Good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and a warm welcome to all of you. Thank you for joining us today for the HUGO BOSS Strategy Update 2025, live-streamed out of our beautiful TV studio here in Metzingen. After four years under CLAIM 5, today it's time to reflect on our key achievements. More importantly, however, it's also time to look ahead into the future and talk about our strategic agenda until 2028. I'm excited to have the Managing Board of HUGO BOSS with me on stage today, our CEO, Daniel Grieder, our CSO, Oliver Timm, and our CFO and COO, Yves Müller, to walk you through our three areas of excellence: brand distribution and operations. I'll be back on stage in about 90 minutes to guide you through the Q&A, but before that, let me hand you over to Daniel. Daniel, the stage is yours.
Thank you, Christian. Good morning, everybody. Welcome to our update. I'm going to go straight into our presentation, and our strategy goes from great to excellent, so I give you an update, and I just want to look back before we look ahead, and I remember we talked about the comeback, and every comeback has a beginning. Ours started with CLAIM 5. And when we launched CLAIM 5, I remember our aim was to rediscover growth, sharpen its focus, and strengthen the relevance of the brand. Or in other words, as I always said, actually, we were behind the curtain and we wanted to bring the brand back on stage. And that's what we have done over the past four years. Because we wanted to become the tech-driven global fashion platform, and we wanted to build brand desirability and bring back relevance.
And we wanted to accelerate growth across brands, channels, and the regions with sustainable increased profitability. And we said we want to claim leadership in all these five pillars that you see here. That was our aim to actually manage to reclaim this leadership and have a great comeback after these five. We have resharpened the HUGO BOSS and really reignited the momentum. We have achieved record results and rebuilt our brands, BOSS and HUGO. And when you see we came from, by the end of 2021, from EUR 1.9 billion with a minus of 12.1% to today of EUR 4.3 billion and a profit of 8.4%. That was an incredible journey, and we more than doubled sales. We put consumers again in the middle of everything we do. Because we said we don't want to have only consumers, we want to have fans.
We got a lot more followers and also members in 2021. Actually, the story is that we created these two brands with new visual identities, with new modern campaigns, with updated logos, and we actually refreshed the stories. Be your own boss or you go your own way. We invested into marketing to really bring back that brand relevance, and we invested into the marketing into that. With that, we also became back in the brand heat. Actually, from nowhere, we made it to the second or under the top three brands, and we remain stable in the past four years. But not only that, we also gained momentum, and actually we gained market shares, as you can see, more than 11% over the past years.
We said HUGO BOSS is not only a brand, HUGO BOSS is a platform, and on that platform we have two brands. One is BOSS with the sub-brands you see here, and the other one is HUGO on the other side. And we said with these two brands, we have a solid platform. We actually created, we became not only a brand for suits, we wanted to become a 24/7 brand, and we actually wanted to come from modern tailoring to modern performance suits, but also to casual, even into active wear for men, but also a 24/7 lifestyle promise for women's wear with the same approach. And we have doubled sales, and we tripled sales, and in HUGO, we also doubled the sales. And actually also there, we have the 24/7 expression from work to hang out, as we said in HUGO, because it's a younger target group.
And also, in actually the underdeveloped product categories like shoes, accessories, and bodywear, we increased sales and made it much more relevant. We actually also went back to all our licenses, and we worked on the business plan, and we said when we can double the sales, they also should be able to double the sales. And we did, and we integrated new licenses to enhance the brand, and our royalties more than doubled in the past four years. And something we are super proud is that we invested into our quality, that we invested into our craftsmanship. And today we can say we increased our price value in our product big time. And today when you go into the stores, we are very proud.
This is one of the points we are super proud that we have really sharpened our product, that we have increased the quality, and therefore also increased the sales through, but also we digitalized the whole value chain. We went much more into data. We established our digital campus. We created data dashboards, and we also integrated already today the AI tools in our company, and we are working with that together to make it more smart, to understand our business better, and to make our business also faster. We actually put digitalization across all the products we are doing. Already today we developed more than 65% is created already digitally, so we put that in everything we do already, and then we reshaped our retail concept. We actually went into the omnichannel. We wanted to be omnipresent with our brand and on every touchpoint where the customer goes.
We actually built, invested into a new store concept, and our KPIs in retail have increased, and not only the KPIs, but also the sales. Now online, also there, we actually went from 18% to over 20%. We doubled our sales on online. Also that development was important to become that we are on the touchpoint of everywhere our brand is shown and to become an omnipresent brand. We also went into wholesale and with our sub-brands, wherever we went, we were able to enhance the space to get more space in our department stores, for example, as a 24/7 lifestyle brand. And the number shows here that it was super successful. America became, or the U.S. became in 2023 our number one country. We tripled the sales.
We became a 24/7 Lifestyle before it was only a suit brand, but then we became 24/7 Lifestyle, and we attracted a much younger consumer, but we also invested into our organizational platform. We built not only the big platform, but we also, within the platform, we built the brand platform, the omnichannel platform, the product platform, the business operation platform, but also the key function platform, and within that, we collaborated much more, and we started to discuss, decide, and then most importantly, we also delivered. We boosted supply chain, and it was not easy because we doubled the sales and we had to be also able to deliver our orders, and we expanded our product capability in Izmir, which is a big advantage that we have. We improved our product availability and strengthened the logistic network.
We actually invested into our Digital Twin to enhance the efficiency, to become better planning capabilities, to improve the planning capabilities, to get better supplier cooperation, to be more transparent, and also get full traceability in place. That Digital Twin helps us with all these elements. Something that we are, second point we are super proud of was actually the culture that we built, is the trust, is the collaboration, and the empowerment of our team. Without a strong team in the back, we would have never been able to come today and deliver all these results. This is something that is still today in place. We have a strong team, we have strong collaboration, and everybody is eager to perform and to get to the next step.
And to summarize what we have done in the past four years, we want to show you with this film. We summarize actually all the project, all the activities we have done and we have achieved in the past four years. Please enjoy this. Welcome back. You have seen a few highlights, and when we look back, I have to say it was an incredible journey. It was an incredible experience, but this was only the phase one. And now we go into phase two, and we will see how this. We're going to show you how this is going to shape up. But anyway, this was remarkable results, and we have really done with that team incredible magic to bring that business and that brand where it is today. In 2023, we increased our ambition to EUR 5 billion and over a 12% EBIT margin.
That was by the end of 2023, we thought this is our target for now, but exactly a bit later, and that when we addressed that, there was no wars, there was no tension in the macroeconomic environment of this world. And exactly then when we announced it, the world has changed, and we were also part of that. And the world is becoming less global, increasingly fragmented, and also volatile. And therefore, to drive this sustainable profitable growth, we want in phase two, we want to refocus, simplify, and strengthen our business. We are completely committed to that. And we want to refocus and prepare for tomorrow's growth. We just take now a deliberate refocus on our business, and then before we scale it again.
And for that, we actually want to put CLAIM 5 in place that focuses on our excellence, because touchdown stands for excellence through refocus and realignment, what needs to be done. It's about focusing on where we have not yet also achieved our initial goals or objectives before we scale and accelerate again the growth. Actually, excellence means outstanding performance by aligning efficiency, effectiveness, and also smart optimization. We want to go in every business part and optimize where we can. We want to drive simplification for maximizing the impact. We want to become the premium tech-driven, customer-centric global fashion platform as we did, because we love fashion and we're going to continue to change CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN, we are prioritizing excellence with efficiency and to become more profitable. In addition, we will prioritize strong cash flow generation.
This is very important, and this is maximizing this, and this tripling actually to the past year is our aim in reinforcing our financial discipline, which we already put in place in the past 12 months, but also give sustainable returns to our shareholders. We actually put three pillars for this in place. One is Brand Excellence, Distribution Excellence, and Operational Excellence. I start with the brand excellence. We focused our brand and elevated it with the 24/7 Lifestyle approach and clearly positioned us also in that. We want to not only for the sake of selling, and we want to grow in a healthy way, and the most important now in phase two, we had the phase one where we have the growth behind us. We want now to build brand equity. This is our most important asset that we want to build.
It's about consumer connection. It's about differentiating from our competitors. It's about bringing the trust and the love into our brand and also the long-term value into the brand. As I said, brand equity is important. From recognized brand to a desired brand, that's what is our aim. And therefore, we want to convert awareness into purchase intent. So it's a more commercial approach that we want to do with our campaigns. And we want to do storytelling that is actually impactful in our campaigns. And therefore, as I said before, we want to drive the brand equity. We continue to invest in marketing. We still invest 7% compared to the previous year where we did between 7% and 8%. So we invest into our brand. We want to continue the brand in the coming years. And we also reinforce the Brand Relevance.
We want to have the red thread whatever touchpoint we have with our consumer, no matter from brand campaigns to fashion shows to partnerships to product momentum, which we're going to push even more in the future to sport events, but also to campaigns, to, for example, the holiday campaign you see. We want to tell authentic stories to our customer. In phase I, we talked about awareness and interest of our brand, but into the future, we want to have more consideration, conversion, and loyalty into the brand. Our consumer should become a part of our brand story. That is our aim. We want to inspire our fans or end consumer. We want to connect with them. As I said, most importantly, we want to convert it into sales into the future. We continue our story, Be Your Own BOSS. We want to continue with that.
And the BOSS, as we said, is those who lead a self-determined life with style, passion, and purpose, no matter if men or women. Everybody can be a boss. And we want to have, and we want to see them strong people with confidence, sophisticated, with a lot of expertise, but also authentic, with a timeless elegance, how they get dressed with modern femininity and modern masculinity. That's what the boss should be. And then in HUGO, we want to do it for a self-made, still in making young generation fit for the ambition. We want to have that the brand is more creative, that they are creative, self-expression, modern, and have an ambition to be independent. That's the aim. Our future will be built on purpose and relevance and aspiration of the brand. This is what we have to give, and that's what we have.
That's our ingredients, and that's what we have on the platform. And fully convinced, we have all in place to continue to build the brand and the business into the future. How are we going to do that on the product? I want to give this the stage now to Oliver. Oliver, it's yours.
Thank you, Daniel. Appreciating. So also, thank you. Good morning from my side. And let's have now a closer look on our product and business units and how do we move forward. So the last five years have been a great success. New record results. We built a great and strong foundation for further growth and profitability, and we've more than doubled our sales over the last years. So our focus is now to continue our CLAIM 5 journey and to finalize it with CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN strategy.
So moving forward with our business units, we are building real powerhouses, two platforms, men for men, women for women. So HUGO BOSS Men's and HUGO BOSS Women's. How do we execute and implement this? So we will have one dedicated leadership under one roof, so one for men, one for women. This will gain us a lot of efficiencies, will gain us a lot of profitabilities, but also a lot of best practice between the teams. So all of our specialists sitting for men's, under men's, and under women's. And for sure, without a doubt, we will have underneath brand specialists for BOSS and the same also for HUGO to give the brands full justice. So moving over to BOSS Men, our potential to make the big bigger is there without a question.
If you see our growth path over the last years, driving the business BOSS Men's from EUR 1.5 billion to EUR 3.3 billion. What is our goal now moving forward? For sure, BOSS Men sticks and will be always the backbone of our business. We've been successfully integrating a 24/7 lifestyle strategy. From BOSS Camel, that's the upper tier, affordable luxury positioning for BOSS Men's, BOSS Black being the backbone, formal wear, but in the meantime, also a lot on a big potential that we did grow in our upper tier sportswear environment. BOSS Orange label sits with our wholesale distribution. With this, we are avoiding cannibalization for our own D2C business. BOSS Green will be the next spinoff. We see a lot of potential, a lot of appetite for BOSS Green in the performance sportswear, especially in Asia and in the United States.
But being a real 24/7 lifestyle brand, you need to make sure that you also have the full top to toe environment. So when you see our shoes department growing by 24% CAGR over the last years, accessories by 19%, and bodywear by 33%, that fully shows you the potential of HUGO BOSS, but also the potential for our 24/7 lifestyle approach and strategies. So our key focus areas moving forward is for sure the 24/7 lifestyle, ongoing, disciplined, make the big bigger for BOSS Men in total. We take a great momentum for sure for our shoes, accessories for further growth, and we are streamlining the assortment. So a lot of efficiencies will happen by smaller collections that give us other opportunities to drive profitability growth for the future. In BOSS women's wear, our clear goal is to be better before bigger.
We've been able to triple the turnover during CLAIM 5 over the last years, but there's a lot of potential moving forward. We've modernized the brand without a question, but also we all know the single biggest potential for HUGO BOSS business units sits with our women's wear business. What is our clear goal moving forward? We wanted to find a clear DNA for what do we stand for, what do we not stand for BOSS women's wear. A consistent message in brand positioning and also in our customer reach out to our female consumers, building the right platform for everyday essentials, and then making sure that we stay relevant and that we are in top of mind brand for our female consumer.
Identity before growth, clearly defining our DNA, building emotional connections to our female consumer, defining the base, our hero items and everyday essentials. The core regions for our focus will be our European and U.S. markets and think women for women. You've seen our powerhouse structure that we move forward implementing in January. Also great news, we are hiring and have hired, joining us in January, a great female talent coming from a multi-billion female, pure female brand, joining us in January and leading our specialist women teams. HUGO, more brand impact, more profitability. You know, we've had a great growth path over the last years. If you see from EUR 300 million growing to EUR 700 million. But for sure now let's sharpen the brand. Let's make sure that we work on the brand equity, but also let's drive profitability. Realign our brand for profitable growth.
So, first of all, we want to have one coherent brand message sending out. There's a lot of potential in efficiencies driving between our red label and our blue label business. And we are opening the brand to have a more, I would say, commercial setup instead of looking for the niche. So I would say to sum it up, it's more like a young at heart brand than being relevant for a Gen Z consumer. And this will give us great commercial opportunities. So you will also see the same like we did for the BOSS brand at 24/7 lifestyle approach. So from work to hang out to relax, having more a seamless and more a hybrid version for our red and blue label brand.
So key focus areas are, we're going to strengthen our brand from doing smart investments, reaching out to our consumers, refine the brand positioning to a wider audience, also commercializing HUGO, unify HUGO having a clear seamless environment for red and blue, elevate our distribution, more wholesale than retail, and our core regions for focus will be again Europe and our U.S. market. So when we talk about optimizing our product assortments and talking about efficiency driving and also revenues and better profitabilities, I have one example for you, and that's our BOSS Men's business. For sure, our biggest business by far at HUGO BOSS. So our teams and we've been able to get a cutback by 25% of our collection size till 2024. And moving forward to 2028, we will see another cut of 20%.
This will drive efficiencies without losing any competencies, without losing any profitabilities, not at all. This will gain profitabilities and also help us to have a long tail and strong foundation for further growth and profitability growth. On the other side, for sure, having a more efficient mindset for our collections, having smaller collections with all the data insights we're gaining from our consumers, from all of our omnichannel touchpoints. Also, the clear goal is to drive our inventories from 25% over to 20% in the next three years. So we will reduce complexity, improve our transparency by better planning tools that we've implemented, increase visibility in wholesale. EDI connections will help us to drive the business even further and better.
And for sure, the retail stock turn with our new Twin initiative, that's the new tool that we are integrating, will help us to steer and to also have a more profitable business moving forward. So let's now have a deeper look at our distribution excellence strategy and how do we move forward. So we did build over the last years, I would say, a best-in-class omnichannel environment. You know, we have all these touchpoints, retail, full-price outlet, HB.com, partner digital platforms, department stores, or franchise stores. And our goal was from day one to have a seamless environment to connect all of these touchpoints and have one communication that we have to our end consumers. And I think we've made great progress and have the best-in-class omnichannel that is existing. So we are elevating ongoing a clear, high-quality distribution.
That's our goal moving forward. Our retail performance will be crucial, like-for-like growth, lead with our wholesale partners. We have a clear wholesale strategy. I will share with you in a bit, optimize our online distribution, and also we are strengthening, first of all, our European business. We are often market leaders, and there's a lot of potential ahead of us for the U.S. and Greater China. Our Good, Better, Best, and Halo strategy was helping us to have the right product at the right time for the right consumer at the right touchpoint. So a clear 360-degree approach for all of our touchpoints, if it's digital, retail, or wholesale. And since CLAIM 5, we also did invest straightforward EUR 500 million into our own store environment. And this is really paying off. Our stores look great.
And on the other side, we did implement a new loyalty program based on a Web3 technology. And you've seen the numbers in the meantime, 30 million partners in our loyalty program. And we all know loyalty members spend more. And for us, our loyalty members spent two and a half times more than your regular customer. So let's have now a quick flight over to Barcelona, and I want you to join me in visiting our store in Barcelona. Enjoy. So welcome back. What a beautiful store. So generating brand equity on the one side and the other side, also pretty profitable. So it's a good balance and a good mix. So how do we move forward in our retail environment? We are optimizing our store portfolio as we speak. That's an ongoing scenario. That's nothing new.
So in the next three years, we expect the closure of approximately 50 stores. Why are we doing it? It's always interesting. You know, when you're signing a lease contract 10 years ago, eight years ago, and then you see certain movements, for sure. We see macroeconomic movements, but also we see a shopping mall is changing. So it was relevant 10 years, eight years ago, but there's a new shopping mall opening and a lot of brands are leaving existing shopping malls. So we need to adapt and also our strategies, where do we need to position? The same for cities and even for countries. So it's always the rent-to-sales ratio, it's always the rent-to-sales ratio. And also it's about driving our KPIs.
It's conversion rate, it's UPT and APT, making sure that our store productivity and the square meter turnover net sales is driving to the right direction. We're boosting productivity by commercial opportunities. So if we talk about gift giving, if we talk about Father's Day, if we talk about Valentine's Day, all of these key commercial moments are fully embedded in our customer journey and customer outreach. We're leveraging smart price increases. So you've seen price increases over the last seasons, and there will be another wave of price increase coming at the beginning of next year. And the loyalty program I just mentioned is crucial. We've seen tremendous growth coming out of our Loyalty program. This is not generic growth.
And we all know loyalty is the key moving forward to drive our profitability, not only in our own environment, but it's crucial to get closer to our consumers to understand what is really at the top of their mind. Then lead in wholesale. I think we've done an amazing journey over the last year in wholesale. You've seen the numbers, tremendous growth. And our goal was always win with the winners. So what does it mean? I can tell you 75% of our turnover we are generating with 5% of our customers. So we've clearly been able on the one side to grow with the key partners globally with all of our luxury department stores. On the other side, we are ongoing cutting back the tail end.
That's also our vision moving forward, win with the winners and constantly cut back the tail end, making sure that we have the right balance of brand equity and generating a profitable growth. We're optimizing the assortment. This is part of our good, better, best, and Halo program. So what sits at which touchpoint, not only in retail and e-commerce, but also in wholesale to avoid cannibalization and to drive full price. Franchise is a great opportunity for further growth. I can share with you what we've achieved so far and what is our way moving forward. In the meantime, HUGO BOSS is operating 390 franchise stores worldwide. There's an option for approximately another 150 to 160 on top on the globe. There's a massive growth behind. This will also help our brand to get to the next level.
Our franchise stores are fully integrated, seamlessly integrated, not only in our omnichannel journey, also with our loyalty program that we're getting connections now to these consumers, getting all the insights that we can then use for customer outreach to measure our collections and making sure that we also hyper-personalize our product to each and every consumer moving forward. We have built a strong foundation in digital from EUR 400 million to EUR 800 million. So we doubled basically our digital turnover over the years. Hugoboss.com doubled. Our digital platform business, wholesale platform business, we tripled. So great development. How do we move forward for this business? So we are amplifying a clear two-brand strategy, separating what is HUGO and what is BOSS to give both brands the right platform and justice. We are optimizing our performance marketing. We see already some great improvements over the years, but there's more opportunities.
And especially our Loyalty program, again, with getting in more organic growth instead of have a paid search and traffic will help us to have a more profitable customer outreach moving forward. We reinforce our strict assortment guidelines, again mentioning good, better, best. What sits at hugoboss.com, our global Halo online store, and what should sit and is sitting, which product and which content is sitting in each and every partner store. Also here to avoid cannibalization and to talk to the right consumer at the right time. And we are enhancing our customer experience as we speak. So you can expect from the first and second quarter on next year that we have a lot more content, customer outreach, customer journey that will get our hugoboss.com to the next level. Then let's have a look on our markets. For sure, we are continuing building on Europe.
In Europe, we are often the market leader, having a very strong base for further growth, and now we want to strengthen our U.S. and China business, and without question, there's a lot of opportunities in our emerging markets. So let's have a look at the U.S. We tripled the business over the last years. We are really on the map with all of our department stores. So one of, I would say, the strongest growth we see in the markets sits with our partners. We are working on our profitability in our own and operated stores. So clearly focusing ourselves on tier one and tier two cities and working on our profitability. We want to localize more, like always think global, act local, our marketing approach, making sure that we get close to the consumer needs.
And I think we've got some very good examples like our collaborations we've had with NBA or NFL that really helped us to establish HUGO BOSS as a 24/7 lifestyle brand into the U.S. market. Then moving over to China. China, we all know, has a massive opportunity. So we are laying now the foundation for further growth. We've seen after COVID how consumer behavior in China did change from a work more to a life balance. And we need now to adjust also our strategies, implementing our 24/7 lifestyle approach. At the moment, still in China, we are known for our formal wear, for our upper tier sportswear, but there's so much more that the consumer can get from us.
That's also part of our marketing strategies moving forward, getting closer to China for China, China faces for China, also making sure that we get full justice into this market, a lot of opportunities. We just opened our Shanghai Halo store two months ago. As we speak this week, we are opening our Macao Flagship Store that will also then reach a Greater China consumer base ongoing in the Macao area. Great movements moving forward. Then our emerging markets, we all talk about the Emirates. Yes, we've done an amazing job. By the way, this is our most profitable region that we have. Great development. Now we have a new joint venture joining us. It will be implemented and executed in June next year with our partner coming from the Emirates. We see a lot of growth coming here.
And on the other side, there are a lot of franchise opportunities also, especially in India, where we have great partners where we see there's a lot of potential moving forward. So to sum it up, driving excellence across all our brands, driving excellence about all our channels and regions. So we will ongoing fully leverage our 24/7 lifestyle approach for BOSS Men. We will sharpen our positioning of BOSS Women and HUGO with our new powerhouse structure. We are optimizing our assortment and using complexity. This will help us to drive profit and to lower our inventory levels. We ensure high quality distribution ongoing, making sure win with the winners, cut back the tail end, and we unlock the full potential of our key regions, as just mentioned. Thank you very much,
Yves.
Thank you very much, Oliver, and good morning also from my side.
Thank you very much for your interest and joining us today for our capital market update. I will talk now about the third field of our areas of excellence, which is the piece of operations. Then I will guide you through our financial ambition and, of course, what is actually how all these strategic measurements, how they are really translating into the financial ambition. When we talk about operations, we talk about sourcing and production. We talk about logistics, we talk about IT and AI is getting much more important, and we talk about the key support functions. This is the whole supply chain that we are thinking of. We have a fundamental belief that if we invest into AI, if we invest into digital capabilities, we can make much better, smarter decisions.
We have also the fundamental belief to have an automated logistics to be to drive efficiency. So the whole operational piece is around driving efficiency and to be better in the future, to elevate, to have a good foundation for profitable growth. So to a little bit to look back, what we have done is so in the past, we really have invested, and this was all around CLAIM 5. CLAIM 5 was about big investments into our digital capabilities, in expanding our sourcing capabilities also because we were growing big time also in volume. So we were increasing our numbers of vendors and strategic vendors. And also we invested into the logistics and our backend, and I will come to this. But it was a period of deliberate investment to have a good foundation for the next period. And the next period is now CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN.
When it comes to our digital capabilities, there is a big program, and you heard a lot Digital Twin. The Digital Twin is actually an investment of EUR 50 million that we started two years ago, where we want to achieve higher visibility of our merchandise, where we make use of a lot of data analytic things to optimize our processes, and where we are investing into our planning capabilities. All these things are coming now to life in the next quarters. I can tell you starting in 2026, almost every quarter you will see it kind of go live. And this is actually the message CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN. so we are in the red zone of those projects, and we will get them done to drive profitable growth going further and to be more excellent and to drive efficiency and with this improve our profitability going forward.
Digital Twin is actually one excellent example where more than 200 people of HUGO BOSS are working to improve our supply chain. Also, what we have seen from a supplier point of view, and the results are already visible in our gross margin. We have achieved over the last four years, if you compare 2020 to 2024, we have improved our gross margin development by 300 basis points coming out of the supplier base because after increasing our number of suppliers, we are now in the consolidation phase, finding agreements, strategic partnerships going forward. And with this, somehow we are able to lower our supplier base. We did this in the past year. We started this, as you can see here, in 2023, but we will continue this path. And this will give us more opportunities to actually place more volumes behind one unit and one order.
And with this, drive economies of scale. And with this, get the gross margin up. Also, a big component was that we are decreasing our airfreight share. You see here, last year we finished the year with 15% airfreight share. This year we will high single digit. But at the end, what we want to have is we want to have an airfreight share of almost zero. This should be the exception. And this will also drive the efficiency of our supply chain going forward. Oliver has been quite explicit in terms of saying we're going to reduce our complexity by 25%. And this was also a big driver to get the delivery margin up. But as we have seen, we will further reduce our complexity by 20% with BOSS men's wear.
So this means there's more opportunities to come to get the more economies of scale and to get the gross margin up with this piece. And also, if you look at nearshoring, you've seen with Daniel, we are investing into our capabilities in Izmir. We are having our mindset of more nearshoring to be closer to our market. So we did this. I would really say we have a flexible supply chain today really in place so that we can swallow all the effects that come with all the tariff discussions. So we really manage with our flexible supply chain to overcome some of the external effects and to have not a kind of, let's say, big effect in our gross margin, but we could really mitigate and reduce the risk coming out of tariffs so far. You never know in the future.
But I think what I can really state is we have a flexible supply chain and we can respond to different needs and we can easily change from one supplier to another one on the different continents. Also, what is crucial is we were growing big time in our volumes. I said this in the beginning. We are selling around 70 million units of products a year. So we were expanding our capacity in Filderstadt and also in the U.K. and in the U.S. So this means we are ready for future growth. We have the capacity in the logistics. We are investing EUR 100 million. But this is also the logic is we started this investment two years ago. Next year in 2026, we're going to see the go-live of our Filderstadt automated warehouse.
With this, we have the possibility to insource our HUGO apparel logistics back from a third party, insource it to Filderstadt with much better prices. This will drive also efficiency. This is another tangible example where you can see this is a touchdown where we finalize this and you will see the effects of excellence and efficiencies in our numbers. I just want to show you now what is really happening. I mean, EUR 100 million is a lot. We invest in automation, we invest in robotics, and it's a marvelous project. You can expect the go-live in the second quarter of next year. Just have a look at what we are doing in Filderstadt. Thank you for coming back. That is about our logistics. I think it's impressive what we are doing. We really believe in automation.
And I can really confirm that we have a world-class supply chain when it comes to our flat goods warehouse and with world-class cost per units for the picking services. Then also what we did in the past is, and that was the piece of CLAIM 5, we said we need to invest into our headquarters and into our showrooms. We have invested in our marvelous showroom in Düsseldorf, big time, especially when we are to the interface to our customers. But also here in our headquarters in Metzingen, we are investing because we want to attract the best talents. And actually, we are getting them. And I think we are very proud of our campus and we really modernize this and the investments are paying off. And also here, when we talk about IT, we also make strategic investments.
We are in the middle of the rollout, for example, to work on our S/4HANA, our digital core. This is another example where we have continuous go-lives over the next period of time. We have already converted one-third of our business in terms of regions, and this will continue in the next years to come. This is the digital core, and this is also the basis for operational efficiency because once if you have one digital core in those countries where we are operating, we have the possibility to harmonize all the processes and to get much more efficient. Also this means that these investments that we have done, that these investments are now over. We will maintain investments, of course, but with CLAIM 5, we went through a cycle of big investments.
Now CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN, we have two things that are visible also in our financial ambition. One is we will earn and leverage much more efficiencies going forward. This will drive our profitable growth. On the other side, you will see normalized levels in terms of CapEx, which will help us then to generate more free cash flow in the end. When you talk about Operational Excellence, we are actually addicted to deliver better gross margin, lower cost, good CapEx efficiency, and to get the inventories down. I think this became evident over this Operational Excellence piece. We really go even with CLAIM 5, CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN, we will further improve our gross margin. We still have more leverage to come from economies of scale when it comes for more volumes per order. We continue our vendor consolidation.
We will focus on strategic partnerships going forward, and also we will have the mentality of an airfreight share of zero and take this as an exception, so this will drive our gross margin further. We have shown it in the past, and this is to be continued in the future, and also when we talk about operating expenses going forward, they will come down. One example was the logistics with the insourcing in Filderstadt. It will also drive our efficiency, but also the use of AI when it comes to content creation, when it comes to translation, when it comes to all the processes. AI is a big game changer for us, and this will also drive our efficiency going forward. We will be better and faster and much smarter in making decisions.
Also when it comes to back office, we have started with our shared service center in Mexico, but now we are also considering to run a project, which is a global business solution piece where we are intending to harmonize the processes, finding the right location for global business solutions, and then optimize them with AI. This will also drive the efficiency and will give us operating leverage going forward and keep the overhead and the back office cost in percentage of net sales under control.
I think which has become transparent also from a capital expenditure point of view, we will see now going forward kind of normalized level between 3%-4% of CapEx spent in the next years to come, which is more in line with competition if you compare us to our peers because the major investments in infrastructure and in retail, how Oliver was telling you, they are now in majority behind us. So, of course, we will continue to invest in terms of maintenance pieces, but the majority of the investments are behind us. And also with these digital capabilities, with the Digital Twin, with much more planning accuracy, with the collection complexity coming down, we really want to get the inventory levels down. And it's our clear ambition to get the inventory to net sales ratio in 2028 down to 20%.
So all these things are going into the right direction. And I will now summarize all the different effects, not only out of the operations, but also what's coming out of the brands, what's coming out of the distribution and the operations. How does this translate actually into our financial ambition? And once again, to make the point, CLAIM 5 was a growth and investment strategy. And I think we have delivered, as Daniel has shown to you, that we really delivered on major milestones. So top-line growth was there. The CAGR was above 20%, was great. We even improved our gross margin. Although we deliberately invested into the quality and into our products, we have a wonderful price-value relation. But notwithstanding, without compromising on the quality, we were able to improve our gross margin going forward.
I think we have shown over the last 18 months in terms of how we reacted to the market environment that we have a good alignment between our cost development and our net sales with the slowing trends. I think we successfully adjusted also our cost base, but this is also to be continued in the future. We have seen substantial investments, CapEx. So you can say over the last four years, 2021 to 2024, our average CapEx to net sales was around 6 percentage points. This will be different CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN, so it will be much lower. You have seen also during CLAIM 5 that we have seen progressive dividend growth over the period of time. And what we also achieved is we are very mindful of our financing structure. We have a financial framework. We have an adjusted leverage between 1% and 2%.
We are in the middle of this. And we have with this actually and with the strong business model that we own, with the right strategy and with the right execution power, we have a strong investment grade. And I think this has been really key achievements of our CLAIM 5 strategy. And now we start now this phase of refocus and on refinement. And I think the key question here is this is a deliberate move that we are taking. So it's a deliberate move of generating higher quality revenues and to find the right platform then after a step of refocus in the year 2026 to then find the way forward for profitable growth. So this is the model that we are applying. So you have seen with Daniel the brand excellence that we are taking.
You have seen all the measurements coming from the distribution part and the product part Oliver was talking about and our part regarding Operational Excellence. This will have a meaningful free cash flow generation. I will come to this, and we will take this kind of free cash flow, and we are committed to return our cash also to our shareholders, so once again, if you translate all the measurements that we have seen now with the managing board, how do they translate into our business? I think CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN, one of the most important pieces is, yes, we want to drive brand elevation. We are focused on brand equity. We want to have higher quality of our revenues. I think this is one important component, and this will translate also in a higher share of full-price sales.
And also, so this is a kind of component that will drive our gross margin. Another piece is actually that we will have smarter price increases also. This will also drive gross margin. And it's our statement regarding marketing investments that we stay around 7% of net sales, which is in comparison to our competition on a comparable level or even slightly higher going forward. With regards to our distribution, I think the statement is here really good. With being more selective, we will drive the profitability because it means for our retail store that we have this review of our store network. We will be more selective when it comes to our wholesale distribution in both aspects in terms of the assortment. Not everything is available for everybody. We have a clear segmentation by Good, Better, Best, Halo.
And on top of this, we are cutting back the tail end. And at the same time, we have the big opportunity of growth with our franchise business and somehow to integrate them also into our omnichannel universe when it comes to services around this. And Operational Excellence, I think we talked about this in my part. We will lift the gross margins because of economies of scale and sourcing efficiencies that we are seeing. We're going to have a disciplined OpEx management, and we will drive this operating leverage. And I think very important also in terms of inventories, we will get the inventory levels down, and we will have normalized CapEx level. And with this, we will boost free cash flow generation.
So, I think the key message that we have here is we will have CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN, we will have a meaningful free cash flow generation going forward for the next three years to come. And this is if I translate this into the numbers, we have seen on average in CLAIM 5 around EUR 100 million of free cash flow generation after leases. It's very important. So if we go now CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN, this will triple to EUR 300. So the average yearly free cash flow generation after leases will be around EUR 300 million for each year. If you include IFRS 16, this would be roughly above EUR 500 million to make it very transparent. So we're going to triple our free cash flow generation for the next three years because of the fields of excellence I've just shown you. So let's have a financial deep dive.
So how does this now translate into the next years to come? I think if you look at this chart, I think it's quite impressive. So you can really see over the years 2020 to 2025 how we really accelerated our growth. We really were growing big time. You have seen the CAGRs of above 20%. But now we take this deliberate step back. So we have now three phases going forward CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN. so the first year will be the year of refocus, a deliberate step of refocusing. I will come to this. And then with 2027, we will grow. And in 2028, we will accelerate our growth going forward. So we expect for the year 2026 a decline, forex adjusted to mid- to high-single-digit because we take deliberate steps. We are focused on brand elevation.
So this means the net sales that we are achieving is of much higher quality. We want to have high-quality revenues going forward because we have optimized our retail footprint. We are rather selective. We are not offering everything to everybody. So this is a kind of refocusing that we are taking a deliberate step. And this will result, despite our price increases, in a decline of our mid- to high-single-digit range. And in the next years to come, if you look at 2027 and 2028, we will return to growth, to profitable growth. And we're going to accelerate this also in 2028 because you will see the productivity gains in retail and the sellouts in wholesale. And we will also see strategic price increases going forward, everything directed to elevate the brand, higher quality of sales, and at the end to also drive the gross margin.
And this is, I think, crucial to understand that we will finish the year at around 62% of our gross margin. But with this deliberate step back, already in the year 2026 and even further growing in 2027 and 2028, we will get the gross margin up. So the gross margin is an indicator of high-quality net sales because of strategic pricing, because on the operational piece, we will have further sourcing efficiency gains. And we will really be focusing in our business on higher full-price sales going forward. And of course, with the better controlled inventories, if the inventory is going down going forward, we intend to have lower markdowns going forward. If we look at the cost piece of things, we have three components. And we don't neglect any of the functions. We are talking about retail. We talk about marketing.
And we talk about the key support functions. So every function has to deliver a kind of efficiency going forward. And I think it also makes sense because AI and all these things are actually concerning every function going forward. So if we talk about retail efficiencies, so and Oliver has been pretty explicit, we will streamline our portfolio going forward to strengthen the performance, to have a clear productivity view, and to have a robust base in terms of profitability per store. And also, we have a relentless focus on our rent-to-sales and pay-to-sales efficiency. We are completely KPI-driven in our retail universe. And with this focus on the cost and at the same time drive the store productivity, we will get operating leverage in our retail business going forward.
And also in marketing, we have a firm commitment because we want to achieve a higher brand equity going forward. We want to achieve the brand elevation. So we are saying we invest 7% of our net sales into marketing. That's our firm commitment. And on the other side, we will have key brand initiatives going forward with the highest return that we can get. And this is what we mean by marketing effectiveness: get the most out of EUR 1 million spent once you have your marketing spending going forward. And also for the back office, for the support functions, we talked about AI and optimization. We are really addicted to do this. This will drive operating leverage. And I already talked about also our global business services going forward with the effects coming in in the year 2028 in terms of improvements of our cost structure.
So having said this, if you look at our EBIT development in the next year, we expect our EBIT to decline to EUR 300-EUR 350 million. This is because of the top-line decline that we are seeing because of this deliberate step of refocusing. On the other side, you can be assured because we want to have a stable base, a stable foundation for going forward. You will see already in 2026 an improved gross margin. And we will get also in absolute terms another year to have structural things, structural efficiencies to get the operating expenses further down. And then in the next years to come in 2027 and in 2028, you can expect return to profitable growth. And what we believe is the long-term potential of an EBIT margin of around 12%. We believe in this.
And we will do anything as us, as the managing board and our whole teams to drive this profitability going forward. I think one component because free cash flow is at the essence of what we are doing CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN. I think it's important to talk about the capital expenditure. You see here on this chart how this somehow developed over the recent years. And you see that we are really climbing the mountains in terms of our investments regarding CAPEX to net sales spend. And I repeat myself now, but also this refers not only to operations, but it also refers to retail. The majority of the investments are now behind this. And we are now coming to a level of normalized CapEx spend. Of course, we drive efficiency also in retail CapEx per net sales spend.
We get them down further if we look into the years, but we will see normalized levels CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN between 3%- 4% of CapEx to net sales spend. And this will free up a lot of free cash flow going forward, and with these levels between 3%- 4%, to be honest, we are also in levels in line with our direct competition. And with regards to our net working capital, we talked about this. We have seen this kind of bouncing back because you see this trough because of COVID, where we really pulled the brake in terms of the inventories. You will see that we will come to a level of our net working capital between 18% and 20% in CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN.
The major driver will be also that we get our inventory levels in the year 2028 to 20% because we have a lot of, and I don't want to repeat this, a lot of optimization measures behind us to get the inventories down to 20% to net sales. So having this kind of combination of the year of refocus and, of course, the EBIT improvements that you're going to see in terms of profitable growth in 2027 and 2028, plus the CapEx efficiency at normalized level, plus the inventory optimization coming, this will drive meaningful free cash flow generation of EUR 300 million after leases every year. Of course, what are we going to do with this cash? So talk about the capital allocation. So firstly, we're going to invest, reinvest in organic growth. We're going to invest into the brand. We're going to invest into the business.
Overall, this is the first mindset that we are having. Sometimes they are capitalized. Sometimes, like marketing spending, they are immediately expensed, but we will use our cash to invest into our business, and then on the second piece, we have our clear dedication to return the cash to shareholders. We will do either dividends and/or share buyback, and like you might have seen during our press release, we will have a final decision for the year 2025. We will have a final decision in 2026 on the 10th of March, where we will be more explicit of how we're going to allocate cash back to our shareholders, and also we want to have a resilient, let's say, capital structure, and with this, we, of course, our intention is always to have a kind of reduced financial leverage. We are now standing between 1% and 2%.
But of course, we have the intention to safeguard our investment grade. We always have to keep this in mind. And actually, from an M&A point of view, in terms of strategic opportunities, we just want to keep the cash to remain flexible for M&A. But for the time being, we will focus on ourselves CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN and the execution. And we would rather take from an M&A perspective an opportunistic approach going forward. If we talk about the financial leverage, because this is also important, we are standing at 1.3%. I think we have given ourselves a financial framework between 1% and 2%. We are fluctuating around this. And it's definitely our intention to maintain this kind of financial leverage going forward. Once if we are more around this 1%, we are considering returning cash to shareholders.
But this will fluctuate in the range between 1% and 2% going forward. The main intention is here to maintain our investment grade rating going forward. So having said all this, our long-term commitment to our shareholders CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN is really that we have built a very solid foundation for profitable growth. And it's our intention to outgrow the market. And if we say outgrow the market, we are saying we want to achieve market share. And you've seen the number in CLAIM 5. We have achieved a CAGR of 11% market share growth over the years. So it's our ambition, our own ambition to outgrow the market and to be better than the market. At the same time, we want to achieve sound profitability. We want to get to this EBIT margin of around 12%.
And on top of this, and I think this has become clear, it's all about cash. Cash is king. And we're going to generate meaningful free cash flow going forward. And this will drive the shareholder value going forward. Thank you very much for your attention. And I will now hand over to Daniel.
Thank you, Yves. Yes, I'm back. And I just want to summarize everything. I think you have seen that CLAIM 5 gave us really the opportunity to invest into our brands. And we have today's two strong brands that we have invested that got back the relevance. But we also have a product for both brands in place where we have a much better price value, which we also invested. We invested further in our omnichannel, which really gives us incredible touch points wherever the consumer goes, is strong.
But we also invested into our setup, into our organizational setup, and into our people. And these investments were there to build a fundament that is very strong and a fundament that will give us growth and that we can now leverage for the future to give us growth. And therefore, this was a very important step. And as I said, this was only step one. Now we're going to go to step two, where we continue and we leverage every investment we have done. Now we don't have to do. We have the setup. We have the ingredients to grow in the future in a very strong base, in a profitable base, in a sustainable profitable way, and create cash flow. And this is our ambition in the future. And what we do now in 2026 is just we adapt to the current market macroeconomic situation.
That's why we want to use this moment to actually optimize the whole part of our business. Or we say it in other words, we turn our little fat into muscles. That's what we are going to do in the next year and be able to actually strengthen in total the business and actually come from the strong one to the excellence. That is our aim. It's an adaptation. And let me make one thing very clear. We are not changing our strategy. It's not a change. It's an adaptation for one year. And then we continue to grow. This is very important to know. And with that refocus and realign, we continue and we are convinced that we can outgrow the market and achieve the EBIT of 12% in the future because we want to come from spread to strength, from claiming to refocusing, and from great to excellent.
That is our aim. And we are very performance-oriented. Our team is eager. Our team is geared up to really build this business, as we just showed you. And I think Oliver and Yves made it transparent what all these platforms, how strong they are, and that they are ready now to elevate. And we have a fantastic team that really has the right spirit, that wants to have the ownership, that has a great mentality, and that is eager to really drive this performance on the culture of trust into the future. And as we also say, you can have a good strategy. The most important is the execution. And I can assure you, with that team in place, from starting from the management up to everybody in this company, we are convinced that we will execute all our targets.
We are able to realign today to take that, adapt to the market situation, and to prepare us for the future growth. We just want to summarize our statement again with that film.
Get ready for the next level from great to excellent with our strategy CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN. with CLAIM 5, we have reshaped HUGO BOSS, boosted our brands, and achieved record sales. We have become a strong, united team built on a culture of trust, celebrating great achievements together. Now the world has changed. It has become tougher, more fragmented, and complex. But we have what it takes to succeed. To bring the game home, we need to refocus, refine, and realign our CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN is our playbook to go the extra mile and win the game, focusing on three fields of excellence. We take our brands to the next level through captivating storytelling and next-level products. We further elevate customer experience through excellent and consistent omnichannel distribution. We continue to strengthen our operational backbone to ensure flexibility, efficiency, and scalability.
Our direction remains unchanged, and we have a clear vision and mission. Together as one strong team, we refocus today to achieve excellence and prepare for tomorrow's growth. Let's bring it home together.
Ladies and gentlemen, that CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN. and now we are open to all your questions. Thank you very much.
It was the night before the holidays, and all through the house. Joy fills the air while the cocoa gets hot. Like a bear on a shelf, the charm and their grin. A ring at the door brings the company in. Amelia, Kabi, a world with no care. Laughter and warmth so sweet to share. The boxes were all filled with gifts big and small. But sharing pure love is the greatest gift of all. BOSS Bear on deck and glittering lights. So cozy, so fine and the feeling is right. Have peace, good vibes, and a little bit of cheer. Stay cozy, my people, and have a BOSS year.
All right. Ladies and gentlemen, we are now ready to begin with the Q&A session. Anyone who wishes to ask a question, please press star and one on your telephone. You will quickly hear a tone confirming that you're now in the queue. In case you wish to remove your question, please press star and two again. Now, quick housekeeping topics to ensure a smooth Q&A session. Please turn off the volume from the webcast. Otherwise, we will hear a wonderful echo in our room. And it's probably difficult for you as well. And finally, to be fair to everyone and to give everyone a chance to be heard, please limit your questions to a maximum of two for the moment. We have a number of people that have already signed up for questions. And I would take the first question from Freddie Wild from Jefferies.
Freddie, the line should be open. You're now able to ask a question. Please go ahead.
Good morning, Daniel, Yves, and team. Thank you for taking my question. My first one is really to understand a bit more about those changes in the external environment, which are motivating some of the reset that's going on. Is it a weaker consumer you're seeing out there? Is it a change in demand for product? Is it softer wholesale order books? Could you give us a bit more detail on what's happening? And second, on a broader point, it feels like there is a bit of a shift happening in how you want the business to be set up in terms of the channel structure. Can you tell us where you want the wholesale versus DTC split to be in, say, 2027 or 2028 versus where it is now? Thank you.
Daniel, do you want to start with the first question? And then maybe Oliver takes the second one, which was on mixed wholesale versus DTC.
Okay. Yes, thank you for the question. As I explained, the macroeconomic environment is tough, let alone the tariffs, let alone the war, the wars that's going on. But the biggest challenge, I would say, and that's the reason why this is happening, is consumer sentiment. Consumer sentiment is down wherever you go. If you go to the States, to Europe, or in Asia, it's just down. Sometimes traffic is down 20%-30% in shopping malls, in cities even. And that has an impact on the business. People are afraid to buy. People think, "Let's use my suit another season," or they think, "Let's drive my car another year." That's the sentiment that the consumers are in, which is fully understandable. However, our conversion rate in the stores, thanks even with this lowering of traffic for up to 20%, is actually much higher.
So we try. We can actually absorb a lot because we have strong teams in our stores. And that makes it up with the conversion rate that they're losing traffic. But this is a global situation that everybody, I can imagine, is facing. And this is something that we have to maneuver through at the moment. We have all in place, as we said. All the customer Touchdowns are ready. We try to engage with the customers on TOUCHDOWNa Also, on social media, we try to get it connect with the customers. But the reality is, consumer sentiment is just down wherever you go. Oliver, you take the second.
Yes, yes. So thanks for your question. So all of our channels and touchpoints play a crucial role in our omnichannel world and also to implement our 24/7 lifestyle approach. So in wholesale, we will move on for sure with our win with the winners strategy and structure and adjust shares. So 75% of turnover comes from 5% of our customers. And that will be an ongoing, so cutting back the tail end, working our profitability for our own retail environment. You heard, so 70%, close to 70% of our stores are new in the new environment. So the wave of investment is behind us. So we are focusing now in our own DTC business on the like-for-like growth. So when you ask me, where will it be? You're like, DTC will stick and stay the biggest channel for HUGO BOSS. Wholesale, for sure.
Let's see how the macroeconomic situation will change. Will play a crucial role. It's a very profitable channel for us. But I would say I would expect the channel mix will stick nearly the same as we are talking today.
Perfect. Thanks for that.
That was very helpful. Thank you.
Thanks, Freddie, for the questions. We move on, and we have as a next speaker, Manjari Dhar from RBC. Manjari, the line should be open. Please go ahead.
Thank you, Christian. Good morning, team. Thank you for the presentation. I also just had two questions. My first question is on the colored sub-label for BOSS, the BOSS Orange, BOSS Green, BOSS Black, and BOSS Camel. I was just wondering if you could give some color on how you view the positioning of these sub-labels shifting across the next three years, perhaps in context of what you said about realigning the product distribution. And then my second question is just on the store estate. I think you mentioned that you were planning 50 freestanding store closures. I was just wondering how those are distributed across the region. Thank you.
Thanks for your question. Let me start with our labels. Orange label, Green label, Camel, and Black label. You really know our 24/7 lifestyle approach and how we've positioned the brands. Camel is the affordable luxury where we've positioned our highest, I would say, quality. Real craftsmanship, made in Italy, made in Germany. That's ongoing, playing a crucial role in our own DTC, lifting up the brand, giving brand equity, and celebrating the brand. With Black label, this is where our tailored business sits. That's crucial. That's 30% of the business. The upper-tier sportswear will play a crucial role for further rolling it out, also in our DTC area and also for certain luxury department stores. When we talk about Orange label, I think this is the beauty of our omnichannel strategy and of the good, better, best, and halo approach.
Orange label sits purely in the wholesale world, so with our wholesale partners. With this, we are avoiding, first of all, an overlap, cannibalization, certain price aggressiveness, or softness of our own DTC business, so Orange purely in the wholesale world. And then the Green label, I just mentioned it. We see a lot of potential moving forward with our Green label product because there's a lot of appetite for this sport lifestyle slash performance product. We see it all over growing big time in Greater China, but also in the whole ZIPIG area and also in the United States. So there's a great chance, and we're testing the waters as we speak with the first tryout of a freestanding Green label concept. Very promising results, I can tell you. So that's something we are pursuing as we speak moving forward.
So a lot of potential also with the different separations that we have, avoiding cannibalization and making sure that we are lifting up our brand now to the next label. Then talking about your second question, the 50 stores and store optimization. I just mentioned it. That's an ongoing goal. So what you've decided or what whoever has decided 10 years ago, cities are moving, consumers are moving, malls are moving, and brands are moving. So we are just optimizing ongoing our store portfolio. Over the last year, we had some great additions. So white spots, stores from Halo to Good, Better, Best. We also have here the Good, Better, Best, and Halo approach and focus for our own store environment. So we had some great additions.
Now we look from pay to sale to rent to sale, from conversion rates, all these KPIs in optimizing our store portfolio ongoing. That's our move that we're doing for the next three years.
And if I can add, Oliver, to that, I remember when we started and we went to the customers, our customers actually said, "Please bring those sub-brands, bring these brand lines back." And this was actually a very easy approach because with putting these brand lines in again, we were not only once positioned in the department store. So we had the possibility to be multiple positioned in the department store, no matter if it is in the tailored area or in the sportswear area or in the green area, in the sports area. So we gained space at the place where the consumer is. And that helped us actually to grow the business. And this was crucial. And by the way, it works very well. It has proven that we have done the right thing, which was the wish from the customers also to do.
Great. Thanks, Daniel. Thanks, Oliver. Thank you, Manjari, for your questions. The next question will come from Jürgen Kolb from Kepler Cheuvreux. Jürgen, over to you.
Thanks, Christian. Hi, guys. Thank you very much. Two parts, two questions from my side. First of all, from a financial perspective for Yves, maybe the 12% EBIT margin that you mentioned as a long-term guidance, do you think this is kind of the ceiling or is that more, shall we more see it as a sustainable level that you can maintain for a longer-term period? And then maybe just between us here in this group, as to when you think you can achieve that or at least get close to that. That's the first one. The second one more from a product perspective. You mentioned further 20% cut in the collections. Maybe some additional indications as to in which, from a color perspective, in which categories you're planning to do so. And at the same time, you're saying you want to differentiate the brand in a better manner.
So is that maybe putting more risk into your collection? Because obviously, with a lower number of pieces, you try to differentiate more. So here, maybe some words on how you want to differentiate and where the cuts are planned. Thank you.
Yes. Good morning, Jürgen. And thank you very much for your questions and your interest. I want to answer the question regarding the 12%. So definitely, we said for the time being, our long-term ambition is the 12%. And as we have seen during our CLAIM 5 strategy in the beginning, I think let's get to this 12% first. I think this is the milestone that we see. I think overall, long-term-wise, I think our business model can do more. But for the first time, we are humble. We want to be realistic. And let's get to this around 12% as the first step. And the second question, and we want to really focus on this. And I think it's an ambitious target if you take our EBIT margin levels today and also for the next years. I think this is very ambitious to get there.
But we will do everything to drive profitable growth and to get to this profitability level as soon as we can. I think this is also what we intend to do. But let's stay humble and realistic for the first time. Let's get close to this.
Thank you.
Thank you. And then answering your question as regards the collection cutback by 20%. So I would say to start it, the collections have been too big. So it was needed to cut back to a healthy base. And there's still room to cut it even further. Why? In the meantime, we're getting so much data, data insights from consumers, from sell out, from sell in, that we can much better also now get into the collection developments. On the other side, we see also as being a global brand, there's a lot of overlap. So we have, in the meantime, implemented global buys. We need to make sure that we are celebrating and have one red thread talking about equally the same brand from New York City to London, from Singapore over to Shanghai. And that's needed.
So there's a lot of synergies, a lot of optimization that we see. I'm not expecting at all any whatever harm of turnover or that we lose any competencies. On the other side, in the meantime, you know we have with our own production in Izmir, the capacities also for quick response. And that's what we want to do, making sure that we are closer to the market, making sure that we really have the relevance. When we see there are certain trends with our own production sitting in Izmir, we can much faster react than perhaps some other brands. And that's also our way moving forward, then driving relevance, being up to date, and driving profitability.
And if I can add also here, one driver in the future is really that we shift our product, that we add the classics into our assortment.
The classics is something that we just started actually in the past years, means the basics, or it's more the classics. There's seasonal classics. That game we have not yet integrated in our business, which is you have one style and you're doing multiple colors in different qualities, and that classic part, like also other brands play a big part, we have not yet integrated fully in our business, and we see there a big potential that can drive our business further.
Thank you.
All right.
Thanks, Jürgen, for the questions. Our next question goes to Daria from Bank of America. Daria, please go ahead.
Hi, thank you very much. This is Daria from Bank of America. And I have two questions as well, please. On OpEx, can you please walk us through the cost initiatives that you currently might have to continue to have OpEx flattish or down in 2026 following one and a half years of very strict cost discipline already, given you still target marketing at 7% of sales? And my second one would be on capital allocation, given we will have an update on dividend policy in March. For the time being, should we assume CLAIM 5 policy holding true? And also on inorganic opportunities, given there have been some rumors in the press over the past couple of weeks, can you please comment anything that you're able? Thank you very much.
Yes, good morning, Daria. I will take those two questions. Perhaps starting with capital allocation. First of all, perhaps referring to my presentation, it's our clear dedication and commitment to return cash to the shareholders. On the other side, we clearly said, let's take the final decision in the beginning of March because that's when we have the final results of our financial statements. That's finalized the year, how we are standing. Then we are taking a deliberate decision in March. Of course, I don't have to tell you that, of course, the shareholders will then vote at the AGM on the 21st of May. What about the distribution? They have the final say during the AGM. I think to repeat, we have the clear commitment to return cash to our shareholders.
CLAIM 5 TOUCHDOWN will be over the next three years, a period of high free cash flow generation. We have the commitment to return cash, either way, dividends and/or share buybacks to make it very clear. Regarding OpEx, definitely what we are seeing, you referred to marketing spending being at 7%. I think this is we had the range between 7% and 8%. We are saying we're going to have 7%. But we also here, I think if we have 7%, this is just a number in the P&L in terms of net sales. I think the most crucial thing is that we have really that we highlight key commercial moments, that we really focus on those things with the biggest impact going forward. As I said, to get the most out of one euro spent, I think that's also the idea behind marketing efficiency.
On top of this, we have the piece of retail efficiency. One is the store closures that Oliver was alluding to, plus also having, let's say, a clear focus of pay to sales, rent to sales, other cost to sales, how we were saying, and this will drive operating leverage going forward. Also coming back to my presentation, fulfillment costs will come down due to the operational efficiencies that we have seen. We talked about shared services, shared services. We talked about global business solutions. In every aspect of our business, we will go for structural efficiencies. I think if you look back into our track record, how we kept the OpEx under control over the latest 18 months, be assured that we will keep on focusing on cost and on optimizing processes.
And I think also with AI and all the things that are happening, plus the projects that now come to an end, we have a good foundation really to drive efficiency going forward and to have really, and I think this is important, to have structural cost improvements going forward that they will remain and that we will keep the operating expenses definitely under control. And you can bet that next year, also in 2026, operating expenses will go down.
Great. Thank you very much, Yves. So next one in the queue is Anthony Charchafji from BNP Paribas. Sorry, Anthony, please go ahead.
Yes, good morning. Thank you very much for taking my question. I have two. The first one, so we are expecting a cut in SKUs, wholesale down next year, and a bit less help also from new subline and some store closure.e So to protect profitability, does it mean that you are willing to open more outlets as we have seen that they represent 20% of your retail network versus 17% pre-COVID, and they are very profitable? So on this one, so the two sub-questions would be, how does this fit in your premiumization strategy, and can you afford price increases? And the second one is just on inventory.
So if you can help us to see how to go from 25% to 20% of inventory to sales ratio, and also given that you expect gross margin expansion through 2028, is there any risk of write-off that could impact gross margin? Thank you very much.
Thank you. I will answer the question with the outlets. Yes, you're right. At the moment, it's 20%. We don't have the plan at all to increase our outlet shares. It would be the easiest model to do, but that's not our strategy moving forward. So we're lifting up our brand. Outlet plays just a crucial role in the omnichannel environment. It's just another touchpoint for HUGO BOSS and for our consumers. But we want to grow organically, like-for-like in our full price environment. That's the focus, like-for-like and full price. Also in our existing outlets, we want to grow like-for-like. There's no plan to extend our outlet capacities. And you just mentioned also the wholesale business. It's highly profitable. For sure, we also see certain softness. What you see, there's still a consolidation happening.
Unfortunately, there have been some bankruptcies that we were facing, that everyone, the industry was facing this year, and we also expect certain consolidation happening over the next seasons to come. The second question was with the inventory, right?
Inventory.
One take.
One take?
No, no, please, please, please. Feel free. So I can perhaps we do.
We do both, exactly.
We do both. From my perspective, I just mentioned it. We work on the efficiencies, so smaller collections will automatically help us to have less leftovers, to have more of the right product at the right time. And this will help us for sure to drive the efficiencies and also will lead to lower inventory levels. On the other side, in the meantime, also you've heard about the Digital Twin. We did implement a lot of new tools for better transparency. And also the data know-how and the data impact we get from seller data helps us to have the better and the right product at the right time. And this will help us also then to steer the inventory levels.
Yes, and perhaps to add to what Oliver was saying, be assured that the aging structure of our inventories is really good. If you compare it to last year, it has even improved. So I think you have to keep in mind that the aging structure is very healthy. And on top of this, with all the measurements that we have seen, you can expect actually next year that the inventories go down by a good double-digit amount of COGS, of acquisition costs. You can expect this going forward into the year 2026.
Thank you.
Thank you. Thanks, Anthony. Next in the line is Andreas Riemann from ODDO BHF. Andreas, the line is open. Please go ahead.
Thanks, Christian. And hello to everyone. Two topics. First one, the product. Oliver, probably for you. You spoke about reducing complexity. Does it mean the product is getting more global in general? And linked to that, how much power are you giving the regions to decide about marketing, about the product? So I'm basically interested to learn how global or local you want to operate the business going forward. Topic one. Topic two, probably for Daniel, M&A. Would you agree that M&A in women's wear is more likely than in men's wear? And do you set yourself limits with regards to the size of a potential acquisition? That would be topic number two. Thanks.
So let me start. Thanks for your question. Let me start with the complexity reduction and also the global message. What does it mean? For sure, our goal is, and I just mentioned it, so we are a global, powerful brand. We need to make sure that we have one seamless, one red thread communication to all of our end consumers globally. Yes, we think global, act local without a question. We fully integrated this into our strategies. We have a global assortment, and every entity around the globe is following our global assortment. And that's also needed for marketing, for communication, for customer outreach to send one message. And then how do we adapt it to local needs? For sure, we see there are warm weather capsules.
So, for sure, you need a different product when you talk to a consumer sitting in the Middle East than when you talk to a consumer sitting over in Canada. So, for sure, we also with our collections and the complexity, when we are talking about cutting back this, for sure, we will never cut any commercial opportunity just to make sure. So, we're making sure that we have all from a global scale that we get closest to the local and to the regional consumers. But at the end, we are a global company. So, we are steering one message around the globe, making sure that you can get your most beloved brand all over the globe at the same quality level. So, that's the first answer. And then the teams, like, our teams are fully embedded in our strategies, in our communication.
So for sure, we always are not only interested, we need to understand, and that's also, I would say, our communication, our team spirit, what is needed in each and every market to be successful, to be more successful. And this is then fully embedded and integrated into our global strategies. So we for sure discuss from our markets from Japan over to the United States, what do you really need? We have here regularly, you know, when they see our collection framework, so they are fully integrated in the development. So we're taking the feedback of our teams, not only series, they are part of the collection development.
At the end, for sure, we are doing the direction, but we want to get all the feedbacks that are relevant, making sure that we get close to our consumers and that we're also making sure that we get the maximum potential out of our regional organizations. So they are fully embedded, and we are taking this serious feedback from our regions and then translating it into our global collections.
And yeah, if we talk about also the marketing before I come to M&A, today it's much more complex to find one brand ambassador for the whole of the world. We have to say we are very lucky. We have Beckham, David Beckham, that is a global testimonial, a global ambassador. But there's not many of them left in this world. So in addition to what Oliver said, we are trying to find also ambassadors for all the regions because, as we said, we have a global company, but we have to listen and act local. And therefore, in the future, and more and more, we have demonstrated that we show not only with Patrick Mahomes to be relevant in the region as well because going forward, that is actually a real target and is important to support also the region. So this is to the marketing on the global part.
And then M&A, yeah, let me be clear. I think our two brands have so much opportunity. And over the last years, we just have identified the opportunity. In our presentation, you also have seen Oliver was mentioning that women's wear is probably the biggest opportunity we have in the future. And we also mentioned that we hired a person and a specialist from a multi-billion company that was really only working on women's wear. And to add somebody into our teams really gives us the competence to build that business. So we have the shoes, we have accessories.
We have so many still opportunities in our business that we can think and explore and exercise that. To be honest, it's not our priority to do now M&A because, again, if we get all this on the street, what we have here and the ingredients, what I said, then we can look for an M&A. However, I want to put there also make it clear if there is an opportunity, if there is something out there, doesn't matter if it is women's wear or men's wear, if we see it adds value to our company, if it adds value to our shareholders, we can do an M&A or we can do an acquisition. But we are very prudent and we are open-minded to it.
But again, first, we have our brands; we see a lot of priorities, and we only do M&A when there is an opportunity, when it adds value to our business, to our company, then we explore that possibility.
Great.
Thanks, Oliver .
Thanks, Andreas. Thank you, Daniel and Oliver, for answering the questions. At the moment, we don't have more questioners in the queue. I do want to offer you, if you want to ask a third question, press dial one, and we are happy to take two, three more questions before wrapping up. We wait for just a few seconds. The next one would be Freddie from Jefferies again. Freddie, maybe one question from your side to see if there's more coming up. Again, two to three more before we wrap up. Freddie, the line is open.
Perfect. Thank you for taking my second go around on this. I was just wondering if we get a bit more of a breakdown of price versus mix versus volume next year as the reset year and then into 2027, how you're thinking about balancing those three things. Thank you.
What do you want to do first?
If you want to start.
So the question around impact from price, space, volume.
Price mix, volume.
Yeah, price mix, yeah.
Price mix, volume. So first of all, I think, Freddie, thank you very much for your question. First of all, we have to say that we have done the price increases for the spring campaign. I think keep this in mind that this will walk into the year actually of 2026 with a full year effect. And on top of this, as you have seen, it is part of the brand elevation piece that we want to do further price increases. I think having in mind this high quality of revenues is, I think, the backbone, and this also includes investments to brand equity and also then have smart adjustments on the prices. So prices will have a positive effect on the mix overall.
And on top of this, this will mean that the volume will, if you look at our 2026 top line, let's say guidance, you will see that the volume constantly will actually go down. And on the other side, if you talk about the mix piece, I think we see massive opportunities in the green products and also some shoes and accessories. And with this kind, especially when it comes to green, I have to highlight that also there the gross margin piece is the highest actually among our sublines. So we have also the intention to push our green products with this regard.
And let me add to that. In my presentation, I said one of the biggest achievements we have made is actually to upgrade our product to increase quality. Just that you know when we were not on that level when we started four years ago, today you have a complete different quality of product and therefore a different price value. So we are not afraid, always in a smart way to also see the potential to uplift the prices wherever possible because the product is done in a much better quality than in the previous or before the four years. So we are very optimistic that this is a really realistic price increases. We do not want to outprice our product and therefore we are very deliberate on where we increase and how we do increase.
Thanks very much. So we have the two last.
Thank you.
Thank you, Freddie. Thanks very much. We have our two last questions for today. The first one coming from Jürgen Kolb, Kepler Cheuvreux, followed by Daria. Jürgen, you start. Please go ahead.
Indeed. Thank you very much. Again, on the price side, do you think these price increases, are you rather followers here or do you lead kind of your category in terms of the pricing or what is behind the intention to or what's the level of the price increases you're intending to do? Thank you.
I will answer this question. What you just have heard, you're like fast price value is crucial, making sure that we offer best quality for the best price. And that's also resonating with the end consumer. Our price increases we've done, so it's not that it's new for us. We've done already two waves of price increases over the last years. And now with the spring having the third price increase, we're very like checking the data, checking the insights, checking how is it reflected. But also for sure, we are in an environment. We are sitting, HUGO BOSS sits in a competitive environment. So for sure, we also have a clear peer group to which we compete.
We need to make sure that we also have then, I would say, price value cross-check, but also from a price retail price positioning that we are also matching the needs to be in a competitive environment very successful. So I'm convinced with all the price increases we've done and also that is ahead of us. And there might be also further optimizations and chances because I think we have great product, we have great opportunities. That's also what you see when customers getting asked. One of the top strengths of BOSS is always quality. It's always coming from all consumer research. It's quality. So I think being a quality brand, there might also be even further next to the spring price increases, further momentums.
Depends then on what region we are talking about, what is a global price increase perspective, and also what might be certain opportunities from a regional perspective.
Thanks, Oliver. Thank you, Jürgen. And our last question for today comes from Daria, as I just mentioned, from Bank of America. Daria, the line is open.
Thank you. Thanks for taking one more question from my side. Is it possible to have any more color when it comes to your next year's sales target between retail and wholesale? So actually, what channel do you see driving the sales decline and lead to this outlook of reset if we can have any color on that for our modeling? Thank you very much.
So Daria, I will take this question. And unfortunately, I have to say that we gave you now a kind of guidance for next year. And please, let's finalize the year 2025 and then we will be much more explicit in March what is referring to the different channels, different geographies and brands. And please, we have to calm down at the moment and focus. And I think we have been explicit where we're heading to, and I think that's enough for the moment.
Indeed.
Thank you.
Thanks, Daria. And thanks for your patience. So ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today's strategy update. Thank you very much for participating. Also in the Q&A session, we look very much forward to engaging with many of you during our upcoming road trip activities. And if you have any questions before that, please reach out to the investor relations team. Thanks very much. Have a great day and goodbye.
Thank you.
Thank you.