Hi everyone, good morning, and thank you very much for joining us today. As usual, joining me here are Carol, John, and Neil. It's been a very busy time for us here at Boohoo. We've spoken a lot about our supply chain and governance, and we're committed to being more transparent. The sustainability of this business will be key to our success, and we are changing all the time. But looking ahead now, our focus is on building for the future. Transparency, governance, and sustainability are now part of our DNA and our day job. We've made a number of acquisitions this year, and we are on a journey to build a fantastic global business. We're investing in our teams, creating new jobs, and strengthening our senior management team.
We are building a platform, investing in technology that supports all our brands and Debenhams, of course, our new digital department store. We are also increasing capacity by investing in warehouses and offices to support our future growth. This is part of building for the future: the brands, the people, the technology, platform, and the infrastructure to be successful going forward and to lead the fashion e-commerce market. Thank you, everyone, and I'll hand you over to John.
Thanks, Mahmud, and good morning, everyone. We've made fantastic progress this year investing in our brands, our platform, and technology, along with infrastructure and people. It's been a year of change, and we've made a huge amount of change, which puts us in an even stronger position as we look ahead and build for the future. I want to take this opportunity to thank our team for their incredibly hard work during a challenging year for everybody. This year has been a very busy one, and we have made great progress across ESG and sustainability with a focus on embedding a new way of working. I'm really pleased to be reporting such a strong set of results this morning, along with strong growth across all of our brands. We've now got 13 online fashion stores, all at different stages of their development.
From those that are well established, where we are looking at growing their product ranges and rolling them out into new geographies, to those that have been launched relatively recently, with the focus being on rebuilding brand awareness in their home markets. We've made a number of exciting new brand acquisitions in the year while investing in our infrastructure and technology and some senior hires to support us. The acquisition of Debenhams transforms our addressable market, creating a destination that will combine fashion, home, and sport with a market-leading prestige beauty proposition. We have a great opportunity to drive cross-category sales across fashion and these new categories, and by developing the marketplace, we will cater for an even wider audience. For Debenhams, we had 19 million shoppers historically, and we will develop this for international expansion in the future.
Looking ahead, we are really focused on investing in making a real success out of this growth. We're building for the future, really focusing on developing the new brands and underpinning them with platform enhancements and ensuring that we have ample capacity to continue to grow. Let's start off by looking at our progress on sustainability. Our priority this year has been on embedding a new way of working across the business, improving oversight of our supply chain, and providing greater transparency. You'll have seen last month that we published our U.K. supplier list, and we will be publishing our international supplier list in September. Since July last year, we've committed to invest GBP 15 million in making this business more sustainable, and we will continue to focus on this area going forward. As part of our independent review last September, Alison Levitt made 17 recommendations.
We've broken these down into 34 work streams, and so far, we've completed 20 of them, with the remaining parts to be fully implemented by September of this year. We've made huge strides and really great progress, but we do recognize there is still more to do. In March, we published our sustainability strategy, which brings together our environmental, social, and governance priorities. This is the first time the group has published a separate sustainability strategy, which demonstrates the investment we are making in this area. We have recruited experts in sustainability, ethical trade, packaging, sustainable materials, and climate change, who will guide our work in this area. I can't emphasize enough how inspired our teams from all our brands are about putting these plans into action. In developing the plan, we carried out a materiality assessment with an independent expert consultancy to identify issues and priorities.
We carried out customer research, stakeholder engagement, and spoke with teams around our business. We also drew on the learnings from industry groups that we are part of, like the Sustainable Apparel Coalition and Textiles 2030. Based on this, we identified clear priority areas and set time-bound goals, which we are going to report progress against. You'll also see that we are communicating this in a no-nonsense way that is very Boohoo and is something that our people can get behind. There are three clear priority areas: our clothes, using more sustainable materials, reducing textile waste, and improving packaging. Our suppliers: transparent supply chains would improve standards and management, which will drive improvements for all in the industry. Our business: climate change, marketing, our people, and the role we play in communities. Our first pillar covers the products that we sell.
We are looking at the materials we use to make them how they are designed, what happens to any waste at supplier level in our own operations and at end of life. We are looking at packaging too. Touching briefly on materials, through our work with WRAP's Sustainable Clothing Action Plan, we have carried out an assessment of our materials mix to understand which materials we use most of. Over 80% of our mix is polyester and cotton, and so that's where we're going to start. We've identified alternative options for these, including recycled and organic cotton, and our buying teams and compliance teams are working closely with suppliers to buy into more sustainable materials. We have done this for a number of years, and as an example, we've worked with one of our suppliers in Leicester on over 300,000 garments in 100% recycled polyester.
The difference now is that we're making these moves at volume. A great example of our progress is by the end of this year, 20% of the boohooMAN range will be made with sustainable or recycled fabrics, which is something new that we have brought in since last autumn. Finally, in our customer research, we know customers find buying into more sustainable garments confusing. That's why we are working on a consistent set of standards and a consistent strap line, Ready for the Future, which will appear on all of our sites indicating which products are more sustainable and why. BoohooMAN launched this last week, and other brands will be following suit over the coming months. We are also active members of WRAP's Textiles 2030, the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, and the Microfibre Consortium, and look forward to inputting into driving sustainability forward with other retailers.
Our second pillar brings together our work with our supply chain on transparency and traceability, standards and compliance, and program work. Although there has been recent focus on our U.K. supply chain, our plans are global and build on our social program to cover environmental management as well. On transparency and traceability, I've mentioned the publication of our supplier lists. We will also be publishing our responsible purchasing practices later this year. On standards and compliance, we have a robust ethical compliance program in place, working with expert third parties and building our teams on the ground. We have also brought a new head of product compliance into the business to work across all of our brands, and we have grown our internal compliance team substantially. Finally, we are developing our environmental program through our supply chain.
For example, our top suppliers are completing the Facility Environmental Module as part of our membership of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition to drive improvements in energy use and environmental management. We're also setting up a Garment Workers Trust in Leicester to help champion workers' rights and provide support for vulnerable workers and have committed to investing GBP 1 million into it. Continuing on the supply chain point, you remember we've purchased a site in Leicester, and we are currently developing that as our factory there, which will be an example of best practice in garment manufacturing. The site will open later this year and is expected to produce around 20,000-25,000 garments per week. While offering an education center with industry-led educational programs, it will also serve as our Leicester office where our in-house compliance team will be based.
Its real focus is to promote the textile industry in Leicester, working with local suppliers to promote best practice and manufacturing excellence. The site itself will create up to 100 jobs for the local community, and the operations will be powered by 100% renewable energy. Our third pillar is focused on building a sustainable business for the future. This includes our governance processes, being a great place to work, responsible marketing, what we can do to tackle climate change, and having a positive impact on communities. On governance, I chair a supply chain committee with senior representatives from sourcing, sustainability, ethical compliance, buying, merchandising, and internal audit. Initially, we focused on our U.K. supply chain, but we have broadened this out in recent weeks to cover sustainability and product compliance too. Supply chain compliance remains a standing item on every board meeting agenda.
On climate change, we've worked with an expert carbon management company to calculate the carbon footprint of our own operations and throughout our value chain. We have also set robust and stretching targets that are firmly based on climate change science, which I'll cover shortly. We have signed up to the BRC's Climate Action Roadmap, and in a few weeks, we'll publish details on our carbon targets and data in our sustainability report and annual report and accounts. On marketing, I've mentioned that our teams are working hard to communicate our sustainable products and initiatives to our customers and engage them in ways to live more sustainably. Finally, for our communities, our teams across the business do a great deal of community work, such as recently donating GBP 750,000 to the Mail Force campaign to help school children get online during lockdowns.
Later this year, we will launch our new social impact strategy, taking this work to the next level. Here are a few of our key targets for this year and out to 2030. We've made really good progress towards this year's targets already, and I've mentioned a number of these, including launching the Ready for the Future ranges, disclosing our supplier lists, the Garment Workers Trust, and our Leicester site. We are also building our design team with a specific focus on sustainable and recyclable ranges. And then by 2023, we'll launch resale and recycling offers across all our brands. And by 2025, all our cotton and polyester will be more sustainable, and no textile waste in our U.K. supply chain will go direct to landfill. We're actually just launching pilots with our Leicester suppliers to make this a reality.
Then finally, by 2030, we're setting science-based targets, which means that we'll have reduced carbon emissions by over 50% relative to our growth across our value chain, which includes our products, supply chain, logistics, as well as our own operations. The business has had a huge and phenomenal track record of growth. This year, we're reporting GBP 1.75 billion of revenue. That's over 15 times what it was in 2014. We are reporting Adjusted EBITDA of GBP 173.6 million, which has increased over 10 times in the same period. Order numbers have grown from 4 million to 53 million, and we've gained millions of new loyal customers, with active customers now standing at 18 million. Our social media followers have rocketed, and we now have 47 million followers across all of our social channels. Over this period, we've also created over 4,500 jobs across our brands and operations.
It's an incredible story of growth, and we have ambitious plans to continue growing the business and building for the future. I joined the business two years ago in 2019, and I thought I'd pull out some key metrics over my time here. When I joined, we had four online fashion stores, and we have grown that now to 13. We have made multiple acquisitions and refined our expertise in relaunching and building our brands and our platform. We have transformed our addressable market, and we now cover a much wider demographic, which gives us a much larger target market. We offer a brand for everybody, covering all ages, sizes, and prices. We've more than doubled revenues in two years and sustained our Adjusted EBITDA margin at 10%.
With active customer numbers growing by around 64%, we're growing our market share while gaining a greater share of our customer's wallet as they continue to shop with us across all our growing portfolio of brands and through more routes to market. Now we've launched our Debenhams digital department store. We've seen a huge increase in our social media following during the last two years alone, growing by 74% to 47 million, with a large part of our marketing focused on targeting customers through partnerships with relevant influencers. And we've created and will continue to create lots of jobs too, supporting communities across the UK. Our growth internationally has been phenomenal this year, and we've managed to maintain a strong international customer proposition despite the challenges presented by the pandemic. The USA really is a standout market for us, with 65% growth in sales in the last year alone.
With around $600 million in sales in the US, we're now one of the largest and fastest-growing UK players in the US market. We delivered a fantastic increase in market share in the US but still have less than 1% share online today. This is a huge opportunity for us, and we continue to adapt ranges, products, and sizes to suit the US market. Our other markets have also performed strongly, and we saw 39% growth in our core UK market, where we continue to see fantastic growth opportunities for all of our brands. We continue to explore new markets and will continue with plans to roll newer brands out to international markets where we have experience and an established presence. We've invested around GBP 250 million in acquisitions this year on very attractive multiples.
This is a real step up in terms of M&A, as we've looked to take advantage of opportunities arising from the current macroeconomic backdrop. We have acquired a number of brands and relaunched them with a stronger fashion focus, utilizing the benefits of our platform to scale their growth, which Carol will talk about in more detail shortly. We now have a really strong record of acquiring and integrating brands quickly in this way, and in doing so, have secured up to 1,000 jobs by saving these brands, along with the additional roles these new brands support across the group. In addition, in May last year, we acquired the remaining 34% minority interest stake in PLT. This deal has today created significant value for our shareholders and gives us full ownership of a brand that is in high growth with a enormous global potential.
We're really excited about the opportunity that Debenhams brings. It is an acquisition that really transforms our addressable market by entering new market verticals such as beauty, sport, and homeware at scale, the significant opportunity Debenhams brings to its marketplace, and offering a new route to market for our existing brands. Debenhams is an established and well-known brand in the UK. It has 90% brand recognition, has been a top 10 retail website in the UK in terms of traffic, with around 300 million annual visits per annum, and historically had 19 million shoppers online and offline. In terms of scale and opportunity for us, it is worth remembering that just 15 months ago, pre-COVID, Debenhams commanded approximately 4% of the fashion market by value, according to Kantar, and it was one of the largest clothing retailers in the UK.
For us, Debenhams also gives the group the opportunity to expand into new categories such as beauty, leveraging Debenhams' heritage and strong market positioning. For example, it had over 6 million beauty shoppers, 1.4 million Beauty Club members, and an estimated 20% market share in prestige beauty. Interestingly, over half of Debenhams' regular beauty customers are aged between 21 and 30, with great crossover potential for our younger fashion brands, while we can capture the older beauty customers' fashion needs through our brands in our portfolio, such as Karen Millen. We launched beauty on site just last week with an initial selection of well-known brands, including Hugo Boss, Calvin Klein, and Elizabeth Arden, and we have signed up pretty much all of the major global beauty brands from prestige to masstige, and we will be rapidly extending the range available on site over the coming weeks.
We also have an opportunity with the brands that we acquired with Debenhams, such as Maine, Mantaray, Principles, and Faith. These brands are important to the Debenhams customer. We are in the process of rebuilding them and relaunching them as more relevant fashion brands, leveraging the strengths of our platform. With the Debenhams launch, we started with our own brands on the website and have added some own-branded homewares, and our beauty rollout is ramping up significantly. We have also launched into areas such as children's wear, which Debenhams has a great heritage in, and are currently building up the third-party brand offering, which will enable us to move into new product categories such as sport. All of this will be launching soon as we aim to create the UK's largest marketplace across fashion, beauty, homeware, and sport.
As we progress, there is a potential to scale all of this up, continue adding new third-party brands, develop our categories, and learn about the best way to develop the opportunity for the UK and international markets. An important part of building for the future is ensuring we have enough capacity to do so, which is why we have acquired two new warehouses, one in Wellingborough and one in Daventry. These will support the new brands we have acquired and also provide the capacity for the growth we expect from our existing and established brands. We're also focusing on efficiency and investing in automating our existing sites, and there is work going on at the moment to further automate our Sheffield operations. We recently announced the acquisition of an office in London. This will house our teams across the London-based brands.
It's set in Soho, right in the middle and heart of the West End, and will be the home of our product, marketing, brand, and technology teams. In addition, we continue to invest heavily into our Manchester head office, which we've expanded and upgraded recently. We're also adding international offices as we expand our global footprint. We want to ensure we have the best possible technology in place to support our growth ambitions. In the last year, our technology teams landed over 90 key change projects covering, for example, sourcing, infrastructure, and our e-commerce front-end, and have more than 115 projects already in the pipeline for this year. To draw out some examples of how we are driving tech-enabled change in our business, you remember back in September we talked about buying processes and our order app. This is all about digitalizing and simplifying our order process.
Since then, we've rolled this out across all of our brands and are making further progress with our supplier portal, which will provide a one-stop shop for our buyers and suppliers to manage orders and give us even greater visibility over our supply chain. In our infrastructure, in the last 100 days alone, we've switched on two new warehouses, added a new office in London to cater for over 600 people. We've launched four new brands. Delivering these is a real testament to our team's skill and agility to land key projects on time, and we are investing in existing sites to drive efficiencies, such as our bonded warehousing project for Burnley and automation projects across Burnley and Sheffield. As an e-commerce business, we continue to develop the customer-facing front end so as to deliver best-in-class user experience to our customers.
Not only have we rolled out six new sites from acquisitions, we further developed our apps and have plans in place to redesign some of our sites, bringing greater functionality and richer content to our customers. We've also been bold, recently launching Debenhams on a headless front-end concept. This is the first for us and will allow us to adapt and develop the Debenhams site with more freedom and agility than ever before as we look to stay ahead of the technology curve. We've made a number of key hires recently to support our priorities and our growth. We've hired Andrew as Director of Responsible Sourcing to lead in our supply chain oversight and help us to grow the business in a sustainable way.
Across our sourcing and compliance functions, we have increased headcount from around 30 last year to over 150, and we have hired a number of new head of departments across these areas, adding a great depth of experience and structure to this key area. We have hired a new MD for our Dorothy Perkins, Burton, and Wallis brands, Mitchell Hughes, to focus on developing these brands and driving their growth. We've also hired a new Chief People Officer, Siobhan Hyland, who is really a senior figure to champion the well-being of our people and ensure we have well-resourced teams across all of our brands. As I mentioned, we have also acquired a new office in London, giving us a much stronger presence and platform for our London-based brands. The well-being of our people has been front of mind throughout what has been a really tough year.
We have implemented fully flexible working and taken time to engage with our people to find out what is important to them and ensure they have the support they need, not only for work, but ensuring a healthy work-life balance. With a young workforce, we've been focused on offering support, especially around mental health, and we have enhanced the resources available through the Boohoo 4u intranet site. We have implemented COVID testing across all of our sites, including the warehouses. We were one of the first companies to do this at our Burnley warehouse. We recently ran an employee engagement survey in January of this year, and the results are very positive. They paint a true picture of what it is like to work for Boohoo.
81% of participants said they felt inspired and respected by their manager, and 75% said they would recommend a job at Boohoo to friends and family. These are group results, but interestingly, for our Burnley warehouse, we actually see a slightly higher percentage that would recommend working at Boohoo to friends and family, and I think that speaks volumes about our organization. Lastly, we are strong advocates for colleagues being able to share in the group's success. All of our employees are shareholders through the award of shares, which in the last year amounted to GBP 3,600 per person, regardless of their role within the group. To summarize, we have an incredible track record of growth, and although this year has been one like no other and we've seen a lot of change, the fundamental strengths of the test and repeat model remain unchanged.
This year, the business has demonstrated its agility and adaptability with the speed at which we can respond to changing customer demands, lockdowns, restrictions, and working from home. The fundamentals of the test and repeat model have worked in our favor and will continue to do so as we build for the future. We have embedded a new way of working throughout the organization, and we've set out some really ambitious targets as part of our upfront sustainability strategy. We've continued to grow the business with GBP 1.75 billion of sales in the last year and growth across all of our geographies. We've made a number of acquisitions and worked hard to relaunch the new brands and are investing in building them up to drive growth.
We have a really exciting opportunity with our new digital department store, which will be an important part of how we develop the business going forward. Strategically, this is a great fit as we already cover the fashion market from value to premium and across all age ranges. There is a great potential to scale Debenhams up as we add new categories and third-party brands through the marketplace. Carol will talk more about that and what we're going to do shortly. We've acquired two new warehouses and a new London office to give us the capacity we need to grow. We're investing in our platform. Technology is the key to being able to scale the business and ensure we continue to offer a brilliant customer experience. Finally, our people.
They're extremely talented, are passionate about what they do, and have worked tirelessly over these last 12 months to help deliver this amazing set of results. We'll continue to build our teams with a number of key hires to support us across these areas as we build for the future. I'll now hand over to Neil to talk us through the financials.
Thank you, John, and good morning, everyone. I'm going to move on to the financial review of the past year, starting with the group income statement. Despite the challenges we faced over the course of the year from the COVID-19 pandemic, we've delivered another exceptional set of results. Group sales grew 41% to GBP 1.745 billion as we saw strong demand for all of our brands in all geographies. This was achieved with a healthy gross margin of 54.2%, an increase of 20 basis points on last year.
Adjusted EBITDA came in at GBP 173.7 million with an adjusted EBITDA margin of 10%. At the heart of this exceptional financial performance, our more established brands have seen continued organic profitable growth both in the UK and internationally. We're particularly pleased to have maintained a double-digit EBITDA margin in a year where we've made considerable investments in acquiring new brands, growing new brands, and against the backdrop of the global pandemic, which has meant that we've seen significantly elevated distribution costs. The strong profitability is also seen at the EBIT level, and we've delivered GBP 149.4 million of adjusted EBIT, which was up 40% year-on-year. Adjusted diluted earnings per share increased 47% year-on-year to GBP 8.67. Once again, this represents an exceptional performance reflecting our strong organic growth and also aided by the purchase of the minority interest in Pretty Little Thing.
That increase in adjusted diluted earnings per share demonstrates the accretive value of that transaction. As we've previously guided, adjusting items increased to GBP 25 million, up from GBP 16 million in the prior year, as a result of an increase in non-cash share-based payment charges. That increase was due to there being more participants in the group share schemes, as well as the management incentive plan that we announced in June last year. You can also see here that we ended the year with a healthy net cash position of GBP 276 million, up GBP 35 million from the end of the previous financial year, and it's great to see our cash reserves increasing as we've made significant investments to drive continued growth. The next slide breaks down our sales by region, and as you can see, revenue growth has been strong in all geographies.
The U.K. market is the largest for the group, accounting for 54% of sales, and revenue in this region grew 39% year-on-year. We've been particularly pleased to maintain this level of growth in our biggest market, and we've seen an extremely strong performance in the U.K. through all of the different stages of lockdown. In the U.S., we've also seen a fantastic performance with sales of GBP 435 million, up 65% year-on-year. All brands are showing great potential in the U.S. market, and we believe that there's much more potential to come from some of our more recent acquisitions, such as Karen Millen. We've also seen encouraging growth from the rest of Europe region, with sales up 30%. Performance has varied considerably as different countries in Europe have coped with different stages of lockdown.
However, we believe there's great potential for all our brands in Europe when clothing markets return to more normal levels and now that Brexit uncertainties are behind us. We had planned for many months amidst those uncertainties to ensure that we could continue to trade effectively with the EU countries following Brexit, and we're pleased to see that operations continued uninterrupted in January and February 2021, albeit with some additional customs compliance costs and additional duties on some products. We've previously guided that the cost impacts of Brexit will be in the high single-digit million GBP this year, but we'll look to mitigate these costs through pricing power, operational leverage, and operational efficiencies. In the rest of the world segment, growth also varied with different patterns of lockdown, but sales still grew at 16% year-on-year against the backdrop of the global pandemic. Onto costs.
Total costs as a percentage of sales increased marginally year-on-year, with an increase in distribution costs, which represented 24.2% of sales compared with 22.5% of sales last year. With the reduction in air traffic due to COVID, we've seen a significant increase in international freight costs. This headwind continues into the current financial year as global travel remains heavily restricted. We estimate the impact of the higher international distribution costs has been up to 300 basis points relative to sales, but this has been offset to some degree by lower levels of returns as product mix has changed with people's lifestyles during lockdown. Marketing costs have increased 36% to GBP 159 million, and that was a decrease of 40 basis points as a percentage of sales.
We planned more cautiously on marketing campaigns in the early stages of lockdown in the first part of the financial year, but we increased marketing activity in the second half of the year as we invested in our new brands and in further international growth. Other admin costs were 12.4% of sales, down 90 basis points compared to the previous year, which is the effect of operating leverage as we grow volumes on our multi-brand platform. Cash flow for the group was extremely strong. We generated GBP 201 million of operating cash flow driven by our profitability and an efficient working capital cycle. Capital expenditure of GBP 49 million related to infrastructure investments as we continue to invest for the future. As usual, the biggest spend related to our distribution centers in Burnley and Sheffield to keep ahead of the business's growth curve, which has been as steep as ever.
But we've also made significant investments in our IT platform and our offices in order to give the group sufficient headroom to continue to deliver on its potential. This spend was, however, lower than we'd previously guided at GBP 82 million as we've continued to deploy capital expenditure as efficiently as possible. So a large part of that underspend will carry over into the current year. Acquisitions of GBP 235 million, which excludes the value of inventory, include the buyout of the non-controlling interest in PrettyLittleThing, which completed towards the end of May for GBP 162 million in cash and GBP 108 million in shares. In June, we also acquired Oasis and Warehouse for just over GBP 5 million. In January 2021, we acquired the online business and intellectual property of Debenhams for GBP 55 million. In February, we acquired the Dorothy Perkins, Wallis, and Burton brands.
The group acquired GBP 39 million of shares for its Employee Benefits Trust in order to satisfy future share option awards and also raised GBP 201 million from issuing shares, and that will support growth opportunities that add value to the group and leverage investments in our multi-brand platform. We ended the period with GBP 276 million of net cash, which is up GBP 35 million on last year. So now looking at KPIs, we're continuing to see improvements in our customer engagement KPIs. The number of active customers in the last 12 months increased by 28% to 17.8 million, and the number of orders increased by 26% to 53.4 million. Order frequency was down slightly, but given the high average order value, which increased by 6%, and lower returns rates experienced this year, this is as expected, and we've continued to see double-digit growth in net sales per active customer.
We're also encouraged by the performance from customers that we've acquired in this year. Purchasing behavior in terms of churn and speed of second purchase has been similar to cohorts acquired in prior years, and if anything, slightly better. Indeed, the order frequency for new customers acquired during the year has actually been higher than for those acquired in previous periods before the pandemic. Looking at our customer cohorts by vintage in a bit more detail, this next chart shows how loyal our customers are and how resilient they've been during the pandemic. We're presenting this chart slightly differently this year in that the cohorts shown here are based on net sales after returns rather than on gross sales as we've previously shown.
Showing net sales more accurately reflects the trends compared to previous periods, given the significantly lower levels of returns in the year just gone compared with all of the prior years. Having said that, whichever way we display the data, it shows really healthy levels of customer retention. It's extremely encouraging to see the earlier cohorts continue to grow from years two onwards. If you take the FY18 cohort, for example, you can see significant growth in the last two years, and we see the same pattern across all of the historical cohorts. As you can see, we had a very impressive new cohort in 2021 as we gained new customers during the pandemic that hadn't previously shopped with us, and we expect strong retention levels in this new cohort too.
Lastly, onto guidance, revenue growth for the full year is expected to be around 25% at the group level, with the newly acquired brands expected to deliver approximately 5 percentage points of that growth. That's in line with our guidance for acquisitions to deliver sales of around 1x the purchase price in their first year under Boohoo ownership. Growth with our established brands remains strong, and over the last two years, we've achieved a revenue CAGR of 42%, significantly overachieving against our medium-term guidance of 25%. Growth was particularly strong during the first periods of enforced lockdown across all of our markets due to the pandemic, which we annualize now in the first half of this financial year. Trading in the first few weeks of the financial year has been encouraging.
However, the economic and consumer outlook remains uncertain, and we expect to see the benefits that we've received from significantly lower returns over the last 12 months begin to unwind this year, whilst we'll still experience elevated levels of carriage and freight costs. As far as EBITDA margin is concerned for the current financial year, the outlook for our established brands is unchanged, and their margins are expected to be in line year-over-year, which reflects a blend of established brands with higher margins and newer brands which are dilutive to group margin as they're closer to break-even or even possibly loss-making. With the significant number of new acquisitions in FY21, we expect a greater dilutive impact from investment in newly acquired brands in the current financial year, FY22. So we expect that to be between 50 and 100 basis points.
Therefore, we expect the group's adjusted EBITDA margin to be in the region of 9.5%-10% for the full year. A double-digit EBITDA margin is possible even with a big investment in new brands, continued investment in international expansion of existing brands, and as distribution costs are elevated in what is hopefully the wake of the COVID pandemic. Sales growth is likely to be weighted to the second half of the year as we make those investments in our scalable multi-brand platform and as we anniversary the biggest sales boost from lockdown 1.0 in Q1 and Q2. Adjusted EBITDA is also expected to see more of a weighting towards the second half of the year, which is consistent with financial years prior to the pandemic and also reflects investments in our multi-brand platform in H1 as we build for the future.
As John mentioned, in April 2021, we acquired a new London office for GBP 72 million. Capital expenditure for the remainder of the financial year is expected to be in the region of GBP 125 million-GBP 175 million. This relates to growth investments in our new warehouse sites in Wellingborough and Daventry, as well as continued enhancements to our existing facilities and investments in our tech platform. In terms of guidance for other income statement items, underlying depreciation and amortization is expected to be around GBP 35 million-GBP 40 million, reflecting those investments in warehousing that we made and will be making this year. The effective tax rate will be 23%, which is higher than the statutory rate due to disallowable items. We expect one-off transaction and restructuring costs of between GBP 10 million and GBP 15 million in relation to our most recent acquisitions as previously guided in February.
Amortization of acquired intangibles is expected to be around GBP 12 million, with a GBP 30 million share-based payment charge this year. So we're focused on building the business for the future and continued investment in our brands, our infrastructure, our people, and technology to drive growth and further economies of scale. We're also committed to continue to make improvements across our environmental, social, and governance responsibilities and to accelerate our sustainability journey. The group's medium-term target of sales growth of 25% per annum and an Adjusted EBITDA margin of around 10% remains unchanged. So that's it from me. Thank you, and I'll pass over to Carol, who's going to tell us more about how our ever-expanding portfolio of brands is developing. Thanks.
Thank you, Mahmud, and John, and Neil. Good morning, everyone.
This morning, I'd like to cover off what we've been up to in the past 6 months and, of course, our recent acquisitions. In what has been a challenging year for all sectors and a really difficult time for retail with the COVID restrictions, we've been very busy, now acquiring 13 branded online stores in our portfolio. It feels like some time ago, but it was only June last year when we acquired the Warehouse and Oasis brands. And in September last year, I touched on these identities and what the ambition was and how we were going to make them relevant for the future. Well, we've done just that. And today, between these two new brands, we have 7,600 styles from across an array of varied products. In January this year, we welcomed the Debenhams brand.
Exciting and new for all of us, this takes us on a new journey and an opportunity to broaden our appeal with a digital department store, an offering that takes us into new categories with beauty, homewares, and widens our customer offer, as well as our new appeal to newer customers. And then in February this year, we acquired Dorothy Perkins, Wallis, and Burton Menswear, strengthening our already thriving British heritage brands, again giving us the opportunity to grow our market share across a broader demographic. Now, I'd like to play you, as always, a short video demonstrating what our brands have been up to over the past 12 months. Well, there you have it. And what you've actually really just missed is my colleagues being on the table here just dancing.
A bit early in the day for that, but it would have been a nice thing to have done, Neil. Well, on the next slide, you can see it's pretty busy. 13 brands we have in our portfolio today. I'm sure you can imagine there's a lot going on here with Boohoo, BoohooMAN, PrettyLittleThing, Nasty Gal, and MissPap. They're all covering off the younger value offering. Then moving to the middle market, we've got Dorothy Perkins also with a value offer. Oasis, Warehouse, Wallis, and Coast covering off the middle market for fashion. Burton, our heritage menswear brand that indexes informal wear but also has a strong hold in casual too. And Karen Millen, our premium brand.
Now Debenhams, our digital department store, with its huge potential to house all of these brands, plus beauty and homewares and children's wear and sportswear and footwear. The ambition is just huge. On the next slide, you'll see our customer sits at the heart of everything we do. We need to be wherever he or she is at all times. As a portfolio of fashion brands, we index highly across all our social channels. As a group, we now have an incredible reach of 47 million followers. Social media remains an important channel and forms our thinking and our marketing strategy. It enables that direct and effective communication with our customers and followers. Of course, every brand has a tailored approach, bringing their followers relevant content and topical conversation.
Now, you can imagine the business-as-usual approach to marketing has just been turned on its head in the last 12 months. As usual, our glam up to go out, our vacation dressing, our festival ideas, and all that great stuff that our brands are well known for just wasn't relevant this past year. So we've had to scrap our plans, move fast, reinvent ourselves, but not just in our fashion offering, but also in our approach to our content across all our social channels. It's always about being front of mind. If you're working from home, that's the content we've served. But thankfully, change is on the horizon. As life returns to near normality, so has our strong fashion offering. In the past, I've talked a lot about our collaborations, and this has become ingrained in our marketing mix.
There's too many for me to pull out, and there's probably been at least 100 different ones over the period. But to name just a few, for BoohooMAN, we launched a skate edit with American skateboarder Boo Johnson. This has really strengthened our men's leisure wear category. At PrettyLittleThing, we've been working with Molly-Mae. She always performs brilliantly for us. And the collaboration with Lydia Millen for Karen Millen continues to be a huge success. And on International Women's Day, Karen Millen launched the We Are Women campaign, donating a percentage of each sale to a charity, Dress for Success. This charity provides women with the tools, the support, and professional attire to help them into the workplace and thrive in their professional life. And I'm sure many of you will remember Rachel Stevens, the UK singer-songwriter.
Well, she's done just an edit with Oasis, which is also proving to be a huge success. There's so many to list and so many more to come. And it's going to be very, very exciting how we execute what has become business-as-usual to our established brands onto our newly acquired brands this year. In the past 12 months, it's really been an education for the whole of the fashion industry. How we may have dressed has taken a huge shift as we've all been working from home. And last month, when we went into lockdown, the fashion demand changed in hours. There was no nights out, no dressing up. And sales in those huge categories, really, they fell off a cliff. Formal wear had no real purpose because we were all working from home. Our customers' shopping patterns completely changed. They were looking for something else.
Within weeks, we saw a return to fantastic growth. All the newer categories, more comfortable casual areas performed well, and athleisure just became the biggest trend of the year. With this approach, we've changed our content marketing strategy: active wear, home workouts, health and well-being were the focus of our customers. As we moved through the summer, we did see some levels of normality somewhere around the world, but the fashion was still very casual. As we moved into the autumn season, our social activity, it was centered around our daily walks. We saw a fantastic increase in our quilted jacket and gilet areas. Leather was really strong with our premium brands, and it's been a fantastic knitwear season. Still, all very casual and definitely not a Christmas party season.
And now, as we move through spring, we've seen the long-awaited dress and going out categories to start to perform some early shoots once again. We can't wait till the country opens up and we can all get dressed up and start selling those going out categories. But I just wanted to demonstrate how fragile the industry really is and how our test and repeat model has served us well throughout this period. It's enabled us to change direction very quickly to respond to our customers' change in lifestyle throughout the pandemic. With that, another change has taken place. More and more customers are shopping online who previously didn't before. For us as a group, it's created more new customers for all to talk to and to offer them more of what we have to offer amongst our brands.
So it's now just giving some focus to Karen Millen and Coast, 18 months on. We're continuing our journey of building a global lifestyle brand for Karen Millen, which focuses on our 20- to 40-something career-minded women. It's simply gone from strength to strength. So 18 months ago, we launched the site, which is 40 styles. And now we have 5,000 options available to shop today. We've outgrown some of the traditional categories, and we've introduced lots of new things to talk about. And while dresses had performed well for Karen Millen throughout the lockdown, we also introduced loungewear, lingerie, nightwear, and jewelry. We've also increased our size offering with the Karen Millen Curve collection, making the brand even more accessible and inclusive. We've maintained our focus on fashion, our quality, and designer luxury with premium design and fabrics, and improving our packaging is all part of the brand experience.
Karen Millen has started her international journey in the U.S. It's early days, but it's encouraging results, and the collections have been received really well. Now looking at Coast, also 18 months on, the focus of this brand has always been around dresses and occasion. Throughout the pandemic, we expanded the collections to include casual wear and loungewear, but still with a very feminine style. We're looking forward to the Coast brand to take its first position as the go-to occasion wear brand. We've now expanded the offering to 4,000 styles in just 18 months. On Warehouse, we've successfully revived the brand, and it now takes place as our trend-led fashion brand for the 25+ market. With a cool urban vibe, Warehouse is becoming the fashion media darling, with call-ins weekly from the fashion press. It really is establishing its fashion status.
This year, we launched our campaign, Warehouse Icons. Statement pieces launched across the website and our social channels and worn by the influencers and the tastemakers in fashion. Oasis is a feminine fashion brand for our 30-something customers. The range is building quickly, and the value pieces across our denim and floral print collections have been received really well. As we continue to build out that offering, our plan is to disrupt the middle market and become the key destination for those must-have pieces each season. As you'll see, we have a prominent message across our presentation this morning on building for the future. Both John and Mahmud and Neil have talked about our ambitions and certainly indexing on our sustainability. Now, each brand is producing sustainable and recyclable collections, and this will go on to build as we go through the year.
We're also working with our supply chain to make changes right across the supply chain. So those bestsellers that we previously had are now going into recycled materials. And we're working with our influencer community to do the talking for us on this. So on brand development, I'd like just to take a moment to look at this slide. It's a good timeline for any one of our brands. So just to talk you through it, post-acquiring a brand, our first job is to build out the website, the range, and integrate all of that into the warehouse. The next stage is building out the brand DNA, a full communication strategy, and then invest in marketing. Now, this could be digital or brand, depending where the brand's at in terms of its awareness, but it's usually a combination of the two.
And while all this is going on, the buying and trading teams are already working on what's next and extending the ranges into new categories and maximizing the growth on the categories that are performing really well. Once we have traction, we're then looking to the future and seeing what each brand does next on what is their overseas growth strategy. So we're right at the start of this journey for Dorothy Perkins, Wallis, and Burton, our very recent acquisitions. Dorothy Perkins, a value brand sitting in the middle market with a feminine fashion handwriting at very affordable prices, high brand awareness, and rich British heritage with the mantra, "If it makes you feel good, you should wear it." Wallis, again, with a rich British heritage, its collections designed very much with an extremely loyal customer in mind, offering the 30s and 40s a very defined style of modern pieces.
Burton, an exciting opportunity for us to add another menswear brand to the group with a heritage and formal tailoring and a fantastic offering in casual too. This not only widens our demographic, but it is our first move as a group into formal menswear and a new male audience. As you can see, brands are at the start of their journey within the Boohoo Group. They're rediscovering their brand identity, and they're moving position to pure play. It's an education for the team, and it's really exciting to keep these brands alive and make them relevant for their future growth. Warehouse and Oasis and Coast are all at varied stages of their development and marketing activity. As I mentioned earlier, Karen Millen at the beginning of her international journey.
I've spoken in the past about our value brands at the youth center of the market, and they're all at different stages, but all have very established handwriting and high fashion. They all have a very good market share here in the UK and a growth strategy for their focused international markets. Now, I can't go through this morning without talking about Debenhams because everybody else is. So Debenhams are our offer of fashion, beauty, and home. We're pleased now to say we've successfully launched the website. Now, it's going to be enormous in the future just about offering everything, but just to name a few where we're at at the moment is we have our fashion, our beauty, our homewear, some of our sport, some of our children's wear, our lingerie, and our footwear.
Debenhams provides a digital department store experience, and it's such an exciting opportunity for us as a team. Introducing the new categories into the group and expanding outside of fashion will contribute to the future growth of the group and broaden our target audience. If you've had an opportunity to visit the site, you'll see there's some exciting rebranding going on. Currently, we have a collection of our current brands, plus some of the Debenhams' own brands that came along with the acquisition. These are Maine and Mantaray, both in women's and menswear, Blue Zoo, a children's wear brand, Principles, the fashion brand, Faith, the footwear brand, and Gorgeous, the lingerie brand. Now, Debenhams' beauty is a very exciting opportunity and fantastic addition to the group. Debenhams is leading in prestige beauty in the UK across makeup, skincare, and fragrance.
We've tapped into a market of over six million beauty customers, and Debenhams has a Beauty Club membership of 1.4 million. Working hard to get all of the brands signed up. We just launched the beauty just last week or beginning of this week, last week, I think it was, with just a few of the brands, but there's lots more to come. So if you went on there, you'd see Marc Jacobs, Hugo Boss, Benefit from a makeup perspective. And also, we're pleased to announce that we've launched our homewares range: bedding, towels, soft furnishings, candles, home fragrance, and there's so much more to come.
So just to conclude on Debenhams, we have an established online department store covering off fashion from value to premium across women's, men's, and children's, beauty from all the world's leading brands, and home from both Debenhams' own branded goods to many of the leading household names we're so familiar with. A one-stop shop with a customer appeal, catering for every age group and every price range. Still, as we move through the coming months, there's still loads more to achieve. So here we have it, 13 brands under the Boohoo Group. This slide clearly demonstrates where each brand sits in its fashionability and price.
So from our value, established high fashion brands, Boohoo, BoohooMAN, PrettyLittleThing, MissPap, and Nasty Gal, our middle market brand with Dorothy Perkins, our second move into menswear with Burton, our fashionista trend-led brand with Warehouse, Oasis, our middle market attainable style brand, Wallis, our loyal customer brand with its very own distinct style, Coast, our occasion wear brand, Karen Millen, our premium luxury brand, and of course, Debenhams, our digital department store. Now, if you can imagine, we've gone within our portfolio from our 2014 IPO with just the 16 to 24-year-old market covered. We've taken that now into the middle market and to the premium market. So we're covering off ages now from our teeny 16-year-olds to our 50-plus consumers. So it very much has changed the old Boohoo Group to the new Boohoo Group and what we're achieving and where our focuses are today.
Of course, that's just to close everybody around the world. It's a big ambition and a journey that we're all really excited about. Not only have we covered off the age demographic, we've also been covering off our fashions, but we've also been covering off our sizes too. Now we're ranging from sizes 4 to 24, XXS to XXXL in many of our menswear proposition, petite, curve, and tall collections, and of course, in a range of prices that are all delivering great value. I do hope this demonstrates the brand bandwidth of Boohoo Group. It's been a successful year that's given the retail sector a lot of challenges. We're pleased with the growth and the numbers we've shared with you this morning. We've strengthened our leadership team to support the business as it grows, acquired two new warehouses and a new London office.
And all of this alongside investing in new brands, we continue to develop our platform, enhancing our technology to support the best customer experience. Our focus is building for the future, investing in our brands, our infrastructure, technology, people, and building out our sustainability strategy to drive us forward to lead the fashion e-commerce market. And we're all very excited about what lies ahead for all of us. So thank you for listening. I know it's been a lot of content to get through this morning, but thank you anyway, and we're happy to take your questions.
Right. We've got quite a few questions in, so we'll see how much we can get through in the next half hour or so. First up from John Stevenson at Peel Hunt on Debenhams.
Could you give a bit of color on how Debenhams will look by peak, be it in terms of clothing SKUs, third-party brands you build onto the marketplace as well as beauty? And secondly, on Debenhams, do you have any plans for standalone sites for the pre-existing Debenhams brands?
So in terms of brands, we'll pretty much have all of the former beauty brands live for peak. And then also on clothing, footwear, and accessories, third-party brands, they're all mostly in the process of going through integration. So most of those will equally be ready for peak. We're equally looking at other brands that we feel are appropriate as we sort of focus on what we want Debenhams to be for the future. So we're having very positive conversations with other brands that weren't previously on Debenhams. We'll continue with our own in-house brands.
So for peak, we're feeling a really good and confident position. With regards to the Debenhams in-house brands of Mantaray, Faith, Principles, Red Herring, etc., at this stage, we don't have any plans for independent sites for those brands.
Okay. Moving on to Anne Critchlow at Société Générale. Debenhams, historically, you talked about having 19 million customers. Could you give any colors to kind of how many of those you might expect to retain? And one, in terms of kind of IT approach, in terms of outsourcing towards developments in-house, should you expect any significant CapEx or capitalization of tech costs going forward?
On the customers, we'd want to retain every single one of those customers. That 19 million includes everybody who shopped at Debenhams on the high street or on the website.
We want to retain all of them, but obviously, that's going to take time from where we are today. The business now is an online pure play. So the sky's the limit, really. And obviously, we can take Debenhams not just in the UK, but internationally as an online business. So we want to retain as many as possible of the 19 million, I think the answer to that is. On the IT side of things, we are ramping up our IT development generally, and we have done that in the last year, and we're doing that now going forwards with also the new headless platform that Debenhams is on. So it's still a combination of third-party applications and our own in-house development that gives us the best answer in terms of a customer experience.
So the capitalization will increase a little bit, but it's not at significant levels that are going to really increase our depreciation charges going forward. But we're doing more proprietary technology development than we have done previously. But at the same time, we're using third-party applications.
Okay. Thank you. Two questions from Simon Bowler at Numis. Could you give a bit of talk and color around your performance in the rest of Europe? How's that been different versus the U.K. and U.S. in Q4? And secondly, on your gross margin in the rest of Europe, that seems to have fallen in the second half of the year a little bit. Does this reflect costs associated from Brexit?
So on the general performance in Q4, rest of Europe, what we had seen was a really strong performance in the U.K., our home market, and a really strong performance in the U.S.
I think both of those markets, we've got relatively high levels of awareness. I think we've seen that during the year as the pandemic has gone on and on, that in Europe, we've seen a much more variable picture in terms of demand as different countries have had different phases of lockdown. So the performance in Q4 was a little bit flat, but actually, we did have some big comps last year in Europe. But I think it's a big opportunity for the future Europe that we're extremely small there compared to, say, the U.S. If you take Europe as a whole, it's a similar-sized market to the U.S. So I think there's a lot of potential there, but we think it's an opportunity when reopening has properly happened for us to build awareness there.
In terms of the gross margin in Europe, it was a little bit lower in the second half of the year, and that reflects we've seen that across a few of the regions and a little bit of Brexit. So we did have a few million GBP of extra costs in January and February that are extra customs clearance charges, extra import duties. So that did impact a little bit in the final couple of months.
Okay. Thank you. Moving on to Georgina at J.P. Morgan. What are your plans with regards to executive pay to be linked to ESG targets given the most recent letter sent to the EAC? And secondly, could you provide some more details on the GBP 23 million of claims in the notes to the accounts?
So if I take the executive pay one, so we're having very positive conversations with the non-exec directors and our key shareholders, and we'll update further on this point in the annual report and at our AGM. And so the claims provisions that you'll see in the notes to the accounts, so this is a class of provisions that we've established this year. It covers all different types of legal claims that we might receive. So trademark infringement claims, design rights claims, claims for misuse of image rights, data protection claims, employer's liability claims, product liability claims, unfair competition claims, lots of different things included in there. But we've made full provision for all of those claims that we have and in accordance with the accounting standards, IAS 37, where we have a reasonable estimate.
I think as we've grown in complexity, we're getting more of these types of claims. We've certainly seen that in the year just gone, but it's the cost of being a global business with many brands that are successful in lots of different markets.
Okay. Moving on to Anisha at Bernstein. Could you give some more color on the growth expected from the brands you've just acquired into the medium term as opposed to just the next 12 months? Second question is regarding customer acquisition. It seemed to slow down a bit in the second half of the year versus the first half. Have you kind of got any thoughts on how you'd expect to see customer acquisition progress this year? And lastly, just if you're able to give any color around the gross margin variance between the regions.
For example, it's 51% in the UK versus 60% in the US.
So from the new brands, I think it's too early to say to give medium-term guidance on that. We give our overall medium-term guidance for the business that we have 25% year-on-year growth sustainably going forward. What we've said about the new acquisitions is let's start with 1x what we've paid for the brands in terms of sales in the first year. Going back to our previous history, that looks like a good benchmark. Nasty Gal was probably the earliest best example of that. That happened in the first year. Then three, well, four years down the line now, the business is significantly bigger than the predecessor business.
So we want to be on that similar trajectory with the acquisition of Debenhams and also with Dorothy Perkins, Wallis & Burton, but it's very early days on that. Customer acquisition, second half versus the first half. I think that was a function of what had happened in the first half of the year. We saw extremely strong acquisition in lockdown 1.0, if you like, across the globe. And then as I spoke before about that, and you saw in the cohorts that we saw great revenues and order frequency from those new acquisitions. So while new acquisition was a bit slower in the second half of the year, I think that was just a function of the way the market has been through lockdown. And actually, we saw very encouraging trends from new customers this year. And then the other question was about gross margin across the region.
So yeah, our pricing is market-led, as you can imagine. And very much the pricing does depend, though, on what we do in terms of charging for delivery and charging for product that can impact your gross margin across the regions. And there's an element of the competitive side of pricing with the UK market being lower. And then there's also an element that we charge a bit more for delivery in some of the overseas markets. And that's what's there. It's not so much brand mix driven. The brand mix is similar across the markets, and the higher-priced brands don't influence that too much. But it's more about that market-led pricing for the different regions and competition therein.
Okay. Got two questions from Matthew McEachran at N+1 on Debenhams. Just firstly, in terms of the Beauty Club database, are you able to give a bit of an update on that and the kind of, I suppose, bigger picture in terms of targeting and marketing strategy you have for Beauty Club? And secondly, with the Debenhams launch recently, was that a soft launch? And kind of when will you actively start to build up the brand marketing there?
So it was a soft launch on the 12th of April. And the site continues to build functionality by week, and we add brands and additional product by week in terms of where we go. So key is obviously that we'll continue to build through the summer and then in a really strong position for peak.
Yeah. Just on the beauty side of the business, I mean, we launched the clothing.
It has been a soft launch, and then we've just launched the beauty just a matter of days ago. We've just got just at the early shoots, really, of starting to build out that inventory, get all of those brands on board. So it's an onboarding process for all of the brands before we can actually really go out to the Beauty Club members. But what we are doing short-term is going out with our e-flyers to our Beauty Club members and anyone who's bought beauty from Debenhams in the past. But that's only just; we're only a few days in. So we'll update on that in due course.
Okay. Thank you. Question from Charlie at Exane. In terms of kind of market segments you're underrepresented in, where do you think there's the biggest opportunity for you in the future?
And I suppose linked to that in terms of future M&A, what type of brands or markets would you be thinking about for that strategy?
I think you've got to remember where we still are. So we've come out of a phenomenal year, just over GBP 1.7 billion of sales, growth of 41%. But if you take the U.S. as an example, we're just on $600 million last year. Sales grew by 65%. But if you look at the market share, we're still less than 1% of what's available in the U.S. So I think firstly is we've got a long way to go on our current brands, and that is the mature brands. But equally, we're just getting off the ground on Debenhams. We're just getting off the ground on Dorothy Perkins, Wallis, and Burton. And it's only just over six months since we relaunched Warehouse and Oasis.
So I think our current stable of brands are at different levels of maturity. All have got a long way to go, even our most mature brands. In terms of as we look overseas, clearly, Neil talked earlier about Europe, pretty much the same population as the US. So there's definitely a huge operation and opportunity for us there as well. So we're very much at the beginning of this growth story, in my view, with lots to do and lots of opportunity out there.
Okay. Thank you. Question from Anubhav at Liberum with regards to Agenda for Change. What's the kind of total investment that you've put to date into that program, and how will that be within your ongoing annual cost base?
So the investment in the Agenda for Change, we'd said initially back in July, GBP 10 million. We didn't say how much would be CapEx, OpEx, etc.
We've actually invested, or with plans for this year, we're going to be investing closer to GBP 15 million in that Agenda for Change. That's all factored into the current guidance, etc. But that is split down. Probably a larger element of that is CapEx than we thought because we were investing about GBP 7.5 million of that into the Model Factory in Leicester. And then the other half is similar to what we thought we'd be investing on the OpEx lines, which is around where we'd expected, but a bit more investment going in there than we'd first thought back in July.
Thank you. Moving on to Alvira Rao at Barclays with regards to current trading. Can you give any comments in terms of current trading patterns given the comparatives last year were quite volatile due to COVID? And kind of how do you see that playing out?
I think it is best to talk about last year first there because what we saw last year that we described in our announcements last year was that our year-on-year growth virtually disappeared in March or decreased significantly and then increased rapidly through April and May. What happened then was we weren't in lockdown in the start of March, but then we went into lockdown. We've got a little bit of an opposite pattern right now where we saw quite easy comps in March, and then the comps get very much tougher through April and May. That's one of the things that we're exercising caution about the guidance because we've got those really tough comps from last year. We did perform particularly strongly through that initial period of lockdown last year.
So I think as we go through the year, we get to more normal comparatives, shall we say, even though it was still during the pandemic. So we're encouraged by trading so far this year, but those big comps are approaching us now. So let's see how that goes. And I think a lot of the big opportunity is now that if going out starts properly and we can really start selling more and more dresses and going out clothes, then there's potentially a big opportunity to come through. But we don't know what that looks like right now, as well as international travel and holidays. Are people going to be buying for holidays? We don't know. So there's a lot of uncertainty around that, and that's what we've reflected in the guidance. But it's difficult to say about Q1 other than encouraging.
Okay. Question from Michael at Berenberg.
In terms of markets that are starting to exit lockdown or show signs of exiting, what learnings are you seeing both in terms of changing demand but also kind of product category and mix?
So we're seeing some change back to, let's call it, pre-COVID mixes. So we're seeing that movement away from athleisure, loungewear into, let's say, dresses, tops, more back to normal, whether it's going to work or going out. But it's still early days is what I would say. And I think, again, for anybody at home in the last sort of 10 days who maybe have gone out to the pub or the restaurant outside, it's not been exactly warm. So I think once we get to the 17th and then we get to the 21st of June, I think we'll see more so people can be indoors.
The weather gets warmer, but equally, hopefully, we begin to travel as well. So movement, but certainly some way to go is what I'd say.
Okay. Two quick questions from Charlie at Exane as a follow-up. Can you give some color on the sales and margin performance of brands like Karen Millen and Coast? Now, you've had them all for more than 12 months. And for the kind of acquired brands, how much did they contribute to the top line last year?
I'll take the second part first of that question. So if you take all of the brands that we had owned at the start of the financial year, so the year-on-year growth from them was not that much different to the overall growth rate. So it was 40%. But obviously, that didn't tell the picture through the quarters.
So through the quarters, because we'd acquired brands through the quarters in the previous financial year, the organic growth rate was kind of between 2%-5% below that of the overall growth rate as an overall average. It was a little bit more of a differential in the fourth period, but that was only two months. And so that gives you some kind of idea that the core brands are growing strongly organically, as well as we're getting the seeds of future growth from the acquired brands. And I mean, Karen Millen has performed extremely well. And Coast has done well. But Coast is an occasionwear brand that's obviously struggled because there's been no occasion. So it's adapted remarkably well. Karen Millen has also adapted remarkably well in terms of it's been a workwear and quite a formal brand. So both have adapted really well. We're really pleased with their performance.
They have been ahead of those targets of 1x what we paid for the brands by over 100%.
Okay. Got a few questions from Ben at Investec. Just firstly, in terms of subcontracting within CMTs, how much of that has been brought back in-house as part of the supply chain program? And second one, just in terms of the strong retention from the mature cohorts that you've acquired in recent years, how do we think about marketing costs as % of sales longer term?
I'll take the CMT one first. In the UK, there won't be any CMTs. Everything is coming back in-house. Everything will be in the tier-one manufacturing units. And again, the list that we published earlier this year will be really just around that tier-one.
I think the best thing I can say about the marketing costs of percentage of sales long-term is in the region that we've seen, 9%-9.5%. But it's mainly driven by continued opportunities to expand internationally for all of the brands and investing in marketing the new brands, the new businesses, etc. But I think long, long-term, we'd expect to be able to leverage that. You can see the strength of the cohorts, but there's still a lot of new customers to acquire. And then obviously, we need to market to our existing customers as well. So in the medium term, think of marketing costs where they are in that 9%-9.5% level. Short-term, more at the 9.5% level. Longer-term, we'll think about that.
But we don't want to run out of any ideas of where to invest in marketing.
Okay. Thanks. And got a couple of questions from Caroline Gulliver from Stifel. I am on sustainability. So in terms of moving towards sustainable cotton and polyester, what's the dynamic there in terms of cost for you as a business? And are you onboarding new suppliers to meet that demand? And secondly, which sourcing countries and markets are leading the way in terms of sustainable manufacturing?
So in terms of sustainable fabrics and yarns, we talked earlier around polyester and cotton are our two major yarns that we use, which covers 80% of our fiber content across our brands. They're the ones we're focusing on initially. From a pricing point of view, it's going to get to a neutral, is my view, because the market is moving that way.
So therefore, the volume is going into sustainable, recyclable, organic, etc. In terms of which markets are moving, I would say all markets are moving. So we're making recyclable in the UK, in Leicester. We talked about one manufacturer who's made over 300,000 units in the last year. We're actually ourselves growing cotton in Pakistan with a manufacturer. And again, full traceability right back to the farm field. So I would say that, look, it's right across all categories. I talked in my presentation about it's a good indication of where we're going and at the speed. So BoohooMAN, 20% of its range for autumn/winter 2021 will be made with recyclable yarns or organic or sustainable cotton as an example. So the other brands will follow.
I'd like to think that by spring 2022, that 30% of all of our brand ranges will be made from those sustainable and recyclable yarns.
Okay. And the final question we've got today is from Simon at Numis. Is there any update you can give in terms of international warehousing plans?
So we've just acquired the two UK ones. And obviously, that gives us capacity, certainly, for the next two years with the work we're doing in Sheffield on automation. We're working on where warehousing will come next after that. And for sure, it looks like it's going to be outside of the UK. And at the moment, that for certain looks like it's also going to be going west rather than east. So it looks like it's going to be in North America. We're just working through the details of location, size, automation, etc.
So we'll update once we've made our final agreements and decisions on that.
Okay. Not got any more questions. So I don't know if you've got any final remarks you want to make.
No, just listen, it's been an incredible year, 41% growth, best ever year, obviously, for Boohoo. We've acquired brands. We've acquired warehouses. We've acquired colleagues. We've acquired new offices. And we've renovated our offices in Manchester as well. So a great demonstration in terms of the capability of this organization. I think equally, when you look at the growth over the last number of years in both sales and EBITDA margin, and then you look at, for example, where we've landed in the U.S. at $600 million, but still less than 1% market share, the opportunity is huge in the future. And we'll continue to work hard to obtain that future.
Just a thanks from all of us for everybody for dialing in this morning. Hope to see you all soon. Thank you.
Thank you.