On the path we're on, given the review, the need to rebuild leadership capacity, boost team capability, and enhance skill sets, there is transformation underway across the group. We recognize that there's a lot happening, but there is real purpose to our actions. The board and leadership team understand that our strategy requires a phased approach. We have to reset the business while also focusing on growth. Our job today is to take you through that plan, and we are making good progress on our reset. This means fixing the basics. We're resetting the operating model, progressing the integration of our power brands, modernizing our sourcing, overhauling distribution, and improving efficiencies and productivity. When we get the right fixes in place, it will help us reduce the cost of doing business. We know we have to get this right.
If we take the NDC, for example, it's an essential building block for our business if we want to pursue supply chain optimization, which we do. You will hear later on today from Daren, who's our new Chief Supply Chain Officer, and he'll explain how it works, but importantly, minimizes risk for our organization. In parallel to the work on the basics, we are also driving for growth. In today's retail market, we just don't have the luxury of sitting back and waiting for the business to reset fully before we turn our minds to growth. That's why we've started implementing our strategic growth plan to help us build advancement, like resetting our important beauty offering, and we are moving at pace. Our loyalty program, which I mentioned before, is also a great example of how we're pushing ahead. We are investing in Myer One now.
We need to be delivering a shoppable app, and we're launching a curated marketplace at myer.com, which you'll hear the team talk about shortly. These are all initiatives which we believe to be game changers. In shaping the future for the Myer Group, the execution of our strategy is well underway. Over the past 12 months, much of this will be familiar to you. We've completed what was a comprehensive strategic review. We've finalized the transformational acquisition of Apparel Brands and are now embedding the business into the Myer Group structure. Look, I'm really pleased with how this is progressing, and you will hear more from Teresa and Kathy about the integration of the Apparel Brands actual framework. We are now nearing the completion of the restructure of sass & bide and Marcs and David Lawrence within the Myer Group.
Importantly, we are clear about where and how we want to compete and win, backed up by data. You'll hear a lot about this, and we have a transformation roadmap to share with you. Let's talk about our new leadership team. It's a brand new team. The ELT, who are seated here in front of me and who you'll all meet today, have extensive retail backgrounds, not only in Australia but internationally, and a strong track record on improving business performance across many sectors. It's early days. Some of the ELT members are less than three months in, but I'm confident that we'll get on when you hear from them today. Complimenting our leaders are clearly our team members. Now, people are fundamental to our strength. Fundamental strength. We're a customer-focused business, and they're a differentiator for us as well.
Our strong customer service satisfaction ratings are a testament to this, and they've seen improved ratings over the last five years. Our team members are genuinely excited about the creation of the Myer Group, and as part of the integration, we're offering team members product and leadership roles in the expanded Myer Group. We're also ensuring our long-term incentives for our senior leadership team are aligned to delivering the strong transformation agenda and on achieving shareholder outcomes. Currently, there is a gateway in place for the LTI plan that requires positive TSR, positive total shareholder return over the three-year performance period. We believe that's critical. One of the key points you'll repeatedly hear from us today and in the future is the focus we're having on financial strength and discipline. It is essential to the successful execution of the strategy.
It's something many companies talk about but don't always match actions with words. I recognize that Myer's been guilty of this in the past. I want to take this opportunity to reiterate that the board views a strong balance sheet as a priority. We acknowledge the proof will be in the returns we reap. When we finalized the apparel brand acquisition, a key strategic priority was for us to leverage our scale and strengthen our balance sheet and funding position, and that's exactly what we have done. We had a very expensive debt facility in place, and that's changed. In March this year, we announced an AUD 150 million revolving facility with CBA and NAB. This provides us with ample flexibility to fund our strategic initiatives while delivering annual cash position of AUD 301 million with strong cash flow generation.
If you look at the balance sheet today, the Myer Group has a WALE of 5.4 years. That's down from a WALE of eight years that Myer had before the acquisition. Financially, we're in a stronger position and with greater capacity to invest in growth across the group. It really is integral to our growth strategy, and it's a key competitive advantage for our business. Myer One's been in existence for more than 20 years, hopefully you're all members. We've got 4.6 million active members, and our data shows that Myer One is highly valued by our customers. In fact, members spend on average 2.8 times more than a non-member, and a tag rate provides deep insights into customer shopping patterns. It's undoubtedly a strength of the Myer Group, but from my experience, I have no doubt we can make it stronger.
I believe we're only at the beginning of the Myer One story. We haven't been using it as effectively to drive product decisions, and to date, it hasn't been used at scale. That's going to change. We can distill customer behavior in our shopping proposition. Our loyalty program also offers us a range of monetization opportunities. If you think about retail media and building on the partnerships that we already have in place, we can do more. Jeff will outline this later today. One of the strategic advantages of the review is that it has broadened our perspective through a focus on global retail trends. It's also helped us identify our target market and our demographics so we know we want to play. We've developed a clear roadmap to drive growth over the next three to five years. Let's take a look.
It participates in five core retail markets: women's wear, men's wear, beauty, kids, and home. You can also see the size of the market, the market growth, as well as the Myer Group's position in each of these core territories and our sales in FY2024. This is how we are thinking about our business, how we are performing, who our competitors are by market. As opposed to a traditional department store, we are playing in five core markets. There is no doubt that we also have a strong customer base that we over-index in the 44 to 59-year-old category while under-indexing in other categories. Belinda will talk about that in the product and brand session. Frankly, we need to do better, much better. We need to broaden our appeal, and there is a genuine opportunity, particularly in the under 30s and in the high-spending 31 to 43-year-olds.
This is the largest spender of discretionary spend, not only globally, but second. Our growth strategy is centered around the concept of the connected customer, and it is focused on four strategic pillars: customer loyalty, products and brand, omnichannel network, and sourcing and supply chain. We are creating a data-powered retail platform that knows our customers better than anyone, driven by a loyalty cycle by delivering what they need when they need it. By knowing our customer, we are better placed to meet their needs. I know that sounds very obvious, but it is not something that we have been doing. It is not just about ensuring that we are offering in-demand products and brands. It is also about how we curate our offering in store and online and how we manufacture ourselves. More broadly, our sourcing and supply chain needs to be faster and more efficient.
We want to capitalize on the scale of our business to deliver quality products at a more attractive margin. For example, we are the second biggest manufacturer of apparel in Australia. We have much to learn from Apparel Brands business in this regard. Value in this. Based on our FY2024 sales, every AUD 33 million incremental EBIT. Financial discipline is clearly a priority. We aim to be top quartile Australian in retail TSR performer with a strong balance sheet and a robust financial discipline. I've talked about our customer data, which is advanced, but we want to harness that data to better inform our decision-making, to help us. We found that many products and brands are no longer hitting the mark, and we will strengthen our capability in this area and, through advanced analytics and AI, ensure our range is aligned and continually evolving to customer preferences.
From today's session is that we want to hold ourselves to account. This hasn't always been a strength for our business. We've identified key metrics across each of our strategic pillars and our strategic enablers to measure our progress in delivering on our ambition to build a retail engine which delivers sustained earnings, sustained TSR, and growth through an economic cycle. Today, you'll hear detail from the team about the scorecard and metrics and how we're going to measure progress and success across each of our strategic pillars and, in fact, how we're going to come back every six months and talk about this business with you and be held to account for our performance. Our CFO, Kathy, will bring it all together and detail the financial metrics and KPIs that investors can judge us on.
This will include sales growth, GP margin, a reduction in the cost of doing business. We are at it, but we want to be open, accountable, and we want to make sure that our approach to investors is one that you understand our business and our investment proposition. Ultimately, we recognize that our strategy will be judged on by how well we execute and the financial returns we generate. We understand that. We really want to take you on the journey, and that is what today is all about. Why invest in Myer Group? We are at the start of a three- to five-year transformation journey, and it was important for us to be very clear about that from the start. To get to where we want to be, significant change is required.
By the end of today's strategy day, I hope this will set us up for success for the Myer Group. The integration of apparel brands has given us significant scale. As I mentioned, we're the second largest manufacturer of apparel in Australia. We've got more than AUD 4 billion in sales, but we need to do more. We need to improve profit margins to support our ambition to generate sustainable returns. Importantly, you can already see how the scale created by apparel brands acquisition is benefiting our business. I mentioned our refinancing. It's a testament to our ability to be able to leverage our enhanced scale to deliver our balance sheet and deliver savings. I cannot overstate the importance of a strong balance sheet. It underpins our commitment to a disciplined framework for capital management. We are very clear on both the framework and the principles.
Within this framework, we will pursue an approach to capital allocation focused on returns and investments to support strategic growth. Today is about you meeting the Refresh Myer team and providing you with an honest and transparent perspective on where we are today and the opportunities ahead for us as a business. I recognize that for some time, Myer has not had a track record of living up to its promises. While I'm determined to change that, I could acknowledge that we can only shift that perception by consistently delivering on our strategy and ensuring that our actions match the rhetoric. We do have a clear strategy. We do have a roadmap for our transformation. We have an iconic brand, an unrivaled omnichannel network, and a market-leading loyalty program. We now have a new leadership team in place with world-class capabilities and a track record. Our strategy is clear.
Our decisions are going to be customer-led. Our investments are data-driven. We'll be execution-focused with a bias to action and accountability. Our job today is to show you how we are doing this. Let's get started. I'm going to hand over to Jeff. Some of you might know Jeff. He's going to talk us through the customer and loyalty plans. Jeff's been with our business since 2019 in the role of Chief Customer Officer. That entails everything that touches the customer. You think marketing, you think loyalty, you think about store renewal, you think about e-commerce, marketplace. Jeff has a lot to cover. He's on a strict timeline, aren't you, Jeff, though? Yeah. A lot to cover. He's worked across many different organizations in for the Sydney Olympics, to name a few, and of course, David Jones.
Welcome to the stage. Thanks, Liv. Yes, I am on a time limit and sticking to my script. A lot to talk about, and for good reason. Myer One is a significant asset for our business. Equally, as Liv said, Myer One is a significant asset for our business, but equally, as Liv said, it is significant in terms of its further potential upside. Established 20 years ago, it has strong resonance with our customer, but that's not always been the case. In 2019, we saw the Myer One program and our Myer One customer declining at a rate six times greater than the non-Myer One customer. We're bleeding out from the core.
Significant focus and progress has been made on initiatives put in place to change this and to get us back into a growth momentum. In fact, we've hit best on record results in the last two years consecutively, which provides us great momentum to build from and great potential. Getting into the scale of the program, yes, we have 4.6 million active customers. They're engaged customers that have spent in the last 12 months. Equally, we have an extremely positive pipeline of new customers. This year, we're expecting to hit just over 800,000 new customers into the program. Importantly, it's coming from the younger customer set, with 55% of those under 35. From an engagement point of view, we are now nearly hitting 80% tag rate.
This is important because when we see the value of a Myer One customer versus a non-Myer One customer, they are 2.8 key for us. We also look at average category shop. This is an important metric for us in terms of not only immediate value, but also is a key driver of share of wallet and lifetime value. It will be important as we kind of expand the program moving forward. While strengthening the work has been a key pillar of growth, unlocking significant value in terms of new customers and also spend. Our pay with points program, if we think this is a seamless way for customers to use their loyalty program points directly into the Myer ecosystem. For CBA, CBA customers can come in in-store or online and use their points seamlessly at point of service or at the e-com checkout.
For Virgin and Amex, it's service partnerships in which we utilize their ecosystem and their data to target new or lapsed customers outside our traditional network. Finally, leveraging the significant upside that comes from the power of the Myer gift card. This is one of the largest in the nation, and the Myer gift cards sold are at over 10,000 outlets and over 14,000 partners globally. These programs provide enormous scale. Connecting these journeys, importantly, has enabled significant growth of new customers, with 102,000 of the 800,000 attributed to these programs in this year alone, 83% more than others. Next slide, please. While the program delivers significant levers to drive engagement and unlock value, it's also the mechanism through which we gather rich data to inform our business decision and insights. Whilst we've made great progress in unlocking this at scale, it is becoming increasingly important.
Our scale of active customers and first-party data is significant, a key point of difference in understanding our customer. It is not enough. It is how we leverage a number of different partners, second and third-party data sources to enrich our data to better target, size the opportunity, segment, and importantly, looking at their spend profile, not just only at Myer, but also outside Myer. These data assets have been combined, and now we use over 50 different assess customers' likelihood to lapse so we can proactively intervene, or we can look at what their next best product or action or best way to serve the customer. Continuing to build on these strong foundations is an opportunity that we have to unlock at scale. In terms of the flywheel effect, the combination of customer engagement assets, partnerships, and insights creates a market-leading flywheel effect for this business.
Myer One acts as a key driver of choice, providing greater reach to retain, engage, and acquire customers. Capturing those at the time of purchase or before allows us to understand who they are and how best to talk. Real shifts, activities to stretch spend to increase frequency through personalized offers are key. With the reward and redemption program that underpins this, it gives us another reason for these customers to return and refuel the cycle, continuing the effect over and over again. Where we are today and where we're going tomorrow? Next slide, please. We've built and reestablished over the course of the past five, six years to unlock value. While great work has been done, we continue to have significant value and opportunity to deliver, which we're well advanced unlocking, and you'll start to see that over the course of FY2026.
While Myer One is strong and well loved by its customers, we do have an opportunity to increase the relevance of the program. Investments in new technology will allow us to better align our tiers and behaviors. Our tiers to behaviors provide richer rewards and provide the customer more choice to engage and how and when they choose to do so. The ability to allow customers to earn and burn points outside of Myer is significant. Further expansion of the partner ecosystem, like that with what Apparel Brands is, which I'll talk about in a second, and others will accelerate and widen options for the customers to leverage value and engage with Myer One more frequently. We've also made good progress comprehensively across multiple channels. Finally, we are looking at how we leverage the program to engage our multi-generation shopper. Yeah, it's a unique proposition for Myer.
By reshaping the core CBP to deliver a household pooling and engagement proposition, we believe that the ability to engage that whole of household spend is significant. Over to our core focuses today. Unlocking the future value will be delivered across four key pillars. Firstly, we will relaunch the Myer One program and the customer value proposition, building on the strong foundation to provide new features and benefits to engage our customers. Personalization capability at scale. Providing customers more ways to engage, to extract value, which will also tie in with the expansion of our existing loyalty partnerships to deliver a true retail loyalty platform.
Finally, this will all be supported by the investments that are already underway in core tech and capability, improving the customer experience and delivering new features like the shoppable app and a digital award and offer hub, which will power our ecosystem for the future. By relaunching the core program, this will be our first pillar. Supported by new technology, as I mentioned, including a new enterprise loyalty management system through Session M, we'll aim to leverage members. Customers will have access to expanded rewards, boosters, first access programs, and product discovery sets throughout the tiers. They'll also have access to faster rewards. We'll move from our current quarterly reward issuance program, which is due to our technology limitations today, to a more dynamic reward mechanic. The realignment of our tiers is important. We know today our tiers only touch 10% of our customer base.
More than 30% now experiencing the benefits associated with that tiering system. Expansion of the earn and burn outside of Myer through the apparel brands initially will be the first time that Myer One has had the currency leveraged outside of Myer and provides customers further opportunity to engage in this program more broadly. We have future plans on how we take this even further. Moving on to the next slide. The road to personalization takes time, and we have been investing in the process and making good progress, but there is still too much to be done to unlock the full potential of this program. To date, we have organized, connected, and enriched our data. We've established new models and identified value pools. All of these programs have largely been limited to single-channel execution, i.e., like email or SMS.
This year, we've added capability and content and AI focused on developing automation processes and actually commenced proof of concepts for cross-channel personalization. This significantly connecting data and content coupled with a significantly improved customer experience with the new technology that I've mentioned in apps and loyalty. This also sets the foundation for us to uniquely connect Myer One into a new retail loyalty proposition, which we'll look to launch as it relates to Myer One. As I said, we're progressing well on the path to personalization at scale. We have a number of models which are in production, which allow us to leverage over 120 million data points today, which powers the insight-led predictive engagements.
With the announcement of how it's starting to unlock the power of AI content generation at scale, from rapid content creation, the use of synthetic models, adaptive content opportunities, and omnichannel orchestration and automation already in play. These unlocks are significant for our business and significant in terms of the capability to scale and improve our go-to-market proposition. On this page, next page is a hypothetical example of a customer today. It demonstrates the type of thing as the potential of each and every customer. Whilst I'm not going to go through this in detail, you can see from a number of things on here that help us inform how we think about our customers. We leverage customers' personal attributes.
Through this, using our targeted predictive models and targeting capabilities, we can see the types of products she's most likely to buy, how often and when we need to drive frequency of visit, and what type of spend on that visit is the potential. This is then used to create a personalized engagement plan for each and every customer in order to deliver her full potential. As I said, these insights and capabilities are available. We've actually also extended the capabilities out to our key partners, particularly in the beauty space. Continue to invest in this, scaling it, and adding more sophistication will be a continued focus into the future. Expanding Myer One externally is a big unlock for the program, giving our customers greater access, greater rewards, and more reasons to keep Myer One as their preferred loyalty program of choice.
As discussed throughout Apparel Brands acquisition process, we will look to roll Myer One out across the Apparel Brands network first. This will commence in August. Expansion across the group is the first step to broadening the Myer One program externally. It obviously allows us to unlock greater access for our customers, the ability to apply our analytical models and augmented data insight across the group, significant cross-shoppability as we look not only as the Myer shopper from an apparel point of view can shop into Apparel Brands and vice versa, but also the Apparel Brands customer cross-shopping into other categories that they do not have access today, like home, kids, and gifting.
We are well underway on the future expansion of partners, which will be announced over the next few coming months as we look to strategically expand this program further across retail, lifestyle, travel categories, as well as exploring the everyday spend proposition. We are uniquely positioned in the position from Everyday Rewards and Flybuys, but it also provides a more accessible reward option than the more aspirational programs that involve flight of reward. Finally, we will look to deepen our existing partnerships. Back one slide. In the first half of 2026, we'll launch Virgin Pay with points in store with a significant opportunity from August. We'll also add new propositions to support the successful CBA partnership. We'll continue to build out our MasterCard partnership with immediate opportunities in data, analytics, technology, and commercialization to begin from the first half of 2026.
On slide D2, excitingly, the new loyalty management system and the rebuild of our app will open new benefits and experiences for our customers. Today, we have a significantly engaged base and scale that use the app. It currently only provides a Myer customer with its Myer One details, its reward cards, and receipts with limited promotional capability. That being said, the number of app downloads is significant at 2.4 million, and the number of active users at 1.2 million is significant scale in which to leverage once we input the new CX benefits. The most notable unlock to this is the shoppable app component. This will provide strong commercial returns and allow us to seamlessly engage our current customers directly into our e-commerce channel.
We've seen significantly increased conversion rates already from indirect linkages and traffic from the app today, so we anticipate a strong upside to this program. Functionality to our customer and also commercialization capability into the app. The app will be released in Q1 alongside the relaunch of the Myer One proposition. Onto the next slide. From a delivery perspective, you can see here it's busy, but we have a clear plan, and it demonstrates that actually a lot is already. Firstly, we'll relaunch the Myer One proposition in October, setting the foundation for the future. This will also include the new app and loyalty management system underpinning it. Secondly, we'll roll our Myer One across Apparel Brands from August with a number of new partners in the pipeline to be announced in the next few months.
Number three, we're working on deepening our partner network with new CBA opportunities I mentioned, which will be announced soon and delivered in first half, and the expansion of Virgin Pay with points in store from August that we've been generating today. As Lift mentioned, retail media will also be a focus and be relaunched at the back end of the FY2026 with new pilots continuing to roll out over the course of FY2026. We have a clear focus. We have prioritized investment, and we have a strong pipeline to deliver value into FY2026. Finally, how we hold ourselves accountable and the metrics that matter. We are clear on what we need to achieve and have broken the key metrics into four key areas. Firstly, active customers. Those that have shopped in the last 12 months is the barometer for health and scale of our base.
We will track this across group, brands, and key customer segments. Secondly, engagement. Engagement is measured in three ways. For us, firstly, tag rate, how many of our customers are using their Myer One card. Points earned as we expand the ecosystem. This will be an indicator of earning potential and spend potential of each of our customers. Maintain our competitive advantage and depth of value of our core customer. Average spend as a third category is obvious as we think about the increased spend per member and also increased visitation. Finally, cross-shop. As we look to cross-shop at a category level, at a brand level, at a group level, we see this as a potential unlock for the value of the customer, for the expanded ecosystem, but also how we drive share of wallet and lifetime value for the customer. Powerful and differentiating asset in Myer One.
The scale and performance has been built over time, and we have strong momentum and, importantly, significant potential that is yet to be unlocked. We will reset our CVP and core program to ensure it's more rewarding, more relevant, and a stronger foundation for growth. We'll continue to aggressively move on our personalization journey, unlocking opportunities at scale with increased technology, content, and data analytics fueling the future pathway. We'll expand the partnerships as we continue to deepen our existing partner network to really deliver a true competitive advantage. Finally, we're well on the path of delivery. We are clear on the outcome. Thank you for your time. Thanks, Jeff. It's very clear that there's great opportunity there, and we'll open up questions after we have product and brand. While loyalty really is an opportunity for us to grow the products and our brands.
This is a second pillar of our strategy, and we're going to hear from both Belle and also from Teresa, hearing their different takes on the products which are currently within their remit. Given the clicker's not broken, can we move to the first slide just to orientate everyone on when we talk about products and brands with the Myer Group, this is what we're talking about, right? We've got within Myer and our marketplace. Today, Belinda will focus really on what our strategy is going forward, what we saw from the strategic view about what's working and what's not, with a distinct focus on women's apparel, apparel overall, our Myer exclusive brands, and also on beauty.
Also on business now after in the last 12 weeks, she's the Managing Director of Apparel Brands, and she'll really talk about the business, the five brands, who their customers are, and how we can use data, how we can think about the customer in a different way. If you have a look at the market overall on the next slide, what you'll see here, it's just to reiterate again, this is how the Myer Group is thinking about our business. We're thinking about those five markets that we're participating in. You can see here there has been growth in every single market in Australia over the last five years, and the growth is expected to play, and there is growth. Our opportunity using loyalty, how do we get a greater share of the customer wallet?
How do we make sure that our products meet the needs of our customers? How do we continue to make sure that that evolves over time so that we do not get to a position where we are now, where we have products the breadth of the customer in Australia? We are not going to spend a huge amount of time going into segmentation. We have reams of information, and we know our customers well. What this shows you is that we have a right to play. We have a right to play, and we are actually performing relatively well across all age groups. When you do a double click on this and you have a look at the category, for example, in apparel, what you will see is that we are overweight in the 44- to 59-year-old, and we are underweight in every other single category. That signifies opportunity.
Equally, in beauty, you'll see a similar trend. What we know from globally and also in Australia, and have a look at some of the competitors in the beauty space, for which Belinda will talk to shortly. This slide is about opportunity. They're in our ecosystem at the moment. They're members of Myer One. As Jeff mentioned, they're just choosing not to cross-shop as much as they can. That is where the opportunity exists for us today. The beauty is now, as part of the Myer Group, that we can actually look at the full life stages and life cycle of the customer. That is where there is unique opportunity, which Teresa will touch on. I am going to introduce the two to the stage shortly.
If we move to the next slide, as I mentioned, Belle is going to talk about the overhaul of our apparel strategy. What does this mean for the future and where we see there is opportunity? Obviously, talk about the Myer exclusive brands, which you'll see over on the left-hand side of the stage. Belle has been with our business for over 10 years. She's got 30 years of experience in retail, both in Australia and overseas. Recently appointed to the role of Chief Merchant. She's been in that role for the last three months, but the last 10 years has really been driving our home business, our homeware business, our kids' business, and our menswear. Now has the added responsibility to use her magic to turn around women's and to make sure that we could expand our managing director there.
She'll talk through the five brands, but has deep expertise across all aspects of retail, not just formally within Premier but previously at the Woolworths Group as Acting Managing Director of Big W. It is great to have the depth of experience, whether it is retail, whether it is merchandise, whether it is planning, whether it is product. We are going to invite Belle to the stage. Thanks, Belle. Thank you, Olivia. Today, I am here to present the Myer merchandise strategy that will see the complete overhaul of our women's wear business and deliver a reinvigorated beauty offer, quantitative research to deeply understand what resonates across different customer segments. Over 6,000 customers took part in focus groups, and through that process, we learned to drive meaningful change. There were seven critical areas of focus. Age matters. Today, we see engagement from an older consumer, but we must better connect with a younger customer.
Strengthening relevance with this group is essential for long-term growth, for acquisition of a new customer as well as loyalty. Brand matters. Our current brand offering does not align to what many of our customers are looking for, especially in fashion and beauty. We are missing key brands that resonate with a younger and style. Addressing this gap in perception is crucial to retaining and growing share of wallet. Experience matters. Dean will share later in his presentation the importance of in-store experience. The next generation of customers expect a modern, inclusive, engaging in-store experience with team members that reflect lifestyles and interests of those customers. Casual lifestyle matters. Customer preferences have shifted strongly towards a casual, versatile wardrobe. Occasion for life's key moments, especially in our beauty assortment. Fashion credibility. To stay relevant, we need to elevate our fashion offer and bring in more trend-aligned desirable brands.
Looking ahead, we will focus on three key pillars: overhaul our apparel strategy in women's wear and men's, creating worlds that fit each stage of life. In addition, be Australia's go-to destination for casual fashion. Collaborations. Complete redesign of our Myer exclusive brands. Our Myer exclusive brands will be star-led and designed as a brand, not just as a label, showcased in prime positions in our store. Reinvigorated beauty proposition. Double our brand offer to attract a new customer, set new experience standards, and become the gifting destination to maintain relevance and protect our strong market position. Olivia mentioned earlier where we've seen category reset is needed to maintain relevance and protect that strong market position. With proven success in categories such as home and menswear and children's wear, this shows we have the expertise, the customer trust, and the market understanding to continue to grow.
There is no image that clearly captures where we sit today and where the opportunities are. It highlights the critical balance between protecting our core customer base whilst uncovering significant opportunities to connect to a younger customer. Our research showed that only 24% of customers surveyed resonated with our current women's wear offer. Yet, as we rebalance our med mix and introduce new brands that resonate with more customers, we expect to deliver a richer margin mix. Our refreshed apparel strategy is underpinned by four pillars to grow market share. Our first pillar here, curated worlds for each life stage, refers to designing and organizing product and brands around specific needs and lifestyles for each stage of life.
Our second pillar, maximize and innovate our apparel space through a minimum clear, well-defined spaces for each curated world that will attract new customers through modern layouts and enhance the customer shopping experience. Pillar three, be Australia's go-to destination for casual fashion and denim, refers to a focused retail strategy aimed at leading a destination with a fresh approach to product placement. Pillar three, only at Myer collaboration, will see a compelling retail space by introducing a 12-week rotation with brands and designs. MEBS. Our Myer exclusive brands are important to our strategy. We undertook a comprehensive review of our performance, and customers provided us feedback on the application of product offer and two margin gain to be realized. Through a relevant product offer that is design-led with a distinct brand and product DNA, this will provide a point of difference and margin gain.
We will have resulting in the retirement of seven brands. This approach allows us to centralize investment to create stronger brand awareness with our Myer exclusive brands. Our current women's wear MEB mix sits at 26%, and our current GP margins sit at 55%. Our future state for women's wear will be approximately 30% mix improvement. Our current menswear mix sits today at 16%, and our current margin mix sits at 58%. Yet our future state in menswear with our Myer exclusive brands will sit at approximately 20% mix and more, with a GP rate gain of 450 basis points basically to deliver. We have seen that success with our homeware of who our customer is and the lifestyles they represent. Expert buying and design collaboration. Our buying and design teams work closely to understand customer needs and curate ranges that reflect their lifestyles.
Our high-performance team are expert in sourcing and negotiation, working directly with our factories. They are known for being detail-oriented. Our team consistently drives strong results through clear communication and collaboration. Curated in-store destinations. Our stores are designed with clear layouts, engaging displays, and strategic adjacencies to make shopping easy and enjoyable. Each category has a defined space, creating either a lifestyle execution or end-use focused execution. Omnichannel leadership with 40% of the category sales coming from digital, reflecting strong customer engagement across all touchpoints. Our strength in homewares comes from knowing our customer and constantly delivering what they value. In our soft home business today, which includes bed linen, bed accessories, and bathroom, our MEBS over-indexes. Our hard home category, which includes cookware and kitchenware, over-indexes in MEBS by 38%.
There are three clear, distinct DNA brands within homewares: Heritage, which is our number one MEB brand in the company, which is a classic, timeless brand. We have Vue, which is our modern and contemporary brand. We have Australian House and Garden, which evokes our typical Australian lifestyle, casual and relaxed. We have the Cooks Collective, which we launched in recent years, which is an end-use category. Now, we are going to move on to our beauty category. The Australian market, as you can see, the global beauty market has grown by 6%, whilst Myer's growth is at 2%. We over-index in categories such as fragrance. However, we under-index in categories such as makeup and skincare. We have a right to play. To deliver the beauty strategy, there are four key initiatives.
Our first initiative is to double our brand offer and attract a new customer, customers from classic to Gen Z across luxury, staple, and niche brands. Our second initiative is to reinvigorate our beauty halls. Our beauty hall will be a beauty destination of worlds: Showcase Worlds, Emporium World, and this Emporium World will become a destination of rotating newness, value brands, beauty treatments, and services, and a relevant space for our Gen Z customer. Our third initiative is set new beauty experience standards by creating interactive beauty zones through treatments, activations, events, and services to drive traffic and spend. Dean will present later today what our new strategy for beauty experience and service looks like. Our fourth initiative is to become the gifting destination of Australia within our beauty category. We are redesigning this world, continue to create an up-to-date immersive experience, volume, and brand choice, rotating newness.
We welcome the middle spender. In Gen Z world, a relevant space that meets the needs of an emerging customer. An experience including blow dry bars and nail bars within the space of beauty. Moving on to the roadmap to deliver these initiatives. Our plan for customer growth, engagement, and visitation. This plan will have strong governance and discipline to support this, several foundational shifts that are already underway. Our new MEB launch in women's wear and menswear will launch in February 2026, including only at Myer collaborations. Brand expansion has already commenced. You will start to see this from August onwards across apparel and beauty. Our beauty hall and services will be disciplined approach has begun, reducing promotional depth and frequency with markdown reduction in order to improve margins.
We will measure our success by increased customer acquisition, sales growth in apparel and beauty, improvement through improved sourcing, promotional effectiveness, and improved sell-throughs. I would like now to introduce you to Teresa Rendo. Good morning, everyone. I'm really pleased today to share a little bit more about our five apparel brands, being Just Jeans, JJ's, Portmans, Dotti, and Jacqui E, along with the strategic rationale and anticipated benefits that we see from this new combination as Myer Group. We will walk through our key strategic pillars and how this combination supports a stronger, more competitive, and more resilient retail platform. Our five apparel brands have strong, although latent, brand recognition, and they operate within specialty fashion retail in both Australia and New Zealand. They provide a diverse set of customers.
We have an extensive retail network of 712 stores, and we also have an online presence, which is our greatest store window at between 16-17% penetration. You heard from Jeff this morning, and you can see dot com. In FY2024, we delivered sales of AUD 791 million with each brand delivering to EBITDAR. The reason we know that is every brand is fully attributed on the P&L, as is every store location. In the weeds, maybe, I would say retail is detail. We are proud to have a talented team of both leaders and retail experts in our stores. They have deep industry expertise, they've got a strong customer focus, and they have been adaptable in and they deliver value in a dynamic retail environment.
Our apparel brands have grown significantly and expanded their portfolio of brands through strategic acquisition, leveraging opportunity to extend market presence and also diversify into new customer segments. Each acquisition has been carefully selected to complement the existing portfolio and to enter new markets, from Jay Jays and Dotti, who enable us to play with the youth demographics, to Jacqui E, who caters to a more mature audience. The combination of Myer and the five apparel brands represents a powerful step forward in accelerating tomorrow. It is not a fundamental shift in our strategy. What changes is the pace and scale with which we can deliver. Our five key areas of focus and acceleration are, firstly, customer insight and to be more data-driven.
Up until 12 months ago, we only knew less than 20% of our customers, which meant we were deeply relying on our own internal insights and our team to really deliver. Imagine what that could deliver for the five apparel brands. The second is resetting our pricing pillar. We have a deep and high promotional cadence in every one of our five apparel brands. The idea is that we can balance this promotional cadence to be more everyday pricing with the right promo density, better margins, and better offers for our customers. Investing in our stores is a really important pillar. Accelerating our investment, and we have got some proof points to share with you this morning, is really important. That means better experiences, a consistent DNA, and harder working fixturing. Growing digital is a huge opportunity.
JJ's is only at about 5% penetration, and Portmans is our highest penetrated brand at around 25%. We are well below. Dot com presents a huge opportunity for us. More eyes on these wonderful brands. Sourcing synergy is what we really bring to this combination. We have a robust sourcing capability, enabling us to provide significant value to the group, greater scale, smarter, and faster. How we plan to optimize and unlock our property network, and how we plan to deliver value through sourcing and supply chain excellence. The integration of Myer One loyalty program across the five apparel brands unlocks a powerful growth opportunity for both customer and our broader business. A compelling platform to cross-shop categories and brands, deepening their engagement through earn and burn and increasing their frequency. The stats are pretty compelling.
Today, less than on average, only 22% of Myer One members shop the apparel brands. Closing that gap is significant to our top and bottom line. The shared loyalty unlocks richer, broader first-party data across multiple banners, shopping missions, and customer segments from precision marketing and promotions to curated offers and product discovery. A more connected customer journey while giving our business the data intelligence to refine our offer, increase our share of wallet, and build loyalty. Growth in digital, the store experience still provides a pivotal role for our customers, not just as a sales channel, but as a brand for our brands, and is far more tactical. Experience is a key pillar in our multi-brand strategy. Frank has untapped potential. Some of our Just Jeans banners look different store by store, as does our fixturing and our layout.
We're focused on ensuring that our stores are in the heart of our core customer communities in high traffic, high relevance zones within the shopping center network with longevity of earnings in every site. The second and most exciting thing from my perspective, though, is the customer experience that we can bring to life in our stores. We landed in last October at High Point, our first Just Jeans new generation work from top to floor, able to hold more stock so it's not out the back, it's actually on the floor and easily replenishable. Team, same product, and is delivering 13% growth year on year and 20% growth versus our executive chair and board have already approved three more stores to go ahead for Just Jeans. We have Riccarton in New Zealand currently closed and we will do a similar activity for the remaining four apparel brands.
We've paused for a moment while we use some of this amazing product. It is at the heart of every retailer, and it's the heart of our strategy. It's not just about having great items, though, customers. It's a strategic differentiator. You will see a very compelling slide later on when Darren presents our very, and I think it will be quite obvious what the unlock is. As I stand here today, all five, by that I mean we can choose to cut and dye our fabric, and we are well on track to deliver what has been an unseen year on year. We will not have a stock problem. We operate within a robust and disciplined sourcing framework where cost, quality, and sourcing excellence spanning supply relationships and ethical standards is why we think we're different. We have deep regional origin insight.
We have a team that every quarter understands where labor is, not just by region, but by location in region. We understand where the mills are that produce the best fabric. We have efficiency in that we unlock, and we have sustainable relationships underway. We've done it in denim in Just Jeans for quite some time, which means we can cut with only 60 days notice. We've started to now do that with linen across our five apparel brands and input cost into fabric, and we actually placed a letter of intent at that time, which means for our Just Jeans brands. We partner with 250 ethically sourced factories on FOB terms.
We have speed, and we make sure so although we would all love sales and GP and stock all to be the triangle that we all focus on, we focus on cost and the health of our inventory, and there's not been a season where we haven't delivered that. If we go to the next slide, you can see that we have in our initiatives with the capabilities and capacity of our teams. As part of Myer Group, we have seen a lot of opportunity, but we must be prudent, and we must make sure that we have quantified and prioritized. We move to the opportunity for questions. There are five key messages that I'd like to leave you with today with respect to the five apparel brands. You will benefit further from the Myer Group in terms of Myer One more immediately and in the longer term, myer.com.
Quality, sourcing, and distribution. With a greater scale of Myer, this very promising early reads on our next generation store of the future. We know that we have focused and existing growth strategies that aren't too different in speed, and we will drive progress through our right-sized network. Lastly, our combined operating model has strategies and synergies which, when unlocked, will provide and deliver long-term returns. How we prioritize these will be key. With that, I'll throw back to Olivia. Teresa, we're now going to move into Q&A. We do have microphones in the room, and we're going to ask Jeff and Belinda and Teresa to the stage so that we can have an opportunity to ask any questions around loyalty, around product, and brands that you may have. If you could just state name. Good morning. My name's Garth Francis. I'm from MST Marquee.
Jeff, this one's directed to you. Just the app to current app holders, or are you going to have to invoke a new download for current customers? It's an update to exist. It's a great upside. And then perhaps just on the apparel brand store network, are you expecting then to close stores that's co-located, or are you expecting to expand stores from where you currently sit? Yeah. Property overall. So what we've opportunity, and we have quite a broad network, but our strategy at the moment is to actually continue to run the businesses side by side. We think it is appropriate for us to have certain product types in the Myer store, and we're going to test and learn. It's the best way for us.
Myer One will be rolled out across the entire Apparel Brands network, and we'll get a better line of sight then around the customer brands that are actually on myer.com. And then through the analysis of working out actually where it's going to work. So we're going to trial Jeans, for example, shortly in one of the Myer stores, two other brands in the Myer environment. It's a test and learn, see what works, and then we can make the going to be very precision-based. Hi, I'm Taylor Guy from Barrenjoey. Just following on from that, when you're testing the Apparel Brands in Myer, will that space come from other areas where there's lower margin utilizing space, which is why we're looking at one particular store in Castle Hill at the moment, and we'll try another one in another Victorian store looking at Just Jeans.
It's not a case of pushing where, which is, I guess, additive for us as well. It's a great opportunity for us to see how the customers interact in store. Okay. About the store network profile over the next two to three years? We might pause that for Josh if that's okay. Josh is going to have a discussion, and there'll be a little bit of this. I'm sorry, guys. Where we think the focus should be from a Myer Group from an apparel in the next session. Okay. Last question in terms of focusing on ranging of brands that customers want, do you have specific examples customers will want them in the Myer stores? Go for it, Belle. We're currently in the process of onboarding those new brands. As I mentioned earlier, you'll see beauty that will be onboarded from August onwards.
What you would have seen, if you recall, that I called it the scatter chart. Do you recall that slide that shows what the customers thought from when we would talk to the customers about what products they like and what they did not? We have a very clear line of sight on which we need to exit, and at the same time, we also have a very good view resonate and how do we bring them in. This is going to be a process, as Belle said. It is starting from August. It is going to take some time, as you can appreciate, because we exit new brands and bring this assortment looks like. It is underway. We are very clear on our target list, and we are methodically working through that, and we will sequence the exit in August. Yeah.
To add to that, with the customer research that we brands that will resonate with a younger customer, and then we have a body of work to do some rationalization in the brands that you saw in the graph previously, and with brands that we're going to onboard so that we have an expanded customer base especially in discussions with. Currently, we have that we're in discussions with in terms of onboarding those brands too. Some of the effort is with our existing brand partners, and then Joseph Michael from Morgan Stanley. First question I had maybe for Belle, just wanted to pick up on the comment you made. I think improvement in women's wear and 450 basis points improvement for men. How are you going to drive that? Is that just purely mixed, or is that also? No.
That comes from, as I mentioned before, when we look at our homewares business and the way that we're structured and the disciplines that are in place there, and also in our children's wear business, we have a very strong mix of MEBs. It's taking that disciplined approach, strong negotiation skills, negotiate better costs, and that's just the beginning. There's still further opportunity over the next coming leverage scale as well. This is just the beginning of the first range that we're going to deliver in February. That's just in relation to MEBs, though Myer Exclusive Brands, which you can see over there, and which is going to be more similar to what Teresa explained around direct-to-factory.
It is also delivering, and you will have seen again if you had that included, our more exclusive brands where there was duplication, and it really was not delivering for our customer needs. We are only serving a small section. We are very focused on what these brands look like, who the customer there is targeting, and we are going to be customers and work out which products are trading well and how we can continue to improve into the future. That is different. The direct-to-factory model, but also the approach with having a clear line of sight on the brand, managing it as a brand, is actually very different while we feel confident in actually improving volume, but also improving margin. Okay. Great. For concession brands going forward, could you also comment on the margins of concessions?
I think everyone knows that there are lower or an EBIT margin line. Our concession brand partners are very, very important to us. They have, you would have seen on the slide, was driven through our national and international brand assortment. They play a pivotal role. They lead the market in fashion. They deeply to our business as a department store offer. Customers expect choice, and that's the role that they play. Hi, Olivia. David. I thought they were fantastic. Two questions though, probably to you, maybe to about total shareholder return and wanting to be in the top quartile. But then you also got Myer and standing at that's probably that. Then you're talking about transition.
When you're all these amazing projects that you've got on, my thinking is, and this is not a loaded value creative rather than value for doing it, but for us as shareholders or for people who are shareholders, what sort of thinking should we be looking at in terms of your transition period? Because my listening to you, it's going to take a bit more than 12 months aspiration. Yeah, it's a really good question, David. I think if you think back to the slide where we tried to explain that there's probably three buckets of how we're thinking about transition year of sorts because it is of everything that we've talked through, whether it's the acquisition, whether it's essentially what's going on in 2025, investing in skills and capability ahead of projects that have been executed as well, right?
There is a number of factors that drive why 2025 is a transition year. As you say, there are going to be certain the basics right and resetting them. When you think about supply chain, when you think about sourcing, that is going to take time, and we have been really transparent about that. The work is starting now. It is like tomorrow, but equally the roadmap to give you a bit deeper understanding about when these are going to hit because there are a lot of initiatives that are actually at the end of the pack, which clearly says what we are actually delivering. There are some fundamental aspects of the business. They are going to take time, but we are starting now, and we do believe there are quick wins. We do believe there are quick wins across the board. Secondly, we think that we need to lean into the growth now.
Jeff mentioned before loyalty, the loyalty management, and that is going to help us reset that business. We're doing that because we see we're resetting the base on other initiatives because there is genuine growth and opportunity for us to lean into that. Equally, resetting our product offering, that takes time, but we've been fast out of the gates. The left or your right is to actually make it real. These hit the store in February. There's a lot of work that's been going on this year, a lot of heavy lifting and where we know we can win that ultimately bring in the customer, increase share of wallet, and hope to deliver in the short but longer term.
We've been clear it's a three to five-year journey, very focused on where we can bring forward value and where we need to invest and execute, and other things are going to take some time. Yeah. You and your team have got reputation. There's no shortcut in product. There's no shortcut in ultimately decides, which is why we've probably over-indexed, but why we are focused on spending time to understand what the customer wants. There's a lot of competition out there. There's a lot. We've got to make sure that our offer, whether it's online, in store, with our product, our brand, active way. Yes, we are going to be methodical. We're very clear on where our priorities are, very clear.
We're trying to do it across the board so that we can bring forward value as best as possible to make sure we can continue to invest in the business. Yep. Slide 56, where it showed the opportunity with loyalty, where you've got 37% of the average Myer One customers shopping at apparel brands. That seems to be very significant when Myer One's, what, 79% tag rate. Synergies that you could get. How do you go and get that? I understand apparel brands with sourcing, very powerful, but how do you actually get that across into Myer and being able to do that? Can you bring some of the life, some of the plans that you've got to do that? Yeah. We're excited about it. Jeff, do you want to talk to it? And then Teresa, maybe how you think about it as well. Yeah.
Look, I think that is great. We can get to 40%-50%, 60% tag rate over the course of the next 18 months. That fuels the insight. Wait until we grab that customer, given that there is already 40% of those customers that are shopping those brands. Customers shop Myer One, Myer customers shop into apparel brands today. As we start to build that base, we can then use apparel brand customers to shop into the Myer base. So our fingertips. We should expect to see value quickly, strongly through how we sign up customers who will build within the apparel brands. It is already very strong within the Myer brand, as you can see, with 800,000 new customers. That can be easily applied to apparel brands too. We now look at this as a group construct.
We've got the power of Myer One that can kind of fuel both, and we'll leverage it accordingly. Teresa, do you want to talk about it? What's really beautiful about this combination of the centers of excellence that exist? When Jeff spoke to where Myer One was a number of years ago to where it is today, I said the customer perspective, it's about more earn and burn. We're just giving them more choice to be the number one loyalty program in Australia from a data. When I say we're promotionally dense, 80% of our range on any given customer is getting a nice surprise when they get to the register. The fact is our ticket prices are within plus or minus 5% of our competitor set. Our ticket price is already very competitive.
Imagine what data will give this team because they are such talented retail sales, which equals shareholder return. That is what I'm excited about. The other piece that we sort of haven't touched on from a data perspective, I mean, it absolutely can help consumer behavior. It is an understanding of actually what the customer will think about the brands. Importantly, how do we make them more relevant? Just Jeans is a fantastic heritage brand. Data can be used in a different way to not only drive the marketing and attracting the customer, but also help Teresa work out actually what is the right product mix and insight into the business from a product perspective as well. Thanks, David. Good morning and thanks for your presentation. Tim Hannah from Petra Capital. The customer base.
To what degree are you looking at different catchment areas and opportunity to optimize your product range to the local demographic? What's the opportunity at hand there? Does that introduce a level of complexity? In terms of the worlds that I talked about before, we would have ranged our product top down from flagship to our smallest and curating our product and our brands from cluster E and all the way up. Recent launch seed and another brand and exceptional growth was had in that store. To ensuring that we had a very strong competent offering I've talked about today in a very comprehensive way to learn from that. Once we launch the product, once we have a wider resource, but let's use Mackay as well. It's 890 km away from any other store.
How do we use that as a way of demonstrating when you take the right brand with the right assortment that you actually can deliver, even if it's in a regional community? Far North Queensland to Victoria. I know it's very obvious, but there is some other thinking here, Sam, that the team across the apparel brands also takes to how they think about application of product. We already have a fully graded store network, but when we actually sign off our ranges every month because we are quite agile, we do range by seasonality, and we will look at it and say, "How many stores is that going to? Is it going to Far North Queensland?" Interestingly, the conversation we've been having more recently is, "What is cold?
Winter? What we're thinking about as we do our post-season reviews is what, and Australia now has a much more reasonable base of temperatures across the country. That is a challenge for us because obviously they are two high ASP categories in terms of ticket price. We sleeve in Victoria, short sleeve in Far North Queensland already. My second question, can you, for between the apparel brands and Myer in terms of your exclusives? It is definitely an opportunity, and Darren is actually going to take you through what apparel brands looks like and you will get some more detail on that, Sam. Top line though, there is opportunity across the board, and it is great that we have got all the skills in, for example, in homeware. There are already some skills that exist.
It's how do we actually build on that and take the learnings from Apparel Brands, do it at scale? Thank you. Just interested in the beauty halls and the reinvigoration questions with concession holders through that. To what extent will there be test and trial with those halls, or have you already done that? You'll hear from Dean Simpson, but we today have what I'd say is some flexible space within our beauty hall that we can increase productivity and set a new blueprint for what that beauty hall looks like. We have very strong case brands. It's not a matter of moving the brands that we case that we'll be really investing in. That emporium space, we're going to double our brand. We have an extensive list of beauty brands strong in our fragrance location.
There is opportunity to expand that with niche and artisanal fragrances in our beauty hall. Some of the space also will go towards services, whether that is on the floor and/or in beauty. Profitable category within the organization. How do we maximize those returns even more? It is the window to the store. It is a highly productive space. We are going to do a test and learn, which Dean will talk about. We will do test and learn in a sandbox store. Bell and I have had lots of conversations with all our top beauty suppliers in investment and a reinvigoration in the beauty hall. As Bell opportunities for makeup, and we clearly have a middle market that we need to go after. Very clear about what our strategy is.
So far we've got really to get cracking with the store on your process, but we'll test and learn. Not everything's going to work. Let's test it in one store. Let's see how it works with the contribution from. Please, just on the loyalty program updates, you said there's pretty much six areas of enhancement. How do you communicate that with your consumers and your—yeah, in terms of the reset of the program and the core value proposition uplift. We'll relaunch that to our customers in October. Obviously we have a strong own channel program in terms of SMS through our app, but we also can use addressable media using Myer, so we'll be looking at a myriad of ways to relaunch this.
Equally, when we do relaunch this, it gives us an opportunity as we see the peak trade and most of our customers coming through to hear about the new benefits, and then they'll start to see that manifest in terms of faster rewards, no longer waiting for the quarterly reward cycle, for instance. They'll be put into new tiers quickly, and that gets done at really tangible proof points that are delivered fast and quickly. We'll also be going out and using all of the channels that we have available to us to speak to them. You do find out what you're giving customers is strong, right? This gives them faster rewards, more rewards from a perspective. We're quite focused to make sure. Okay. Sean Cousins, UBS. Maybe just a question for Teresa.
You made the point around the opportunity for lower factory costs, possibly to come through with this current uncertainty that we've got. You mentioned the example of linen fairs. I think it's an interesting time. Certainly in the short term, see China as a real opportunity. You would all know if you read our modern slavery statement that we're between us right now because they're under a little bit of pressure, which means that we do have a number of things in our favor, which includes raw materials and also source country. It's also good for us because when you have weather like we've had, we can cut our fabric and dye it in a shorter period. And New Zealand. We've got input costs in our favor at the moment.
We've got region in our favor at the moment, and hopefully we'll have shipping and hopefully the FX will. The short term that, and Darren you'll hear from him later about this, is the opportunity is also in the scale, right? When you think about where we're sourcing from a Myer perspective, it's under 5% and where the opportunity through a medium to longer term opportunity for us as a group, which is about being clear about where we've got duplication and where we can generate benefits from a scale perspective because we have more volume to potentially. Questions for Bel just around the youth customer. We had Kmart last week talk about the youth customer as well that they were interested. When you think about what you're providing, need to be, is the quality that you offer respected or understood by customers? Do they get it?
Do you need to sort of more actively engage with them? It's really resonating at the moment, but obviously it's a target market for you and for others. Thanks. Our current position today in that Gen Z, so the collection that you'll see, and I'm happy to walk you through that in the break, is that we have invested in design. We are style led, so we've invested in quality without sacrificing margin. It's fit, it's style, it's design, and it's the sum of all of that that we'll launch in February, this new collection, because then we'll understand them a lot better. Aside from that, that's mentioned an onboarding of acquisition of new brands, what those brands look like for us, right?
I think what Belinda said there is, look, we're going, we definitely don't have it through one lens of one market. It actually can be across many as well because beauty plays an important role. You have heard a few of us talk about cross-shop and what that means is, Sean, is that they might be shopping in beauty. How do you encourage them to get up the escalators to shop in a different category? We have a slightly different opportunity here because they're already under the age of 35. There is strong growth there. Members of us, how do we get them engaged here in order for us to win? You link in the loyalty program as well. I think some of the changes that Jeff has made help solve for that market.
It's a combination of factors, and it will take time. I think we're going to pause because we're running slightly behind. Make some phone calls, stretch the legs, and then we'll come back. We do have questions at the end of the day, so there's going to be plenty of time. Thank you for your patience. Enjoy a coffee. This session, which is about the omnichannel network, you're going to hear from a number of executives who I'm going to introduce and then hand over. Firstly, Tony Sutton. Tony's now Chief Operating Officer, so works across the entire business. Think about the store network at Myer and Apparel Brands, and that's where Tony's focus is. He's got deep insights from his previous role at Premier Retail. He was there for...
and his team are a great asset to the Myer Group. His experience is not only in Australia but also internationally. You'll also hear from Dean Simpson. Dean is around, I'd say, 30 years of retail experience both here in Australia and overseas with some very large names, whether it's Target, Kmart, and the store transformation at Marks and Spencer. You'll hear from Dean shortly. Finally, we also have Warrick. Obviously, part of our omnichannel network is e-commerce. Jeff touched on this briefly. Warrick is leading the e-commerce strategy, working as part of Jeff's team. He's got depth of experience in e-comm, including Walmart in the US. You'll get a chance to hear from Tony. At the end of this session, we'll then open up for questions as well. Thanks, Tony. Okay, thanks, Olivia. Good morning, all, and good morning to those online.
Today, the team and I would... it gives our customers the ability to choose how they shop with us anywhere and any time. For example, if they choose to... social platforms. As you've heard today, this is underpinned by one of Australia's largest loyalty scales and sets us apart from our competitors, providing us with a unique competitive advantage. If I go to this slide on the left, you can see that we have over 130 million visits to our stores across our extensive 714-store network. As you heard earlier, we have 4.6 million active Myer One members, making us one of the largest loyalty programs in the country. This... with our valued customers. Why is this important? Because we know from... and choose to be able to shop across... also know the value of these customers.
The omnichannel customer spends 2.4 times more than a customer who only chooses to shop in stores. We also know that 39% of our customers research online, then choose to go and purchase in store, and vice versa, 28% of our customers go in store to do their research. Importance of the omnichannel customer. Now, when we think about omnichannel, and today, we are going to share with you our plans in three different areas. First, of the digital experience in our store, and Warrick will take you through that shortly. Josh will take you through our property portfolio, through which we think is a very exciting store renewal program to come up, and we will go through e-commerce. Thank you, Warrick. Thanks, Tony. Good morning, and thanks, everyone, for joining. That lie ahead for Myer today. Might need to press it a little bit.
With AUD 819 million in FY24 online sales, Myer established a foundation for us to build upon, particularly in core categories that we've discussed today: apparel, beauty, and home. Business generated AUD 704 million in online sales in FY24 and serves as a... The strength of Myer's omnichannel network gives us a comparative advantage over online pure plays and category spending... of online orders being click and collect today at Myer, and our attribution models indicate... for their shop in store. Tony mentioned before, 28% of... This unique positioning within the Australian market allows us to build on omnichannel success... diverse pickup and return options. Most importantly, and as Tony highlighted, our omnichannel engagement data underscores a powerful... both in store and online. Are spending 2.4 times more... strategic importance of continuing to increase our trust with these high-value omnichannel customers. As we look to the...
Online and omnichannel potential with a step change in experience for our customers. Firstly, our shoppable app will launch later this year, which unlocks the online shopping experience and supports our new Myer One loyalty proposition that Jeff spoke about. Today, when those users click through to the mobile site to shop, they convert at twice the rate of other users that go directly to our mobile site. A really material opportunity for us to reduce friction and improve their experience. The first version of our shopping app launches later this year and will create the foundation for future releases that strengthen the connection of the store experience to online. Those future releases will include features like product scanning, visual search, click and collect, push notifications, and other omnichannel... product personalization, recommendations, and the presentation of... elements including visual outfitting solutions on our product pages, as well as agentic tools...
tailored product recommendations that... In addition, we're presenting real-time stock availability earlier in the journey. The online experience ensures that our customers know what pickup and delivery options they have available to them as they browse the site rather than at checkout. From an omnichannel standpoint, we're working... experience and benefit from strong unit economics in that channel. We have several initiatives underway today to improve convenience for... streamlined single-page checkout journey, reducing complication and friction for the customer from the current three-page experience to a single page. We're also simultaneously reviewing our click and collect processes and technology. It's particularly important given that we know that 29%... same day. With 21% of online transactions at Myer being click and collect and benefiting from stronger order economics and with no delivery charge, this incremental potential is particularly valuable to...
All of these checkout and pickup initiatives ultimately establish a foundation to enable same-day delivery for Metro customers. Finally, on the next slide, we're focused on expansion of our online product range and assortment through our marketplace offering. It's performed well but remains a significant opportunity for further growth. With a three-year... We're consciously accelerating this part of the business with complementary category offerings and wanted brands. Based on our department store heritage, we know that we have the credentials and the right to play in these categories that we plan to expand into, particularly, you know, by way of example, baby hard goods, firm... marketplace benefits our customers who enjoy greater product choice and increased value through our Myer One program. It benefits our third-party sellers and...
and it benefits Myer, allowing us to scale our product offering profitably without the need for investment in inventory and enables us to focus on areas where we can add unique value. Existing performance in the marketplace clearly demonstrates cross-shop benefits already, with 48% of marketplace baskets also including... growing AOV materially without inventory risk. Additionally, 81% of marketplace customers in the past 12 months. Our customers already enjoy and want more from this offering. It's very clear. To support these growth efforts in marketplace and get ready for scale, we'll be investing... in brands to engage with Myer and our customers and an... On the next slide, I have an example that helps... The children's wear category... key role for our existing customer base. In FY2024, 2.4 million customers... 2.4 million transactions at Myer included a children's wear item. The last...
and customers have long trusted Myer for us to... An example transaction with children's wear today includes 2.4 apparel items and has an average basket size of AUD 64. What's great about this... are Myer exclusive brands, which are high margin. They are, however, low to mid price point. Expansion via third-party marketplace sellers into baby hard goods... of apparel today, with a strong assortment of high consideration and higher price point items in product types like prams, carriers, and nursery furniture. Want and trust Myer to offer. This is just... engagement and profitable growth with Australian customers through marketplace. Key takeaways for the future of Myer's e-commerce strategy. Our strong omnichannel foundation is a unique advantage, demonstrated by... built upon for future growth. Secondly, we're... serve our customers, including the release of our shoppable app... and reducing friction with streamlined checkout and real-time stock visibility...
which offers significant potential for capital profitable growth, while better serving our customers and strengthening the Myer One... they're already looking for. With that, I'd like to pass to Josh, who's going to speak to our property portfolio. Good morning, everyone. It's a privilege to speak with you today and share insights into the new Myer Group property portfolio. Our combined portfolio, as Tony mentioned... Myer Department Stores, of which 54 are leased, with an average lease term or WALE of eight years, and 718 specialty stores across Australia and New Zealand with a WALE of 2.1 years. The Myer portfolio reflected legacy leases and constraints. Long-term leases across a network have limited our ability to... The portfolio has been concentrated among four major landlords, with a strong presence in CBD centers, limiting our diversity. Many locations have included... and our approach... without a clear long-term vision.
A refreshed strategy, we're building a portfolio that is diverse, spanning CBDs, regional and subregional shopping centers, high streets. It's flexible, with retail formats that can adapt to different markets, investment cycles, and consumer needs. Working with all our landlord partners across the entire, collaborative way, due to the frequency and nature of the newly combined portfolio. A new level of versatility in both the rental structures and the way that we choose to bring our specialty brands into Myer, as Olivia mentioned earlier. Options now exist for us to exit under opportunistic, specialty brands now gives us flexibility to reformat and reset our store network, support and enable product and brand initiatives, investment into the store renewal program, which Dean is about to take us through. Get the clicker to work. Portfolio through disciplined, financially sound decision-making.
Two, build strong and strategic partnerships with our landlords and built environment suppliers, leveraging both our scale and reach. Three, deliver lease structures that enable sustainable... or leverage Myer One data insights to support the development of our property strategy and store environments. In summary, the combined Myer Group has a diverse, flexible... spanning Myer Department Stores, specialty retail stores, DFOs, and the digital loyalty program, as Jeff outlined earlier. In addition, our property team is unified across... all our... and the capability for Dean to take you through store renewal. Thank you, Josh. Good morning, everyone, and thank you for the opportunity... Myer. We know that over 76% of our retail sales come from our physical stores in Myer. Physical retailing is important today and will always... and equity within Australia... into a great customer experience in all our stores. We're facing into that through the renewal program.
Returns and all the learnings to apply those learnings into our future thinking. As we move through to the first slide, we've captured program. The renewal program is comprehensive in nature. Framework. We're very clear around affordability and to ensure that this is a scalable program for the organization. The renewal program is genuinely very holistic. We are looking at the physical store, the customer organization to bring these strategies to life in store. Equally, we're looking at the operating model in and of itself. Thirdly, to ensure prioritize discipline approach to ensure best returns at the right time in we intend to use to ensure that we deploy our capital in a sense. As we move through as to the why renewal, so why renewal and why today and why now.
to the great fleet of stores that we have in Australia and the opportunity that exists with that. Equally, we acknowledge the legacy... customers through obviously the product and how we bring that product to life in a modern and contemporary experience for our customers. The relevance to our shopping experience will ensure... that we address the immediate opportunities and long-term... markets. Today and tomorrow, I think it's well noted around where we are today. As you walk our stores in Myer, we have a very... change. We also have a level of inconsistency in... but also importantly, we have to look at opportunities around driving efficiencies in our stores. As we look forward though to tomorrow, importantly, the renewal program... Firstly, the physical experience in our stores.
We need to remain relevant to our customers, but to do so, we need to think through our design, which we'll share with you shortly, the initial intent, but it needs to be flexible to ensure that we are able to grow categories of growth, contract categories of contraction, and grow that through the... Flexibility and core principles are the key. Efficiencies in service, we need to also look at opportunities that exist that we're not leveraging today. Many of these include small levels of technology to ensure that we... We're very clear around those opportunities where we do need to improve our service model today in Myer. We've got very clear data and very clear insights around those opportunities they rightly expect in a Myer store today. I mentioned before around the importance of time to ensure that we have a clear and robust...
that provides priorities of our capital deployment. In addition to that, the right level of spend in the right location that shows growth, also market opportunities and leasing. Perhaps I'll explain that in a little more detail. The growth opportunities, this is a scalable program to ensure that this delivers great returns for our shareholders. This is how we're starting, through sensible levels of investment at the right time. We also need to respect the overall growth opportunities, may be large-scale center redevelopments, growth corridors, and many others. We need to be very aware of these, capital investments at the right time in these particular locations is and will remain a key ingredient to how we approach this renewal program, ensuring that we align to lease obligations and also lease renewals, working very closely with Josh, property strategy.
In regards to the merchandise strategy around the five clusters of stores, the renewal program... product is number one, and we will ensure that we design these stores and land these stores to drive... customer-focused and customer-data-led. We will align to the A to E clusters... and design the stores aligned to those clusters. Which will underpin an affordability envelope for each of their stores... investment program is best referred to as a full renewal, a light renewal, and a basic renewal. This will ensure that we deploy the right amount of capital, but it will also... ensure that Myer has a consistent... The overall three-tier investment model is a well-proven model in other global businesses that have led very successful transformation programs... today. Finally, the holistic... investment returns. This is best described through what we refer to as our four Ps.
This framework is intrinsically linked to how... internally, which goes into this program. Firstly, product. We need to ensure that our retail experience best... with visual merchandising and many others. The retail format is designed to enable... in regards to place, obviously the overall store environment has to be conventional with our overall brand and what the Myer brand stands for. This will be end-to-end in regards to a forensic review of all aspects of... are reviewed and brought to a standard in which you would expect. An example of this may be a parents' room, a very important part of a customer experience. In this program is incredibly important. We're very lucky to have a wonderful team of people. We need to best... provide them the tools they need to do their role and to ensure that we give our team...
This will involve a service model review to ensure that we are focused on those areas that matter the most to our customers. To bring operations end-to-end, process remains a big part of this program. We need to drive efficiencies in our stores. There are very simple, low-cost technologies available to us that we're not leveraging today that will provide support on the backend to those areas to overall improve our service experience in Myer. We've put together today a very short fly-through for you just to help bring to life, for want of a better term. The video hopefully demonstrates some of our core principles in our thinking as we think through the store. As you walk into our store at the front of our store, as you walk to our stores, we have a very clear presence of our branding. The simplicity of the format in...
around the certain worlds in beauty, ensuring that the worlds and the product strategy comes to life in the customer experience. The use of light... Also, we will ensure that the equipment is very flexible to ensure that we can again sell the right product at the right time in a very low cost... important throughout the customer journey as we bring this to life. One of the key components of the merchandise... through certain services coming through in a very simplistic... As you walk into clothing and home, we're going to use light in... remains an opportunity in a Myer store today. Very simple, low-cost techniques that are very effective. DNA. The intent of the product, the intent of the branding will emulate in the store environment. We also know that important parts of dwell areas in the store...
An example of this is the fitting rooms, a very well-used and loved area of our stores. We need to... supported by a great service model. In regards to efficiency... checkouts is an opportunity. To support that, we'll be doing digital... Finally, the importance of dwell areas in high-traffic areas such as around escalators... Perhaps in this video as well, you'll see the use of wayfinding... to ensure that it's very clear, purposeful, and useful for our customers. This provides you a short glimpse of the... and our core principles come to life in... Okay, thanks Dean. That gives you a bit of understanding... of how we are thinking about omnichannel network and the plans that we have in place really to maximise the potential at hand.
As you can see, we have a clear roadmap and a lot of this work is well underway. You can see on the property, Josh spoke... and the store renewal, but we have earlier talked about the Myer exclusive brands, which you can have a look at over there. Also, the renewal program, our first proof of concept... marketplace review and the re-platforming of marketplace, really giving us a clear path forward. We also will measure that and... How are we going to do that? Under customers, we have a comprehensive customer satisfaction program, so we will measure the customer feedback through that. We also have our net promoter score. We do plan to grow the numbers of our omnichannel customers. We want to increase the profitable sales and the profit per square metre.
We know that this is an opportunity for us and we can do better. Optimizing the lease portfolio, we talked about an increase in online sales, grow the online penetration, and grow our marketplace sales. That is how we plan to measure... We'll move over to the left and I'll hand back... Thanks, Tony. Thanks all. Good to see lots of questions... property and store renewal very seriously. We've uplifted our capacity and capability in these particular areas. I mentioned before that Josh has clearly come from 15 years at Premier and Dean has done a substantial turnaround in terms of store renewal at Marks and Spencer. The questions, I think we're starting with David, is that right? Yeah, thanks Olivia. Can I just open the... the batting? I'm trying to get my head around what message Dean was trying to give on slide 80 with these store renewals.
I mean, it looks really exciting. I... and I see 15 stores with full renewal. Is that a big cost that's coming our way for these renewals? And can you go into a bit of detail if you... big cost that Myer shareholders have to endure to get the network up to where you want it? Yeah, as well. This gives you an overview of our entire fleet, right? It is in a different way. You've obviously got at the one end, you've got the premium stores or the larger stores, and then we've categorized it all the way down to the smaller store. This just gives you an... We're going to take a very... a very methodical approach to this. We're going to start with one store. We're going to see how that works. We're going to test and learn. What we haven't...
includes in the beauty hall, which includes with supplies when they're fitting out their concessions. There is a different contribution model when you should be thinking about this. Kathy will explain... should think about it. This is going to be sequential, and it is going to take many years for us to roll out what we believe... We will be starting with those stores, which demonstrate whether it's lining up with leases, whether there's an opportunity for expansion, whether it's... opportunity for us, which we've been doing really over the last five years. You should think about it in those ways, David. There are a lot of different factors that contribute to this, but it... plays a really important role. In order to ensure that we can continue to access the customer and that they want to come and spend more...
able to start this store renewal process, we'll learn along the way, we'll see what works, and we'll roll things out progressively. Obviously, it needs to have a return on their invested capital. It is a different approach, and it is going to be scalable. What do we mean by that? The way that we've been thinking about store renewal hasn't been in this same way. Scalable... fleet. That gives you scale when you're manufacturing fixtures... model. It means that the fixtures... don't have under our control today. Flexibility, scalability, it can be rolled out and... customer at the heart of it. We have spent on stores previously, and it's been largely maintenance. We need to make sure that the... investment that we make clearly delivers a... going to bring them back. That's going to have repair...
Talk about how you've done that in the past as well at Marks and Spencer, but I'd be keen for your views and then also Tony. Yeah, sure. Thanks, thanks Olivia, and thanks David for the question. In regard to how we approach the first test in the store, we'll be very honest in our assessment as to what demonstrates commercial return or customer experience, timings in that regard. Very much to Olivia's point, a transformation program of this running up to the property strategy is critical. If I reference previous companies at this scale, really well to ensure that we optimize the overall commercial return. The three-tier approach though does acknowledge the fact it is provided a consistent customer experience, which is an opportunity for what that customer should expect from a Myer in the future. This will ladder up, albeit still within a cost envelope.
will set us up for the long term in the future. The other thing I would say is that to do this well, these programs well, we need to ensure that this is very durable in the sense... stores, that we should see upside in which we do in history, and that's proven. So... ensure that we think about this end to end, because the design of a retail environment, you have to really respect that you're not building in latent costs... previous example in the previous company, that was indeed part of the core and the thinking, that this is not a moment in time, this has to last a very... relevant to our customer. And that is very much at the thinking of what we will do with the approach of this. I'll just add to that, I think one of the...
the mistakes we've made in the past and... program, and we'll have our sandpit store. There will be things in there that we see work that we can roll across the fleet quickly. We're not going to sit and wait, you know, if we see something working in footwear or ladies' accessories, and you know we're confident we can roll it. We've taken a lot of learnings from what we've done in the past, and there's been some great things that we've done, and they've worked. You know, Dean and the team have looked at that, and we've also learned from the things that haven't. I think we're in a good place to move forward. The only other thing I... actually look at efficiencies and productivity here, right? You think about digital. I give example I would give would be the...
You can roll that out across the fleet. That saves man hours, that saves printing. How do you look at things like automatic checkout, for example? There's a bunch of things there that I'd put in the efficiency bucket. How we operate at the same time, and there's clearly benefits there. Thanks, Olivia. I just wanted to make sure that you get... We just didn't want to make sure there was a whole... Ensure that obviously every dollar spent is delivered. And then we'll go back over. G'day guys. Just there were a couple of... investment, if you could maybe give us a sense of that, and then just if you could also talk to, there was a stock availability on the app. Are you going to have to invest heavily in RFID tagging across the store network to facilitate that? Yeah. And just look at team members.
That is one element. We will be investing in team member service to support the rollout of the MEBs from February. Customers, when we had our listening sessions, talked about service in fitting rooms. We are building a model for fitting room service as well. There is all that non-human service, you know, whether it be through the digital ticketing. We are looking at other ways to free up some money that we can reinvest back in to invest there. In terms of RFID, we have got a pilot going on at the moment in Tommy Hilfiger. You know, it takes like 10 minutes to scan a Tommy pad. We can replenish it twice a day. We are also seeing some benefits in shrinking with that. I think that is a theme we are going to test and learn, right? And see what works.
Rather than making a... works, and let's see how we can roll it out as opposed to making decisions upfront without any genuine lived experience. Hi, it's James Tracy from Blue Ocean. Question for Josh. Could you please give a bit more... changed in lease negotiations in the new merged Myer apparel brands versus Myer Evolt? I think the key thing which I kind of spoke to was just the frequency. That's now shortened over time, and we've got a WALE within Myer of eight years. You've got a WALE sitting inside apparel brand portfolio, is that we're now interacting across landlords' entire portfolio, where Myer was never interacting across the entire... that Myer never had before.
We've got a fast turning specialty brand portfolio where we're interacting with those landlords, talking to them about their developments, talking about expansion opportunities that exist, but also reformatting our specialty network and whereas typically what I would say, possibly both the landlord and Myer, the box by itself. Now we're talking about the box, but we're talking here and there. I think, thanks, Josh. Just a question around the store renewals. Do you have any sense of the incremental CapEx for the group that will be invested in that, or is it more a case of capital envelope, so to speak, and how it will be similar to previous years? It's just about how we're allocating the capital and how we're making the decision between maintenance CapEx. Right. Thank you. Thank you. Great. Yes, Sean. Sean Cousins at High Point was sort of highlighted.
Given the prospect of putting some of the apparel brands' products per square metre, do you sort of take a slower pace of refurbishing apparel brands? Because you may not need putting them in, access those sales by putting them in Myer stores. Yeah, like I'll ask Josh, but our approach isn't, our approach is actually to continue to run specialty stores upside. When we invest in the right way, as we've seen at High Point, the customers respond. Same product, same offering, same customer, same staff is strong, and the payback is short term within the 12-month period. We think that this is an opportunity for us. It is not a case that we're closing to open in Myer. That's not our strategy. We believe that there is, as we've mentioned there from a Just Jeans perspective, but Josh, did you want to also comment?
The way that we should all think about it is Apparel Brands as a high-margin, fast-returning business. We've got market-leading investment returns sitting in that portfolio, and it will continue to evolve. Specialty brands and in their portfolios in terms of how they run and operate. Apparel Brands have continued to exit underperforming stores, open new stores, expand and refurbish the slides that I spoke about. Myer brings a new set of opportunities to that, which I know that you raised in terms of the rental structures, but also the opportunity that sits for us to put high-margin parts of our business or ranges into. We've got multiple retailers that sit in Australia today that run both a concession or an in-store model as well. Great thing for Myer is we own both those models. Great.
Maybe for you, Josh, as well, just your WALE at eight years in Myer... landlord contribution, I'd assume landlords might seek some tenure to do that. Should we anticipate eight years, or certainly doesn't continue the decline that it's... a site-by-site basis. When I say that, we're going to be making decisions purely on financial discipline of individual stores and locations. I think that's possibly been one of the key successes within the... we drill into the performance on specific sites and those investments. We're going to do Dean's team and my team in terms of those returns. I think on a case-by-case basis, that might... that we enter into. I think the flexibility that sits within the portfolio will continue for the group as a whole. Yep. Thanks, Tim.
Just interested in terms of how you're thinking about that A to A format in terms of Myer. Because if everything you're saying is successful in the sense of... selling to your apparel business, aren't you going to need smaller stores? I think the point before, you might be able to put beauty in these other areas. I'm just wondering, do you think about shrinking this progressively... smaller Myer, more click and collect, more apparel, more beauty to really drive productivity? Because that feels where you can really make a decent chunk of change, a decent amount of money. Yeah, look, it's a really good, it's a really good question. For example, look at Brisbane, a market that we're currently not in, which we want... the same approach that you would have taken a couple of years ago.
How do we really challenge ourselves about how do we have space that's productive? What is the right, what is the right shape? During this process, as I mentioned... if that, you know, we have the right footprint at the moment, we'll continue to refine in terms of what is right sizing. How much floor space do we actually need in these different locations? I'm not going to speculate today on what that might look like, but this is absolutely... I believe that there is opportunity here. Josh, did you want to... I think this all comes back to data insights. Obviously I've been with the group for three months, but within the first week of getting there, I met with Jeff's team and we said... data insights component so that we have a look at it and we're getting all the customer detail. But...
From Apparel Brands talking about, and I mentioned regional locations and performance of regional locations. Olivia's point is right that we do not have a specific... data and information, and it offers up opportunities for both Myer and Apparel Brands going forward. You look at, you are spot on Ben, around how do you think about different... there that we do not want the space... but there are verticals there we have a right to play, which Warrick outlined a couple there, and that is how we are going to be able to service these different markets. You can offer the... breadth... We should be looking at it through what products are right for the right channel. Just one final quick one for me... marketplaces. You look at Saks on Amazon in the States now. You talk about building Myer One and the brand portfolio to build brand... Very much on Myer.
It's a high-traffic site, and I'll get Warrick and Jeff to mention this... for focusing on making sure that the loyalty program can be as strong as it is, and that myer.com currently has... that. Actually growing our marketplace means that we drive more customers to myer.com and actually... We think that this has untapped. We think that there are clear verticals that we can play in. There are multiple examples of this where we have the core customer today, and there's no reason why we can't start selling the ancillary products, and the loyalty program is a reason... system. Warrick... Jeff, did you have anything else to add there? Yeah, I think the investment in new technology to support the marketplace expansion gives us the option to do that. We think, to Liv's point...
ecosystem, that we absolutely have that opportunity down the track, and that'll be a lot easier to... Taylor Guy from Barrenjoey again. Just going back to my earlier question post the... the next two to three years, and then also just to clarify... or brands into the Myer network is good. Should we still not expect many changes in the apparel store network as well? The way that I would respond to that is that in the world today, a number of specialty businesses, like if you look at Inditex, you look at Next, are growing or they are constantly updating and renewing the portfolio. I think we can expect to see that we're going to have constant change with entering into new stores, and that's because the cycle... time. I think also there's a focus on the individual returns of each and every store.
To turn around and say... will be the performance of those individual stores. That comes back to Myer as well, and that thought and thinking... and making sure that all space is productive. The other... it'll be a distinct... assortment. It's not going to be the full assortment that you would find in Just Jeans... store. It is a particular... allocation of stock that we know that is going to be appealing as opposed to the full complement. It is a complementary approach from that perspective. I think just... better out of that. Through the renewal program, we are looking at different types of fixture and kit to make it more productive. We know that we can fit kids wear on two-thirds of the current space.
We know we can fit watches and jewelry on one-third of the current space and just drive that high, productive space as well. Thanks, Tony. I think Garth, you had another question. Oh, sorry, I just had one more question. Sorry. Just right at the end of the presentation, you talked about where you think that will get to or what the targets are and how that compares to today. We do know that we have to increase it. We've got, you know, really productive space in cosmetics, you know, and some actually have some really good benchmarks internally. If you just take, and we're going to use renewal to help with some of that going forward, but new to Myer. Myer's extremely fortunate to have very good data around space as I've joined the company. We're through space.
In actual fact, a lot of the part of the solution to commercial returns is the use of space in renewal. We have a very clear line of sight to how that needs to be landed, obviously aligned with the overall, Belinda's overall. You've mentioned underperforming stores a few times. Can you give us a sense of what portion of the portfolio is underperforming by your metrics? Not specifically, but I think we split it apart again and just talk about probably Myer and also specialty brands. That's right. Like any business, there are cycles that those stores are going through. I think what I... is that we're hitting into a window of reset and renegotiation on our portfolio, right? We've got 73% of our stores within the next eight years to have those discussions. We're not going to wait eight years, nor...
the space that are potentially coming onto the market and up for renegotiation. And then within specialty brands, when you manage a portfolio of 712 stores, there will be stores that sit within that, or due to rental situations or just the way that the retail has changed, will cause us to exit. I think we've got a long-disciplined approach to making sure that we exit unprofitable stores. All right, terrific. One that's probably more directed towards Myer and the online offer. Are you going to keep that differentiated? And if you're a customer of an apparel brand and rebranded, how do you manage that differentiation? There's two questions here, one about Myer One. And as Jeff has mentioned before, we're rolling out Myer One across apparel brands in early, about the e-commerce assets that we've got, which are currently separate. Yep.
Warwick, Jeff, would you like to talk to that? Yeah, look... so we'll continue to drive that. There is opportunity, which we've outlined, to actually bring our brand products onto... and then the Myer One is the link between the two. And we know that that's a powerful asset that's going to... Really important, though, because you think about e-commerce plays a really important role for the apparel brands. And these are five distinct brands that we need to make sure that we continue to invest in them and have their own brand strategy. So... Myer.com and in-store, as we've talked about, but actually making sure... brands in their own right that have their own DNA, their own characteristics, and in fact should be attracting a very distinct customer. So we think that we can play in... the engine, which is why Myer.com has been successful, that...
The e-commerce capabilities and hopefully revenue in the future from Apparel Brands. And then what we'll do is, over time, look to consolidate the backend and drive efficiencies through that. Charminath Nepala from coming to expiry very soon. Would that be used as a negotiations there? I think you might be referring to Parramatta possibly. Josh, did you to you what we're doing with Myer moving forward? Obviously, this is the first time it's been presented to everybody, and literally the next step, and this is obviously rolling out this discussion with landlords and our landlord partnerships across the board. Expiries provide, I think that that's important, and we've kind of demonstrated that. That will form part of the great thing is that we've got optionality in terms of which store we do first and which landlord we do that first. So exactly which store that will be.
We need some tension in the system to make sure that we get the best return for... All right, I think we might be done on questions for this section. If that's the case, thanks, team. As you exit the stage, we're going to roll straight into the last speaking segment for the next two speakers. Firstly, you'll hear from Darren Wedding. Darren is new in... extend across supply chain, across the group, but also group sourcing. He's going to talk you through the opportunities and some... into the future. Darren comes to us with an extreme number... He's got military, steel manufacturing, consumer goods, retail, third-party logistics experience over 35 years, and we're very happy... chain and sourcing. After Darren, we'll hear from Kathy, some of you have met. Kathy Karabatsas has...
Extensive experience in leadership roles, formerly the CFO at David Jones, and has had senior leadership positions. Recently appointed in the role, I think it's 10 weeks in. We're looking forward to hearing from Kathy as well. Closing Q&A. Thanks, Darren. Thank you, Olivia. Good morning, everybody. My name is Darren Wedding, Chief Supply Chain Officer. Today, I want to take the opportunity to give you a bit of a view of how I've seen things in my first three months with the business. Have in terms of the immediate benefits that exist within both sourcing and supply chain. As I've looked to the sourcing, and for supply chain, Tony and the stores are my primary customer. I've spent a lot of my time, customers, but particularly in the place where most customers don't go, in the backdock.
What we do there for the stores is, of course, we give them very little visibility. Of course, that makes it really difficult for them to plan their labor. When those pallets arrive, all 20 of them or more, they're mixed. What do I mean by that? There might be some menswear, some women's wear, some homeware, some beauty electronics, all mixed together. Before they can even think about taking them out onto the floor or into the saleable department, they have to apply a security tag to that garment. Again, this is all to the floor, slowing that speed of sale. For us, the opportunity in supply chain is to withdraw that, to provide the product when needed. As we redesign and remedy the process for alignment, and Teresa's spoken already about the sourcing opportunity, it comes down to their sourcing. Direct merchant buyer relationships with the factory.
We do have our own team in the past to really drive that type of direct relationship. We see that as an opportunity to really move the sourcing operation forward. Similar products from similar geographies, but we actually share less than 5% of common suppliers. Finally, of course, we want to optimize. In everything we do, we want to make sure that yes, it is customer-centric, we align and we leverage, but it has to... If we then look at the guest... simply want to orientate you there from the plan through the sell within any business cycle. I will be focusing on the buy... supply chain. Let us move and dig into... sourcing. I have had the great opportunity to... meeting our people in Bangladesh, in India, in China, and also seeing our hubs. What I want to orientate you today is the way that...
Indulge me a little. Top is Myer, the bottom is Apparel, as Apparel brands are now specialty brands. Effectively in Myer, the factory, they deal through a sourcing office based in Asia. They're designing things, specifying them, passing them on to someone else who goes and then does all the costing, the sourcing, agrees back with the buyer, they place a purchase order. We then in Myer maintenance factory those goods and we, one in Malaysia. All of our goods arrive there and they undertake some processing before we send them to Australia. Indulge me a little. We receive the cargo, we open the boxes, we count every article and we check them up for the stores.
They send us back a list, we pull those boxes back out of storage, we lay them out and we then split them out store by store, a bit to High Point, a bit to Chadstone, a bit to Melbourne City store. We pack them up again and we consolidate them. Journey in Myer is circa 180 days. That's six months. From the time that we come up with a concept and we set a purchase order to the time we arrive in distribution center. As you'll see from Apparel Brands, that's all done very... doing the store pack, that's done at origin, in the factory. So there's no intermediary hubs. They literally make the goods, they're checked, they're packaged, and they're shipped directly to their DCs, either in Australia... customer. A much more simplistic way.
As we illustrate at the bottom, from 180 days, you're down to 120-150 on average... 90 days. Opportunities for us in terms of the speed with which we do things, which of course means the freshness of the inventory and our investment in working capital. Of course, we're shipping differently. We use different shipping lines... full container loads to make full container loads, get better rates, or even just do our more frequent sailings because we're consolidating our goods together. Great opportunities within the sourcing space. Let's move on and give you a bit more color here... as it talks to the private brand product that we purchase. Meyer through to Apparel Brands and then our other specialty brands, sass & bide, Marcs, and David Lawrence. Then we talk to the amount of value we purchase at...
suppliers, and then finally how many factories that we have. As you can see, we source about AUD 557 million... manufacturer of Apparel within Australia. We have 340 suppliers. As I've already... there's clearly opportunities by working together in terms of our sourcing base. Another example would be that we source a lot of denim from 21 different factories. 340 suppliers, 769 factories. If you do the math, 557, 669... our scale. In fact, when we often go to see our factory manufacturers in Asia, they really like dealing with us. We're a good, you know, a quality... we're a small player. We have great... and really go out there in the marketplace and have a much greater presence within the manufacturing marketplace. Moving forward, we want to talk about where we're going to from today to tomorrow.
From a today point of view, I've already talked about the fact that we do have multiple sourcing models. It's not just as simple as direct in Apparel Brands and indirect in Myer. We see that we can already do that. We just need to upskill our teams, provide them with some additional resource rather quickly. What do we mean by that? We have different payment terms, we have different rebates. That's not unusual when two companies come together. We have an opportunity to clean that going forward. The long lead times and design the product to meet what our customers want, but also make it store ready. Have the hanger already in the garment. Put the security, we want to make sure that, again, at the moment, our merchandise and sourcing functions are attached. We want to make sure they're much more connected.
It's a much more simple... hooked at the hip. Finally, we do have limited agility, and Teresa made the comment that within her brands, they know when the cut days are. They know... to repurpose things, speed them up, or slow them down. We're not quite there within Myer. Great opportunity to learn from the Apparel Brands that's now within our business. If we move forward... I guess this slide best summarizes where we're going to with sourcing... connection from the buyer to the factory. We want to align our sourcing base. We want to simplify our network, and we want to leverage our scale. Finally, we just want to simplify the flow of products. Take all those... touch points out. Touch points mean time, they mean cost. Leveraging our scale.
It's a simple model we see from Apparel Brands that we don't have to go outside and learn... the amount of pace. Again, really fertile ground for us to get after here and really leverage the scale that we have in the marketplace. To supply chain. About, first of all, fixing the basics, then about our interim solution for peak. What we do plan to do in terms of remediating... the new role, I'm sure you see the obvious things. For supply chain, I see a team where they're very motivated, they want to do the right thing, but the shipping team are kind of disconnected from the warehouse. Get the basic standards, the expectations right, so that we understand in the end, Tony and his team want their goods... interaction works more seamlessly.
My team needs to have the basics right so that I don't have individual metrics, they have a team metric that's focused on... about the internal... the interim plan for peak trading and likewise for the NDC remediation. I will talk about... investing in a new warehouse management system, which I'll talk about a bit more later. Let's move forward and let's have another model. Again, I said, indulge me. I need to tell you... different ways of doing the distribution. There's nothing wrong with being different. They're done for different reasons. Again, at the top, Myer, below is Apparel Brands. We've already talked about the offshore piece, but in Australia, Myer runs a regional distribution network, which means that all the goods for Queensland will land in our Brisbane DC directly... goods from Brisbane to Queensland. Same for Perth. For that reason, it means for...
Smaller locations for that relevant geography, we have shorter distances to travel to get to the store. To work on a national model where they consolidate their inventory. So the New Zealand store inventory goes into New Zealand DC, and likewise the Australian inventory goes into... They do not do that store sort in the DC. All they do is simply sort in the DC in Victoria for Victoria country. Now, it is a long distance. Transport is expensive in this marketplace, but they have opted for that model because it allows them to pool their inventory and optimize and minimize the amount of inventory, remain more agile from that regard. The different models... Now, as we bring them together and we have time to look at this, we can optimize what is a very efficient operation to watch and see.
While Myer, there's still things to fix, which of course we'll get to the NDC very shortly. We do have fundamentally different things, differences... In terms of the journey from today to tomorrow, I don't want to go through all the turning points. There's a couple of key ones... Part of that is about fixing the basics... making sure we understand what is that... We want to process them, when do we want to move them to store. We do that. We don't really have the data sets and the information to manage that effectively now. We want to make sure that we set that up appropriately... flow the goods as and when... There'll be a lot of focus on end-to-end connectivity and building capability in that regard. The other... Now, our warehouse management system... is at least 40 years old.
Now, I can attest to the fact there's nothing wrong with being old, but in this case, our WMS is just not fit for purpose. There are just basic functions it does not do. It hampers us. It duplicates costs within our warehouse network. We really need to change. We need a much more contemporary... business to really make this the right supply chain for the future. I'll talk about the DC. I remember arriving and hearing about the rebellious robots. Please allow me to orientate you a little bit to... Far side is a schematic of the distribution center... which is central replenishment and online. The central replenishment online area is where the rebellious robots live. In our business, 70%-80% of our business arrives, and it is already...
shipping container or a local domestic truck, and we put it across a sortation system, and we send 70-80% of our stock out, out it goes to Chadstone, out it goes to Myer City store. That's a simple process. It goes into a central replan online area. All inventory, we want to hold it back. The reason we want to do that is we don't know how the rate of sale is going to work in store. By having a pool of inventory held back, as things sell faster in High Point, we can move some more inventory to them. If it's a bit slower in one other place, we can hold it back. Again, less clearance, less... you get is that once you build this central replenishment capability, you're putting circa 100,000 products...
Online business, where all of a sudden, rather than trying to pick one product from one store and one thing from another and trying to bring that customer's goods in separate parcels, we can... That was the vision of the NDC. To one, do the cross-dock, but primarily to have this new... I'm very convinced that we can still deliver that... within the asset that we've got. I'll talk a little bit more about... that we would improve our cross-docking capabilities... markdowns. We would be able to fulfill 70% of our online orders... we'd have more single parcels. I'm sure many of you have bought online and ordered two or three things and ended up two or three parcels... It costs us a lot less to execute. Let's talk about the interim solution... for this peak.
Basically, in the last, I guess, 12 weeks I've been here, we've done the root cause analysis, which I've talked about, but effectively we've now got the NDC running at a very modest rate. Cross-dock is fine, not quite up to the... but we have got the NDC output working now. We have done a bit of a quick win in the... women's wear and the homewares all mixed together. We've managed to do a quick fix, and we've got down to four sort points... separate to women's wear, separate to homewares, separate to all the other categories that are mixed. Again, it's already an efficiency gain in terms of that back... We're confident with the NDC, so we've commissioned the NDC, and we have it running every day now. We're pushing volume out. We're already commissioning the auto packaging machines... those machines. Again, we've had people manually packing.
We now have auto packing machines doing that work for us. Again, we're starting to drive... remediation that still needs to be done. We can't fix it all before this peak. We don't have the time to do that, and there's too much risk. That is why we've stood up a third-party logistics solution. The deal is that the shed exists. It's in Sydney. It's wrapped. It's shelved. It's being operated by people that previously used it for retail fulfillment... for us. At the moment, we're in deep discussion around the business requirements and the interface... truly ready for peak. Between the two of those processes, we end up taking circa... was a massive pain point for last peak. We had more people in the back of store doing online orders than we had serving the customers out front. We need to change that.
We need to give Tony and his team pressure off the store network for this peak period. The other benefit we get out of issues with late or stopping caught up and knocking the stores in time. All that money that we burnt last peak is not going to be repeated this peak. This will work. This is a low-risk approach that really takes the heat out of what's going to go on for this peak trading period. That is our interim solution. As I said, we actually thought about a couple of different approaches. One, do we literally walk away from the existing technology and bring in different technology, forget about it and move to a third-party solution for the whole thing? Or do we try and remediate it? My judgment...
and what they've given us is a level of confidence at a global level is that they do now have the solutions, they understand our needs, and they're willing to partner with us to build out a solution that will remediate the NDC. To get to the key issues, one, we planned to have our WMS, I don't want to get technical, we built a WMS without the functionality it was supposed to have. We didn't get what we were planning to have. The robotics we put in there, they were fit for purpose, but they were never going to deliver the... We know that we can repurpose some of the robotics, but we need to introduce some new technology to give us the speed and throughput that we need from this site. I mentioned here that our cross-dock is below specification.
We understand what we need to do to remediate that. At the moment, it's not a handbrake to the business, but we know that we need to build it out for the future... and we understand what we need to do here. We're in the final... remediate the site, hopefully over the FY2027... what's coming through FY2027. What are we going to do? We're going to implement a proof of concept. Again... that we're doing the right thing here. We found a secure area within the national distribution... pulled out a new robotic solution for us, a new technology platform, and have that stood up in about a six-month timeframe. By Christmas, we intend to have a proof of concept working, which will give us much more flexibility...
In modeling out our new warehouse management system and working out how do we interface that with all of our existing merch, finance, online fulfillment systems so that post-peak, we can then solution in line with the proof of concept. We join them back together. Just to, I guess, put it in the picture, why is the 3PL so important? An online solution, we can impair that for a period of time because the 3PL will pick up the slack. The business will not be impacted by it. In the FY2026 period, have the NDC back and running to not only original business case, but actually appreciably larger in terms of both its storage and its throughput. Why is that important? Because with two separate warehouses in Victoria, two national distribution centers, we can really fractionalize the benefit across one platform.
Allow me to move forward to the bank of work that we have ahead of us. It is a significant amount of work that we do have, but in true supply chain style, we will be very prudent in the way that we seek to spend dollars to make our investments and look for unlocks in terms of savings as we move along. We also have to make sure we have very good risk management and all over this to make sure that we do these things right. Of all these things, nothing is really new here. Even the robotics that we're looking at, it's all been tried and tested. We've touched and felt it. We can see it.
I guess from my point of view, to give you a level of comfort, they're all things, all of these things are things that I've done before and implemented before successfully. It is a lot to do, but again, they're all things that we can do and we have a... to wrap up how we'll measure when we're successful... when they need it in the format, ready to go out on the floor, ready for sale. Our online customers will be getting improved... sourcing will be simplified, more direct buyer dealing with the... from factory straight through to the final DC. Of course, the aspiration is... benefits and really driving service benefits. I will pass over to Kathy.
Thank you, Darren. Good afternoon, everyone. As the recently appointed Group CFO for the... from the leadership team today about our growth strategy, transfer... to share with you some of my initial observations and my approach to injecting greater financial discipline. As with any transformation, it is important to reset the building... if we are to deliver to our shareholders something Myer has not... consistent shareholder returns. I have spent my time to date studying the key areas where we can act with more discipline financially... that there are five areas of opportunity. I will speak to... leveraging our scale... maintaining and leveraging our strong balance sheet, simplifying our organizational structure, and having discipline and... things, and things every company CFO would say... Myer has not been as successful in doing that in the past.
I would now like to take a moment to talk to Myer Group's scale post-acquisition of Apparel. It is a key aspect of our financial strength and simply has not been capitalized upon. As you can see, delivering over AUD 4 billion in revenue with a gross profit margin of 41%. This is an enormous and enviable sales. Our department stores have generated AUD 3 billion. The profit we make is simply not where it should be in all stakeholder negotiations. To reduce our cost of doing business and enhance our gross profit business, which generates significantly stronger gross margins of 58%. Apparel Brands' team, we have inherited a focus and discipline around profitability. You heard from Darren the opportunity to streamline our sourcing model, learning from Apparel Brands to reduce the number of touch points and not just lower costs, but increase our speed to market.
This is just one example of what we need. We also now have a more diverse revenue profile. As Belinda shared with you earlier, we know today that we under-index in certain customer segments and demographics from one third of our sales now in Myer-owned brands. This is a tremendous focus and opportunity for our leadership team and business. Belinda also shared with you our focus on future investment in Myer-exclusive brands and the beauty category to facilitate gross margin expansion. Streamlining to five Myer-exclusive and design-led is very different to how Myer has managed multiple Myer-exclusive brands previously. For a long time, Myer's financial position was not strong. That was reflected as well as the cost of debt, which was very high on a facility that was largely expanding in a stronger financial position. With a new debt facility...
and for the first time in some time, the flexibility to invest. The strength in our balance sheet provides a platform to deliver on the key initiatives the leadership team have shared with you today. If we now focus on achieving a balance of both cost management and profitable revenue growth. At the moment, the Myer Group runs Aston, Buyard, Marks, and David Lawrence. We have three lots of each function, three finance teams, different people, processes, and policies, and three marketing teams managing brands, and that's just to name a few areas. We need to simplify our efficient, faster, and more streamlined decision-making. This means aligning our core support functions with financial objectives. This sounds simple, but it is a change to how Myer has operated in the past, where duplication created inefficiency and cost, and where key enabling functions like finance, IT businesses were not integrated nor aligned to one.
opportunity today, and the centers of excellence that we have started implementing focus on the key enablers of the business... across all functions to deliver both revenue and cost initiatives as part of our strategic plan. I want to now take... He has a slide that looks like this, which talks to the discipline and process followed in capital allocation decisions... today, which simply did not exist 12 months ago... and targets over time. Today, I can call out... prioritize a strong balance sheet and net cash position. Second, we envisage capital... brands in the near term. What will change, however, is the way we allocate investment... must be met, including RoEC exceeding WAC throughout the cycle. In FY2026, we are forecasting to invest AUD 70-80 million of capital to deliver the key priorities... presented by the leadership team today. Thirdly, excess capital will be returned to...
I would now like to share with you a few... how we will measure financial success. The three key focus areas here from a financial perspective are... first... David Lawrence into the Myer Group. Secondly, how we will look to leverage our greater scale... and thirdly, how we will implement our growth strategies underpinned by our evolving financial framework. Let's start with our specialty... brands. As you know, we are at the initial phases of the integration of the... of synergy benefits from the integration. We reiterate that guidance and have made good progress, though... already delivered a reduction... through the recent announcement of the refinancing of our debt facility with the Commonwealth Bank and the National Australia Bank. We have also made good progress negotiating a number of key material contracts... benefits. This initiative will be ongoing as key contracts expire and are negotiated. That figure...
To see benefits in the 2026 financial year are the expansion of Myer One across the Apparel Brands portfolio, which is set to complete in the first quarter of FY26 with Premier Investments to leverage operating efficiencies and further procurement benefits for the group. Establishing a Marks and David Lawrence. This work has commenced, and we product development and manufacturing will deliver synergies consolidating sea and air freight. As noted by Darren earlier, we are planning of 2026, and are also currently planning additional synergy benefits to be delivered in the to updating you on this progress. As previously announced, we also expect that the integration of Sass & Bide, Marks, and David Lawrence into the Myer Group will deliver AUD 10 million of benefits annually. We anticipate completing this integration in mid-2026.
A lot today about how we will use our enhanced scale to drive operational efficiencies and the role that centers of excellence will play in our future operating model. For me, however, it starts with building a cost mindset culture across the business to... This is fundamental to our transformation and has been lacking historically. For example, today we purchase multiple variations of clothes hangers across products and brands... operational processes and structures to manage the way we work. Us, and in time we will size up all the opportunities we have. % reduction in our cost of doing business is expected to deliver AUD 8.3 million in incremental EBIT... in our enhanced scale as a... negotiation of non-trade procurement terms is critical. Historically... non-trade procurement contracts were renewed or rolled over and... not retended to get the most competitive price in the market.
Going forward, we will take the opportunity to retender contracts and have already... providers, cleaning and maintenance suppliers as just a few examples. To date, like I mentioned earlier, we have delivered AUD 1.8 million in synergy benefits with negotiations ongoing. We're also looking at ways of improving process efficiency... experience from previous transformations I have been involved in delivering. This is a key opportunity for Myer to... transactional processes to remove process waste and facilitate decision-making at pace with the correct checks and balances... today, such as digitizing aspects of our HR, finance, planning, and risk processes. Will be critical to... manage inflationary pressures as it relates to outgoings and rentals. As Josh shared earlier, our network optimization will drive cost efficiency across the group by focusing on... and exiting unprofitable stores. The wealth of experience Josh and his team brings from Premier Investments whose property...
Approach is a significant step change for Myer. To wrap up... metrics, we will look to measure our own progress and success. We are not in a position today... but we want to be transparent... with you regarding the five key metrics we will use to... Our sales CAGR over the FY2019 to 2024 period was 1.8%... in which we operate. Secondly, we are focused on GP margin expansion... throughout the presentation today. What we know is that if you base our calculation on FY2026, every 1% uplift in GP margin is expected to generate approximately AUD 33 million in incremental EBIT... in business. I have spoken a fair bit about this. As we know, a 1% reduction in cost... EBIT. You also heard me talk earlier about our... our capital allocation decision-making at Myer.
Our investments will be disciplined and staged, and required to deliver a RoEC greater than WAC throughout the... And our intention is to maintain a strong balance sheet as we execute the strategy across the next three to five years. Finally, as I mentioned previously in my presentation, I would like to close by saying that as a business and as a leadership team today, we are at the beginning... of 10 weeks, I see tremendous opportunity. I am focused first and foremost on getting the basics right. As I have hopefully shared with you transparently today, there is much... in place. We are in a position to finally let... is clear, and we understand the importance of a disciplined financial framework to deliver... our shareholders. Thank you and... Thanks, Kathy. Thanks, Darren. We're going to now enter our last session of Q&A. EMP Capital.
I had two. The first one on gross profit margin. You called out some MEB opportunities... Minor. Are there any contracts or long-standing relationships at the moment in the Myer business that might make it harder to go... Apparel brands have done, but you know I understand there are quite a few large suppliers of your private label business. Is there anything that we should be... This obviously will take some time as we transition off existing contracts... which is an outsource office which is based in Hong Kong. This is not going to be a hard start and a finish. How are you thinking about it? Yeah, I think the just yeah short answer is no. I mean, we have a number of long-term... It's typically the buying season and at most a year. Yeah. And just on costs...
On a pre-ISB basis, because rents... AUD 1 billion for the last 10 years, which is a pretty impressive result in an inflationary environment. I am just trying to understand whether going forward, there is... Feels like it has been cut pretty hard today, but you know that is just a sort of view on looking at the numbers over the last 10 years. Sorry to Kathy on this, because we have called out an increased cost of doing business, obviously, in the heart, but Kathy can talk more broadly about how... In the past, there has potentially been, you know, costs have been cut, but they have been cut in the wrong places, and there is a reinvestment. When you bring three businesses together, you cannot just add it all together and say that is my new base. The focus on streamlining is going to be really critical and important...
Inflationary impacts. We've seen, as we mentioned on Friday, significant... As it relates to rental increases from an inflationary perspective, we have to have the discipline and the mindset correct so that we can manage that through the cycles that, you know, going forward... We'll look back through the business into some key initiatives that we've shared with you today, but there are many more as we go into... Great, thank you. Thanks. Sorry, I'm chewing up. Sorry, Garth. Go for it. I just wanted to ask, plan to still break out Myer performance versus Apparel Brands? Or will you be disclosing with the pre-ASB reconciliation, or are you going to move away from that going forward? Whether we will be doing segment reporting or not from a disclosure perspective, we're currently working through that. The Myer business reports post-ASB today...
Calc at the back of the slides, as you know. At this point in time, it'll be post-ASB. Okay. And then you called out a benefit from the Sass & Bide road into the rest of the business. You said mid-2026. Was that calendar or financial year? Financial. Thank you. Thanks, Garth. Just if you look on a like-for-like, apples-apples basis with your apparel or with your MEPS business versus your apparel brands, because obviously it's difficult when you've got concessions and electronics and toys, etc. in there. What's the delta? Like if we look like-for-like today, is it 10 points... When you're paying the Li & Fungs, etc., all this money. Like is it 5, is it 10, is it 15 points? It feels like it's probably some... to how we're thinking about it.
Yeah, I think we probably haven't got into actually the sourcing piece yet in terms of those... I guess a tin tax point of view. We've just spent some time seeing the... There. What we see is opportunities to move to an open book costing model with... Compare what the Apparel Brands do and my teams are doing in terms of what are they sourcing, how much are they sourcing, what prices are they looking at so that we can do some... Be another one. We're not quite there yet. The easy win for us, though, is those hubs that we have in Asia. That's an easy win for us to go up. Literally going, that's not going to exist in the future. You need to help us accelerate that closure and move that cost out of the business.
I'm not ready to talk about the margin on the product, but certainly there are... in the short term. When you say it takes a long time, what does that mean? Because like if we look back at Kmart and Target back in the day when Guide to split from Launer and what was done at Premier, which I envisaged would make it easier. If you're only going on 12-month contracts, I would have thought you can probably push pretty aggressively to realize that. Yeah. For us. We want to also benefit from scale. It's not a simple situation where we're... Apparel Brands have doing it. In fact, our team have been doing it for some time in home as well. We know where we need to get to. It's just a case of us working out what is the...
Cities in the outsourcing model that we currently have. Yes, you're right. We have a playbook. There is a plan. It's just going to... start in, you know, we've only got 5% overlapping factories at the moment, but that's clearly where we'll start. We're pretty clear on where we're going to start. We're keen to start it as quickly as we can. I might just add to that, Ben, that we've said mid-second half of 2026 is when we'll have... but we've also got sea and air freight contracts that have to come up for... on both sides. We renegotiate once on our sea freight. That will deliver a benefit. Thanks. I just want... sorry. I just want...
If you've got a dollar to put into an apparel brand store, given the support you get from landlords and the margin, it's going to materially outweigh from a return standpoint doing a refurb for a 10, 15, 20,000 sq m box that's unproven. Just interested in how you... Weighing that up from a capital allocation standpoint. I think I mentioned that we would be prioritizing... And yes, you're right. A payback on an apparel brand store is far shorter than a payback on what would be a box in the Myer space. But we... And they have to stand up against the internal benchmarks that we have from a RoEC perspective. In the past, it was not that way. In the past, it was we want to invest... We have some structure on how we're going to do that capital allocation. We've got...
Capital, that's what we call replacement capital. Then we have growth capital. A lot of these stores will... Hey, Sean Cousins, yes. Just a question regarding the NDC. Technology, such that that was the issue in terms of, or was it that the provider did not provide you what you asked for? I am asking with a reference around insurance. Can you go back to the provider to, you know, ultimately if they have... To answer that, I think there was a lack of specificity on both sides in terms of what we expected out of the deal. I think we have both a little bit of blame here. From that point, that prejudice. I guess what we found is that the incumbent technology... Record, you know, they are trying to grow a global business. They understand what we are trying to do. We have probably been...
Brought, I guess with Olivia coming on board, brought a level of focus to the NDC that was around the risk and the mitigation and then work prudently going forward. I think to answer your question, I think it's a bit on both sides, actually. Service agreement that you've got with them, 12 months is sort of the NDC, right? Is that a requirement to sort of exit, sort of take things in-house without having the NDC optimized? I'm just curious if those two things are linked. Within that, you don't have any other assets in New Zealand. Why would—so New Zealand's probably a one model. I mean, there's more than one way to skin a cat, let's say. I mean, we don't actually have to have for stores in New Zealand from Australia.
We're actually from a New Zealand point of view, exploring all the models... How they serve the customers both online and in-store, and then assess what's that best model, again, in line with what we're observing as a TSA... With Josh about the property portfolio and how we work on that. From an Australian point of view, the NDC is an elegant unlock to bring apparel... But it would mean going and setting up another approach and another set, because in the end... The systems integration, and we talked about loyalty, Myer One... Both from a physical bricks and mortar, but also systemically, you know, same order orchestration tool... Having the NDC is the most elegant way of bringing the apparel brands business in.
The only thing I would add to that, so I absolutely agree from a simplicity perspective, and Kathy mentioned that before in terms of the operating model around our TSA, and we can extend that as required, but it's one of our synergies. We see there's opportunity and we do want to make sure that we can optimize the full supply chain, and that's obviously part of it. Yeah. Thank you. On the AUD 30 million of synergies that you've reaffirmed today, previously you've in terms of the describe it in that way, and what would you describe in terms of years? What, how should we... Question. What I would say is Myer online... On track to deliver that in the first quarter of 2026. We've already... This together, like I mentioned, with payment partners and distribution, transport distribution.
Ultimately, it would be by the end of next year, financial year, those synergies should be... And just further to that, how do we measure the dollar value of synergies realized when there's a lot of moving parts in terms of the cycle? Mining some benefit, but when you talk about sales or revenue synergies and gross margin synergies, how do we distinguish that as investors and shareholders? We use FY2024. We would be reporting back to you every six months on... David. How do I ask this? I'm trying to get it out, get the right words without... being rude, because it's not rude to you or your team. Go for it. Perfect from the strategy from Myer. I can't speak for others, but I think the strategy is really sound. Calling, absolutely dreadful, is to the state that you guys are currently in.
That's the message that I've taken away. It appears to me that the strategy is now sound, as you've got a lot on, but you've got to get your execution. What about the team underneath the team? Have you got the capability? It's just not that's substandard, the position that you're in. I'm surprised that you got 85% customer satisfaction given the state of the stores, given where you're at. How can you... Execution right here. Spot on. Absolutely. How do you do it then? How can you... Yeah, let me break it down. And I think it's a really good challenge. With your top leadership team. There's no doubt about that. That has taken some time. You can see the team here. You've had an opportunity here from them today. Hopefully you get a sense of...
Old and new, but you have to start with your top leadership team. You have to have people that are up for the challenge, that have frankly been in high pressure situations. It is about making sure that you have that capability and capacity at that next level down. The senior leadership group, who are the direct reports of each of these individuals that you've heard from today? It is that team that are really critical, very critical in creating business, having that second circle that are committed to it on the ground, not only the top leadership team, but that next level down. Making sure that we have the right people in roles. We've been doing that over the last six months. You've seen some of them today. You've heard from Warrick around e-commerce and the deep expertise he has in that space.
He is leading the change that is required there. You have heard from Dean, who has over 30 years' experience in store renewal, working for some of the biggest. We are not finished on that journey yet. We have been clear that we are needing to invest and we have. We are investing ahead of execution. That next layer down, we are on a journey there. It is making sure that we have capability and the right skill sets to deliver on it. That is one thing. Skills and capability. Second for me though is actually having a, and then being very, very clear on what it takes over the medium to longer term from a three- to five-year view about where are we starting, what is the lever, what are the levers that we need to pull.
Where are we going to hunt first and what are we going to execute on? You can, there is a slide. In FY26, not what you are seeing in three and five years' time. Let us break it down so that you can see next year, FY26, what are we going to deliver on? What is the, clearly capability and then being clear and diagnostic what the issue is, which I think we have, and then being clear around where we are going, but what are the next steps? It is going to come. What are those projects and programs which are not a priority? Having honest conversations about what we can absolutely take on in sequence and then spending within our means. The other piece is making sure we do have dedicated resources that understand, and importantly, a risk assessment across the entire piece so that we understand program.
What do we need to watch out for? What are the things that can go wrong? Because not everything is going to go right. There are going to be... Sit with each of these programs of work. From my perspective, and I think from the team's perspective and the board, we're very clear about where we need to start and where it's important for us to invest from the get-go. One of the most... They can, but what I would say with that is, and it is 40 years old, but Myer has continued to operate for the last 40 years. What I would say in the last trading period, we've seen a significant growth in online. It's up 9% for the first 16 weeks of the, I know that's short term, but it's first 16 weeks.
We are seeing growth. We are delivering. Yes, we have been very transparent. You might—transparent view, right? Of the situation. We are going to tell you as it is. This is not a case where we should—it is. My preference, I would prefer to have that conversation in the room. I do not want you to accidentally find out, as you potentially did in September, that there was a problem with the NDC. Here it is. Here is a problem. This is what we know. We are going to be clear with you and we are going to go and fix it. On the WMS, there is a pathway forward. You have not met him today. Mark is sitting here in the front row. Wave, Mark. Mark Medwell. He is a new CTO. Again, veteran, 10 years at Cotton On. He has been in many other large organizations beforehand.
We're in really, you know... WMS, we'll work through that. I wouldn't see that as a red flag. Yes, one of the downsides of being transparent is that you... If I could just add to that, David, the way we're going to prioritize this capital is going to be different to how it was before. I've come in and I've been in 10 weeks and... There, when we've got a WMS... Based on return for growth, prioritization based on break fix needs for the business for replacement CapEx. Pleasure, David. The FY2024 pro forma EBIT margin of 3.7%. When do you really... Sustainable EBIT margin over the next two or three years? Thanks for that question. I don't think we're...
I can't give you a target today, but what I can say to you is a 1% increase in our GP margin is 30... incremental to the bottom line. That's the opportunity. That's what this strategy will deliver. David, I... Can I just talk about that quickly? You mentioned that you're concerned about our customer service. Look, the feedback we get from... Up alongs, we've done focus groups, we've talked a lot to our customers, so we know where their concerns are. One of the issues that we get back... when they are served. That just goes to the fact that. For those of you that have spent time in stores, I think you can see the genuine passion and care that you get from the Myer team. The...
That mix of passion and understanding the business and wanting to deliver for our customers, I think... If you go to a store huddle before it opens, as I have many times with Jimmy, you hear what they're talking about and it's always three things. Firstly, they talk about shrinkage and making sure how we're on our shrinkage. They talk about how many Myer One customers they each need to be able to bring on and engage. Top of mind. We know we can do better. We do. I do think that the team have done a really good job over the last couple of years to improve it. Yes, the service model isn't necessarily right. I think Dean and Tony have already talked to you about that. It is definitely one of our strengths in store. Sorry for cutting you off.
Or slide 112, the CODBS, a percentage of sales. Is that... You cannot sit and measure it and work out what comes down to 19% or something. No, it is not Cisco. Okay. It is just... Lastly, just the cost headwind in first half 2025. What will that be in second half 2025 and FY2026? I guess what Darren shared with you today is there is no more trap stock. Choose to then for your model. How we are setting that. The other component part, obviously, from an NDC perspective was actually increased labor costs because we are relying on in-store. Right? That was the additional cost that we have talked about in the second half, but as Kathy and Darren have said... In the second half. However, I should probably add, not in the GP... In our cost of doing business part as it relates to the NDC. Yeah.
Okay. Any other questions? Come on, David. All right. We might bring it to a close then. Thank you for being such an attentive audience. Slide, that would be great. Hopefully what you've heard from us, it is a transition year. We're at the start of a journey. It's three to five years. We're at the beginning. We're aligned. The team have talked you through their component parts of the strategy. It's very clear that we have a lot to do. If I was to say, what should the takeouts be? Hopefully this is the slide that I guess sums it up, is that yes, we are clear on what our priorities are. It's a three to five year journey. We're also very clear on where we have started and where we will start.
What we want to use this for is a way for us to talk to our shareholders about these are the areas that we're focusing on. We're focusing on them because in some cases, it's an opportunity to bring value forward and an important opportunity for us to realize the synergies for our power brands. This is how, when we come back at our half year and our full year, we'll continue to talk about how we're progressing. What is our, and how are we performing from a financial perspective? Hopefully that will sum up commentary about the full agenda. It is a full agenda. It is not without dedication that we will continue to deliver on this transformational journey. Our philosophy is very much that all our decisions are going to be underpinned by data.
We are going to be very prudent about the way that we invest in our business. We do believe, we genuinely believe that Myer can grow into the retail powerhouse. It will take energy. It will take the right people. Ultimately, it is about being proud of the fact that we've now got the full team on board. We know we have a journey ahead and making sure that we keep you informed along the way. I appreciate the questions, the challenge, and the opportunity for us to hopefully shed a little bit of light around what the next three to five years looks like. Thank you everyone for attending.