One. Before we begin, I would like to remind everyone that comments on today's presentation will include forward-looking statements, as described on this next page. Presentation can be referenced in its entirety on our website flexsteel.com under our News and Events in the investors section. In terms of what we're going to be covering today, I'll start by providing a high-level overview of our company and our strategy, and then Mike will provide his perspectives on our investment thesis and our financial outlook.
To start company overview, I thought it would first be beneficial to highlight five key elements of why we believe investors may consider an investment in Flexsteel. First, we've proven that we are a disciplined share gainer and have outgrown the industry over the past two and a half years.
The furniture industry has been, I'll describe it, in a lull for most of the three years. As a result of our share gains, we do believe that Flexsteel is well-positioned to deliver outsized growth once the housing market recovers and consumers are on stronger economic footing. Second, we'll discuss our operating model and our competitive advantages, which are really driven by a combination of deep consumer insights, focused innovation, and an exceptional execution.
Why we believe this model ensures that our differentiation, share gains, and attractive operating margins are sustainable long term. Third, Mike will outline the drivers of significant margin expansion over the past several years, and why we believe more margin expansion is achievable in the mid to long term. Fourth, we'll outline the attractive cash generation potential of this business.
Fifth, we'll highlight our disciplined capital allocation framework and how we've responsibly returned capital to shareholders when we don't have attractive opportunities to deploy it otherwise. If you look at our track record over the past several years, you will see that we do have a proven model for growth and value creation.
We've delivered 10 consecutive quarters of growth in challenging industry conditions, as represented by the left-hand most chart on this slide. We've also meaningfully expanded operating margins over the past three years from low single digits to +7% kind of range. Ultimately, we've delivered superior total return to shareholders of roughly 68% TSR in the past year and 237% TSR over the past three years. Feel good about our performance.
To give you some other perspectives in terms of the company, on the left-hand side of the slide, you'll see that our trailing 12-month sales are a little north of $450 million. We have solid operating margins north of 7%, which we believe are top quartile in our industry. We generate meaningful free cash flow and have a strong debt-free balance sheet.
On the right-hand side, you'll see that we've highlighted that we are a top 10 U.S. furniture manufacturer in a large market that is highly fragmented, both at a retail and manufacturer level. Our furniture is sold broadly across all U.S. geographies through our +1 ,400 retail partners and their plus 2,700 kind of storefronts. We also have a diversified supply chain as we manufacture our own furniture in North America, while also sourcing product from strong partners in multiple countries in Asia.
This hybrid supply chain has really been an advantage in quickly adapting to changing global supply chain conditions. That's going all the way back to COVID in 2020, to most recently, all the shifting tariff policies and geopolitical disruption that we've had to deal with.
To give you a little bit deeper perspective on the company, we view our portfolio through three dimensions, and the first is really what we sell, our products. We do offer a full suite of furniture solutions to address consumer needs in just about every major room in the home or apartment. That said, where we really excel is in the primary living areas such as the main living room or family room, which accounts for over 80% of our projected fiscal year 2026 sales.
Besides continuing to lead in primary living areas, we do feel like the biggest growth opportunity for us is, at least from a product view, is expanding into and further penetrating other areas of the home, especially the bedroom, dining room, and health and wellness, where we feel we're under-indexed. The second dimension of our portfolio is where we sell or our sales distribution. Breadth of our omni-channel national distribution is one of our greatest strengths. Most of our sales go through independent furniture retailers, of which, as I said earlier, we do business with over 1,400. This channel is of vital importance to us, and we are competing well. We're gaining share, and we feel like we're aligned with the right partners for long-term growth.
Our growth opportunity is to expand, though, beyond the independent furniture retail channel and into national accounts, to make sure that our brands are positioned everywhere that consumers want to buy furniture. We have longstanding relationships with top retailers like Amazon and Wayfair that we continue to leverage. Over the past several years, we've also developed new partnerships with Costco, Macy's, and others.
Lastly, we do maintain our own direct-to-consumer sites, but these mainly serve to engage consumers, and they complement our core selling channels, so they aren't necessarily a meaningful direct contributor to our sales. Reasons that our retailers choose to sell Flexsteel, there's a bunch of them, but three are really top of mind. First is the strength of our brand, which we believe drives higher consumer traffic to our retailers, higher ticket prices, and ultimately higher margin for our partners.
Second, we've got a turnkey marketing program that attracts and educates consumers and drives really strong demand. Third, we offer thought leadership on consumer insights and bring innovation that meets those consumer needs, I think, better than others. Third and last dimension of our portfolios is who we sell to, consumers, and how ultimately we position ourselves to meet their needs.
We currently go to market through our primary brand, Flexsteel, which is a premium price solution targeted towards the mass market and best known for comfort, quality, and durability, and supported by innovation like our proprietary Blue Steel Spring. In addition, we've developed several sub-brands that are category specific, which are resonating well with both retailers and consumers. We feel this multi-brand approach allows us to tailor solutions to specific consumer needs and effectively win in multiple market segments.
Our greatest growth opportunity is to continue to build brand awareness with consumers, especially earlier life stage consumers who are growing their share of wallet of the overall furniture market. Turning to our operations, we do believe that our supply chain is a clear competitive advantage due to our scale efficiencies, our diversification, our agility, and ultimately competitive cost.
Our North American manufacturing production currently comes from three plants in Juarez, Mexico. We also have a facility in Mexicali, which is currently not in use, but is available mid to long term to support future growth. We have a three DC network in the U.S. that's complemented by multiple trailer transfer points to efficiently serve just about every primary and secondary U.S. market. Our North American operation is complemented by a very strong and diverse global supply chain.
We have offices and talent in three countries in Asia to support our global sourcing operation. Feel like we're aligned with the strongest and most capable partners in the industry who are highly committed to supporting our growth. We continue to expand and diversify our supply base in other parts of the world to become even stronger and more resilient whenever the economics make sense.
In many instances, we do source specific products both from Asia and North America, which gives us increased agility to respond to global supply chain disruptions and other external factors when they do arise. Again, feel like our supply chain is a clear competitive advantage. As we look at our leadership, I would describe this team as strong, stable, competent. Individuals on our team are highly result driven and bring really diverse experiences, both within and outside of the furniture industry.
While I'm certainly biased, I do believe that we've got one of the strongest management teams in the industry, and glad to have all these individuals certainly on our team. Quickly, I think it's important to note that we are a values driven company. Couple things that I'll highlight. Across every facet of our organization, we have a customer consumer first mentality.
We've got an intense focus on driving results. We've got a hunger to seek out and pursue continuous improvement in just about every area of our business and have an emphasis on agility to quickly adapt to changes, challenges, opportunities, especially in today's increasingly dynamic environment. I think I'd argue that these values have served us well and will continue to be foundational to our continued future success.
Also, really quickly, while we're intensely focused on driving results for our shareholders, it's important to know we do get those results the right way, and we are a responsible steward of our people, communities, and environment. Okay. Now that I've provided you a solid overview of the company, would like to pivot to our strategy and specifically discuss how we win. The best way I can describe it is we've built this integrated system of four pillars for sustainable competitive advantages to really ensure we remain relevant and differentiated. I think it's important to note that all these pillars work in unison as a system.
It starts first with being consumer driven at our core, and that means every team function across our entire organization understands who our targeted consumers are, what problems they face, and ultimately how we create value for them better than anybody else. It's this mindset and deep focus that ensures we are relevant to those consumers that matter most to our business. Next, we leverage those insights and our understanding of how consumers use furniture to make bets on differentiated innovation that solve what I'll describe as real consumer problems that they're willing to pay for.
While a deep understanding of consumers and meaningful innovation are important, it's not enough. The third leg of this stool is we need disciplined execution that flawlessly delivers that value with speed, consistency around service reliability and competitive cost at scale each and every day.
I think we've built a really strong operating system and set of capabilities to consistently execute in a way that's valued by our partners. Lastly, and probably most importantly, none of these things are possible without exceptional people and culture. They're the heart of this repeatable system that ultimately drives consumer relevance, meaningful differentiation, and vantage execution for Flexsteel.
I firmly believe that together, these advantages will allow us to win, grow profitably, and thrive for many years to come. I just described the system for how Flexsteel wins, I think it's also important for you to understand the foundation for how we create value for our consumers and the source of our brand strength. At its fundamental core, Flexsteel differentiates itself through unmatched quality, comfort, and durability. The source of that differentiation is derived from innovation, like our patented iconic Blue Steel Spring.
What's important to note is that we are highly committed to driving new innovation that strengthens our value proposition in ways that are relevant to consumer and ultimately drives continued profitable growth. Thought it would be good to share an example of how our winning system is kind of executed in action. I want to share with you our Zecliner solution, which is really a sleep recliner.
It started really with consumer research several years ago, where we uncovered that 70% of U.S. adults are unable to sleep consistently in their beds every night due to a variety of health or other reasons. It could be sleep apnea, acid reflux, health injury, you name it. Currently, these individuals sleep in their recliners or sofas, which were never built for comfortable sleep.
We use that understanding of this unmet consumer need, and then we leverage innovation to specifically design Zecliner to achieve 8+ hours of comfortable sleep at night. We used a unique combination of technology and material innovation to achieve superior sleep results that actually have been validated by independent sleep studies. We put some powerful marketing behind this product to convey that value to consumers, and we're having tremendous success.
We're going to continue to pursue new innovations like this, using consumer research and ultimately differentiate Flexsteel through innovation and provide superior value to market. Again, this is a great example of this winning system in action and how we continue to leverage this approach to drive our success.
Lastly, you've got an understanding of what our system is for winning, but I think it's also important for you to understand that we've got a discipline around focusing that system on well-defined markets that we believe offer attractive growth and return potential. We think about our growth portfolio through a three-by-two matrix.
Represented by the three dimensions that we shared earlier, so product categories, our sales distribution, and consumer segments, which we then further bifurcate between the core markets where we currently operate and are growing successfully, and then new or expanded markets where we either are under-indexed or have outsized growth potential. This matrix clearly defines where we compete compared to the four pillars that I covered earlier, which define how we win in each of these markets.
We believe each of these areas has meaningful growth potential, and collectively, we think the portfolio provides us the diversity and balance of initiatives that can sustain our continued growth or share gains for years to come. With that, I'm going to turn it over to Mike. He's going to review our investment thesis and financial outlook. Mike?
Thanks, Derek. Derek kind of hit the highlights of this at the beginning, but I'll provide a little bit more color around what really makes Flexsteel an attractive investment opportunity. I'd say it really starts with what Derek talked about as far as our differentiated operating model, centered around consumer insights, innovation, strong execution, and then our talented folks. What I would say is the model has proven that it's working. We've been in a pretty challenging environment.
We've demonstrated our ability to gain share, and we believe this system sets us up to continue to gain share regardless of what's going on externally in the market. Derek also highlighted what we've done to improve our operating margins. We've got the formula. We understand what those levers are to maintain strong margins going forward, as well as even potentially expand margins as we execute our growth strategy.
I would just highlight, the business generates a lot of cash. We've significantly improved our cash position and strengthened our balance sheet, which has given us flexibility to reinvest back in the business where there's attractive returns. We're also very disciplined around capital allocation and have been very thoughtful around responsibly returning excess capital to shareholders if there's not attractive investment opportunities.
This slide just kind of illustrates, it reinforces our operating model and why it's working. The chart on the left shows what U.S. retail furniture sales have been over the past several years. You can see there's a lot of red. We've been in a pretty challenging environment. The chart on the right shows that despite that, we've been able to deliver 10 consecutive quarters of growth.
That's why it gives us confidence that what we are doing is working, and we need to stay focused on our operating model and executing those growth strategies that Derek has laid out. While near term, there's certainly some challenges to the industry when you think about what's going on with inflation and consumer sentiment and everything that's going on externally.
There's probably some short-term challenges, but mid to long-term, we're actually very bullish on the industry. If you think about what's going on with housing demand has been depressed for several years. Furniture demand is directly linked to housing demand, and we believe that the housing market will rebound at some point in time, which is going to create significant churn and demand for furniture.
Additionally, as we think about younger consumers and their purchasing power increasing, we believe that that's another catalyst for the industry long term. I would say we're very well-positioned to take advantage of a rebound in the market. Diving into operating margins. As you can see, we've improved operating margin from low single digits to above 7% over the past several years, and the main driver is being sales growth leverage.
We've been very disciplined around reinvesting and adding structural costs back into the business. We've got ample capacity within our manufacturing and distribution supply chain to support 20%-25%+ growth from current levels. As we execute our growth strategy, we're going to continue to benefit from that leverage dropping to the bottom line. The number two item is we've been very focused and disciplined around product portfolio optimization.
Derek talked through several of those kind of different product categories and channel categories that are in our growth strategy. We know where the profit engine is, and we're very disciplined around making sure that we're constantly bringing new, innovative products to market that consumers are willing to pay for, that have better profit profiles than the category average. Lastly, Derek talked about our talent.
We have very strong leaders within our supply chain, from a sourcing, logistics, distribution, manufacturing, kind of the end-to-end supply chain. They've done a great job driving cost savings and productivity. We've got a continuous improvement culture and mindset, and that'll continue to be a lever for us to not only offset inflation pressures, but also give us potential to expand margins to reinvest back in the business. I'd also just like to highlight strong earnings per share momentum that we had.
Fiscal year 2025, we delivered $4.17 adjusted diluted earnings per share. That was actually a company record. If you look at the trailing 12-month timeframe, we're actually outperforming that level. We believe that long term, we're going to be able to continue this earnings momentum as we improve profitability and execute our growth. From a capital requirement perspective, the business is relatively low level of capital requirement.
Capital expenditures typically run at or below 1% of sales on an annual basis, and those investments are primarily targeted towards productivity improvement initiatives, where there's an attractive return, and then just ongoing maintenance within our supply chain and our IT infrastructure, et cetera. The other thing that I would highlight is as we've grown sales, as we've improved profitability, we've actually been able to do that with less working capital requirements.
We're going to continue to focus on being very disciplined around working capital investments and optimizing inventory, which will result in strong cash flow generation well into the future. This slide just illustrates what we've been able to do in terms of free cash flow generation and what we've been able to do in terms of strengthening our balance sheet over the last several years. You can see in 2022, we actually had $35 million of debt, and we just ended our Q3 back in March, and we had over $57 million of cash on the balance sheet and no debt. Lastly, I'd just highlight from a capital allocation perspective, our priorities are reinvesting back in the business where there's an attractive return above our cost of capital.
If there's not attractive returns, we've got a demonstrated history of returning excess capital to shareholders through both dividends as well as share repurchases. Recently, since our Q3 quarter end, we actually executed a pretty large one-time share repurchase of over $60 million. We took 24% of our outstanding shares out, that's just an example where we're going to be very disciplined around capital allocation, but we're very responsible around capital allocation, and we'll be very thoughtful around making sure that we're driving value for shareholders long term.
The last thing I'd just touch on would be kind of long term, we aspire to deliver $750 million in top-line sales. Obviously, that would come with acquisitions. Then operating margin at or above 8%. We believe those numbers are certainly achievable, in that they'll create meaningful shareholder value. With that, we'll open it up to questions.
Thank you very much, Mike and Derek for sharing the Flexsteel story. As a quick reminder to those in the audience, if you do have a question, please type it into the Q&A box. If you don't see it, you can just click on the three dots, and it should come up there. I'll kick off with a couple of questions of my own here. As you guys alluded to, you've been able to outperform many of your peers during the post-pandemic slowdown. You've talked a lot about the consumer research and focusing on innovation. Just wondering, as far as the product pipeline that you have for the next year or two, how is that looking like? Just maybe general thoughts without sharing too much of the secret sauce.
If you could just speak to that, and then as far as the portion of products that are coming from newer sales, how is it now versus, let's say, three or five years ago? Maybe talk about the margin differential for some of these newer products that you have coming up.
Yeah. I'll start, Anthony, and then I'll have Mike kind of talk about what the portfolio composition looks like from a margin perspective. As he alluded to, new product has been a significant driver of our growth. In recent periods, more than 40% of our sales have come from product that was introduced over the last three years. It is really the kind of lifeblood of our growth engine.
I can't reveal a lot in terms of the secret sauce, but what I can convey is that there's a lot in the pipeline, a lot of new innovation that's centered around, again, new consumer insights, differentiated value, things that, again, we've got confidence in terms of solving a consumer problem that they're willing to pay for. I'm excited about the pipeline, and it gives me confidence that our continued share gains are sustainable. Mike, you want to talk about the margin impacts of the portfolio?
Yeah. I won't go into the individual details across the categories, but what I would tell you is that our product sourcing, manufacturing, finance teams are hyper-focused around driving improved profitability. We've got detailed gross margin thresholds across the various product categories, and every new product that we're bringing to market, we're targeting that those products launch with kind of above category average, Anthony.
It feels like the good news is we've got the team hyper-focused on that, and it's proven that it's working, and we believe that there's still more upside as we think about some of the other categories that maybe we don't have as big of a composition of our sales coming from new products. I would just add, I think it's exciting, and we're going to continue to make it be a meaningful portion of how we maintain and expand margins in the future.
Got it. Okay. What are your thoughts about a replacement cycle? It's been six years since COVID first started. At first, there was a lot of not so great quality furniture sold back then. Maybe if you could speak to that. What are your thoughts on that?
Yeah, I think you're dead on, Anthony. There was a lot of furniture sold, not so great quality during COVID. Typically, when we think about living room furniture, on average, there's a six-year kind of life cycle. We're right up against that life cycle. I think what's constraining some of the demand right now is the external environment. There's a lot of uncertainty around the conflict in the Middle East, inflation that's been being driven by higher energy costs.
Again, there's pent-up demand, I think, for furniture in general, but even more so because we're coming up on this replacement cycle. I think we, as consumers, need more certainty around both the external environment, and they need some relief from the inflationary pressures that they're feeling, and that will unleash that demand.
Got you. Okay. We're almost coming up on time over here, but we do have a couple of questions here from the audience here. I guess first one, can you talk about what's your sense and what do you think is your durability as far as your competitive advantage?
Yeah, I think it goes back to that system that we talked about, right? It starts with deep consumer insights, leveraging those insights to drive meaningful kind of innovation that consumers are willing to pay for. It's an operating model that executes flawlessly, and it's all dependent upon exceptional people and culture. Putting those four things together, I think is what provides a sustainable competitive advantage. We just don't go to market with furniture, with new designs.
Again, we're trying to solve real consumer problems, and we've built an operating model, I think, that does that extremely well. As long as we continue to execute that, I think we can deliver continued market share gains and attractive profitability.
Are there any large big box retailers or regional furniture chains that you are not currently selling to that you would like to have your furniture sold there and to add to your distribution?
Yeah. What I'd say, Anthony, is there's still a handful of names, not a lot, but there are a handful of names that we believe are large retailers where our brand fits. We continue to have strategic dialogue around the right entry point to develop a relationship. Again, I think there's not a lot of opportunity, but there are some finite set of opportunities for us to expand our distribution with kind of key retailers, both independent retailers as well as national accounts.
Got it. Okay. Well, we're already up a minute over our allotted time, so we'll need to wrap it up here. Derek, do you have any closing remarks that you want to share? Anything else that we may have missed that you want to touch on before we wrap it up?
I appreciate everyone's interest and time, and feel good about where Flexsteel is at, our competitive position, and certainly our ability to continue to kind of thrive even in a difficult environment.
All right. Well, sounds good. Thank you very much, Derek and Mike, for sharing the Flexsteel story. Thanks also everyone tuning in and asking thoughtful questions as well. We'll wrap it up here, and enjoy the rest of your day. Thank you very much.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Take care. Thanks.