we're getting from investors, and it's an understandable question, is your average store volume used to be $2.7 million.
Somewhat magically, in April of 2021, that $2.7 million spiked up to about $4.2 million. More than a 50% growth in our average store volume. The question has been, well, can you hold on to that? Well, there's a few proof points that would say we can hold on to that. The first is it's now been 21 consecutive months. The second is we've seen where the growth has come from, and the growth has come from new customers. Our strategy was to expand the definition of the Boot Barn brand. It seems we've successfully done that. The question becomes, well, where did they come from? Why are they shopping at Boot Barn now, and do they intend to stay? Our answer would be, we're not sure.
We went out and asked about 3,000 customers those three questions. The first question is, well, where did you use to shop? The answer was a number of different places. Less predominantly within the industry, and more predominantly was we were getting customers from more general retail. That was the goal anyway, so we felt great about that. Why did you come over to Boot Barn? Again, a variety of reasons. We used to think it was solely because we were open when other retailers were closed. That is a portion of it. The cool thing, and we tend not to sort of pat ourselves on the back, is it was also because we were executing. Our marketing had become more prevalent and got more cut through, and they really commented on the broader assortment that we were bringing to life.
The biggest question, and we're gonna answer this question 100 times in the next 36 hours, is do they intend to stay? We asked them, and 96% of them are either very likely or extremely likely to remain a Boot Barn customer in 2023. From our perspective, that new level of $4.2 million is a new floor level, and we'll just build from there. We have four strategic initiatives. They've been the same four strategic initiatives for the last 10 years. I will tick through them relatively quickly. Before I do that, I just want to talk about the brand and the industry within which we operate. We are a little bit less than $2 billion in sales, and the overall market is $40 billion. We're less than 5% of the market.
Our original market was just Western and work. We've now added a more casual country lifestyle customer, that helped us expand into more mainstream retail. The easiest way to think about our customer base is that our customer builds America, feeds America, and protects America. You don't see a lot of those folks in some of the markets where you all emanate from, that's what we see when we visit our stores and interact with our customers. What do they do? What do they do for a hobby? What do they listen to on the radio? Well, they listen to country music. The number 1 genre of music in the entire country is country music, that is true in virtually every part of the country, not just in Texas, not just in Nashville or in Denver.
We say this each and every year. What do they drive? They drive a pickup truck. The number 1, 2, and 3 most popular vehicle in the U.S. for 5 years running is a pickup truck. Not a Tesla, not an Uber, not a subway. 1 in 5 cars sold in the U.S. are pickup trucks. We often are asked, "Well, your customer is extremely rural," and this is something that is not well understood about Boot Barn, so shame on us. We decided to say, "Well, here is the top 50 U.S. cities." You're half expecting to see the next 50 cities where we have all our stores. You might be surprised to know that in the top 50 cities, we have stores in 43 of them. Our biggest markets are Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Phoenix, Vegas, Nashville, outside of Los Angeles.
We are not going after Elko, Winnemucca, Cheyenne, and these very small markets. We do have stores in some of those markets, the vast majority of our business comes from urban centers. Notably, most of the people in this room are from New York and Boston, we don't have stores in either New York or Boston. You can see New York at the top of that list, if you go down far enough, you'll see Boston. Both cities I've lived in, by the way. Boston is smaller than Oklahoma City. We have plenty of stores in Oklahoma City. We don't yet have stores in Boston. To give you a sense for how big some of these cities are that you perhaps don't travel to every day, there's a lot of volume and a lot of population there.
As we go through the four strategic initiatives, the first is expand our store base. Today we have 333 stores in 41 states. When I started, we had 86 stores in eight states. By the end of the year, we had guided that we'd get to 340. We put this teeny tiny little plus next to the 340, and we've had about 75 questions about what does the plus mean. Is it 342? Is it 347? Can you time it? I got to build my model. We'll at least hit 340 and hopefully go right past that number. One of the coolest things about our story is the model itself for new stores. When we went public, we said we could do $1.7 million per store, and it would pay back in three years.
We've done much better than that. Our new model, slightly bigger store, slightly higher investment, is double the sales volume. Three and a half million dollars in a new store with a payback period of just over 1 year. The really cool thing is that is true in both brand-new markets and in legacy markets. That's true in Texas, that's true in California, where we have 50 or 60 stores in both states. That's true in Dover, Delaware, and Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Vienna, West Virginia, and a lot of the new states that we're now starting to enter. Paging through what the new stores look like. This is right outside of Denver, Colorado. We have 4 different regions. This is a store in the northern region. This is a store in Little Rock, Arkansas, the south region. The Inland Empire in California, in Fontana, the west region.
Lastly, Cherry Hill, New Jersey, right outside Philadelphia or the east region. You're looking at these pictures saying, "Well, that was a waste of 4 slides. The pictures are exactly the same." You'd be right. We have to do nothing different as we enter these new markets. You might say, "Well, in Philadelphia, the percentage of business that you do in cowboy hats and cowboy boots has to be different than the rest of the country." You'd be right again. It's higher. We have a higher percentage of sales in cowboy hats and cowboy boots in Philadelphia than the rest of the country. When you take a big step back and say, "Well, you guys are going to continue to open stores.
Can you achieve this growth? All we need to do is open 10, 12, 15 stores a quarter, and we can build another $2 billion in sales over the next seven years in our business. We don't have to create another mousetrap. We don't have to run a three-minute mile. All we need to do is continue to build stores. If you're worried about the downside risk of that, every single store in the company is profitable. Even if we have a bad store, maybe it doesn't pay back in a year, it could pay back in four, but it won't lose money. I thought for a second that I was gonna just drop the mic and leave because this is really the whole story.
I'm not sure what other company can virtually guarantee that we can double their business in the next six or seven years. We may as well go through the next few strategic initiatives. Same-store sales growth. We started a strategy about four or five years ago to expand the market we were going after. How do we expand the customer reach? We had to upgrade the look of the brand. We also had to be careful that we were talking to each new customer the way they wanted to be spoken to, and to our legacy customer the way they did. We had to tailor our customer communication and invest in the customer experience. That often used virtuous cycle. I'm gonna fly through this just to give you a sense of what it looked like. This was our core customer historically, Western and work.
About 5 years ago, we added a fashion customer. You guys all freaked out that we were gonna have markdown risk. We didn't. We've grown our margin about 4 or 5 points in the last few years, even after adding the fashion customer. More recently, and bigger market, we've added this country lifestyle consumer. Many of you might be thinking, well, the difference between Western and country is a distinction without a difference. It's not. When we look at these pictures, and if you were to hold the product and you were to talk to the customers, you would understand better. Our core Western customer rides horses, attends rodeo, loves country music, often wear cowboy hats, and this next adjunct customer base is a bit more casual. They rarely, if ever, would wear a cowboy hat. They would wear a ball cap.
They might wear boots and jeans, but they're not gonna wear a Western-styled shirt. Our broader assortment was going after those two customers on the right-hand side, and that's where a lot of our growth has come from, the additional customers and getting a larger share of wallet from the people on the left side of the screen that are also buying some more casual product. We're very careful to tailor our communication, so our Western customers will always hear from us in core Western language. Our work customer will hear from us about products that they care about. Our fashion customer, our country customer, similarly. We're very segmented in how we communicate with our customers because we couldn't lose sight of our historical, traditional Western customer. We invest tremendously in the customer experience. I think everybody at the ICR conference would say the same.
Our investment tends to be really in the stores. We put our best product in the stores. We carry a lot of inventory in the stores. We staff them well. We arm them with technology to help them make a sale, to view the entire assortment in the palm of their hands. We've elevated the look and feel of the brand across every dimension, including packaging. Finally, we've added a Boot Barn app that's added a whole 'nother dimension to the business. What has that translated into? For the last 10 years, we've grown our comp sales by about 10% on average, which is just a remarkable feat. We've seen that growth both in retail stores and online.
As thrilled as I am about a 10% comp on average for 10 years, I would once again encourage you to continue to focus on total sales growth. We might comp up 5, we might comp down 5, we might comp +1, might comp -1, but we're gonna continue to open 12%, 13%, 14%, 15% new units every year, and that is a virtual guarantee that we'll get ongoing sales growth. From an omnichannel standpoint, we tend to not call it e-commerce. In fact, half of the mind share of our digital team is focusing on how to get customers into a store.
If I were to talk to our chief digital officer, he would say, "Yeah, two of my objectives are drive store traffic and deliver a digital experience in the store." When they then focus on the e-commerce business in particular, we tend to be contrarians by nature, we tend to focus them on efficiency and profitability on the online channel and not just top-line sales growth at all costs. I know this isn't so in vogue today, but we actually have a very profitable e-commerce business. Not quite as profitable as our stores business, but still pretty good. I think the winning model going forward between channels is companies that can integrate and blend stores business and e-commerce businesses together. Today, about 60% of our digital sales are touched in one way or another by our stores.
When you look at the landscape of companies that are direct-to-consumer brands, and they were gonna be disruptors and eliminate the inefficient brick-and-mortar channel, they are now starting to build stores also. I think everybody has now realized that the winning model is the model that brings these two channels together. Because we have so much growth in stores, both from a comp perspective and from a new store growth perspective, our e-commerce channel continues to actually get smaller as a % of sales rather than larger. You guys should be happy about that. You tend to be sad about that, it's a much more profitable proposition for us to do a sale in a store and not online. We used to do 16%-17% of our business online. It spiked up, of course, during COVID, and it's now down to about 13%.
Our fourth strategic initiative, exclusive brands. Historically, we had 6 exclusive brands. Now we have 10. We continue to build out the footprint of each of those and to add additional brands. They are specifically segmented to the consumer segments that we go after. For Boot Barn, our exclusive brands are not a store brand or private label. They're not a cheap alternative to the real thing or to the national brand. They tend to be the best, highest quality product in the store. In fact, when we look at our top-selling brands, 3 of the 5 top-selling brands in our business are our own brands. 5 years ago, that wasn't true. We feel quite good about the brands themselves and the growth of these brands over time.
When we look at it as a penetration of sales, our exclusive brand business used to be about 3% of sales when I first got here. Now it's about 33% of sales 10 years later. In the most recent quarter, we had a really nice step-up in our exclusive brand business, growing 570 basis points to about 34% of sales. When you take the growth in percentage, and you couple it with the growth in total revenue of the business, this is what happened to our exclusive brand business in the last 10 years. It's grown from $5 million to about $500 million in the last 10 years. You guys will sit here all day listening to different PowerPoint presentations and numbers being thrown at you.
I try to always reason by analogy and say, "How big is that?" It's about a third of our business. It's about the size of Warby Parker. We think about going forward. Where is the future growth gonna come from? We have multiple growth drivers. The biggest one, and we'll continue to harken back to this one, is we can open more new stores. We'll hit 340 stores this year. We've done a study that said we could do over 1,000 stores in the country. We are well on pace to do that. It's an immediate payback of just over one year. We think we can continue to comp positively. We've had a 10-year track record of doing so, while at the same time building our margin rate.
If I looked at it over a 10-year period, we've probably built our merchandise margin rate by 8+ percentage points in the last 10 years. Finally, from an EPS standpoint, you know, for the three quarters of this year, we've gotten to about $4.07. We guided on our last call that we'd get to, you know, $5.70 or so. It's kind of fortuitous that the people that left the stage right before we got on the stage was Five Below 'cause the high end of their range was $5.70. What's perplexing to me is our stock's at 60, and theirs is at 175. You guys can, over the next 36 hours, help me better understand that.
I think I have a reason, though, and I hope you just give me a little leeway 'cause I grew up in New York, I lived in Boston, so as I poke fun at you, I'm poking fun at myself in a somewhat self-deprecating way. Five Below yoga pants, prescription eyeglasses are familiar to investors and portfolio managers that live in New York City and Greenwich, Connecticut and Boston. I've done this entire presentation indoors with a fleece vest on. You guys think it's totally normal, and running shoes. In case I have to run outside really quickly and get a cup of coffee and I'm cold, I'm ready to go. That's what you see every day, but you don't see our customers every day. You look at our customers and go, "They look kind of funny," and it just doesn't make sense.
In my view, the reason our valuation hasn't caught up with the growth of the business is it's just not familiar to where most of our investors live and operate, and they don't see it every day. I would encourage you all to either through our website or just get on a plane and go out and look at our stores, interact with our store associates, and talk to our customers, and I think you'll see that outside of Boston and New York or outside of New York and Massachusetts, the other 46 contiguous states dress a lot like this. If you do go out and you dress like this, they may look at you a little funny. You might wanna kind of get a Carhartt jacket and a cowboy hat.
I think you'd learn, like I did when I started 10 years ago, that most of the country doesn't wear running shoes and a vest over a suit. Most of the country wears blue jeans, Carhartt jackets, cowboy boots, and cowboy hats every day of their life. They don't view it as Western wear. They view it as clothing. Thank you very much. I give you two minutes of your life back.