On tables, kind of the best table tennis table, the Cybershape, which came out of STIGA. Truls won the silver gold medal with that unique and patented shape there. You see our Illinois Fighting Illini outdoor shuffleboard table, which has been a great seller for us. We are really focused on engaging consumers. We do that through partnerships, we are doing it through social media and then our direct-to-consumer websites. Hopefully, getting good consumer insights from those experiences. Here you see a little bit of our product. These are Amazon ratings, but where we choose to play, we generally have strong reviews, bestseller tags. That is a little example of what we are selling on Amazon and how consumers perceive our product from a demand perspective, but also from a quality perspective. Just a little overview of some of our partnerships.
We talked about the American Cornhole League, which you see on ESPN. We worked with Chuck Leavell, who is the keyboardist for The Rolling Stones. We did a Rolling Stones table for his farm plantation where he has bird hunting also. If you go and do some hunting or visit there, you will see the Brunswick Rolling Stones table. Savannah Easton is a sponsored player for Brunswick. She is one of the emerging young players in billiards. We work with the SPIN Club, which has two outposts in N.Y., but also around the country. We are the official table provider for SPIN. The Hunting Public is a collective of hunters who go out and talk about hunting online, and we do some special bows for them. That has been a great partnership.
We run the Cajun 8 Limited Bowfishing Tournament, which is part of a group of bowfishing tournaments that happen in the summertime, and that has been a nice event for the bowfishing. Adidas, which we talked about earlier. We are on social media, on Instagram, Facebook, and we have got a pretty active site presence across most of our brands on social media. We consolidated our DTC business to Shopify so that we are on one platform for all of our brand size, but we are running 15, 16 different DTC websites, and that is a strategic and growing part of our business. We are looking at growing market share through cross-selling from acquisitions that we have done. We want to broaden our customer base and deepen it with existing customers.
We are really focused on gaining more share in the family game room and the backyard where we have strong presence, but we want to build emerging categories like fitness, safety, pets, and the broader outdoors. We are continuing to look at new categories as well. Pets is maybe an example of how we have moved into a new category that we have observed for some time. A little overview of our customers. Amazon is our largest customer today, as I mentioned, and Dick's Sporting Goods is our second-largest customer. You can see some customers that are important to us, Bass Pro Shops, Academy Sports + Outdoors, Dunham's Sports, Scheels. We do a lot of safety business with Uline, Nebraska Furniture Mart. You will see our Brunswick Billiards tables there. The farm and fleet customers are important to us. You see Rural King, Blain's Farm & Fleet.
And then more recently we picked up Chewy, Petco and Bomgaars were new customers from the ASL acquisition which we did earlier this year. As I mentioned, we are really focused on building share in the game room and backyard where we already have a dominant presence and then growing in new categories that are emerging for us like safety, pets and the outdoors. Now I am going to turn it over to Wes who is going to talk about acquisitions and kind of close us out.
Thank you, Patrick. Next strategic priority to discuss is pursuit of non-dilutive acquisition opportunities. We consider both strategic platforms and tuck-in acquisitions that extend our footprint capabilities, customer base or category presence. The acquisitions are intended to complement rather than replace our organic growth. Escalade has got an established track record of executing the acquisition strategy. Over the last 14 years, we have acquired 16 different companies including Gold Tip, Bee Stinger and All-Cornhole in 2025. As Patrick mentioned, ASL Solutions earlier this year. We focus primarily on opportunities connected to healthy active lifestyles in our core sports, games, outdoor safety and fitness markets. Attractive targets may provide scale benefits, new capabilities, new customers or entry into complementary categories. ASL actually checks the box for all these as we gain a new manufacturing capability with rotomolding.
We added new customers to the Escalade portfolio and we entered into a new category with pets. Our emphasis remains on acquisitions that are strategically aligned and accretive. Maintaining that capacity to pursue these opportunities requires continued financial discipline. Here we will discuss our last strategic priority which is to maintain a strong balance sheet and remain focused on shareholder value. Financial discipline and return on assets are central to how we evaluate operations and capital deployment. Balance sheet supports organic investment, acquisitions, dividends, share repurchases and resilience through economic cycles. 2025 total net sales for the company was $240 million and net income was $13.7 million. Our margin was 26.9%. Return on equity was 8%. Return on assets was a little over 6%. Diluted EPS increased from $0.93 in 2024 to $0.99 in 2025.
Our total debt declined from approximately $25.6 million at the end of 2024 to $18.5 million at the end of 2025. Year-to-date 2026, we posted two strong quarters, showing year-to-date sales growth of 3.3% year-over-year, improved gross margins, moving from 25.7% in the first half of last year to 28.4% year-to-date 2026. Our year-to-date EPS through two quarters is $1 per share, compared to $0.32 per share in the prior year. Looking across several years provides some additional perspective on our performance. This slide shows progression of sales, EBITDA, and EPS from 2021 through 2025. As you will note, our sales have shown a little bit of a decline from 2022 to 2025. To note, 2019 net sales were approximately $180.5 million. In 2020, net sales were favorably impacted by COVID, increasing our sales by over 51% to $273.6 million.
Then we grew another 14.5% to approximately $313 million in 2021. Our sales started to normalize, and despite changes in revenue levels, the company maintained profitable and continued to generate meaningful EBITDA. We enlisted a few restructuring improvements, reduced our footprint with the sale of our Mexico facility, and exit of a long-term lease in Orlando, focused on reducing inventory and reducing debt, which led to us actually improving EPS from 2023 through 2025. As of June 30, 2026, Escalade had $144 million in current assets, $16.4 million in cash, compared to $45 million in current liabilities. Our debt level at the end of the June 30 was $14.9 million, which was all on our term loan that has interest of 2.97%. We are on a path to being debt-free by the end of 2026.
At the end of the second quarter, we had full availability of our revolver, which was $60 million. This financial position provides flexibility to invest in the business while evaluating acquisition and shareholder return opportunities. Escalade has demonstrated history of returning capital to shareholders through quarterly dividends and through opportunistic share repurchases. Quarterly dividends shown on the slide has reached $0.1525 per share in the most recent periods presented. Company has purchased 218,000 shares in 2025, and year-to-date through June, we have purchased around 72,000 shares. These actions reflect our capital allocation framework and our commitment to evaluate attractive uses of excess cash flow. As Patrick mentioned earlier, Escalade has been public trading on Nasdaq for more than 50 years and is among some of the oldest Nasdaq-listed companies. Over the 25 year period presented, Escalade's total shareholder return outperformed key indexes, including the S&P 500 and the Russell 2000.
A long-term view is particularly important because it captures performance across multiple business and economic cycles. Our objective is to continue building on that record through profitable growth, disciplined operations, and prudent capital allocation. To close, I would like to summarize the key takeaways. Escalade owns leading brands across sports, games, outdoor, safety, and fitness categories. Our portfolio is aligned with healthy, active lifestyle opportunities. We combine innovation, consumer engagement, broad distribution, and selective acquisitions to pursue profitable growth, financial discipline, a lean cost structure, and a strong balance sheet provide resilience and capital allocation flexibility. Together, these capabilities have supported a proven record of long-term shareholder growth. With that, we will open it up for questions.
Thank you so much, Wes and Patrick, for sharing the Escalade story here. As a quick reminder to those in the audience, if you do have a question, you can type it into the Q&A tab at the bottom of your Zoom screen, and I will read the questions out loud. We already have a couple of questions here that came in. First question here is on your organic growth potential. As we talked about before, Patrick, you did see an increase in sales in the first half of the year, up 3.3%. I think some of that was related to acquisitions, but I think it is mostly organic growth, which is good to see that you have turned a corner there.
So maybe you could speak to us as far as how do you see just overall your base business growing on an organic basis in terms of revenue and for profitability, whether it is EPS or EBITDA, however you want to address that.
That is a great question, Anthony. We are generally in mature categories, so I would say most categories are GDP businesses. You will sometimes see there is a trend. When "The Hunger Games" happened, archery grew faster. Pickleball has been an emerging sport, so that has been growing faster as well. So we will see some accelerated growth in some categories as well. But general, it is GDP. So we are looking at taking market share to grow kind of above that GDP level, through new product, or just consolidation too, or we can do an acquisition. So part of that can be inorganic with acquisitions to go above that GDP, but also the market share gains. As an example, in archery, we have been picking up market share as that industry has consolidated more and players have moved outside of our price points.
Mm-hmm. Got you. Thinking about the profitability going forward, as you look to grow sales kind of more or less in line with the GDP, I know there is a lot of puts and takes between tariffs and fuel costs and so on, but how do we think about the profitability of the business kind of going forward here?
Yeah. No, that is great. Great follow-on question there. We are, I would say, optimistic to the extent that we grow the top line, we get some operating leverage there. Our longer-term target is to have double-digit EBITDA on kind of pre-tax margins on the business. As our gross margins touch that 30% and kind of stay at that level, we think that is possible as we look out the next couple of years.
Mm-hmm. Got it. You recently entered the growing pet segment with the acquisition of ASL Solutions. Can you talk about this new market opportunity for you, and what other opportunities do you see in the future as it relates to potential M&A activity?
Yeah, no, great question. We see the pets market as adjacent to sporting goods and the outdoors market. We share a lot of the same customers. If you go into a Bass Pro, you'll see a nice pet section. If you go into a Cabela's, which is owned by TJ Maxx, you see a nice pet section there. We've looked at the category, and this was a nice strategic opportunity for us to step into the pets category. ASL rotomolds their dog houses, and we do blow molding, injection molding, so we weren't doing rotomolding, so we added a new manufacturing capability. As mentioned, we share a lot of customers there, so that is some synergies there. On the customer side, we think we can expand distribution there. We're looking at expanding.
This is kind of a first step into pets, but we like pet fitness, pet toys, and then also the pet carriers, pet transportation too. You see a lot of opportunity in there for similarly rotomolded products. We're going to digest and integrate ASL, but look for bolt-on acquisitions in the pets category. We're also looking in the broader outdoors market. We're in archery, but we're not in that broader hunting market, which is much larger than archery. That fishing, camping, hiking segment, we're not in that, but we would like to bolt on at some point some additional opportunities in the broader outdoors category beyond archery. We continue to look for opportunities within our existing categories to add on, similar to what we did with the All-Cornhole acquisition. It could be new categories, too, that we're not in.
Disc golf, for example, if we could find a great acquisition in disc golf to get into that category, we would do that. We are looking at things that we can fill in on the outdoor game side or potentially in other areas.
Mm-hmm. Got you. Just wanted to follow up also about your DTC business that you do with Shopify. How big is that business nowadays, and do you have a goal in mind as to where that could be at some point?
Yeah, no, we don't disclose that, but we're roughly mid-single digits there, and we'd like to get to mid-double digits there over time, and we're investing in that. We're an omni-channel company. The consumer can buy online through Amazon. They can go to a Dick's Sporting Goods or they can buy through us on a variety of our Shopify-powered websites. But it's a growing area for us, and it's an important area for us from a branding point of view, but also a selling and marketing point of view.
Mm-hmm. Got you. Got it. Okay. We had a couple of other questions come in just about acquisitions in general. Obviously, you guys have done a fair number of acquisitions throughout the years. Just thinking about how meaningful could those be to the overall growth of the company and the earnings power, and maybe just talk more about the potential pipeline of deals that you're looking at, the multiples that the companies are asking for in terms of those are concerned. If you could address that'd be great.
Yeah, no, we've got a nice funnel of acquisitions. We generally don't like to participate in auction processes, though we do from time to time. Brunswick was an auction process, and Gold Tip was an auction process as well. We generally like to contact, reach out to companies in our industry and work with the owners directly, and that's how most of our acquisitions happen. We've got a pretty robust corporate development process. We've got a nice funnel of things we're looking at and that are far along in that funnel, and we'll see what comes out of that. But we're generally trying to do one to two acquisitions a year. Multiples range from, I'd say, for a certain type of company, up to 10 maybe. We don't play up in that segment usually.
Our sweet spot's probably in that 6x-8x range that we're paying, and that depends on the size and the growth and the category that's in. That's a typical multiple range. In terms of impact on our business, as I said, we're a GDP business as a baseline, and we're growing through market share, new products. Then that inorganic piece also will drive that to mid-single digits, is kind of where we want to be ultimately from a growth perspective acquisition part.
Got you. All right. Obviously, you guys have a very strong balance sheet, have no debt. Is there a certain debt level comfort that you'd be willing to have for the right acquisition maybe? Just talk about the flexibility you may have and the comfort in terms of taking out debt if you see an acquisition opportunity that you like.
Yeah, no, that's a great question. As Wes kind of pointed out, we've got net cash position now. So we're fine to have a net cash position, so ideally no more than one turn of cash sitting on our balance sheet, but EBITDA. I'd say generally wouldn't want to have more debt than one turn of EBITDA. We've had higher debt when we did the Brunswick acquisition, we reached and went in a little bit further into that, and we got up to around 2x. Part of that was funding working capital, with the COVID kind of bump as well. We've got a nice credit facility from JPM that we can dip into, if needed, which is untouched.
Got you.
aside from that term piece.
Mm-hmm. All right, and then I guess the last question, given the time constraints that we have here, maybe if you could just talk about how do you manage advertising and branding, given the fact that you do have a lot of brands that are out there. How do you go about, as far as managing the advertising spending and the return on that, the spending? How do you think about that?
Yeah. We, I'd say, generally focus on our key brands. Bear Archery, for example, we're working with these partnerships that we talked about, sponsorships of The Hunting Public, with Brunswick, with Savannah Easton. We'll do partnerships, and we also do a lot of the Google, Facebook advertising, the Amazon advertising as well, but it's concentrated more in our key brands and a little bit less concentrated in our smaller brands. We do advertising and co-op with our retailers as well. Those are kind of our main ways to advertise and market.
Got you. Understood. Okay. Well, thank you so much, Patrick and Wes, for sharing the Escalade story. Thank you also, everyone asking thoughtful questions here as well. Hope everyone has a very productive day at the conference, and we'll wrap it up there. Thank you again.
Yep. Thank you, Anthony.
All right. Take care.
Thank you.
Thanks.
Sure. Bye.
Bye.