Good morning, everyone. Can we try that again? Good morning, everyone. That's a lot better. I'm Sue Perram, Vice President , Director of Investor Relations. I'd like to welcome you to Brown-Forman's 2025 Annual Meeting of Stockholders. Thank you to those of you joining us in the room today, as well as my fellow Brown-Forman colleagues who are joining us virtually from around the globe. Before handing the meeting over to Campbell, I'd like to remind you of the code of conduct for today's meeting which is on the slide behind me and can also be found on our meeting website. I also need to make you aware that portions of today's presentations may contain forward-looking statements and certain non-GAAP financial measures. Each is more fully described in the slide behind me and in the appendix to the presentation which will be posted on our website, brown-forman.com later today.
With that, we appreciate your interest in and continued support of Brown-Forman. I would now like to turn the stage over to Campbell Brown, Chair of the Board. Campbell.
Thank you, Sue.
Good morning everyone.
I am pleased to now call the Brown-Forman 2025 Annual Meeting of Stockholders to order.
To start, I'd like to acknowledge certain i ndividuals who are here with us today. Our board of directors.
I'm sorry, former members of the board that are here today. So Dace Brown Stubbs is here. Sandra Frazier, Martin S. Brown, Laura L. Frazier, G. Garvin Brown IV, Augusta Brown Holland, and Stuart R. Brown.
Members of t he executive leadership team, including Mike Carr, w ho will serve as secretary of the meeting.
Representatives from Ernst & Young are also here.
We have the independent inspectors of our election, Karleen Finnegan, Nancy Muffrey, and Eric Koeberlein.
Mike, can you please describe the notice given to stockholders?
Yes.
Thanks, Campbell. Good morning everyone. On June 20, 2025, we began mailing notice of this meeting to our Class A stockholders as of the record date, together with a proxy statement, our integrated annual report which included our Form 10-K for fiscal 2025, and a proxy card. I can confirm that we have a quorum for today's meeting, with approximately 96% of our Class A stockholders either present or represented by proxy.
Thank you, Mike. There are two items of business for today's meeting. First, the election of the following 11 director nominees. Elizabeth M. Brown, former President, Dendrifund, Inc. Mark A. Clouse, President, Washington Commanders. Marshall B. Farrer, Executive Vice President, Chief Strategic Growth Officer, Brown-Forman Corporation. W. Austin Musselman Jr., M anaging Member, White Oak Investments LLC, and Owner and Manager, Ashbourne Farms.
Michael J. Roney, retired Chief Executive Officer, Bunzl plc. Jan E. Singer, former Chief Executive, J. Crew.
Tracy L. Skeans, Chief Operating Officer and Chief People & Culture Officer, Yum! Brands, Inc.
Elizabeth A. Smith, Executive Chair, Revlon Group Holdings LLC. Michael A. Todman, retired Vice Chairman, Whirlpool Corporation. Lawson E. Whiting, President and Chief Executive Officer, Brown-Forman Corporation.
Lastly, I, Campbell P. Brown, Chair o f the Board, am also standing for reelection. The second order of business is to ratify Ernst & Young as the corporation's i ndependent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2026. Mike, would you please describe the voting process?
Yes. Thank you, Campbell. Class A stockholders, as of the close of business on June 9th, 2025, are entitled to vote at today's meeting. If you previously voted, you do not need to do anything further at this time. If you have not voted or you would like to change your vote, the polls are now open and you may vote online using the instructions behind me. We'll pause for just a moment. Now that everyone has had the opportunity to vote, the polls are closed and the inspectors will tally the vote.
For the election of directors, each o f the 11 director nominees has received at least 95% of the Class A votes cast. Therefore, each nominee is duly elected to be a Director of the corporation. For the ratification of Ernst & Young as the corporation's independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2026. Over 99% of the Class A shares present and entitled to vote voted for the proposal. Therefore, the selection of the independent registered public accounting firm for fiscal 2026 has been ratified. We will issue a press release announcing the final voting results later today and file a Form 8-K with the SEC within the next 4 business days.
Amble.
This concludes the formal portion of the meeting.
Thank you, Mike.
Thank you all for the confidence that you continue to place in Brown- Forman and the Board of Directors.
Since there is no other formal business t o come before the meeting, I declare the formal portion of the 2025 Annual Meeting of Stockholders adjourned.
Okay, today marks the fourth and final time I stand before you as Chair of the Board. Before I pass the gavel to my cousin and great friend, Marshall Farrer, I wanted to reflect a little bit on a journey.
A journey that started about 31 years a go and maybe even a few years before that. There were four opportunities early in m y career that really shaped my perception of the culture of Brown-Forman and how our company pursues growth and success. I remember my first day as an intern in the mailroom in the summer of 1986.
Didn't know much about Brown-Forman, if I'm being totally honest.
I got to tell you, that j ob, it felt like the firmest handshake w ith the culture of this company you could imagine. I spent that entire summer crisscrossing t he campus, every corner of it, and watching magic unfold around me. I was struck, you know, not just b y the iconic brands and the very s mart people and the exceptionally cool point of sale that was in all of your offices.
It was really the sense of purpose.
You know, you could feel it in every hallway and every office. The second internship I did in 1989 was assigned to the R & D Lab.
I gotta tell you, for most of that period of that time, I reported to the incomparable Lucille Allen. I don't know how many people here know Lucille, but she is truly a pioneer in our industry.
She was the Brown-Forman and the U.S. spirits industry's first Black female chemist. I think Lucille might be here today. I know it's super dark, but if you're here, can you just give me a wave? There she is. Yeah. Lucille, you worked a miracle with me. I mean, I know it's hard to tell, and those that know me are going to be shocked by this, but I had no skill set whatsoever in lab work.
You kept me moving forward. You taught me how to show up every day. You taught me that details matter and that if I was consistent, I would earn your trust.
I thank you for that. My whole career has been marked by people at this company that have served as great mentors to me.
It's one of the special, special t hings about Brown-Forman.
I finally joined officially in 1994, which was a period marked by a l ot of uncertainty and low growth, which s ounds familiar. You know, if you recall, the U.S. s pirits industry was still reeling from the 1992 federal excise tax increase. American whiskey had been on a 30-y ear decline and was still kind of coming out of that slumber.
Jack Daniel's did over 100,000 cases in e xactly five global markets. Brown-Forman placed a bet and l aunched the Advancing Markets Group, which was a bold initiative to begin to expand our international footprint.
This group would open markets all over the world. For me, it delivered a life changing opportunity.
I'd always dreamed of working overseas, and the first place that Brown-Forman decided t o send me was India. I have to admit, for your first overseas posting, I kind of had these dreams of waking up on a beach sipping Chianti. There I was.
I went anyways and something surprising happened. What started as a reluctant f our- month stint turned into a remarkable year in New Delhi.
I found myself building something from the ground up.
I was able to hire my first team. We began to import and bottle American spirits and we launched Southern Comfort in six local Indian markets.
I remember leaving, I was in t he cab on the way to the airport and I was in a bucket of tears. I could not believe that a job or a time in the market could have such a powerful impact. I will tell you that experience taught me that the biggest leaps in growth o ften come from the things we're the most hesitant to do. A few years later, another unexpected assignment i n an unlikely location occurred.
At the time, Turkey was maybe a 20,000 case market.
There was a lot of debate inside Brown-Forman on how much of the 20,000 cases were actually being consumed in Turkey.
They asked me to move to Istanbul and to open an office and b egin working with this really dynamic young distributor.
Flipped Turkey from what was r eally a duty- free market into a duty- paid market.
I was hesitant, but again I went anyway. Despite earthquakes, Turkey became AMG's first 50,000 case market.
Today that market delivers over 400,000 cases of Jack Daniel's.
That's the kind of transformation that happens w hen you bet on potential and you back it with patience.
That same spirit guided us as we built an international footprint from expatriate launches t o empowered local leadership, from third party distribution relationships to fully- owned route to consumer platforms. We believed in our brands and we delivered a structure that would build on that belief.
Today Jack Daniel's delivers over 100,000 c ases in 17 global markets and 18 if you include Global Travel Retail. From day one I have like t his mindset that we invest for tomorrow, we do not just defend for today.
In recent years together we've acquired Diplomático rum, Gin Mare, Fords Gin. These are all beautiful brands. High margins and growing categories.
We've challenged our brand teams to think m ore globally about their portfolios.
Jack Daniel's, for instance, we now enjoy t his incredible global relationship with Coca-Cola.
I got a lovely reminder last night of this important relationship we've created with a very successful Formula One team in McLaren.
Most recently the Jack Daniel's brand t eam has reminded all of us what a special place Lynchburg, Tennessee is with t he launch of their new campaign What Makes Jack Jack? And we've repositioned Woodford to be the n ext great American whiskey in our portfolio. This remains, I think, our greatest medium and long- term opportunity.
While we've made strides, Woodford is o nly over 100,000 cases in a single market.
Within the United States, there is o nly one state that delivers over 100,000 cases. That's what opportunity looks like. These aren't just smart moves. These are statements about who we are and where we're going.
Yet the thing I'm most proud o f isn't a fancy location or one of our global brands with a ton of market share.
It's our founding brand, Old Forester. Remember the first conversation I had with Lawson and Paul Varga and my brother Garvin l ike it was yesterday.
After decades of neglect, Brown-Forman was r eady to invest in our founding brand.
You know, a brand that had really f rankly, lost its luster. We had declining volumes and anemic P& L, but we had a growing c ohort of crusaders that wanted something special to happen here. We needed to connect a story, authentic story, between a family and America's first bottled bourbon. We needed to remind people that this company and that brand was founded on a promise that there was nothing better in the market.
Armed with a really strong capital plan.
Thank you.
A commitment to telling a true story.
The collective will of what felt like an entire community of employees, f amily members, and the bourbon faithful.
We m ade something special happen there, didn't we? Yeah, we reimagined everything, showed up in the market differently.
We began to have our production folks i nteract on the floor of our new h ome place on Main Street.
We mined our archives for authentic stories, and we redesigned the packaging and rolled o ut an incredible line of innovation that was built on the powerful shoulders of Old Forester's fantastic timeline. And so, step by step, we built i t back from under 100,000 cases to 500,000 cases and counting.
It's now a profitable, proud centerpiece of our portfolio.
I get a lot of pats on the back for Old Forester, but the truth is it wasn't about me.
It was a team of people. Power of storytelling and the strength of craftsmanship and pride of legacy.
It reminds me even when a brand seems forgotten, it often becomes one of your most powerful assets. That lesson applies not just to bourbon. It's far beyond that.
Because at the end of the day, it's about our people.
Their belief, their pride, their grit.
I see that same spirit everywhere I g o, all around the world.
Just this past year, I was in Poland, in Germany, and in Mexico. We have people that are building businesses there like they run it like they are t he owners of those businesses. People who are driving BF forward across m ultiple brands, entire portfolios.
What sets us apart is not just the products we make.
It's in our culture.
Culture that's not inherited, but it's shaped every single day.
Culture shows up in the way we treat each other, the standards that we hold, and in the pride that we take in doing things the right way.
That's what gives me such confidence a s I get ready to pass the gavel. T he next chapter of our legacy will be marked by bold action and a clear strategy that's aligned around the t hings that matter most. I know Marshall, Lawson, and our Board of directors are ready for that moment, and they always are.
As I stand here today, I'm grateful beyond words. Let me. I just heard something cry over there. Let me just say thank you to our shareholders, my family, and investors a like, for the trust.
To our employees.
Yeah, good people. They're all good people.
To the executive leadership team, my fellow board of directors, your wisdom has g uided me and will continue to guide all of us. Thank you.
Finally, to Sarah, Maddie, and Chandler.
Love you guys.
You're going to feel a little bit more of me moving forward, so buckle up for that. The trust and the love and support has been first class. Okay? If there's one thing I hope y ou take away from today, it's this. Brown- Forman's strength doesn't come from a s ingle person or a single brand or a particularly special moment. It comes from a culture of people who show up when it matters most. If you're part of this story, s hareholder, a family member, my ask is simple.
Keep showing up, keep raising your hand.
Keep taking the leap. Be the person who carries the legacy forward. That's how we'll rewrite the next great chapter together.
Thank you.
Now. Thanks.
Thank you.
It now gives me great pleasure and a ton of confidence to hand the Chair role over to my cousin, the 10th Brown family member and third of our fifth generation to serve in the seat, Marshall Farrer. Congratulations and good luck.
Thank you, Campbell. Good morning, shareholders, family, employees, and partners.
Before we look ahead, I want to reflect on the great leadership over the past four years and more than 30 years of service.
Campbell, you've left a lasting legacy. You've led with courage and clarity and heart. You've guided bold acquisitions, global expansion, and a pandemic era pivot that put people first. You've shown that conviction can be steady and kind. On a personal level, I'm extremely a ppreciative of your mentorship and camaraderie.
You've traversed both a personal and professional p ath ahead of me and I am d elighted that you will continue to serve a longside me on this Board as we navigate the next chapter ahead. Thank you.
As Campbell mentioned, and I think you all probably already know by now, I'm a fifth generation family member and my journey with Brown-Forman has been both d eeply personal and professionally formative. I didn't necessarily always plan to join the business.
Towards the end of college I found myself drawn to Brown-Forman, to the purpose, to the people, our brands and the possibility of making a meaningful long- term contribution.
I leaned in. I began my career 27 years ago.
Out in California in our then wine division before transitioning to spirits.
Since then I've had the privilege of growing brands and building global capabilities around the world. From Latin America to Australia, Asia, Global Travel R etail, and Europe.
These experiences have broadened and shaped my w orldview and given me a great appreciation for complexity.
Throughout all of that complexity, lived i n San Francisco and with my family in Sydney, London, Amsterdam and of course r ight here in Louisville.
Worked across these m arkets, built commercial teams and helped steward key partnerships such as Jack and Coke and McLaren Formula One Racing. I have worked and will continue to w ork with governments and policymakers from Capitol Hill to the White House and of course international policy offices around the world o n regulations that so formatively shape our i ndustry and how we operate within it. For nearly 10 years, I've also served on the Board and all of these experiences have reinforced the same lesson for me.
Patience practiced over time becomes endurance. I'll be candid with you. I am not a patient person.
I like momentum. I like progress.
I've come to understand that true e ndurance, the kind that our company is built on, isn't built on the absence of urgency.
It's the result of discipline and long- term commitment.
That's what makes Brown-Forman different. That's what gives me confidence in today.
Yes, we are navigating very complex times.
Guess what?
Brown-Forman has always been shaped by challenge. We've endured world wars, depressions, prohibition.
Countless s hifts in global trade, from tariffs to tax hikes, changing consumer preferences and even digital disruption.
We have met each one of these, n ot with panic, but with purpose.
We're still here, stronger, smarter and more aligned. Why? Because this company is built on three bedrock truths.
One, long-term family commitment, now six generations strong. Two, enduring leadership rooted in discipline and built for the long haul. Three, a culture of belief.
Belief in each other, our brands, and i mportantly, doing things the right way. That's what carries us through cycles. That's what powers our adaptability.
That's what sustains our dividend payable every year since 1944.
That is what makes us uniquely positioned t o navigate this near- term turbulence and build for generations. Even amid today's challenges, we see momentum building. We've reignited Jack Daniel's behind a bold new campaign. We're investing behind critical emerging markets and developed market powerhouses. We've reshaped our U.S. distribution behind focus and dedication that puts Brown-Forman first. This reflects a company that doesn't just r eact, it invests forward.
What sets Brown-Forman apart is our ability to master the balance of l ong- term thinking and short- term action.
Confidence in who we are, yet the courage to evolve. That's only possible because of our people. I've seen across the generations and geographies, the same values hold true.
Integrity, humility, pride, and a relentless desire to build something that lasts. That culture, our culture, is our greatest advantage. As your incoming Chairman of the Board, I am committed to preserving that culture and help steer the next chapter of growth.
It's a responsibility that I take very seriously. As a family member, it represents the highest form of service and leadership.
That I can provide to our shareholders, our family, and to a legacy of leadership that includes my grandfather, George Garvin Brown II, who held the very same role. Though we never had a chance t o know each other, I've always been guided by the inspiration of his service and leadership.
I know that both Campbell and Garvin have as well.
Together, Lawson, our executive leadership team, fabulous one. And our great Board of Directors, we will continue to manage through the complexity. We will invest with intention and we will build a Brown-Forman that not only lasts, but leads.
To our shareholders, thank you for your trust. To our employees, thank you for your dedication and care. To our extended Brown-Forman family, thank you for your enduring belief.
Our legacy is strong, but the future is brighter still.
Thank you.
It is now my pleasure to w elcome forward Lawson Whiting, our Chief Executive Officer.
Thank you for doing it. All right, thank you, Marshall. Look, looking forward. I have a new Chairman to work with, but really looking forward to what we can do together over the upcoming months and years. And Campbell, four years of leadership, of p artnership and of friendship has been awesome.
I've loved working with you.
Very happy you're staying on the board.
We get to continue doing these things together. What I thought I would start with today is a story that goes back 25 years. That was December of 2000, and we were looking at buying the Seagram company for anybody that might remember that.
It was something we'd been working o n for years or a year.
It was a transformative acquisition potential at l east. We all been working really, really hard on it. We were up in New York, it was the final days.
We had put a bid in.
We were waiting to see what happened. We were in. I remember it was in midtown, in an Italian restaurant up on the second floor. We had a private dining room and it was me kind of huddled in the corner. I was the young guy, I was 32 years old and I had the Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets on a laptop.
I did all evaluation work. So besides me, it was Owsley Brown.
It was Bill Street, Michael Crutcher, John Bridendal and Larry Probus.
Six of us in the room.
We're in there, we're waiting for the phone call to see if we had won or not. If you remember what cell phones looked like back then, these were not iPhone days. I mean, this was like a brick with an antenna coming out of it that I remember so well. The phone rang and John picked it up and they said, guys, you didn't get the deal. It was like silence. Everybody, you know, you've been working on something so hard for so long, you know, you're a bit deflated.
Owsley went to the waiter and.
He said, please put a glass of ice in front of everyone that is sitting here.
He grabbed a bottle of Jack Daniel's.
He started, he opened it up and then he poured a glass.
He'd start talking a little b it and he'd pour another glass and he went around the room himself and that's when he was talking about how, look, we've spent the last year chasing these external brands.
The market is tough, growth is really r eally hard to come by. Our margins are down, the stock price is down. There is something about it that we need to realize. We need to recognize and believe we own the greatest spirits brand in the world. Time to double down.
We're going to refocus the organization. We need more and better consumer communications.
We need better on- premise ideas. We need better pricing strategies and execution, all of it.
It started around that from that year i n 2000 until for the next 20+ years, we went on a tear. We developed the Jack Daniel's brand into the brand it is today and just reminded that when we settle, double down, and focus, we can really build something into a great success. That is what we are going to do going forward. The external headwinds are tough, the market is tough, and we are going to talk through a lot of that this morning. We are getting through it and we are going to continue to plow forward. I mean, inflation has been brutal on the consumer products world and particularly on beverage alcohol. There are shifting consumer preferences, there is lots of change happening. Many industries are going through change. I do want you to know this is not business as usual time.
If there's only one thing that y ou remember, one thing you take away from today, it's that we're not standing still.
We see the challenges and the opportunities.
We are moving with speed and focus to capture them.
Look, today I'm going to focus o n the future for the most part, but I thought it makes sense to put a little bit of context around what the environment is today. This is not a fun chart, but this is U.S. total distilled spirits. It is the spirits industry in the U.S. Although if you took this and apply, it basically applies to most of Europe and the developed world, you saw p retty steady growth on this chart. It's 2014 up until the pandemic.
If you went back to probably the 10 years before that, it would stay in that same range. We enjoyed nonstop growth in the spirits industry for a long, long period of time. Then you saw the massive spike during the pandemic and it has come down drastically over the last couple of years and even into 2025, to be honest, it's not improved, it's even a little, it's a little worse than down one. While difficult, we are fighting through this environment, and I will say we said it in the last quarter in our earnings release, we expect at least we're going to be the only company in the entire spirits industry that showed both top- line growth and bottom- line growth last year. We're still taking share, we're still performing well, but it is in an environment that we haven't seen in a long, long time.
This is the chart I'm going to base the rest of the presentation around. Really. We call this a strategic framework and I'm sure many of you have seen this before.
Our strategy is anchored in four strategic p riorities, our portfolio, geography, people, and investment. At the heart of it all is nothing better in the market. I'm going to walk through each one of these. I'll try to talk you through each one of these buckets and the things that we're doing right now to improve the state of our business.
I'll start out with portfolio. Now this is not a one- year thing.
This is something we've been doing for 10 years. For that matter, Brown-Forman has strategically reshaped its portfolio many times over the decades.
These are the new brands that we b rought in in the last 10 or so years.
They're excellent brands. These are brands we really believe that h as a really long-term future. They're in categories we haven't, for the most part, haven't played in very much.
They're exciting super premium brands.
We got rid of some brands like Southern Comfort, Early Times, and Canadian Mist and even most recently Sonoma-Cutrer.
We did that because we believe in t hese brands and the future for them. Now the reality is when you buy brands like this that are super premium and growing faster, you're going to pay a big multiple to buy them.
You don't get much when you sell b rands that are in decline, so you get dilution.
In a family- controlled company that's okay.
I really believe you all can live t hrough a few years of dilution, so t hat we get these and that we have a brighter long term future. Now innovation, the other important part of portfolio development these days, much more important, say than it was 20 or 30 years ago. Every brand has to play in the innovation world i f you're going to try to keep up. Jack Daniel's Blackberry here, which I know you're going to be able to try out in the Grand Fair when we finish this presentation. But it's going to be, my confidence i s very high that that's going to b e a rousing success.
Woodford Reserve is one of the best, h as the best innovation pipelines of any brand I think in our industry. It is all very, very premium stuff. That picture there is Double Double Oak, an extension off of Double Oak, which we've had in the market for a number of years now. It has been a great success and continues to be. We really focus on premium, focusing on flavors and convenience.
There's a new mix, of course, Jack and Coke, all fit the convenience consumer movement that's out there that we have to go with and we think we can be really successful. Old Forester's Main Street Series, Campbell talked a little bit about that. That has also been a great success in our tequilas, which need help. Our tequilas have not performed very well in the last few years.
Innovations in the Cristalino space for both, El Jimador and Herradura, I think can be successful, and we're excited to get those out.
The most important thing within o ur portfolio, I know you all know, is to keep Jack Daniel's healthy and growing.
It's been challenging.
We have developed an entire new campaign. Mark Bacon and his team have developed a fantastic campaign, and I think most of you have probably seen this, but I love it so much that I t hink it's worth spending 30 seconds taking a look.
Jack Daniel's starts here. From pure cave spring water to the fires that create the sugar maple charcoal, where every drop is mellowed until it's smooth Tennessee whiskey, a whiskey we all know by name, made by those who pour everything into their craft for those who drink it all over the world. That's what makes Jack Jack.
So that what makes Jack Jack.
I just. I love the tagline. I love taking what sort of the fundamentals of the Jack Daniel's brand and Lynchburg and some of those cues and making it a little bit more modern and bringing music into it. I think we've gotten onto a really good path with the brand. It takes a while, these things. It takes a while to turn around, but I feel confident that we got the thing on the right track. That's within the portfolio bucket. G eography. We continue to see a tremendous amount of potential in our geographic expansion in terms of controlling our distribution and going direct to the markets.
We've opened up both Italy and Japan o ver the last year or so. Those are markets that not many people are investing in these days.
We see, like in Italy, Gin Mare is a dominant brand in that market.
We see real big potential there.
Same for Jack Daniel's in Japan, which is a really big American whiskey market. Very, very premium. There are good things to be had there.
We don't often talk about geographic expansion i n the U.S. business, but you can see here, and you've heard earlier we made some very, very significant moves in the U.S. distribution system over really just the last few months.
Started with Jeremy Shepherd working on this. Nine or ten months ago, Michael took o ver the U.S. business with Robinson, and between the two of them, put this thing over the line. These are big changes. Probably if you're not in the business, you may not appreciate how big these changes are.
While it's 14 states, it's California, it's New York and it's Texas. Three really, really big states for us.
We're making the changes. It's all happening right now.
We feel really good about our n ew partners and some exciting stuff to go. We expect to get an acceleration in our U.S. business very shortly from all these very important changes. We are controlling the controllables, making the changes that we can. Now people, obviously.
This has been a tough year for some of the employees of Brown-Forman. We recognize the environment is so competitive.
We need to evolve.
We need to evolve how we think, need to evolve how we work and how we lead. In January we announced a global i nitiative where we had a workforce reduction of about 12% of our global workforce. Not an easy thing to do and is much larger than anything Brown-Forman has ever done in the past.
We need the flexibility, honestly we n eeded to take some costs out of the system, but we also need the ability to reallocate resources to better growing markets. We are going to do that. A tough decision overall, but I think is the right, I know it is the right thing going forward.
The other big change within that i nitiative was finally getting exiting out of the wood business or the barrel making business. So we got out of the sawmill business or we had been getting out slowly over the previous few years.
We sold the Jack Daniel's Cooperage, which w as down in Alabama about a year ago and then most recently closed the cooperage here out by the airport just t owards the end of the fiscal year.
Once again, decisions, I would call those bold decisions.
A lot of people thought owning our o wn barrels or making our own barrels was just absolutely core to who we are.
I mean there would have been a p eriod of time, probably more like 30, 40, 50 years ago, but when there wasn't, there was no one that could have made the barrels to the scale that we needed. So we got into the business because we needed to.
The reality is we found a partner who's much bigger, much more cost efficient and will help us improve our margins. Again, we are very focused on improving our gross margin.
The biggest reason it had a d ecline in the last few years has been wood, has been barrels. We made some tough decisions there. They were not made lightly, but they were grounded in our long- term commitment to a stronger, more sustainable future. Now, core values, and this is something.
We get kind of sensitive if somebody starts to challenge. Has all these changes changed the core v alues of Brown-Forman? I can tell you right now, the core of Brown-Forman has not changed. Our core values care for our people.
Our commitment to doing the right thing.
I can tell you right now, as long as I am standing here on this stage, our core values are not going to change. Now, investment, that's the other big bucket or the fourth bucket on our strategic framework. These really haven't changed, honestly, in a very long time.
The first priority is always to i nvest in our business. We always do that through capital expenditures, through building our inventories and things like that.
We advance our portfolio ambitions.
We've done two fairly large acquisitions in the last few years. We're taking a little bit of a break on that now, but we believe that that was the right thing to do once again, for the long- term b enefit of the company with share repurchases and returning.
Once we finish with those, we're going to continue to return the balance t o shareholders, whether it be through share b uybacks, whether we do special dividends, or the continuing growth of our regular dividend.
Really reflects the confidence that we have i n this business going forward. We are a proud Dividend Aristocrat.
As long as I'm standing on this stage, I can promise.
We continue to work to ensure that we will remain Dividend Aristocrats far into the future.
Look, we're not just investing or m anaging for a quarter. We're managing for generations. We know that.
We're going to continue to take bold a ctions and use this framework as our guide to continue to grow the business. As I said several times today, the market is very difficult right now, more difficult than it's been at any time in my career.
I believe we have the right people and the right teams and the right brands. So back to New York City. You know, when times are tough and t he external world continues to throw challenges your way, you've got to react, you've got to control the controllables. We must continue to believe that the best chapters for Brown-Forman are yet to come.
We're clear about the challenges.
We're confident in our path.
I am very, very confident in our people. We are committed to delivering value to s hareholders who place their trust in us.
So Owsley's, the lessons learned from 25 y ears ago, his challenge was to remain laser focused on the controllables. Make sure that you are fixing and driving everything that's under your control, deliver on your commitment to nothing better in the market, and never forget that we still own the greatest spirits brand in the world.
Thank you.