Academy Sports + Outdoors continues to flex its footwear muscle.
In conference call with Wall Street analysts after posting first quarter results on Tuesday, Academy’s chief executive officer Steven Lawrence cited continued growth in the category.
“Footwear sales were up 3 percent for the quarter,” Lawrence said. “Key drivers of growth in Q1 were our cleated business driven by baseball along with our summer seasonal businesses, driven by Crocs and Birkenstock.”
“We also remain encouraged by the momentum we’re seeing in the performance running category fueled by key platforms such as the Nike Vomero, the Adidas EVO SL, the New Balance Ellipse and the Brooks Glycerin,” Lawrence said. “Our plan is to continue to build out our assortment and space devoted to this category as we progress throughout the remainder of the year.”
“Nike is a growth engine for us,” Lawrence also said, citing the Vomero line as a key performer. The CEO also said he was upbeat about Nike’s upcoming expansion in the performing running category to about 150 doors — double the store count from a year ago — just in time for back-to-school. “And it feels like they’re just starting to get their innovation pipeline really moving,” the CEO told analysts.
Overall for the first quarter, outdoor was the retailer’s best performing category at up 12 percent, followed by sports and recreation at up 6 percent. Apparel sales rose 5 percent, with strength in the outdoor and work businesses.
“On the athletic side of the business, gains were driven by continued momentum in the Nike and Jordan brand, coupled with double-digit increases in our better private brands,” Lawrence said. For the second quarter, the outdoor retailer plans to add 55 Jordan brand shops, which will up its Jordan Brand shop count to 100 stores.
The CEO also noted that the summer is one of the retailer’s “prime selling seasons, and we’re well-positioned this year to help fuel the fun for our customers,” he said, noting tailwinds this year that include the World Cup games in venues within Academy’s footprint, as well as the celebration of America’s 250th birthday in the second quarter.
Lawrence also said the retailer will migrate the search platform for its online site so it will be powered by Google’s AI commerce search and Gemini Enterprise customer experience in time for the back-to-school selling season.
“We believe customers are increasingly utilizing AI agents to aid them as they shop online, so moving our search to be powered by AI is a natural evolution and will be intuitive for them,” he told analysts. “As we continuously evolve our online capabilities, we expect the sales momentum we built over the past year in this business will continue to provide a strong comp tailwind to our overall sales.”
In an interview with executive vice president and chief merchandising officer Matt McCabe, the executive said the biggest trend happening in the shoe business right now “when it comes to athletic footwear is the shift from basketball shoes worn as fashion to running shoes worn as fashion.”
McCabe said that as more people are wearing running shoes every day, “what we expect is both in performance run and what we would call running-inspire, which are really [entry] price-point running shoes, that that part of our business is going to accelerate and it probably comes at the expense of more court-type shoes, which have been hot for the last three years and are starting to slow up a little bit.”
McCabe told FN earlier this year that the outdoor retailer has been opening more stores located in suburbs that target a profile dubbed the “Always Game Family,” where different members are active participants in various sports. Some of those locations will be part of the 15 to 20 doors that Academy plans to open in the back half of this year.
“We see those customers coming in and doing a lot of footwear buying because those families, especially during back-to-school, [are] buying [for] multiple kids,” McCabe said. He emphasized that footwear is a “big part” of Academy’s back-to-school business.
