Greetings. Welcome to the Build-A-Bear Workshop Investor Presentation Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in listen only mode. A question and answer session will follow the formal presentation. You may submit questions via the web at any time by using the Ask a Question feature on the side of your screen. If anyone should require operator assistance during the conference, please press star zero on your telephone keypad. Please note this conference is being recorded. I will now turn the conference over to spokesperson Glenn Akselrod, Thank you, Glenn, you may begin.
Thanks , and thank you everybody for joining our webcast today with Build-A-Bear. The purpose of today's presentation is to give our audience a better understanding of the business through a PowerPoint presentation and then questions and answers with management. As a reminder, this is not a quarterly earnings call, and our purpose is to give a high-level broad overview of the business. The discussion is gonna be led by CEO Sharon John, who's also joined on the call by Voin Todorovic, CFO. You should see the presentation through the webcast. If you'd like a copy, simply email me at glenn@bristolir.com. We will break for Q&A at the end of the formal presentation. When we do break, we encourage questions, and as a reminder, we're only taking questions through the web portal.
If you're listening over the phone, please access the web link sent earlier to ask a question. Remember, you could submit that question at any time. I'll ask the question on the air for everyone to hear, and then the management team will answer. I'm not gonna reference any names, but I will simply read the questions asked. As we have a fairly large audience today, if I can't get to your question online in time and it has not yet been addressed during the call and can be, I will come back to you through email. I'm not going to read the forward-looking statements, but I simply state that they apply, and I reference them on page two of this PowerPoint. With that said, thank you again for joining us.
Remember, this is fairly informal, and we do encourage questions to help you better understand the business and its growth path. Now I'll turn the call over to Sharon to start her part of the discussion and presentation.
Thank you, Glenn, and thanks for everyone for joining us today. We look forward to walking you through our strategies and some of our results, and being able to answer some of your questions toward the end of the meeting. Many of you may know that Build-A-Bear Workshop was formed in 1997, and when it was formed, it was a mall-based experiential specialty retailer where children and their families could create their own stuffed animals. Well, that was just the beginnings of Build-A-Bear. Over the last nearly 25 years, Build-A-Bear has become a brand with high consumer awareness and positive affinity. We've now sold over 200 million furry friends that have been made by our guests around the world.
That impact allows the company to leverage its brand strength, and that's what we've been doing, and that's what we're planning to share with you is some of the outcomes of the strategy of that strategic leveraging to evolve our brick-and-mortar retail footprint beyond traditional malls, creating a versatile range of formats and locations that include tourist destinations, that where we've been able to extend our consumer base beyond kids to include teens and adults with entertainment and sports licensing, collectibles, and gifting. The company has also significantly advanced its digital transformation that's enabled meaningful growth in e-commerce and our omni-channel business. That primarily relates right back to that Build-A-Bear pop culture and multi-generational appeal. We will walk you through a lot of those initiatives today and the results that have come from us executing those over the last few years.
The first slide, page four, highlights much of what I just said and gives you some real data on the impact that we've had, whether that's from the evolution of our omni-channel capabilities. We're now nearly 40% of our retail sales are e-com, that we've now diversified our portfolio of stores, where 35% of our stores are now not located in that traditional mall location. We have nearly 500 locations globally, inclusive of international locations that are franchised. And 40% of our sales are now to teens, tweens and adults. That is highly impacted by this deep and extensive long-term licensing relationships with 75 different-- over 75 different licenses with best-in-class partners, and some data here about the brand's power.
We have a multitude of data points where we continue to build that brand awareness over time. From an investor consideration perspective, we are a profitable business. In fact, we ended 2021 as it being the most profitable year in the company's nearly 25-year history and revenues of $411.5 million. We have good cash flow, and we have a very solid balance sheet. We do have not only that powerful brand, but what's really interesting about that is we leverage and strategize for future growth and future opportunity. The brand and what we do with that brand in our stores is also right in today's zeitgeist of consumers, what they want, whether that's experience or interactivity or personalization or DIY.
It's also really important in today's market where you are a trusted and authentic brand, and, Build-A-Bear is certainly that. That drives a tremendous amount of opportunity for us, whether that's in media impressions or social media followings. As well as our first-party data with our loyalty program. At this juncture, we believe we are a much different company than we were when, Voin and I started, which would be almost nine years ago now for me, or about nine years ago and eight years ago for Voin. We've been on this road of diversification and diversifying that business model to be able to participate fairly in the digital economy and become an omni-channel company.
That, we believe over the last two years, particularly has been accelerated with our digital transformation, through the COVID environment and our ability to have created the building blocks over the prior years to then leverage and lean into the power of the brand. That's only done with an accomplished team. Now we are very well prepared for continued profitable growth from an expectations perspective. We are also, as I said, looking at our 25th anniversary, and we'll be celebrating that throughout the year. You get a sense on page six of what our timeline is on that. Page eight, this is some metrics, as I referred to, on the power of the brand. We do have a lot of first-party data.
Our brand awareness and distinctive numbers, affinity numbers rival a lot of top brands in the consumer kids, particularly kids consumer space. We have about 20%-60% of our store visits are planned, and about a third of our business is about birthdays. The reason we like to share that is, one, that provides leverage for us from a negotiations perspective from our leases in that consumers choose to come to Build-A-Bear. Secondly, a lot of times there's an assumption of a very fourth quarter skewed seasonality for something that might be retail and toy combined. That birthday business actually balances out our seasonality. On page nine, you'll get a sense of the fact that we have a balanced, highly coveted consumer base.
Children-driven, of course, except, you know, we are, as we noted, building out that business with new consumers or the end user is teens and tweens. That higher than average socioeconomic strata is also a very good consumer base for Build-A-Bear. Importantly, as we have driven our e-commerce business in the past two years, specifically, although we had seen double-digit quarterly growth prior to that for quite some time. On page 10, you can get a sense of how that strategy is bifurcated, with the retail stores having a primary objective of driving that business with families and children, and the e-commerce business is actually over-indexing with the teens, tweens, and adults for the collectors and gift-giving business. Both of these sides of our retail business have a very specific objective, and we work to drive that business.
Ultimately, we do gather first-party data, and we also recognize that the generation of increased lifetime value is founded many times in having them shop in store and then shop online or have an experience online and come in store. It's a completely integrated approach that we've been doing that has been driving value for us. The power of the brand has value, and that value is beyond our ability, although important, to create these relationships with powerful licenses. That value also comes in the package of getting a lot of media and a lot of press. You can see on page 11, this is just a small sliver of the type of impact that Build-A-Bear generates. I'll point out one, is the Baby Yoda impact that we had that generated over 1 billion impressions in a single week.
You may recall, which isn't in this particular sheet, just recently with Valentine's, we generated another 1 billion impression experience with our After Dark program that was sold through The Bear Cave, which is a new space, an age-gated space, on our website. Again, focusing on and targeting that teen and adult consumer. We're regularly in pop culture, just embedded and into the programming itself, because Build-A-Bear is so recognized. This is a snapshot of some of those world-class collaborations that I was sharing with you, that give us a lot of credibility. It also.
When we mash up the brands, what we call collaborations, it generates a lot of interest for not only consumers who are Build-A-Bear first consumers, but consumers that may be interested in the partner brand first, that then engage, get engaged with our brand because of that relationship. Some examples of that are in gaming like Animal Crossing or Pokémon. Some examples of that would be a Harry Potter relationship, as well as some of our more recent types of relationships that we do put in the Bear Cave, for example, a Matrix Bear or Deadpool Bear. On page 14, you can also see that we then, because of that high awareness and that emotional attachment, we do create tremendous loyalty.
Some of the efforts in our digital transformation in recent years are about evolving that loyalty program, evolving our strategies, our CRM data, growing that CRM data, and creating a dynamic way for us to communicate and engage with our guests on a regular basis to drive sales. That brings us to digging in a little more into the omni-channel revenue model. You'll see that that's based on, if you reference page 16, it's based on this idea of a continuous circle of engagement. Our basic construct is that we put the consumer as an important part, obviously, of who we are as a brand, but that we believe that they can enter the brand at any point and can reengage with the brand. When we create a great relationship, a great memory, we can then extend that lifetime value over time.
Retail is one way to enter the brand. That often does create that first step of having a love for our particular brand and creating that memory. As we start to build out new revenue streams, whether that's in, you know, our entertainment areas, our content creation areas, our outbound license areas, that's another way to enter the brand that then may get them to come to the store. There's this ongoing creation of value that we're able to generate. That has led to profitability. Profitable not just our stores, but our e-commerce business, and which has been translated into, again, the most profitable year in the history of the company. Some specifics related to that.
We have been very focused over the past seven, eight, nine years on the evolution of our retail formats and footprints to lead us to have more leverage, a lot more latitude in the way we set up our leases so that we have flexibility in those lease structures, as well as to assure that we are building and driving toward a profitable store fleet. Over the past few years, we have elevated that effort to a place where 97% of our corporately managed stores in North America are now profitable with over 25% average store contribution. We continue to focus on that and work hard on that. As we mentioned in our most recent earnings call, with that, we believe there's significantly more potential for Build-A-Bear even in that traditional retail space.
I'll just caution when I say the word traditional, that doesn't mean that we're going to continue to drive into malls. That means that we believe that the experience of Build-A-Bear, which is break from in and of itself and often credited for creating experiential retail in some fashion, we believe that we have continued opportunities to open stores in the right location. Because that iconic hands-on experience does build that emotional connection to the brand, which is then what we're leveraging, again, to build ongoing value and build into new and diversified revenue stream. The different store formats that we've created over the past few years have now allowed us to move into a lot of different areas, and we'll highlight that in just a moment on the types of physical locations that we now are able to profitably exist.
We will stay focused on the fact that we believe that an important part of this model is the retail stores and the retail store experience. That provides us with the ongoing ability to leverage the power and monetize the brand equity over time. We have expanded into a number of global locations, which you see on page 19. As I referenced earlier as an example of some of the things that we're doing even to diversify the experiences on e-com in our digital area, you'll see The Bear Cave as one of those offerings. On page 20, what we've done on buildabear.com, again, is this is an example of the recognition that we have different types of consumers who have different types of needs when they're shopping online.
Our primary objective, as I noted before, from a consumer perspective, is the older consumer that's more likely engaged or involved in gifting or licensing. We've created sub-brands and places for them to go that might look a little different, or there's bundles available for them to purchase that make it a more seamless type of interaction, often mobile first, and certainly, they want it to be as frictionless as possible. At the same time, we do have some children with over-the-shoulder mom going through our e-commerce experience, and we create experiences that are more like the store for them. That's exemplified by the Bear Builder, our Bear Builder 3D, which we recently launched.
It is a virtual reimagined store experience where the furry friend actually comes to life on screen while you're going through the process. We've most recently launched the HeartBox, which is a curated gifting box, boxed bear with other products such as candles or tea or cups that are designed to wish someone a happy birthday or happy anniversary or happy Valentine's Day. When you look on our online shopping experiences and engagement, we are purposefully creating these sub-brands to appeal to different types of consumer groups because we recognize through our research and data that these different types of consumer groups see Build-A-Bear in different ways, so we're meeting their needs.
Ultimately, that entire digital transformation that we've been going through, that touches many parts of the business beyond e-commerce, but it has supported our ability to create a growing and profitable e-commerce platform. That's was a critical objective for the company and remains incredibly important to us. You'll see that we now have over $70 million in revenue, and that we've seen that over 34% CAGR since 2016 since we really started to rebuild that entire website. We still have opportunity continue to continue to rebuild, reskin, reimagine the website as well as our loyalty program, which we mentioned in the last call that we expect to upgrade and update in the course of 2022.
Some of the data that reflects the underlying fundamentals of this growth is we see positive site traffic trends of +30%, increased unique visitors, our on-site average of 4.2 million per month. We are in partnership with best-in-class partners from a technology and expansion of digital capabilities perspective, namely Salesforce. We are doing ongoing development and initiatives to drive sales against different types of consumers. On page 22, you can see some of our positive metrics that again are contributing to the overall profitable growth of our e-commerce business.
With a 97% increase in digital transactions from new guests and a list down the left side of the presentation of different key areas of measurable metrics where you're seeing increases for our website engagement, whether that's digital transactions from lapsed guests, opted-in email lists, digital traffic, e-commerce driven by our advertising, increased impressions, or even Google searches, which is really a metric that is related greatly to the power of the brand. I'm gonna turn it over to Voin to review some of our new and diverse formats and business model options that we've expanded from a physical retail perspective.
Thanks, Sharon. On slide 23, you can see that we have as a company developed multiple range of formats that helped us be in a variety of different locations, and really that drove our diversification away from traditional malls. You can see that like a lot of our initiatives over the last several years were to like move away and open more stores in tourist locations where we over-indexed on a lot of key metrics. We have some stores within Walmart on the fourth wall as you get into those locations. We created this concourse model, where in 200 sq ft within the concourse of the mall, you can have a full Build-A-Bear experience, variety of seasonal shops and events from boats to NFL experiences, Gaylord Hotels.
We are there where people are going for fun and entertainment, and we are continued to evolve that model. Our corporately managed stores, we have close to about 350 of those. Last year in 2021, 99% of North American stores were profitable with 28% average EBITDA, for mall EBITDA as percentage of sales. We also operated over 60 locations with almost 12 different partners, primarily in U.S. Third-party retail model, where we sell to them on a wholesale basis, and you can still get a full Build-A-Bear experience. This is an asset-light model for us. We provide training, support, but, you know, we get more of that wholesale revenue from them. We do have international franchise model currently in eight different countries with over 70 locations.
As we think about our overall store fleet, we believe that we are not over-stored, and we believe in future growth plan, especially in North America, our biggest market. We have plans to add 15-20 locations over the next couple of years in North America through a combination of these corporately managed and third-party retail locations. Strong profitability that I mentioned definitely allow us to fund some of that expansion and really help support drive some of that digital demand to our 300+ locations that we often refer to as mini distribution centers and fulfilling this growth and demand that Sharon talked about that's representing roughly 20% of our business compared to 4%, just several years ago. We also have done a good job as the organization managing our lease optionality.
We have over 70% of our leases coming up for renewal over the next three years, and that gives us tremendous amount of power in our negotiations with landlords. We are one of those companies that is driving traffic to the mall. We have a high percentage of our business that plan visits. In addition to that, we continue to innovate. We just recently announced that we are opening a Build-A-Bear Adventure store that's gonna have a much larger footprint, that's off-mall, where you are gonna have ability to have full parties, arcade room, and really full Build-A-Bear birthday experience. We are excited about it. In addition to that, as we mentioned, we have new vending machines, automated teddy machines or ATMs, as we refer to them.
That's another way for us to be in places where running a traditional regular stores may be cost prohibitive due to the labor constraints. We continue to find innovative ways to really expand our brand and be in more places where people go for fun and giving them opportunity to engage with our brand.
Yeah. One of the bellwether of brand strength is when you can actually leverage your equity on page 25 into partnerships where you may not have a core competency on the product line itself, whether that's bedding or what we call subscription boxes or bicycles or other products, where Build-A-Bear is paid a margin-rich royalty revenue, and it places the brand in thousands of additional doors, and increases the presence of the brand. We refer to this as outbound licensing, as which is to differentiate it from our licensing business, where we pay the royalty to a company like a Disney to be able to sell a Frozen doll or a Frozen furry friend, for example.
That leverage of brand strength also allows us, on page 26, to lean into creating and elevating emotional connections through content creation and storytelling. It's a great part of our engagement strategy. It's also an important part of what is now the new marketing strategy. Traditional advertising to children has the entire approach to that, tactical approach to that has evolved enormously over the past few years. The creation of this type of marketing approach has been very good for us to be able to create that emotional connective tissue back to our brand and our sub-brands like Honey Girls, for example, which is a recent movie that we launched in conjunction with Sony Pictures Worldwide Acquisitions, and is now available on Netflix. I'll turn it over to Voin Todorovic for some quick financials, and then we'll get to the questions.
Really quick, on 2021 was our most profitable year, and definitely some strong results in some of the comparisons that you can see on this slide, 2021 versus 2020, and probably even more importantly versus 2019. That was the last full year before COVID. Over 21, almost 22% growth in total revenues. Our pre-tax income of just shy of $51 million was the record in company's history, and it's almost $50 million more than what we had in 2019. Strong profit margins, about 53%, 760 basis point improvement compared to 2019. Cash and cash equivalents, about $33 million, and that reflects some of the capital allocation that was done in late in Q4.
We did $20 million, basically one-time special dividend, and we announced a share repurchase program in the amount of $25 million. The next slide 29, highlights some of the key metrics, as Sharon pointed out, since we got here now many years ago. We did see a big transformation that was led by the current management team and a broader leadership team that was all brought in. Our total revenue from 384 to 411 has gone even though there were turmoil in the overall retail environment and decline in mall business and mall traffic, we were able to really improve our profitability to a tune of $85 million in EBITDA from a loss of $25 million in 2012. Our digital demand, as we pointed out, from 4% to almost 20%. North America stores being profitable, as I pointed out.
These metrics, we had about 80% of the stores in North America that were profitable, but the contribution margin on the four-wall EBIT basis was less than 10%. That's now over 97% with over 25% contribution margin. We diversified from traditional mall locations, and our average dollars per transaction versus 2012 has gone up over 50%, and it's in most recent year, about $53. If we can just take a quick skip to page 34, we'll pop over the COVID response. Although it is an interesting read, I encourage you to take a look at that. But I think just to focus on some of our plans to continue this road of profitable growth in 2022 and beyond, we're not significantly shifting our strategy because our strategy is working.
It is a three-pronged approach that we have shared of leveraging our ongoing and continuing to accelerate actually our digital transformation to drive growth. And that is focused on this lifetime value expansion and the extension of our addressable market beyond kids and the use of digital media and content to drive that, continue to drive that brand awareness. Leveraging our omni-channel capabilities and evolving our retail experiences and footprint. Voin Todorovic shared with you some of those initiatives on that from that perspective. We also expect to use our stores as a conduit to capitalize on our 25th anniversary celebration this year. Speaking to all the people that, you know, have such a brand love for this company to drive incremental sales and visits during that year.
We have actually at this point reintroduced birthday parties in conjunction with our 25th birthday. We haven't had birthday parties because of COVID-induced challenges in the last two years. That has a lot of excitement around it. To continue to create new digital experiences and across all sorts of environments where we can engage and elevate the relationship with our guests. As Voin Todorovic noted, continuing to leverage our financial strength to drive that same profitability making appropriate investments with the right kind of ROIC to continue to build for the future as well as generate revenue, profitable revenue in this year.
You can see on page 20, 35 rather, some specifics and/or initiatives that we're sharing, a lot of excitement in the corporation around a lot of these initiatives, inclusive of the Build-A-Bear Adventure, which we recently launched, which is a brand new approach to an expanded leveled up experience for guests. Of course, as we noted, the continued driving across a number of fronts that consumer relationship marketing and database across gifting collectibles and our traditional bear building process. The next few pages highlight our leadership and board. I believe in summary is that we, and this is on page 38, you know, we're a profitable business with strong margins, great balance sheet managers. Strong brand connecting on a global basis with millions of consumers.
We believe that we're now with so much of the groundwork done, building blocks in place, a strategy that is showing success, that we're in a position for further advancement and establishing a broader consumer segment against a diversified model with different reasons for consumers to shop and engage with Build-A-Bear. We're looking forward to continuing to drive profitable growth with this accomplished and seasoned leadership team. Glenn?
Oh, you guys are ready for questions? Okay, perfect. Again, to our audience, if you have a question, please use the question and answer text box. We've got quite a few questions already in the queue, so I'll just get going. Sharon, Voin, can you talk a little bit about your management style and culture and how incentives work for both top management and store managers, as well as employees?
Yeah, sure. We are very proud of our culture, actually. We love to talk about it. Our mission is to add a little more heart to life, and we take that mission to heart. We think about not only, you know, from our corporate headquarters, which we call the Bear Quarters, to the Bear House, which is the warehouse. We clearly have our own culture, our own language. You know, we pride ourselves on our engagement at the store level. The Bear Builders, the managers are often given credit as they should for being the team that is the one-to-one relationship with our most important entity, which is our guests. We value the fact and honor that we have this opportunity to make people smile every day.
I know that might sound a little bit, you know, soft on some edges, but, ultimately, you know, Build-A-Bear is an experience company, where we're creating furry friends for kids, you know, and kids at heart, for probably reasons where they're celebrating or they're making a memory or it's an important moment in their life. We believe that ultimately we're here in that construct of adding a little more heart to life, is that our job is that we're making every day a little bit better for somebody that comes to Build-A-Bear. That means whether they come to work or they go to the store or they go on our online or they're packing a box in our bear house. I'll give you a really good example of that.
Well, one, we've been on multiple best places to work lists over the years. We actually were also given an award for that through Forbes most recently. But as an example, without prompting, our warehouse, before they do their bear building stuffing process every day for the e-commerce orders, they, on their own, have the heart ceremony each morning before they start that process. That just gives you a really good sense of how much we permeate the importance of what we do every day into this company. Not to mention the Build-A-Bear Foundation, which gives both in-kind and actual money to multiple charities with the interest of children's health and wellbeing each year.
Perfect. Thank you for that, Sharon. Next question is, how have you achieved 25% store contribution? How does that compare to previous peak levels, mall retail peers, and your expectations? Proportionally, how much of the increase in the past couple of years was from better leases, and what were some other keys to this?
Yeah, over the last several years, we've been working, you know, that to achieve these high four-wall contribution margins that we said, over 25%. Again, this is in the average of basically the entire fleet. How does it compare? You know, again, there is some seasonality, you know, by years and different things that we have had. Prior to us coming, as I... One data point in 2012, we were under 10%. What has happened? During that same timeframe, we have spent enormous amount of time expanding our merchandise margin. Our merchandise margin during that same timeframe improved just shy of 1,000 basis points. We did renegotiate a lot of our leases and work with our landlords, and that definitely helped as well. You know, we managed our merch margins, we managed our occupancy costs, and we continue to manage our promotional activity.
Even this past year, our promotional activity has been at some of the lower levels. Comparatively speaking, I spent most of my career in retail. These are some very strong numbers. you know, we believe even with some of these high numbers that there is still definitely some opportunity to expand and continue to drive top line and leverage some of the costs that we have, especially from the lease perspective.
I actually think, if I could, Glenn, I think this is a good point to possibly interject some data that we shared on our last earnings call, concerning the significant changes, and I think we showed in some of the charts, but in the prepared document of what this leadership team has been able to accomplish, and it makes sense that you know, ultimately we would end up with four-wall, you know, to have returned to sustained profitability. I started in 2012, and to give you some of those comparisons, as an example, we've referenced our digital demand this year in 2021, year-end with over $70 million with a penetration of nearly 20% of net retail sales. That's compared to what was $14 million in 2012 and 4% of net retail.
Our merch margin has increased 950 basis points compared to 2012, even with some pandemic challenges and supply chain disruptions. As we noted that 97% of our North American stores were profitable and with a 25% contribution margin. That's compared to 20% of all locations being unprofitable in 2012, with an average of less than 10% contribution in 2012. In that effort of diversification, 85% of our stores were in what would be considered a traditional mall, and it's now less than 65%.
Okay. Thank you. I've got, I guess, another question that sort of goes in this line of discussion, so I'll just ask it now versus later. Do you ever discuss same store, or as you would have several formats, same format sales year over year?
We have in the past discussed same store sales and comp sales. The reason we decided to not specifically discuss it in that way is because we wanna drive both our e-commerce and our store sales, and we want people, investors to focus on total revenue growth and total profitability. In an evolving situation where we're significantly shifting our store footprint and format and locations, and where we, in our situation of e-commerce, have significant growth opportunity, using that to acquire new types of consumers to expand our addressable market and reasons for purchasing. Plus, we're in a situation where for us, e-commerce and in store, not that much different from a profitability perspective because we don't have returns, which is generally the one thing that pulls down the profitability in e-commerce on a comparative mall-based, omni-channel kind of location.
Our focus is on driving profitable growth for the company through a diversified strategy.
Okay, perfect. Can you give us some color on what you're seeing with regard to the health of the consumer? How sensitive do you think the business is to shift in discretionary income?
I'll start with that, you know, throughout 2019 into 2020, of course, we had some blips in there with our entire fleet being shut down, but a lot of that did drive our e-commerce business, the shift in consumer shopping habits. Then into 2021, we've seen not only an increase in traffic, conversion, dollars per transaction. As we've moved into 2022, what we shared on the call is that we're still seeing some positive momentum. Now, there's been a little bit of a shift around in what they're purchasing, but we've also been able to strategically raise prices plus maintain that momentum. It's hard to predict how people are going to react as so many geopolitical issues going on, as well as inflationary issues.
You know, clearly at the end of the day, you know, how discretionary is a teddy bear? You know, we've seen in the past that the toy industry can be comparatively protected from some of these situations. I would also offer that it's not that you don't celebrate the child's birthday even in a recession or an inflationary time period. It's just how do you celebrate the child's birthday? Hopefully, Build-A-Bear would be part of that selection set.
Okay. Thank you. You mentioned all the transformation you've done over the past few years that led to your recent strong results. Were there also external factors that contributed to the success such as COVID behavioral changes?
Yeah, I mean, definitely, you know, there was a lot of work that was done internally, and, you know, there were things and both tailwinds and headwinds that we had from the external environment. Some of those challenges that we can see that we have experienced, both from declining mall traffic to COVID pandemic to Brexit, we also looked as opportunities and a lot of good things came out as a result of those events. For example, with the decline in mall traffic, we were diversifying in all these different formats that I mentioned during our presentation and really increased the flexibility for us to operate in places where people were moving to go for fun and entertainment because those places historically were malls, but now there are just many more choices.
When we think about even the COVID pandemic, even though our stores were closed for a period of time, there was a much bigger focus on e-com and technology during that time. We accelerated some of the investments during those difficult times. That really helped us and enabled us to drive that digital demand and use our store fleet as fulfillment centers and really to help fulfill this tremendous growth and demand, as well as to shorten the timeframe between the order and the time the guest is getting the final product. Because having one fail point from our warehouse in Ohio to be distributing all these e-commerce orders, we have, like, a much more flexible model. Again, there were challenges. We used those challenges as opportunities.
You know, same thing with Brexit and challenges in U.K., in recent year, in 2021, even though they had to deal with COVID and everything else, our business there is very strong. We are continuing to look at ways to improve, and we are seeing continued strong growth both in U.S. and in U.K. and continue to see growth in our digital demand.
Okay. Thank you. How have the collectibles gifting adult revenues trended in recent years? What percentage of revenue were they a few years ago versus the current 40%?
We have not specified the collectibles gifting as a different segment, but what we have specified is the consumer demographics as a specific. 2015, 2014, the teen, tween, and adult business was more about 25% of the total business.
Yeah.
Now it's about 40% of the business. That gives you some directional information about how important the expansion into some of these giftables and collectibles and affinity products have been for us because they certainly, that older consumer over-indexes on those types of purchases.
Okay. Thank you. Can you please discuss your capital allocation strategy, the weight between new stores growth, share repurchases, dividends?
Of course. Definitely we are pleased with the management of our financials and our disciplined approach through some of the very challenging times, especially during COVID. You know, we came out on the other side with healthy, clean balance sheet. At the same time, as I mentioned earlier, we did spend about $20 million in special dividends that was declared late last year. Our board authorized $25 million share repurchase program that at the time of our last earnings call, we spent about $5 million against. We continue to look at ways to return share value to our shareholders, looking for ways from the return on investment and like what may be the best payback. We are also making investment in our business.
We guided for this year that our CapEx is expected to be $10 million-$15 million. We expect to add 15-20 new locations. We continue to invest in our digital transformation. It's finding that right balance between all these things. We do have a full availability under our credit facility. We have asset-based line in the amount of $25 million. We are well-funded, and you know, we continue to look at best ways to return money to shareholders and continue the growth trajectory that we had in place.
Okay. Thank you for that. Can you talk about the repurchase revisit rates, what revisit repurchase rates look like for your customer base?
Yeah. Our repe-
The-
Go ahead, Glenn.
I mean, Glenn, did you ask-
I think just the repeat business.
Repeat business. One of the things that's again a little bit unique with our consumer base, we do have what we refer to as a leaky bucket, because every year we have a portion of kids that age out, but every year you are kind of replacing with new kids. What's really happening there is due to the nature of the business and the kids information that we can track, usually their parents or grandparents are signing for some of the loyalty programs and rewards, and that's how we are tracking these individuals. From that aspect, we are a little bit unique, but we definitely are working on some of the initiatives to increase the frequency of visits for our guests through what we mentioned before, the loyalty program investments and expanding on those.
In addition to that, increasing that lifetime value of our guests through some of the programs that we talked about, teens, tweens, and adults. Some of these guests that are buying, that's representing that 40% of our business, when they were little kids, they came to Build-A-Bear. Like now we are just extending that lifetime value. Even though probably when they were as kids, we tracked them under their parent's account, now we are tracking them under their own. It is a little bit more challenging due to the nature of that data for us to really look at it. But again, the focus is really to increase the frequency of all those guests that are in the pipeline that we have.
We recognize that, you know, there's an opportunity to. Again, this is kind of a separate strategy in that we focus on that kids business. When they're in our Bonus Club, for example, a lot of times we know when their birthday month is, and we're able to put numerous journeys together to engage with the consumer and drive that next sale through different events that are happening, whether it's spring breaks or we know when their, as I said, when their birthday is or the holiday, certain holidays, the Easter holiday, Christmas holiday, Halloween, where we have kind of a natural cadence. Then we also have obviously the data about what was purchased under that particular name.
We will push out journeys concerning if they bought this Pokémon, the next Pokémon's coming out, or when the next Harry Potter thing is coming out, or the next Star Wars thing is coming out. There's a lot of activity against that, particularly the younger audience, where we're speaking more to mom or the gatekeeper. Now we have completely separate objectives and journeys and tools to reach and mine the older consumer on that collectible side, which is a little bit different. To give you a sense of our what we would call our opted-in address sort of market, we have about 12 million opted-in email accounts and about a little over 10 million of those have chosen to join our Bonus Club.
Excellent. Thank you. Can you talk a little bit about how much testing goes into new product innovation?
How much testing goes into new product innovation?
I would guess just the, you know, launching a new product, you know, what goes into it, how much time you guys spend on it.
Well, we launch innovative new products on a very regular basis. We have a pretty fast cadence on product launches, some that are driven and in through our relationships with licensing and some that we create on our own. They're segmented by consumer base to assure that we're meeting the needs of our big segments. They're cadenced in conjunction with some of the licenses that may have specific moments in time where they're going to have a movie or an event, and then we'll cadence our own launches around them. We have a tremendous amount of data from our own sales information, as well as the information that our guests are kind enough to share with us, that you know we take very seriously and privately from the Bonus Club data.
You know, as well as being plugged into pop culture and what is basically happening in the world, that's how we work together with our development team, our design team, external companies to assess what might be the next pop furry friend. Some of those would not be perhaps. I'll go out on a limb, obvious to you know sort of non-toy people. I'll give you an example of some really hot products for us that we've created and developed. One is an axolotl, and the other is a frog. We're plugged in to what's going on in social media and pop culture, and those are the things that drive the example.
Now, we, because we're a vertical retailer, have little risk associated with these fast-driven creation of what's next, because I'm not selling that into anyone. We can source limited quantities if we want, put them online, get an assessment of that, then understand through some of our models and algorithms, how big we would think this particular item is, choose to either amplify it online, order the next full container load or whatever we think is right, or then transfer it to an in-store experience, depending on the sales feedback. It's a very dynamic process.
Okay, thank you. You guys have done a great job, and now that you've got an excellent working model, can you be more aggressive in scaling the business internationally and at popular locations? Are you seeing any pent-up demand for your birthday parties?
Definitely there is an opportunity internationally to look at and scale the business because clearly we are under-penetrated. We do have franchise agreements in several different large markets around the world. Now, some of those expansion plans have been impacted by COVID pandemic in those respective countries. China, India, Australia, South Africa, they all had their own fair challenges during those times. When the world gets back to a little bit more of a normalized situation, definitely this is one of those areas that we believe is an opportunity. In addition to that, we have been looking, and we are trying to expand some of the tourist options in the markets where we own and operate. U.K. is a good market.
You know, right before COVID, we did open stores in some of the tourist locations like the London Eye, O2 Arena in London. Yes, we are looking at those things and like things that typically work here in the United States and some of these tourist markets work for us globally. With some of the changes, again, created by COVID, it gives us probably a little bit more leverage to be in some of those places as the rents could be a little bit more reasonable for the operating model to work.
On your birthday question, the answer is yes. But I, you know, we've noted on the last call that birthdays in the past can be up to 5% of our total business. Even though there's clearly pent-up demand for having birthday parties overall, and kids have not had birthday parties in the last couple of years as a general rule, it did not mean that there weren't people coming in to celebrate birthdays. I would just even though we believe there's some positive impact, obviously, from reinstating our birthday business and starting those celebrations for kids again, it won't. We expect it wouldn't be entirely incremental because what will likely happen is when there's a birthday for one, they might now have a party, which is a bigger ticket, but not an entirely incremental ticket.
Okay. Thank you for that, Sharon. We've reached the top of the hour, so I don't wanna keep you guys too much longer. We still do have a number of questions in the queue, but I'll get back to those individuals via email. My apologies if we can't do it live. Maybe, Sharon, I'll ask you for some closing remarks, and then we'll end the call. To those investors on the call, if you'd like follow up one-on-one, just reach out to glen@bristolir.com, and we'll be happy to arrange. Sharon, some closing remarks by you and Voin, and then we'll end the call.
Yeah. Thank you, Glen. Really appreciate the opportunity. Thanks for everybody for joining us today and taking a few moments to learn about the Build-A-Bear journey. We believe that we have significantly evolved the company over the past few years. The underpinnings of that strategy is based on the strength of the brand, but the hard work of the digital transformation combined with a incredibly proactive evolution of the retail footprint and the marrying of those two things together with a robust omni-channel solution combined with strong balance sheet, strong financial management, we are looking forward as a management team to a potential continued profitable growth for the company in the future based on the idea that we are more than malls, more than retail, more than kids, and more than toys.
Perfect. Thank you so much, Sharon. Thank you, Voin. Thank you to our audience, and this concludes this presentation.
This concludes today's conference, and you may disconnect your lines at this time. Thank you for your participation, and have a wonderful day.