A subsidiary of western wear company Boot Barn Holdings Inc. of Irvine, California, bought Country Outfitter, the one-time online sensation from Fayetteville's Acumen Brands.
Boot Barn CEO Jim Conroy announced the February 16 acquisition during Boot Barn's June earnings conference call. Boot Barn subsidiary Sheplers Inc. paid $1.3 million in cash for Country Outfitter assets and assumed another $500,000 in liabilities.
For comparison, Boot Barn bought Sheplers in 2015 for $147 million.
Conroy said Boot Barn acquired the CountryOutfitter.com domain name, its customer list and social media assets. Boot Barn also announced it spent $500,000 to restart the website, which had closed when Acumen Brands was put up for sale earlier this year.
Acumen Brands is now known as One Country. Terry Turpin, CEO of One Country, did not return a phone message.
The company said it would operate CountryOutfitter.com as a separate website along with its BootBarn.com and Sheplers.com websites. Conroy said, after buying Country Outfitter, that Boot Barn now owns three of the top four highest traffic websites in the western and work wear category.
Conroy said Boot Barn researched Country Outfitter customers and found they were not active customers of the Boot Barn or Sheplers brand.
"We are excited to announce that we have further strengthened our position as the leading omni-channel western and work wear retailer in the U.S. with the purchase of certain assets of CountryOutfitter.com, a large pure-play e-commerce retailer targeting a younger, female country customer," Conroy said during the conference call.
Boot Barn operates 219 stores in 30 states, but none in Arkansas. Boot Barn CFO Greg Hackman said the company would count Country Outfitter as a new store in terms of sales figures starting in April 2018; Hackman said Boot Barn expected Country Outfitter to have sales of approximately $10 million in fiscal 2018.
The sale was a quiet end to Country Outfitter's meteoric rise as the star of Acumen Brands. Acumen was founded by John James and Turpin in 2009 and flourished behind such branded online stores as Country Outfitter and Scrub Shopper.
In 2013, the private equity firm General Atlantic invested $83 million in Acumen Brands and assumed 60 percent ownership. James resigned as CEO in 2014 to run the startup support company Hayseed Ventures but remained on the Acumen Brand board of directors until late 2016.
After the General Atlantic investment, Acumen Brands moved into a 200,000-SF facility on North Shiloh Drive in Fayetteville where officials said they were filling 7,500 weekly orders. Acumen was headquartered in a 76,000-SF building across the street; that space is now occupied by Kimbel Mechanical Services, which took over the lease in May.
