Byrna Technologies, Inc.

Good morning. Welcome to Berna's fiscal second quarter 2025 earnings conference call. My name is Daryl, and I will be your operator for today's call. Joining us for today's presentation are the company's CEO, Brian Gantz, and CFO, Lori Kearns. Following their remarks, we will open the call to questions. Earlier today, Berna released results for its fiscal second quarter ended May 31st, 2025. The copy of the press release is available on the company's website. Before turning the call over to Brian Gantz, Berna Technologies' Chief Executive Officer, I will read the safe harbor statement. Some discussions held today include forward-looking statements. Actual results could differ materially from the statements made today. Please refer to Berna's most recent 10-K and 10-Q filings for a more complete description of risk factors that could affect these projections and assumptions. The company assumes no obligation to update forward-looking statements as a result of new information, future events, or otherwise. As this call will include references to non-GAAP results, please see the press release in the investor section of our website, ir.berna.com, for further information regarding forward-looking statements and reconciliations of non-GAAP results to GAAP results. Now, I would like to turn the call over to Berna's CEO, Brian Gantz. Sir, please proceed.

Thank you, Daryl, and thank you, everyone, for joining us today. This morning, we filed our 10-Q with the SEC and issued a press release providing our financial results and business highlights for the fiscal second quarter ended May 31, 2025. As usual, I will start by turning the call over to our CFO, Lori Kearns, who will review our financial results for the period. Following her remarks, I'll discuss the operational highlights that drove our 41% year-over-year revenue growth, and continued gap and non-gap EBITDA profitability for the quarter. I will then offer insights into our strategy on a go-forward basis before we open the call to questions from our covering research analysts. Laurie.

Thank you, Brian. Good morning, everyone. Let's review our financial results for the fiscal second quarter ended May 31, 2025. Net revenue for Q2 2025 was $28.5 million, a 41% increase from the $20.3 million reported in the fiscal second quarter of 2024. This $8.2 million increase was driven by the launch of the CL, increased dealer and chain store sales, and broader brand adoption. In Q2, direct-to-consumer revenues increased by $2.2 million through Burna.com and Amazon.com compared to the prior year period. Additionally, sales to dealers increased by 3.9 million, or 106%, largely driven by initial stocking orders for Sportsman's Warehouse. Gross profit for Q2 2025 was 17.6 million, or 62% of net revenue, compared to 12.6 million, or 62% of net revenue for Q2 2024. The introduction of the Compact Launcher led to a favorable product-sales mix that offset any decrease due to a change in channel mix from stronger dealer sales. Operating expenses for Q2 2025 were $14.2 million compared to $10.6 million for Q2 2024. The increase in operating expenses was driven by increased variable selling expenses, discretionary marketing spend, and higher payroll costs. as well as some expenses directly related to the launch of the Compact Launcher. Net income for Q2 2025 was 2.4 million, compared to 2.1 million for Q2 2024. This increase was driven by the overall increase in product sales, which was partially offset with higher income tax expense for the quarter. As mentioned in our last call, due to the release of our valuation allowance in Q4 2024, the company will transition into full taxpayer status in 2025, and we expect our effective tax rate to be approximately 23% for the year. Adjusted EBITDA, a non-GAAP metric for Q2 2025, totaled 4.3 million compared to 2.8 million for Q2 2024. Cash, cash equivalents, and marketable securities at May 31, 2025 totaled 13 million, compared to 25.7 million at November 30th, 2024. The decrease reflects the planned increase in inventory ahead of the Compact Launcher release and normal seasonal working capital movements. Inventory at May 31, 2025 totaled 32.3 million compared to 20 million at November 30th, 2024. The company has no current or long-term debt. I'll now turn it back to Brian.

Thanks, Laurie. As our results demonstrate, the sales momentum from the launch of our compact launcher in May catapulted us to a new quarterly revenue record of $28.5 million. We achieved this significant 41% year-over-year growth despite the slowdown in consumer spending and the subdued sales in April that we saw while people waited for the launch of the compact launcher. It's important to note that we were able to achieve these record sales without yet selling the compact launcher on Amazon, which, as everyone knows, has been growing at a faster rate than Barna.com. As of May 27th, however, the CL is now available on Amazon and is included in this week's Prime Day sales event. We believe that having the compact launcher on Amazon will will significantly increase product visibility and will help support future sales growth. As a reminder, the fee on products sold through Amazon is 15%. That said, we are somewhat agnostic as to whether we sell through Amazon or burner.com, as our net margins are not that much different, as there are several areas of savings on Amazon, including no credit card fees, no Shopify fees, and lower outbound freight. Additionally, our advertising costs are significantly lower on Amazon. Laurie spoke about Sportsman's Warehouse. That was another important driver for last quarter. It was a solid start to our partnership with Sportsman's Warehouse. Q2 dealer sales, as Laurie mentioned, were up 106% or $3.9 million, with the bulk of that coming from Sportsman's initial stocking order which drove $2.4 million of the $3.9 million increase in dealer sales. During the quarter, we launched 21 store-within-a-store locations, 14 of which have a Burna-supplied shooting pod. Another 34 stores have Burna's point-of-sale display, which is a four-sided fixture. And finally, four more sportsman stores use sportsman-supplied end caps to offer Burna products. This brings the total number of sportsman's locations that currently stock Burna products to 59 stores. Even in the locations that only have a Burna point-of-sale display or a sportsman-supplied end cap, sportsman sales associates can let people test fire the Burna in their archery range. And many of the sportsman's locations have successfully taken advantage of this opportunity to allow potential customers to to test-fire the Burna launchers. And as a result, some of the POS locations, that is the locations with just a point-of-sale display, are outperforming sportsman's locations that have a Burna shooting pod. We recently staffed 12 of the sportsman's locations that have a store within a store with a Burna representative, or what we call our Burna geniuses. These are representatives that can walk customers through the less lethal experience. It is our intention to provide Burna Geniuses for every store with a shooting pod. We believe that this in-store support will further strengthen sales going forward. I have to say that both Burna and Sportsman's are pleased with the initial results of the partnership, as sales have grown every single week since we started off the program. As a result, we are looking to add nine more shooting pods in Sportsman's best locations over the next several months. At the same time, Berna and Sportsman's are working on outfitting an additional 72 stores with Berna's POS displays, which would bring the total number of Sportsman stores that carry Berna to approximately 140 locations by year end. It is important that we bring on the remaining Sportsman stores as quickly as possible, as our celebrity endorsers, such as Tucker Carlson, are now telling their audiences that they can try and buy Berna's range of non-lethal launchers at their nearest Sportsman's Warehouse location. Other outdoor and sporting goods chains are starting to take notice of the success that Sportsman's Warehouse is having with Berna. And while Berna cannot offer these chains a shooting experience due to our exclusive arrangements with Sportsman's Warehouse, we are seeing increased interest in Berna which is translating into more stores carrying Burna. Specifically, Big Five Sporting Goods, a chain with over 400 locations, and Shields, who are already carrying Burna products, are growing the number of stores stocking Burna. At the same time, they're expanding the range of products that each store will carry. We're also seeing interest from new chains that we've not worked before, including Dunham's Sports, a chain with 260 locations that is testing the market. Perhaps most interesting to me is we are seeing interest from chains that serve new markets, such as farming and ranching. This quarter, both Rural King with 123 stores and Family Farm at Home with 73 stores will be putting Berna in a number of their stores as they test the market. Expanding our brick-and-mortar footprint is critically important in the current market environment, As the retail market generally, and the firearms industry specifically, are facing economic headwinds due to falling consumer confidence, driven in part by uncertainty over interest rates and the effect of tariffs. By growing the number of outdoor and sporting goods stores carrying burnout, and by expanding the range of products that they carry, and perhaps most importantly, by expanding the markets that we're able to go after, such as the farm and ranch market, we can continue to grow our top and bottom line even in the wake of a softer retail environment. For our company-owned stores, these stores have performed exceptionally well and are ahead of where we anticipated them to be at this point in the year. Just five months after opening, our stores in Scottsdale, Nashville, and Fort Wayne are already profitable, and we expect our Salem store to become profitable in the near future. When combined, all five of our retail stores averaged $69,000 in sales in May, which annualizes to approximately $800,000 per store, which is way above their breaking point. We are incredibly encouraged by the success of these stores. Scottsdale, in particular, is already running at the same level as our longstanding Las Vegas store. While we don't have any immediate plans to expand our company-owned store model, We see long-term potential for these stores in select markets that are not really served by our retail partners. We also want to use what we learn at our company-owned stores to assist our premier dealers that are running a very similar type of store to our retail stores. We are in the process of rolling out a revised premier dealer program with more generous pricing, including price protection, in exchange for higher annual commitments. On the international markets, we generated 2.6 million in international sales this quarter. This is an 86% increase from the prior year period. This included a one-time bump in royalties from our partners in Latin America. As you may remember, last year we sold our ownership stake in Bernalatam while retaining an option to buy back the entire company. Berna LATAM is now simply a distributor and Berna licensee. Under our agreement, we both sell product to Berna LATAM, and we earn royalty income on products they produce under license from Berna, which include the Berna SD, the Berna Mission 4, and Certain Ammo. We are extremely encouraged by the success that Berna LATAM is seeing in South America and And as a result, we do expect to exercise our call option at some point in the future where Berna Latam is both consistently profitable and honestly can pass a U.S. public company audit. To support our growth, we've continued to expand our marketing efforts. Last month, we brought on Tucker Carlson to our roster of celebrity influencers. Tucker, like Sean Hannity and other successful influencers, has a large audience of primarily conservative listeners. So far, the early results of the partnership have been encouraging. We are also currently in ongoing discussions to bring on a few marquee celebrity endorsers that have enormous audiences that cover a much wider swath of the American public, and we will keep you informed of our progress as these negotiations progress. In addition to expanding our influencer strategy, we have begun using AI to quickly scale content production and increase the frequency of our advertising across various platforms. This has helped us produce more tailored content both faster and more efficiently as we react to the acceptability and effectiveness of our ads. I am not sure if you've seen our new banana commercial. in which potential victims are carrying a banana rather than a burner. Not only does this allow us to get around the sensors that won't permit advertising that shows a weapon, it is sufficiently intriguing to get people to come to our website to see what the burner really is. This piece of creative, which has proven extremely effective and is generating a very high ROAS, was produced entirely using AI programs. allowing us to produce a 30-second commercial in hours at essentially no cost that would have otherwise taken several months and would have cost several hundred thousand dollars to produce. Next month, we plan to introduce BurnitCare. BurnitCare will be a source of recurring revenue in which we will offer to replace the burner launcher, no questions asked, if it is lost, stolen, damaged, or confiscated. This will be our first foray into the recurring revenue model, which we hope to augment next year when we install a chipset in the CL that will be able to contact the authorities in the event that the launcher is used in self-defense. We also saw an uptick this quarter during the ICE protests in June. As many television news stations were covering events, less lethal was at the forefront of the national conversation, and Berna naturally appeared as a trusted leader in this space. These type of events further normalize the less lethal market and highlight Berna's role in the personal safety market. The continued normalization of our product category generally, and of Berna specifically, has allowed us to garner significant earned media. In fact, last night I was on the NBC Evening News to discuss tariffs, which drove thousands of incremental sessions. the night before I was on Fox News, also discussing tariffs. Our goal is that through increasing...

Ladies and gentlemen, please stand by for technical difficulties. Please stand by. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, thank you. We are all set. Lori, Brian, you're good to go.

Okay. I apologize. It appears that we got disconnected. I believe we were disconnected when I was talking about production. As we move into the second half of the year, we are actively working to keep our production in line with demand. Ahead of the Compact Launcher debut, production was running at 24,000 units a month, as we work to build up inventory. We now have a solid inventory position in place. We've reduced production to a steady state of 15,000 units per month across all of our various launchers, and we have the ability to adjust to changes in demand on a real-time basis. Following the compact launcher debut, We've seen what we expected, which is some cannibalization of the LE launcher, given the relatively small price difference between the LE at $479 and the compact launcher at $549. This has caused customers to gravitate to the compact launcher. Honestly, the compact launcher has better margins, so we're just as happy to see people gravitating away from the LE to the CL. The CL, in fact, is 38% smaller, 36% lighter than the Berna SD, our entry point launcher, yet it is just as powerful in terms of energy density or joules per square inch as our most powerful launcher, the Berna LE. It's also 27% narrower than our current pistols, which make it ideal to conceal carry. As I said, we don't really mind the cannibalizations. The CL helps our margins with a 7 to 8 percentage point advantage over the other launchers. Additionally, we've shifted production away from traditional assembly lines to a more efficient assembly pod-based manufacturing system, which is reducing our labor requirements and improving our first pass yield. This initiative along with our onshoring or reshoring initiatives, is improving, as I said, first pass yield, reducing manufacturing variances, and improving quality. Looking ahead, while we expect consumer sentiment to remain subdued, which may impact what I refer to as same-store sales, I believe that we will continue to grow our top line between 25% and 40% as a result of more stores carrying an increasing array of Burda products and as a result of the continued normalization of our product category and the impact of earned media. We also plan to roll out several variations of our new CO launcher, both up and down the pricing spectrum as we target a broader demographic. This is going to result in our cash position rebounding quickly as our inventory levels normalize over the coming months and quarters. Well, the third quarter is typically a slower period for Berna. We continue to focus on executing against operational priorities, expanding market awareness, and setting the stage for a strong finish to the year. That concludes my prepared remarks. Daryl, I'll turn it back to you for questions.

Thank you. The company will now be taking questions from cell side analysts. If you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. A confirmation tone will indicate your line is in the question queue. You may press star 2 to remove yourself from the queue. For participants using speaker equipment, it may be necessary to pick up your handset before pressing the star keys. One moment, please, while we poll for questions. Our first questions come from the line of Matt Kuranda with Roth Capital Partners. Please proceed with your questions.

Good morning. I just wanted to start off with the June trends that you mentioned, Brian, in your prepared remarks. I think you said maybe you saw some strength around the civil unrest that we saw in June. Could you give us a sense for growth in June and quarter to date? And I think you mentioned at the end of your prepared remarks there, 25% to 40% is sort of the sustained growth rate you expect. Is that sort of the range we can kind of pencil in for the near term?

Yeah, Matt, thanks for the question. We did see strength during the week where the riots were occurring in Los Angeles, but that's not surprising whenever there is civil unrest. we see much stronger sales. I would say during that week, sales were probably up by 40% versus the prior week. That said, it's a very transitory trend. It happened that week during the riots, and then sales returned exactly to where they were before the riots. You can use 25% to 40%. Last quarter, we were up 41%, slightly more, but I think 25% to 40% is a very good range for the year. So, yeah, I would work with that. Again, as I said, there is some softness that we're seeing in the market and that other CEOs that I speak to are seeing in the market. That said, we are growing dramatically in terms of our distribution channel, the number of celebrity endorsers, and... the places where you can buy Burna. So I think even in a softer market, 25 to 40% is a safe bet.

Okay, fair enough. And then maybe just since you mentioned softness and the prepared remarks here in the Q&A, I'm curious, where do you see that showing up, I guess? Is that like in between promotional periods where you're on promotion with some of the launchers? Is that a trade-down into sort of maybe the FC from people that might have bought the CL? Just curious maybe if you could expand on the comments there.

Sure. We are a very, very data-driven company. We analyze in great detail the activity of all of the people that come onto our website, you know, how much time they spend on a page, what pages they look at, you know, abandoned cart rates, what we're seeing are indications inside our numbers that, for example, we're seeing a slightly higher level of abandoned carts. There's a little bit of, you know, sticker shock when people are seeing pricing. So although we are seeing growth, you know, and on the surface it looks like, you know, there's no issues, you can see underlying in terms of some of the particular statistics of people's activity on the website is that it's softer. And also, we're just seeing this and talking to our customers that, you know, the market is a little bit softer right now. And I don't think that's a surprise to anybody. That said, we're also in the summer. And, you know, in our industry, there's kind of the dog days of summer. So this is a traditionally slower quarter. Nevertheless, we do expect to see significant growth this quarter.

Okay, fair enough. And then maybe just the last one from me. When we think about the ramp up with sportsmen, you throw out a lot of numbers in the prepared remarks in terms of locations that you'll be expanding to. Can you just clarify in terms of shop and shops where we're going to be at the end of the third quarter? Is that number 22? It's the 10 in addition to the 12 that you currently have. And maybe just curious about sort of you mentioned there might even be some performance at the PLS locations that's even better than where the shooting pods are, which I assume are shop and shops. Maybe just is there a big relative difference between PLS locations and shop and shops? I'm trying to get a sense for how we should think about the ramp up there as you get to the, I think you said, 140 locations overall.

Okay. So keep in mind that there is a difference between store within a store and shooting pods. So every shooting pod is part of a store within a store, but not every store within a store has a shooting pod. So currently there are 14 shooting pods, but there are 22 store within a store locations. The ones that don't have a shooting pod have a whole burn a store, but they use the archery range for the try before you buy experience. We have an additional nine locations. shooting pods that have been constructed that are going to be shipped to sportsmen that will be installed in their best locations. So they will go from 24 store within a store to 33 store within a store, of which there will be 14 plus the nine, there'll be 23 shooting pod locations. The other locations have just this point of sale display. So there is no, you know, shelving and store experience, but there's a point-of-sale display and there is an archery range. So in some of these stores with point-of-sale display and the archery range, we are seeing them actually outperform some of the other locations that have a store within a store. Now, obviously, we need to understand why. Is it a function of these are just better sportsman's locations? They have more traffic. Is it a function of the personnel? Are they simply better salespeople and they're getting people into the archery range? We are in the process of putting people on the road, going to all of the sportsman's locations to really spend time understanding the, you know, both those stores that are doing well and those stores that are not doing well. We are also providing SPFs to the store employees to give them some incentive to sell the Burna product because, look, for sportsmen and Bass Pro and Big Five, they are in the business of filling demand. They are not in the business of creating demand. Burna is in the business of creating demand. So the thing that's interesting for Sportsman's Warehouse and for the other locations is they have an opportunity to sell to customers that may have walked into the store not even knowing what Burna is, not thinking about buying a Burna. They have an opportunity to take their existing customer and augment the lifetime value of that customer. To do that, we need an educated sales force. We need a motivated sales force. That's the purpose of, one, providing burner geniuses, and two, spiffing the sales personnel. So we are in the very, very early innings of this program with Sportsman's Warehouse. I do not see any reason, honestly, why these locations that have hundreds of people a day coming into them cannot be as effective as our retail stores are which have, you know, tens of people a day coming into them. So, you know, we're doing $800,000 annually on average with our retail stores, you know, that are in a strip mall and have a dozen people walking in the front door. You know, we certainly should be able to do $300,000, $400,000, $500,000 a day in the, you know, certainly in the bigger sportsman's stores. But it's not going to happen overnight. It is going to take some work as we educate people. the sales team as we build out the stores. But we do expect to have in probably 140 of the 146 stores, and in virtually all of the major sportsman stores, we do expect to have burnout presence, whether it's the form of a POS display or whether it's a store within a store that uses an archery range. or whether it's a store within a store that uses a shooting pod, we will be in essentially all of the sportsman stores by the end of the year.

Okay. Super clear and very helpful. I'll leave it there.

Thank you. Our next question has come from the line of Jeff Van Sideren with B Rally Securities. Please proceed with your questions.

Oh, yes. Hi. Good morning, everyone. A little bit of a tough question. but wondering how you're thinking about the evolution of channel mix in second half with all the moving parts.

You know, as I said, we are seeing, and in Q2, we saw our fastest growth in brick and mortar. We think brick and mortar will continue to be the faster-growing segment of burn-off. Within the DTC segment of the business, the online segment of the business, we expect Amazon to continue to grow at a faster rate than Burna. When we talk about DTC, one of the things we didn't really focus on is that Sportsman's also has a DTC operation. And whereas Burna has a million-plus visitors a month coming to our website, Sportsman's has 7.5 million people a month coming to their website. We are really expert in DTC operations. This is not Sportsman's primary focus. For them, DTC is generally people that order a firearm and then have to go to a Sportsman's to pick it up. So our team is working very closely with the Sportsman's team to help them really, you know, improve their online presence, particularly for Burna, because they have access to 7.5 million people a month that, you know, probably very little overlap with the million people a month that we have access to. So there's a huge untapped market for Burna through the Sportsman's Warehouse e-commerce effort. So, again, I think we're going to see faster growth in brick and mortar than we see online. With the online segment, we'll see faster growth with Amazon than with Burna. And I do think sort of the wild card will be Sportsman's. Is this going to be, you know, a few sales a day, or is this going to be, you know, 100 sales a day? The jury is out right now, but I think there's enormous potential there.

Okay. And then Sportsman's, just a point of clarification, the stores with the pods, I know there's moving parts, too, with more pods coming in. But the stores with the pods versus the archery ranges, I wasn't clear on the performance there. Were you saying that the archery range performance was sometimes greater than the store with the pod performance?

You know, we don't have enough data yet, Jeff, to say that conclusively. It would make no sense to me that the archery range would perform better than the pods because the pod is, you know, graphically, you know, and cosmetically, it looks great. It's got glass windows on the side. It's placed in the center of the store. When you're there, you hear the bang, bang, bang when it hits the targets. So it draws people into the pod in a way that the archery range does not. That said, you know, most things with business, you know, you know, come down to human beings. I think, you know, when we get the burn of geniuses into these stores, we will, you know, the stores should perform, you know, more efficiently, more effectively, and we'll have a much better sense. But my guess is, all things being equal, the stores with the shooting pods will perform the best. But it's too early yet to say that conclusively.

Okay. Makes sense. And then I just wonder if you could touch just finally on your mention of the new iterations of the CL, anything you can elaborate on there.

Okay. So we came out with a particular model of the CL with fiber optic sites in a ready kit. We are looking to move both up and down the pricing spectrum. So the CL comes ready to be equipped with a red dot sight, with laser sights, with Hogue grips, and we expect to bring out a more bespoke version of the CL. At the same time, we expect to bring out a lower-priced version of the CL that, you know, doesn't come with fiber optic sights, comes in a more basic box, doesn't come with additional features, CO2 and ammo and magazines so that we can catch a broader spectrum of our customer base. We recognize that $550 is expensive. We can see it at checkout where there is a higher abandoned cart rate the more expensive the sale is. Somebody goes to checkout and it's a $700 sale. There can be sticker shots. So we want to be able to price the CL across a broader range of prices. We've done this with our other launchers. We came out with a basic box for the SD. That performed very well. We're just applying that same strategy to the CL. And that will probably happen, you know, later this quarter.

Okay. Thank you for taking my question and the continued success. Thank you, Jeff.

Thank you. As a reminder, if you would like to ask a question, please press star 1 on your telephone keypad. Our next question has come from the line of John Hickman with Lattenberg Thelman. Please proceed with your questions.

Hi. Brian, could you elaborate a little bit on your comments about recurring revenue with the CL? Is this like an insurance program? Yeah, sure.

I'm going to let Laurie take that because, honestly, so much of this first thing is back office, and, you know, I'll let her talk about this, and then I'll talk about the more SAS aspect of the recurring revenue model.

Okay. Hi, John. Yeah, the burden of care that we're going to come out with is kind of like an insurance policy. It's really just this you know, think of the insurance policy and extended warranty. So people will pay a monthly fee. They can pay it in an annual amount or monthly. So we're kind of working on the back end to get this kind of set up for the recurring, right? So subscription fee that gets auto charged to their card. And yes, if they lose it, if it's stolen, if it breaks for any reason, and previously, like our current warranty only covers if you use Burna Ammo, Burna CO2. So this one, We won't restrict it for that. So it will be a way that they can pay a monthly fee. And, you know, it is an expensive product so that they can have coverage of that, similar to any other products when you go and check out and they say, you know, do you want the protection plan? That's really what it is. So it will be recurring, and we're just working on setting up kind of that auto-charge capability.

And interestingly, I get people that get through to the CEO of Burnout. And unfortunately, one of the reasons people get through to me is they've got some, you know, sob story where, you know, the thing fell off the boat into the water. I lost it. I can't afford to get a new. There's a lot of people for whom, you know, they end up either, you know, damaging or losing their burner. We've actually had a bunch that were stolen. So this is a way to address that problem and also to start the recurring revenue models. The much bigger source of recurring revenue, though, will be next year when we start installing a chipset in the BRNA. This is something that we've been working on and had planned from the very beginning of the development of the CL. And what we want to be able to do, and this is not, you know, cutting-edge technology. The technology exists. But what we want to be able to do is to have your BRNA be able to speak with your phone. So that if you're out and about and it's set to self-defense mode, for example, I'm out in Boston with my Berna and, you know, walking with my wife and I get accosted, I use my Berna, it will immediately speak to my phone, geolocate with my phone, contact a call center that will contact pre-programmed numbers, either 911 or, you know, potentially if you're a student, maybe campus security, you know, or you're a family member. And that's something that, you know, maybe it's $5.99 a month. You know, there have been other things we're looking at, like the ability to talk to your smart home. So, you know, John, you're at home and your wife says, I hear something downstairs. You pull the burner out. You take the safety off. You talk to your smart home, turns on all the lights, you know, $3.99 a month. So, you know, these are not new ideas. These are ideas that are used. And, frankly, I think there are other companies that are currently doing similar things. But we think, given the fact that there's already over 650,000 earners in the market, I mean, this is something where we're going to have tens of thousands of customers. They're going to want to be able to take it to the next step and have their burner be a smart launcher. that is able to speak with their smart home or their phone.

Okay, thanks. Laurie, could you also elaborate? It sounds like from Brian's remarks that there are some cost savings that are non-recurring costs due to the launch of the CL and inventory and the ramp in the manufacturing that now will side it. Can you help us out with our, you know, kind of model for the coming quarter as far as the expenses go?

Sure, John. So really the expenses, we had a few hundred thousand dollars of extra expenses in the quarter just specifically because of the compact launch and release. That being said, it will really be probably replaced in Q3 with increased marketing spend. As we move through the year, we increase our marketing spend. so I don't know that you'll see a much change on the OpEx. On the inventory side of things, we did use a lot of cash to build our inventory. As you saw, it's kind of a record high inventory at the end of the quarter, and we've reduced our production, and we expect through the balance of this year to start to pull that inventory levels down and increase our cash position.

Okay, I got that. Now, Let's see. Could you elaborate on why you think the Scottsdale store is doing so well, kind of vis-a-vis expectations in your other stores or other experiences?

You know, first, it's a great location. It's a very, very heavily trafficked street. I think the traffic on that street is probably 2x the traffic on these streets in front of our other stores. Secondly, it's just a good market. Scottsdale has got a lot of people with our demographic, gun owners, more conservative population. It is a wealthy community. Part of it is the human element. We have a couple of very good salespeople in Scottsdale, and, you know, it's telling us that we better continue to find good salespeople in all of our various stores. But it is encouraging for us to see there wasn't something unique about Las Vegas. You know, our biggest concern with Las Vegas doing well is, you know, is it just people that won $10,000 at the craps table last night that went in and bought a launcher? And the answer is no. You know, all of the stores have done well. I'll tell you, the little engine that could, though, is Fort Wayne. You know, Fort Wayne is a relatively small community. It is not a particularly wealthy community. It is doing extremely well. You know, it's even outperforming the Salem store, despite the fact that its footprint is probably half of what the Salem store is. So, yeah, there's a lot of factors with each store. But, you know, overall, their performance is extremely encouraging. And it's encouraging not just for our retail stores. It's encouraging for what we can do with premier dealers. It's encouraging for what we should be able to do with Sportsman's Warehouse. It's telling us that this model works.

Okay. Hey, thanks. That's it for me. Thanks, John.

Thank you. At this time, this concludes our question and answer session. I'd now like to turn the call back over to Mr. Gans for his closing remarks.

Daryl, thank you very much, and I just want to thank all of our investors and customers for their support, and we will keep you apprised of our progress. Thank you very much.

Thank you for joining us today for Berna's fiscal second quarter 2025 conference call. You may now disconnect.