Solo Stove and their parent company Solo Brands are continuing to implement changes to turn around the company. They’ve made significant strides already, and they have more on the horizon.

Solo Stove started out as a direct-to-consumer (DTC) company that relied heavily on promotions. Their pricing was constantly changing on their website to drive sales.

While that can work in a DTC model, it’s more difficult when also selling through retail. Solo Stove has focused much more on the wholesale channel in recent years as DTC sales declined. It’s difficult for retail partners to deal with changing pricing and online promotions undercutting them.

Solo Stove has trimmed the number of retailers they’re working with to focus on ones that best represent the brand, and they’re moving to a minimum advertised price (MAP) model.

Under our Solo Stove segment, although sales improved sequentially from Q1, our second quarter sales declined significantly from a year ago, as expected, reflecting the continued hangover as our retail partners work through their excessive year-end inventory, and we better aligned our promotional strategies with our key retail partners. We have made a concerted effort to move away from the heavy promotional approach in our direct-to-consumer channel with MAP integrity playing a key role as we set up Solo Stove for long-term success. If you are not familiar with MAP, it stands for minimum advertised price, which Laura and I will refer to today.

John Larson, CEO of Solo Brands

Innovation

Solo Stove has historically found success with releasing new products. Their growth through the Pandemic propelled them to be synonymous with smokeless fire pits, and they feel that the strength of the brand will carry over to adjacent categories.

To big examples of that are the cooler and the griddle that they released this year. Both are outside of the fire pit category.

The new Griddle we’ve launched, which we’re very excited about. And quite frankly, we’re now sold out and we’re on back order. So we like — really like the success so far that we’ve had on Griddle and the cooler space that we’ve moved into. So we believe our customer, higher end loves a great product, but we have to be a premium brand in our products will move with us. And so a big part of our strategy is moving in those adjacent categories. And right now, we feel really comfortable with the reviews we’ve had and the success we’ve had with customers moving out of just the core fire pit markets into some broader adjacencies.

John Larson, CEO of Solo Brands

Solo Stove still has two more innovations they plan to release this year, and they will continue new releases into 2025. While they haven’t given any indication of what they will release, reading the tea leaves I think it will be a new line of furniture that doesn’t require tools, and an outdoor fire place that I’ll write about in the near future.