Thank you for standing by, and welcome to the Adore Beauty Group Limited FY 2022 Results Conference Call. All participants are in listen-only mode. There will be a presentation followed by a question and answer session. If you wish to ask a question via telephone, you'll need to press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone keypad. If you wish to ask a question via the webcast, please type into the Ask a Question box and click Submit. I'd now like to hand the conference over to Tennealle O'Shannessy, CEO. Please go ahead.
Thanks, operator. Good morning, everyone here in Australia, and good afternoon to our U.S. investors. I'm Tennealle O'Shannessy, CEO of Adore Beauty Group. Thanks for joining us to discuss Adore Beauty's results for the 2022 financial year. We will be referencing slides from the investor presentation uploaded to the ASX this morning. Joining me on the call is our CFO, Stephanie Carroll. This morning, I'll start with a quick business update before taking you through the strategic initiatives driving our long-term revenue growth and margin expansion. Stephanie will then go through the full year numbers and balance sheets, and I'll finish with our strategy and outlook for the year ahead. We welcome questions at the end of the presentation. Adore Beauty has delivered another solid financial result in financial year 2022, with record revenue, multiple record trading days, and strong growth across key customer metrics.
Revenue increased 11% over the prior year to AUD 200 million, driven by growing, returning customers and multiple record trading days. Active customers increased on a year-on-year basis, up 7% on the prior year to 872,000. Importantly, our active customer base now includes a higher proportion of valuable returning customers. Our returning customers grew 31% over the prior year. Gross profit margin improved by 0.3 percentage points to 33.3%, underpinned by product margin expansion and increased brand co-funding. Our FY 2022 performance demonstrates early signs of the operating leverage this business can achieve. EBITDA of AUD 5.3 million and EBITDA margin of 2.7% is in line with guidance, reflecting our continued investment in strategic initiatives to drive sustainable long-term growth within a large AUD 11.8 billion-dollar market.
Adore Beauty is well funded to execute on these initiatives with a strong balance sheet of almost AUD 30 million cash as of the 30th of June 2022 and no debts. We are executing on a clear growth strategy based on five key strategic initiatives, which are already contributing to top-line revenues and driving improvements across key customer metrics. Our strategy enables us to grow revenues by attracting and retaining loyal, high-value customers while expanding margins. Our mobile app and loyalty programs, which support customer retention and lifetime value, are scaling well, now contributing 11.3% and 60% of total revenue, respectively. We grew our own marketing channels and communities with our content delivering industry-leading organic website traffic share. Our content supports new customer acquisition, brand awareness and cost-effective retargeting of existing customers.
We onboarded 29 new brands during the year and continue to see strong growth in our adjacent product categories. Fragrance now accounts for 4.1% of total revenue, while Korean beauty represents 2.5%. Our broad product offering drives customer acquisition and increases share of wallet. Finally, we proudly launched our first own skincare brand, Viviology, in Q4, with sales in the first month well surpassing internal expectations. Owned brands diversify our revenue profile and will be instrumental in expanding our margins into the future. As I mentioned earlier, our FY 2022 performance was underpinned by strong growth in returning customers. Returning customers spend more on the platform and do so more frequently. In FY 2022, our 472,000 returning customers accounted for 70% of all revenues, up from 62% in FY 2021 and 56% in FY 2020.
These highly engaged loyal customers become more valuable each year they remain with us, increasing both their basket size and order frequency in subsequent years. Our changing active customer base now has a higher proportion of returning customers, which is delivering improvements in key customer metrics. Annual revenue per active customer increased AUD 10 over the year to AUD 229, supported by strong growth in average order values. Active customers increased 7% over the year to 872,000, up 48% on FY 2020. While active customers declined slightly on the half year, this reflects the washing through of the significant volumes of new customers acquired during the COVID lockdown periods. Turning now to customer retention. To start with, it's important to say that shopping for beauty is different.
Loyal beauty shoppers use these products daily, consider them essential, and repurchase multiple times a year. As I highlighted on the last slide, 70% of our revenue in FY 2022 came from returning customers who order from us on average three times per year. Many of you will be familiar with the chart on the right, which shows our new and returning customer growth over time. The gray shaded sections reflect lockdown periods, which spiked new customer growth and elevated returning customer spend. As operating conditions return to normal, we're seeing more sustainable new and returning customer growth that remains above pre-COVID levels. Returning customers grew 31% in FY 2022 and are up an impressive 115% on a two-year basis. This more than offset the 13% decline in new customers, resulting in two-year active customer growth of 48%.
It is important to note that new customer numbers remain above FY 2020 pre-COVID levels as we move into more normal operating conditions. New customer growth in FY 2022 was impacted by higher competition in paid marketing channels, which continues to increase customer acquisition costs. In our half year results, we outlined an industry-wide cost per click increase of circa 45% as both online and traditional retailers increased digital spend, and Apple's privacy changes impacted the effectiveness of some channels and pushed up spend in others. As a digital-first business, we remain focused on optimizing our marketing spend to sustainably and profitably acquire new customers. Aggregate FY 2022 customer retention of 57.7% was down 3.3 percentage points on the prior year, reflecting a large proportion of new customers acquired.
We typically see our lowest retention rates in the first year of acquiring a customer at around 40%. From year two onwards, our customer retention rates are subscription-like at levels above 90%. Our mobile app content strategy and loyalty program are designed to reduce year one churn, improve retention and increase lifetime value. The ratio of lifetime value to customer acquisition cost measures the effectiveness of our marketing and advertising investment. We have strong unit economics. For the FY 2018 to FY 2022 cohorts, the average customer acquisition cost is recovered in under a year, while the lifetime value continues to grow over time. By year five, customer lifetime value is almost 8 times the acquisition cost. While customer acquisition costs remain elevated compared to the prior year, they have stabilized.
We are reducing our reliance on competitive paid marketing channels by growing our owned media and marketing channels, diversifying paid spend, and retaining more of our valuable returning customers. Our disciplined investments in content, mobile apps, loyalty and brand awareness are supporting customer retention and lifetime value growth, which has reduced the impact of rising marketing costs. In FY 2022, marketing cost inflation was offset by 70% of orders coming from repeat customers and 4% growth in annual customer spend. Increased brand co-funding is also cost-effectively scaling our marketing activities. I'll provide more detail on this later. We will continue to invest in a disciplined, data-driven way to predict, target, and acquire new higher value customers. Alongside this disciplined investment, we are also focusing on increasing long-term profitability. Scale, revenue growth, improving profitability and increasing marketing ROI are key to margin expansion.
Top line revenue growth will be driven by increased scale through new products and retention of higher value returning customers. There is opportunity to drive further revenue growth through M&A to scale our owned brand portfolio, as well as expansion into new markets and geographies. Scaling margin-accretive owned brands, combined with improved supplier terms and changing product mix, will support gross profit margin improvements. Lastly, we'll reduce marketing costs through growing our owned media channels, increasing revenue contribution from our valuable returning customers, and growing brand awareness and brand co-funding. Moving now to what we are targeting margins to look like over the mid and longer term. In FY 2022, we delivered an EBITDA margin of 2.7% in line with guidance. This reflected reinvestment in strategic initiatives, the foundations of which are now in place.
FY 2022 did not include material revenue contribution from our owned brand, Viviology, which only launched in June. While our mobile app contributed 11.3% for the year, revenue contribution was skewed towards Q4, where it contributed 15.5% of revenue. While we expect short-term challenges in FY 2023, we are continuing to selectively and sustainably reinvest in priority strategic initiatives to accelerate margin expansion. We are targeting an EBITDA margin of 8%-10% for the full year of FY 2027. Our scaling owned brands and mobile app will be key, targeting a contribution of 10% and 30% of revenue, respectively. Strategic initiatives will continue to drive top line growth, and scale will increase operating leverage. Increased brand funding will reduce marketing costs, and M&A of owned brands that are marginally accretive will play an important role.
Beyond FY 2027, Adore Beauty is targeting an EBITDA margin of 10%+ as owned brands targeted contribution increases to 15%+ and new geographies unlock additional revenue opportunities. The board and management are incredibly focused on expanding margins, and we are very confident that we have the right foundations in place to drive these outcomes. As I mentioned earlier, our strategic initiatives in FY 2022 are laying the foundations for future growth, and I'd now like to share some highlights of those. Our mobile app continues to exceed our expectations, contributing 11.3% of revenue in full year FY 2022. The graph in the bottom left-hand corner shows mobile app revenue contribution on a quarterly basis. Doubling from 7.7% in Q1 to 15.5% in Q4.
Encouragingly, the app continues to deliver higher levels of engagement, conversion, and order value even as our user base scales. Our customers are loving it. Currently rated 4.8 out of 5 from over 7,000 reviews. We have a number of initiatives in place to encourage download and adoption, such as gift with purchase and integration with our loyalty program and podcast. Future iterations of the app will include additional content integration and data-driven personalization. Our app provides us with a content-first owned marketing channel to engage, retain, and grow the lifetime value of customers. It enables us to build deep, ongoing relationships with our existing customers so that we can add value to their daily lives, not just when they're shopping. At scale, sophisticated apps can account for circa 30% of revenues.
In June, we successfully launched our first owned brand, Viviology, with six SKUs priced from AUD 35-AUD 55. Sales in the first month exceeded internal expectations, with products receiving strong positive customer feedback. Created in collaboration with well-known Dermal Therapist James Vivian, Viviology is a gender-neutral range designed for consumers new to the category. The range aligns with premiumization and cosmeceutical trends. A second owned brand leveraging the Adore Beauty master brand is on track to launch in Q2 FY 2023. Our investment in own brands will double in FY 2023 to support scaling future revenues and margin expansion. At scale, our owned brands are expected to be both revenue and margin accretive. We are targeting owned brands to account for 10% of revenues in FY 2027, growing to more than 15% in the longer term, with a gross margin target of 80%+ at scale.
Moving now to our loyalty program. Our loyalty program is progressing well, with members now contributing 60% of all revenues. More than 95% of our most valuable customer tier has signed up to the program, and we're continuing to grow our member base. Throughout the year, we hosted 16 ticketed loyalty events and 8 member-only competitions. The program has been recognized by industry also, with three award nominations. Our loyalty program plays an important role in cost effectively engaging and retargeting our existing customers. It enhances and leverages our first-party data to improve personalization and experience. Adore Beauty's integrated media and content strategy is a key differentiator and a significant competitive moat. Our content underpins Adore Beauty's industry-leading organic traffic share at 2x higher than the average competitor, supported by 4% growth in content-driven impressions.
Our content is an authoritative and authentic voice on beauty and personal care with a loyal and highly engaged community. It plays an important role in driving traffic to our owned marketing channels, which now include multiple podcasts and blogs, as well as follower communities across Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, and Facebook. Engagement with our content is at unparalleled levels for a retailer, and our competitors have not been able to replicate our scale. Our seven podcasts have now been downloaded over 4.3 million times, and we're continuing to experiment with live shopping and other content solutions. Adore Beauty's investment in its owned content channels reduces our reliance on competitive paid marketing channels and effectively offsets marketing spend over the long term.
This is reflected in our marketing costs as a percentage of sales not being impacted to the same extent as other online retailers, where we've seen an industry-wide circa 45% increase in paid channel cost per click in the past year. These highly competitive paid marketing channels are resulting in more of our brand partners looking to leverage our digital marketing expertise through co-funded marketing activities. In financial year 2022, we saw our brand marketing partners almost double. Adore Beauty is proudly a values-led business. In FY 2022, we re-signed more than 230 of our brands to contracts with updated Modern Slavery clauses and further reduced the environmental impact of our operations. New smaller box sizes have significantly reduced our cardboard and plastic tape usage. Our packaging and void fill is recycled and recyclable, and both our CFC and headquarters use green power.
We're also working with our brand partners to reduce and eliminate non-recyclable packaging from our supply chain. Diversity and inclusion are at the heart of our operations for both our people and our customers. We're recognized as an inclusive employer by the Diversity Council Australia, and importantly, our content features diverse representation across imagery and paid content creators. I'll now hand over to our CFO, Stephanie Carroll, to take you through our financial performance.
Thanks, Tennealle O'Shannessy, and good morning, everyone. Tennealle O'Shannessy mentioned, in FY 2022, Adore Beauty delivered record top-line revenue and produced multiple record trading days. Revenue of AUD 200 million was an 11% increase on the prior year and up 65% over a two-year period. Gross profit margin increased to 33.3%, up 0.3 percentage points on the prior year and 1.5 points higher than FY 2020. EBITDA of AUD 5.3 million and EBITDA margin of 2.7% was in line with guidance, reflecting reinvestment in our strategic initiatives to drive long-term growth. The past two years have been atypical, it is beneficial to measure the underlying growth of Adore Beauty over a four-year period.
As you can see across these three graphs, when viewed over the medium term, Adore Beauty has consistently delivered strong growth, which is continuing to underpin key profit and loss lines. Even before COVID lockdowns, Adore Beauty had a track record of delivering long-term year-on-year growth. The next slide shows our profit and loss statement for FY 2022 compared to the prior two corresponding periods. Record revenue was driven by a larger proportion of returning customers who are spending more on the platform. Average order value increased 6% on the prior comparative period to AUD 109, while average order frequency remained stable at 2.1 orders per customer annually. Moving down the P&L, we improved the unit economics.
Gross profit margin of 33.3% was 0.3 points higher than the prior year due to improved supplier terms and increased brand-funded promotions. As Tennealle mentioned a few slides ago, marketing as a percentage of sales increased to 14.1%, in line with expectations due to significant price volatility in paid channels. Importantly, we continue to recover customer acquisition costs in just over a year, and our growing owned marketing channels are enabling us to effectively manage these expenses. EBITDA of AUD 5.3 million reflects our disciplined reinvestment in strategic initiatives, and EBITDA margin of 2.7% was in line with guidance. Turning to our balance sheet, Adore Beauty is well funded for growth with a strong closing cash balance of AUD 29.8 million and no debt.
Adore Beauty's business model is highly capital efficient and was cash flow positive in FY 2022. Inventory levels are higher than the same period last year to support growth. However, inventory turnover at 8.2x remains in line with the prior period. Out of stocks of popular electrical products that impacted H2 FY 2022 have now been resolved. Our strong balance sheet provides the flexibility to pursue opportunities that accelerate growth, including scaling and supporting our owned brands. I'll be happy to take questions at the end of the presentation, but for now, I'll hand you back to Tennealle.
Thanks, Steph. Now to our market opportunity and outlook. Beauty is a very resilient and attractive category, one where consumers engage multiple times a year to repurchase products they use daily and consider essential. This is particularly true in skincare where we index very highly. The graph in the middle shows this resilience, with the category demonstrating a strong track record of long-term growth through the macroeconomic cycle. Beauty and personal care is an AUD 11.8 billion market in Australia, forecast to grow at a CAGR of 4.3% to 2026. Within the broader market, Adore Beauty is the market leader of the AUD 1.5 billion online segment, which is expected to account for 23.6% or AUD 3.5 billion of the total market by 2026.
Given the accelerated online adoption of the past two years, this market growth is not expected to be linear, with subdued online market growth forecast in the calendar years 2022 and 2023. Online sales in Australia are still years behind more mature markets such as the U.K. and the U.S. As you can see on the graph on the right, online category sales in the U.K. are forecast to reach just over 40% by the end of the 2022 calendar year, up from 18.4% two years ago. There is no structural reason why Australia can't reach these online penetration levels over time, supported by new digitally native Millennials and Gen Z consumers entering the market. What we have seen in these more developed markets is that the online market leader takes a disproportionate share of growth as e-commerce penetration increases.
As the online market leader, Adore Beauty is best placed to grow customers, revenues, and margins as the Australian market matures. Adore Beauty is much more than just an online retailer offering convenient replenishment. We've been heavily investing in content for more than five years and have a significant first-mover advantage. Through our expanding media network of podcasts, videos, and blog posts, we use content to educate, engage, and entertain our customers. Our unique content strategy is increasingly enabling us to become the destination for discovery, introducing our customers to new brands and products they didn't know they needed. For our brand partners, we have become a marketing and media partner, not just a distribution channel, able to demonstrate significant uplift in sales after featuring a product in a content piece. For our customers, we are a trusted, authentic source of beauty information.
Our long-term strategy remains focused on growing top-line revenue from our loyal, returning customers, cost-effectively acquiring new customers, and expanding margins. We are phasing our investment across these four strategic pillars over the coming years, prioritizing those initiatives that accelerate revenue and margin growth. This slide sets out our current, medium, and long-term growth levers. We'll continue to grow Adore Beauty's unmatched product offering, increasing share in our core categories of skincare, haircare, and makeup. We'll also continue to expand and scale into new adjacent product categories such as fragrance, sex, men's, and wellness. Our broad product offering supports growth in new customers and increases share of wallet. We are scaling our mobile app, which delivers higher conversion rates and order values. Increased data-driven personalization will continue to enhance our online transaction experience. This will continue to translate to improved conversion rates, retention, and lifetime value.
We're also investing in the competitive mode that is our content-led owned media channels to increase brand awareness, acquire new customers, and retain our high-value returning customers. Our expanding owned marketing channels also enable us to more effectively manage marketing costs over the long term and to increase brand co-funding opportunities. We are also continuing to scale our loyalty program to grow retention and lifetime value. Finally, we are scaling our first owned brand while developing, launching, and seeking to acquire additional owned brands. Our owned brands will significantly expand margins over time and provide international direct-to-consumer opportunities. We're also focused on increasing our footprint in New Zealand, which remains under-penetrated. Adore Beauty is cycling off a period of significant growth in the first half of FY 2022, when most of Australia was in lockdown.
This means, as expected, year-on-year growth comparisons will be volatile during the first half of FY 2023. Trading in the first seven weeks reflects this volatility, with revenue down 28% on the prior comparative period. Like many online retailers, Adore Beauty is also facing inflationary pressures around employee, freight, and marketing costs, and consumer sentiment is more subdued. The company is implementing cost control measures to actively manage these inflationary pressures. We continue to invest in our strategic initiatives in a disciplined and phased way. We are prioritizing and stepping up our investment in key strategic initiatives that drive margin expansion. In FY 2023, we will double our investment in owned brands to support scaling future revenue and margin expansion. Given the cyclical headwinds and continued disciplined investment, Adore Beauty does not expect to achieve an EBITDA margin of 2%-4% in FY 2023.
However, beauty is a resilient category even in times of economic downturn, and we expect to remain profitable in FY 2023 on a full year basis. We expect to return to a 2%-4% EBITDA margin range for the full year in FY 2024. Longer term, we will continue to benefit from the structural shift to e-commerce, which, combined with our high levels of customer retention and growing brand awareness, position us for strong future growth. Strategic initiatives, including owned brands and marketing channels and scale benefits, are expected to increase operating leverage and deliver EBITDA margin expansion. We are targeting an EBITDA margin of 8%-10% for the full year in FY 2027, with the mobile app and private label targeting a contribution of 30% and 10% of revenue respectively.
Beyond FY 2027, Adore Beauty is targeting an EBITDA margin of 10%+ as owned brands targeted contribution increases to 15%+ and new geographies unlock additional revenue opportunities. Thank you all for your time today. Our FY 2022 results would not have been possible without the passion and dedication of the whole team at Adore Beauty, and so I wanted to finish off by thanking them for their efforts over the past year. Stephanie and I will now take questions. I'll hand you back to the operator to put them into the queue. Operator?
Thank you very much. If you do wish to ask a question via telephone, please press the star key followed by the number one on your telephone to register. If you wish to ask via the webcast, you can type it into the Ask a Question box and click Submit. You're turning to the phones first. Your first question comes from Danny Yunis at Shoreham Partners. Please go ahead.
Hi, Tennealle. Hi, Stephanie. I've got three questions, if I can, please. The first one's around your outlook and trading update. You've talked to inflationary pressures and a more subdued consumer sentiment. My first question relates to both these parts. Have you seen consumer sentiment dip markedly from third quarter to fourth quarter to the first seven weeks with respect to sales? And can you quantify some of the growth in those inflationary levers that you mentioned, like freight, marketing, and employee wages?
Thanks, Danny. I'll address the first part on consumer sentiment before handing over to Steph to provide a little bit more detail in some of the inflationary pressures we're seeing. Consumer sentiment, you know, as we have seen, is having an impact, but I think it's fair to say the bigger challenge heading into FY 2023 is the inflationary pressure increasing employee, freight, and marketing costs. I think it is also really important to note that the company is also cycling significant growth in the first half of FY 2022, when most of Australia was in lockdown, and that is definitely having an impact. Important to call out that for Q1 FY 2023, we are cycling a prior period growth of 25%, and for the half, that was 18%. That's just a little bit of a backdrop.
When we look specifically to consumer sentiment, largely the downturn in consumer sentiment will have a minimal impact on overall sales in the beauty category 'cause consumer demand for beauty products is actually relatively inelastic. That's some of the features that I was talking about on why premium beauty is different. Customers are brand loyal, they frequently repurchase, and they consider these products essential. I think it's also well understood throughout history that beauty is a resilient category even in times of economic downturn. The phenomena referred to as the lipstick effect. Consumer sentiment is much more likely to have an impact on big-ticket purchases rather than beauty. I think that that's well reflected if we have a look at some of the recent results.
Publications of some of the global beauty brands like Coty and Ulta both called out the strong performance and ongoing resilience of premium beauty, even in the face of consumer sentiment challenges and seeing little evidence of trading down in customers. That's just a bit of color on the consumer sentiment piece. I'm going to hand over to Steph now, and she can provide you, I guess, a little bit more of a view on some of the inflationary pressures we're seeing.
Thanks, Tennealle O'Shannessy. Yes, you know, as Tennealle O'Shannessy has mentioned, we are seeing some inflationary pressures, specifically around employee freight and marketing costs in line with most retailers. What we're doing is that we're implementing some cost control measures to actively manage these inflationary pressures, including closely managing our supply chain relationships, phasing the investment in our strategic initiatives, being selective with the recruitment for new roles, and improving efficiencies around marketing. We're confident that we'll remain profitable in FY 2023, while at the same time continuing to invest in our strategic initiatives that will drive future margin expansion.
Okay, thanks. Second question is around long-term EBITDA margins. Your projections are 8%-10%. It would appear that private label, if it achieves 80% gross margins, would be the largest contributor to that. Can you maybe talk to the other pieces in terms of the EBITDA margins going from 2%-4% to 8%-10% long term in terms of, you know, your increased supplier terms, moving internationally, New Zealand product expansion, lowering customer acquisition cost, and how much they will all contribute as well?
Yes, certainly, Danny. I can talk to those. Now we're not providing quantitative contribution, but I can definitely talk to the drivers that we're focused on there. These align very closely to our strategic initiatives. There are three main drivers to getting to those targets of 8%-10%. First is scale and revenue growth, second is improving profitability, and third is increasing marketing ROI. I'll talk to each of those. Underneath top-line revenue growth, this will be driven by increasing scale through new products, through retaining those higher value returning customers, and you're starting to see some of that play through already. There's also opportunity to drive further revenue growth through M&A, as well as expansion into new markets and geographies.
Where we're focused in terms of phase one for new markets and geographies is initially through scaling New Zealand, which remains under-penetrated for us, as well as exploring international distribution opportunities for our own brands. The second driver of those margin targets, as I mentioned, was improving profitability. Where we're focused here is through scaling those margin-accretive own brands. As you rightly called out, at scale, we are targeting gross margin of 80%+ for those owned brands, as well as continuing to improve supplier terms and brand funding. These will underpin gross profit margin improvements. You can see as part of our FY 2022 results, we have continued to improve that even in the current environment. I think we showed a 0.3 percentage point increase in gross profit margin.
Then lastly, the last driver is increasing that marketing ROI. The key to reducing marketing costs is really aligned to where we've been investing in terms of our strategic priorities. This will be delivered through growing our owned media and marketing channels, through increasing the revenue contribution from our returning customers who are much more cost-effective to retarget and through growing our brand awareness and brand co-funding. That's a little bit more color on the drivers that get to those targets.
Thanks, Tennealle. Maybe a last question, if I can sneak in, follows on the marketing question. It came in at AUD 28 million, the expense for the full year, about 14%-15% of your sales. Can you maybe just talk to the two leverage levers there? I mean, you had a 45% increase in your paid channel cost per click in the last twelve months. What does that look like for the next twelve months? What is the incremental cost or expense to build out your own channel?
Thanks, Danny.
Sure. Sorry. Do you wanna take that one, Tennealle?
No. Go ahead, Steph. Go ahead.
Okay. You can add to it at the end if needed. We expect to continue to see the elevated paid marketing channel cost in FY 2023. Whilst we aren't providing any guidance around marketing as a percentage of sales, we will continue to be very disciplined in how we invest in this area, and we'll make decisions based around the LTV to CAC ratios. We are working through a number of efficiencies that will help us better manage marketing, including growing our owned and organic channels, for example, mobile app and loyalty, and increasing brand co-funding.
Great. Okay. Thanks a lot. That's all.
Thank you. Your next question comes from Apoorv Sehgal from UBS. Please go ahead.
Morning, Tennealle, Steph. Thanks for taking my questions. Just on the first, on the own brands, just wanna sort of check my maths behind something. If it's 80%+ gross margins, I guess that implies like incremental 50-ish% on your current group GMs. If we're getting to 10% of FY 2027 sales, I think that would sort of roughly imply about 5 percentage points of incremental GM to the group. Presumably, that flows through to EBITDA margin expansion as well. Am I right in saying that roughly in your guidance thinking the 8%-10% sort of 5 percentage points or roughly comes from private label and then, you know, maybe a slight amount on top of that from increased marketing ROI and maybe labor costs.
Is that sort of the right way to think about the math behind the guidance?
Apoorv, I'm not going to make detailed comments on the math behind, but I think at a principle level, it's fair to say that owned brand is instrumental in expanding margins. That's why you will see we have communicated very clearly that whilst we are being paced and disciplined in our investment, we are continuing to invest in our strategic priorities and are looking to scale our investment in owned brands because of the important contribution to future revenue growth and margin expansion.
Yep. Okay. Just one on the average order value, maybe more for Steph. I think it was about AUD 106 or AUD 107 at the first half, but the full year's coming in at AUD 109. Pretty good uplift there in your AOV in the second half. Just wondering what's driven that. Is it to do with maybe price increases being put through?
Yeah, good question. Thanks, Apoorv. Look, I think you know, we've been focusing on you know, increasing average order value, and you rightly say that it increased, certainly for the whole of FY 2022 by 6%. In terms of what drove revenue in the full year, there was you know, 6% came really through you know, increasing orders and increasing order size, so units per order. There was an increase in average order value by itself of 3%. In terms of pure price rises in the second half, pure price rises for the full year, sorry, was about 2%.
This reflects the fact that price rises from suppliers came through, you know, more towards half two than half one.
Okay. Thanks for that. Just on the loyalty program, sort of 60% of sales already sounds impressive. Sounds like a pretty big ramp up pretty quickly. Can you just give us an idea of how that percentage has progressed? Like, what was that at like the start of FY 2022 and just how quickly it's come up to 60%?
Yeah, definitely. I can take that one, Apoorv. I mean the loyalty program during the second half celebrated its 12-month milestone. I think it's, you know, very strong growth over the period. We've been very happy with the progress and scaling. We have looked at initiatives to encourage joining the loyalty program, so looking at, you know, specific gifts with purchases, and competitions for our loyalty members. One of the key advantages of our loyalty program is it gives us the opportunity to cost effectively retarget and re-engage those returning customers. We've been incredibly pleased with the results of the loyalty program and the strong scaling of members.
Got it. Thanks, guys.
Thank you. That concludes our question and answer session for today. I'll now hand back to Tennealle O'Shannessy for closing remarks.
Thanks again for joining us today. We look forward to connecting with many of you over the coming few days. Thank you again for your support, and we'll now close the call.
Thank you. That concludes our conference for today. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect your lines.