Hello, and a very warm welcome to you all. Thank you for being with us for Maisons du Monde's Capital Markets Day. I will be hosting today's session together with Régis Massuyeau, our Group CFO. Hello, Régis.
Hello, Julie. Hello, everyone. Very glad to have you all with us.
Régis will be joining us a little later in the program. Thank you, Régis.
Thank you.
Before we get started, allow me to give you a quick reminder of who we are. Maisons du Monde is the European leader in inspirational and affordable home and living. This leadership position is based on three key pillars. Firstly, a direct to consumer love brand. Secondly, a distinctive business model that delivers high and sustainable growth. Thirdly, a robust financial model that drives increasing shareholder returns. Régis and I will be going into much more detail on these pillars later in the presentation. Let me tell you first about our ambition as a company. We aim to create sustainable value for all our stakeholders while continuing to deliver high growth. More specifically, we see growth as the means to create value, and that's how we treat it, assessing growth avenues for their capacity to create sustainable returns for our stakeholders.
During this Capital Markets Day, we will be explaining to you exactly how we are doing this. Let me briefly walk you through today's agenda. We will begin by telling you about the market opportunity in the home and living space. We will then be giving you a detailed explanation of each of the three key pillars I just mentioned. Before we take your questions in the Q&A session, I will share our outlook for the next four years. Let's start by looking at the market, which for us combines two complementary categories, furniture, which drives high basket size, and decoration, which brings better margins. I think the first, and perhaps most obvious point to make, is that this is a vast market, and it is a market that has been growing at a steady rate over the past five years.
Another key point about the market is that it is highly fragmented, with IKEA occupying a unique position. With EUR 40 billion in global annual revenue, it is the number one player in each of the European markets, including France, where it stands at a 14% market share. If you then look at the next 10 biggest players after that, collectively they have a market share of less than 30%. Maisons du Monde is one of the strongest among those next 10, with a market share over 4%. Our growth over the years has been thanks to our market share gains. Going forward, growing market share remains our strategy, and as you can see, there is plenty of room to do so.
As this chart shows, the pandemic triggered a strong and lasting shift towards e-commerce in home and living more than in other categories, and Maisons du Monde was visibly able to capture this opportunity with online sales growth well above the category. Although the pandemic accelerated this shift in consumer habits towards digital platforms, we still have a lot of catch up before we draw level with more mature categories such as fashion or electronics. This shows vast potential for growth in online sales, and as far as Maisons du Monde is concerned, this is very good news. Looking ahead, the prospects are positive across Europe. After more than a year of good dynamics lifted by COVID lockdown and post-lockdown demands, consumers are still looking to spend more on their homes.
Over 60% say they want to redecorate their homes over the next 12 months, which is more than over the last period. One driver of this is working from home, which is expected to become an increasingly common practice. Beyond feeling cozy and efficient at home, consumers say they also feel more inclined to move than in the past five years. Departures for the countryside or to a bigger place, all these projects will be opportunities for furniture and decoration purchases. As a matter of fact, the category is expected to grow at a rate of about 2% year-on-year for the next five years, which is faster than the past five. As I just said, the digital shift has been one key outcome of the pandemic. The other one has been a strong increase of consumer interest in environmental and social issues.
Not only do people feel more directly concerned, they also want companies to play their part. Through the products they choose to buy, they want to support actions they approve of. Credit cards are modern voting ballots. In the light of these trends, I believe that Maisons du Monde has a compelling value proposition, perfectly positioned to succeed in tomorrow's home and living space. Allow me to elaborate. Let's return to the three pillars I mentioned at the start. The first pillar is that we are a direct to consumer love brand. This direct access means we can gain deep understanding of our customers and create a memorable experience for them. Looking at our net promoter score measured across a panel of 30 brands, we are one of the most recommended brands among home and living specialists in all of Europe.
Despite strong local brands established in each market, we are always in the top three. Even in newer geographies like Germany or Switzerland, consumers who already know Maisons du Monde seem to really like what we do, and what we offer is perceived as pretty distinctive. Indeed, among brands they know of and visit in home and living, consumers say that Maisons du Monde is one of the brands that most brightens their day. One that sells products that they are particularly proud to have in their homes. In fact, our customers say we make them feel good. Moreover, thanks to our affordable and inspirational positioning and an offering that covers a wide array of styles and budgets, we are able to speak to each and all. That's what comes across here on this slide. Throughout Europe, the distribution of our customer base spans all age groups.
We are also relevant to people in different income brackets. We are speaking to families as well as to couples with their children. We do have a broad customer base and therefore plenty of opportunities to grow that base. Okay, so what exactly do our customers like about us? Here is what they've been saying. Across our different markets, we are perceived as leading the pack on originality, products I cannot find elsewhere, quality products with elegant materials, and inspiration, where I can find inspiration. Indeed, Maisons du Monde is a love brand with three key attributes that set us apart in the home furnishings market. Creativity and inspiration are part of our D&A. Both have been core concepts for us since day one. Another pillar has been developing strongly over the last five years, and this is engagement.
Engagement with our user communities and with the needs of people and the planet. Engagement has become our third pillar and differentiating attribute. This unique combination is what makes our love brand so relevant today and even more tomorrow. I'd like to talk about each of these pillars in more detail. First, let's watch a short video on our design making process.
Maisons du Monde is constantly striving to offer our customers more. With every season, we introduce new sophisticated materials, new techniques in weaving and basketry, for instance, and new creative approaches designed to spark emotion. Travel is a huge source of inspiration for us. It's a part of our D&A. The different way people live and all over the world, and their knowhow inspires a lot to create stories and imagine concepts. We really take care about the quality feel of each item. Well-done objects with story, with soul. For Exotic collection, the very expressive vocabulary embodies the uniqueness of Maisons du Monde. I have to say that we are very proud of what we do, and making eco-design a priority is a part of that. In addition to style, Maisons du Monde has worked to make its products more responsible, stronger and longer-lasting. We are reinforcing quality control criteria like fit for use and durability of both end products and raw materials, as well as monitoring production at every step. Our constant revision of existing designs also enhances quality. While we're definitely meeting customer expectations as our 4.5 out of 5-star average product rating attests, there's always room for improvement. Conscious that today's shoppers crave selection, Maisons du Monde is expanding consumer choices with a carefully curated marketplace that has grown Maisons du Monde's offering from 18 to 100,000 products. The marketplace has brought new categories like bedding, childcare, and bath, as well as other functional furnishings. It opens space for new exceptional items like Martinelli Luce's lamp, for instance.
All this suggests insights for how Maisons du Monde can improve its own product line. Consistent with our D&A and in line with our company purpose, 30% of marketplace products are sustainably sourced. All this drives an amazing community of consumers and key opinion leaders. Style, quality, sustainability, choice, that's what makes us a love brand. If I had to sum up Maisons du Monde, I would say that Maisons du Monde is about inspiration, creativity, colors, tendencies, feel better at home, everything that is warm and that is cozy. A key asset for us to remain the European leader in inspirational and affordable home and living.
Style, quality, sustainability, choice. These are the key consumer outcomes delivered by creativity at Maisons du Monde. We have a very specific way of approaching creativity. We see it as a virtuous ecosystem that combines art and science. To put it differently, the creative talent of our teams and partners is enriched by the power of data. The marketplace we just launched is harnessing that creative horsepower even more effectively by expanding our options in a very structured and strategic way. Let's detail each of these components. Consumers are all different, and this is what we love about them. On the French market, for instance, that you can see here on the left-hand side of the slide, there is no one style preference. There is a wide range from contemporary to pop, including Scandinavian or country. Looking at specific age groups, such as 18-24 years old, you can see that the top three styles there, design, zen, and industrial, are completely different from those of the over 65s, which are contemporary, classic chic, and country.
The same goes for the rest of Europe. At Maisons du Monde, we are proud to address all of these preferences, and we do that over time. As you can see here on the right-hand side of the slide, we continuously adapt and rework our product offering so that we stay on trend and keep delighting our customers year after year. How do we manage to stay in sync with our customers? First, we have a lot of creative horsepower, and we keep strengthening this asset over time. We have grown the number of stylists and graphic designers working at Maisons du Monde to as many as 30 now. We have no less than 170 people in our product teams creating or curating our 18,000 products every year. We also work in close partnership with our suppliers.
Whether it's a new handcrafting technique, such as wood carving or textile embroidery, or an idea on finishings, our long-term relationships enable us to work side by side for the end consumer. Three years ago, we started complementing this talent through design school contests for eco-friendly products. This year, we took a step further by inviting independent designers to do exclusive creations for us, and also by launching our first upcycled capsule collection with Renée Recycle. These are secondhand products revisited by two trendy creators and sold as one-of-a-kind pieces. The collection was sold out in a matter of three weeks, and all profits were donated to a nonprofit organization that helps women in need. Today, more than ever, creativity is our motto, with an increasing focus on sustainability. To make the most of this creative potential, we are starting using more data and using data more.
Starting with the richest of all, customer feedback, this year we started gathering massive data at the product level from people who had just made a purchase. In the space of 9 months, we collected nearly 80,000 reviews, about 12,000 of our products. This obviously provides very valuable insights, which we share with our product teams for continuous improvement. With the launch of our curated marketplace, we are building an even bigger and richer creative ecosystem. In its first year, our marketplace has boosted our product offering from 18,000 to over 100,000. That's 700 brands from over 20 countries. Once again, Maisons du Monde delivers on its promise to bring talent from all over the world with high standards in terms of style, quality, affordability, and sustainability.
All of our partner vendors are signatory of the United Nations Global Compact Principles for Natural Resource Preservation and Civil Rights. That's a very uncommon ask for a marketplace operator. Furthermore, we actively select and promote those brands whose offering is eco-friendly or made in Europe. Today, as much as 30% of our 85,000 marketplace products meet at least one of the two criteria. Looking ahead, we will continue to offer the best combination of style, quality, affordability, and sustainability. Creativity will be further boosted as we keep opening up our creative ecosystem. On top of the external talents who have been joining us recently, we will invite our communities to create with and for us.
Through design contests or collaborations, Maisons du Monde colleagues, influencers, and customers will be invited to express their own creativity in the form of many new and exclusive designs to bring to our deco fans. We will also further enhance the value for money proposition of our products. On top of our style and trends-based approach to collectioning, we will implement a category management approach that will include our marketplace offering to ensure that we are addressing every user need in the most efficient way. Also, in addition to further increasing product quality at each price point through differentiated quality standards, we will examine our pricing approach to make sure we are pricing products based on value perceived by our customers relative to the competition. This will be particularly valuable in the context of high cost and price volatility across the board.
Finally, in Spring 2022, we will introduce our responsible product label to guide consumer choices. Today, this label aims at promoting two different goals, products made with sustainable materials, either certified or recycled, and products made in Europe. After two years of intense work, including the introduction of recycled materials in textile and the relocation to France of the majority of our sofa production, we are proud to announce that 20% of our offering will be eligible already when the label is released next spring. Well, our ambition is that no less than 40% of our offering will be labeled as responsible by 2025, and this target stands for our marketplace as well. This significant move to sustainable offering is certainly one of the greatest changes underway in our company right now, and one that makes us particularly proud.
Let me turn now to the second of our three differentiating attributes, inspiration. How do we inspire? Well, in three main ways. Firstly, by providing an immersive experience across all our consumer touch points. Secondly, by offering customer coaching. And thirdly, by giving our community a daily dose of inspiration that makes us part of their lives. Let me tell you a bit more. The immersive experience can be seen across the Maisons du Monde universe, both online and offline. Of course, our stores provide the first opportunity to inspire our customers with fully furnished rooms in different styles. Our store experience is perceived by customers as truly distinctive in that regard. Our website is another key source of inspiration, from thematic campaign to shop the look moods. It offers a fantastic showcase for our products.
Over the last years, we have been enriching our own ecosystem with innovative adjacencies, notably with a series of hotels that are fully decorated with Maisons du Monde products, from the rooms to the lobby, to the restaurant area, providing a real-life and entirely shoppable experience of our brand. Meanwhile, Rhinov is our online-based and very affordable professional interior design service that provides spectacular 3D before-and-after room designs that, again, can be sent directly to a shopping cart. That's the immersive experience. Now coaching. Coaching takes place in a number of ways. First in our stores with the support and guidance offered by our expert store teams. Maisons du Monde colleagues are truly passionate about decoration. This is actually one of the big reasons they join us. Surveys show that customers visit us not just for product information, but really for decorating advice.
That creates a particularly strong bond with our customers as decoration is both intimate and emotionally involving. Second, on our website, thanks to extensive imagery, decoration tips, or celebrity home tours. Third, over the phone with a dedicated and highly trained team working in our call centers to provide support and coaching. Last but not least, Rhinov with a palette of self-help tools to guide our customers, such as the highly popular deco quiz, where you can discover your very own style. Supporting our customers through the decision-making process is a key part of how we aim to inspire them. We don't want this to suddenly come to an end at checkout. We want to provide our customers with ideas and inspiration on an ongoing basis every single day. How do we do this?
Firstly, through our catalogs, which our customers view as coffee table books and often browse for ideas. Indeed, they have much more of a magazine feel. Secondly, our stores are a great source of regular inspiration. Every week, new products come in and are carefully staged to give our customers plenty of ideas. From Easter to Christmas, there is always something new and exciting happening in our shops. Thirdly, our website with its feature pieces, its city guides that bring our collections to life through evocative sketches of life in other cities or our do it yourself tutorials, which our customers just love. Lastly, Rhinov, which offers inspiration that comes directly from their team of 30 professional interior designers. Like here in our decoration tips in 1-minute videos where our community receives easy-to-apply decoration advice. Tomorrow, we want to do even more to help our customers take action.
First, through personalization. Our website and CRM will increasingly show users products and themes likely to fit their tastes and needs. We will pursue that route by connecting new artificial intelligence-based algorithm. We will also offer consulting sessions online and in-store so customers can get individual in-person advice. Moreover, we will revamp our loyalty program to make sure our customers feel even more rewarded and increase their share of wallet with us. Second, through localization, whether through brand content or in-store merchandising, we aim to better adapt our offering to customers in ways that are tailored to where they are and what is popular in that area. We will also strive to offer payment and delivery options that fit the specificities of each market. Third, through services. Our financing proposition is best in class in France already, with plans of up to 20 installments on a single purchase.
We will soon deploy some of these financing options in the rest of Europe and offer financing for our marketplace offerings. We will also provide new services in line with our customer demands. First, we are preparing to publish product ratings on our website alongside customer reviews so that customers get transparent peer-to-peer feedback on our products. Second, we will offer an option for customers to have their old furniture removed and recycled when they buy replacements from us. Third, we will propose a furniture assembly service. At every step of the way, we will strive to make inspiration relevant to customers and help them to convert it to action. Now that we've covered creativity and inspiration, let's turn to our third pillar, engagement. Engagement means two things at Maisons du Monde, engagement with our customer and influencer communities, and engagement for people and the planet.
Well, what better proof of consumer engagement than our growing customer base? Maisons du Monde has now over 7 million active customers across Europe, meaning people who have made a purchase during the past twelve months. That is 2 million more than five years ago. Customer base growth was particularly strong outside France, with our European customer bases growing by a staggering 85% over the last five years. What this slide also shows is that our active customers are spending more and more money with us with an increase by nearly 20% of our annual spend per active customer compared to 2016. With as much as two-thirds of our business coming from repeat customers, it is clear that our customers really do love what Maisons du Monde offers, and they keep coming back to us over and over. There's plenty of evidence of their liking online.
In the past few years, there's been a growing number of Maisons du Monde fan groups across Europe and across all social media, notably Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest. These communities have all grown massively and organically, creating their own hashtags, which shows how consumers relate to our brand and want to be part of the conversation. Looking specifically at Instagram, here you can see a third-party research piece that shows engagement rates of the most popular home and living brands in each market. Each colored dot represents a brand. What's really striking here is the fact that excepting the one major player I mentioned to you at the start of the presentation, Maisons du Monde is the only company in a top five position across the board. Most of the other top five companies are local players resonating with their domestic audiences.
In addition to showing you how engaged our communities are, this slide also demonstrates that there seem to be two pan-European home decor brands, and Maisons du Monde is one of them. One of the major sources of engagement with customers is Maisons du Monde's corporate social responsibility. As you know, Maisons du Monde is committed to promoting sustainable consumption and environmental consciousness. With that in mind, you won't find many discounts on our products. We avoid inciting unnecessary consumption by setting the most accurate level of demand for our given products right from the outset. Instead of Black Friday sales, we do what we call Giving Days, during which we donate to worthy causes by bringing our customers on board with a matching donation approach. Basically, we give away one product for each one purchased. Customer involvement is a constant at Maisons du Monde.
Indeed, our customers feel particularly concerned about environmental and social issues. Every year, they finance up to one-third of the EUR 1.5 million we donate to the Maisons du Monde Foundation through a rounding up mechanism. At the checkout counter, as many as half actually choose to round up their bill and make a micro donation to our causes in the process, demonstrating their trust and endorsing the values they share with the company. On the social front, Maisons du Monde also wants to play its part. We have been scaling up our partnerships with the Red Cross, Emmaüs, and La Fondation des Femmes for years now.
Of course, we feel called to provide the help we can in hard times, like we did during the peak of the pandemic, whether that's through financing vaccination campaigns for suppliers in India or equipping hospitals to provide comfort for caregivers. This year, we will have given the equivalent of EUR 5 million of products to charities. Our engagement is strong, authentic, and long-standing. However, it is not visible by all yet. Surveys show that only 30% of our customers across Europe know about our commitments. Likewise, we are a loved brand, as shown by the high consumer engagement and repeat rates, because our value proposition is lovable. Now, the time has come to structure this approach around brand experts.
To this end, I have created a new executive committee position, Brand and CSR Executive Director, and I'm happy to announce that Nathalie Rozborski will be joining us next month to lead this department of 70 people. Combining existing positions like in-store concept, social media, or CSR, and new positions such as for brand content, Nathalie and her team will have three main objectives. One, improving and prompting brand awareness in our main markets. Two, reinforcing brand leadership. Three, delivering on our CSR ambitions. As former Deputy CEO of NellyRodi, the leading agency for lifestyle trends and branding strategy in France, Nathalie is intimately familiar with the most successful DNVBs and lifestyle brands. She's also committed to social causes, especially equal opportunities for women. I am confident she will be instrumental to our next phase of brand building, and I welcome her warmly.
With Nathalie and all our teams, we at Maisons du Monde will be making our brand mission more explicit. We aim to empower everyone to create their own feel-good home, a place of self-expression that is desirable and yet sustainable. Because building a cozy nest and freely expressing oneself at home is integral to the pursuit of happiness. Also, because the world has so much to offer and to protect, and no one can durably feel good about themselves if the planet is at risk. Mostly because there is no need to choose between desirability and sustainability. Our forceful action, as well as our intimate and growing relationships with our communities across Europe, support our brand vision to be the most desirable and sustainable home and living brand in Europe.
You've got it by now, so simply to sum up, the three attributes at the core of our loved brand are these, creativity, inspiration, and engagement. Now, let's talk about our business model. Clearly differentiated, it has consistently delivered high and sustainable growth over time. We are, of course, planning to keep it that way. How are we going to do that? Fundamentally, we rely on three pillars to grow our business, pillars that were built and strengthened over the years. A distinctive omnichannel approach, a track record of successful expansion across Europe, and industry leadership in terms of sustainability. These three pillars are all equally important to us, and they remain the solid foundation in which we will build our future. I suggest we go through them one by one in greater detail. First, let's look at omnichannel, a distinctive model that combines online, marketplace, and stores.
As you can see on the slide, we have built a superior digital-led omnichannel model. In fact, we generate more than half of our revenues through digital assets. Let's break that down. Online, which could also be called e-commerce, has grown strongly and steadily and will reach well over 30% of our total sales this year. On top of that, we also have our click-in-store system. These are sales made at stores on vendors' tablets for products that cannot be seen on site and which are home delivered to customers or picked up later by them. These two channels together, what we call digital, already drive more than half of all of our group sales. Before we go further, let's watch a short video to illustrate omnichannel at Maisons du Monde.
Today's customers are more mobile and connected than ever, and Maisons du Monde has risen to this challenge. To make our vision reality, Maisons du Monde relies on the data-driven power of a strong digital platform that is much more than an online store.
For us, unified commerce is more than a buzzword. It's a commitment to serve the needs of our customers wherever they interact with us. Thanks to a scalable cloud-based infrastructure and a coherent real-time IT and big data framework.
Strengthening our ecosystem approach is Maisons du Monde's rapidly growing marketplace.
Maisons du Monde is an amazing ramp-up of its marketplace, vastly outperforming comparable marketplaces we've seen in number of vendors, sales per vendor, quality of customer service, all while remaining highly selective and fully integrated to the Maisons du Monde experience.
It's a real opportunity to sell our Temahome products on Maisons du Monde marketplace. Our brand, with its stylish and inspiring positioning, immediately met its customers, especially thanks to the high quality audience of Maisons du Monde. Since the beginning of the collaboration, sales have developed very well, and today we look forward to the opening of the marketplace in all other markets.
This rich and powerful digital environment interacts with our experiential physical stores to benefit both. Click and collect, a perfect example of unified commerce in action, as the pandemic clearly showed. Another exciting development is inviting the marketplace into our stores. We've also rolled out our truly cross-channel frictionless shopping cart. Our stores are where we welcome our customers with an immersive experience and expert support. We believe that providing the best experience in home and living means having a place where home decor enthusiasts can touch, feel, try, and ask and really enjoy it all. For us, that is integral in being the European leader in inspirational and affordable home and living.
One reason for our omni-channel success is that consumers naturally have different journeys when it comes to buying a piece of furniture or decoration. Here, you see results of a survey where we ask people about their preferences when buying different products. You can see that people give two main reasons for buying in store: if the product is expensive or needs to be tested for comfort, such as a sofa or a chair, or if there's no specific need to enjoy the pleasure of shopping around. This is the case for many decoration categories, tableware, textile, candles or kids' accessories, you name it. Meanwhile, some products at the top here are more functional and need no comfort testing. TV stands or lamps are good examples. There, customers are satisfied purchasing online.
The choice to buy online or in store depends a great deal on the financial or emotional involvement a purchase generates. Numbers confirm why omnichannel is a customer-winning model. Analyzing our data, we've discovered that most of our customer journeys in Europe are indeed omnichannel. We have known for some time now that most store visits are prepared online. People check the website, open a newsletter, or scroll on Instagram, and that triggers a desire to come and visit a store. We've even increased this movement over the years through our drive to store strategy. What is interesting to observe here is that in many cases, even when the purchase is ultimately made online, being able to see products in the store and talk to real people is essential, and this trend can be seen across Europe. For instance, research online, purchase offline is extremely popular in Spain.
Conversely, consumers may visit a store to get a feel for the product or get advice and then finalize the purchase online. As many as three-quarters of online sales take place this way in Italy. As markets move online, it is important to keep in mind that a physical experience with a product or the brand is, in our category, a key step in the decision-making process. People just really like to mix and match these channels, and that's what they ask from their favorite brands. Not to mention that this results in fewer product returns. A key element of this omnichannel proposition is a strong online platform. Here are the results, I believe, speak for themselves. In France, for instance, both traffic and sales are up tremendously. Traffic growth was one driver of performance, thanks to our ever-improving online marketing strategy.
Over the first nine months of the year, we've had an average of nearly 7 million unique visitors a month, which is almost double the traffic only 2 years ago. A key step in boosting our online traffic was the launch of our marketplace at the end of last year. Our performance is also the result of continuous effort to offer our online visitors a compelling value proposition. Regular A/B testing and optimization have been proving effective, especially on mobile, which now represents three-quarters of our traffic and half of our orders. As a result of these system efforts across marketing and on-site experience optimization, we have been able to materially gain online market share, especially through the COVID period, with a 20% increase over just 2 years. One of our critical success factors is, without a doubt, our approach to data. Why? Two reasons.
First, because we moved early. We have been building best-in-class data capabilities over the past five years and are now well ahead of the curve. Today, we have one single database which brings together millions of data points from all sources, online and offline sales, customer care, marketing spend or CRM, but also product sales performance, replenishment algorithm, customer reviews, and so on. All of this is delivered through cloud computing, so it's accessible, robust, and green. We have been able to develop our own data science models, which we test and improve continuously. The second reason is that data is now pervasive in our organization. Across the business, no less than 800 KPIs are monitored and measured against targets. Today, over 200 of our colleagues make extensive use of our dashboards on a daily basis, and that is 10 times more than five years ago.
Another important milestone in recent Maisons du Monde history is the launch of our curated marketplace. The importance of the marketplace model is no longer in doubt. During the pandemic, it outgrew any other, and looking at other continents, the dynamic is expected to last. The question is no longer whether a marketplace is a good idea or not. The question is whether you are strong enough to stand on your own feet and be the one that consolidates others' offerings, or whether you need someone more powerful to get distributed. We at Maisons du Monde made a clear choice from the outset. Based on our broad but curated positioning, the size and quality of our audience, and the trust and attachment our brand enjoys among consumers, we had what it takes to become the one-stop shop in inspirational and affordable home and living. We did.
This strategy has a number of clear and lasting benefits. It contributes to omni-channel sales growth. It increases brand visibility and profile in our different markets. It provides ample feedback on what products consumers like and don't like, so that we can reinforce our own offering. Last but not least, it is accretive on margins. However, it does call for a clear strategy to make sure it is a positive addition, both regarding our brand and also the performance of our own collections. In our case, this means four things. One, adopting a broad but highly curated approach with approval at product level alongside a strict checklist. Two, bringing additional offering across all home categories, including our key existing ones. Three, a strict monitoring of the user experience with high standards, both in browsing and filtering capabilities, and also, of course, in customer service.
Four, a continuous test-and-learn approach to optimize each product family over time. Here we are, celebrating our first anniversary. Our 85,000 products cover all our categories, and customer satisfaction on our marketplace orders is just excellent. We are also pleased with our 300 vendors, of whom we have retained over 95%. Most of the very few that we deactivated were just victims of their own success. With customer orders piling up, they were not meeting our customer service standards. In such cases, we are actively working with our vendors to find solutions and bring them back to our website. We very much see our vendors as partners, and that's one thing they say they particularly like about us. On the sales side, our marketplace drove over 20% of our French GMV over the first 9 months of the year.
It is about to become a revenue stream for our store network also. Its deployment started last month in 70 French stores, where our sales associates are promoting our marketplace actively. We are very enthusiastic about this initiative and the fact that it is not an online-only element of the proposition, but again, a truly omnichannel feature. Omnichannel is our credo. You've got it by now. Stores are clearly a cornerstone of this model. Stores have a number of intangible roles that are hard to quantify, yet are absolutely essential. They are a materialization of the brand universe, and as such, strongly contribute to brand discovery and attachment. Also, as we saw earlier, stores have no match when it comes to impulse purchases. But just as importantly, stores are a key enabler of digital performance.
In fact, they sit at the very core of our ecosystem by enabling several efficiencies in terms of logistics and marketing. Logistics-wise, the efficiencies we achieve through stores are truly a win-win situation. As we saw earlier, our total digital sales, including online and click and store, stand at over 50% of group revenues. Well, of all our digital orders, a full third are delivered in-store. Perhaps more impressively, over 20% of our furniture and digital orders are delivered to our stores for customer pickup. This drives real savings in delivery costs, both for our customers, as store delivery is free of charge for them, and of course, for us. Furthermore, our store network makes our marketing more efficient and more powerful. When it comes to customer acquisition, stores still drive a majority of our new customer inflow.
Over 60% of our new registered customers came to the brand through our stores over the first 10 months of this year. In addition, stores are key for customer loyalty. In fact, we get 50% more repeat business from customers we acquire in stores compared to those we acquire online. Again, decoration is more of a repeat purchase compared to furniture, and stores are particularly strong in that category. In order to maximize the value of our omni-channel model, we have been actively managing our store network. We have been decelerating on gross openings, further raising our standards to ensure that we are opening with high enough long-term potential and that we are not cannibalizing our existing network. We have also been accelerating on store closures and repositionings, improving the overall profitability of our network.
At the same time, we have been accelerating on store refurbishments to ensure our stores are up to date and appropriately exemplify the brand experience. As a result, our store network has never been stronger, with 350 stores across Europe at the end of September and an average store size of 1,200 sq m. As one would expect, retail park stores are bigger than city center or shopping mall stores, and thus allow us to display a part of our furniture offering in fully furnished rooms. As a decoration and furniture brand, it is important for us that our stores show our entire universe, and this is also a key ask from our customers. Also, store economics are better in retail parks, thanks to substantially lower rent.
Over time, we've been slightly increasing our share of retail park stores with that format now approaching 70% of our total network. Now it is also important to make our brand visible in city centers and shopping malls, especially in countries where our brand awareness is lower, like in Germany. The smaller formats represent about 30% of our network today and equally contribute to our omnichannel model. Tomorrow, our goal is to further enhance our omnichannel performance and further increase our share of omnichannel customers, which has almost doubled already over the last 5 years, with an acceleration in 2020. It is well known that omnichannel offerings increase sales, and we are no different. At Maisons du Monde, omnichannel customers generate 2-4 times more revenue than single-channel customers, and this positive gap has been expanding over the last few years.
How do we plan to increase the omni-channel customer value? By strengthening each element of the equation and by reinforcing the links between channels. Let's look at this in more detail. First, regarding online, we will sustain our efforts in performance marketing and implement smart marketing automation to optimize returns on investments. We will offer new services to customers, such as product ratings and customer reviews that we've already mentioned, or visual search tools to help them find their dream products more quickly and more intuitively. Our branding strategy should also drive more organic traffic, which is a key driver of profitable growth. Finally, our marketplace will continue to contribute to online sales growth. Now, regarding stores, we will continue our refurbishing efforts to make sure our store portfolio is up to date.
We will offer an enhanced in-store experience through data-supported store layout optimization and additional vendor coaching. To that end, we will deploy a mobile-based sales force training program next year. We will also roll out digital tags for customers so that they can access product information in a seamless way via their mobiles. Lastly, our marketplace will trigger additional revenues for our stores as it will be logically included in click-in-store sales. In addition, we will reinforce a virtual omnichannel loop through two key initiatives. First, we will be deploying a consolidated ID ordering platform across online and stores. In practice, this will allow sales associates to initiate an online basket in store for final purchase by the customer back at home.
Second, we will review our KPI and incentive system so that our store teams are adequately rewarded for their role in the customer journey, even when the sale takes place online at a later time. Let's come back to our marketplace for a minute so that we can share with you how we see our way ahead. We will be pursuing its development in two directions. First, we will enrich the proposition further. This means three things. One, adding vendors and categories to complement our own offering in the most efficient and profitable way.
Two, enhancing the visibility of our marketplace using the data we've collected for better search engine optimization and also through thematic campaigns on the website, mixing Maisons du Monde and marketplace products for a fully integrated user experience. Three, increasing our sales per vendor through enhanced reach and efficiency, helping them stand out through filters and badges, bringing them advanced analytics, and helping them improve their offering. Second, we will fully deploy our omnichannel and international model. We will bring marketplace offerings to our stores, first on our sales teams' tablets, and later, via select showrooming. Marketplace will also be rolled out across Europe with five countries in total over the plan, France, and also Spain, Italy, Germany, and Belgium.
As we do so, we will reinforce the distinctiveness of Maisons du Monde's value proposition to marketplace vendors, as we will offer an online and offline Pan-European platform with a uniquely large and high-quality audience of deco fans. Another key ingredient to our successful omnichannel strategy is the active management of our store portfolio. Over the next four years, we will open stores at an average rate of 15-25 stores a year, which is a bit less than the 25-30 stores rate we had over the pre-COVID period. In this, we are again raising our standards further in terms of area potential and expected net contribution to total omnichannel sales. We will continue to close stores at a rate similar to that of the very recent years. That is 10-15 a year, mainly through our usual repositioning logic.
That is closing old and small stores in less dynamic areas to open bigger stores with higher traffic potential, typically in retail parks a few miles away. About half of our closures over the plan will be in France. All in all, that will result in 5-15 net openings per year and a total of 30-50 net openings over the 4-year period. By geography, that will mean a net addition of up to 10 stores in France, as most repositioning moves will take place in that country, and one closure followed by one opening will be equivalent to zero net opening. Outside France, net addition will be higher, with new country opening plan proving particularly dynamic. To complement these store openings, we will be testing the commission-based affiliation model in 2023.
Affiliation is better suited than franchise to our branded concept, as it allows Maisons du Monde to remain in control of store experience, product assortment, and pricing. This is a most integrated model, where the partner covers the CapEx while Maisons du Monde keeps the inventory ownership. We believe this model could be an interesting addition to our own store network, particularly in France, as it could allow us to open in less dense areas where we would not go by ourselves. Now this is a test, and we do not embed it in our financial base case. Our brand being so valuable, we will take the time we need to make sure it is a good option and how to best go about it. Let's now talk about international expansion, another key pillar of our distinctive business model. First, let's look at some numbers.
As you can see on this slide, international sales have nearly doubled in revenue size since 2016, despite substantial COVID-related store closures over the last two years. All countries have progressed, with countries such as Switzerland, Germany, and Spain showing outstanding growth. Germany has thus become our third non-domestic market after Italy and Spain. It is also our solid first in the online segment. One of the reasons we have been able to grow so quickly in Europe is that we have a very agile omnichannel model. Specifically, we can adapt our mix between online and offline, depending on each country's pace of growth and digital shift. For example, this year, as much as one-third of our sales will be made online in Spain, a country with a historical digitalization rate comparable to Italy. We can also be flexible in terms of store concept.
While our typical model is a retail park store, as we've explained earlier, we can, and we have, opened smaller stores in higher traffic locations such as city centers, like in Madrid or Hamburg, or shopping malls like in Vienna. In countries where brand awareness is lower, these stores help create visibility and consumer trust. They also support the development of online sales through the free in-store delivery service they offer. Germany is, for us, a good example of our agile yet disciplined approach. Indeed, agility is best served when it comes with discipline. Agility means testing and learning, and discipline means consistently translating lessons learned into usable playbook. In Germany, we opened a first set of seven stores in our first two years of operations to try out various combination until we understood the winning recipe. Our following openings followed a specific playbook with an omnichannel logic.
From 2019, we've been opening our stores very selectively, favoring city centers where our online sales were strong already, like Berlin, Cologne, Hamburg, or Frankfurt, or areas with established and complementary furniture players to benefit from natural high walk-in traffic, like in Dresden. In parallel, we kept actively developing our online presence and sales. Online was, as you can see at the bottom of the slide, a key growth driver, especially through the pandemic. As a result, country sales have been developing at a great pace. Even between 2019 and 2021, country sales growth has been well above European average, despite a total of 8 months of store closures over the two years in that country. This shows how unique our omnichannel model is. We plan to continue our agile yet disciplined approach to international expansion as it proved effective over the years.
This leads us to be very pragmatic and take clear and fact-based decisions. This is how we decided to pause our development in the U.S. Indeed, we realized that despite some early success, the level of investment was high to win in that market, and we saw better value creation opportunities in our existing countries. To maximize shareholder return, the best move was to refocus on Europe. Today, this logic drives us to expand our omnichannel model in each of our core markets, once again adapting to local specificities. As we mentioned, Spain is experiencing a sharp acceleration in e-commerce penetration following the COVID pandemic, and we are actively riding that wave. We are allocating marketing spend to that country. In the meantime, the digital shift in Italy has been more modest so far. Therefore, we are there focusing more on driving traffic to stores through online.
These trade-offs are easy to make in our centralized organization, which gives us extreme responsiveness in marketing spend allocation and more broadly, optimization across countries. In addition, we will be implementing the virtuous omnichannel cycle in markets we have previously tested online. This is how we came to open our first store in Portugal in 2019 and our first store in Austria in 2021, following years of online activity. I've told you about our strong omnichannel model in which online and offline genuinely reinforce each other, and we just discussed how we are applying the experience we've gained so far to move forward on healthy pan-European growth. Now I want to talk to you about sustainability and how it is integral to our business model, just like it's embedded in our brand. To launch this part, let's watch a video.
Responsibility is embedded in our DNA. We take action for the planet. In the last decade, we've increased our use of certified wood to 70%, and this year we introduced OEKO-TEX certified textiles, which already represent 25% of our textile offering. We have also reduced our energy consumption drastically, especially in our stores, enabling us to successfully cut our carbon footprint across Scope 1 and Scope 2. We also seek to embody corporate citizenship.
Our foundation has donated EUR 3.7 million to forest conservation efforts since 2015. What makes us most proud is the support we receive from our customers who have given EUR 1.5 million in 3 years through our micro donation programs.
More broadly, people are at the heart of what we do. We take an active role in social programs. We work with our suppliers. We conduct 150 supplier audits and coaching programs every year. We also foster social innovation through sharing of best practices in China and India. We work with civil society.
Because of our business, we are uniquely placed to provide comfort to those in need. We have been partnered with the Emmaüs network for five years, and every year we furnish five shelters of the French Red Cross. During the pandemic, we also provided 40 dec
oration packs to hospitals across Europe. We work with our own teams.
We are very proud of our exceptional gender equality. Women are two-thirds of our employees and 80% of our internal promotions. They make up half of our executive committee and board, placing us among the SBF 120's top 5.
Overall, our colleagues are highly engaged with the company. 82% feel proud to work at Maisons du Monde. Today, guided by our company purpose, we are taking our commitments one step further. To protect the environment, we are taking a more holistic approach by also addressing product end of life from repairs and second life to waste management. To promote social inclusion, we are helping young people from all horizons enter the job market with increased apprenticeships and mentoring focused on underprivileged youth. These are all illustrations of our company purpose in action. Creating unique, heartfelt and sustainable places together is the driving force that guides our decisions throughout the company. We believe this vision will appeal to our customers as much as to our teams, reinforcing our position as the European leader in inspirational and affordable home and living.
Maisons du Monde has been engaging in sustainability for over a decade, long before it became a thing. As a home furnishings company, our first efforts concerned sustainable wood sourcing, and also because this was one of the first ecological labels to gain currency. In 2016, we launched our first company-wide CSR plan, which included an ambitious program to reduce our energy consumption. I'm proud to say that over 95% of our stores are now powered by green energy, vastly reducing our energy-linked carbon footprint. In 2019, we raised our ambitions by adhering to the SBTI or Science-Based Targets initiative, a worldwide corporate action framework that came out of the Paris Agreement on Climate Change. This led us to set ourselves a bold 2030 trajectory on carbon reduction with quantified targets and milestones.
In 2020, we made our first push for nearshore sourcing, with over half of our sofas now made in France. In 2021, we launched our first OEKO-TEX certified textile offering, granting sustainable manufacturing. We take sustainability very seriously, and we apply the same discipline in this area that we apply to running our business. Let me give you a little more detail on exactly what that means. We were among the first non-food retailers, and still among the few in our category, to run a Scope 3 analysis of our carbon footprint. As a reminder, Scope 3 means analyzing the entire value chain to fully assess our direct and indirect impact on the environment. As you probably know, this is quite challenging and not many companies are doing it yet, given all that it requires in terms of traceability and accountability.
As a result of our analysis and to fit with the SBTi 2030 trajectory, we have set ourselves the goal to reduce our carbon intensity by 25% by 2025 across Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3. We will do this by acting on the 5 highest sources of emissions, namely, 1, products, improving what they are made of and how they are manufactured. 2, customer travel to stores by increasing the shelf online itself and by relocating our stores in higher traffic areas. 3, transportation, optimizing footprint from factory to end customers. 4, product end-of-life management, reducing waste and ensuring recyclability. 5, finally, energy footprint reduction through more reasonable consumption and the use of renewable energy. To illustrate the complexity involved, let me linger on transportation for a minute.
It is interesting to note that this source of emissions accounts for only 8% of our total footprint, and that includes the last mile travel from a warehouse to user's home for online orders. It is also hard to reduce with current technology. Indeed, one ton transported on a truck from Warsaw to Paris has the same carbon footprint as one ton transported on the boat from Shanghai to Marseille. Nearshore sourcing has a limited impact on transportation-related carbon footprint reduction. In some cases, however, it may come with greener manufacturing techniques or better social conditions for workers. These are all characteristics we carefully analyze for each product category to design a truly impactful roadmap, which we will be reporting on every year.
The ambitious and disciplined approach we take to ESG explains why we are broadly recognized as best in class in our category, with excellent extra-financial ratings. These rankings are consistent across agencies, whether you look at MSCI, where we are number 1 in the home sector, or Sustainalytics and Vigeo Eiris, where we are among the top 5%. Well, 2021 marks another milestone in our ESG ambition with our just announced company purpose, our raison d'être. After 18 months of work with our colleagues and external stakeholders, we are proud to share it with you today, inspiring everyone to open up to the world so that we create unique, heartfelt, and sustainable places together. Each word has been translated into company-wide roadmaps to make sure we align our entire strategic agenda along that company purpose. Of course, sustainability is a foundation of this vision.
This is why we are taking extra steps on environmental, social, and governance matters. On the environmental side, in line with our company goal of reducing carbon intensity across our overall footprint, we are planning to reach carbon neutrality across Scope 1 and Scope 2 as of next year. Last but not least, we want to be at the forefront of circular economy in our category. Here, we have several initiatives underway. Last year, we started training our style and product teams so that product design can favor recyclability at the end of product life. This year, we opened our own repair and reconditioning unit at our warehouses in Marseille. This new unit consists of 40 people, including cabinet makers, painters, and carpenters. It has achieved great results already in its first year with 20,000 products repaired and 30,000 repackaged.
Even more exciting, we have just started our Second Life program to offer our products to customers secondhand. We are aiming for this solution to be live by the start of 2023. On the equally important social side, we are also taking additional steps. First, the well-being and engagement of our employees remains our key priority. This year, we have implemented permanent work from home routines, which drive high employee engagement. In 2022, we will roll out our personalized mentoring and training programs with one-to-one professional coaching and modular mobile-based learning so that our employees can keep growing and increasing their skill sets. We also want to take an active role in society. Of course, we want to offer equal opportunities for women.
We are proud of our gender equality index of 83 out of 100, and we have just been nominated in the top five of the SBF 120 for women in leadership positions for the second year running. We also want to give a hand to young people, especially those from diverse communities. We are making commitments to promote greater diversity in our workforce, and we have just embarked on a company-wide mentoring program for our colleagues to reach out to underprivileged youth. Finally, governance. Our suppliers are our first partners, and we have launched an initiative to consolidate our supplier portfolio so that we can coach them better over time. In parallel, we have reinforced our social auditing capabilities with 150 audits this year. That is five times more than five years ago.
To further strengthen our supplier governance, we are planning to relocate a share of our manufacturing in Europe in the coming years. We are in the process of defining our sourcing roadmap at product family level to strike the right balance between cost, manufacturing know-how, and sustainability. Like I said before, relocation to Europe may lower risk when it comes to workers' social conditions, as European regulations are stricter in that regard compared to most Asian countries. Also, consumers now value Made in Europe products more, so it makes sense for us to consider increasing the share of nearshore sourcing for certain categories. However, Maisons du Monde is also about exotic wood and handcrafting techniques, some of which cannot be found in Europe. So balance is the name of the game. In addition, we are raising our standards in terms of traceability.
This year, we launched a structured approach to product traceability, and in our first year, we've managed to trace over 80% of our products at factory level. Finally, we are aligning interest of our teams to those of our shareholders by embedding free cash flow and also CSR targets in the short-term or long-term incentives of our managers. These three ESG dimensions are all equally important and contribute to making us a brand people are happy to buy from and work for.
Before I hand over to Régis for our financial segment, let me just recap what we've gone through. Our business model is fit for purpose and set to deliver profitable growth. Our flexible omnichannel approach is unique by strong online and offline synergies, and especially suited to expansion across Europe. No less important, we are driven by a determination to reconcile performance and sustainability, and to this end, we are aiming to reinforce our leadership on CSR matters. These three drivers will keep strengthening our business model, which delivers high and sustainable growth. Without further ado, Régis, the floor is yours.
Thank you, Julie. Now let's look at what is specific to Maisons du Monde's financial model, reviewing our performance since 2016 with key metrics that explain Maisons du Monde's model, which aims to deliver increasing shareholder returns. There are three pillars I would like to cover, looking at our past performance with the benefit of hindsight. The first one is about growth. Maisons du Monde story is growth, and more specifically, it's a story about the development of our omnichannel model. Second, I will cover profitability, which is at the center of financial equation. Third, I will review cash generation, another key metric that is essential for returning value to shareholders. Starting with growth, I propose that we address its different components, looking closely at our omnichannel model, reviewing our international expansion, and covering our innovative new adjacent revenue streams.
Before we get into each of these components, I think it's important to set the scene by looking at where we stand today. Our business is now around EUR 1.3 billion in sales compared to less than EUR 1 billion in 2016. It is around 50% growth over the last five years, equivalent to a strong compound annual growth rate of around 8% per year. We have continually demonstrated our capacity to grow at a high rate, in particular, when you consider that our business was hit by the pandemic recently. Even at the height of the pandemic, we delivered the equivalent of a high single digit CAGR over 2 years. Our 16% growth in the first 9 months of 2022, which illustrates the resilience of our business model during a challenging period.
This track record of high growth was made possible thanks to two specific drivers, digital and stores. First, let's talk about e-commerce, which contributed 36% of sales in the first nine months of the year. Our online sales have more than doubled in five years. This is equivalent to a CAGR circa 20%. How did we achieve this? First, our online traffic is three times what it was in 2016, and we have increased our conversion rate by 35%. Another interesting element is that this growth is very strong in the international part of our activity, with 53% of web now outside of France. We have also successfully multiplied our online customers by 2.5 times to 1.7 million.
Importantly, I would like as well to highlight that 60% of our online sales are now repeat business, up from only one-third in 2016. Finally, as Julie mentioned, our curated marketplace is off to a great start with EUR 50 million GMV over the first nine months of the year, which is above 20% of our French online GMV. Let's now move to the other growth driver I mentioned, store performance. This graph shows how sustainable our performance has been since 2016. Again, despite the ups and downs due to COVID, we were nevertheless able to deliver a store CAGR of 3.5%. If we were to adjust from COVID effect, this CAGR would be above 4%. Let's examine a few of these KPIs that highlight our store performance.
My first example is sales per square meter, an interesting metric which, adjusted for COVID, increased 3% over the period. The second one is the performance of recently opened stores versus earlier openings. Taking the average sales contribution of each store at opening year plus one, stores opened recently delivered 5% higher first-year performance compared to stores opened 5 years ago. This illustrates how disciplined we are in choosing new locations that maximize sales and in our attention to return on capital employed when allocating CapEx. Again, as Julie already said, stores are a key component of our growth and also an area where we are leveraging our data capabilities very effectively. Our discussion of sales performance would be incomplete without talking about our international performance and the way we have successfully extended our business beyond France.
Looking at this graph, international aggregate CAGR has been above 15% since 2016. Notice how this growth is balanced between our established countries, namely Italy, Spain, Belgium, Luxembourg, and our new markets, which delivered over 25% CAGR in the last five years, including two new countries we opened since 2019, Portugal and Austria. The second thing worth noting is that our international growth is very strong across both channels, with an even higher acceleration for online as I shared before. All in all, Maisons du Monde's omnichannel model is very well adapted to extending in other European countries, where we see a clear path towards developing our footprint. With Julie, we will tell you more in the final section of this presentation about what this means for our roadmap towards 2025. Next, let's revisit our growth in terms of categories.
Maisons du Monde has a very good multi-style offering that is built around furniture and decoration, categories that complement each other. Both categories are growing fast. Decoration and furniture have similar growth rates, high single-digit%. It was feasible thanks to two different elements. First, revitalization of our decoration collections and a powerful in-house creation team. Second, there's the extension of our furniture product range. Third, through the development of larger stores and facilitating online furniture sales. The recent performance of outdoor in 2021 that we commented this year is a perfect example of the strength of our portfolio with growth low- to mid-teens% this year. Globally, our omnichannel model benefits both categories and vice versa. Historically, store networks had more home decoration sales. Conversely, online had more furniture sales. Thanks to the seamless integration of our omnichannel strategy, both categories are evolving across channels.
A strong omni-channel model combined with balanced and diversified portfolio is key to creating more value. To complete our sales overview, let's update on our new activities. These adjacent businesses may still be young, but they play an important role in our pan-European omni-channel model. Our B2B activity will be around EUR 40 million at year-end, very close to 2019 performance. That's four times what it was in 2016. B2B had a strong momentum until the pandemic outbreak, from EUR 11 million in 2016 to EUR 40 million in 2019 with the launch of web channel in 2018. Now, most verticals, namely hotels, restaurants, office spaces, durably suffered from the pandemic with hotels and restaurants closed a large part of 2020, and office spaces being reassessed by companies in the light of development of work from home practices.
Demand has progressively resumed over the last few months, with B2B players still being cautious in this recovery phase. Having recovered in 2021, the level of 2019 is already a very positive rebound. The underlying business is still very promising. We expect demand to keep gaining momentum, as showed in our numbers over the last six months, +12% versus 2020. Furthermore, the profile of our B2B activity is better by the year, with growth driven more and more by online, which now accounts for 55% of sales versus a level below 50 in 2018. Our offering is also increasingly successful outside of France, with rest of Europe now representing 45% of B2B sales. We are resolute in developing this segment further, which we see as a valuable component of our branded ecosystem.
Our image among end customers strongly contributes to our appeal to B2B customers and our B2B achievements. Like the three hotels we have fully decorated sets us further apart from other B2C players and reinforces our brand. Not to mention, this segment is accretive on margin. Now, because demand is hard to predict on the post-COVID environment, we prefer to be cautious in our sales estimates. One could therefore view this as an upside to our core plan. Last, let's update on Rhinov, an activity that has doubled since 2019. Rhinov is proving an effective way for us to connect with customers both online and in stores. It offers an innovative solution that is vertically integrated from initial concept to choice of products.
One interesting KPI online of 50% of our service sales turn into product sales with an average basket equivalent to 3.5 times our average basket from other customer journeys. Innov still has high growth potential and is another relevant component of our omnichannel value proposition. After our discussion of sales, our next section is about profitability. Maisons du Monde is not just about growth, but more importantly, growth at a high level of profitability. I would like now to review three key features of our profitability. Gross margin, operational efficiency, and finally, how we invest to fuel growth. Gross margin. I think it's fair to say that our gross margin is not that of a classic retailer, but more comparable to a well-established brand. We have maintained a gross margin of about 66% since 2016.
This is high sustained level and a very good overall performance. This puts us 20 points above the median of our peers, which illustrates Maisons du Monde's superior business model as a loved brand. The second feature of our profitability is operational efficiency. First, on logistics. This is an area where we keep rationalizing costs year after year. Two data points I think are interesting to share. Since 2016, our warehousing costs per unit manipulated in our warehouse have decreased by 4%, thanks to densification of our operations and lean programs. On transportation, despite inflation, the development of our international network and the acceleration of direct-to-consumer delivery, we have been successful in maintaining a flat ratio of transport to sales. On stores, total SG&A ratio is overall stable despite inflation and higher costs in new countries where we have recently expanded our network, such as Germany.
Looking at our store network, we continue to manage our spending with discipline. I'm proud to report that we have decreased our network operating cost per sq m by roughly 10% on a like-for-like basis versus 2016. Lastly, operational efficiency is also about the way we invest to support growth. Our total SG&A ratio, for example, for web, excluding marketing specific spending, is down almost 1 point, thanks to sales growth and centralized operations. Before we get into the details of what investment for growth could mean, I'm happy to report that our returns on online investments have nearly doubled since 2016. On all levels, we are constantly managing our model to maximize the profitability behind growth, as our recent guidance update shows. This is essential.
Our focus beyond growth to seek for further efficiencies in the way we execute our agenda is critical to fuel a virtuous cycle of investment. This is the perfect transition to talk about investment and where we are taking Maisons du Monde going forward. To preserve our future growth capacity, it's essential to be able to increase investments in our model. The first investment focus is marketing. Looking on the left-hand side of the slide here, our marketing spending to sales ratio is more than 100 basis points higher than in 2016. Recently, we have boosted our online investment to support the launch of our marketplace, money well spent, as you already know. We have also been accelerating investment in our brand. Finally, CapEx, which are naturally investment for future growth. There are two important elements you can see on the right-hand side of the slide.
One is that our CapEx has increased over the period, approaching EUR 60 million-EUR 70 million every year. At the same time, a CapEx to sales ratio that has been decreasing, reflecting both our growth agenda and our highly demanding approach to selecting growth projects, whether they relate to store openings and maintenance, 60% of our current CapEx, logistics, 15% of CapEx, or more structural investments such as IT, another 15% of the total, an area where we've been increasing our spending over the last 3 years. Combining all these elements from the structure of profitability to management of our resources, Maisons du Monde is very well equipped to keep nurturing profitable growth. We are a growth company with the potential to grow at a strong pace, but this cannot be growth at all costs without regard for profitability.
I think it's now time to pause and explain what we aim to do. The resilience and sustainability of our model depend on constantly maintaining a balance between our growth rate and our profitability. Depending on the context, we must maintain the agility either to seek acceleration or at times to adjust the pace of growth to preserve our profitability equation. This is exactly the way we are currently driving the last part of 2021, as we commented during our nine-month performance call. How do we do this? We have three main avenues for optimizing this balance to keep growing and ensure the right level of profitability for Maisons du Monde. First, it's about strengthening the growth model around developing the brand, its omnichannelity, if you will, its pan-European scope, as well as prioritizing the sustainability-driven initiatives. The second element is to keep enhancing operational excellence in every area.
Finally, remaining very disciplined in the way we allocate our resources. All of these factors contribute to a strong and sustainable balance between growth and profitability. Now that we have looked at the models that we aim to implement for the long run, I propose that we overview how that balance-seeking approach flows through our P&L. Here is how it will translate into our 2025 profitability profile. Gross margin, it should remain stable as a combined result of, first, external headwinds, such as freight, with a major effect in 2022, and raw material cost increases, strategic investment to further enhance product quality and sustainability. On the contrary, margin protection initiatives, including supplier and product mix management or pricing optimization. Net margin should slightly improve despite online and international gaining higher share in the sales mix.
Indeed, our resolute action to drive operational efficiencies at logistics and transportation levels, partly enabled by our new semi-automated warehouse, combined with the deployment of our marketplace in five countries by 2025, will have a net positive effect. Like I said, our priority is to fuel profitable growth, and smart marketing investments are a key part of this agenda. We will increase our performance marketing budget to support online growth, and we will also materially increase our branding investments so that our brand awareness and brand profile both develop, especially outside France. This will increase our marketing ratio from 5% of sales in the last 12 months to somewhere between 6%-8% in 2025. Coming to other SG&A, here again, we keep in sight the necessary balance between cost optimization and midterm growth. We will sustain our cost discipline to drive operating leverage.
Meanwhile, we will further strengthen our organization, recruiting new talents and implementing new tools so that we can grow at scale while maintaining high level of efficiency and staff engagement. In addition, we will also invest in new initiatives to support our sales expansion. For instance, our new brand and CSR department will work on enhancing our store concept and developing brand content across Europe. We will invest in the Second Life program Julie just mentioned, and recruit experts to develop our sustainable raw material sourcing. Innovation is a key enabler of our growth story, and we want to safeguard financial capacity to try new things, test, learn, and ultimately succeed. All in all, SG&A ratio on sales, including the extra effort on marketing, will decrease over the period of the plan. As far as CapEx is concerned, investment will grow in value but decrease as a percentage of sales.
As Julie described in the prior section, we'll keep opening a smaller number of stores every year, but less than the average of the past years. As our sales grow, we will get leverage. Store CapEx should go slightly below 50% of total CapEx. Logistics investments will be higher by 2023, as our new warehouse ramps up and should decrease after. As a consequence, our logistics investment ratio should go down from 15% today to half of this in 2025. Finally, our IT and data investments will go up both in value and in ratio to further digitalize the company, including new tools and systems for finance and HR, to guarantee that Maisons du Monde is fit to take on its ambitious growth agenda. HQ overall CapEx may double to circa 30% of the total by 2025.
Having discussed our model of profitable growth, I want to conclude this section explaining how it translates into cash generation and what we do with our cash. The model I've just described is naturally cash generative, and if you look back as far as 2016, we have turned our profitable growth into a NOPAT that is consistently around EUR 75 million-EUR 80 million on average and very likely higher this year. As we saw a moment ago, our disciplined approach to spending results in a constantly optimized CapEx allocation. Lastly, we are maintaining our efforts to improve working capital. On this topic, you can see on the slide our volatile inventory management has been and can be. Obviously, this is a key focus to support our business as well as cash generation. Normalizing the situation is an essential priority at the moment.
These three main cash flow drivers underpin our model and combine to structurally deliver high free cash flow. On this slide, we can see this performance over the last 5 years with cumulative free cash flow of over EUR 300 million. This cash has allowed us to almost fully deleverage the company for a net debt ratio very close to zero today. The growth agenda I've described is therefore self-funded, demonstrating that we possess all the levers to fuel and manage our future growth. I think it's important at this moment in time to acknowledge that this cash generation has allowed us to deliver a very good return to shareholders. As you see on the left, our dividend grew consistently pre-COVID, with a payout ratio of 30%-40%, one of the highest amongst our peers.
This regular distribution of value to shareholders, which remains our central lever for returning value, has been recently combined with the announcement of our first ESG share buyback program in the amount of EUR 50 million, which benefited from increase of our 2021 outlook, as well as proceeds expected from the sale of Modani. To conclude, let me briefly summarize the key points I'd like you to remember. Maisons du Monde is all about the capability to grow at a high pace, to grow in a profitable way from an already high level of profitability. To place this in the service of a self-funded growth model with a strong capacity to generate cash every year. This model provides a framework for delivering strong and increasing shareholder returns. Thank you. Now I'm back to Julie.
Thank you, Régis. We've told you about the strength of our brand, our business model, and our financial profile. Now I'd like to take a step back and show you how they fit together going forward in our outlook. We have a clear path to create sustainable value for our shareholders. This comes in three parts, growth, profitability, and cash generation. First, growth. We have explained in previous sections how we are planning to grow. Reinforce brand awareness and leadership around creativity, inspiration, and engagement. A digital-led omnichannel model strengthened by our curated marketplace, and agile yet disciplined international expansion with a focus on Europe. How will that materialize in financials? Channel-wise, you can see here that growth will be broadly balanced between online and stores, driving a total revenue number of EUR 1.8 billion-EUR 1.9 billion in 2025.
In gross merchandise value terms, revenue should exceed EUR 2 billion by that year. That is an over 50% increase versus 2021, or a 10%+ CAGR over the period. Adjacent avenues, namely B2B and Rhinov, will make a limited contribution to sales growth in the near future for the reasons Régis has just described in the previous section. That is progressive ramp up of the underlying demand. That said, we continue to see them as highly valuable add-ons that reinforce our core model. Over the four-year period, this ambition translates into a high single-digit sales growth CAGR at group level. If we now turn to our geographical split, here again, growth will be balanced between France and the rest of Europe.
Focusing on the rest of Europe, about 30% of total growth will come from our established markets, namely, as Régis mentioned, Italy, Spain, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Twenty percent will come from our new markets, which are Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the U.K., Austria, and Portugal. We are looking at a model in which our countries outside France make a strong contribution to our future growth. As a result, here is what Maisons du Monde's profile should look like in 2025. Online should account for 40% of total sales, while digital, that is online plus click and store, should represent over 60% of total. International, meaning the rest of Europe, will represent 48%-50% of the group sales from the 45% today. Yes, Maisons du Monde is a growth story. Not just that.
We by no means are pursuing a strategy of growth for the sake of growth. What we want is profitable growth and sustainable value creation, and that requires discipline and action at every level of the company to achieve. Let's talk about how this should translate into profitability. As you've heard over the course of the presentation, we have a strong and varied toolkit for enhancing profitability, not just when it comes to our growth ahead, but our current operations as well. As a result of this increasingly disciplined approach to secure the right balance between growth and margins, we expect to approach the EUR 200 million EBIT bar by 2025. That is an EBIT margin around 11%.
As you can see on this slide, we also expect to deliver cumulative free cash flow of over EUR 350 million over the next four years through three main drivers. One, leveraging our profitable growth model and low level of debt. Two, driving CapEx with strict discipline. Three, optimizing our working capital level. This really matters for two reasons. First one, as Régis said earlier, it is obviously crucial to fuel our future organic growth, which remains our first objective when considering use of cash. The first period of the plan will be as well important to rebuild inventories and to further strengthen our organization, as Régis explained, so it is well equipped to fully capture the opportunities of our growth agenda in the long run.
In the midterm, cash may allow us to also possibly explore and develop new growth avenues as we see fit. Second reason is that cash allows us to reward our shareholders. We have a history of industry-leading returns, and we intend to maintain our payout ratio between 30% and 40% in the years ahead. Before we move on to Q&A, where Régis and I will answer the questions, let me leave you with a recap of our midterm guidance. Sales should achieve a CAGR in the high single digits over the four-year period, with sales reaching EUR 1.8 billion-EUR 1.9 billion in 2025 and gross merchandise value exceeding EUR 2 billion by that year.
Our EBIT rate should reach around 11% in 2025, which comes out to an extra 150-200 basis points over our just upgraded guidance for 2021. Cumulative free cash flow is expected to reach EUR 350 million over the period, with a target of EUR 100 million for the year 2025. In addition, as I just said, we will maintain our payout ratio between 30% and 40%. Lastly, our guidance would be incomplete without ESG targets. On that front, we plan to become carbon neutral in 2022 over Scope 1 and Scope 2.
To reduce our carbon intensity by 25% across Scope 1, Scope 2, and Scope 3 by 2025. We will also double our share of products meeting sustainability criteria to reach 40% of our total offering by the end of the plan. To conclude, I hope we have convinced you today that Maisons du Monde is well-positioned to remain the European leader in affordable and inspirational home and living through the most desirable and sustainable home and living brands, and a distinctive model that creates sustainable value for all our stakeholders while continuing to deliver high growth. Thank you for your attention.
Thank you all.
For our Q&A segment, Christopher Welton of Investor Relations will be coordinating the questions you've submitted via the chat, as well as those on conference call. If you haven't sent us your questions yet, please feel free to do so now. Chris, hello. I think you have a first question.
Thank you, Julie. Just a very quick reminder, if you want to submit a question in writing, you can do so in the chat section on the webcast. If you want to give a question on the telephone, please press star one. Now, let's see if we have a first question. We do. The first question is, your online is already 36% of your total sales. You plan to grow that to 40% over the next 4 years. Does that mean that your online penetration is slowing down?
Thank you, Chris. That's right. Our online reached 36% of our year-to-date sales, which is indeed a very high number. Now, as you know, our Q4 is geared towards decoration and store sales. Usually out of the full year sales, we usually lose 2-3 points in terms of mix. We could expect that this year online should account for approximately 1/3, 33% of total sales. That will be for 2021. If you take that as a starting point, reaching 40% in 2025, that is in 4 years' time, approximately equals to a 2-point share gain over the period, which is broadly similar to what we've achieved over the last years, which is a very bold ambition. Any other question, Chris?
Yes, we have another question. This one on the marketplace. The question is, you are already at 21% of your online sales, and you tell us that you plan to be at 25% by 2025. Can you please explain to us the journey on this specific revenue element in a little bit more detail, please?
Thank you, Chris. Twenty-one percent of total French sales out of the 9-month sales was indeed what we've achieved. As you know, France is about half of the online sales, so if you would take the total scope, that would be around 10% of total GMV out of the 9 months. Again, that is our starting point. Now, to go from there to 25% of total group GMV means that we will be implementing our marketplace both in France and in other countries. By the end of the plan, what we expect is that the marketplace should reach about 30%-35% of French online GMV. As for the other countries, we expect the marketplace to reach 20%-25% of the online GMV of those respective markets.
That difference is linked to the fact that we are off to a great start in France, so we will have more time during the plan to increase the penetration rate. Indeed, it is off to a great start this year. As for the other countries, because the marketplace model is a little bit less mature, we expect this year to be a little bit smaller. Now, we may be positively surprised as we've been in France, but that's our correct expectations.
We have a third question. If we have understood correctly, you plan on generating EUR 350 million of free cash flow over the period and maintaining a payout ratio of 30%-40%. Could you please give us an indication of how you're going to use the free cash flow? How much for dividends? How much for CapEx? Thank you.
I will take this one. Thank you, Chris, for the question. Three elements I could mention. First I will start with the slide that Julie commented in the outlook section, which describe two phases. One is really the first part of the plan, where we're gonna replenish our inventories, which is an important element in our immediate journey, as well as strengthening our model and investing in our internal tools. I think it's important to have that in mind. Second part of the plan will be really about turning to new revenue streams. I think second element I would like to mention of the plan is CapEx.
As per the question, Chris, you may remember in the presentation we have mentioned that CapEx should get to ratio around 5% of sales, which means that globally, and it's really important part of the agenda and in our use of cash, considering how we have to fuel for growth, probably translating at the end of the plan with a level around EUR 80 million. Back to the other part of the question. Indeed, return to shareholder is an important part of our agenda. We mentioned in this, in the guidance today a ratio 30%-40%, which is really our ambition to make it really sustainable. If we translate that for the period 2022 to 2025 related to the dividend of 2021 to 2024, to be totally correct, I think it's fair to say that the portion of the cash dedicated to dividend will be probably circa EUR 80 million-EUR 100 million.
We have another written question, and it goes like this: "Hi. I'm not sure I understood where the 150-200 basis points improvement in your EBIT margin is coming from. Could you please go over that again for us?
I take this one as well, Julie, if you're okay. On EBIT, I think the question is probably in connection with the guidance, which is to increase a bit 150-200 basis points. I think it's fair to consider twofold. One will be EBITDA, probably 50-100 basis points. In EBITDA, having half of this development related to net margin and half on the SG&A. On SG&A, you heard Julie and myself explaining that while investing and increasing investment on marketing notably, but as well on quality and sustainability. I think it's an important factor to bear in mind.
The second element of development of EBIT will be related to D&A for 50-100 basis points, roughly, on the back of the discipline we put behind CapEx. I hope you understood that level of discipline we want really to maintain over the resource allocation in general. Secondly, the digitalization of the model plus growth obviously will create leverage. That would be my way to summarize the two elements that contribute to the development of margin in the guidance.
The next question is on ESG. It is, "The company's commitment to ESG initiatives is impressive." Thank you. "Would it be possible to explain in more detail how you integrate ESG into your investment decisions?
Thank you, Chris. I hope we made it clear during the presentation. CSR is really part of all of our roadmaps and is core to our decision-making process. We want to be truly impactful. We really specifically focus on those drivers that really generate the highest share of the carbon footprint. Maybe to give concrete examples, let me focus on product. As you could see, that is one driver that will make our company more responsible in that regard. Product, for example, we did several things. Well, first, as you know, we've been resorted to more and more sustainable materials. Let's take wood. Now nearly 70% of our wood products are made with a certified or recycled wood. Certified wood is substantially more expensive. It's about 10% more expensive.
In a given year, it's about EUR 5 million-EUR 6 million additional spend that we put just to really make sure that we have a certified wood for our furniture products. That's one. Another one regarding organization, we have really reinforced massively our quality and sustainability department within the offer teams. We are nearly doubling the size of the team, so that means really extra resources, experts in terms of sustainable material sourcing, for example, in terms of really design of the product to make sure that we are going for extra durability. This team basically will be nearly double the size in 2022 compared to 2018. That's very concrete investment, and obviously impacts the way we are doing things. Typically now our quality are much more upstream in the process.
We have a very rigorous checklist for our suppliers, both on environmental and social criteria. That's really important. Maybe on another topic, a third example would be on store. As we said, we've been massively reducing our energy footprint at store level, which is the main part of our Scope 1 and 2. For that, we've been implementing a vast relamping program to be able then after to fill with green energy. That was the equivalent of EUR 5 million-EUR 6 million invested to really reinstall our store network with this new lamping system, which basically allows us to reduce our energy consumption. Very concretely in each department, we do take CSR as a key part of our decision-making process.
Just a reminder, if you want to submit a written question, you can do so via the chat section on the webcast. If you want to ask a question over the telephone, please press star one. We have a question on the line from Bryan Garnier. Operator, could you please connect Clément Genelot? Thank you.
Good afternoon, Clément.
Good evening, everyone.
Yes, we can hear you very well.
I will have quick questions for myself if I may. The first one is on EBITDA margin. Is the 11% EBITDA margin against 2021 in line linearly across the trend of versus 2021? I mean, even 2022, a year of margin around [Inaudible] Struggle to work out the model in recent countries, or maybe what makes you more confident this time that you will succeed there. My third and last question is rather on prices. In your last Capital Markets Day in 2019, you mentioned price investments as a drag on gross margin development, and now you may rather be talking about price increases for all the years ahead. Is this shift only due to higher cost from inflation, cost inflation post-COVID, or is it rather a more global shift in pricing and so on? Thanks a lot.
Thank you, Clément. Régis will answer your first question, and I'll take your questions two and three.
Okay, let's start. Thanks, Clément, for your question. I understood the question is about how our linear margin development could be over the plan. Twofold. Our intention via the model we explained today is really about profitable growth, and you understood how important for us it is to balance growth and margin development. Not seeking for growth at any cost, and at the same time not seeking for high profitability per se. This is really one element I would like really to emphasize via your question. Second, yes, we know that 2022 will be a year where the effect of the freight will be much more material than for the rest of the plan.
We have commented, and I have commented during the last communication we made, end of October on Q3 results, that we have decided for price increase to offset most of that. Having said that, I think next year gross margin will be impacted this way and probably slightly negative. At the same time, we really want to keep the level of investment that will enable Maisons du Monde to support the growth agenda for the future. Next year we will maintain our effort on branding, customer experience, IT, quality, sustainability. We do not want to revisit this too much. Very likely that next year, 2022 margin being probably at the low end of the guidance we have set for this year.
Which means that in the agenda of the plan it's probably year one in the range of what we contemplate today, which I think considering the fight against inflation is really a good performance. Again, as I said, we do not want to stop the model to support growth. Then, a more, let's say, regular profitable growth over the target we have set around 11%. Hope it gives you elements.
Your second question on Germany. So to give maybe a picture of how I would describe it for Germany, it is true that we've been opening fewer stores in Germany compared to our other geographies, and that was really part of the strategy. We know that Germany is a complex market, and that really requires to really understand the local consumer in detail, and also to really understand the digital maturity of the country. That's what we understood quite early on. For quite a few years now, Germany has been very successful online regarding Maisons du Monde, and it has been our second online market just after France for quite a few years already.
Now, store sales have been a bit longer to pick up, not because we were struggling or the brand was not working, but this is a country where consumers, we found out, need a bit more time to be around the brand, to really visit stores, to really comprehend our concept. The more we are in this country, the more the concept is understood. It's true that it's very unique in Germany. It's very differentiated, and the more we go, the more it works out, as you could see, with the sales growth over the last few years. We are very optimistic about Germany. Again, we keep being very selective in terms of store openings, just to make sure exactly that we have a complementary channels between stores and online.
Specifically in Germany, we particularly look at where our online sales are really performing. We really look at our customer base to make sure that we drive this omnichannel model in the most effective way. The numbers prove that strategy right, so that's exactly how we plan to keep doing in the future with very selective store openings, mainly in city centers to really increase brand awareness and also to keep developing online. The third question was on prices. You're right, absolutely. A couple of years ago, we said that we would be doing price investment to make sure that we achieve really the best quality-price ratio and the best perceived value for our customers. That's exactly what we did.
What we in fact did is that we implemented pricing architectures for our categories. Meaning we really defined different price levels to make sure that our offering was balanced across those levels, and we were competitive, the most competitive at each price pricing level. What's really interesting is that this lower price range, what we call our PZO, was extremely successful over the last two years. This pricing investment really worked out. The other interesting piece is that our P3 and P4, so really the top of the pyramid, the more premium offering for Maisons du Monde, also proved particularly successful. That is something that we keep observing here in a COVID, post-COVID environment.
People tend to trade up a little bit, so we see really particular success in this upper price segment, which is really good news for us. We can see again that the brand drives pricing power and that we can pass along some pricing. Now, the situation is indeed unusual in the sense that, as Régis explained, the freight costs are really soaring as well as the raw material cost. Indeed, we have decided to implement selective pricing in the 5%-10% range, which is really what we also hear from the market. From that point of view, we don't think that we will lose competitiveness, because we think that everybody has increased their price or is increasing their prices.
Because we are very selective and very analytical about what price we increase and the other ones where we invest, we think that we will not lose competitiveness in that regard. Just to finish on that point, you know that we, with a lot of in-house design, our product comparability is very low. Less than 25% of our offering can be really comparable to products we can find at competition. Again, that gives also flexibility on that pricing topic.
Okay, we have another written question from Ajay Nandlal from Citi. Hi, AJ. AJ asks, "What is your base case assumption in terms of online penetration in the overall furnishing market? In case online penetration pickup is faster or slower than anticipated, will it impact your financial goals?
Thank you, Ajay Nandlal. The base case right now, research shows that it is around 12%, 12%-14%, depending on who runs the surveys. Online penetration rate is about that rate. We could expect that this goes up. I don't have exact forecast because we don't have those forecasts going down to 2025. Looking at more mature categories such as fashion or electronics, it could go up to 15%-20%. Obviously, Maisons du Monde is in a very good position to capture that opportunity. At the very beginning of the presentation, we could see that online penetration had really accelerated through COVID and Maisons du Monde had even more accelerated. Why is that?
Because in those times of acceleration, our centralized operations and the fact that we've been running online and digital marketing for quite some time now allows us to be extremely agile, extremely reactive, and to capture opportunities. I'm very confident that should that penetration go faster than what we currently expect, we will be able to capture the opportunity, as we did during COVID. Now, will that be positive or negative to our financials? Well, that would be positive because indeed the online segment has proved now to be really accretive to margins and will be increasingly so, with the marketplace development.
Okay, we have another call-in question from Maryline Faur at Société Générale. Operator, would you put Marilyn through, please? Thank you.
Okay. You measure your market share at 4% in France, which seems to me not significant evolution since 2018. How do you explain this? Is it due to higher competition? Could you elaborate a bit on that topic?
Thank you, Marilyn. That's just the game of roundings. We were a bit below 4% in 2019. We are above 4% in 2021. That's really the game of roundings. We did increase our market shares, and I take as an example the fact that we grew in terms of sales much more than the category. This is really a reflection of our market share gain. That is specifically the case online, where we do have panels which allow us to follow market shares in a more precise way than global markets.
It's not like in other categories where you have GfK panels. Here between furniture and decoration, it's pretty hard to really have a very precise estimate, so we have to do assessments based on the sources available. We just look at the category growth and Maisons du Monde growth, and we could clearly see that we have been gaining market share.
Okay. We have
Thanks, Marilyn.
We have another write-in question from Oddo. Hello. In 2025, you gave us GMV of the marketplace for 2025. What will be the contribution at the EBIT level for MDM, for Maisons du Monde? Thanks.
Okay, thank you. Okay, so let me elaborate on that one. You know the mechanism. Well, as we said before, marketplace is accretive to the model. At the same time, it does require some material and investment to support launch, development of the marketplace. You may have understood well during the presentation of Julie that this new ambition for 2025 relies on the development of the marketplace in France as well as the rollout in 4 other countries that will require investment.
If you consider commission rate around 15% on this GMV, plus a level of investment which is probably in between 10%-15% of total GMV in marketing, you will come to something probably around a drop-through of 30%. What I would like to highlight is that drop-through will not be immediate. I think 2022 marketplace will bring several million EUR to the equation of EBIT of the company. As I said again, it will still be a year of building the marketplace and investing for the model. This drop-through of 30% is very likely to be skewed towards the end of the plan much more than for next year.
Okay, we have another write-in question from Midcap, Florent Thy-Tine. Florent actually has two questions. The first one is: how do you explain the positive gap between the 2025 guidance and the last plan, which guided a decreasing EBIT margin? And then the second question, which is like just a very quick add-on. The free cash flow guidance excludes IFRS 16, correct?
Okay, thank you. For those two questions, I will start with the second one vis-à-vis free cash guidance. Yes, I think definitely it's consistent with the way we have been guiding since last year, so no difference there in the definition. Second one or your first question was about EBIT 2025 new guidance versus the previous one. I may let Julie complement on what I'm gonna say, but I think those are two different equations. I think I would see three main elements of difference between the two plans.
First of all, the way the trajectory of revenues is built, because now, with the destination around EUR 1.8 billion-EUR 1.9 billion sales, you have understood that it's a different setup. I will just take as a comparison element what Modani in the previous plan was supposed to deliver. It's a different component in terms of revenue. Second one, I will mention COVID. Whatever we say for the future, it still has an impact in the transition and the way we go forward. More importantly, I think, it's about freight. It's a materially different element, or this element is materially different from the assumption we had in the previous plan.
We may acknowledge that freight is an element that has an effect on the way we manage our equation and in the trajectory it will impact as well the way we monitor the equation going forward. To be honest, on my perspective, those are two different equations, and I would really want we emphasize on the one that we project going forward, which is about this trajectory of increasing the profitability around 11%. At the same time, we are confident about executing a plan which is about delivering high single-digit% growth. I think that's really the metric in between the two that matters towards creating higher value in term of absolute amount. Sorry, it may be a long answer vis-à-vis the previous plan, but I wanted to really emphasize about the components of the one we are presenting today.
Maybe indeed to complement, the difference between the previous plan and this one plan is really a more focused plan. The idea is really to focus on the core model in our core market, and that plays a role because we are achieving more discipline, and we're also trying to create sustainable value. That shows at gross margin. Notwithstanding what Régis mentioned and the fact that indeed, compared to the previous plan, we have much higher increases in terms of cost. Notwithstanding that, we are expecting our gross margin to stay stable between now and the end of the plan, which is a big achievement compared indeed to the previous plan. That is really the result of different things.
We are reinforcing the way that we manage our product mix and our supplier mix. As we said during the presentation, we are about to consolidate our supplier portfolio to make sure that we build more strategic partnerships and that really our supplier management program brings some efficiencies that we will be able to reinvest in quality and sustainability and still in pricing as per the question before. It's not that our strategic vision regarding consumer and product has changed. On the contrary, it has been reinforced, but we are finding ways to basically finance those investment through better supplier management, through better product mix management, and also with the development of the marketplace, which will be playing a higher role in this plan compared to the previous plan. That's really the big difference in terms of the economics for this plan.
Any question, please on,
No, we have no further questions.
Well, in that case, that concludes the Q&A for our Maisons du Monde Capital Markets Day. I'd like to extend my warmest thanks to all of you for attending, as well as for your questions, and I hope I see you, some of you on the road to further discuss the Maisons du Monde journey and agenda. Thank you, Chris, and thank you, Régis.
Thank you, Julie. Yes, let me thank you all for attending this session. Obviously, Chris and I are available in the coming days to follow up on this conversation. Looking forward to discussing it more in detail, and probably I see some of you on the road very soon. Thank you very much. Thank you, Chris.
Thank you.
Thank you.