Can you guys all hear me okay? All right. If somebody wants a long presentation, I got a short version. I can cut to the chase, give you guys some ample time. Food? No? You guys okay? I'll give you the long presentation. Okay. The team's prepared an incredible deck. I know your time is precious. I'm going to run through the deck and hopefully leave some time. I've got half an hour for this, right? 25 minutes. We'll leave some time at the end for the present, you know, for questions. I'm sure you'll have lots. You guys have all heard about DAVIDsTEA, I hope. Some of you are customers. Some of you are shareholders in this room, right? All of you, at the end of this session, will want to become investors. I'll tell you why. What an incredible story DAVIDsTEA has. My name is Frank.
I was hired six years ago as the Chief Financial Officer of the company. Along the way, I've inherited a few other roles. I have fun at work. I'm inspired by the talented people I work with. They make me better every single day. I know that your time is precious. I'll cut to the chase. We'll make it fun and entertaining. You'll learn a lot. I'll tell you about this thing called our grand plan. It's a very simple plan. Hopefully, you'll come along for the journey. Oh, yeah. This is all legal stuff you need to know because I have a tendency of telling you a beautiful story about the future. The formality of it all is important. You should understand our risk factors. They're in our statutory filings. If you can read all those, that'd be great. I'm going to tell you a bit about the future.
I'm going to make some promises. With all that, from a legal perspective, we'll move forward. DAVIDsTEA was founded back in 2008 here in Toronto at the corner of Queen and Spadina. How many of you remember that store? It was 17 years ago. 17 years ago. In fact, this year, DAVIDsTEA celebrates a 17th birthday. The brand, like many teenagers, can be strong-willed and independent and may sometimes struggle with authority. It's that rebellious streak that goes across every employee at DAVIDsTEA that fuels our creativity and drives us to imagine the impossible, inspires us to blend bold new ideas into every cup. Over the years, we've built an enviable brand, a reputation as a premium supplier of loose-leaf teas, including tea-related gifts and accessories. We've created a new category, and we continue to push the boundaries.
Today, we stand tall and look forward with the belief that we can continue to be the most innovative tea company in the world, inspiring greater wellness and sustainability. Our mission is simple: to make tea fun and accessible, to make tea fun and accessible to all, one cup at a time. We're market-driven, focused on revenue, supported by effective operations. We focus our energies every single day on creating compelling products that consumers love. Flawless operational execution is what we aim for. We make mistakes, lots of them. We react quickly with agility, resilience, aiming to please customers and never be satisfied. All-around good team players. That's the DAVIDsTEA that I work for. It's a DAVIDsTEA that I love. You'll learn, if we flip over to the next slide, that in Canada today, we have 20 boutiques. We're in all major grocery and pharmacy stores in Canada.
We're the exclusive supplier of tea to go, to Circle K and Couche-Tard. We distribute our collections in North America, both online as well as on the Amazon Marketplace. Our grand plan, we're going to talk about the grand plan. It's a simple grand plan. It's proven. It's a store-led growth plan. We believe that doubling the store footprint in Canada will provide sufficient incremental free cash flow to generate sustainable profitability and provide all shareholders a solid return on investment. We'll talk more about that in a minute. One more thing that you need to keep in the back of your mind. As society continues its shift away from alcoholic beverages and towards the wellness and functional beverages, our brand resonates more than ever. Specialty tea remains the fastest-growing segment in the multi-billion dollar global tea market. DAVIDsTEA is exceptionally well-positioned to benefit and grow from these trends.
The addressable market is massive. It's what got me excited when I first joined the company. It grows annually in the mid-single digits. Euromonitor, Statista, and all the others show massive marketplaces. Herbal tea is the fastest-growing segment within the market. If you were to read the Euromonitor report that I read when I first joined the company, it stated that DAVIDsTEA played a major role in shaping consumer demand. The company offers consumers an exceptional experience, which is not easily available elsewhere in the marketplace. A unique store design, smart product branding, effective use of packaging, and a strong focus on the younger generation's concerns can be considered behind DAVIDsTEA's incredible performance. Since then and now, a lot of things have happened. Pandemic hit. Canada Post went on strike. You'll learn about what we did at DAVIDsTEA. There's no other competition in the marketplace.
No other that does what we do. We're unique. This is my favorite slide. Why? It talks about product. Beautifully blended, expertly crafted, innovation, frankly, that you can taste. When you look at this, one of the people in the audience, they mentioned, "Where can I find DAVIDsTEA?" It's a very popular question. We have a store at the Toronto Eaton Centre. I invite you all to go visit it. It's an incredible store. Have you guys all seen this product? It's what we call our advent. It's a work of art. If you're a non-tea drinker or you're a seasoned tea drinker, you will love what we produce. We have a product for all. These products, annually distributed, come in at this time of the year. It allows for you all to select some of the best flavors that bring to the marketplace.
The one thing that you should know if you're a non-tea drinker, what we do, nobody else does. Why? When you look at the ingredients of our teas, anybody can come out with an orange pekoe. Anybody can come out with a matcha blend. Only DAVIDsTEA and its products have probably anywhere between 12 and 15 ingredients in every single one of our products. Not anybody can do that. That's the moat. It's not easily replicated by others. Only we do it. We've done it for a number of years. Beautiful slide. We have it all, so you can have it all. Beautifully blended, expertly crafted, loose tea matcha, which is a phenomenal trend that's taking wave. If you haven't heard about it, read up about it. Matcha shortage. We were very fortunate buying a lot of matcha.
We were one of the first, if not the only, company that came out with what's called a matcha stick. Look it up online. A phenomenal innovation. DAVIDsTEA, we have it all, so you can have it all. How do we go to market? We're an omnichannel business. We do business in three channels: online, brick and mortar, as well as in wholesale. We make beautiful products that are good for you, available to consumers pretty much anywhere you want to have us. We have 20 boutiques for my friend in the back room. Okay. Using our trailing 12 months as a barometer, our 20 stores accounted for 37% of our revenue. Our wholesale partners accounted for 14%, and e-commerce accounted for 49%. What's phenomenal about this business, if you're a potential investor, is that the unit contribution is phenomenal. That's important when you look at companies to invest in.
Unit contribution allows us to confidently model the future, a predictable future with growth centered around bringing consumers a one-of-a-kind in-store sensory experience, fueling complementary online and wholesale growth, and leaning into health and wellness trends that continue to resonate with consumers everywhere. If you're a non-tea drinker, how many of you guys drink tea in this room? A lot of you. And a lot of you don't. For those non-tea drinkers, I was one many years ago. One taste, and you get hooked. There are about 150 blends in our stores. There's one for you. Whether you're looking for a functional need or looking for something to wake you up in the morning or something to calm you down, to build that community, that friendship, there's nothing better than a cup of tea. Our grand plan, back to that, is simple.
I'm sure you've heard the saying that a rising tide lifts all boats. We plan to double down on brick and mortar. That's simple. Just double down on brick and mortar. There'll be a positive spillover effect on the other channels, firmly believe. This is a fun slide. There's a lot of detail here. We can talk about the future, but I want to go back on history for a minute. You get to trust that if you decide to invest, there is a return. Why? It's our second time around the bend. Not many companies get that. We're fortunate to be able to give them that gift. At our peak before the pandemic in 2019, we had over 230 stores in North America. Sales plateaued at CAD 216 million. In the three years leading up to the pandemic, we lost CAD 30 million annually. We had a problem.
We had some challenges. The path we were on wasn't sustainable. Our analysis revealed at the time that the losses stemmed primarily from non-performing stores in Canada, from rapid expansion into the remote regions of the Canadian marketplace, a poorly executed U.S. expansion strategy, and an infrastructure that was built for a much larger company. You need to understand also from a brick-and-mortar perspective, of the 186 stores that we had in the Canadian marketplace, 125 were making money. It's an important number to know. We'll come back to that. We only have 20 stores today. The connection with today and tomorrow is there's a tremendous amount of runway in the Canadian marketplace. At the time, many of our long-term lease contracts were virtually impossible to fix. These are contracts that were entered into before I joined the company. You can't negotiate your way out of it.
It appeared that we were destined to ride out the portfolio of underperforming stores. We were given the gift. From a business perspective, the pandemic hit. What the pandemic did, it gave us the ability to accelerate the transformation in the business. We used the letter of the law. We used CCAA to restructure the business. We closed all of our stores in Canada except for 18. We closed all of our stores in the U.S. We doubled down on e-commerce. At the time, nobody was going out. It was easy to double down on e-commerce. Just fuel it. We also distributed our products more than ever before in the wholesale channel. Why? Stores were open during the pandemic. The future looked bright. We were hit with two other surprises. In 2022, we, like a lot of other brands, use third parties to distribute our products.
The whole concept of picking and packing and shipping a product, that wasn't us doing it. That was a third party. Unfortunately, the volumes were so great at DAVIDsTEA, the third party imploded. Wasn't good for us. Dissatisfied a lot of customers. In 2024, when you think the future looks bright, we in 2024 were hit with the Canada Post strike, like a lot of other retailers. Tremendous dissatisfaction within the consumer base. In 2024, now we've taken actions to stem those issues, right? We've internalized fulfillment. No longer are we beholden to a third party, and we own the brand experience. From the Canada Post strike, we learned the agility, the resilience, the ability to change. We partnered with incredible last-mile delivery partners that are doing a phenomenal job today. We knew that we also had an SG&A problem to solve.
In 2024, not being shy of additional work going into the busy season, we decided to rip and replace our total tech stack. We replaced 12 applications. Most companies fail when doing one. We replaced our ERP, our front-end systems, and everything in between. Flawlessly executed. We went live November 1. Incredible. Incredible. As I sit here today, looking forward, I feel that our turnaround is complete. We've stabilized the business from the unfavorable headwinds, and we're now going into growth mode. We're looking ahead with confidence, and we're very excited about executing our grand plan. Our grand plan, which is a store-led growth plan. Let's take a look at some of our financial results. What you see here on this slide is using trailing 12 months, Q2 actuals, and back. So 12-month periods comparing the last 12 months against the previous 12 months.
Nothing but a phenomenal story told through numbers. If the numbers could speak, they'd say, "Hey, your assortment is resonating with consumers. The top line is stabilized year-over-year, 61 versus 62 this year." The numbers would also tell you that as a result of the internalization of fulfillment and the fact that we de-risked our last mile of delivery, our gross profit margins improved by CAD 4.6 million year-over-year to now 18%, improved by 18% year-over-year. Margins are now at 49% of sales versus 43% in the comparison period. If the numbers could also speak, they'd be telling you the following. SG&A expenses were reduced by almost CAD 7 million, 18% over the prior period. A phenomenal change in the complexion, the financial complexion of the business.
As a result, we dramatically changed the complexion from roughly the same revenues, going from a loss of CAD 11.7 million to a loss of a little less than CAD 1 million and an CAD 11 million improvement. A complete financial turnaround in the business. You guys are looking at that. That's a celebration. That's a moment in time. Why? We've overcome a tremendous amount of hurdles. We're here today to talk about the future, building upon this foundation. When we look at the future, our desire is to sort of lead with a store-led growth plan. Canadian market, I told you that about 125 of the stores were profitable. We're going to expand. We got 20 stores today. You may or may not know, we're building out a store in Quebec City. It's going to be open by December this year.
Some of you guys that live in Toronto, we're opening up a store at Square One in July of next year. A phenomenal location. An incredible mall. Our grand plan is simple. It's a store-led growth plan with spillover effect on the other channels, wholesale and online. We believe that there's room for additional stores in the Toronto region. We estimate that doubling our stores in Canada will provide between CAD 6 million and CAD 7 million of incremental free cash flow to the bottom line. We also believe that we have strong store economics. Let's take a look at that next. Our typical store is about 750 square feet, generates anywhere between CAD 1.2 million and CAD 1.4 million annually. We spend anywhere between CAD 400,000 - CAD 475,000 per store. Stores generate 25% four-wall profit. Payback anywhere between 15 and 18 months. These store economics are comparable to Starbucks, to Aritzia. Look them up.
Comparable to some of the best-run retailers in the industry. Just imagine, let's extrapolate the numbers. I've got five minutes left. Just extrapolate. If you just open up 20 stores, you double down on the footprint, which isn't a big lift because we had 125 stores that were profitable. Pro forma revenues approximate CAD 88 million, CAD 5 million if it does. To all you guys in this room, use a multiple of whatever you want to use. That means a lot of money from a return on investment perspective. Wholesale, we have a great presence in the Canadian marketplace. In the U.S., our plan is to replicate the success that we've had in Canada and do that over time in the U.S. Give us some time. Good things will happen. Our online presence is substantial. We're everywhere: TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, and it'll have a spillover effect.
Let me tell you about the path towards value creation as I run out of time. If we sum it all up, over the next three years, we intend to generate sales CAGR of almost 10% on the strength of the new store openings. We also plan to realize gross profit margins between 48% and 50%. Why? Because we've internalized fulfillment. We own that overall brand experience. Finally, we expect to leverage the realized SG&A savings that happened in 2024 and be cautious about discretionary spending as we try to grow the business profitably. We believe that achieving the adjusted EBITDA margin in the low double digits by the end of 2027 is attainable and should have a positive impact on shareholder value. For you all in the room, why invest now? If you go back and you listen to the storytelling, a huge marketplace that is growing annually.
We have a wellness trend that's fueling the tailwinds, sustaining the growth. We have an in-store experience that's distinctive that is not found anywhere else. That's our moat, including our products. We believe that the operational turnaround is complete. The time is right to leverage our strong store economics to scale the business profitably. The management team is fully committed to executing against the grand plan. I don't know if I've got time for questions, but we'll open it up for questions. U.S., Canada, very different trends. The question was, in the Canadian marketplace, the strength of the consumer? For folks that love DAVIDsTEA, we're an affordable luxury. Notwithstanding, if you look back on history, there have been ups and downs with the economy. We've always performed well. Our customers love the brand.
I think when you're looking for something to treat yourself, spending the amount of money that we have for our products is not a big lift for consumers. I see in the numbers that our consumers are resilient to what's going on in the economy. Yes. Good question. The question was, you had a lot of stores before. You have 18 stores now. How do you ensure that your growth plan doesn't result in the same negative outcomes as what happened prior to the pandemic? For a couple of reasons. When we look at stratifying the population of stores, I mentioned that 125 were profitable. There's a lot of runway ahead between 20 stores and 125. I feel that we shut down more stores than we wanted to back in 2020 during the pandemic for two reasons.
We knew that reentry into brick-and-mortar, and we didn't know when that was going to happen. Because the vintage of our stores was such that we needed to invest in the upgrade of the stores, we said, why don't we just lean more on the aggressive side of shutting down the stores? Knowing that, for the second point, our stores are relatively small and getting 750 sq ft in a mall is not that difficult to do. We figured, whenever time is right, we'll re-enter brick-and-mortar. We'll spend money on the investments that we would have had to regardless if we kept more stores open. The availability of space is not a barrier to our ability to re-enter brick-and-mortar. I think today, if you knew what I knew, we have a tremendous amount of runway in the brick-and-mortar environment.
One thing I didn't mention, just on brick-and-mortar, because it is our store-led growth plan, there's a lift-off point for you financial people. The lift-off is when it becomes self-fulfilling. For example, opening up 10 stores, the cash flow that frees up as a result of opening up 10 stores feeds the cash required to open up the next series of stores. I mentioned we've got two stores under contract. We've got eight stores remaining to lift off to get to that perpetual self-funding state where we can open up many more and do the right thing for shareholders. If you guys are looking to invest some money, I'll be available after this meeting. We can talk about the future plans of DAVIDsTEA. It's a great place to place some money. It's a great product. I have an impact on the business every single day.
I work with incredible people at the office. Any other questions? One place to look, because I may run out of time, if you look at our investor relations site, you'll see all the historical, you know, same-store sales. In Q2, we published 8.6% same-store sales over the prior Q2 quarter. I think we had about 9%, but don't quote me on that number, between 8% and 9% in Q1. You'll look at all of our historical trending. We really believe in shareholder transparency of information. You'll look for that presentation. You'll see all the data there. One more question. Pros and cons to everything that we do. It's a great question. We struggle with it every day. When I look at predictability of being able to generate free cash flow, this one, investing in e-commerce, is a little bit more risky versus a predictable growth plan centered around stores.
Why? That sensory experience that we provide is only available to consumers in an in-store environment. Once you sniff, smell, and, you know, taste the product, you can replenish online. We really believe store-led will lift up the other two channels as well. I'm out of time. I would love to talk to you more. I'm available, table number 23.