American Outdoor Brands, Inc. (AOUT) Business

Item 1. Business

General

We are a leading provider of outdoor lifestyle products and shooting sports accessories encompassing hunting, fishing, meat processing, outdoor cooking, camping, shooting, and personal security and defense products for rugged outdoor enthusiasts. We conceive, design, source, and sell our outdoor lifestyle products, including premium sportsman knives and tools for fishing and hunting; land management tools for hunting preparedness and for use in the backyard; products used while hunting; meat processing equipment; outdoor cooking products; and camping, survival, and emergency preparedness products. We conceive, design, produce or source, and sell our shooting sports accessories, such as rests, vaults, and other related accessories; electro-optical devices, including hunting optics, firearm aiming devices, flashlights, and laser grips; and reloading, gunsmithing, and firearm cleaning supplies. We develop and market all our products as well as manufacture some of our electro-optics products at our facility in Columbia, Missouri. We also contract for the manufacture and assembly of most of our products with third parties located in Asia.

We focus on our brands and the establishment of product categories in which we believe our brands will resonate strongly with the activities and passions of consumers and enable us to capture an increasing share of our overall addressable markets. Our owned brands include BOG, BUBBA, Caldwell, Crimson Trace, Frankford Arsenal, Grilla, Hooyman, Imperial, LaserLyte, Lockdown, MEAT! Your Maker, Old Timer, Schrade, Tipton, Uncle Henry, ust, and Wheeler, and we license additional brands for use in association with certain products we sell, including M&P, Smith & Wesson, and Performance Center by Smith & Wesson. In focusing on the growth of our brands, we organize our product development, customer service, and marketing teams into four brand lanes, each of which focuses on one of four distinct consumer verticals – Adventurer, Harvester, Marksman, and Defender – with each of our brands included in one of the brand lanes.

•Our Adventurer brands include products that help enhance consumers’ fishing, outdoor cooking, and camping experiences.

•Our Harvester brands focus on the activities hunters typically engage in, including the activities to prepare for the hunt, the hunt itself, and the activities that follow a hunt, such as meat processing.

•Our Marksman brands address product needs arising from consumer activities that take place primarily at the shooting range and where firearms are cleaned, maintained, and worked on.

•Our Defender brands focus on protection and include products that are used by consumers in situations that require self-defense, for training, and for securing high value or high consequence possessions.

Our sales activities are focused on how we go to market within the e-commerce and traditional distribution channels. These two channels involve distinct strategies intended to increase revenue and enhance market share by placing our products where the consumer expects to find them. Our sales team is built around the two distribution channels and is organized into product categories and regions within the e-commerce and traditional channels and sells our products across all of our brands. We measure our success through sales performance in these distribution channels against prior results and our own expectations.

Our objective is to enhance our position as a leading provider of high-quality and innovative outdoor lifestyle products and shooting sports accessories for the hunting, fishing, outdoor cooking, camping, shooting, personal security and defense, and other rugged outdoor markets and to expand our addressable market into carefully selected new product arenas.

Key elements of our strategy to achieve this objective and deliver long-term stockholder value are as follows:

•introduce a continuing stream of innovative new and differentiated rugged outdoor products and product extensions that appeal to consumers;

•leverage our innovation advantage to gain market share, enter new product categories, enter new consumer markets, and expand distribution;

•cultivate and enhance consumer relationships through our digital platforms;

•expand and diversify our supply chain;

•maintain an asset-light operating model that is designed to be agile; and

•pursue acquisitions that financially and strategically complement our current business.

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We believe that throughout our history, we have been able to utilize our understanding of consumer needs to develop and introduce innovative new disruptive products with strong intellectual property protection that have continually increased our market share in their product categories, such as our BUBBA Electric Fillet Knife, which we believe represents a substantial portion of the market share in the electric fillet knife category. We have enhanced our product development capabilities, developed a multi-faceted marketing approach, improved our multi-channel distribution platform, and expanded and diversified our business through organic growth and strategic acquisitions.

Our net sales were $222.3 million for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2025; $201.1 million for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2024; and $191.2 million for the fiscal year ended April 30, 2023. Our gross profit for the fiscal years ended April 30, 2025, 2024, and 2023 totaled $99.3 million, $88.4 million, and $88.1 million, respectively. Total assets were $246.4 million as of April 30, 2025 and $240.6 million as of April 30, 2024.

Spin-Off Transaction

On August 24, 2020, Smith & Wesson Brands, Inc., or our former parent company, completed the spin-off of its outdoor products and accessories business to us, or the Separation. The Separation was effected through the transfer of all of the assets and legal entities, subject to any related liabilities, associated with its outdoor products and accessories business to us, and the distribution of all the outstanding shares of our common stock to the holders of the common stock of our former parent company, as of the close of business on August 10, 2020, or the Distribution.

Corporate Information

We were incorporated in Delaware on January 28, 2020 and we maintain our principal executive offices at 1800 North Route Z, Columbia, Missouri 65202. Our telephone number is (800) 338-9585. Our website is located at AOB.com. Through our website, we make available free of charge our annual reports on Form 10-K, our proxy statements, our Sustainability report, our quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, our current reports on Form 8-K, and amendments to any of these documents filed or furnished pursuant to Section 13(a) or 15(d) of the Exchange Act. These documents are available as soon as reasonably practicable after we electronically file them with the SEC. We also post on our website the charters of our Audit, Compensation, and Nominations and Corporate Governance Committees; our Corporate Governance Guidelines, our Code of Conduct, and any amendments or waivers thereto; and any other corporate governance materials contemplated by the regulations of the SEC and Nasdaq. These documents are also available in print by contacting our corporate secretary at our executive offices. Our website and the information contained therein or connected thereto is not incorporated into this Annual Report on Form 10-K.

Market Opportunity

Our primary target customers are outdoor-oriented consumers who enjoy active lifestyles with a focus on outdoor activities. The primary users of our products consist of a wide range of outdoor enthusiasts, including those who engage in recreational target shooting, personal security and defense, hunting, fishing, meat processing, outdoor cooking, camping, hiking, and land management.

Outdoor recreation consumer participation trends have been favorable since 2020, resulting in 14.5 million new participants since January 2020, driven in part by the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. A report issued in 2024 by the Outdoor Industry Association outlined that the outdoor recreation participant base grew by 4.1 percent in calendar 2023 to a record 175.8 million participants, or 57 percent of the United States population ages six and older. According to various other industry studies published by the Outdoor Industry Association, National Shooting Sports Foundation, or NSSF, Southwick Associates, and the Recreational Boating and Fishing Foundation, participation has increased in hunting, camping, and fishing. According to the Outdoor Foundation and Recreational Boating & Fishing Foundation, as of 2023, there are an estimated 57.7 million anglers over the age of six in the United States, with nearly 43 million of those anglers participating in freshwater and 15 million anglers participating in saltwater. Our acquisition of Grilla in March 2022 gave us entry into the estimated $7 billion outdoor cooking industry. In addition, strong participation in firearm ownership led to approximately 26.2 million new entrants into shooting sports since calendar 2020, according to the NSSF. According to a study in 2022, the NSSF estimates that participation in sport shooting increased from 34 million to 63.5 million adults between 2009 and 2022. Finally, the Outdoor Industry Association estimated that roughly 15 million people engaged in hunting in 2022.

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Competitive Strengths

Portfolio of Leading Brands and Products Focused on the Rugged Outdoor Market

We currently sell our products under 20 distinct brands that we believe focus on the desires of our consumers and have a reputation for superior quality and product innovation. We believe we have built loyalty and brand recognition over our history by understanding our core consumers and delivering innovative products that they desire.

Our Brands Have Significant Runway for Growth

Our brands are organized into four brand lanes focused on specific consumer verticals that are based on consumer behaviors and desires. This structure organizes our business in a manner intended to deploy specific resources dedicated to designing and marketing products directed at these respective consumer verticals. For each existing brand, we apply the proper strategy and the dedicated brand lane resources to unlock the brand’s potential value. We use the defined methodologies to determine the types of products desired by that specific consumer and then design products in both existing and new categories that meet those desires. We believe this approach helps us drive growth from opportunities in new product categories and expand our footprint in existing categories.

Repeatable Process for Innovating and Rejuvenating Mature Product Categories

We have approximately 50 product designers, engineers, quality and sourcing specialists, and software developers situated across five in-house state-of-the-art product development labs who are capable of delivering over 200 new products, annually. Our product development employees come from diverse industry backgrounds, including medical and laboratory equipment, defense, home goods, and automotive. We believe this diversity yields a unique combination of methods and perspectives that fosters innovation within traditionally mature rugged outdoor product categories. We have developed a proprietary process that identifies large addressable markets where our brands can participate, seek out the most common consumer pain points within those markets, then seek to resolve those pain points with new innovative products and services, especially where we can create new intellectual property to protect our growth. We recognize the importance of innovation and protecting our intellectual property. In recent studies published in 2023, Deloitte noted that 76% of U.S. consumers are willing to pay more for products that align with their values, such as innovation and sustainability, while McKinsey & Company reported that in the past two years, 70% of consumers have tried new shopping behavior, including experimenting with innovative products. In addition, NielsenIQ reported in 2022 that 63% of U.S. consumers prefer to purchase new products from brands known for their innovation and quality. We currently have more than 400 issued and pending patents and have registered and unregistered trademarks related to our products. New products, which we define as any SKU introduced over the prior two fiscal years, represented 21.5% of net sales for fiscal 2025. New products introduced since fiscal 2020 represent over 50% of our fiscal 2025 net sales and have a compound average growth rate of over 40% during that time.

One example of this innovation is our entry into the large, underserved "catch and release" market with our BUBBA tournament-grade Pro Series Smart Fish Scale, or Pro SFS, which is integrated with smart technology that consumers can access through a BUBBA smartphone application. This smart technology allows anglers to log their catches, record detailed information, and connect with other anglers to share information about their catches and their excursions. We believe the BUBBA Pro SFS is the first product of its kind and is intended to reinvent the way anglers pursue their sport. In addition to fostering enhanced competition and enabling the gamification of freshwater fishing through its tournament functionality, the BUBBA Pro SFS supports conservation and sustainability in fishing by allowing anglers to catch, weigh, and immediately release their catch, reducing the fish out-of-the-water time. In fiscal 2025, we launched the BUBBA SFS Lite, which offers some of the same professional grade features and gamification capabilities for casual fishing trips, at a price that everyday anglers can appreciate. The strategy we employed with BUBBA is one that was several years in the making, and serves as one example of our multi-year product development approach.

Another example of our multi-year product development approach is our Caldwell ClayCopter, a revolutionary new target system, which includes an easy-to-use, handheld electronic launcher that propels a set of biodegradable discs up to 100 yards in a variety of flight patterns, providing shooters with a unique and challenging experience, and making it extremely easy and fun to take a thrower and targets to the range. For nearly 150 years, traditional clay targets have been the most practical option for shotgun sports enthusiasts. But traditional clay targets typically require heavy throwers that are bulky and cumbersome to store and transport. Clays are extremely fragile, they fly in predictable patterns, and they come in heavy containers that often make transportation a challenge. The ClayCopter was designed entirely in-house and includes pending intellectual property. The portable launcher weighs just three pounds, but delivers the same power of a traditional thrower in a handheld motorized design small enough to fit in a range bag or backpack. The ClayCopter target discs are 70% lighter than traditional clays and designed to break only when shot. They can be purchased in a lightweight,

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compact tube of 50 disks and they are inexpensive to transport, allowing retailers and our Caldwell brand to ship directly to consumers, and adding a new consumable product to our revenue stream.

Because we have such a wide breadth of products that span 20 brands, our product development teams frequently leverage our products to “cross-pollinate” technology across brand lanes and bring new insights into mature product categories. An example of this ‘cross-pollination’ can be found in our BUBBA Pro SFS, which we launched in 2023 and which incorporates technology or design from products that are situated across all four brand lanes. The BUBBA Pro SFS incorporates lithium battery pack technology from our Caldwell brand, Bluetooth connection capability to a smart phone with live data monitoring and logging through a cloud server system from our Lockdown brand, interactive LCD screen and menu system from our BOG brand, and waterproof storage system and BUBBA-Rubba non-slip grip technology from our BUBBA brand.

Leverageable Platform for Acquisitions with Demonstrated Acquisition Execution

We believe our brand lanes and sales organization provide us with a leverageable platform from which to integrate acquisitions quickly, achieve cost savings, provide immediate brand support, and add sales expertise to drive brand penetration within our customer base. In addition, our senior management team brings significant acquisition experience, having completed a total of 24 transactions over the last 18 years, ranging from $1 million to approximately $1 billion in enterprise value. In conjunction with reviewing potential acquisition candidates, we believe that our long-standing industry relationships facilitate the identification of future potential acquisition targets.

Experienced, Entrepreneurial Management Team

Our senior management team has substantial knowledge and experience in the rugged outdoor industry. This team is responsible for defining and executing our business strategies with a “brand-first” orientation supported by our brand lanes. We strive to promote a collaborative and supportive environment for our employees. This approach allows employees within our brand lanes to pursue new ideas and experimentation, leading to a highly entrepreneurial culture.

Strategy

Introduce a Continuing Stream of New and Differentiated Rugged Outdoor Products and Extensions that Appeal to Consumers

We plan to continue conceiving, designing, producing or sourcing, and marketing in a timely manner a continuing stream of innovative new and differentiated high-quality rugged outdoor products and product extensions that appeal to consumers, achieve market acceptance, and drive customer satisfaction and loyalty to our product groups. Our tradition of innovation and our ongoing research and development, product engineering, product and component sourcing, marketing, and distribution activities are critical components of our ability to continue to offer successful products and help grow our business through increased market share in the product categories in which we participate.

We believe our track record of understanding consumer desires, introducing flagship products in our core product categories, and then strategically expanding within those categories will enable us to continue to expand our existing product offerings. We recently received the following awards:

•Big Rock Sports Dealer Show 2025 “Best New Shooting Accessory” – Caldwell Lead Sled 4

•Outdoor Life 2025 “Best Overall Chamber Vac Sealer” and “Best Overall External Vac Sealer” – MEAT! Your Maker;

•Outdoor Life 2025 "Best Clay Throwers" – Caldwell Claymore;

•Smoked BB Source 2025 "Best Vertical Smoker" – Grilla Mammoth Vertical Pallet Smoker;

•Outdoor Life 2025 "Best Large Hopper Sausage Stuffers" – MEAT! Your Maker 15.0 Pound Vertical Sausage Stuffer;

•Food & Wine 2025 "Best Splurge Meat Grinder" – MEAT! Your Maker 0.5 Horsepower Dual Grind Meat Grinder;

•NASGW Show 2024 "Best New Accessory" – Caldwell Claymore PullPup;

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Leverage Our Innovation Advantage To Gain Market Share, Enter New Product Categories, Enter New Consumer Markets, and Expand Distribution

We plan to continue to leverage our innovation advantage to grow our business through gaining market share, entering new product categories, entering new consumer markets, and expanding our distribution. For instance, we believe we have displaced competitors in the meat processing market with products from MEAT! Your Maker. Our Caldwell Claymore family of clay throwers, as well as our new ClayCopter Launcher and Targets, represent our organic entry into the broader shotgun shooting sports category. We believe our innovative BUBBA Pro SFS and new SFS Lite represents our organic entry into a large freshwater "catch and release" market. We believe our innovative Hooyman seed spreaders represent our organic expansion in the farm, home, and hardware distribution channels. The acquisition of Grilla represents our entry into an estimated $7 billion outdoor cooking market by providing high-quality, barbecue grills; Wi-Fi-enabled wood pellet grills; smokers; accessories; and modular outdoor kitchens. We expect, by gaining market share, entering new product categories, entering new consumer markets, and expanding distribution, we will further increase and diversify our customer base.

Cultivate and Enhance Consumer Relationships through Our Digital Platforms

We plan to continue to cultivate and enhance our direct relationships with consumers by addressing the growing desire of consumers to deal directly with the product and brand source and by recognizing the changing retail landscape and the trend to two-day or next-day delivery. We have established dedicated websites for all of our key brands, and each of our brands has access to marketing and e-commerce resources that work to support online marketing and delivery methods that foster direct-to-consumer efforts. We also expect that our direct-to-consumer efforts will generate pull-through for our products at retail locations for those consumers who prefer a traditional retail approach rather than purchasing directly from our online platform. In addition, our e-commerce platform allows consumers to purchase our products direct from our warehouse, which is not constrained by inventory management efforts at retail. Our e-commerce platform and digital systems also provide opportunities to support the launch of entirely new brands and products to meet the needs of our consumers. For example, we leveraged our e-commerce platform and digital ecosystem to organically enter the meat processing market with our MEAT! Your Maker brand, which includes grinders, mixers, vacuum sealers, sausage stuffers, dehydrators, and slicers. In addition, we sell Grilla branded products, acquired in fiscal 2022, directly to consumers on our e-commerce platform. Although we began selling these brands into the traditional channel in fiscal 2024 and fiscal 2025, respectively, we have sold and expect to continue to sell these products directly to consumers through our websites MEATyourmaker.com and grillagrills.com. In fiscal 2025, our direct-to-consumer channel represented 13.3% of our total net sales.

Maintain a Flexible and Resilient Supply Chain

We plan to maintain a flexible and resilient supply chain by identifying, qualifying, attracting, and maintaining contract manufacturers in various locations and other suppliers of finished products and components made to our specifications and the raw materials needed for products and components that meet our efficiency, quality, cost, delivery, and other requirements. Qualifying additional suppliers, regardless of location, reduces our dependence on any one or small group of suppliers and helps protect us against supplier financial, operational, performance, or capacity issues.

Maintain an Asset-Light Operating Model that Allows the Company to Remain Agile

We believe that our asset-light operating model has allowed us to remain agile in order to react to market changes. A key component within that operating model is owning our intellectual property and the tooling required to manufacture our products. We plan to continue to leverage the infrastructure of our manufacturing partners while we invest in the product designs and tooling required in manufacturing. In addition, we plan to continue to leverage the internal investments that we have made in our e-commerce platform, enterprise resource planning or ERP system, and data analytics platform to drive net sales while controlling costs.

Pursue Acquisitions that Financially and Strategically Complement our Current Business

We plan to continue to complement our organic growth initiatives by pursuing strategic acquisitions that will enable us to expand our product offerings, add new brands, penetrate adjacent and complementary markets, increase our customer base, expand our supply chain, increase our marketing and distribution capabilities, and enhance our operating results through improved acquired company performance, especially when we believe we can improve the performance and

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profitability of an acquired company through the implementation of our operating methods, strategies, flexible technology platforms, and services. We believe our latest acquisition of Grilla in fiscal 2022 demonstrated the above criteria. We believe the architecture of our brand lanes, sales organization, distribution capabilities, and flexible technology platforms provide us with a leverageable structure from which to integrate acquisitions quickly, achieve cost savings, provide immediate brand support, and add sales expertise to drive brand penetration within our existing customer base.

Product Design and Development

We believe that innovation is key to our long-term success. We have developed a proprietary process that identifies large addressable markets where our brands can participate, seek out the most common consumer pain points within those markets, then seek to resolve those pain points with new innovative products and services, especially where we can create new intellectual property to protect our growth. In addition, to be successful as a leading provider of outdoor lifestyle products and shooting sports accessories, we must continue to conceive, design, produce or source, and market a continuing stream of innovative new products and product extensions that we believe appeal to consumers and achieve market acceptance and drive customer satisfaction and loyalty to our brands and product groups.

We believe that we will drive customer satisfaction and loyalty by offering high-quality, innovative products on a timely and cost-effective basis, as well as providing world-class customer service, training, and support. We regard our high-quality, innovative products as the most important aspect of our customer satisfaction and loyalty, but we also offer customer service and support with various programs, such as customer support numbers, e-mail customer question and answer communications, broad service policies, and product warranties. We have developed unique brand-specific content on our websites to help maximize the consumers’ experience with our products.

Through our research and development personnel, we conceive, design, and develop potential products that we believe will be attractive to our customers and help address the needs, wants, and desires of our target consumer base. In so doing, we must seek to anticipate and respond to trends and shifts in consumer preferences by continually adjusting our product mix with innovative features and designs and marketing them in an effective manner. Prior to introducing any product, we assess its cost of production and delivery, estimate its potential sales volume and margin, and conduct vigorous prototype and production-quality sample testing.

As noted previously, our outdoor lifestyle products include premium sportsmen knives and tools for fishing and hunting; land management tools for hunting preparedness and for use in the backyard; products used while hunting; meat processing equipment; outdoor cooking products; and camping, survival, and emergency preparedness products, while our shooting sports accessories products include rests, handgun vaults, and other related accessories; electro-optical devices, including hunting optics, firearm aiming devices, flashlights, and laser grips; and reloading, gunsmithing, and firearm cleaning supplies.

We typically launch over 200 new outdoor products and accessories stock keeping units, or SKUs, each year. We generally strive to bring a new product from concept to market within 12 months, depending on product complexity and other matters. Our extensive product portfolio includes highly regarded brands, such as Caldwell, our line of shotgun sports products, shooting and range supplies, BOG, our line of hunting accessories; BUBBA, our line of fishing tools and knives; MEAT! Your Maker, our line of meat processing equipment; and Grilla, our line of outdoor cooking products.

Approximately 15% of our employees are focused on research and development activities. In fiscal 2025, 2024, and 2023, our gross spending on research and development activities relating to the development of new products was $7.7 million, $6.9 million, and $6.4 million, respectively. We expense research and development costs as incurred.

Our Brands

We currently sell our products under 20 distinct brands organized under four brand lanes.

Adventurer Brands

•Grilla - outdoor cooking products

•BUBBA – fishing tools and knives

•ust – camping and survival products

•Schrade – rugged outdoor cutlery and tools

•Imperial – cutlery and tools

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Harvester Brands

•Hooyman – land management tools

•Old Timer – cutlery and tools

•BOG – hunting accessories

•Uncle Henry – hunting knives and tools

•MEAT! Your Maker – meat processing equipment

Marksman Brands

•Caldwell – shooting range and marksman products

•Wheeler – gunsmithing tools

•Tipton – cleaning and maintenance products

•Frankford Arsenal – reloading products

Defender Brands

•Lockdown – security and storage solutions

•M&P Accessories – cutlery, flashlights, and various accessories

•Performance Center by Smith & Wesson – cutlery, cleaning kits, and various accessories

•Smith & Wesson Accessories – knives, flashlights, shooting glasses and cases, cleaning kits, and hearing protection products

•Crimson Trace – aiming solutions

•LaserLyte – training systems

We own all of our brands with the exception of those brands and trademarks that we license, which includes the Smith & Wesson logo, the script “Smith & Wesson,” the “M&P” logo, and the script “Performance Center,” which are well-known and have a reputation for quality, value, and trustworthiness in the accessories industry.

Brand Lanes

Our Brand Lanes are the foundation for our distinctive product development and marketing functions. Our brand-first approach is combined with passionate personnel to deliver authentic experiences to our consumers. Our knowledgeable employees develop a deep understanding of our brands and understand precisely what our customers and consumers desire most in new products. Dedicated management, marketing, creative, digital support, and engineering resources supporting each brand lane allow us to strategically and efficiently approach our development roadmap and marketing efforts.

Marketing

We deploy a multi-faceted strategy to engage with consumers and to deliver positive consumer experiences. Our marketing approach begins with our team utilizing digital, television, print, and other advertising media to assure that our customers and consumers connect with our brands and to the products we offer.

In order to help convert at the point of purchase, increase the likelihood of loyal consumer relationships, and build advocacy with our consumer base, we market our products to consumers using focused campaigns that align with each brand’s core characteristics. In this regard, we utilize what we believe are the most impactful mediums, such as in-store retail merchandising, online merchandising, grassroots events, digital advertising campaigns, influencer marketing, and robust distribution of content across most social media channels, to encourage enthusiasts to continue exploring our brand offerings and ultimately lead to purchases. Our influencers participate on a variety of social media platforms, regularly posting brand imagery, lifestyle content, instructional material, and detailed reviews of our products to help promote our brands. To further our message, we frequently participate in various earned media across a full spectrum of digital and print publications, which drives authenticity back to our consumer base as they read about the latest information regarding our suite of new products. This multifaceted approach is intertwined with the brand lane structure that we believe differentiates us from our competition and offers a significant advantage in efficiency.

For the fiscal years ended April 30, 2025, 2024, and 2023, advertising and promotion expenses were $10.9 million, $11.1 million, and $11.9 million, respectively, excluding the cost of rebates and promotions reflected in gross profit.

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Original Content

We utilize content as the engine to drive our strategic approach to marketing. We continue to emphasize the enhancement of our content capture and editing capabilities. Our team of producers and external resources has provided an accessible outlet for regularly distributed fresh content for each of our brands. The deployment of this content assists us in positioning our brands, garnering the attention of our customers, establishing a lifestyle connection with those discovering our brands for the first time, and educating our consumer base about the features and benefits of the products that fall within each brand. By owning the development and distribution of our content, we are able to ensure that each message is consistent with our brands’ positioning and strategy.

Our Digital Platform

We believe social media platforms, such as Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube, are effective in enabling us to showcase content, educate our customer base about our products, and generate enthusiasm for most of our brands. Our direct-to-consumer e-mail marketing helps us to further engage our consumers and communicate the value of our brands. We continue to invest in new digital marketing capabilities designed by our e-commerce and marketing teams to provide favorable customer experiences. Utilizing our digital platform, we operate branded e-commerce websites designed to inform, inspire, and prepare our customers for the rugged outdoors. We believe our digital platform supports our core business and facilitates future sales growth and profitability.

We utilize our websites, including AOB.com, BUBBA.com, SCHRADE.com, grillagrills.com, ustgear.com, BOGhunt.com, Hooyman.com, OldTimerKnives.com, MEATyourmaker.com, CaldwellShooting.com, FrankfordArsenal.com, WheelerTools.com, TiptonClean.com, CrimsonTrace.com, Lockdown.com, Laserlyte.com, and store.smith-wesson.com, to market our products and to provide a wide range of information regarding our company to customers, consumers, dealers, distributors, investors, and government agencies.

Industry and Consumer Events

We sponsor a number of events and organizations in support of outdoor activities that our consumers enjoy. We typically attend various trade shows, including the Shooting, Hunting, Outdoor Trade (SHOT) Show; the International Convention of Allied Sportfishing Trades (ICAST); the National Association of Sporting Goods Wholesalers Show (NASGW); the IWA Outdoor Classics Show in Europe; National Hardware Show; ; Consumer Electronics Show (CES); Outdoor Retailer (OR Show); REDCREST; Bassmaster Classic; and various distributor, buying group, and consumer shows. We are actively involved in organizations that support our industry such as American Knife and Tool Institute, where we have a seat on the Board of Regents. We also seek to establish relationships with professionals and influencers for our brands to help evaluate, promote, and establish product performance and authenticity with customers and consumers.

Distribution, Channels, and Customers

We distribute our products through e-commerce and traditional distribution channels. Our e-commerce channels include net sales from customers that do not traditionally operate a physical brick and mortar store but rather generate the majority of their revenues from consumer purchases from their retail websites. This also includes our own e-commerce platform, including our websites. Our traditional channels include net sales from customers that primarily operate out of physical brick and mortar stores and generate the large majority of revenues from consumer purchases inside their brick-and-mortar locations. These traditional distribution channels include sports specialty stores, sporting goods stores, dealers and distributors, mass market, home and auto retailers, and original equipment manufacturers. Our go-to-market strategies for these two channels are tailored very differently, with e-commerce initiatives focused on digital advertising and consumer awareness, while traditional channel initiatives include in-store displays, focused advertising, and tailored promotional programs. The world’s largest e-commerce retailer, through its very extensive customer base and consumer-driven product offerings, accounted for 20.3% and 22.1% of our net sales for fiscal 2025 and 2024, respectively.

Our sales team is built around the two distribution channels and is organized into product categories and regions within the e-commerce and traditional channels and sells our products across all of our brands. We believe the structure of our sales organization allows us to accomplish four very important goals. First, it gives us the ability to consistently focus on the unique needs and requirements of each product category. Second, it allows us to bring brand expertise and awareness to our customers. Third, and most importantly, it allows us to develop and execute strategic plans based on how each channel conducts business as well as how it targets the primary and secondary consumers within those channels. Finally, our sales organization is designed to be able to adapt to acquisitions and the expansion of our brands into new

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categories without having to alter our sales structure. We believe this will allow us to integrate new categories into our teams with minimal disruption to our existing business and, more importantly, allow us to quickly begin leveraging our size and scope with the new additions.

Although we have long-established relationships with many of our customers, we generally do not have long-term supply or binding contracts or guaranties of minimum purchase arrangements with our customers. Instead, our customers generally purchase from us through individual purchase orders. As a result, these customers may cancel their orders, change purchase quantities from forecasted volumes, delay purchases for a number of reasons, or change other terms of our business relationship. We grant payment terms to most commercial customers ranging from 30 to 90 days. However, in some instances, we provide longer payment terms.

We believe consumers favor multiple purchasing options between online and traditional brick and mortar retailers. As a result, traditional brick and mortar retail stores are evolving to remain competitive. Traditional brick and mortar retailers have also been expanding their own e-commerce retail platforms and assortment of products as well as expanding their online advertising and promotional programs.

Retailers are continuing to reduce lead times for product delivery and reducing their inventory levels, and in certain circumstances, require suppliers to ship orders directly to consumers for purchases on their e-commerce platforms.

The ultimate users of our products consist of outdoor enthusiasts, including shooting and hunting enthusiasts, fishing enthusiasts, outdoor cooking enthusiasts, campers, hikers, and other sports enthusiasts.

Service and Support

In order to provide consumers with positive experiences involving our products, we maintain a dedicated team of trained customer support representatives who seek to successfully address customer questions or issues that may arise across our product offerings. We utilize a customer service number and resources on our website to answer questions and resolve issues. We stand behind the quality of our products by offering a variety of warranties, ranging from limited lifetime, four-year, three-year, two-year, or one-year warranty programs, depending on the product. We also will repair or replace with an item of equivalent value, at our option, certain products or parts that are found to be defective under normal use and service, without charge during the warranty period.

Sourcing, Assembly, and Production

Except for certain assembly operations performed at our Columbia, Missouri facility, we generally utilize third-party contract manufacturers and suppliers for our finished products and components. Third-party contract manufacturers and suppliers provide finished products and components to us in accordance with our product and component specifications. Third parties also supply us and our contract manufacturers with the raw materials used in our products and components, including steel, plastic, aluminum, copper, lead, and packaging materials. Most of our third-party contract manufacturers and suppliers are in Asia, primarily China, and, to a lesser extent, Taiwan, Vietnam, Myanmar, and the Philippines.

We generally provide these suppliers with short-term advance forecasts of our production requirements, however, when we anticipate delays in our supply chain or congestion at shipping ports, we will order in advance to mitigate supply chain risk. Our suppliers must meet our quality and other standards and have the ability to produce our finished products and components and supply our raw materials in a timely and efficient manner. We strive to maintain a flexible and resilient supply chain to mitigate the potential impacts from tariffs, to maintain competitive pricing and high quality standards, and to position ourselves to respond rapidly to changes in customer demand, market trends, and other supply chain risks. For certain products and components, we utilize a dual sourcing supply chain to mitigate risks associated with sourcing key components from any one supplier.

Although we do not have long-term contractual arrangements with any of our suppliers, we have long lasting working relationships that we believe guarantee us production capacity, prices, lead times, or delivery schedules. Our reliance on these independent parties exposes us to vulnerability because of our dependence on a few sources of supply. We believe, however, that other sources of supply are available. In addition, we continually strive to develop relationships with other sources of supply in order to reduce our dependence on any one source of supply. As a result, we believe that our current and other available suppliers will ensure that we obtain a sufficient supply of goods built to our specifications in a timely manner and on satisfactory economic terms.

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Facilities and Distribution

We lease approximately 632,000 square feet of building and surrounding property located at 1800 North Route Z, Columbia, Missouri. The lease provides us with an option to expand the building by up to 491,000 additional square feet. The lease term ends on November 26, 2038 and does not provide for an extension of the term of the lease. We receive related tax and other incentives from federal, state, and local governmental authorities.

We also lease 5,000 square feet of office space in Chicopee, Massachusetts; 2,500 square feet of office space in Shenzhen, People's Republic of China; and 2,500 square feet of office space in Yanjiang, People's Republic of China.

Our Missouri facility includes our principal executive, administrative, financial, sales, marketing, R&D, production, assembly, and distribution operations. Our Massachusetts facility houses certain administrative and finance staff. Our China facilities house certain R&D staff.

Patents, Trademarks, and Copyrights

We recognize the importance of innovation and protecting our intellectual property. We currently have more than 400 active or pending patents at the United States Patent and Trademark Office and have registered and unregistered trademarks related to our products. We apply for patents whenever we develop innovative new products, unique designs, or processes of commercial importance and seek trademark protection when we believe they provide a marketing advantage. We do not believe that our business is materially dependent on any single patent or trademark.

We rely on a combination of patents, copyrights, trade secrets, trademarks, trade dress, customer records, monitoring, brand protection services, confidentiality agreements, and other contractual provisions to protect our intellectual property.

Because of the significance of our brand names, our trademarks, service marks, trade dress, and copyrights are also important to our business. We have an active global program of trademark registration, monitoring, and enforcement. We market our products and accessories under 20 distinct brands, including the brands sold under a license agreement.

We vigorously pursue and challenge infringements of our patents, trademarks, service marks, trade dress, and copyrights, as we believe the goodwill associated with them is a cornerstone of our branding strategy.