Good morning. Welcome everyone to Vivara's third quarter 2021 Earnings Conference Call. We would like to inform you that this event is being recorded and simultaneously translated, and all participants will be in a listen-only mode during the company's presentation. Also, the slide deck of this presentation is available on the platform, and the slide selection is controlled by the users. After the company's remarks, there will be a question- and- answer session. Questions received via webcast will be answered later by the IR team. Now, I would like to turn the floor over to Mr. Paulo Kruglensky, CEO of the company, who will begin the presentation. Mr. Kruglensky, you have the floor.
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us this morning for our third quarter 2021 earnings conference call. As usual, joining me today are Otavio Lyra, CFO and IRO, and Melina Rodrigues, our IR head.
The third quarter results have a special meaning to us. We are closing yet another cycle of Vivara's earnings releases as a publicly traded company. For yet another quarter, we have seen our competitive edge make a difference and be a pillar for growth. After 24 months after our IPO, we have opened over 60 stores protecting our margins even before the challenge of neutralizing the effect in the increased costs of gold and silver, and we continue gaining market share. Now, let's go to slide number two of the presentation. Here, we can see Vivara's performance highlights. BRL 410 million in gross sales, up 33% vis-à-vis 2019, and up 22.7% of same-store sales compared to the third quarter of 2019.
A 40% increase in gross profit, an EBITDA of BRL 67 million, and net income of BRL 86 million, with very healthy margins of profitability. Now, moving on to slide three. As a result of such performance, we have registered an impressive gain in market share. In September, we have achieved 15.3% market share, reinforcing our absolute leadership in the market. We have gained three percentage points of market share since September last year. It's great to see that Vivara is the leader and is increasing the difference and the space to the second and third players of the market. On slide four, you can see a bit of our prospects for organic expansion next year. In 2022, we will accelerate the pace, opening 50-60 new stores.
In the short- term, we are going to prioritize the expansion of Life. This is the following opportunity scenario for Life. We see a good acceptance of the new format of Life stores, an accelerated maturation and cannibalization that is under control. It's important to emphasize that we'll not stop expanding Vivara in the medium- and long- terms, but we wanna prioritize this channel that is doing really well. We're gonna have from 35-40 Life standalone stores and 15-20 Vivara stores. We are very confident about our potential of expanding our footprint in stores in smaller towns and malls in smaller towns, keeping attractive return levels. Now, moving on to slide number five. Here, you can see the empowerment project of the Life brand, which is gaining good traction.
Our strategic fronts that we have established to develop the Life brand and structure it as an independent channel has been showing good results. We have established four core values for the brand. This is a product for all. It is collectible, giftable, and with lifestyle. In the last quarter, we created over 70 new SKUs with new categories and commercial products, six new models of bracelets, and the collections that are already a great success. Our stores now create a more seamless buying journey with 360-degree counters and better display of the products. We have also enhanced the manufacturing of our products at the plant, moving processes in-house and optimizing internal production processes. In-store expansion, we have prioritized higher returns, going for the best square footage in the country. We have also created a recurring customer recognition program called Life Lovers.
These customers already account for 14% of the active customer base of our company with a buying recurrence of 3.2x a year. This is a channel that is growing, and it will become even more relevant for us in the future, and we're very happy about the results we got there. On slide number six, you can see a bit more about Life and the main highlights of our stores. We have 19 stores that were recently added to our park over 1,000 square meters, and in the third quarter of 2021, the stores of the Life brand were responsible for 3.5% of the physical store revenue. On slide number seven, you can see a brief overview of the digital journey at Vivara.
In the pre-pandemic scenario, the buying journey was completely separated and fragmented. There was no stock integration. There was a low level of customer clustering. The buying journey was more focused on transaction and not on experience, and there was just a little segmentation in our product registry. Now, in the last two years, with the evolution of our initiatives, we have been able to close the gaps of operations. We accelerated digital transformation, and we also focused on more immediate projects. We overcame the goals we wanted. The program, Joias em Casa, that now with all of our stores open, still represents 35% of our digital sales. It still has a great representativeness in our evolution. This participation also reflects the strong relationship of, and the deepening of the clustering of customer information in our sales app with a more personalized service.
We're now able to offer the right product to the right customer, and that was a major evolution we saw in our last quarter. We also started unifying our buying journeys, making our distribution center stock available to all stores. In the third quarter of 2021, we had over 400,000 customers visiting our stores or our website. We have created dedicated pages that mixes the content of product and customer experience. We have created the Blog Vivara, and we also started campaigns in new platforms like Pinterest and TikTok, for example. Now, looking ahead, we're going to deepen more and more our customer segmentation. We're going to improve the personalization of the experience in order to get more customer loyalty. We'll consolidate our digital media strategy, content and product, reducing our dependence on paid media.
We wanna focus on experience and content rather than working with conversion media. Our new digital platform aims to bring more agility and flexibility to UX and conversion projects, and we're going to strengthen more and more our omni-channel strategy that will enable us to explore new possibilities. On slide number eight, you can see some numbers as examples of the recent evolution we witnessed. Digital sales accounted for 14.6% of the total sales of the quarter, double the pre-pandemic levels. A 160% growth in digital sales and 34% growth in the number of unique users. Now, I will close my participation in this earnings conference call saying that I'm very happy with our digital evolution and the evolution of our store parks with great expansion. Now, I'd like to turn the floor over to Otavio.
Otavio, you have the floor.
Good morning, everyone. It's great to be with you yet again for another earnings conference call. We have had solid results in the third quarter of 2021. I will start on slide number nine, telling you about the store expansion. This quarter, we opened 13 points of sales, six Vivara stores and five Life stores, as well as two kiosks, in a total of 275 points of sales, 227 Vivara stores and 19 Life stores as well as 29 kiosks. In October, we have already gone to 278 points of sales, with five new store openings and two closures of kiosks in Flamboyant and ABC Mall. Of the five openings, we had four Life stores and one kiosk.
Year-to-date, we have had 29 stores opened, 19 Vivara stores and six Life stores and four kiosks. Now, if we add the October numbers, we have another five points of sales opened, and in November, another three, two Life stores and 1 Vivara stores. We are on the right track to achieve our goals, which was to close the year with 40-50 points of sales being opened. I think our status is quite well to achieve our goal by the end of the year. Now, moving on to slide 10, you can see for the details about our revenue growth. We had BRL 410 million in gross revenue, net of returns in the third quarter, 33.3% up against the same quarter of 2020, and 33% against the same quarter in 2019.
Our net revenue grew 39% against 2020 and 40.3% against 2019, with a net revenue of BRL 337 million. It's important to say that this has happened because of some of the effects I'll mention now. We had a great contribution in increased activities of our plant and revenue deductions. We got a balance of BRL 73.4 million. As we advance our transactions between the two subsidiaries of Vivara S.A., we increase the benefit of the sales, the tax benefit, and the representativeness of such tax benefit at our company. The presumed credit line has been gaining more relevance, especially compared to 2019, but also compared to the third quarter of 2020, which is benefiting the deduction line.
That's why we see this difference between the net revenue and gross revenue growths. This will also impact other lines of our results, the line of taxes and social contribution. I'll give you further details about that later on. It's worth mentioning that since our last quarter, our plant activities have gained speed. We added headcount at the Life line and also at the Vivara line. The monthly production in kilograms has achieved levels that are three times as high, the levels we were used to complete this internalization movement that we're going through and also to add inventory at this moment, which is quite favorable for us, and we wanna make the most of our competitive edge complementing our product lines. We are a bit comfortable there for our coming quarters, especially until mid-2022.
At different intensities, the plant will continue performing at higher levels than previous years, and this will continue to benefit some specific lines of our results. Now it's important to mention that year-to-date numbers, we have achieved BRL 1.141 billion in the first nine months of the year, growing almost 54% against 2020 and almost 18% against 2019. Net revenue of BRL 916 million, a 56% growth against 2020 and 20% growth against 2019. Very robust numbers compared to other players in the market. We work in, we operate in the retail segment, and we are outperforming slightly the rest of the segment for the high income audience. Now, I skipped a slide.
We had 45.3% of physical stores compared to the third quarter of 2020 and year-to-date, 48.8% in physical stores plus e-commerce or 70.4% if we look only at physical stores. Okay, moving on to slide number 11, you'll see the evolution of our sales mix at the company. We can see a great stability compared to last year. There hasn't been any major changes. We see changes compared to 2020 when it comes to the different channels of physical and online channel. Life is gaining representation in the physical channel. The jewels are still expanding their participation in the online channel, and our balance is therefore a bit better compared to the third quarter of 2020.
Now, as compared to 2019, the e-commerce has brought us a better balance for the company. With time, we saw great growth for the jewel category, with a considerable expansion of 4.4 points against the same quarter of 2019, which is a great highlight of the quarter. Now, moving on to slide 12. You can see some numbers of our physical or brick-and-mortar stores. It's interesting to see these numbers, to see not only the evolution in the number of stores because of the replacement we've been making, but also a growth in sales area. We have achieved 20,600 sq m in Vivara sales area. A 10% growth compared to 2020 and 23% growth compared to 2019. For Life, BRL 12 million in revenue. This is finally getting a bit more representativeness.
Of course, this is still small compared to Vivara, but way above what we achieved in other quarters in previous years. That was BRL 3.5 million and BRL 1.7 million in the third quarter of 2020 and the third quarter of 2019 respectively. Of course, the growth has been accelerated. Kiosks, it's worth mentioning that we had BRL 10 million in sales with 29 kiosks. The number has decreased in recent years. We had a decrease of 16 points of sales compared to 2020 and 25 points of sales compared to 2019. This is a strategy we already shared with you in an email to reduce the number of kiosks and focus on the profitability of the channel. Jewels has been gaining market share over two points against the third quarter of 2020. Watches are stable.
Actually, Jewel lost 2.5 points of share and Life expanded. This is an important message. Life is gaining representativeness in this channel. Once again, this has been influenced by the opening of the stores that we have done. On the other hand, if we move on to slide number 13, we see the event that I have already mentioned on the mix of digital sales. We can see the opposite happening here. Jewels have an accelerated growth with 2.2 percentage points expansion of share against 2020 and against 2019, a complete transformation that we implemented in recent years. This was of course, accelerated by the pandemic and the relevance of the digital channel, which was also transformed with the Joias em Ação program, which has been shown to be quite resilient in recent quarters.
This has been able to add this mix of jewels and 40% higher ticket amounts, which was really important for the digital growth that we see. The jewel category has reached 50.3% of our sales mix in digital and has had a 21.4 percentage point growth compared to the same quarter of 2019. This is the magnitude of the transformation, which was really significant for the channel, both in terms of the growth in tickets and also the representativeness of the channel. A highlight for the Joias em Ação project was the resilience of the program, its format and shape and representativeness in recent quarters, which has remained quite stable around 35%-37% of the digital sales this quarter. More precisely, 37.2% share in the digital sales.
The omni-channel ship from store deliveries accounted for almost 10% of the digital sales in the quarter, which is something that adds convenience to our customers. This program reached BRL 22.8 million in revenue in the third quarter of 2021, and in the mix of sales, 68% was made up by the jewel category. You see the size of the contribution and how relevant it has remained in recent quarters. Now moving on to slide 14. Here you can see further details of the trends in our gross profit, BRL 228 million gross profit in the quarter with 67.7% gross margins, a 2 percentage point pressure on the margin compared to the same period of 2020 and a stability compared to 2019. Only 0.1 percentage point below 2019.
Now against 2020, we have lost 1.3 percentage points in product margin, inputs, raw materials and products because of a temporal gap in price adjustments and price transfers done in the third quarter of 2020 and not on the second quarter of 2020 as we usually do because of the seasonality of our business. We had a few stores. The stores were still closed in the second quarter of 2020, and that's why we postponed the price adjustment which benefited the margins we saw in the third quarter at the expense of the margins of the second quarter of 2020. Now if we compare and we go back to the more normal seasonality in 2021, this can explain part of the SG&A pressure that we see.
Now, the other part of this temporary pressure on our margins comes from the added expenses in our plan to support the production growth that we have achieved in the third quarter and that we will continue adding up until mid-2022 as I mentioned in the beginning. BRL 11.2 million in expenses and expressive growth against what we saw a year ago. This is benefited by the MP that benefited us throughout 2020. All the additional factory expenses we had pressured our results in 0.8% of margins, especially because of the personnel that was added to our headcount. This increase in production has already been reflected in sales and in this heated environment in the short- term, and we expect an even better benefit from the stock recomposition that we have been making.
We are going to dilute the factory expenses that will eliminate the pressure we see in the short- term. Year-to-date, as usual, the main goal, in spite of the seasonality of the business and the differences between gross profit and net revenue in the seasonality of the second and fourth quarters because of our sales mix and launch of new collections, we've been able to achieve a better stability. We have 0.8% pressure against the same quarter of 2020, and 1.5% gain in margins compared to 2019. Now on slide 15, you can see a bit more detail of our selling expenses.
Here we have a great operational leverage that has contributed with 2.1 percentage points of added margin against 2019 or 1.6 percentage points against the same period in 2020. We had selling expenses grew 31.6%, representing 104 million BRL in the third quarter of 2021. We see a good dilution of our personnel expenses as well as lease and rent and the freight line. In the last two years, we have performed a significant migration to outside the usual concentration with the mall. We went from 60% in 2019 to around 40.1% in mid-2021. This has created more convenience and speed of delivery in some regions of the country, and above all, it improved our unit economics in the last two years.
We go against what we see in other companies with a greater representativeness of the straight line, which in our case decreased throughout time. Last year, the digital channel was a bit more relevant, so there was a bit more pressure. Now that things are going back to normal, it's losing representativeness, and we see this, the centralization of our freights, which was mostly done by the mail, the post office in the past. Now on slide 16, you can see greater detail about general and administrative expenses. You can see a bit more detail here, so you are aware of the evolution we expect for this line. We see strong growth compared to 2019 and also compared to 2020.
In the last two years, we went to BRL 40.3 million in administrative expenses, and that is a 2.2% profitability loss, now accounting for 11.9% of the revenue from 8.8% in the third quarter of 2019. We were benefited from the MP, and against 2019 we have an INSS credit that benefited the balance of the third quarter of 2019. Of the 21.1 million that you can see there in the chart, and also BRL 3.3 million that were from reclassifications of the first quarter of 2019 for selling expenses in the quarter. This is a recurring balance. If we look at the nine months of the year, this is not gonna make a difference. I'm sorry.
What I mean is that it won't have an effect on the line, but this has an effect on the quarter and the size of the expenses we see. If we consider these two effects, it's 5.3% up against the BRL 21 million that we see here. Now, the rest, if we normalize the evolution, we see a significant growth in this line of expenses to sustain businesses because of our increased payroll and also third-party services increase to support all of our online marketing campaigns and all the technology that we have been evolving at the company. There's also a greater participation of PLR provisions compared to previous quarters, either because the company grew or because the results evolved a lot, especially compared to 2020. Now moving on to slide number 17.
As a consequence of all of the factors we mentioned, there were almost BRL 6 million-BRL 7 million EBITDA in the period, representing 19.8% of the revenue, a 24% growth against the same quarter of 2019 or 34% against the same quarter of 2020. Year- to- date, BRL 165.8 million of operating results. The adjusted EBITDA includes the exclusion of IFRS 16, so rents. Going back to the SG&A. The 165 million represented 18.1% of the revenue, up 8.2% compared to 2019, and 110% against 2020, because of obvious reasons, the impact of the pandemic and the beginning of 2020.
Now on the next slide, you can see for the details of our net profit on slide number 18. A highlight to the tax line that benefited the results of this quarter in BRL 25.3 million, quite different from the trend we were seeing in the last two years for the same quarter that was a bit below BRL 1 million, which is still positive, but because of the factory levels, the production levels. Now there are one major effect we have excluded from non-recurring, almost 19 million in the quarter. Monetary correction of tax credit, PIS, COFINS, and ICMS that we recognized in 2019. We're bringing this back to the results, and this is benefiting the results in BRL 19 million. BRL 18.9 million, to be more precise.
Another effect, as I mentioned in another slide, is the increase in factory activities. Our factory operations increase. There's been an increase between the subsidiaries, and our income has increased. The income pays a tax of 15%, and when consolidating both companies in Vivara S.A., we get credit at 34%. The higher the activity, the better the benefit, the greater the benefit. This benefit disappears as the activities stop being as intense to compose the additional inventory that we want. We have a growth of about BRL 7 million, which would give us a balance that is very similar to what we got in previous quarters.
We have considered this a recurring effect because the plant accelerates and slows down every year because of the seasonality, and we can see the presence or absence of the benefit in our business, which is a very recurring effect in our business. Not at this same intensity, but this has been seen in all of our operational years. Now on slide number 19, you can see the investments of the company. Vivara has never invested this much in its operations. Opening new stores in the quarter, almost BRL 80 million invested, renovations, almost BRL 2 million, factory, BRL 2 million, and IT systems, BRL 3.5 million. Now, if we compare to the same quarter of 2020, in which we were still slowing down investments or resuming investments after a halt in the second quarter because of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Year- to- date, BRL 58.2 million in investments, 38.7 in new stores, almost BRL 4 million in renovations, and then factories and systems, more, with a greater representation than previous years. The expectation is that we close the year with over BRL 100 million in investments, considering the stores to be opened, most of them life stores. We'll close the year with 40-50 new points of sales, with some additional investments in renovations and factory as well. Now slide 20, you'll see our net debt and net cash of the company. Gross debt closed September with 290 million BRL, which is quite stable.
Ever since the first quarter of the year, the adjustments we saw from December 2020 to September 2019, a BRL 100 million reduction was the adjustment in the size of the debt that we did in the first quarter, February and March. Because of the additional raise that we did in the end of last year to make the most of the IOF benefit that was being given because of the effect of the pandemic on the different companies. We closed the quarter with BRL 713 million of cash, free cash flow of BRL 435 million. Now we're working with a cash flow that is closer to BRL 600 million than BRL 700 million, which is very close to the level that we will land at the end of the year.
Now on slide 21, you can see the effect of all that on the operational cash flow of the company. BRL 71 million in cash generation of BRL 45.4 million of free cash flow. It's important to mention the benefits of the operations we've been doing. Almost BRL 35 million of positive effect on the quarter or BRL 102 million year- to- date. As a reminder of the history of these transactions, we were already predicting this increase in inventory levels with this effort that accumulates BRL 200 million from the end of last year to September. This was an important strategy to alleviate our cash consumption.
At a net cost of zero, the spreads charged at these operations are above the cost of these operations for Vivara, so it makes perfect sense, and this extends our deadlines in the purchase of gold and silver, which are our main inputs, and this has helped us to normalize the trend of operational cash flow in the third quarter and year-to-date. Year-to-date, BRL 127.2 million after BRL 52.8 million in investments. That's all, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you once again for joining us this morning. We have just started the most important season of the year for our company and for the whole retail segment. We have started the months of November and December.
This is a very important quarter for us, accounting for about 35% of the company's revenue historically and over 40% of the income. In the pandemic year, this is not going to be well-balanced because of the effects we had in the months of March and April that impacted the results of the second quarter. Now we have started our sales convention. This has been a very exciting event. All of our salespeople from all over the country and the Vivara team in São Paulo is gathering to share our results, share our values, product launches, and to prepare for this very important season for Vivara. We are all very excited and very well prepared to start the month of November with the Black Friday event that will start soon with activities here at our company.
With other stores to be opened to complement our joias, we'll continue with our expansion program at an even higher pace next year, creating jobs not only during the pandemic year in 2020 and more consistently now in 2021, and we are preparing for yet another year of accelerated growth in 2022 with new products to be added for our customers and reinforcing the availability and convenience to everyone. The representativeness of the omnichannel will continue adding value to us, and this is going to be important for us to continue gaining relevance in the sector. We have achieved 15.3% in market share, as Paulo said, but more important than that is the consistent speed of market share expansion that we have seen in the last three months and will continue growing at an accelerated pace due to the opening of stores.
There is no other player opening as many stores as we are opening in this segment. Let's make the most of our brand and the efficiency we have in execution at the point of sales. Thank you all once again. Now let's open for questions.
We'll now start the questions and answer session for investors and analysts only. If you have any questions, please press star one. If at any point your question is answered, you may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Questions will be taken in the order that they are received. We do ask you that when you pose your question, you pick up your handset to provide optimum sound quality. Please hold while we poll for questions. Our first question is from Thiago Macruz with Itaú BBA. Hello, everyone.
Congratulations on the quarter results. What have you been learning with the expansion of Life? Maybe you could tell us about the maturation speed, potential revenue per store and the impacts of cannibalization that you might be feeling in your Vivara stores as a consequence of the expansion. Now, my second question about the informal market. We know that you have a market share of 15% in the formal market, but that should only account for half of the total, I believe. Do you have plans at the company to go after this opportunity that is not being addressed by you right now? That would be really great to hear about that. Thank you very much.
Hello, Macruz. Thank you for your question. Life, well, we have been learning a lot about the business model and the potential of these stores based on the performance.
These stores are having as revenue BRL 4 million a year. The cannibalization is what we expected, 2%-3% compared to Vivara. We have seen new customers coming in, customers that never bought in Vivara stores and are now buying in Life stores. These are new customers, a great source of new customers with a different experience that has been working really well. These stores are maturing quite fast, achieving 75% of the levels of a mature store in the second month of operations. When we see this maturation and this income, it's very exciting and the cannibalization levels are very low. The Life project has been very successful. That's why we wanna accelerate it even further and look at it from an increasingly structured way. Now, this Life maturation also shows us our ability to manage as is.
You know, we see how much Vivara is growing and how our same-store sales is performing really well. We had a 22% growth in same-store sales, even with aggressive competition. We were always wondering how we could guarantee our as is and look at the to-be, but we have been performing quite well in the as is and in the to-be. Now, when it comes to the informal market, we think this is still very large. If we look at the size of the market, we would say it's, like, twice as big as what we have today, and that will depend on the expansion of stores and working on the omni-channel approach and grow in locations where we are not yet present with different mixes of products, prices, structured platforms and apps.
We need to evolve with technology to reach the markets where we are not present yet. If we say we have 15% market share, well, the market is much larger than that, so we see the size of the opportunity that Vivara, Life, and the whole jewelry market has. I would just like to add something to the first point about Life, just to give you a bit more flavor about other things that we have identified. I think Paulo was quite precise. This maturation has been really exciting, very encouraging. The stores achieved 75% of the sales levels of mature stores by the second month of operations. So that's quite good. The Porto Alegre store was opened on July 17, and it had BRL 1 million in revenue in the first quarter.
These stores are gaining sales representativeness really fast. We're going into excellent shopping malls, and this will make sure that the maturation is different from our average. They're gaining really fast. They're growing really fast. The sample is small. We're gaining critical mass, and we'll be able to draw even better conclusions from now on. The five stores with the new format accounted for 32% of the Life stores' revenue in the third quarter, with a cannibalization level that is very controlled within the range that he mentioned.
That was all. Great. Thank you so much for your answers.
Our next question is by Joseph Giordano from JPMorgan.
Hello, good morning, everyone. Good morning, Paulo, Otávio. Thank you for taking my question. I would like to continue talking about Life.
I would like to understand the contribution margin of 50% and the level of inventory per store, which has a value that is much lower than Vivara stores. What do you think about street stores? Because you're now opening stores in malls, but is that a format that you're considering to explore throughout Brazil? Now, my second question is about the competitive environment. If we go to the stores, we see many of the windows empty, which is quite sad. What is your take on the quality and depth of the inventory of the competition, and how is Vivara being positioned within this context? Thank you.
Thank you, Joseph, for your question. First let me talk about Life and the potential of street stores. We think this is an opportunity that would be an evolution of our business to have street stores and going into cities.
With a safety model that is simpler than opening a jewelry store. Life could be a possibility. Before opening Life stores on streets, we are opening Life stores in the best square footage of malls in the country. We're going to open Morumbi Shopping, Barra Shopping Mall, Fortaleza, Recife, Diamond Mall. This is an opportunity that our company has to go into the best consumption square footage there is today. I think there is an opportunity to open store on the streets. We're discussing how to have a pilot project on that so that this is yet another growth avenue. We think we can have over 300 Life stores and shopping malls with ROIs that are quite attractive at levels we already have at the company. That would be the first point. Now about inventory.
We see our good sales performance being reinforced by our increased inventory levels and the depth of our mix. We work with a demand forecasting model looking at SKUs demand in stores. Our product is very giftable. A client goes into the store, and if he wants to buy a cross for his wife and he can't find it in our store, they will go to the next store, and if he can find it there, they will come to Vivara. Our conversion only increases. If I look at the competition, I suppose they have been using a stock with a lower gold value to generate cash, and now they find it hard to recompose their inventory with the higher, cost of gold. That was something we did really well.
The opportunity in our inventory that was increased in earrings, bangles and rings and collections made all the difference. Like earrings, over 50 different models of earrings, rings as a solution for customers. This has been very successful, and this has been supporting our growth. Do you have anything to add, Otávio?
No, I think you said it all, Paulo. The messages that we have received from our salespeople monitoring the competition make us excited about the short-term, and especially about the Life opportunity that we have, which is huge. To gain representativeness and independence and the additional profitability enables us to generate a lot of value. We see that the competition is still suffering, closing stores. You know, our main competitor continues to close stores quarter after quarter. This is an exciting moment for us.
When we talk about competition, we're not talking about only, jewelry, but giftable. When you think about finding the perfect gift, our competitors are shoes, fashion, perfumes, electronics, and we wanna compete with all of this market. If you think about a gift, you will think about Life and Vivara. We're working with our media to compete not only with jewelry stores, but with all giftable market as a whole. Giving a jewel as a gift is fantastic, and we have to make the most of that.
Thank you, Paulo and Otavio.
Our next question is by Danniela Eiger, XP.
Hello, Otavio and Paulo. Thank you for taking my question. I have two questions, actually. One still about Life, but from a different perspective about Life Lovers.
You disclosed how much this represents in your customer base today and the revenue, I think it was about 50%. I remember that this program was still quite limited, was not available to everyone. Can you tell us about the rollout of the program? It seems to have great potential. Now about the margin dynamics. You said that the pressure happened because of the base, which makes sense. From now on, with this acceleration, what do you see in terms of margin dynamics from now on? Do you expect to see an improvement of margins with the mix of Life, increasing in your total numbers?
Okay, I'll start by answering about Life Lovers, and then Otavio will answer your question about margins. Life Lovers has been evolving quite well. We're very excited about it. A Life product is a product for a woman's life.
We want it to be a product that a woman will wear for like 10 years, and when after 10 years she looks at the bracelet, she sees how much has evolved. The frequency of purchase is really important for us to work on the events and the successes of the customer that will buy new pieces of jewelry. I have a bracelet, and now I got married. I'm gonna buy a little ring to put in my bracelets. If I go to Paris, I'll buy the Eiffel Tower. If I had a baby, I will buy something else to put in my bracelet. No bracelet will be like another because no woman's history is like another woman's history. We need to tell this to women to evolve in this business.
We were very successful in doing that in the past, and now we're working with Life Lovers again to do that. They now represent 14% of the active sales and 50% of the Life sales. 167,000 customers that are active in this program. The idea is not only to have it active right now, but to keep it in the coming years, working with tools, with the buying journey, with communication and with recognition, which is really important. We have to recognize customers as Life Lovers and see what their experience is like in the buying journey. Otávio, can you answer the question about margins now?
Of course. Well, I think that you were very precise, Danny, when you said that this is a more short-term pressure that we're experiencing.
We had already predicted that from the beginning of the year, considering the size of the price adjustments we saw, especially in gold and silver. The exchange rate also affects us on our imported inputs, and we had to absorb part of that in terms of cost efficiency, which was a major challenge for us. On top of that, we had the representativeness of the additional factory expenses that I mentioned in my presentation, which is something isolated. As we evolve, this pressure will be diluted. The company has had over 3,400 employees in total by the end of September, so we have been growing a lot. We added personnel, especially in our Manaus factory. We have over 600 workers there. This heated environment in the factory will continue by mid-2022.
Even after the growth cycle that we are preparing for, this is not only the heated production environment to increase our inventory levels will continue growing after that. After seeing the return of this additional production, the pressures will be eliminated. You know, this pressure that we saw, not on the quarter but on the year. Now, from now on, in the medium- and long- terms, Life will gain representativeness with the acceleration we see and the return profile of Life in our business, so it makes sense to accelerate more on Life than Vivara. As a result, Life will gain share and the margins will continue to be relevant. I'd say it makes sense to think about enhancing the margins throughout the years as we gain profitability with Life's representativeness that is increasing. We have seen a growth in the representativeness of jewels.
Watches have stabilized 13%-14% of our sales, and we focused on profitability. We have three to four points more profitability than a year ago for these products, which is quite interesting. After that, I'd say that the margin expansion that we see in-house is due to the mix and not other efficiency gains. The efficiency gains are happening continuously. We're always enhancing our factory, adding technology, but there is also an increase in the prices of raw material, which is also continuous if we consider BRL prices. This is a recurring challenge we face, and we're making investments in order to be able to face all of that by gaining efficiency in the coming quarters and coming years.
That was very clear. Thank you very much.
Well, if there are no further questions, I would like to turn the floor back to Mr.
Kruglensky for his closing remarks.
Thank you all for joining us this morning for our earnings conference call. I would like to state once again how excited and confident we are for the coming season with Black Friday, Christmas, and all of that. Thank you very much and see you next time. Have a great day, everyone.