All right, looks like we're ready to get started, guys. So thanks everyone for attending our conference. I'm Brian McNamara, one of Canaccord's analysts in the consumer space. I cover home, outdoor, and auto stocks, and we are very excited to have Traeger here, and to host CEO Jeremy Andrus, CFO Dom Blosil, and Nick Bakes, who heads up IR. So Jeremy, I guess to start off, maybe a quick overview of the business and kind of some key takeaways following your Q2 earnings report last week?
Yes, let me start with just a quick overview of the business, which is that, you know, I'm now about 11 years into my journey in Traeger. And the underlying thesis of Traeger has always been a disruptive product solution for outdoor cooking, and it's innovation that creates an experience which inspires people to do something that most people hate doing, and that's cooking. And it creates these great food moments in backyards, around kitchen tables, in cul-de-sacs, and neighborhoods. And, you know, what was a $70 million brand when I looked at it 11 years ago, has grown tremendously. Last 2.5 years post-pandemic has definitely been challenging.
You know, whereas we were a steady grower and share, share gainer before the pandemic, you know, everything home good related, notably this category, went straight up, and then consumer behavior shifted material over time. So we've been, we've been working through a bumpy moment in this industry. I think what is, what is notable about the second quarter, really two, two things that I, that I think are... I'll point out to, as real positives, given where we've been the last two and a half years. The first is that grill revenue grew, and, you know, for many years, it grew year in, year out, quarter in, quarter out.
But as consumers shifted behaviors coming out of the pandemic, grill revenues have been challenged, and so, we grew grill revenue, and that was a bit of a surprise. And that was sort of the output of a strategy that we chose to run in the second quarter. The other thing that I think is really important to note is that gross margins increased 600 basis points in the quarter over the prior year, and that is, that had been another pain point coming out of the pandemic: meaningful material inflation in the supply chain across a number of inputs, and we've now had two quarters in a row where we've grown gross margin, you know, at or above 600 basis points.
So combination of grill revenue acceleration in the second quarter, meaningfully relative to expectation, and gross margin growth created a great quarter from an EBITDA perspective. We grew EBITDA 25% over a 2% decline in sales, and caused us or motivated us to increase guidance at the midpoint of the range by about 15%.
Got it. So to your point on grill sales, it was a big surprise to the market, obviously, growing in Q2. It's a big sell-in period, obviously, for grill sales. So what drove that strength and gives you confidence to increase the guidance, particularly for the grill segment, and for the back half?
You know, the strength was driven by a combination of two things. One, a strong brand that has great, great consumer engagement. We focus heavily on engaging the community with cooking content, lifestyle content, social content that connects people digitally, and it's one of the things that we've leaned into, sort of post-pandemic. In an environment where driving sales was difficult, we said, you know, there's sort of two things that are sacred about the Traeger brand. One is the product experience, and the other is the community, the brand that it just gets people fired up. And that is an innovation in and itself, and part of the disruption of Traeger in this industry.
Strong brand, and we decided to lean into promotions. You know, as has been sort of consistent over the last couple of years, grill demand has been underwhelming. As we, you know, as we reported on the first quarter earnings call, grill demand was moderately soft coming out of the first quarter, and we decided that this was an appropriate moment to lean into promotions. And I think the response is clearly an indication that there's demand for the Traeger brand. You know, we don't use promotions often. We have a fairly typical cadence of promotions, and we didn't deviate meaningfully from that, but we were promotional on our opening price point. We sold on promotion a full-size grill for $389.
It's the first time we've been below $499. And that was that and sort of strategic promotions in the line, you know, particularly around, you know, SKUs that we are in the process of sunsetting towards the end of this year. That allowed consumers to respond favorably, and I would say we were pleasantly surprised by the uptake on the promotion.
So with this widening TAM, presumably you want to maintain your premium brand status? So how should we think about pricing? How low can you go compared to the, you know, industry ASP of, you know, $290-$300?
You know, so a couple of things I think are important to note. One is, we are more than two times the industry ASP. And so when we talk about promoting our opening price point down to $389, that's still more than 20% higher than the average selling price at our promotional price point, in the opening price point. So, you know, how low can we go? Well, I think we've tested that, and I don't anticipate that we'll be going lower than that. But I think it speaks to the position of the brand that we're still more than two times the industry selling price point. And it's, you know, there is real discipline around choosing the moments to be promotional.
You know, any brand, particularly a premium brand that over-promotes, ultimately dilutes the position of the brand. We have always promoted around Father's Day. Second quarter is—like, that is traditionally when our competition runs promotions, and so I wouldn't say that we were you know, meaningfully out of bounds for our brand or our industry. You know, we chose to do a little bit more this year than we did last year, and over time, we will be sort of... We'll continue to be disciplined around the promotional cadence. But it, you know, this—if ever there was an environment to do it in, it's this environment.
Right.
You know, this is, you know, clearly consumer sentiment, although the consumer has been more resilient than I think we would've guessed coming into this year, the consumer is softening, we're towards the, the end of a macro environment where, where interest rates have been high, and that's being felt, and there's been meaningful inflation. So we felt like this was a promotional... that this was, this was an appropriate moment, but going forward, I, I anticipate that, you know, we'll be on fairly traditional promotional cadences.
Right. So Traeger, as you mentioned, has been a disruptor for years. You've been a really strong grower up and kind of through the, you know, the pandemic and then, you know, softness the last couple of years, given a tough grill market. So with innovative product launches coming out next year, after you sunset some SKUs this year, how should we think about growth for Traeger moving forward, both in absolute terms and relative to the grill industry?
So, you know, there's... We went public in the third quarter of 2021, and within 60 days of going public, things began to change in the industry. One, first was gross margins, and the second was a shift in consumer behavior coming out of the pandemic. You know, really having been focused on consumption of, you know, anything- just about everything, but notably, you know, home goods. Consumers decided that they wanted to be, you know, more experience-focused.
I think if your lens of Traeger is only through the lens of July 29th, 2021, the day we went public to today, you will underappreciate the fact that, you know, we've grown from $75 million when I met the brand almost 11 years ago, to, we'll say approximately $600 million today. We've always been a grower. We've always been a share taker, and there were certain necessities coming out of the pandemic. High inventory, compressed margins due to some shifts in the industry, consumers who are no longer consuming durables. But the five years leading up to the pandemic, the business grew at a top-line CAGR of 30%.
And so, we have, even during this moment, where by necessity, we've had to get lean and become more efficient from a P&L perspective and focus on spend and leverage, and you know, gross margin more than growth. And I think that's notable because we are a brand, like the team and the culture is built for growth. It's been a different period. Now, if you could look beneath the sort of the hood of the car, what you will see is a lot of investments that focus on future growth. We really believe in product and the product experience as a moat around our business, and as we said, couple of quarters ago, we've literally doubled the size of our product team over the last two years.
And so although this hasn't been the moment to lean into top-of-funnel marketing, given where the consumer is, product is a long lead time. And, you know, from initial concept to product launch, you know, we're sort of two and a half years in innovation and development, and so we've been focusing on that. In 2022, we launched the Timberline XL, which is a $3,800 product. It is our best product, it is our most innovative product, and there is a lot of new technology in that product.
Our model is to build, not only to build from halo down to price point, but it's to conceptualize new innovation and to understand how the consumer values that and how we cascade that innovation down to price points that are more accessible to our consumers. So, you know, we saw that, we went from that product at $3,800 in 2022 to the spring of 2023, where we launched Ironwood, which is priced between $1,800 and $2,000. As would be the natural cadence of bringing that innovation down to more accessible price points in first half of next year, in the spring of next year, we plan to continue that process.
We've talked about that in our calls as we are sunsetting and bleeding down certain SKUs, we will begin to sell in some of the new product. We have begun to show that to our retail partners under NDA, and that's an exciting moment for us.
Right.
I mean, like the product experience is everything, and I'll say one of the capabilities that Traeger has really developed over time is the ability to really leverage our brand and our ability to create energy around a product launch. The benefit is not just selling that product, the benefit is this halo energy that gets people fired up for the Traeger brand, and, of course, that's leading into the cooking season of next year.
Got it. You mentioned on your call, your earnings call last week, that industry volumes are approximately 20% below pre-pandemic levels. How did we get there, and do you believe there's pent-up demand moving forward?
So, look, this is... I think durables inherently have some cyclical nature. Consumers tend to underconsume in tough moments, and they delay purchases if the product is functioning. And then there tends to be pent-up demand in better cycles. We saw an exaggerated version of that in the pandemic. I mean, like-
Right
... the entire industry, which tends to grow at sort of low, low single digits, pretty methodically, grew in 2021 at around 20%. It's a massive accelerant for a steady industry, and so the opposite is also true in what happens post that cycle. If you're to look at the 20 years pre-pandemic, there was a single year that declined by double digits. 2009, the Great Recession, the industry declined by 10%, and, you know, it was sort of flat to moderately down in 2010, and then it grew for the next 11 years. And so our expectation is that, well, we know this is a resilient industry.
We also know that the TAM in the U.S. grew from 75- 76 million households that own an outdoor grill. And so, being 20% below where the industry was leading to the pandemic, it is going to recover. Like we simply have we have no doubt about that. The pace of the recovery is, like... So it's a little bit hard to sort of quantify. If this were just about math in a normalized macro environment, we would have expected that 2024 would begin to be a recovery year. Now, it appears that if we monitor the pace of decline, this feels like it's a year that the industry has found bottom or is finding bottom.
You know, it's sort of like the effects of the pull forward from the pandemic intersecting with a weak consumer, and so interest rates coming down certainly create borrowing or consumption capacity for consumers. Consumers, American consumers finance a lot, especially $1,000 $1,000 grill. And you know, and housing transactions are down meaningfully given where interest rates are. But our expectation is that we're sort of nearing the end of a very long and difficult cycle for this industry, and when it starts to grow, we think there will be, you know, a few years of growth leading back to recovery.
During that period of time, we believe that we have the right initiatives in place that will begin to harvest those investments, and then we will also, in turn, lean into top of funnel or all the activities that stimulate demand for the Traeger brand. The combination of a recovering, a growing industry and what we've done to take share, we think that's a pretty powerful, we think it's a pretty powerful combination over the next few years.
The replacement cycle for Traeger is roughly 5 years. The industry is 7, 8. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Mm-hmm.
How are you planning for a potential replacement cycle next year, the folks that bought early in the pandemic, and how do you square that with the potentially weakening consumer?
So the industry 7-8 years, Traeger's closer to 5 years, that's driven by a couple of things. One is it's innovation. When we launch innovation, we see that in technology, many technology categories. New innovation motivates compressed product ownership life cycles. The other is that a Traeger just gets used a lot more than a conventional grill. Conventional grill tends to be a summertime activity. Traeger gets used year-round. It's a connected device. It's a closed-lid cooking solution. So those two things tend to compress the ownership life cycles a little bit. You know, it's hard to say when these life cycles become more normalized, but we're definitely getting closer to that period of time.
I do think it's gonna be interesting to see how the market behaves when the 2020 cohort starts to upgrade, starts to replace and upgrade. The 2021 cohort, again, a bigger year in terms of total unit volume. You know, we're starting to get to the moment where that consumer thinks about replacement, thinks about upgrade, and a healthy consumer certainly, you know, certainly is a catalyst to that. But we are going to see some large replacement years happen just based on what happened during the pandemic.
Got it. Tell us about MEATER. It's been a nice acquisition for you, but was a negative surprise in your recent Q2 results.
Yeah.
What happened there, and how quickly can you get that, that side of the business back on track?
Yes, it's a good question. First of all, I would say our thesis for acquiring MEATER is still very much intact. And actually, before we chose to acquire MEATER, we really started with a commercial product partnership, where we wanted to integrate the MEATER wireless probe with this great digital functionality into our Timberline XL that we launched in 2022. As we came to understand the MEATER brand and the position that it holds within cooking, we said there are a lot of great analogs between us. You know, it, the, the... There are over 20 million MEATER probes sold in the US, and, you know, the average selling price is probably mid-teens.
The average selling price of a MEATER is north of $100, and so it is innovation. It improves the cooking experience. It's premium, but it's one of those consumer disruptions where, you know, we are giving a consumer a reason to spend more for a better home cooking experience. MEATER's had a lot of growth since we acquired it in July of 2021. We came into this year and we pivoted a little bit in the demand creation strategy, whereas, you know, MEATER had been a growing brand. I think we had a general bias coming into 2024 to focus on efficiency, flow through profitability over growth.
We just believe that that was the environment that we were in, and so we chose to be more efficient in our ad spend. We were less focused on prospect marketing, much more focused on lower funnel conversion, and I would say we got sort of midway through the second quarter and believed that that was the wrong pivot. And so we're in the process, of course, correcting that. We really do believe deeply in the MEATER brand and the opportunity. We launched the MEATER 2 Plus in November of last year. It is a single probe that sells for $130 versus the first generation, which sells for $99.
It's the performance has been really impressive, and so there's no reason for us to believe that there's not a lot of growth ahead in MEATER. Heavily concentrated in digital, and so that sort of tweak in strategy had outsized impact. One of the things that we're very focused on that will take time is leveraging our retail distribution and our capability to bring retail distribution to the MEATER brand. We believe that this category is very under-penetrated from a category perspective, and that there's an opportunity to do what we have done so well in Traeger, and that's build an experience at the point of sale.
So, you know, we're very, we're very bullish on the long term of MEATER, and we're in the process of course-correcting a negative surprise.
Got it. It's helpful. One for Dom on gross margins. You know, you did 43-odd% of gross margins in 2019. You've guided for 40%-41% this year. You're well ahead of that in H1. Can you talk about the puts and takes on gross margins and kinda where you expect that to level out when you have a quote-unquote "normal year" again?
Sure.
How should investors think about that?
Yeah, we're really happy with our progress in gross margin. You know, Jeremy talked about going public in Q3 of 2021, and that's when we saw this dramatic impact to margins. We're very sensitive to transportation costs, and I think we're all pretty aware now of kind of what's happened over the last couple of years, and the pressure we felt within gross margin led to roughly 35% margins in 2022, largely driven by inbound transportation rates. You know, our focus really has been on two components that's gotten us to where we are this year, you know, the first being the macro assist, right? We really needed macro to stabilize, and we've seen that take shape. You know, we had a belief that inbound transportation rates were transitory.
We played our cards accordingly, and I think that's led to a very positive outcome, where we're benefiting dramatically from inbound transportation rates that really came back down to pre-pandemic levels, save maybe, you know, a year-over-year uptick and some components to that environment that, you know, are slightly elevated compared to, say, last year, but that's factored into our forecast. So that macro assist is number one. We're also benefiting from FX, which is another component to our gross margin upside this year. And then the second element is really around the controllables. We stood up a gross margin task force to really focus in on how we make our supply chain more efficient.
You know, we've talked on earnings calls around our direct import program, you know, driving more efficiency in our, you know, our manufacturing base of pellet mills, and that's translated into nice incremental upside and Gross Margin, which we believe has stabilized the picture, you know, fairly dramatically. And these are areas that we will continue to focus on, right? So this is something that we believe has stabilized. We feel good about kind of the midpoint on guide that we've set at 41%, and believe that, you know, we'll continue to focus in this area with that stabilized base of macro as we drive, you know, the controllable side of Gross Margin to further stabilize and potentially find some upside.
Great.
And then, you know, we really haven't given much, much, much insight into the future, but it's safe to say that this remains a key focus for the brand.
Great. Just quickly, one last one on the consumer. We're asking all of our consumer companies this question, like: How healthy is the consumer today relative to this time last year when you were at the conference? And how do you see that health evolving in H2 and as we enter 2025?
Couple of quick thoughts. First of all, the consumer has been fairly resilient throughout high interest rates and some of the headwinds that we face. You know, our category's been in recession for over two years now, and so, you know, my belief is that, you know, we see some softening of the consumer. You know, saw the Home Depot numbers, earnings report this morning, which referenced just a lack of home improvement, a bit of a softer professional trade in contracting. And we sort of expect that the consumer will soften before, you know, before it really picks back up.
But, you know, we've been through, you know, such a challenging period of just this, of this category that, as so soft-