Alrighty, thank you everyone for being here. Up next, we have Brilliant Earth Corp trading on NASDAQ under the symbol BRLT. Presenting on behalf of the company is Chief Financial Officer Jeff Kuo. If anyone is interested in a follow-up meeting, Colin Bourland, VP of Strategy, Business Development, and Investor Relations, will also be around after.
Great. Thanks very much, and thanks for having us. It's a pleasure to be here at the Ideas Conference. As mentioned, I'm Jeff Kuo. I'm the CFO of the company. I've been with Brilliant Earth since 2015. Before I begin, here's some safe harbor language regarding our forward-looking statements and non-GAAP financial measures, and you can also find this on our presentation on the Investor Relations website. Brilliant Earth is the next-generation jeweler for today's consumer, and I think we've been able to drive our success in the business through a number of different factors. One is our authentic, mission-driven brand. Also, a collection of distinctive, proprietary, signature products, many of which have won design awards, and so people really come to us for distinctive, signature designs.
Experience across channels, like an omnichannel experience, whether you're engaging with us digitally, or in our showrooms, or speaking with someone on the phone, or some other way, really creating a seamless, joyful experience to make the right decision about what jewelry that you want to buy for yourself or for a loved one. I think this is all underpinned by an asset-light, data-driven model that has allowed us to move very nimbly and adapt to changes as they occur, and to be advantaged relative to the rest of the industry in terms of how we're able to swiftly see trends and move to capture the benefit from those. These have all together been underpinning our success in the large and fragmented jewelry industry. A little bit of context about our customers.
Our customers are, you know, the biggest part of our customers are millennial and Gen Z consumers with a high household income in the $100,000-$200,000 range, and we cater to a range of different customers. This could be couples shopping together for an engagement or a wedding ring. It could be people giving a gift to a friend or a family member or a spouse. It could be self-purchasers just buying something for themselves, and that's really, you know, a range of different reasons that people come to Brilliant Earth. Our customers are very digital in terms of their DNA, grown up really experiencing and using multimedia across different types of touchpoints, social channels, expecting a continuous and seamless experience across different touchpoints, both digitally and in person, and then really valuing a personalized and exceptional experience when they're shopping.
That's a little bit about just the psychographic of our consumer. They also are very tuned into authenticity, authenticity of messaging about what a brand stands for, finding something that uniquely expresses themselves and that aligns with their values. That, I think, is a customer base and profile that Brilliant Earth is really uniquely positioned to meet. This next page gives you a little bit of a history of some of our major milestones over the last 20 years, and this highlights some of our financial milestones, some of our product milestones, including at the right-hand side, the launch of our Jane Goodall partnership and collection, our showroom openings, as well as some of the ways that we've been giving back to the communities that we operate in.
We have a globally diversified supply chain across many different geographies that really reduces the dependence and exposure to any one geography. Many of these supplier relationships have been longstanding in nature. We've been working with them as a trusted partner that, you know, I think helps us really work very effectively with our suppliers. As I mentioned before, a very tech-enabled model with many of our suppliers. We're integrated on the back end with technology platform to allow us to very quickly turn around a make-to-order item or other aspects of the supply chain while minimizing manual processes that may occur. Also, as I mentioned before, we have an award-winning in-house design studio where we craft many of our designs in-house, and so we have this great collection that's curated of unique styles that are available just at Brilliant Earth.
Just to take a little bit of a step back, some of the company and industry opportunities. First is that the jewelry industry is large. It's about a $350 billion global industry. It's also quite fragmented in that about 2/3 of the industry is made up of smaller independents, and I think that's an opportunity for us to be gaining share as a strong, branded, trusted, and well-capitalized player. We have a swiftly adapting, agile business model, and I'll talk through some of this in particular with regards to working capital a bit later in the presentation. We're using data throughout to inform our decision-making, whether it's in pricing, marketing, where we're putting our showrooms, and really incorporating that throughout the operating cadence of the company.
An omnichannel model that is really integrative and seamless across the different touchpoints that you may interact with us because this is a considered higher-value purchase. We do want to create that seamless experience to meet customers where they want to shop, how they want to shop, and when they want to shop. Of course, this is all underpinned by having a mission-driven set of values that strongly resonate with our customers. This provides a little bit of a perspective of the last five or six years in terms of our net sales and our gross margins. Over the period from 2019 to 2024, we grew at a 16% five-year CAGR, and we were able to do so while still expanding our gross profit margins, which were in the low 40s in 2019, getting to 60% in 2024.
Maybe just to pause a bit on the gross margin, how we've been able to do that has been a few different factors. One is a focus on the premium brand and positioning, design of the products, and how we price. We're not discount-oriented like many others in the industry may be. Operationally, we amplify that through our price optimization engine that allows us to take a variety of different inputs, including market conditions, input costs, seasonality, and other factors to allow us to, on a granular basis, really think about what's the right way to price products to trade off between top-line growth and margin capture and continuously optimizing that as we get new data.
Then also operationally, constantly looking at ways that we can drive procurement efficiencies, and this could be vendor mix optimization, this could be terms that we have, and I think these have all been underpinnings to how we've been able to get to strong gross profit margins. This page just highlights a few of our Q1 2025 financial highlights. We drove about $94 million of net sales, which was within our guidance range that we had provided, and had an average order value of a little over $2,000. This is a considered higher-value purchase, and you know, it manifests in this over $2,000 AOV.
We saw strong growth in both total orders and repeat orders for the quarter, year- over- year, and then our gross margin was strong at 58.6%, which was within our medium-term guidance range for gross margin. I'll step through the medium-term outlook towards the end of the presentation. We had $1.1 million of adjusted EBITDA, which was our 15th consecutive quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA. That's all the quarters that we have been public. We've delivered a positive adjusted EBITDA, and we ended the quarter with $92.5 million in net cash. We have a strong balance sheet that allows us flexibility to pursue opportunities as we may see them arise. Just a little bit of additional color on some of the points. I've talked about the first where we delivered our net sales and adjusted EBITDA for Q1 within the company guidance range.
Also, just on Valentine's Day, we had record-breaking total bookings in the two weeks leading up to Valentine's Day, with year-over-year total bookings growing in the mid to high single digits. It was a successful holiday for us. We had positive year-over-year engagement ring growth in Q1, and then we also drove strong double-digit year-over-year growth in fine jewelry. This resulted in bookings for fine jewelry contributing 14% of our total bookings in Q1, and that was a year-over-year expansion of 350 basis points. It's probably worth just a pause here to talk about why we think this is noteworthy. Fine jewelry, as we think about it, includes things like pendants, earrings, bracelets, things outside of engagement and wedding and anniversary bands. For us in Q1, that was 14% of our total bookings.
For the industry as a whole, this is the majority of total industry sales, and so there's a significant opportunity for us to grow from our strength and heritage in engagement and wedding and anniversary bands to sell more fine jewelry, to be able to engage with customers at more different times in their lives, to be able to be there for self-purchases, for gift-giving, and so this really is a significant upside opportunity for us, and you can see the success that we've been having with our Q1 results. We opened one new showroom location also in Southlake, Texas, which was our 41st, and since then we've opened our 42nd location in Alpharetta, Georgia. We do have significantly higher turns in inventory turns than the average for the industry. Ours are about four as of the end of Q1.
The average for the industry is about 1-2x turns, and so that really allows us to be much more working capital efficient and to be able to take smaller and faster and smarter bets to meet demand where we're seeing it. I mentioned before $92.5 million in net cash, and that's a growth year- over- year of about 5%, and that really speaks to our business model and how we've been able to be thoughtful in terms of delivering gains in net cash as well as positive adjusted EBITDA. I think I've covered most of these points before on Page 12 regarding the quarterly trends, and so I'll move on to the next page here just to highlight one item on our first quarter AOV and total orders.
We did have a decline in year-over-year AOV in Q1, and this was due to a couple of things. One is the comparatively stronger performance of sub-$5,000 engagement rings, as well as that growth in fine jewelry, which has lower price points than our assortment overall. As we continue to expand the mix to have more and more fine jewelry, we do expect that that would bring AOVs on a blended basis down for the company, and this is something that's expected that is in line with our strategic goal of driving more fine jewelry penetration and capturing some of those strategic benefits like I was just describing on the last page. This page highlights some of the successes that we've had in our products and how they're intersecting with how we're communicating our brand.
A few of the highlights here include the strength in our signature engagement rings, which are available just at Brilliant Earth, with another quarter of year-over-year bookings growth in Q1 outpacing the total engagement ring collection by double digits. We also had year-over-year bookings growth in wedding and anniversary bands in Q1, with outsized success in men's wedding bands and women's eternity bands. We have talked about the strong performance that we have had in fine jewelry, including here in the two weeks leading up to Valentine's Day.
I think one other thing that we'd like to highlight is our recent news with Beyoncé, who wore a one-of-a-kind bolo tie that we created for her during a recent concert in Chicago. This is something that we were really glad to have the opportunity to design and create for her, and we also were able to follow up on this with a limited edition product, a Bee pendant that was available for sale. I think this really highlights some of the successes that we've had in terms of engaging with influencers, with celebrities who are increasingly coming to Brilliant Earth and seeking out, you know, seeking out the products that we offer that are really distinctively designed and on trend.
To speak a little bit more about our working capital model and our inventory turns, we can leverage different types of models, including virtual inventory and consignment inventory, to keep our balance sheet light even as we offer a wide range of inventory for our customers. This allows us to achieve that 4x inventory turns, which is a lot higher than the industry overall. You can see that year-over-year inventory ended 2% higher in Q1, even after significant growth in fine jewelry and a larger showroom footprint, and I think this speaks to the discipline that we have in terms of managing our inventory. Our quarter-end cash was about $147 million, so that was about flat even after capital investments and reductions in the debt principal balance, and probably like our quarter-end net cash was $92.5 million, which is about $4 million higher year-over-year.
That illustrates our ability to operate, make the right investments, and still grow the net cash balance overall. I spoke earlier about creating that seamless omnichannel experience across different touchpoints, and we really do endeavor to create that integrative experience because that's really how customers want to engage with us on a considered purchase and a high-value purchase like this. When we open our showrooms, we see a compelling metro uplift across the metro post-opening, and that's something that we look to to really drive that incrementality in bookings, you know, after we open our showrooms. We also continue to iterate and deliver on new experiences in our showrooms.
One of the latest is our try-on bar, which is featured in some of our most recent showroom openings, which is really a way that in our showrooms you can experience our jewelry in a more interactive and engaging way, and an example of how some of our strategic initiatives like showrooms and fine jewelry intersect and how this really creates the opportunities for showrooms to be accretive to fine jewelry and vice versa. As I mentioned before, we have a current footprint of 42 showrooms with the opening of Southlake and Alpharetta. Moving on to a bit of our 2025 priorities.
We are, one, prioritizing continuing on our path to become the world's most loved and trusted jeweler for today's and tomorrow's consumer, continuing to create distinctive, ownable signature products that are beautifully crafted and unique to us, delivering omnichannel experiences that are really delighting customers and setting new standards for how retail or modern luxury is done, and then continuing to invest in innovation, in data, systems, people, and processes to drive operational efficiencies and long-term sustainable growth. Just to play what that means over a slightly longer term, these are medium-term targets for how we're thinking about the business.
On the top-line side, looking to, you know, in 2027, getting to a low teens year-over-year growth rate in terms of net sales, and that's going to be driven by a number of factors, including improvement in engagement rings, outsized performance in areas like fine jewelry, which is still a small part of our business, but there's a significant upside as we get that to be a larger part of the business, to be more in line with how the industry mix is, as well as growth and uplift from our showrooms and underpinned by overall growth and strength of our brand awareness.
On the gross margin side, we're guided towards a high 50s gross margin percent through 2027 by continuing to focus on the areas that I mentioned earlier, the premium brand positioning, price optimization engine, and procurement efficiencies, and really focusing there to drive that strong, compelling gross margin, delivering leverage as a percentage of sales for marketing. In 2024, we were able to drive year-over-year leverage in marketing as a percentage of net sales, and we expect to continue decreasing that as a percentage of net sales from 2025 through 2027. This all translates into an adjusted EBITDA margin target of a double-digit margin in 2027.
Really, in conclusion, what we have is a distinctive and disruptive model at Brilliant Earth that's able to combine that authentic, mission-driven brand, distinctive, award-winning, unique products that we create ourselves and really win customers over with our designs, a seamless, joyful, integrated luxury omnichannel experience across the different channels that you may interact with us, and underpinned by a business model that's agile, data-driven, and asset-light. I think these are all combined to be the unique Brilliant Earth value proposition and how we think that we're very well positioned to grow and gain share and do so profitably over the upcoming years. Those are my prepared remarks. Wanted to thank you again for tuning in and joining us at the conference, and we'd like to open it up if there are any questions, or if not, we can conclude. Great.
Thank you very much. Really appreciate it again. It's a pleasure to be here and look forward to having the opportunity to talk more with you in upcoming quarters. Thank you.