Speaker unverified: evaluation

Transcript context

…It's like the healthy alcohol during a regular recession. Thank you. We were not an essential business. Marijuana and alcohol were, so figure that out. But during the Great Recession, 50% unemployment in Italy and Spain under the age of 30, running took off double digit growth after the Great Recession. We'd seen that before and it turned out to be Covid-friendly. You now know the story. It was social distancing friendly, outdoors, walking, hiking, running all made the cut, but nobody knew that. We had an hypothesis. We created this frame on how we thought running would recover. Here's what we did. First of all, Strava data magic. Every day after the quarantine shutdowns, Strava activity was growing and they were sharing that. Then what we did, we have 40 in the US alone, 45 field marketing people, we put them in high traffic running parks at 4:00 PM every afternoon and they counted runners. Guess what? It was growing every day. We watched digital sales. We have visibility on 85% of our retail sell through. Digital went from 30% of all of our products going through a website of somebody's, ours, or another partner’s. It went to 80% by the end of April. We sold more in May 2020, almost all through digital than we did in May 2019. Running made the cut. We grew 27% in 2020, that Covid year. We saw this was the key because of our customer obsession and our ability to work. Multichannel was a big advantage in that time because we can move inventory around and make it happen. Inventory, if it isn't there, you can't sell it. Multichannel was a big advantage. The other was our focus on the runner. We turned our supply chain on at least 6–12 weeks before anybody else did. Because if you were a broad-based retailer, there was no clarity on when the customer was coming back. For a lifestyle product, nobody went outside for a year. Was the fact that you exclusively made performance running gear gave you the confidence to flip it back on? Because if you're making all kinds of stuff in your factory and you're pushing all kinds of stuff through retail channels, most of it is not going to sell, so you can't actually open.…

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