There we go. Excellent. Thank you for coming today. I'm going to tell you a little about our company, Playboy. Before we start, I just want to say we were here a year ago. It was very much a transition story. It was very much a turnaround. We spent a lot of time talking about that. Today, we're going to talk about growth. I'll give you a little update as to where we were coming out of it a year ago. First question is, who are we? If you don't know, that's a problem. We're Playboy. We've been around for 73 years. Global recognition. We're a timeless brand. As I said, we have a dual audience, we'll talk about that in a minute, which is really helpful. We've been pursuing an asset-light model, that was part of the turnaround.
We also have a brand of premium lingerie called Honey Birdette. Two brands, one company. This was the turnaround. I want to spend time on this because the last time I was here, I think it was March of 2025 at Paris. I recommend it. We had not posted that first pink chart up there. I was telling everybody, "We're turning it around, we're turning it around. I swear we're turning around." Today, you can see what we've done since we were here, we just posted that gold bar. Doubled our EBITDA relative to a year ago, I can't wait to come back and show you more gold bars because they're going to look better. We're going to continue the story that we've been on.
We've decreased our debt since then by $73 million. We've just been focusing on the high-margin licensing business, simplified the organization. We've outsourced a lot of things to get on the road to where we are today. Our number one issue right now is that we have too much debt. I'm going to talk about how we're bringing that down. We did a deal recently with UTG. They're a company based out of China. Our business, we own 50% of it, we were making about $8.5 million of cash flow. We did a deal with UTG where we sold them a 50% interest in our business in China. For that, we received $45 million in cash, which we're going to use to pay down debt.
We received $67 million of guarantees over the course of eight years, we received a brand services fee of $10 million that we spend over the course of three years. The takeaway here is just in the first year, the minimum distribution we're going to get of $10 million far exceeds what we were doing when we actually owned the business ourselves. To us, that's a transformative transaction. What we're doing is we're going to take those proceeds, as I said, to pay down debt. We're targeting by January 1 of 2028 to be at $108 million of debt. That should save us about $7 million on an ongoing basis on interest costs. For us, we don't want to have debt because we're not a tax-paying company. We have $300+ million worth of NOLs.
For us, holding debt is. There's no tax benefit of doing so. Our goal is to continue to delever the company, and that'll take some time. I will say we've gone in the right direction, bringing it down $73 million already. Getting onto the growth, the fun stuff. We've got two brands, four drivers of growth. The first is licensing. That's our cash cow, and will continue to be our cash cow. The second is media and experiences. We're going to get back into what was Playboy. We'll talk about this in a second. The Playmates, the parties, everything that made Playboy what it is today, we're going to get back into that. We're also going to take it to the physical world, out of the digital world, and start opening clubs. We're not going to. First of all, back up.
It's a three-year process to open a club, so this is very early terms. We have a space in Miami that we're looking at, we're going to do it on an asset-light business. We're going to have operating partners, the typical way that Playboy's done things. The fourth growth prong is Honey Birdette. We can talk about Honey Birdette. We were also here a year ago, starting to see some changes, talking about how that was going to turn. I'll show you what we put in place, and I'll show you the numbers we're posting, and they're going to continue to look like that over the course of the second quarter, third quarter, and hopefully going into the fourth quarter. First, let's talk about the brand. The way I look at this is the unique asset, the 73-year history, that's really the castle.
The moat is the content, our content's really efficient to produce because content providers are creators. They're creating the content for us that we use. To refill that moat, obviously to drive that growth, we have to continue to get new content. It really kind of becomes this circle where we have creators, they create content, we put out the magazine. That brings in more creators, create more content. Excuse me. It is a brand that converts to revenue. These aren't just vanity stats. We do about $46 million of licensing revenue. We're located in 100+ countries. We have 27 million followers. We get billions of free advertising impressions. We do have a dual audience. Obviously, the men consume the content, the vast majority of the men. They look to us for culture, for relationship advice, entertainment advice.
They're the ones that will drive membership. They'll drive subscriptions and platform growth. Our halo audience is the women. The women are the creators. They create the content. They help drive the voice that pushes the brand forward. Interestingly enough, both audiences convert. As I said, the content consumption, about three quarters of it is men. The interesting stat, it might be tough to believe, is 55% of our licensing product is sold to women. What that does for us is it really opens up areas of the brand to license that we wouldn't have permission to do. Home, wellness, Color cosmetics, these are all things that if we were truly a men-focused business, we wouldn't be able to license, we're not. The magazine is how we generate content.
The reason why it's so efficient for us is there's a prestige of being in the magazine. Women come into the magazine, they create the content, we repurpose that content, they bring their audience, then we sell stuff to their audience, licensing goods. To do that at scale, because you only put out one magazine a quarter, we have the paid voting contest that we're doing. I'll just give you an update on where we stand and how it works. You can be a Playmate. You enter a contest, you put your link in bio, and you go out and get your followers to vote for you in this contest to become the next Playmate. What ends up happening is last year, we had 16,000 contestants that signed up.
They created a lot of content that we had and could use, we got about 500,000 men sign up to vote for the women. We got not only the creators, their phone numbers, their emails, we got the audience, those 500,000 people themselves to come, all that data became ours, we can use that to drive this ecosystem. We just launched the second contest, we already have 45,000 contestants sign up, we're just starting the voting period, we've done almost as much voting revenue today with eight days of voting than we did for the entire first contest.
This is successful, it's a great top of funnel to bring in talent, content, and audience. When you put this all together, our last magazine that we launched, Karol G. Does anyone know who Karol G is, or am I the only person that didn't know? Okay, good. I'm not cool, clearly. This all worked together. Karol G, we had the two contestants that one of The Great Playmate Search that were in the magazine. We had Karol G on the cover because she wanted to be a part of it. She has 70 million instagram followers herself, she wanted to be on the magazine.
What we saw is we had 70 million social views, 200,000 people came to our site. I know it's only 22,000, the copies were sold out immediately. This is the proof of the ecosystem working and what we want to do going forward, do it more regularly. Let's talk about how we monetize today. This is the best stat. Our licensing business, it's 90% gross margin.
It's a little over 70% EBITDA margin. 90% of the revenue is contracted, we know what's coming in. We have about $330 million of unrecognized revenue that we'll recognize over time. It's a cash cow, that's what's funding the next leg or next two legs of the brand. We have global recognition, I can't really sit here today and say we have global penetration. We need to work to get into EMEA, Latin America, do a better job around APAC. That's really the turnaround has been our first focus, now we're focusing on other geographies that we can get into with the Playboy brand. Same thing for the categories we're in. Predominantly, it's an apparel business. It's about 72% of our business, there are other areas that we can naturally be in, such as Gaming.
Color cosmetics is an area that we're looking at. Just spending a lot of time trying to grow outside of our existing categories. For anybody that remembered the 2025 presentation, Gaming was only 6%. We're already starting to move that needle. Our second pillar, media and experiences. It is all about the Playmate. Some people have heard me say this before, but when I first took this job three years ago at Playboy, I called some friends and told them that I was going to come to Playboy. They said two things. First is, "Can you get me a copy of the magazine?" The second was, "Can I come to the parties?" Does not speak to the friends I have. What we need to do is continue to create content, and we're going to do that with a Playmate in Playmate First.
She creates the content, the product, the experience, the community. It is all around her, which is what it was in the past. We're able to add our signature franchises to that. The Playboy Interview, Ask Me Anything, Discovery Series. We're starting to put more content around what we have today. We have that 73-year archive. We have not used the archive. We used to make $10 million a year just selling access to the archive. We need to find a way to bring it back, restore content. We can repackage it if something is happening that is, say, politically, what is going on in the market. We can go back into our archive and through AI, find that data that we had. If it is anything similar to what was happening in the 1980s, 1990s, 1960s, 1970s, we can repackage that content and bring it to date.
The way we monetize it is two ways. I will talk about subscriptions here and also events. We're starting out, it is very light touch with a digital membership or a digital and print. That is just the beginning. We're feeling our way into this. This is the very beginning or early stages. As we build out more stuff around the Playmates and events, you can see that it will evolve in terms of the subscription offerings that we can give the member. We're also going to bring back the events. Our golf tournament, I think we used to get paid $10 million a year from a golf sponsorship, and we had 40 tournaments across the country. We're going to bring back a few select events just to keep this content turning, and then infuse the Playmate into that.
Bring it to the real world, hospitality. We selected our first location in Miami for, let us call it the mansion. It will take a while to build it out. We have found a partner. We found an operating partner. Funding it, we're not going to fund it, but we will get a lot of brand recognition out of it, and it will be a Playboy mansion. I put this stat up here because we used to have 45 of these clubs, and everything I have been talking about is getting back to what we were in the past with the Playmates, the parties. Same thing with the clubs. That is something that we're going to lean into. It is not a growth platform for today, but it is something that three years from now, so I guess in 2029 when we're all here, we can talk about this.
All right, Honey Birdette, this is our fourth leg. Honey Birdette, when I first came, they were just selling to anybody at any price. They were discounting, trying to drive revenue. One of the things we did is we tried to train the customer not to look for a discount. We took our days on sale, we cut them in half, and we saw as our gross margins went up. We went from 40% margins to 60% margins in two years. We took a step back in terms of our growth, but it really was about getting back to profitability, because in 2023, we weren't profitable. By doing that, we didn't see the sales growth, but we definitely saw the profitability increase. Now that we've gotten to that point, you can see we're starting to comp up.
I know everybody's been asking me about Victoria's Secret. We started comping up before they did. It started in the fourth quarter with our brick and mortar, and you've seen even the double stack in the first quarter, that's up against a 2022. We were up 2017, and I think you're going to see charts that'll look like this certainly in the second quarter, third quarter. Then you're going to see total comps. Obviously, the online business was slightly behind because that's where you got the vast majority of your discounts was online. It was a lot more visible and it's a quicker turn. We're seeing that turn now also where the total company is comping up. I would say Honey Birdette, I don't want to say fixed, but we've put it on the right path.
These stats are kind of obnoxious if you're from Australia, but the U.S. represents our largest market. It is 12 x the size. Everybody knows this. The lingerie market's bigger, but our sales are 50/50 between Australia and the U.S. From our standpoint, we want to lean into the U.S. and I'll tell you why. If you look at the stores themselves, two times the turnover. We're generating about $1,500 a sq ft in the U.S. with our footprint, and we're generating $1,100. We're generating half of that in Australia. In terms of profitability, our four wall EBITDA margin in the U.S. right now is about 33%. We closed a store that was dragging that down. That's where we need to invest, is where we can find the dollars.
I think that right now we have about 10 stores in the U.S. We've talked about having an open to buy for another five stores, and I think ultimately you can open up another 20 stores in the U.S. We brought our economics down. It used to cost us $750,000 to open a store. We've brought that down to $400,000. When we look at where we're going to invest, it's going to be in the U.S. Same holds true for online. It's cheaper to get a customer and they pay more. Australia, you can see their average order value is $120. In the U.S., it's $280. The cost to acquire that customer is a lot lower in the U.S. We're going to start investing more in advertising, more in advertising in the U.S. to continue to grow the brand.
I don't know if I need to go through this again, but definitely it's an irreplaceable brand, talking about Playboy. We do have durable cash flow. We have more financial discipline than we've had in the past, and we continue to see those stats move in the right direction. That's all I got. Unless you want me to read through the appendix. How you doing? Do we have time for questions? I don't have my glasses, but yeah. Okay. We have time for questions. There you go. Yes.
I didn't see any information about the demographics of your customers online. Do you have any?
For Honey Birdette or for Playboy?
For Playboy.
Playboy, it spans. It spans because we're in so many different products. We see it all the way up into the 60s. We haven't done a proper demographic study. Just looking at the facts coming out of our e-shop, we see that it goes down as low as 18, 16 for hoodies and T-shirts all the way up into the 60s. It spans an array. I would say it's more of a socionomic, a psychographic, I think is what I'd heard, more than just a demographic. It's personal to the individual person. Yes.
I was in college right in the 1990s. Playboy was.
Here we go. All right.
I just deal with the new generation, Gen Zs and everything else, how does the brand resonate with them? That would define the future growth, right?
100%. When I talked about having that halo audience, the dual audience, you see a lot of young kids in college now that are wearing the hoodies and tees and the Playboy bunny. It's really about, I can't believe I'm saying this, but it's about feeling sexy and empowered because that's always been that way. If you go back to Hugh's original mission with the magazine, it wasn't about just the women being nude. It was more about empowering the women. That's why you had people like Cindy Crawford in the magazine. It's definitely more upscale than that, and it does resonate with the college kids. It's on us to continue to create that content and that awareness to capture each next generation, because that really is the moat that we have.
Considering that Honey Birdette is still a large part of where the revenue is coming from, how do you reconcile the company's asset buy strategy with the CapEx that you still have to spend all over now in expanding the retail footprint?
That's a great question. Honey Birdette right now generates about 60% of our revenue, about 40% of our cash flow. Licensing obviously is the inverse of that. We had spent a lot of time. They were buying so much merchandise, Honey Birdette actually did turn into a cash suck. We spent a lot of time bringing our inventory levels down because it was a business when they originally bought it that was cash flow positive. It wasn't a cash suck.
For me, it's are we going to be generating enough cash to self-fund opening the stores? That really is the question. That really meters how fast we can open these stores because it's $400,000 to open a store. 10 stores is $4 million. Not that I have that in my pocket, but it's not a big ask. That's how I reconcile it, is that it is a cash flow positive business even though it takes assets. Is that it?
What's the market for an original first edition?
Of the magazine?
I happen to have one.
Do you really?
First edition.
Should we do an auction? I can do that. We go $1, better $1. Do I hear $2? I hear $2 now. Do I hear $3? $3 in the back.
All right.
Never mind. Okay. Wow, that's great. All right.
Just one last. The Chinese lender or the department that you are seeking the [inaudible] from, how big are they? Or how big were they to basically increase the chances of seeing.
Yeah. It's a good question. They used to pay us $22 million a year in royalties. They have money. Now, that entity, they obviously got rid of that entity when we had the lawsuit. Obviously, the entity doesn't have assets in it anymore. We're actually going after the principal himself. We're seeing if there's any fraudulent conveyance of assets. The judgment was recognized in the Chinese courts. We're being aggressive. We're going to go after every dollar we can get. Are we going to get it? I don't know. Am I planning on it? I'm definitely not planning on it, but it would be nice if we do get something out of it. Okay.