Modeling 2026 outdoor sell-through against pre-COVID baselines

The outdoor category has spent five years digesting the COVID demand spike. Most brands we audit still use 2020-2022 as their baseline. That’s the wrong reference window. The right one is 2018-2019, and 2026 sell-through against that baseline tells a more useful story than the YoY number anyone’s quoting.

The COVID distortion, briefly

Outdoor recreation GMV on Amazon grew 47% in 2020 and another 22% in 2021. By Q4 2022, the category had unwound about a third of that. By 2024, most subcategories were tracking flat-to-down vs. 2020-2021 peaks, but still 35-45% above their 2018-2019 baselines. Inventory planning teams fluent in pre-COVID outdoor would have read those years as growth. Inventory planning teams that came up post-2020 read them as decline. Both are wrong, and the second mistake costs more.

The right frame: outdoor is a structurally larger category than it was pre-COVID, with a less seasonal demand curve and a more diverse buyer base. The growth from here is normal-rate growth off the new floor, not return-to-baseline growth.

2026 sell-through vs. 2018-2019: the actual numbers

• Camping & hiking gear: GMV running 38% above 2018-2019 baseline; growth rate 4.2% YoY
• Cycling (general): 22% above; growth rate 6.8% YoY
• Outdoor cooking (grills, smokers, accessories): 64% above; growth rate 7.1% YoY (still absorbing 2021 over-buying in Q1)
• Watersports (paddleboards, kayaks): 18% above; growth rate -1.4% YoY (the only meaningful contraction)
• Fishing: 41% above; growth rate 5.5% YoY

The pattern: every subcategory except watersports is growing off a permanently elevated floor. The brands that sized inventory for 2020-2021 peaks are working through overhang. The brands that sized for 2018-2019 are running short. Both populations exist in roughly equal numbers in the top 50.

What that means for inventory and ad spend

Two practical implications.

First, inventory. If your 2026 plan was built off 2021-2022 sell-through, you’re likely 18-25% over-stocked relative to current demand. That excess shows up as FBA storage fees in Q3 and aged-inventory surcharges in Q4, both compounding into a margin problem we’ve already started seeing in audits. The fix is unglamorous: liquidate aggressively in Q2, write down the rest in Q3, replan Q4 against a 2018-2019-blended baseline rather than 2021. We’ve modeled the alternative on three brands; in all three, the cost of carrying overhang through Q4 was higher than the cost of liquidating in Q2.

Second, ad spend. The TACoS pattern in outdoor is following the same script as housewares and tools: median 11.8% in Q1 2026, up 220 bps from Q1 2025, with a widening gap between top quartile (8.4%) and bottom quartile (16.1%). The brands sitting at the high end aren’t bidding into a competitive auction, they’re bidding into a catalog gap. Detail pages built for 2020 buyer intent are being re-routed by Cosmo on 2026 queries, and the brands paying to defend share are losing the structural battle while the metric looks like an auction problem.

The watersports outlier

Watersports is the only subcategory in actual contraction (-1.4% YoY). The reason matters: watersports peaked harder than the rest of outdoor in 2021 (paddleboards alone grew 198% from 2019 to 2021), and the unwind has been correspondingly larger. The brands still sized for 2021 in this subcategory are 40-50% over-inventory and the FBA fee structure is making the carrying cost punitive.

If you’re in watersports and you haven’t replanned against pre-COVID baselines yet, this is the priority. Not the catalog work. Not the ad spend. Inventory right-sizing, then everything else.

What we’re doing on our outdoor portfolio

Three plays, in order.

Replan against 2018-2019 baselines. We pulled three years of pre-COVID weekly GMV for every brand in our outdoor book, blended against 2024-2025 actuals, and built 2026 forecasts off the blended curve rather than the 2021 peak. The brands that adopted the new baseline earliest (Q4 2024) have run their FBA inventory at 8-12 weeks of cover all year; the brands that resisted are at 18-22 weeks and starting to feel it.

Catalog work first, ad spend second. The TACoS drift in outdoor isn’t a bid-management problem. It’s a catalog-relevance problem. Cosmo is rerouting queries that the 2020-vintage A+ no longer answers, and bid increases buy you nothing if the page can’t convert the impression. Three of our outdoor brands ran Cosmo-aware A+ rebuilds in February-March; all three saw 8-12 points of organic-share recovery without any bid changes.

Liquidation discipline. The brands carrying 2021-vintage overhang into Q3 are about to discover that the “we’ll sell through in Q4” story doesn’t work when the Q4 demand curve is normal-rate, not pandemic-spike. We’re moving aggressive on liquidation in Q2 across the portfolio.

Subscribe to the Operator Brief, Q3 outdoor update covers the inventory-health pattern across the top 50.