Okay. Two years ago, we embarked on a journey to stabilize and reset the financial foundation of Honest. We developed three prongs of a very focused and purposeful action plan, and in May of 2023, we introduced the Transformation Initiative. The three prongs included Brand Maximization , Margin Enhancement , and Operating Discipline . Brand Maximization focused on all the activities to increase availability of Honest products, drive greater velocity of consumer sales, and to fuel innovation. Margin Enhancement focused on all the levers needed to improve the profitability of those sales and to address the company's expense structure. The goal was to improve gross margin, generate expense leverage, and turn around the direction of earnings. Operating Discipline set the expectation internally that if we were to sustain the improvements made beyond 2023, that we needed to create a mindset of ongoing excellence in our execution and a cost containment mentality.
This includes how we manage the resources and the capital needed to achieve the first two pillars, and how we go about achieving our Honest mission. I'm pleased to share that on all fronts, we were successful. We grew revenue 10% in 2023 and are up 10% year to date in 2024 through a combination of increased distribution and velocity, reset pricing, and new product launches. We significantly improved our margin and cost structure, realizing gross margin expansion in 2023 and over 1,000 basis points year- over- year in 2024, and we quickly realized bottom-line earnings improvement. Lastly, we right-sized our inventory levels to build liquidity and recently reported over $50 million in cash and zero debt at the end of our third quarter. All in doing this, we began the institutional practices to ensure lasting success. So what were the actions we took to realize these results?
We exited unprofitable channels and low-performing product lines to improve the portfolio's profit potential. We addressed the product cost structure through better pricing with manufacturers. We amended or changed our supply chain services to realize cost reductions and better service levels, and we took price increases to maintain our brand position and address input cost inflation. In our operating expenses, we absorbed transition costs and set our plans on flattening the expense structure. Marketing expenses were redirected into higher-performing channels that generated much improved efficiency on the media spend. The progress on our earnings turnaround is notable and has led to a positive Adjusted EBITDA four quarters in a row, including two quarters with positive operating income. Achieving positive Adjusted EBITDA was an imperative of the Transformation Initiative, and as we introduced in the spring of last year, our long-term outlook calls for continued expansion of annual earnings margin.
With more flex in the cost structure, sales growth will flow through to the earnings faster. In summary, we're pleased with the results of our transformation initiatives and the benefits that are generating strong financial performance. Since the beginning of fiscal 2024, we have increased our annual outlook twice and reaffirmed the guidance provided at the end of the third quarter. Embedded in our outlook is revenue growth combined with a priority on earnings growth that positions us well going forward for operational flexibility. This flexibility allows us to build products that meet growing consumer needs and invest where needed to drive scale of the Honest brand. Over the long term, we see the strengthening of our profit model will best position The Honest Company to compete and deliver on our mission while delivering shareholder value. With that, I'd like to thank you.
I think we still have a few minutes and probably time for a couple of questions if we want to ask them.
Yeah, and let people know we have a breakout.
Oh, come on.
We have a breakout session right after this. I don't know what room, but we'd love for you to join us in our breakout session if you want to have an opportunity to talk a little bit closer. But yeah, we'll take a couple of questions if anybody wants to ask anything here. I don't see any hands up. Oh, yes. Hi. Okay, I'm going to try to restate your question after you ask it.
Sure, so you had this slide talking about the distribution of hero products versus the overall ACV that we got before, which I think is in the 80s.
Yes.
And you talked about the hero products, are those typically the most distributed? And there are other products that have even more opportunity? Or just maybe give a little bit more color around how that overall ACV compares to the household products and the opportunities there?
Yes. Thank you for that. The question was, we talked about the distribution opportunity available to us. And while our overall ACV distribution as a brand would measure in the mid-80s, we showed you that if you double-click on that and go to any item level, it's significantly below that on an item-by-item basis. And the question was, are our hero products already the ones that are the most available in distribution? And is that a correlation with the distribution strategy? That's what I heard as the question. First of all, I would say we don't externally disclose what we think of as those center main stage products in our portfolio. I know many consumer products companies define something as their core. And for us, we call that our hero items. We don't specifically disclose that externally.
But I would say very broadly across the portfolio, there's significant distribution opportunity available, including in our hero items. And some of that is because for many years, our largest retailer was Target, but there are other brick-and-mortar and omnichannel retailers where we have not penetrated, even with some of our fastest turning and highest quality items. So we think that that opportunity very much still extends to hero items. Another way we plan to grow hero items that follows consumer packaged goods best practices is really this idea of the Pareto Principle , that there is this really nice chewy middle core of products that consumers love the most. And when you find out what that is, offering that to them in various varieties, form factors, sizes can still be an incremental item in that sort of most loved product that can still get you an expanded consumer household.
The great example I love to use is we've got these. Kate talked about our great lavender fragrance bubble bath and our shampoo body wash, and that item was such a hit, and at one point only came in a 10-ounce size. We have since introduced that item in an 18-ounce size and also in a refillable, recyclable milk carton style 32-ounce, and as we continue to see the size expansion, we see those sizes are incremental for us. Thanks for asking. Any other questions? No? Well, we very much appreciate you taking the time to learn about the Honest Company and the Honest story. We're very encouraged to be here with you today. Thank you for your time. We do have a breakout session if you rather prefer to ask your question in a smaller forum, so we hope to see you there. Thank you. After a little...
Hello. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm Carla Vernón, the CEO of The Honest Company. And before I get started, I actually wanted to just take a moment. As a company that was founded in LA, we have the majority of our employee base in LA. We just want to express our deep and heartfelt prayers and sympathy for the Californians, the members of the LA community, and the loved ones who care so much about them for what people are going through right now in LA. It's our honor to partner with Baby2Baby as a resource supporting families in need at this time. We just ask everybody to look for ways to help. Thank you for that. Now I'll kick us off. Before I begin, we have forward-looking statements. That's the usual. Great. Okay.
Today I'm joined by Kate Barton, our Chief Growth Officer, and Dave Loretta, our Chief Financial Officer of Honest. Having recently celebrated my two-year anniversary with Honest, I'm pleased at the progress we've made on our journey to transform and scale the Honest Company and our important mission. We're an incredibly unique company with a highly engaged and dynamic team drawn together from many different backgrounds in the consumer products industry and retailing industry. For example, just among the three of us up here, you have experience from Amazon, Estée Lauder, J&J, Nordstrom, and General Mills, all coming together to build a new kind of consumer products company, and together, our focus has been to articulate and advance a stronger business model and a stronger balance sheet to propel us forward. We believe Honest is a personal care company built for modern times.
In a moment, Kate will give you an overview of the distinctive elements that Honest brings to many of our categories and our approach to driving increased scale for the Honest brand. Then Dave will share how we've improved our financial foundation, giving us solid footing from which to grow. Launched in 2012, Honest was born out of a desire to bring a higher standard of clean ingredients and sustainable design to baby and personal care products. In fact, our mission is to be the personal care company that courageously challenges ideals, ingredients, and industries so that people can protect who they love. This is because new consumer needs have been emerging, and many households today are seeking solutions that they cannot find in many of the legacy and conventional brands.
According to Mintel, 70% of consumers are concerned about the effects of certain chemicals in personal care products and prioritize safe-for-sensitive skin claims to meet the needs of their family. Also, estimates by KBV Research indicate that the market for sensitive skin care products is expected to be $80 billion by 2030, which is nearly double the market size today. These consumer trend indicators are well aligned with the high standards that Honest delivers in our clean and gentle products. To this day, we hold every product we sell to the Honest Standard. This standard is a set of guiding principles that puts our mission into action. At Honest, our standard always begins with clean ingredients. That's why our entire portfolio distinguishes itself by eliminating more than 3,500 chemicals and materials of concern from our products.
Our own Honest Standard is higher than the benchmarks that are dictated by either E.U. or U.S. regulations. But our success goes beyond our approach to ingredients. We have innovated our categories and reinvented how a modern CPG is built. The power of a single brand, Honest, that is relevant across baby products as it is for household beauty and apparel, this provides our brand both power and efficiency. Now, with our financial and operational transformation bearing fruit, we are well on our way of continuing to scale and maximize our business model. I'm going to turn it over to Kate to tell you more.
Hi everyone. Kate Barton, Chief Growth Officer at The Honest Company. Excited to tell you today about our path forward for growth. But I actually want to start with where we began. From the very beginning, we've revolutionized baby care.
We brought in modern designs to the diaper category, unlike anything the category had seen before. We then extended it into baby apparel and bath and body for baby, creating spa-like moments. We've secured our position in registry with our baby gift sets, and all the while have developed a very deeply engaged community of Honest shoppers who not only appreciate our modern and honest approach to parenting, but also those clean credentials that Carla just walked you through, and they've been voting with their wallets. Today, we are the number one natural brand in baby personal care. In fact, at Target, we are the number one baby personal care brand overall, inclusive of conventional. We've been growing share in all of our baby product categories in the last 52 weeks. We're the largest share gainer in natural wipes in the U.S. Every year, we're growing household penetration.
Even outside of our baby categories, we're continuing to invest in our adult and all family lines. Right now, we're the number one Climate Pledge Friendly mascara on Amazon. That's their kind of clean designation. The number one mascara. We do not use any microplastics in our mascara formulas. Also to note, recently, Oprah Winfrey picked us for the fourth year in a row as her Oprah's Favorite Things for family pajamas, the Fam Jams that are for the whole family. Moving ahead, a majority of our focus will be on distribution. We have been growing our total points of distribution this year, but we're still significantly underpenetrated compared to competitors. And I want to contextualize how we look at distribution within the Honest Company. On the left-hand side of this page, you can see some of the retailers and banners that we're in today.
Quite a few, but there's still some that aren't on this page. But even within that, when we double-click, our team doesn't just look at which retailers we have, but also, are we in all the doors for those retailers? Are we in all the store counts? If we're in a retailer, are we in all the aisles that people are looking for our products today? And even within that aisle, do we have the right shelf set and the right number of facings? Oftentimes, a total brand ACV metric or total brand, total points of distribution can mask some of these very important fundamentals in distribution that lead to significant growth for us in the future. So as a team, we really double-click and look at all of these different dimensions. Now I want to bring it to life for you in a couple of different ways.
I talked about door count. Right now, year ending, we are in about 45,000 doors nationwide. Store count. That is still half of what our leading competitor is in. Significant amount of door count opportunity. When we look at individual product SKUs, internally at Honest, we've designated a part of our portfolio. We call them our hero products. These are products that are very strategic to us as a company. We've looked at ratings and reviews and repeat rate, as well as ensuring that our hero products have the right margin and business model behind it, and picked a set of our core products that we call our heroes. They are the gems in our portfolio. And then when we compare those gems to the next leading competitor in terms of ACV, you can see, oh my gosh, there's still so much opportunity.
If you haven't tried the Hydrogel Cream, I highly recommend it. Lavender Bubble Bath here on this chart is another great example. That's our top turning fragranced bubble bath. And it still only has a 34% ACV. So much growth when we look at the individual SKU count. And then additionally, there's an opportunity for a larger presence on shelf. The average products on shelf per store selling still has so much more room to grow. Here we've highlighted the kind of cream color is our Honest results here. And then the next key competitor is in the light blue. And you can see in terms of number of items on shelf, there is still so much more room to grow, even within our current retailers that we're at. So we are excited about the growth ahead. We're starting with a brand that is healthy and vibrant and growing.
As I talked about some of those kind of key stats at the beginning, we're going to continue to be a modern brand with a vibrant community of shoppers. But we're also going to work on making ourselves more physically available to their shoppers in all the doors, aisles, looking at all the shelves that they're shopping at. So with that, I'm going to pass it over to Dave, who's going to walk us through some of the financials.
Thank you, Kate. Okay. Two years ago, we embarked on a journey to stabilize and reset the financial foundation of Honest. We developed three prongs of a very focused and purposeful action plan. And in May of 2023, we introduced the Transformation Initiative. The three prongs included Brand Maximization , Margin Enhancement , and Operating Discipline .
Brand Maximization focused on all the activities to increase availability of Honest products, drive greater velocity of consumer sales, and to fuel innovation. Margin Enhancement focused on all the levers needed to improve the profitability of those sales and to address the company's expense structure. The goal was to improve gross margin, generate expense leverage, and turn around the direction of earnings. Operating Discipline set the expectation internally that if we were to sustain the improvements made beyond 2023, that we needed to create a mindset of ongoing excellence in our execution and a cost containment mentality. This includes how we manage the resources and the capital needed to achieve the first two pillars and how we go about achieving our Honest mission. I'm pleased to share that on all fronts, we were successful.
We grew revenue 10% in 2023 and are up 10% year to date in 2024 through a combination of increased distribution and velocity, reset pricing, and new product launches. We significantly improved our margin and cost structure, realizing gross margin expansion in 2023 and over 1,000 basis points year- over- year in 2024, and we quickly realized bottom line earnings improvement. Lastly, we right-sized our inventory levels to build liquidity and recently reported over $50 million in cash and zero debt at the end of our third quarter. All in doing this, we began the institutional practices to ensure lasting success, so what were the actions we took to realize these results? We exited unprofitable channels and low-performing product lines to improve the portfolio's profit potential. We addressed the product cost structure through better pricing with manufacturers.
We amended or changed our supply chain services to realize cost reductions and better service levels, and we took price increases to maintain our brand position and address input cost inflation. In our operating expenses, we absorbed transition costs and set our plans on flattening the expense structure. Marketing expenses were redirected into higher-performing channels that generated much improved efficiency on the media spend. The progress on our earnings turnaround is notable and has led to a positive Adjusted EBITDA four quarters in a row, including two quarters with positive operating income. Achieving positive Adjusted EBITDA was an imperative of the Transformation Initiative, and as we introduced in the spring of last year, our long-term outlook calls for continued expansion of annual earnings margin, and with more flex in the cost structure, sales growth will flow through to the earnings faster.
In summary, we're pleased with the results of our transformation initiatives and the benefits that are generating strong financial performance. Since the beginning of fiscal 2024, we have increased our annual outlook twice and reaffirmed the guidance provided at the end of the third quarter. Embedded in our outlook is revenue growth combined with a priority on earnings growth that positions us well going forward for operational flexibility. This flexibility allows us to build products that meet growing consumer needs and invest where needed to drive scale of the Honest brand. Over the long term, we see the strengthening of our profit model will best position the Honest Company to compete and deliver on our mission while delivering shareholder value. And with that, I'd like to thank you. I think we still have a few minutes and probably time for a couple of questions if we want to ask them.
Yeah, and let people know we have a breakout.
Oh, come on.
We have a breakout session right after this. I don't know what room, but we'd love for you to join us in our breakout session if you want to have an opportunity to talk a little bit closer. But yeah, we can take a couple of questions if anybody wants to ask anything here. I don't see any hands up. Oh, yes. Hi. Okay, I'm going to try to restate your question after you ask it. Sure.
So you had this slide talking about the distribution of hero products versus the overall ACV that you got to work, which I think is in the 80s. Yes. Can you talk about the hero products? Are those typically the most distributed? And there are other products that have even more opportunity? Or just maybe give a little bit more color around how that overall ACV compares to the hero products and the opportunities there?
Yes. Thank you for that. The question was, we talked about the distribution opportunity available to us. And while our overall ACV distribution as a brand would measure in the mid-80s, we showed you that if you double-click on that and go to any item level, it's significantly below that on an item-by-item basis. And the question was, are our hero products already the ones that are the most available in distribution? And is that a correlation with the distribution strategy? That's what I heard as the question. First of all, I would say we don't externally disclose what we think of as those center main stage products in our portfolio. I know many consumer products companies define something as their core.
And for us, we call that our hero items. We don't specifically disclose that externally. But I would say very broadly across the portfolio, there's significant distribution opportunity available, including in our hero items. And some of that is because for many years, our largest retailer was Target, but there are other brick-and-mortar and omnichannel retailers where we have not penetrated, even with some of our fastest turning and highest quality items. So we think that that opportunity very much still extends to hero items. Another way we plan to grow hero items that follows consumer packaged goods best practices is really this idea of the Pareto Principle, that there is this really nice chewy middle core of products that consumers love the most.
When you find out what that is, offering that to them in various varieties, form factors, sizes can still be an incremental item in that sort of most loved product that can still get you an expanded consumer household. The great example I love to use is we've got these Kate talked about our great lavender fragrance bubble bath and our shampoo body wash. That item was such a hit and at one point only came in a 10-ounce size. We have since introduced that item in an 18-ounce size and also in a refillable, recyclable milk carton style 32-ounce. As we continue to see the size expansion, we see those sizes are incremental for us. Thanks for asking. Any other questions? No? We very much appreciate you taking the time to learn about the Honest Company and the Honest story.
We're very encouraged to be here with you today. Thank you for your time. We do have a breakout session.