Okay, we'll go ahead and get started. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back to Sidoti's November Conference. My name is Daniel Harriman. I'm an analyst here at Sidoti. This afternoon, we're lucky enough to get to host Brilliant Earth Group. That's ticker BRLT. We're going to hear from the company's Chief Financial Officer, Jeff Kuo. We also have Colin Bourland here, the VP of Strategy, Business Development, and Investor Relations, for any questions that you may have after the presentation. We're going to give Jeff about 20 minutes to go through these slides, during which time, if you do have a question, I encourage you to type that into the Q&A box, and for the last 10 minutes, we'll go through that and see how many we can get through before time is up.
On behalf of Sidoti, Jeff, thank you so much for being here multiple times this year, and we look forward to catching up and hearing your presentation.
Thanks, Daniel, and thanks for having us again. It's a pleasure to be here at the Sidoti Microcap Conference. Appreciate everybody taking the time to hear from us this afternoon. As Daniel mentioned, I'm Jeff Kuo. I'm the CFO of Brilliant Earth, and I've been with the company since 2015. Before we proceed, we'd just like to highlight our safe harbor language regarding forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures. You can also read these in the presentation that's been posted to our Investor Relations website. Brilliant Earth is the next-generation jeweler for today's consumer. We were founded in 2005 with a mission to create a more transparent, sustainable, and compassionate jewelry industry.
We have been transforming the industry with a combination of our authentic, mission-driven brand, beautifully designed and trend-leading proprietary products, a seamless omnichannel experience across our soon-to-be 40 showrooms and our digital platform, and an asset light and a data-driven business model. This is all translated into our ability to profitably grow and gain share in the large and fragmented, approximately $300 billion jewelry industry. This page walks you through some of the highlights of our company history. It showcases our leadership in product innovation, in media engagements, and partnership, including our recently announced partnership with Jane Goodall, some of our financial milestones, and also some examples of how we give back to our communities. There are a few points that it's helpful to highlight about Brilliant Earth. One, we operate in a large industry that's ripe for disruption.
As I mentioned, it's about a $300 billion jewelry industry, and it's also a highly fragmented industry, with about two-thirds of the industry being comprised of independents. We've got an agile business model that can swiftly adapt using data and technology to continuously determine how can we optimize along many different dimensions. We also have this asset light model that isn't burdened by holding excess inventory that allows us to adjust much more quickly to trends as we see them emerging and diminishes the risk of holding inventory, and we have an omnichannel model that really provides a joyful and seamless shopping experience, caters to customers' how and when and where they want to shop, and a set of values that strongly resonate with our customers. To provide a brief recap of some recent performance from the top line and profitability side.
We reached $446 million in 2023 net sales, and you can see that we also, over this period shown, grew our gross margin, reaching a gross margin from 45% in 2020, getting up to 58% gross margin in 2023. And we've been able to do this while delivering positive adjusted EBITDA, balancing making investments both in near and long-term growth, and driving efficiency and profitability. I thought it'd be helpful to walk through some of the highlights from our recently announced Q3. So in Q3, we did $99.9 million in net sales. That was within our guidance range and expectation, down 13% year over year. Total orders were approximately flat at minus 1% year over year. And then we had an 11% year over year growth in repeat orders.
With an average selling price that was approximately flat year over year in engagement rings and a year over year ASP growth in wedding and anniversary bands and fine jewelry. We continue to have strong gross margin performance with a 60.8% gross margin in Q3, which was a 230 basis points expansion versus the prior year. And then we were able to drive 10 basis points of leverage in marketing expense as a percentage of net sales compared to Q3 last year. And then this all combined to allow us to deliver an adjusted EBITDA of $3.6 million, which exceeded our guidance range. And that was our 13th consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA as a public company. So all the quarters that we've reported as a public company.
As I mentioned earlier, we do have an asset light inventory model with inventory turns that are significantly higher than the industry average. Our turns are around the 4.5 range compared to the industry average. That's more in the one or two times range. So that really illustrates how we can be very nimble and agile with our working capital, and we were able to drive a $5.5 million increase in our cash balance year over year. And this is even after making capital investments and reducing our debt principal balance. Here, I think we've covered a lot of the highlights in terms of sales, gross margin, and EBITDA, so I think we can move on to the next page, which highlights some of the order and AOV trends.
So I've mentioned before we had approximately flat total order growth at minus 1% year over year, and then an 11% year over year growth in repeat orders, which we're really glad to see. And I think this overall demonstrates the efficiency of our customer acquisition retention, as well as the fact that our brand and our products are resonating with consumers. In terms of pricing, from an ASP perspective, ASPs were approximately flat year over year in engagement rings, and they were up year over year in wedding and anniversary bands and in fine jewelry in Q3. And so we're glad to see that. And that speaks to, again, the resonance of our brand, as well as the fact that we are not discount-oriented and thoughtful about our pricing and stewardship of the brand.
When you look at an average order value or AOV, we do expect that to moderate as fine jewelry becomes a bigger part of the product mix. So this is something that we expect, and we think there's a lot of opportunity in areas like fine jewelry where we can offer additional products to customers over their lifetime for gifting and for self-purchase. And it's a strategic growth area for the company. We also continue to deliver on elevating our brand. So as you may have seen, we executed an omnichannel campaign highlighting the launch of our Jane Goodall Collection, which is a mission-aligned partnership that we launched together with Dr. Jane Goodall. We're very honored to work with her on this partnership. We also launched a "Rethink Everything You Know About Diamonds" campaign that really amplifies our leadership and innovation over the approximately two decades of our history.
Our brand awareness has continued to grow. We've been growing in our unaided and aided brand awareness over the last couple of years and have also driven success in growing earned media impressions, as well as success in our social media strategy. And this really just helps us continue to elevate the awareness and prominence of our brand. And we think there's long-term potential to continue to grow the brand and its awareness. And we're glad to report what the successes that are shown here. Also here, see a selection of some of our products. And really, we have an assortment that's finely curated of trend-leading, distinctive, and proprietary products to us. We had strong year-over-year bookings growth in wedding and anniversary bands, as well as fine jewelry in Q3. And as I mentioned before, we launched this much-anticipated collection in partnership with Jane Goodall.
And this has been our most successful launch ever for fine jewelry collection. And you can see the carbon-captured diamond cuff on this page here. Our business model is really very working capital efficient. And you can see this in the strong inventory turns that I mentioned earlier, as well as negative working capital. So our design-your-own model and virtual inventory of hundreds of thousands of diamonds really allows us to both offer a breadth of products to our customers while keeping our balance sheet inventory low. And this really allows us to drive high inventory turns. It diminishes our risk of buying the wrong inventory or at the wrong price at the wrong time and allows us to adapt to market conditions in a very agile fashion and adapt to demand as we see it emerge.
This allows us also to just free up cash and have a balance sheet that is working capital efficient. You can see that on a year-over-year basis, we ended up with just a slight increase in inventory at about 3% higher year over year, even though we've been growing the showroom footprint and expanding in areas like fine jewelry. And we did end the quarter in Q3 with about $153 million in cash, which was higher year over year, even after capital investments and reducing our debt principal balance. We have soon to be 40 showrooms across the country. And I think these showrooms really are a key part of our omnichannel strategy. This is an omnichannel, large consider purchase. And we offer customers a variety of ways to interact with the brand, whether it's on our digital channels, in our showrooms.
It can also be on chat, on the phone to really meet customers where they are and provide them with that joyful, curated experience to help them find the jewelry that's right for them. And we really work to make this a seamless experience across our channels to make the shopping experience what customers are expecting for a considered luxury purchase. We've got showroom experiences that really enhance customer engagement. You can see examples here of some of our recently introduced try-on bars, which we think are a very nice and compelling addition to our showrooms that allow customers another way to experience our jewelry. And we continue to introduce new features to optimize customers' digital experiences. And then the showrooms you may have heard me talk about before are compelling economically as well in that they drive compelling uplift across an entire metro when we open the showrooms.
And so we're looking really to drive that incrementality across an entire metro when we open those showrooms. And we continue to see that. And we've been expanding our retail footprint in major metro areas. So we have our Nolita showroom, which just opened last week in New York, which is our first ground-level location in New York City, as well as two locations in Boston in Chestnut Hill and Seaport. And so we'll have 40 showrooms going into the holiday shopping season. Talking about our priorities for the year. So we would like to continue on our path to become the premier global jewelry brand for today and tomorrow's consumer, expand and refine our distinctive and high-quality product offering, expand and elevate the omnichannel experience, and invest to drive operational efficiency and long-term sustainable growth.
This really speaks to just how we're continually making the right investments for the long term and balancing that with the importance of profitability, efficiency, and ROI. In terms of our guidance for the year, our net sales guidance for the year is in the range of $410 to $425 million. And our adjusted EBITDA guidance for the year is in the range of $14 to $16 million. So we dynamically manage operating expenses, including marketing spend, to deliver profitability while making strategic investments in the business for the long term. So again, our focus on balancing, making those investments while being thoughtful about profitability and ROI. And just a couple of things maybe to point out about guidance is that the midpoint of this guidance does imply sequential improvement in year-over-year net sales growth in Q4 compared to Q3.
We continue to have strong performance in our fine jewelry sales, including encouraging repeat purchase trends, which we see as a positive indicator going into the most important seasonal quarter for fine jewelry, Q4. As we've discussed previously, if you've tuned into some of our past presentations or earnings calls, we expect that engagements will continue their gradual path to normalization. We also think that other key drivers of Q4 performance will include realizing uplift from our showrooms and benefits from our ongoing brand-building efforts. Then just going to take a slightly longer-term perspective, these are our medium-term targets. I'll just talk through those briefly here. For net sales, we anticipate that net sales growth will get to a low teens growth rate in 2027.
We expect this to be driven by the gradual normalization of engagements, growth from our showrooms, continued strong performance of fine jewelry, and as well as other non-engagement assortments, as well as growth of our brand awareness. For gross margin, we expect that to remain in the high 50s% through 2027. This is driven by the same levers that have gotten to where we are today, which includes our premium brand, our proprietary product collections, our price optimization engine, procurement efficiencies, as well as our warranty program. Then on the expense side, we're targeting driving leverage in marketing as a percentage of sales beginning in 2025. We expect that drivers of this will include, again, our growing brand awareness, increased conversion from our showrooms, continued success in areas like fine jewelry, which will help us capture additional repeat purchase opportunities.
These will all contribute towards driving increasing leverage in marketing cost. Then we anticipate the combination of these factors will drive us to an Adjusted EBITDA margin reaching a double-digit margin in 2027. To recap, our premium brand and our differentiated business model, including how we're data-driven, asset-light, and how our seamless omnichannel platform, these all combine and demonstrate our ability to deliver profitability and to achieve our strategic and financial objectives in a variety of different environments. Thank you again for taking the time to tune in this afternoon. I'll turn it back over to Daniel to see if there's any questions.
Awesome. Thank you so much, Jeff. We have a little over 10 minutes now. As a reminder, if you do have any questions, I encourage you to type them into the Q&A box.
We've had a few come in, Jeff, and thank you for the presentation. Some of this, you may be forced to repeat yourself a little bit, but I hope that's okay.
No worries.
Just can you maybe, and I'm going to try to combine some common themes here, but maybe talk a little bit more about the competitive space in the market and then also a question about lab-grown diamonds and if you see those as a potential threat moving forward.
Sure. So first, taking the competitor question. So as I mentioned earlier, the industry is quite fragmented. About 2/3 of the industry is made up of independents. And we see this as a compelling opportunity for us where we have a strong brand, differentiated products, profitability, and the balance sheet to really make investments and gain share against that backdrop.
That's part of the opportunity that it's both a large and fragmented industry. We have the ability to deliver to really capture long-term opportunity there. In terms of lab-grown diamonds, we've been offering natural and lab-grown diamonds beside each other for more than a decade now. We view this as one dimension among many of choices that we can offer our customers. We can offer them this curated selection of jewelry, natural and lab-grown diamonds, gemstones to really meet them where they are. Customers in this space often shop with a budget. We're able to make a compelling assortment available to our customers and help them meet that budget with some jewelry that they're going to treasure for a lifetime.
Perfect. I warned you you might have to repeat yourself.
Not at all.
Here's again, just asking for maybe some statistics from you, which you probably provided, but I don't recall. How much of your business comes from fine jewelry now? And do you have a goal in mind in terms of the percentage of sales that you would like to come from fine jewelry?
Fine jewelry is a small part of our business right now. And then just in terms of context, the industry as a whole is majority fine jewelry. So I think that is a big part of the opportunity for us to grow from our bridal heritage to offer fine jewelry. And it's compelling for a variety of different reasons. One, it allows us to engage with customers at more different points in their life cycle, whether it's for special events, gifting, self-purchase.
It really allows us to have more opportunities for the customer to purchase from Brilliant Earth to drive additional repeat purchase behavior, and we think that we have a compelling assortment and the platform to do so successfully, so we're very excited about the opportunity and the success we've been driving there.
Perfect. I know that we've asked you this one in a previous presentation, but you talked about your showrooms and understanding how important those are, but in terms of a goal, do you have an idea of how many you eventually want to get to, or is it going to be on a case-by-case basis moving forward?
We think that we can cover our customer base with an efficient footprint, so we don't have a specific target number that we've communicated beyond the 40 that we expect for this year.
What I can say is that we expect that we can cover our customer base with an efficient footprint, so this isn't a thousands of stores necessary strategy. I think our showrooms tend to be destinations where people will come to us, and they may already be aware of the brand, and they'll go specifically to shop at the Brilliant Earth showroom, and as we've introduced more locations that are ground floor, street level, or in malls, that also allows us to complement the appointment-driven model with opportunities to discover us and engage with us on a walk-in basis, and we find that to be an exciting complement, and our three newest locations with things like the try-on bar will further kind of accentuate that opportunity, but we think we can do so efficiently.
Perfect.
I'm going to go back to the lab-grown and natural question from earlier because another one came in, Jeff. Are you able to disclose the approximate mix of the two? I know that you've been selling them side by side for about, I think you've mentioned 10 years. But are there any notable ASP and margin differences between the two different types?
Yeah, we haven't provided breakdowns along those lines. Probably would go back to the fact that we do sell both and have sold both alongside each other for quite some time. We think that we're well-equipped. Our brand, our platform, and our team are well-equipped to sell them both, and we're able then to help people meet the budget that they're looking for with that as one dimension of the choice alongside many others.
Perfect. Okay.
And I know you touched on this one with your bridal roots, but you've recently talked about early indications of improvement in the bridal market. And a question came just about, can you expand on that? And if that comes through, as you expect, what would be the expected impact on your AOV?
Yeah. So in terms of that, what we've talked about is that we've seen so far some sequential improvement in our bookings growth rate so far this quarter, including in engagement rings. And so we are seeing some of the signs of that progression toward normalization. We do think that there will be a gradual normalization there.
This is embedded both in our guidance for the year as well as in the midterm model that I talked about earlier, is that there is this path after we had some of the peaks of engagement in 2021 and 2022, and then a lower point in engagements. Bridal is an enduring tradition, and we think that we're well-equipped to be there to meet demand as it emerges, and as well as complementing that with performance in areas like fine jewelry, wedding, and anniversary bands.
Your business model is such, and all the work that y'all have done, even in a difficult market, sets you up to really perform well when that demand does return. Question about capital structure and if you have any capital raising plans in the future?
Yeah. In terms of capital structure, we've raised money, of course, through our IPO.
We also have a debt facility, and we're net cash, and so I think that complements well with our positive Adjusted EBITDA, so we've got a few things going for us: the positive Adjusted EBITDA, the working capital efficient model, the fact that we're net cash, and I think this all combines to give us financial wherewithal to make the appropriate investments in terms of capturing the long-term opportunity there, and so we are approaching this environment with a position of demonstrated potential to drive positive Adjusted EBITDA that's complemented with the strong balance sheet. We've got the debt facility available to be net cash. I think we feel confident in our ability to be able to make those right investments and really capture additional opportunity in the long term.
Perfect. I believe we are at our last one.
So last quarter, can you talk a little bit more about what drove the gross margin expansion on the sales decline year over year? And another one, with your medium-term forecast suggests that last quarter's 60-plus GPM is not sustainable. Why is that? To the extent you can answer those.
Sure. So in terms of the gross margin drivers, this is driven by our premium brand, our price optimization engine, our procurement efficiencies, our warranty program. So I think these are all factors that contribute towards driving that strong gross margin, for example. And maybe just to double-click a little bit on the price optimization engine, that really allows us to dynamically adjust pricing to determine what's the right mix of pricing to get that right mix of margin capture and top-line growth. We think these will be factors that we continue to utilize going forward.
In terms of the target, I did mention the high 50% gross margin target earlier, and the Q3 performance was above that, and we're glad to see that. I think the way to think about this is it's a continual optimization effort where there'll be a target, which is that high 50s. And in some quarters, we could exceed that. We've been intentional, though, in communicating that high 50s target, and we'll continue to test and optimize to drive that right combination again of margin capture as well as top-line.
Perfect. We're up on time. But Jeff and Colin, thank you so much for being here once again and sharing your story with us. For those of you that did participate today in the presentation, thank you for being here, and thank you for your questions.
Jeff, Colin, on behalf of Sidoti and everybody in the audience, we really appreciate your time today and sharing your story.
Great. Thanks so much, everyone. Really appreciate it, Daniel. Thanks again for hosting us. It's great to see you. I hope everyone has a great holidays. Awesome.
Have a great afternoon, everyone. You too.