Build-A-Bear (BBW) Part II: The Scion Capital Analyst Tempate and the All Map

Build-A-Bear (BBW) Part II: The Scion Capital Analyst Tempate and the All Map

2006 Scion Capital Analyst Template Re-awakened and Fit to this Mall Dinosaur, an OG 2004 IPO, PLUS the All Map Returns

Michael Burry

Oct 29, 2026

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[

Scroll all the way down for the

All Map updated with new IV15s

and map positions for

Microsoft (MSFT)

,

Alphabet (GOOG)

,

Sprouts Farmer’s Market (SFM)

and

ServiceNow

(NOW)

, which all announced earnings and moved significantly after-hours

.]

Now, this left-for-dead retailer has nine lives. The GFC tried to kill it, then smart devices tried to make you ignore it. Now AI is trying to hide it. And once again the consumer is weakening and trading down on discretionary.

Six, no, five more.

It’s a perfect storm for

Build-A-Bear (BBW)

, a one-of-one retailer now heavily shorted, 25% of the float, almost 9 days to cover. It does not get more discretionary, so it might seem. The stock hit $1.80 in the COVID panic. Soared over $75 last year, now languishes around $25.

Build-A-Bear

is not at all hard to understand, but most of Wall Street does not get it and does not cover it.

Build-A-Bear

is a micro-cap with a market cap under $300 million, no financial debt and EBITDA in the $80 million range.

The company appears deeply discounted if not on sale. So I took a look through the lens of my old

Scion Capital Analyst Template from 2006

. I put this together in order to get my growing analyst team across two offices and two continents all on the same page.

This was something I sat down with Word and off the top of my head started creating. I was done in a couple hours, templated it, and shipped it off to my analysts.

My analysts had come from Harvard, Morgan Stanley, Carlisle Group, you name it. They did not miss a beat. They ignored it.

Analysis Template 2006 V 2

202KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Nevertheless, it was the distilled knowledge in my head on how to analyze a stock circa 2006. It was a different era, but what better stock to put through this today than a true mall dinosaur born and bred in that same decade. In my judgment, the Template did a good job covering all the bases here in 2026. My prose may be choppy, as it often was in my own write-ups for myself.

☒Analyst’s Long-Form Business Notes:

BBW was born a mall rat in 1997, often to be located near food courts. From 2001 to 2007, revenue more than quadrupled to $474 million. Mall traffic collapsed during the GFC, and everyone, even children, emerged from the crisis with a smart phone and/or a smart tablet. The nature of entertaining a child’s imagination changed, and BBW suffered dramatically. Malls themselves were even thought to be dinosaurs in the post-GFC period.

New management in 2012 inherited a Build-A-Bear franchise where 20% of all locations were unprofitable, and the entire store base averaged less than a 10% contribution margin. 85% of stores sat in traditional malls, and e-commerce was just 4% of net retail sales.

Over a decade, management restructured the lease book, and by 2022, over 70% of leases were less than 3 years. Build-A-Bear is one of the few mall concepts that is proven to drive traffic, which gave it leverage. Over 80% of visits to Build-A-Bear are planned.

The company also de-malled, to an extent. Mall exposure fell from 85% to 65% by 2022 as it focused on toursit locations and small-format “concourse” stores.

The format of the store was refreshed. The updated format, called Discovery, graces 55% of corporate-owned stores today.

Build-A-Bear also added partners, such as Carnival, Landry’s, Girl Scouts. These partners funded buildout, real estate, labor, and bought wholesale inventory from Build-A-Bear. Wholesale grew from 60 locations in early 2022 to 177 at June 30 of this year.

The company now has seven master franchise agreements covering twelve countries, but is early in the planning for international expansion.

The economics and business model changed dramatically, but over an extended period of time, so it was easy to miss.

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