Other one. So, we are a consumer home goods producer and retailer, and a provider of e-commerce services and solutions for consumer brands. The company was founded in 2011. We've developed a catalog of over 6,000 SKUs under our own in-house brands in a number of different categories. And we deliver these through an assortment of e-commerce channels and partners. The origin story of the company is centered around tech and data. We've developed a strong set of capabilities across the e-commerce value chain. And that includes as early as product design and development, as well as logistics, merchandising, and fulfillment. These capabilities have allowed us to expand into the service business, where we're making these capabilities available to third-party brands that do not compete with our in-house brands. And I'll talk a little bit about that service business a little bit later in the presentation.
We participate in a number of different consumer categories, the biggest being home goods, followed by general gardening, outdoor recreation, and pet goods. We sell our product in a number of different channels, the largest of which is Amazon, where we are a first-party wholesale vendor to them. We sell these products under a number of different brands. You know, the company is named iPower, and we actually have products under that brand, but we developed a whole set of brands here. Most of these have been launched in the last five years. Let me touch briefly on financials. Fiscal 2024 was a recovery year for us, so we're on a June fiscal year. You know, we along with a number of other companies in the consumer space dug ourselves out from the great inventory reset that came post-pandemic and in the face of the Fed's rising interest rates.
During this year, we improved gross margins 650 basis points, generated $6 million of cash from operations, and significantly lowered, narrowed our loss from the prior year. You know, in our most recent quarter, the June quarter, we were back in the black. Gross margins were 47%. I will say that that's not shouldn't be considered the new high, or the new normal for the company. There were a lot of things that worked in our favor this quarter, including product mix, as well as some of the channels that we were working through. But we think we can consistently keep gross margins in the 42%-45% range, on a go-forward basis. And we're pretty excited about kind of where we're headed with the company. And as I said, we were back in the black.
It was the second consecutive quarter of positive net income for the company. So let me touch a little bit on our service business. You know, we call this business SuperSuite. And the idea is pretty simple. We're providing third-party brands who don't compete with us, and giving them access to our value chain playbook. And so we offer the following: one, access to our sales channels, with Amazon's first-party channel being the crown jewel of that access. Access to our warehouse and ERP system, logistics and fulfillment capabilities through our own facilities and our partners. And a SaaS platform for partners to manage this relationship, which includes access to our market and category analytics. And I'll talk a little bit more about that a little bit later in the presentation.
So we launched this in the spring of 2023, and we're in the process right now of courting partners to the platform. We've got a couple of partner brands that we're working with here. These probably aren't name brands that you've heard of. And in some ways, this is exactly what we want. I'll talk about that a little bit later. But we've identified several criteria that we think makes for successful partners for us. They need to have products that are well-positioned for e-commerce. So as an example, I was just using this one in a one-on-one meeting. We're not going to partner with someone who's manufacturing riding lawnmowers. That's a little difficult to distribute in an e-commerce platform. We also like companies that participate in fragmented markets. And then finally, we like that they these companies have little obvious.
And the obvious, the word obvious is the operative word here: little obvious market differentiation. The reason being, we believe we can add value by identifying how and where to differentiate using our analytics capability. So the way we're attracting brands to the platform is through a number of different avenues that are kind of listed here. One, it's our sales channel. Small brands, undiscovered brands, have a lot of difficulty working with Amazon on a wholesale basis. Because of our relationship there, we get them significantly better distribution than if they were going to work on a third-party basis with Amazon. And we have a growing business with other channels, including AliExpress, and Temu. Our partner companies in logistics and payments are also a way that we had attract partners, giving them access to our analytics that comes through access on our SaaS platform.
And then introductions to our contract manufacturers. You know, we've got over 10 years of history with over 100 different suppliers in Asia. If a company is struggling a bit with costs or reliability, you know, we can introduce them to our network and ultimately find them, you know, a better fit than what they currently have. So, you know, I'll touch a little bit on each of those, on each slide. So, obviously, Amazon is our crown jewel partner. You know, they have probably don't even need to say it. They have reached beyond kind of anything else that's in the marketplace. But our wholesale relationship with them is the thing that's the most important. It's as I mentioned earlier, it's very difficult for a small company to get access there.
We think that, you know, our relationship is a high value one, that we can market to third-party brands, but we've recently added Temu and AliExpress. You know, I think AliExpress was added or officially announced a little over a week ago, and we're pretty excited about that relationship. Some of the others you see on here, we've worked with for some time. Walmart was one of our early ones. eBay is a place you can find products, and we're making that available to third-party brands. If you're familiar with MercadoLibre, they're, you know, kind of the Alibaba slash Amazon of Latin America. All of these are channels that we have relationships with, and then Lowe's and Home Depot, we have relationships on their e-commerce platforms, so we've also started a couple partnerships with folks in the payments and logistics space.
Again, Western Post is a third-party logistics company in the U.S. Not a super well-known name, but they help provide us logistics, and warehouse space, predominantly on the East Coast. What was interesting about them was that they have over 200 customers that they work with, all of whom could be potential partners for us on our service, SuperSuite offering. Same for Zall. So Zall is a payments platform associated with Alibaba. The reason for our partnership there was the same thing. We want access to their customers. And Zall approached us and said, you know, we've got customers who've been asking about you and want access to the things that you provide. And so, you know, this is one of the kind of key ways that we're going to find high-quality brands and products to run through our infrastructure. So this was also just recently announced.
It went live, you know, less than a couple weeks ago. It's our kind of SaaS platform. It's used by our current SuperSuite customers. We have five right now. They use it to manage their relationship. But more importantly, they get access to our market and segment and SKU-level analytics. The way that we have done product development for iPower, for our in-house brands, we capture a lot of data that's out kind of on the web and in, you know, public forums. So think product reviews on places like Amazon or any other e-commerce entity where products for sale and customers are reviewing it. It's largely unstructured data. We structure that into a database.
What we're looking for is understanding what customers are attracted to, what they like, what they don't like, and maybe equally as important, what they're looking for, and what they wish they had. Using that, we then can go into some categories and target with a fairly kind of surgical and precision kind of approach a SKU or a set of SKUs that kind of capture all the things people are looking for and have eliminated to the extent we can the things they don't like and really lean into the stuff that they like. That's been the kind of origin of the success for our in-house brands that grew from probably less than $10 million in 2019 to roughly, you know, $85 million, as we sit here today.
You know, that level of analytics and that data we're making available to these third-party brands. The benefit for them is they can see where their products fit in this category of data's or the categories of data that we have. They can modify product. They can tweak their merchandising to better capture the attention of the consumers they're going after. We think this is one of the most valuable aspects of our service platform because we're going to, you know, essentially recreate for them, you know, what we were able to do with our in-house products. Shipping is another thing that we're making available. Amazon Shipping is essentially the third-party competitor to UPS and FedEx. You know, we have a relationship with them because of our first-party relationship with Amazon. The rates are pretty competitive.
They're cheaper than shipping direct, UPS and FedEx. They've got really great delivery times, weekend pickup. Customers can see their tracking in real time. Amazon is pushing us to make this available to as many of our partners as possible. We think this is, you know, another way to attract service partners to our platform. Then finally, on the kind of supplier and manufacturing base, we just opened our first manufacturing partnership in Vietnam. Most of our manufacturing or contract manufacturers are based in China. So, you know, we did this for two reasons. One, we need to diversify our contract manufacturing base. You know, this helps us avoid some of the tariffs that are in place right now. You know, the production is, you know, as high a quality as what we've seen with our manufacturers in China.
But we're seeing right now lower unit costs. So, you know, we're happy it's going to be used right now in-house on one of our kind of main, high-running product lines, our shelving units. However, these guys, being the manufacturing partner, have experience in a number of different consumer product areas. And we want to make them available to our SuperSuite partners as well, and that's just starting. And then finally, you know, I talked a little bit about, you know, how we've done kind of our own in-house product development using our, you know, vast amount of data. You know, again, we're going to allow them to tap into that. But we also have pricing data. We've got inventory planning data based on what we've seen over 10 years working with folks like Amazon.
We've got tools that allow companies to also kind of track and monitor their operations that we're going to make available to them. So think of it as, you know, a platform for a small up-and-coming brand to manage their operation. And all of this can be monetized through a fee-for-service or through a subscription. So, you know, I'll close with saying, you know, we're well-positioned, we think, to get back on our growth path that we had prior to that inventory reset. We think we've got multiple avenues to do so. You know, we've added new channels. We you know continue to do the product development that we've done for the last 10 years on our in-house products.
I think one other thing I would say is the nice thing about the SuperSuite business for us in working with these third-party brands is it will give us the opportunity to get a really good look over a longer period of time at companies that we might want to bring in-house, as an in-house brand. I mean, you know, I'm sure many of you are familiar with the very typical kind of M&A process that happens for companies in, you know, just about any industry. You know, you're working with a banker, you tell them, you know, the kind of thing you're interested in, they bring you companies, you sign a three-month exclusivity agreement to try to vet them, do due diligence, and you make a go or no-go decision.
You know, it's been my experience that three months is kind of insufficient to really learn enough about a company, to know whether or not it'll be successful, but working with somebody for a year and a half, I think gives you a sufficient amount, and a deeper level of due diligence that we can make better decisions about M&A to grow our own in-house product catalog. And then finally, you know, I guess the last comment I'll make on SuperSuite. Right now it's, you know, 8%-10% of our kind of total revenue. Our goal over time is to have the SuperSuite business be as big as the product business, you know, within four years. So we've got, I think, optimistic, but I think realistic plans to make this a real contributor to the overall company.
And so I think I'll stop there and see if there's any questions. Thanks. Yes.
How much are you charging for the SuperSuite?
So, we haven't disclosed kind of pricing because we're essentially doing custom contracts with everyone. Most of what we're doing right now is acting as a sales agent, because it's really the most attractive thing to a brand. Imagine you're just struggling to make any progress on Amazon and we come to you and say, well, guess what? If you kind of check the boxes for us, you're going to get Amazon selling your products as opposed to you trying to compete with everyone. And so in that situation, what we're doing is we're buying inventory as if we were buying inventory from one of our own contract manufacturers and then selling it to Amazon.
The difference being, we're only going to buy that inventory if we have a firm PO from Amazon. So we have a PO in hand, we make sure they have the inventory available here in the U.S., we'll hold it for a couple days, and then ship it to Amazon. And so it's similar to kind of what we're doing with our current business where we're buying from our contract manufacturer. The difference there being it takes a lot longer for us to make that purchase and have that product shipped from overseas across the, you know, the Pacific and then into Amazon's hands.
It's Aterian? Yes. Yes. They kind of didn't right up your alley, they didn't update. I listened to their pitch. You know, they're kind of, you know, they make a lot of changes. Yep.
They're trying to do too many things. Right. Kind of, you know, Fox didn't end up. They got like six verticals, and they're spending, I think they're spending like 40% of their money on Amazon, but still not satisfied. So, you know, it could be a.
Yeah. So the one difference, yeah, because we get this question a lot. I think the one difference between us and Aterian is, they own the brands and I think they do a lot. I mean, and this is not meant to be pejorative at all. You know, but I think a lot of the M&A that they did was similar to the description that I presented. You know, they said, okay, you know, somebody brought them a deal and they're like, this looks great. It's a great looking product, but they owned it.
And I think some of them probably didn't work out as, as well as they thought. That's one. Two, my understanding, and this may be changing, but my understanding is they do most of their sales on Amazon on the third-party platform. So their rationale that I, you know, and I think there's some merit to it is that they want to be able to control pricing, and not let Amazon drive the pricing. But when you're a third-party brand, let's say you're in coffee makers and, you know, there's 15 others, and Amazon is buying wholesale, guess who gets priority, you know, in that search? You know, they might be up there, but the Amazon one is going to be priced just a little, little bit less and it's right next to the one that's being promoted by Aterian.
So it's a you know, it's a model that can work, but it also has some challenges. But yeah, we're familiar with them. We get asked that question a lot. Any other questions? Okay.
Cash-wise, you guys are in good shape? Yeah.
The question was, are we in okay shape cash-wise? Yes. We've historically been able to run the business with you know, not a ton of cash on the balance sheet. It's not a very capital intensive business. One, and we have an ABL in place with J.P. Morgan. So it allows us to manage working capital. We did a small financing over the summer, largely to support this transition of the new contract manufacturer in Vietnam.
When you bring on a new manufacturing partner like that, if you don't have any history with them, they would like you to pay upfront for the product. And you know, we had some fairly big ambitions there. So, you know, that was meant to support that and then pad the balance sheet a little bit if we wanted to do some acquisitions. But yeah, I think we're right now, we're fine on cash. One of the things though is if the services business takes off, there may be some additional infrastructure and it'll, you know, we'll see if we're going to be able to self-fund that. We're optimistic that we can, but we may need a little bit more infrastructure to support that.
But it'll only be, you know, the need for additional kind of cash will only be driven by growth that's, you know, far and away, higher than what we were expecting. You mentioned acquisitions. Do you have any with which you're trying your plans to? Well, I think most of that's going to come through the work that we do with our SuperSuite partners. Because we like the idea of, you know, getting a good look. You know, there, I would say there's nothing imminent. But we've been very cautious. The only acquisition we've ever done so far was with a partner who was doing co-engineering work for us, was doing QA work for us. They were starting to get attention from some of the larger kind of players in, you know, consumer product space.
And we're a little worried that if we lost them, we'd lose some momentum. So we went and brought them in-house. But we're going to be cautious on kind of general M&A. I think we can, we can, we can do better by having them work with us as a customer. And then we can make a decision if after a year and a half, you know, it's really taking off. You know, maybe it's a little bit more expensive to do it that way, but I'd rather make the mistake of paying over, overpaying a little bit for a company that's really starting to kind of do it with a scalpel instead of a hammer. Yeah. That's a good way to say it. Yeah. I'll, I think I'll use that next time. Feel free. Yes. I'll, I'll give you a little nice royalty. Any other questions? Yeah.
Would Amazon ever approach you and say, listen, this product's not moving?
Oh, of course.
And say, this SKU number is just not moving?
Oh yeah. We've retired SKUs in the past. I mean, and the nice thing about that model though is if it's not moving, they don't have to buy any more inventory, right? So, you know, we work with them really closely and we have, you know, a lot of data. Like that product that it just happens not to be moving?
Do they go back to you and say, listen, we have a product that needs to move, it's just not being advertised right or being properly articulated right?
Yeah. I mean, we've had some of those conversations, but I mean, it's, it, I think to them it's fairly simple. It either moves or it doesn't.
They may say they like the product, but the general managers are tasked not for their kind of love of the features, but you know, if the data says it's good and it's supported by it generating kind of return for them, then they'll do it. If not, then they won't. So yes, we've had those conversations.
But then they change the wording and the keywords that we would be incorporating in more searches, but it would change the.
Oh yeah.
Product. So we included in more of the, you know, the general.
Oh, totally. Yeah. So we do that all the time. We do that all the time. I mean, that's one, I think that's one of our best strengths. We're, you know, we've got 13 years of merchandising on that platform. We know we're doing live videos, demos, keywords.
So if it's not moving, it's not because we did something really wrong with how it's being promoted. All right. I think we're out of time. I got the stop sign. Thanks everyone.