Thank you. Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to the investor presentation of LightInTheBox. I'm Suhai Ji, the CFO of the company since May last year. I'll be walking you through the key highlights of the company. LightInTheBox as a company has had a fairly long history dating back to 2007 as one of the first cross-border e-commerce companies out of China. We went public in June 2013 on NYSE and have been listed for almost 13 years. We pioneered a direct-to-consumer or DTC e-commerce platform, offering a diverse range of products to global consumers through a drop-shipping model. In the last couple of years, we have gone through a strategic transformation to reposition the company from drop-shipping of broad product assortment toward a brand-led lifestyle offerings.
As you can see on this slide, from 2010 to 2013, our revenues grew from $58 million to $629 million at a CAGR of 20%. Over nearly two decades, we have built a global DTC platform with broad consumer reach, supplier connectivity, digital marketing capabilities, and cross-border fulfillment infrastructure. Starting in 2023, our legacy drop shipping model came under pressure with new entrants, especially Temu, which intensified price competition and drove up customer acquisition cost significantly. In response to the new market dynamics, we are repositioning LITB, which is our company, toward brand-led lifestyle offerings focused more on event-driven demand, self-expression, and a differentiated product e-experience. Here's our transformation playbook, which has three key pillars.
First, our legacy platform now offers highly customized non-standard products during Western festivals, holidays, and special occasions, meeting consumers' emotional and a lifestyle needs. Such events-driven positioning allows us to address the sentimental rather than purely functional needs of our customers, thereby delivering a joyful lifestyle to our customers. Second, we started our own branded products by adopting a brand matrix strategy. We launched three proprietary apparel brands successively since 2024 in women's fashion, golf apparel, and light party dress. These brands built around the social attributes of women aged 30 and above, delivering emotional value and a more relaxed, enjoyable lifestyle experiences across scenarios such as vacations, social sports, and parties.
Third, we have fully embraced AI to capture the real market demand and drive operational efficiency across all aspects of our business, such as product design, photography style, marketing channels, and customer service. This page gives you more details on changes happening on our legacy platform. Instead of offering commodity-like products that competed more on price, we now shifted more towards lifestyle and occasion-based offerings. Our products build around gifting, holidays and festivals, self-expression, and event-driven demand. Such positioning gave us stronger pricing power and a reduced reliance on price competition. We now focus more on margin and profit growth rather than revenue market share. We now have the profit coming from the legacy platform with occasion-based demand, where will the growth come from? This comes the second pillar of our transformation.
Since 2024, we have launched three apparel brands successively in women's fashion, that's Ador, in golf's apparel, that's called the Ace Golf, and a light party dress, the brand is called Mrs. Glamour. All these three brands centered around women aged 30 and above. We believe this is a attractive demographics to target. Together, the three branded apparel grew over 143% in 2025 last year and already accounted for 17% of our total revenue, up from only 6% in 2024. This page gives you an idea on why we're launching those three brands in this segment. Basically, we're targeting high-spending consumers in growing lifestyle verticals. Another benefit about our own branded product is that we would now have total control of the product quality and the entire supply chain, which also improves our gross margin.
With shared DTC infrastructure, we are able to expand into different categories such as parties, sports, vacation, and we are looking to launch one-to-two new brands each year. The third pillar of our transformation is really the application of AI in our business. We have fully embraced AI to convert trends faster and operate leaner. AI has improved our ability for trend sensing and product selection, as well as enhance our operational efficiency across all aspects of our business, such as merchandising design, creative generation, and customer service. An end-to-end AI automation has also contributed to a workforce optimization of 58% since 2023, thus further improving our profit margin and financial results. Following the 2024 reset, we now have a rebuilt LITB, brand-led, AI-enabled, and profitability-focused.
We have successfully repositioned from a traffic-led drop shipping model toward a lifestyle platform built around differentiated demand and product portfolio. Here we list some of the key operating metrics. We have products sold over 100 countries, and now we only have 345 employees supporting that business. Many investors like to look at comparable companies, although no perfect comparable exists. We feel we are evolving towards an online hybrid of Michaels and Etsy. Those two are U.S. companies that you may be familiar with. Michaels proves that occasion-driven demand can thrive with low-price giants like Walmart and Costco. Etsy shows the value of customization and self-expression. We combine both logic to move beyond the commodity e-commerce through our online, global, and AI-enabled DTC platform. Here are the financial validation of our business model and transformation.
Since our transition toward a consumer lifestyle platform, we have delivered eight consecutive profitable quarters since the second quarter of 2024. In 2025 fiscal year, which is last year, we generated a net profit of $8.3 million on revenue of $224 million, a record high since 2022. Our gross margin of 65% in 2025 was also at its highest level since we went public in 2013. For the most recent quarter in Q1 this year, we just had our second consecutive top-line growth of 11%. We are turning the corner not only on profit, but also on revenue. Two factors leading such results are the brand-led pricing power and also AI-enabled operating leverage. In summary, we believe here are some of the key investment highlights of our company. One, proven profitability turnaround.
We have sustained profitability for eight consecutive quarters, with the most recent Q1 revenue, net income, and Adjusted EBITDA all increasing year-over-year. Second, margin and brand-led growth model. We have shifted from traffic-led, low price, high volume towards margin quality and a brand-driven growth model. Third, emotionally resonant positioning. We are targeting consumer moments around gifting, celebrations, self-expression, and lifestyle occasions where relevance and connections matter more than price. The fourth is scalable brand incubation platform. Our shared DTC infrastructure, supplier network, merchandising capabilities, and the data-driven operations support expansion across targeted lifestyle verticals. Last but not least, AI-enabled operating leverage. Our AI-enabled workflows are translating into measurable productivity gains, with revenue per employee increasing from $469,000 in 2024 to $585,000 in 2025.
This concludes my presentation, and I'm happy to take questions, if any. Thank you.
Buying back the stock. Can you explain a little bit about your capital, give a little bit of overview about your capital allocation strategy and your balance sheet?
Sure. Well, in terms of our capital structure, I mean, our public float is relatively small. We only have 28%, a total share base of about 18 million, and the company has been buying back stocks. The repurchase amount is quite limited given all the restrictions on the buyback. So far, we have bought about $1.2 million worth of stocks, and the total authorization is about $3 million. On the balance sheet, we are debt-free company. Mostly it's, you know, working capital. We don't have ARs because consumers all pay upfront. We have some accounts payable, accrued expenses, because the biggest part of our expenses is actually advertising cost.
We spend nearly half, like over 40% of revenues on advertising, basically paying Google and Meta, I mean, those company really make money to much easier than we do. That's where we spend most of our money in terms of customer acquisition. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. Yes, please.
What are your biggest revenues by country? Sorry about that.
Yes. It's U.S.A. The biggest revenue generator is close to 60%, mostly coming from North America, U.S. and Canada, and also Europe, you know, including EU and U.K., those countries. All these combined, probably more than 85%. Some from Middle East and Southeast Asia, and also Australia and New Zealand. We have a global footprint, other than China. 100% of our revenues are all generated outside of China. Yes?
Do you have any interest in mergers and acquisitions? Would you go to the finance and any kind of deal?
Well, not in the near future when our stock is depressed. When we were at a revenue of $630 million at its height, we had a market cap close to $1 billion. During that one year, you know, when we were getting crushed by much larger competitors like Shein and Temu, our business really came down, and a lot of people don't think the company will be even able to survive. You know, with this strategic transitions in place already, we managed to not only survive, but surviving with profit for eight consecutive quarters. That was a year the revenue went from $630 million to $250 million, from 2023 to 2024. Also, during course of that year, our stock price came down like 90%. Now it's only like $50 million.
If you look at on a PE basis, it's about less than like 5 x PE. It's gonna take a while for us to get back, I think. Yeah.
Did you receive any interest from companies looking to buy your company during that time?
Well, you know, we are small. People don't think we're gonna survive, you know, among the two really large competitors, you know. Now we may be able to getting some interest, but we still feel we have a lot of room to grow, given the profit we have and You know, we don't really have a capital needs. It's not like other companies, they're losing money. If you don't raise capital, you're gonna go bust. For us, you know, financially, we feel more comfortable. It's just with the stock price, we don't feel as comfortable because we feel they're significantly undervalued. Yeah. Okay. Thank you very much.