Weekly TikTok Haul Analysis: 12/27/2025

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We believe that one of the potential biggest beneficiaries of the holiday shopping season is a company that has been silently growing amongst a base of incredibly niche consumers, and that is Amer Sports. This conglomerate owns a wide range of niche outdoor and sports-oriented companies, including Arc’Teryx, Salomon, and Wilson.

In September 2025, Amer Sports faced a PR crisis when its subsidiary Arc'teryx sponsored a fireworks display titled "Ascending Dragon" in the Himalayan region of Tibet, collaborating with Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang. The event triggered significant backlash on Chinese social media, with critics calling out the perceived hypocrisy of an outdoor brand known for environmental stewardship staging pyrotechnics in a fragile ecosystem. Shares of Amer Sports dropped roughly 8% in the immediate aftermath as Chinese authorities launched an investigation, and Arc'teryx issued a public apology stating the event was "out of line with our values." However, the fiasco didn’t seem to impact the brand, as Q3 earnings showed that China revenue surged 47% year-over-year, with record quarterly profits.

Web traffic is an important metric to pay attention to when, especially in an increasingly online-oriented shopping environment. With that said, Arc’teryx has experienced strong growth in recent months with unique visitors to arcteryx.com increasing on a year-over-year basis by 25% and 30% in October and November, respectively. Likewise, with Salomon, we saw year-over-year increases in unique visitors to salomon.com of 19% and 25% in October and November, respectively. We’ve also observed what we believe is a substantial increase in the conversion rate for both brands, which would lead to revenue growth exceeding what you might expect when looking at top-line web traffic growth alone.

Although I don’t think Google Trends is an entirely trustworthy source for investment insights on its own, it’s still a helpful tool for corroborating trends you’re seeing on social media and in other alternative datasets. I won’t bore you with dozens of Google Trends charts showing each individual search term, though. The charts above effectively summarize the interest we’re seeing.

With Arc’teryx and Salomon, it’s hard to find a search term that isn’t up considerably on a year-over-year basis. Terms like “Salomon shoes” and “Arcteryx jacket” are up significantly year-on-year, which leads me to believe we’re going to see a bit more than the 21% year-over-year growth that analysts are forecasting.

Although Amer Sports likely won’t be reporting earnings until late February or early March, there’s a good chance we’ll hear from them before the earnings release. This, of course, is important if you are building a position in this stock around the thesis that the company will outperform this quarter.

One of the largest retail conferences in the world, the ICR Conference, is happening from January 12-14, 2026. Oftentimes, retailers attending this conference will pre-announce their earnings if they did especially well. Those who traded Amer Sports around Q4 last year know this well, as they delivered better-than-anticipated Q4 2024 earnings and pre-announced them at the conference!

It’s important to keep this conference in mind for any retail trades for Q4. A list of attendees for the event is available here.

Amer Sports seems like an interesting potential play on retail for Q4, as the stock hasn’t moved very much in recent weeks. The post-Q3 earnings release run-up brought the stock price back to where it was before the fireworks fiasco, but it doesn’t seem like analysts have fully realized the degree to which the flagship brands are trending. The stock seems like it presents an interesting risk/reward as we move into Q4 earnings season.