American Outdoor Brands (AOB), the parent company of Grilla Grills, reported their quarter ended October 31st this week. There were some tidbits about Grilla and about shifts in the business overall.

American Outdoor Brands has identified innovation as a key pillar to their growth. As that relates to Grilla Grills, they’ve recently released a large vertical pellet smoker and a pellet fueled pizza oven.

Their future growth is tied to continuing to release new innovations. Those innovations aren’t just in the product categories that they currently operate in. They called out in their investor presentation that they plan to expand Grilla’s offerings.

Grilla’s innovation pipeline is full of products that expand its ecosystem and fulfill the brand’s promise to “evolve the backyard.”

December 2025 AOB Investor Presentation

Grilla sits in their Outdoor Lifestyle segment which currently makes up 57% of their overall business with Shooting Sports occupying the balance. That’s been growing since fiscal year 2020 where is was 46% of their business.

AOB projects their future state to be at $400 million in revenue (they’re current at $207 million) with a mix of 65% in Outdoor Lifestyle. That will likely require a larger product portfolio or taking quite a bit of share.

With AOB’s focus on innovation, it’s a bit surprising that they haven’t updated any of their core pellet grill offerings that built the brand beyond some controller upgrades. Their comment around expanding the ecosystem leads me to believe that won’t be a near-term priorty either. It makes me curious if they believe there’s more ROI in category expansion under the current market conditions.

Online Sales

I’ve covered for quite a while now how online sales continue to be a source of double digit growth for many major birck and mortar retailers. AOB is seeing the benefits of that on their end.

They’re conversely though seeing revenue declines at online-only retailers. They argue that online sales at omnichannel retailers are canibalizing some of that, and that those sales should be bucketed as digital sales rather than traditional channel sales.

Before I turn to channel sell-in, I want to take a step back and talk about the evolution that is occurring in our traditional and e-comm sales channels. In our traditional channel, a growing share of what has historically been classified as brick-and-mortar or in-store sales are now occurring through traditional retailers’ online channels. Buy online, pick up in store, ship to home and same-day delivery, reflecting an evolutionary shift in how consumers shop. Many of our largest brick-and-mortar partners have invested heavily in omnichannel capabilities and we are benefiting from that investment.

For some of our retailers, online sales represent up to 20% of their total revenue. Although these transactions reflect digital buying behavior, they are captured in a growing portion of our traditional sales channel results. In short, consumers are still buying online, but the wear is shifting.

Brian Murphy, President and CEO of AOB

There’s definitely truth to that with all the major retailers offering a variety of deliver options from online purchases. It’s hard to tease out from their numbers though if there is any net loss or gain in digital with that shift.

AOB has been moving towards putting Grilla in wholesale but they currently are still one of their DTC brands. There weren’t many Grill specific comments on that earnings call, but thye did call out growth year-over-year.

In our Outdoor Lifestyle category, which consists of products relating to hunting, fishing, meat processing, outdoor cooking and rugged outdoor activities, net sales were $34.6 million, down 5% compared to Q2 last year, mainly driven by a decrease in meat processing equipment, partially offset by increases in our BOG and Grilla brands.

Andy Fulmer, CFO of AOB

They also called out strong results at Grilla later in the Q&A section of the call.

And I think the — we haven’t talked about direct-to-consumer much either, but we also saw, and that’s part of the POS, really, really strong direct-to-consumer business, in particular for MEAT! Your Maker and Grilla…

Brian Murphy, President and CEO of AOB