Matt McCabe, EVP and chief merchandising officer at Academy Sports + Outdoors, spoke with SGB Executive about the retail chain’s evolving merchandise strategy, including efforts to feature more premium products, prioritize newness, reduce out-of-stocks, and markdowns. He also shared insights into today’s Academy customer.
McCabe shared his insights with SGB Executive a day after Academy set its new growth goals at an Analyst Day event, including 5 percent sales growth and high-single-digit earnings growth on average over the next five years, with the sales boost largely driven by the opening of 125 stores through 2030 and e-commerce penetration expanding to 15 percent from 12 percent. In 2025, Academy posted its first year of annual growth in four years.
McCabe joined the nationwide retailer in December 2016 as VP/DMM, Athletic and Licensed Apparel and Accessories. He was promoted to SVP/GMM, Footwear in September 2017 and has been chief merchant since June 2023. Prior to joining Academy, he was VP/DMM of Men’s, Women’s, Kid’s Apparel and Footwear, Front End, Golf Carts and Bags, Drinkware at Golfsmith. Earlier in his career, he held buying roles at Bon Ton Department Stores, Inc., Bachrach, Sears, and Mark Shale.
SGB: Can you talk about Academy’s “good, better, best” merchandising focus? Is that a new approach?
Matt McCabe: We had been good at “good” for a long time. About five or six years ago, we decided we had a bigger opportunity to stay with our customers as they pursued their passions throughout their journeys. We found that we were the place people came to get their kids’ first tee-ball gear. And then, six months later, when their kid decided they hated tee ball and wanted to play soccer, they hadn’t broken the bank and could come back to get their kid soccer gear. But we also found that if they stuck with tee ball by the time they reached eighth grade, we were graduating them to another retailer. So, we decided we have an opportunity to keep that kid through their entire journey from first pitch on the field to when they’re a college recruit. But beyond baseball, we saw opportunities throughout the store where we could do that.
If you’re a first-time griller looking to avoid burning the burgers, or a master griller looking to smoke some meat, we have the grill for you. If you’re a first-time fisherman, we can sell a cheap combo to see if you can catch a fish. If you’re advanced in your angling career and you want some more advanced stuff, we can sell you that, too. And then, if you’re trying to buy a pair of running shoes just to see if you can go around the block for the first time, or if you’re running your 10th marathon, we can now take that athlete on their entire journey from start to when they’re really experienced. And this has done a couple of things for us. It’s allowed us to still provide the value component to get our customers started in something that they want to try, but it’s also attracted a “better” and “best” customer that comes into our store knowing that we have that better product, and that customer becomes stickier because they’re seeing things around the store that they really like.
SGB: Do you feel Academy has the right “good, better, best” mix now?
Matt McCabe: It’s a journey, so we’re doing it where it makes sense. We don’t have a stated goal. If you were to ask me percent-wise, I’d still say about 50 percent of what we do is “good” level product, and the other 50 percent is “better” and “best.”
SGB: How is Academy securing more of the premium “better” and “best” products?
Matt McCabe: It’s been different from different vendors. In some cases, we’ve had to test, learn and prove to different vendors, like Nike, that we can sell a better product. On the footwear side, we started that journey with running, but it’s since leaked into lifestyle products, where they’ve seen we can support higher price points. In other cases, we’ve done things like when we got the Jordan Brand last year, we dramatically elevated our brand presentation in the stores. So not only has that helped us sell better product within the brand where we did it, but other brands come into the store, see how we can bring a brand to life, and they want to be part of it too. So that leads to better access for us across the merch world.
SGB: How did the Jordan launch go, and what does having the brand mean for Academy?
Matt McCabe: It means a lot. We’re pleased with how the brand is progressing in year one. We started small in about half of our stores, and we’re expanding that door count by about 55 this year with a full-shop concept, while some parts of the brand are already in all stores. We also started small in terms of breadth of assortment, and now we’re getting broader and enriching what we have, particularly on the apparel and footwear side. We’re very happy with how that’s going so far, and they are too, from what I hear.
SGB: Can you discuss the push to emphasize newness?
Matt McCabe: When we look at our brand assortment, we really try to grow it in three ways. First, we try to grow our most important partners and make sure we have the best assortment and the brands that matter most to us. Second, we try to take what we’ve tested and scale it as quickly as it makes sense, so it becomes more meaningful to us. And then third, we’re trying to find a steady diet of new things to test and learn in our stores, see what works and what doesn’t. A good example of where we’ve tested and are now starting to scale is Baseball Lifestyle 101, which has become an important brand for us. Turtlebox speakers are another example. One we’re really proud of is a lifestyle brand called Burlebo, which started small and has grown to be meaningful in the stores as well.
SGB: Any new brands you’re particularly excited about?
Matt McCabe: Right now, we’re testing a brand called ChicknLegs, which is a fun brand for young runners. It’s all printed shorts, and they’re $35, so it makes a lot of sense for us, but over time, we’ll see that expanding into a little bit broader assortment for that customer who likes that kind of product. We’ve also just launched a training equipment brand called Hyrox by Centr. We’re the exclusive brick-and-mortar retailer in the U.S. for Hyrox, which is also the hottest fitness craze out there.
SGB: How does Academy approach private label, and how might that differ from other retailers?
Matt McCabe: The main way we’re different from a lot of other retailers is that we have 19 different private brands in our store. So, we don’t just have a private brand in apparel, we have it in hard lines as well, whether it’s fishing, grilling or other hard lines, and they’re meaningful as well. What we primarily aim to do with our private brand is provide our ‘ultimate value’ to our store. We have brands like Magellan, where people think of their national brands. They don’t know it’s proprietary to us. Barbeque has become a powerful business for us, and our Outdoor Gourmet private label is a big part of that. We use private brands to fill market white space or to deliver extreme value to our customers.
SGB: Steve Lawrenve (Academy’s CEO) at the Analyst Day event discussed the benefits Academy gains from offering a wide range of categories, from Outdoor and Western lifestyle to Work and Hunt & Fish. Can you elaborate on those advantages?
Matt McCabe: The broad-based categories allow us to do a couple of things. One, we capture a broad base of customers, whether they’re a sporting goods family or whether they’re an outdoor enthusiast. We talked about in the meeting that when those two customer cohorts overlap, that’s really our sweet spot. It’s that broad base of categories that gives us the customer who’s loyal to our stores. The other thing it does is, let’s say that outdoors is having a great season, but we’re struggling in sporting goods. It allows us to lean into one side of the house rather than the other to ensure we meet the sales goals we need. So having a broad-based category is really important to us.
SGB: Let’s talk about the Academy customer. Academy recently underwent a deep dive into its customer base. What did you learn from a merchandise standpoint?
Matt McCabe: There are really four outputs of that research that our customers are looking for, and we’ve given them catchy names.
One is “Fuel The Fun,” meaning customers are coming to us because they want to buy stuff to help them have fun, and that is all about having new and exciting things in our assortment. And so, we’ve learned that they come to us because they want to see new and exciting things.
Second is “Simplify My Shop,” meaning they want to reduce the number of stores they need to visit to complete their shopping. And that comes up in two ways. One is that if you come to our store to buy something for fishing, you want to be able to find everything you need to go fishing. You want to find your bait as well as your rod and reel. Maybe you want a fishing shirt to go with it. And you can find that all in one place instead of going to two or three stores to complete your shopping trip.
The other thing is, let’s say you’re shopping for youth sports, and it’s football season, you want to be able to come in and buy your kids their youth football equipment, but you can also do back-to-school shopping for their apparel and footwear. So, reducing the number of places a customer has to visit, they told us, was important because, when you have multiple kids, your time is really valuable. I’m a dad of three kids. They’re grown now, but when they were little, my wife and I were always splitting up all the time to try to take this one to that place and another to another place. Time is tight.
Third is “Stretch My Dollar. “That means we need to have great value. And that value isn’t strictly price, though it’s a leading component. We offer things like free grill assembly and free line schooling on fishing. We also assemble bikes, so those things really add up to the value equation for why people shop with us.
Lastly, “Respect My Time,” which means we need to remove as much friction as possible from the shopping process. That means we have to be in stock. That means that things have to be easy to find within our store, displays have to be good, and if they can’t find what they need, we can have something delivered to their house. Another thing that falls into that is the convenience factor. If your son or daughter forgets their shin guards at the soccer game, we can DoorDash them to the field, which is really a service that helps our customers be more time efficient.
SGB: How is the Academy consumer these days? Inflation has been pressuring your core lower-income customers in recent years.
Matt McCabe: About the same as last year. We see that as a possible headwind. But we’re also excited about the new customers we’re adding to the funnel, which are helping to drive our business, and most of those are coming from the higher-income quintiles.
SGB: What’s driving the increased traffic from higher-income households?
Matt McCabe: They’re attracted to our “better” and “best” level merchandise. They see value in our stores. And let’s face it, when gas prices go up, and food gets more expensive at grocery stores, everybody’s looking to save money, not just lower-income folks.
SGB: Can you talk about Academy’s progress in improving in-stocks?
Matt McCabe: We grew our in-stock rates by nearly 500 basis points last year, and we did that through a couple of ways. We cut out the fringes from the assortment that weren’t productive and invested more depth in the styles that matter most. That was really the key driver behind it. But another thing that has been beneficial for us is the introduction of RFID. We’re delivering all our private brand and soft lines with RFID capability this spring. By the end of the year, we’ll have about 50 percent of our s
oft line areas on RFID, which really helps make our customers happy when they come into the store and find what they were looking for when they saw it online. The third thing is we’re going to start piloting electronic sign labels, which will allow us to be more dynamic for our customers and enable Pick-to-Light, so our customers and our associates can find things a little easier, for instance, when picking something from an online sale.
SGB: Academy has increased gross margin by 500 basis points versus pre-pandemic levels, in part by reducing markdowns. What’s driving that?
Matt McCabe: We use a markdown optimization process, and we use a promotion optimization tool as well. Markdown optimization has been in place longer, but it allows us to ensure we’re optimizing what gets marked down and the markdown rate we think will optimize sales. That’s been a game-changer for us in how we’ve handled markdowns and the depth of markdown we need. We also introduced a more defined climate-clustering process about 18 months ago, and that’s allowed us to mark down product in different parts of our footprint when they need it most. For instance, if you’re talking about a summer seasonal product, we’re going to mark it down sooner in Ohio than in Texas. And the combined markdown optimization tool and climate clustering allow us to do that. So, we’re giving customers value when they are looking for it, and we clear goods when we need to, depending on the seasonality of the footprint we’re in. That’s been really valuable.
Our promotional optimization tool has allowed us to be more specific about which promos deliver value when we do promote. As a value retailer, one thing that’s really interesting is that over three-quarters of our business is done at regular price. We’re not a discount house, although we do promote in our most important weeks. And when we do promote, we want to make sure we’re doing so in a way that our customers are looking for and respond to. So those two items have been really valuable to us.
SGB: Are tariffs still weighing on pricing?
Matt McCabe: We saw a lot of the tariff activity impact pricing of goods in the back half of last year and, to some extent, earlier this spring from a lot of our branded partners. I think we’re through most of that at this point, and we’re starting to lap the track on that stuff, so I don’t see that as a headwind for most of this year.
SGB: How would you rate the health of the sporting goods space?
Matt McCabe: I think it’s really healthy. We’ve seen participation in youth sports increase, and I think it’s an exciting time for stores like ours because there aren’t many places to find sporting goods equipment, which helps us. In terms of other sports, like where I came from in golf, we’re still seeing a lot of baby boomers retire. They don’t know what to do with their time, and many are trying things like golf. They may not want to buy a super expensive set of golf clubs to start. They want to buy a box set and see if they like it. We cater to those customers, and that helps our business a lot, too. So, I think it’s a good time for the sporting goods and outdoor space overall, since many people are heading outside and staying closer to home rather than traveling. I think one effect of higher gas prices is that people do more things closer to home, which benefits our categories. So that’s a great thing.
SGB: How do you like working in sports retail?
Matt McCabe: I grew up running track and wrestling in high school. I’ve been involved in sports my entire life. I have three kids. I coached my oldest son in baseball for 10 years before the high school team wouldn’t let me in the dugout anymore, and then my two younger kids played soccer. So, I’ve been really close to the sporting goods world my entire life, and working in it is a dream for me.
Images courtesy Academy Sports + Outdoors
