Key Takeaways:
- Grassroots Outdoor Alliance member stores posted comp sales growth of 4.89% through May 2026, with gains in every month of the year so far.
- Of 32 stores that reached a sale or closure point over the past decade, 22 found new ownership, a continuity rate of 67%.
- Used gear and apparel sections are emerging as a growth driver, according to GOA President Gabe Maier.
Independent outdoor specialty retail is performing at its healthiest level since the pandemic, according to new data from Grassroots Outdoor Alliance (GOA), the trade group representing more than 100 independently owned outdoor retail businesses across over 225 locations in 45 states.
In a mid-year update published this month, Grassroots President Gabe Maier reported that member comp sales grew 2.88% for full year 2025 and are up 4.89% through the first five months of 2026, with growth recorded every month from January through May.
Comp Sales Accelerate Through Spring
Grassroots tracked monthly comp growth of 2.87% in January, 6.63% in February, 5.58% in March, 6.95% in April and 2.51% in May. May’s gain was the smallest of the year but also the broadest, with 53% of reporting stores up more than 3%, the highest share Grassroots recorded in 2026.
The distribution of performance across stores has also shifted. In 2024, 59% of Grassroots retailers were declining year over year. That figure dropped to 37% in 2025, and today 47% of stores are growing, 23% are flat and 30% are declining.
The improvement is showing up even among the smallest retailers in the group. Tracking the same 60 single door stores over the same January through May window each year, the median store moved from down 4.8% in 2024 to up 3% in 2026 year to date, with the share of those stores growing climbing from 17% to 50%.
A subset of 28 retailers connected to Grassroots’ point of sale data program showed transactions up 2.95% and units up 4.53% in the first quarter, evidence that comp sales growth reflects more than higher shelf prices from tariffs.
“After two years of declining transactions and units in that same group of stores, people are buying more things at these stores, not just paying more for them,” Maier wrote.
In an interview with SESO, Maier said rising retail prices tied to tariffs and inflation are still part of the growth story and cautioned against reading the point of sale data as a full picture of demand.
“It’s not a perfect picture, I don’t want to come across as saying that’s the case for the whole channel. They’re just little data pieces that help round out some of the ambiguity,” he said.
A Closer Look at Store Closures and Transitions
Grassroots’ decade of closure and ownership transition data offers a different picture than individual headlines tend to suggest. Of 32 member stores that reached a sale or closure point over the past 10 years, 22 found new ownership, a continuity rate of 67%. Of those 22 sales, 14 went to employees, customers or family members.
Only 10 stores closed outright over the decade, roughly one per year, and Maier attributed four of those closures primarily to overextension into online and third-party marketplace sales, which he called the most damaging source of financial distress he has seen in the channel.
Maier pointed to 2025 as an example of how closure narratives can outpace outcomes. Three Grassroots retailers announced closures that year, but only one ultimately closed. The other two remained open, one under new ownership and one under its original owners, after local customers rallied behind them.
In the July 7 post, Maier pointed to the aftermath of Midwest Mountaineering’s closure in Minneapolis in 2023 as an example, noting that a longtime staff member later opened a new independent shop in the city, Lake State Mountaineering.
“The people who come up through these stores are often the ones who carry the channel forward, and we are seeing a healthy volume of them in recent years,” Maier wrote.
Maier said a similar pattern has played out more recently in Portland. Next Adventure had been on track to close before its original owners decided in recent weeks to keep it open in a resized form, he said, and a former Next Adventure employee has since opened a new store in the city called Foster Outdoor.
Used Gear/Apparel Becomes a Growth Lever
So what is driving performance at the strongest stores in the group? Maier pointed to used gear as the clearest bright spot. He estimated the share of members with a used gear section grew from roughly 23% in 2023 to roughly 28% by the end of 2025, with another 12 members planning to add one in 2026 and 13 more expressing interest.
Maier told SESO that most stores that add a used gear section see it grow to more than 10% of total volume within two years, largely through new customer traffic rather than cannibalization of new gear sales.
“It’s driving new customers, and at least from what we’ve seen, really not much cannibalization of existing sales,” Maier said, adding a little overlap does show up in hard goods categories.
He told SESO he expects more than half of Grassroots members to carry used gear within the next couple of years, putting the category on par with run, bike, snow sports, paddle sports and climbing as a standard offering across the membership.
Context Compared to Big Box
Against the big box and chain store channel, independent specialty is outperforming on volume. OIA’s first quarter 2026 analysis of the larger athletic and sporting goods channel, built on Circana panel data, showed dollars down 0.7%, units down 7.3% and average price up 6.7%. Grassroots’ point of sale subset showed units up 4.53% over the same period.
Against REI, the country’s largest specialty outdoor retailer, the post noted the gap is also notable. REI’s net sales fell 6.2% in 2024 and were essentially flat in 2025, and its net loss narrowed to $54 million in 2025 from $311 million in 2023, though much of that progress came from cost cutting rather than growth.
Maier returned to that same theme when asked about the negativity that often surrounds specialty retail coverage. He said the challenges facing independent retailers, including rising fixed costs and continued margin pressure, remain real, and that positive momentum is not universal across the channel.
But he told SESO the current data supports a more balanced view than the closures that tend to dominate industry conversation.
“There’s a lot of good going on out there,” Maier told SESO.
