John Walbrecht
Analyst · ROTH Capital
Thanks Aaron. The parts of our business that we highlighted is critical to driving our shareholder value are on track. We are growing sales in our fundamental equipment categories. Our gross margin have improved significantly. We are investing in sales and marketing campaigns that are driving enhanced consumer awareness, which have both driven strong ASAP orders for fall 2017 and improved even more the stronger bookings for spring 2018 and we have made, what we believe, to be a strong acquisition under our redeployment framework. Now a few comments on our spring 2018 product lineup. We are excited about our brand momentum heading into the spring 2018 season. With the winter gym season approaching, we will continue our focus on award winning rock shoes, shipping and retail in November and our climbing sportswear, a category we continue to see stronger than expected demand. We will also see the launch of new developments in both climb and mountain. We anticipate seeing growing momentum as we continue to invest in new products alongside more disruptive marketing. In addition to the launch of the rock shoe collection, a few of our new products include the expanded spring stretch rainwear collection, a new belay device called the ATC-Pilot, patented trekking poles, updated harnesses, expanded packs, sportswear, logowear and more. In total, more than 50 new products for spring 2018. Looking forward to 2018 and beyond, we have more than 30 new product initiatives in the works across more than 30 product categories BD currently offers. In terms of marketing and advertising, through 2017, BD has held true to its promises strengthening our sellthrough and marketing efforts achieving more than 4.5 billion impressions en route to our goal of five billion impressions for 2017 in PR and editorial alone. In addition, we will complete 2017 with an aggressive national ad campaign which encompasses both print and television focusing on our Defy the Dark headline campaign and our backcountry skiing campaigns. Our partnership with key photographers like Tim Temple, Jimmy Chin and Chris Burkard continues to drive very strong branded impressions. We experienced many first from Black Diamond athletes, including Adam Ondra's climb of the Dawn Wall, Babsi's free climb of the Zodiac, Joe Kinder's Bone Tomahawk, Alex Honnold's free soloing of Freerider, Nalle's achievement of the V17, Adam's achievement of the 5.15b and Joe Grant's podium finish at the Hardrock 100. These achievements continue to drive dominant impressions with our consumer. Coupled with our aggressive marketing, we have been able to boost our Instagram followers by more than 45% in this year alone. In regards to Sierra, I would like to conclude my remarks by speaking in more detail of our acquisition of Sierra Bullets on August 21, 2017. Sierra Bullets is a leading bullet company in the world and has been in business for 70 years. From local and international shooting competitions to sport and hunting, Sierra offers best-in-class accuracy and precision that hunting sporting enthusiasts have come to depend on. In Sierra, we also acquired a business with industry-leading brand recognition and a very strong management team, all who we expect to remain with our team. Along with the brand, we also own the state-of-the-art underground testing range. It's the reference range in North America and a strong asset that supports their commitment to R&D and quality control. In fact, Sierra builds custom machines to have complete control over the manufacturing process in order to achieve the tightest tolerances in the industry. Sierra also has a highly diverse customer base. In addition to a wide base of retailers, Sierra customers include distributors, law-enforcement agencies and industry OEMs. This diversification is further enhanced by an approximate 400 SKU offering, which is historically mitigating customer and product concentration risk. As a manufacturer of premium products targeting outdoor sportsmen, we believe Sierra has been relatively insulated from the demand volatility. These premium sales channels have also historically been less susceptible to discounting driving higher margins for Sierra retail as well as the OEM customer base. From a financial perspective, Sierra has a very strong cash flow and margin profile. They generated 95% free cash flow conversion ratio with limited ongoing CapEx requirements and an average EBITDA margin of more than 35% from 2007 to 2016. For Clarus, our return on invested capital is expected to benefit from our large tax carryforwards. We expect to leverage our very strategic and financial resources to accelerate Sierra's growth. This includes investments that will seek to enhance both sales and marketing, including social and digital capabilities, improve distribution, forge new customer accounts, especially within law enforcement and government and of course continue to innovate new products. We will follow a very similar process as we have the last 12 months with BD. So in closing, we are really pleased about where our business stands today. We believe our retailers continue to invest behind brands that have momentum and are bringing truly innovative products to the market. At Black Diamond, we believe we are innovating best-in-class products, bringing true innovation to the marketplace and doing so more rapidly than our competition, all the while supporting this innovation with a clear marketing strategy that speaks to our core consumer. This strategy is driving sellthrough at retail and in return is building their support for our brand. We expect our momentum to continue and even build and look forward to integrating Sierra into this model. I would now like to turn the time back over to our operator for any Q&As before my closing remarks. Operator?