Perfect. Good afternoon, everyone. I'm Alex Perry. I cover the leisure sector here at Bof A. I'm very pleased to have YETI here with us today, including Matt Reintjes, Chief Executive Officer. YETI's coming off a very exciting year, and innovation in particular, 24 new product launches last year, record color introductions. Maybe I just wanted to start there. Can you just talk about the innovation pipeline? What products are you most excited about for 2025 across both coolers and drinkware? How should we think about growth contribution, both from core legacy categories versus new products?
Thanks, Alex. Glad to be here with you. We did at YETI have a great 2024, really exciting from an innovation perspective. This is a brand that, from its very beginning in 2006, was built on product. I mean, it's foundational to what we do. We built the brand as the products have continued to grow and expanded the brand. We think we've got this great balance of an incredible enthusiast lifestyle, outdoor active brand combined with an incredible product portfolio. What I think you saw last year was the proof points of the investments we've made, the focus we've had on innovation and expanding our product portfolio across the range of products. That was a result of a strong pipeline of products that we've had in development for a couple of years.
It's the result of some organizational changes we've made to really focus the organization around drinkware and food and beverage products underneath one group, a group that's focused on gear and equipment, which is our hard coolers, our cargo, our storage solutions, some of our chairs. There is more of a soft goods group that focuses around our soft coolers and our bags. As we built that focus in the organization around those three foundational pillars, what you're seeing is a result of some Uptempo innovation. We expect that to continue into 2025.
That is from legacy hard coolers going all the way back to our origin story, which will celebrate 20 years next year of being in hard coolers, to soft cooler extensions into everything from premium soft coolers in the $300-plus range down to thermal insulated lunchboxes, lunch bags that extend use cases from the job site to the office to the commute. In drinkware, the further expansion of our portfolio is that has just crested over 10 years of building up, we think, a really incredible drinkware franchise that is now expanding into more food, other beverage offerings, kind of rounding out the consumer experience and consumer journey.
Perfect. You had an exciting announcement, I think, last year on this call in the cooler category. You mentioned the acquisition of the capabilities and technology for a powered cooler system. What is the timeline for the rollout of that? Could this provide a significant sales lift? Any more color on sort of the entry into the powered cooler space?
Yeah. I think the powered cooler technology, IP know-how, capabilities that we acquired at the end of 2024 was really the culmination of a good year in M&A for YETI and the way we think about M&A, which is we think about it as additive to our product innovation, accelerating our product roadmap, bringing capabilities, know-how to the team. The year started with our Butter Pat acquisition, which gave us a small little deal that gave us a toehold into the high end of premium cookware and cast iron. The Mystery Ranch acquisition gave us a lot of the foundation and ingredients into a much expanded bags portfolio, now led by Layne Rigney, who's the former CEO of Osprey, is running that group for us. We're incredibly excited about where bags can go.
We finished the year with this acquisition of the IP and technology and some of the know-how on powered coolers, which we think is an incredible addition to our longest-standing product category in hard coolers. We think there's incredible white space. We think it fits within the passive coolers that we have today, which are known for being thrown out of airplanes and surviving fires and doing all the crazy things that YETI coolers have done for so long. It extends the use opportunities. It provides, I think, global market opportunity. The powered cooler market is more developed in Europe than in Australia than it is in the U.S.. We see white space opportunity to really extend the powered cooler.
This was a great way to step into a technology, step into some know-how that builds upon our legacy in coolers, but also brought some skill sets and resources to bring it to market. We did that at the end of 2024. We do not expect that to impact 2025, but we did not do this for a multi-year rollout. We wanted to really kind of bend the curve a bit on our innovation, which is why we leverage what we think is an incredibly strong balance sheet and very strong cash position to go do some smart innovation acquisition to drive long-term growth. How it fits within the hard cooler portfolio, we think it fits incredibly well from a complementary perspective. A little early to commit to what the growth impact will be, but we did it because we are excited about it.
Perfect. I want to talk a little bit about sort of channel strategy and how you think about wholesale versus D2C growth. A big part of the algorithm historically has sort of been D2C growth outpacing wholesale growth. I guess, what is the overall strategy? How are you thinking about direct-to-consumer versus wholesale growth? If we sort of isolate the direct-to-consumer business, I think it's been relatively balanced between Amazon, corporate, dot-com, and owned stores. Are you thinking that would change at all as we move through 2025 here?
Yeah. Great question. I would say if you go back in history, this will be my 10th year at YETI. When I joined YETI, 90+% of our business was wholesale-based. We had a very small direct-to-consumer business. What we saw at the time and we said we wanted to do was we wanted to build out a powerful omnichannel, and we wanted to be where consumers wanted to shop. I think it's costly and it's challenging to change consumer behavior on where they want to shop. You really need to create the desire and the need and the reason for them to shop across the channels. What we also saw at that time was that there was unmet opportunity on the D2C side of the business.
Much like we have a very diverse wholesale business that has incredibly deep roots in specialty all the way up to national accounts, we are recreating that same model globally. We also saw an opportunity to build a powerful and diverse D2C business made up of our dot-com, our direct fleet of stores, YETI stores, the Amazon marketplace, which I think globally will be Amazon Plus marketplaces, and then a really powerful corporate sales partnerships, B2B-type business. At the time when we were disproportionately wholesale-based, we saw an opportunity really to drive that balance of the business. We did expect outsized growth coming as we went public in 2018. We expected outsized growth from the D2C business because we saw the opportunity of where consumers wanted to shop. We knew they wanted to engage directly with the brand.
Certain consumers want to buy on marketplaces like Amazon. We saw the opportunity in the corporate sales, but we always knew that wholesale was an incredibly powerful piece of our business. While we have affected this shift to being a 60% direct-to-consumer, 40% wholesale business, we've also grown our wholesale business that whole time. It hasn't kind of come at a demand shift. It's really come at a complementary consumer capture, consumer purchase moment capture. Now that we're at 60/40, I think there's opportunity across our omnichannel from specialty wholesale to regional wholesale to national wholesale and across our diverse D2C to continue to drive growth across there. I think the growth rates will look a little bit different than they did maybe six or seven years ago when we were public, where we had an outsized near-term opportunity we thought on the D2C side.
We're going to be where consumers want to shop, and that's really our objective.
I guess if we just sort of isolate wholesale, how are you thinking about driving growth there longer term? Will new growth come from new distribution or the existing partners? You entered some new categories that seem like they could drive new distribution points for the brand. Can you just talk about do these new categories sort of open up new distribution for YETI if we think about cookware, barware, outdoor cooking? What type of new wholesale opportunities are there?
Yeah. There's a mix. I mean, first and foremost, we want to see productivity out of our accounts. That's the type of partnerships we build. That's the way we've structured our team is to have direct engagement, direct management with our wholesale partners domestically. Again, we're replicating this model around the globe. We want the equivalent of same-store sales to continue to produce, which means shelf space needs to be productive. It means adoption of new innovation needs to be there. We earn that through really strong partnerships. We also have the conversation that our wholesale partner's job is to drive demand for their door. Their job is to drive traffic for their door. Our job is to drive demand for our brand.
If our brand and product are combined with partners that drive demand for their nameplate and their store, it's an incredibly powerful, long-standing, impactful relationship. We have a list of those, again, from small independents to some of the largest national accounts. Our commitment is we want good partners that can grow productively. As our portfolio grows, it does create opportunity for evolving wholesale partners. I'll give a small independent example. What was hardware stores and fishing shops as we evolved our brand and spoke to more communities and expanded more in the U.S.? We opened up surf shops and skate shops, these things that really anchor in the brand, really create real representation. As the portfolio grows, it opens up opportunities for additional type of retailers.
As we've gotten more into food and food transport and as we think about things like cookware and where our drinkware can play, accounts that service those customers, service those customer needs, and service those selling opportunities, I think, are expansion opportunities. I don't think we're done as it relates to the wholesale fill-in that we can have. As the portfolio continues to grow, we think about what's relevant to our existing footprint and what could or would we want to go out and access to expand. That's an ongoing conversation and something that we've done thoughtfully over time, but we've even made those moves over the last handful of years.
Perfect. I wanted to spend a little bit of time on international, which continues to drive pretty significant outsized growth for you. I guess if we just think about 2025, what regions are you expected to drive the strongest growth this year? Does your international rollout sort of mirror the U.S. in terms of balanced growth between wholesale and D2C? Can you just remind the group sort of how international margins compare to domestic?
Yeah. I would say the things that we expect to drive growth, and I think it is 2025, and I think it is in the near midterm. I think the U.K. and Europe are the most exciting near-term momentum opportunity we have. What we are seeing happen in the U.K. has been outstanding. What we are seeing happen in Europe on the continent, in particular Germany and some of the northern markets, it feels like YETI. It feels like the same way we saw the growth and momentum happen in Canada, the same way we saw it happen play out in Australia. I feel very fortunate to have seen a lot of that even as we expanded in the U.S. over the last 10 years. I think Europe in total and the U.K. are incredible growth opportunities.
I think the next thing, we talked about this early in the year, we started in the rest of Asia with a real initial focus on Japan. In January, I was at our first commercial event in Japan where we brought dealers and partners, brand partners, influence kind of ambassadors together in Tokyo in early January to introduce the brand and the energy and the opportunity that was there. I'm incredibly excited across Japan, which is a large market, has a reverence for the outdoors. You've seen active outdoor brands come into the market and do very well. We are excited about what we are building in Japan, and I think that will spill over into the rest of North Asia and Korea.
As you get down into the greater Asia, we're seeing kind of laying the seeds for that to be the next phase of growth right behind Europe. Very excited about what we're seeing there. As you think about the go-to-market, the other important thing is our playbook is traveling, how we build the brand, how we expand wholesale or focus on direct-to-consumer to your question on channels to market. We saw Canada largely play out like the U.S. developed. We saw Australia play out largely like Canada and the U.S. developed. We've seen that happening in the U.K. We're seeing it happen in Germany. We expect from the early indications that Asia and Japan, in particular, won't be fundamentally different. The mix can vary based on how we went to market. We expect strong wholesale starting with small independent referential wholesale partners.
We'll add selective regional and in some cases national partners with a primary focus on that order. We want to come over the top with a strong e-commerce offering. What happens is these corporate sales businesses start to build as your brand fame does. That for me is when we start to see indications that we're taking root, is when we start getting the inbound on the corporate sales and the types of brands, the types of accounts, the type of interest that we're seeing in Europe and the U.K. from just inbound tells me that the brand and product is resonating and taking root. The mix at the start can shift a little bit different. The U.S. is overall YETI 60/40.
We have certain markets that are a little heavier in wholesale because the full complement of the D2C is not built out. I think I would expect over time we'll be representative of how consumers want to shop in those markets, and it probably won't look fundamentally different than where we are overall today. From a margin perspective in all of our major markets today, because we're running a similar playbook or the same playbook around the U.S., it means we're either direct or a one-step distribution. When you think about we generally look for global pricing harmonization, our product margins are largely the same. I think the thing that can change the gross margin region by region really comes down to the mix. Less about anything fundamental or structural to those markets, the mix.
When you think about the operating margins, that really has to do with the maturation of the market. We've said Canada and Australia, the most established, that they're really positive from an operating margin perspective. The markets we're investing in, you can imagine the U.K., Germany, Australia, excuse me, Japan, we're in the investment phase, building out the team, the infrastructure. As an asset-light business, that can turn over pretty quick. We don't have kind of large investment that then needs to roll over. I think the last wave of international is as we think about distribution for those markets that are just more efficient, more cost-effective, and creative to reach through distribution.
Do the international markets, particularly the ones that you're focused on for this year and next, in terms of product mix, do they largely mirror overall company product mix, drinkware versus coolers? Can you just remind us within that, I think drinkware runs at higher margins, so how that sort of plays in as you scale international?
Yeah. I would say, again, it kind of varies by market and varies by how the markets have built out. I think one of the unique things is when the brand was built in the U.S. for the first eight years, if you wanted a YETI, it had to be a hard cooler. From 2006 to 2014, there was really no choice. We had an eight-year runway in the U.S. of building this brand underneath a hard cooler. In 2014, we launched soft coolers and drinkware, and soft coolers continued to grow and hard coolers continued to grow, and drinkware became what it is today. That early sort of foundation of the business was rooted in hard coolers. The difference as we've gone to the international markets is we're coming in with a suite of offerings.
Before, it was rough, you say $300 to become part of YETI, you had to buy a $300 cooler. In the U.K., you could become a YETI customer at GBP 30 versus GBP 300. You do see a little bit of mix difference. I would say that it is a little heavier in drinkware, but it is within the band of the way we set up our wholesale partners, the way we have been driving demand through our e-commerces. We want to make sure we have hard coolers, soft coolers, bags, lunchboxes, drinkware, kind of the full suite represented. Drinkware has, and we have said this before, drinkware does have a higher product margin than the coolers and equipment side. It is about 1,000 basis points difference between the two. In general, at retail, it is a $30 transaction versus a $300 sort of average transaction.
Perfect. I wanted to spend a little bit of time on the competitive environment across both drinkware and coolers, but I guess just starting with drinkware, what's sort of the strategy to navigate sort of what appears to be an increasingly competitive landscape in the U.S. drinkware market? How does YETI think about the competitive dynamics playing out, especially within drinkware?
Yeah. I think, as I said, when we first launched into drinkware in 2014, I think a lot of what we built over the last 10 years is actually affecting consumer behavior. It is how people want to drink, what their expectations or relationship with their drinkware is. At its most simple, the expectation of hot things staying hot and cold things staying cold is really what we built up over the last 10 years. Over that time, what started for us as two SKUs in a 20-ounce and 30-ounce tumbler has become an assortment of things that range from bottles and tumblers to Barware and serveware and really surrounding more of the consumer's life, bringing that same brand promise of durability, performance, and design to more use cases, more consumer environments. That is really the game we are playing.
We talk about this idea of we want to have depth and breadth. We want to have deep meaning for the various ways consumers want to live, and we want to give them more options. I think what's happened throughout that time, our success, whether it was in drinkware, hard coolers, or soft coolers, has invited competition. It's invited our retail partners to have private labels. It's invited Me- Too brands that said, "I want to get on that growth." It's invited knockoffs in the past and invited counterfeits. I mean, this is not a competitive environment, is not something that we're not used to and that we operate in. Frankly, we welcome competition because in many ways, competition brings the focus on a category, and it gives us a chance to stand out.
I think that the most interesting dynamic in the last couple of years in drinkware is the significant growth in the category and the concentration in that growth around certain form factors and sizes, which is really a bit of the antithesis of the strategy we've been driving in drinkware, which is diversification, creating more meaning, creating more use cases, really redefining drinkware into things like food and beverage. I think the recent past in drinkware has been much more concentrated, much more focused on the accessorization of it, the trend of it, the kind of immediacy or desirability, the immediacy of it. I think those dynamics you can see ebb and flow, and we've seen that happen before.
I think the underlying thing that is most exciting for us in drinkware and in food and beverage is, I think, the focus on hydration and the health and wellness benefits. I think that's an incredibly important dynamic that I think will stick. I think the normalization and the comfort with the desire to always have something with you is actually a global trend we're seeing, and that hasn't always been the case. I think the third one is people's focus on making sure that something's not a one-off. The durability, the reusability, I think, is another really positive dynamic. You just look, you travel out into airports, you go, "There is water available everywhere." Now it's become a very commonplace thing. I think those are the trends that underpin the drinkware category that gets us most excited.
The stuff that cycles in and out, I think, is harder to chase. Soft coolers are our approach. We continue to lead the market in high-end performance soft coolers. You heard me say on the last call, we're continuing to extend that into food and beverage, thermal bags, lunchboxes, things that get used in multiple environments, some tough job-type environments and some commuting to work and at the office, at the desk, at the school. I think that bringing our design performance materials to that role, I think, is exciting. On hard coolers, we've been at it for 20 years. We had a great year in hard coolers in 2024. We had a great Q4. Our innovation was well received. We're kind of extending the use environments with the powered coolers. I think that that's an environment that's always had competitors come in and come out.
Some competitors stay. I feel really good about where we're positioned across the portfolio from a competitive perspective.
Perfect. I wanted to ask, can you talk about how you think about driving repurchase frequency for your average customer? I guess, particularly within drinkware, how do you think about driving repeat purchases? Do you do it through new form factors that you mentioned, new product extensions, new colorways? How do you drive sort of incremental demand on drinkware in particular?
Yeah. It's a great question. I think what we've shown after 10 years of selling a lot of drinkware, particularly in the U.S. market, and even some of the behaviors we're seeing globally, is some of it's changing routines and changing behaviors. Some of it's addressing, and I'll kind of talk through this a little bit, some of it's addressing the use cases and what people need. The third one is continuing to make incredible product that has desirability and a brand that speaks to you. The changing behaviors is that expectation of, "I want all my drinks to stay that hot. I want all my drinks to stay that cold," whether that's coffee in the morning or a cocktail at night or hydration during the day.
Building out this ecosystem around the consumer, my desire for the YETI brand is something we focus on is I don't want to be a pickup and put-down brand. I want to stay with the consumer through their journey. That may be in multiple products, that may be multiple touchpoints, and maybe how the brand speaks to them throughout the day or throughout the week. I don't want a winning product. I want to fill in that consumer in their ecosystem. Drinkware is no different. If you look at the way we built out the portfolio, what started as a 20-ounce and 30-ounce cup that was disproportionately probably for cold things became coffee mugs and French presses and cocktail shakers and shot glasses.
It was bottles of varying sizes, whether that's chug drinking or straw drinking, and whether that was on the sidelines or on a hike. That's what we mean about kind of filling in the consumer lifestyle. That then leads itself to repeat purchase, and it leads to further adoption and winning deeper into the consumer's life, winning deeper into the cabinet. Whatever angle you want to use, that's really what we're trying to do, and take that same behavior change, adoption, and kind of be the brand with them.
I guess within that realm, how important are partnerships to driving use occasions? For example, you announced the NFL partnership gives you the right to use the NFL logos on your, I think, both drinkware and coolers. Does a partnership like that provide a meaningful lift? How do you normally scale a partnership like the NFL over time?
Yeah. I mean, it's a broad spectrum of how those things work. We're really excited about the NFL licensing deal. The avenues of growth it creates are interesting. You get to use team colors. You get to use the logos. You get to market to those Geos. You get to play into the loyalty of those fans. You take a great product and a great brand, and you combine it with somebody's passion, and you put those together, people want to be able to express what they are. I think that it creates new wholesale channels to market or leveraging existing wholesale channels to market. I think from a basic growth perspective, they can be really powerful. What I would call is they're all additive, though. You have the NFL deal. We've got things we do with Oracle Red Bull Racing.
We've got Little League sports partnerships. We have collegiate partnerships, all these different what we're really trying to speak to and be cognizant of are what are our consumers passionate about? If we can leverage their passion for YETI and their love of YETI product with another of their passions, we think that just further kind of integrates you into their lifestyle. I think you're going to see us continue to smartly look for those things. We're not a sponsor things and hang a banner. We're not a just get licensing deals for the sake of a licensing deal because those don't have any substitute. We want to really lean into how do we activate the NFL partnership like we've activated the collegiate partnership. We have a deal with the Dallas Cowboys where we're integrating into their fan shops.
We're integrating into their stadium offerings, creating kind of a culture around it. We do the same thing at the University of Texas in their sports stadiums. We've integrated with their concessionaire, and we're part of their program. I think that's where you really get the payoff of these things. That's the investment, the disproportionate human capital investment we make to build those relationships to dig deeper. We want to be from the sidelines to the suites, and we want to be in the fan shops, and we want to be in the homes of those enthusiast groups, whether that's Oracle Red Bull Racing or the University of Texas football or the Penn State men's wrestling team.
Perfect.
We call real examples.
I wanted to get your view on sort of near-term health of the consumer. What are the signals you're looking for that sort of informs your view on the consumer? If you think about the different parts of your portfolio, sort of elasticity of demand and a potential downturn, how are you sort of viewing from your seat the health of the consumer right now?
Yeah. It's a pretty broad, I mean, it puts a lot of gravity in my answer to tell you what the health of the consumer is. I mean, obviously, we read the same things everyone else does, and we pay a lot of attention to it. I think a consumer that's comfortable and not concerned and confident and not worried is a better consumer for everybody. I think there's a lot of unknowns. I think that you're reading a lot about that, or we all are reading a lot about that. I think the thing that we focus on, and we've talked about this in the past, that we said last year through multiple quarters, we think the consumer's more discerning. We think they're thoughtful about where they're spending money, particularly in goods, as they were focused more on.
We were seeing a lot of spending in experiences and, in particular, travel, which we also think is a really positive dynamic for where we're going in bags and where drinkware and how those things fit in, those kind of lasting experiences, desires, and travel desires. At the end of the day, we believe that while our products are premium in their categories, we think our products have rarely been a need. They're a want product. The want is because of what we create in the product and what we create in the brand. Continuing to make great product and continuing to stoke the brand and stoke the desirability, we think, is number one. Number two, while we're premium in our categories, our price points are actually really reasonably approachable.
I mean, our drinkware ranges from $20 to kind of the core is $20-$50, goes up a little bit higher than that on certain of our Barware, Serveware, French press types of use. Our coolers are traditionally in the, call it, $200-$400 or so dollars is the traditional consumer prices. From a relative basis, they're not expensive from a category. They're premium. The reason that that's important is as you get into these important gifting time of year, Q2, Mother's Day, Father's Day, graduation, beginning of summer, travel, you get towards the end of the year and all the holidays at the end of the year, we think there's a really positive disconnect between the cost of the product and the value of it as a gift.
We think that that's something we've leveraged is, yes, it's a $30 cup, but the recipient receives it for a much greater value than that. That's the desirability of the brand. That's the desirability of the product. That's the performance of the product. We lean into those things. It's not that consumers stop spending. You just need—I think that's the role of any great brand and any great product company—is when people are spending, you need to make sure you're the choice they make. That's how we think about focusing our marketing, how we think about focusing our branding, how we think about the timing of our product innovation is really to address those opportunities. Where the consumer goes and how the year goes, we probably have less impact over that from a macro perspective.
What we can control is our innovation. We can control and drive the desirability of the brand. We can control getting the product out in front of consumers. We can control leveraging our investment and our partnerships to make sure that we remain top of mind.
Perfect. I wanted to spend a little bit on tariffs. Can you just remind the group sort of current exposure in terms of tariffs? What's the impact in terms of what's currently been announced, particularly with China? What is the strategy for mitigating the impact?
Yeah. Let me start a little bit with, obviously, tariffs, incredibly topical. Obviously, tariffs continue to move in what's active, what potentially is coming, what may be coming, and what the timing is. A lot of—not to say the obvious, but a lot of variables moving in there, which makes the pinning down more challenging. What I would say we communicated in our Q4 call was, at the time, the tariffs that we were aware of, we said that or that had been announced that we said that they had a less than $10 million impact on the year and that we believe there were opportunities within our supply chain, within managing our COGS and our overall P&L to manage those. Obviously, a lot's changed since then, some on, some off, up and down.
What I would say in general about tariffs is we start first and foremost with we want the supply chain that we believe is right for YETI for the global growth of this business for the long term. We are making those decisions to make sure we are positioned globally to manufacture to support our global business. We also called out that, in particular, as it relates to China, which is disproportionately our exposure on tariffs, and particularly in drinkware, that in 2024, we had an objective to have 20% of our global capacity available outside of China. That is a project that goes back to 2019 that we had talked about when the previous tariffs were in place. We were working that. We started our first factory outside of China in early 2023 and then built through 2023 and built through 2024.
By the end of 2024, 20-plus % of our global capacity was outside of China. What we announced in the call was that this year, we anticipate—I am going to resolve down from global capacity to U.S.—that by the end of this year, we believe that 80% of our U.S. capacity will be outside of China and a number of other markets for drinkware. By the end of this year, we will have a significant reduction in our exposure to a single market from a drinkware perspective. How the rest of the world and the rest of the tariffs and the reciprocal tariffs play into it, we will see. Our reaction, and this is consistent back from 2019 when we talked about this, is we start with our partnerships with our suppliers.
They and we have a shared interest in making sure that we continue to drive the strong, profitable growth of this business. We start there, and then we work things through our P&L and how we operationally manage. I think we've shown that we have an ability over time to manage the P&L really strongly. It comes all the way up to how we think about, ultimately, our pricing in the market. The way we think about pricing to the consumer is we want to be priced so that it fits within our pricing architecture and our pricing portfolio and that we're thinking long term and we're not reactionary because I think you can get in this situation where you're whipping around pretty quick. We're pretty thoughtful and methodical about how we step through those various elements of the tariffs.
Really, at the end of the day, we want no regrets pricing, and we want no regrets supply chain that ultimately enable the mid and long-term growth of the business.
Perfect. I think final question here with the last minute we have. Can you talk about key priorities for capital allocation? How do you think about M&A? You've done a few deals over the past year. What categories that you find attractive that you think would complement the YETI brand? Particularly, if you would think about going after that organically or through M&A?
Yeah. I would take capital allocation in three pieces and three priorities. One's the continued investment and operation in the business, including the growth investment that supports the organic product portfolio. The second piece would be growth-related, but it would be M&A akin to what we did last year, the Butter Pat acquisition, the Mystery Ranch acquisition, the Powered Cooler technology. In total, that was about $75 million last year, really focused on accelerating innovation, access to new markets. I think there are more of those out there of that ilk that we think we can leverage the YETI brand, the YETI design ethos, the YETI go-to-market, the YETI team globally to really accelerate things that would be on our product roadmap. The third piece is returning value to shareholders. We did that last year in the form of buybacks.
We did $200 million worth of buybacks last year. I think when you look at our cash position, our balance sheet, my stated comments around the size and scope of M&A, the ongoing operational needs of the business, I think there will be continued opportunity to return capital in the form of buybacks.
Perfect. We are right at time, so we'll leave it there. I want to thank YETI and Matt for a great fireside chat here. Thank you guys all for coming.
Perfect. Thanks, all. Appreciate it.