Good morning, everyone, and welcome to PVH Investor Day 2022. Thank you for taking the time with us this morning. We are beyond excited to share our multi-year growth plan, the PVH+ Plan. I'm especially excited that I'm able to do it partly in person and with my team here, having navigated through COVID the past two years. This is a special location. This is Calvin Klein's first building, and where we sit today is where Calvin had his runway shows. Introducing a brand-led growth strategy, we couldn't be in a better place. Little over a year ago, I had the great opportunity to come into the CEO role for PVH.
I did it always having to look at PVH from the outside and being impressed by the underlying strength and being attracted to the underlying strength. Because what I saw was two of the most iconic brands in the world in Calvin, we own both those brands. Those type of brands are not made anymore. They are beloved by the consumer globally. They're true lifestyle brands, and they have unique staying power. What I also saw was the strength in our international business, where we have had market-leading performance for many years. Thirdly, what I also saw was that we have real underlying brand strength with both Calvin and Tommy in the North American market.
One of the first strategic initiatives that I took when I came in as the CEO was to focus in intensely on our core strength, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein, and divest the focus from non-core. We divested the heritage branded business, which over time had become a lower growth rate, lower profitability business. When we share our growth plan today, we do it with the clarity and the focus of PVH being the global growth platform for Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein. That's what we are, and that's what we're gonna execute and share today, the plan behind what that means.
Before I take you through the plan, I first wanna give you some background in the current business and where we see the consumer and the market are going because all those factors are influencing the plan you will hear from us today. Looking at where we are today, we are $9 billion in revenue, global revenues. We have over 60% of our business coming from international. It's the fastest and most consistent growth segment at PVH. We are 40% direct to consumer, which puts us as close to the consumer as you need to win going forward. We are 25% digital, where digital having the highest growth rate of all channels. That's our starting point. When we look at 2021, we drove an accelerated recovery above what we set out to do.
It was driven by the increased focus on Calvin and Tommy. It was driven by supercharging digital, and it was driven by product strength and pricing power. We grew revenues in international above pre-pandemic levels, 2021. We also drove record gross margins through increased pricing power in every region and every brand. We doubled our digital penetration versus 2019. We achieved an EBIT rate above 2019 pre-pandemic levels and record EPS. We, as a result, came out of the year with an even stronger balance sheet than we had coming into the pandemic. While we are pleased with delivering such a strong 2021, for us, that's just a first step because our focus has always been to position ourselves to win in the new normal.
The reason why that is so important to us is that we are convinced that we are already in the new normal, and we are convinced that COVID just accelerated underlying consumer and market trends. Here are some of the trends that we see being part of what we see as the new normal and what we see we have to compete and win in already now. Starting with that the barriers of entry are down, so anybody can start a fashion brand. You can start a fashion brand in just a few hours, social media, third party everything, and you're up and running. And a lot of people do. But what most realize after doing that is that the noise level has come up.
Building the next Calvin Klein and the next Tommy Hilfiger has probably never been more difficult. As a result of the barriers of entry coming down, the consumer has infinite choice. The consumer has never had more choice. When you compete today, if you compete with anything generic products, generic experience, generic brand, you're gonna get crushed. The next generation consumers are already here. Gen Z, millennials, they're already leading the market, and we have to follow them. As a result, they are digitally first, and as a result, the market is digitally first. This is the new normal that we see we're facing already now. That means that the formula to win has changed. We see three ways that it has changed.
The first one is coming back to the importance to be relevant, to have brand strength and brand relevance with the consumer and with the next generation consumer. The second insight is that scale can be an incredible advantage. I often feel like scale as an advantage is not very talked about. It's not very much talked about. It's probably the least recognized insight into what's needed to win in the new normal. Because if you have scale, you have, as in our example, we have two global brands that are almost impossible to build today. We have the strength of that. We have the global consumer base that we don't have to acquire that. We have a consumer globally in all markets that love our brands.
We have the strength of a marketplace, where we have an omni-channel presence in the marketplace, digital stores, relationships, and we have the investment capabilities to invest in technology, supply chain, sustainability, people. Scale would only be important. The reason why we say it can be an incredible advantage is only important when you connect it to brand relevance. Then thirdly, the third insight we have from competing to win in the new normal is to get as close to the consumer as you need. To really leverage the strength of scale, you have to have a demand and data-driven operating model that drives speed, that enables you to continuously change, and that gives you resilience. Something we have all seen firsthand over the importance of that over the past two years.
When we are building our PVH+ Plan, it's about connecting these three and having a plan that builds on our core strength and connects to these three insights. Let's take a look at the PVH+ Plan. To start with, the PVH+ Plan is a brand, digital, and D2C-led plan, where we are taking the core strength of Calvin and Tommy and connecting them closer to where the consumer is going than any time before. The way we do that is underpinned by five growth drivers, win with product, win with consumer engagement, win in the digitally led marketplace, develop a demand and data-driven operating model, and the fifth one, to drive efficiencies and invest in these initiatives. It's a growth plan. You will hear that more from Zac in his financial part.
These five growth drivers come to life in our three regions, where we will fuel the market-leading strength we have in Europe, we will accelerate from strength in Asia, and we will unlock our real opportunity in North America. Let me now take you through each of the growth drivers a little bit more in detail. Starting with product, where we have set out to create the best hero products in the market. Most of you have heard me talk about hero products since I came into the company, and let me share what we mean when we say hero products. Hero products to us are the most essential products in the consumer's wardrobe. Think about the sea of generic stuff on one hand, and then think about the 10 most important products in your wardrobe.
Think about it from a consumer perspective, that it's spring. Spring, even if it's still cold in New York, it is spring officially. We are moving into spring. You are, as a consumer, starting to shop your wardrobe. Increasingly today, the consumer is informed and knows what are the 10 most important essential products and then build the assortment from there. Those are our hero products. We build those hero products increasingly focused on playing in the biggest and most growing demand spaces, whether it's casual, whether it's athletics, whether it's street, we are very focused on the right demand spaces and within those, focusing on the key growth categories. Coming back to the strength of our two brands, we have the right to play across the lifestyle.
You will hear it from our brands how we do that, how we take category by category that's important to the consumer, and we build our strength through hero products. Once we have those hero products, there are several benefits with that. The first is it creates the platform and a canvas for seasonal newness. So the consumer knows, and I'm sure you're all consumers, so you know when you have found your favorite pair of denim, your favorite shirt, your favorite outerwear silhouette, your favorite and then we play with that silhouette with seasonal newness, seasonal fabrics, limited edition, collaborations. So you combine being the most trusted source, go-to source for the most essential products, and then we add the newness and the reason to come back all the time.
We need hero products to then connect them to a responsive demand-driven supply chain. I'll take you through more in detail how we will do that. It's increasingly important as well, and you will hear it mostly from Martijn and Avery when they go through Europe, that the hero product platforms enable us to win more sustainably. We just see that with the Gen Z, with the consumer that more sustainable products are gonna be key to compete to win going forward. The second growth driver we have is taking those hero products and win with consumer engagement. The way we will do it is digital first. Why? Because the consumer is digital first.
Build it around the hero products, and then connect those hero products to the biggest consumer moments. One thing that we see, perhaps the strongest in Asia and China, but we see it everywhere, is that the big consumer moments just keep getting bigger. The best hero products leaning in even more to the big consumer moments, and then we partner, increasingly, we utilize our brands as platforms for creative partnerships. Two examples I wanna share with you today, and the brands will take you through it more in detail, but they're really good examples for how we tie it all together. One is Tommy's collaboration with A Bathing Ape. It sold out within 1 week. Second one is Calvin Klein's collaboration with Palace. We just launched on Friday, and my 15-year-old daughter texted me saying, "Dad, your website crashed.
Try to fix it." And I texted back saying, "Shouldn't you be in school where there is a no cell phone policy?" But what happened, why the website crashed and we got back up, and Palace is the most successful collaboration we have done so far, is because the consumer loves when we play in the demand spaces that they care about, in the right categories, with hero products, invite creators like A Bathing Ape or the Palace crew in London, and add their creativity. We show up digital, we show up physical, we have lines everywhere. That's just a really good illustration of how we will work across the whole company internally and increasingly open our platform for creative partnerships.
that you will see the inside and outside being less important and more of an open platform. Again, most importantly, the consumer loves it. Let's move to the third growth driver. When we have the best hero products and we have the best consumer engagement, then it's about winning in the digital marketplace, digitally led marketplace. I often get the question, "Stefan, what's PVH's, what's your brand's distribution strategy?" I always tend to answer it really simply, which is, it is to follow the consumer where they wanna shop our brands. The way we are doing that is to lead with digital and D2C, because there we have the ability to get closely connected with the consumer and create the pinnacle experience of the brand. The consumer is also telling us, "We love shopping third-party e-commerce.
We love shopping your brands. We might get inspired in your brand world, and then we shop on the third-party and move in between. We also love to shop in brick-and-mortar in your own stores and in wholesale experience. What our job is to make sure that we focus the distribution strategy on the consumer. We look at each geography cross-channel. We can't look at distribution in silos anymore. We look at the geography, put the consumer in the middle, and then our job is to be where the consumer wants to shop and balance the distribution between channels so that we drive brand strength and pricing power.
You will see that from the regional presentations, how when we do that, how we increasingly win and in many places market-leading performance when we put all of that together, the best product, the best engagement, and then meet the consumer where they wanna shop us. The enabler for all of that, again, is to develop a demand and data-driven operating model. Here is where we have most work to do, because we come from a traditional place where you plan, you buy, you sell your inventory in one way. I have the benefit of having been a part of the team that grew H&M from $3 billion-$17 billion and 23% operating profit. I firsthand worked with the operating model behind that.
When I left H&M and came to the U.S. to lead companies, all the board members asked me, "Tell us about speed. How can we do things faster?" What struck me when I really understood the difference between a real speed model and a more traditional model is that it doesn't start with speed. It starts with a systematic, repeatable product engine, that every single product has an intent tying back to the hero products. Is it a hero product? Is it a test that could be a hero product? Is it a hero product that we are phasing out, and we are growing another? It starts with that kind of discipline. Then, the way you get there is cross-functionally bring design, merchandising, sourcing, planning together. Because then you cut most of the lead times.
Because what struck me coming from a short lead time speed model to a traditional model was almost all of the lead times is internally created. Working with supply chain, say, let's take five, six weeks to produce this order, everything else is internal lead times. The fastest way I've been able to cut lead times is to bring the teams together. Instead of handing over to each other, we are together cross-functionally creating the best hero products, and then we can go from one, two long lead times to multiple lead times with a lot of speed options. Again, early days, we're starting to lean in, and you will hear examples, and in the Q&A, we can share where we are the furthest. A lot of value to unlock here.
In essence, it looks so simple, but it takes quite a lot of work to especially work differently and change the mindset. Okay, the fifth and final value driver that you will hear about today in our plan is to drive efficiencies. In an organization like ours, it's easy to do things that we have always done and do things the way we have always done it. When in reality, we know we're in the new normal, we navigate constant change, so we need to get simpler in how we work, how we are organized. We have to empower the doers. We are starting to do that work, and we are committed to continuously find efficiencies. We need those efficiencies because of two reasons. We need to invest in growth. This is a growth plan.
We need to invest in growth. Secondly, we need to become cost competitive. What we are setting out, and Zac will take you through more in detail, is to, over time, drive down SG&A as a share of revenues. All the parts of the PVH+ Plan come to life in our regions. That's where we are the closest to the consumer. That's where the business happens. Let me start with Europe. For many years, Europe has executed both Tommy and Calvin in a market-leading way. When Martijn takes you through how, I encourage you to really listen to the how and the underlying approach and value drivers. We have a systematic, repeatable approach to win with the consumer and create value.
Perhaps best seen during the pandemic when we were able to fully leverage all those strengths and out-compete almost everybody in the market. You will see why we in the PVH+ Plan are so confident and continue to fuel that market in leading strength. When you hear from Tom in Asia, he will take you through how we accelerate from underlying strength. We have had a lot of COVID disturbances, and we still have in Asia big markets. Underneath there, we're seeing a lot of strength. Tom will take you through how he unlocks that strength, and you will see the connection to how we work in Europe. It's the same underlying drivers. Yes, each consumer and each market, each region has their own specific traits.
Underneath there, the way we win with product, the way we win with consumer engagement, the way we win with digitally led marketplace, it's the same value drivers. When you hear from Trish, you will hear how we are leaning into North America with the same value drivers. We know that our job in Americas is to unlock the business strength that should reflect the brand strength. We know that there are a lot of your questions are around Americas, and today we're gonna share where we see our strength, where we have work to do, and how we do it. Just wanted you to hear it directly from me. We have incredible strength, and Trish will take you through it in brands for both Calvin and Tommy.
Pre-pandemic, that made it almost too easy to do business in North America because we could rely on 30%-40% tourism, and then COVID hit, and all of that tourism-driven sales went away, and it exposed the lack of focus that we have had on the domestic consumer. It exposed that we had taken our eyes off winning with the domestic consumer in a brand or creative way in the market. As a result, we had become too exposed to the value channel and not enough focus on driving product strength, pricing power, consumer engagement with the domestic consumer, and winning in the channels, investing and winning in the channels where the consumer is growing the most. Digital too is the most obvious one.
Why I want you to hear it from me is through my own experience, having turned around Old Navy, having helped reposition Ralph Lauren for much more profitable, sustainable growth, I've seen this movie before. The good news is that it's fixable. There is a proven way to do this, and that's the way we will follow. It will just take time. When Trish goes through the step-by-step approach, it's an approach that almost every other of our best competitors have done already in North America. When we look at Levi's, when we look at Ralph, even Nike has had to rebalance their distribution and lean in to win more disciplined with the domestic consumer. What will come out from that work though is a big value unlock.
It's a big value unlock in North America that will come out. Our growth plan enables every region to drive growth with an accelerated financial performance. I'll take you through on the highest level what that financial performance looks like in terms of targets and goals. Starting with our targets algorithm, we are setting out to drive high single digits revenue growth. We are setting out to expand our operating margins. We are setting out to drive EPS growth ahead of EBIT growth. We are setting out to drive strong free cash flow. By 2025, we are targeting to be $12.5 billion in revenues. We are targeting an approximately 15% operating margin, and we are targeting a cash flow beyond $1 billion.
What you see here coming out of the PVH+ Plan through the brands, through the regions, is an accelerated financial performance. This is how the different parts come together. From a brand perspective, from a Calvin and Tommy perspective, we are planning to drive balanced high single-digit growth for both brands globally. From a regional perspective, we are planning to drive high single-digit growth in Europe and North America, and we are planning to drive mid-teens growth in Asia. From a channel-driving perspective, you will see that the strongest growth will come out of digital, + 20%, 20%+ growth rate, high quality growth rate. B2C growth rate will outpace wholesale. In parallel to driving the financial performance and accelerating that, we have, as a company, for a long time, leaned into having a positive impact.
We do that through our initiative called Forward Fashion. We have three groups of targets that we are driving. The first one is to increase our positive impact to 100%. The second one is to decrease our negative impacts to zero. The third one is to improve over a million lives in the value chain. I'm pleased to share that we are making progress. We have hard targets, 2025 and 2030 for all these areas. Let me give you a few examples. When it comes to increasing our positive impact to 100%, we have set out to sustainably source 100% of our cotton by 2025. We are over halfway there already.
When it comes to reducing our negative impact to zero, I want to give you the example of that we have set out to use 100% renewable energy by 2030, and we are 50% there. When it comes to impacting over 1 million lives in our value chain, we are working with USAID and today engaging 100,000 women in Bangladesh and help them with their professional development. We are working on expanding that to 500,000. In addition to these examples, last year, we importantly launched our inclusion and diversity commitments, where we have set out to make a real and lasting positive difference. We are backing up these commitments with a $10 million investment.
When we sum it up, the introduction to the PVH+ Plan, brand-led, digital, D2C, unlocking Calvin and Tommy closer to the consumer, the five value drivers, driving strength and growth in our three regions, it all comes to life through our people. Plans are only as good as the execution, and people first has always been at the core of what PVH is about. I wanna share just a little bit of how we have developed this plan, because it's a different approach. We have, over the last few months and past 12 months, engaged the team, the top 100 leaders, to co-create this plan.
What this means is that when we share it with you now, we already have the engagement in our top hundred leaders all across the company starting to execute, starting to share learnings, starting to improve. You will see our approach over the coming years is very much built on empowering our teams and our leaders to work as one team with one vision and one plan. With that introduction, I'm excited to, I believe for the first time, for you to be able to hear directly from our brand and regional leaders. It will start with Tommy, the global brand, where Martijn and Avery will take you through that. Trish will take you through our growth plan for Calvin Klein, then we'll have a break. Then we'll go through the growth plan for Europe.
We will take you through the growth plan for Asia Pacific, and we will take you through the growth plan for Americas. Zac will wrap all that up in more detail of what it means from a financial target and delivery perspective. I will come back for closing remarks, and after that we'll have a 45-minute Q&A. With that, I'm handing it over to the Tommy team.
All right. Good morning. My name is Martijn Hagman, CEO, Tommy Hilfiger Global and PVH Europe. The first part of this presentation will be done by myself, and then afterwards I hand it over to Avery Baker, President and Chief Brand Officer of Tommy Hilfiger. Embracing the past, conscious of your roots, but with a clear, enthusiastic view to the future. That's the true spirit of Tommy Hilfiger. I really love this quote because it so much captures the unique DNA and purpose of our brand. Because from the onset, Tommy Hilfiger has been all about relevance. Has been all about bold innovation, constant momentum, and a track record of outperformance. That gives us the perfect springboard to future growth. Our 35-year rich brand history is anchored in our heritage and in iconic American style.
Now, what makes our brand American is not just the colors of our flag, but the values that are at the essence of the true American spirit. Our unique DNA of reinventing the classics, playing bravely, welcoming differences, and pioneering together are at the core of what we do and how we do it. We've seen consistent global growth over the last 10 years with a high single-digit CAGR of 7%. In 2021, we recovered to pre-pandemic sales levels, driven by the international businesses in Europe and Asia Pacific. There are three key core drivers behind this decade of growth. The first one being the brand's control over distribution across all the regions.
In the most recent years, we did strategic acquisitions in Asia Pacific to take control over high growth, high potential markets like China, Australia, and the Far East Asia countries. The second growth driver has been the expansion of our lifestyle portfolio, the product offer within that, and gaining market share in key product categories like outerwear, jeans, footwear and accessories, and underwear. Last but not least, the digitalization of our value chain truly unlocked speed and efficiency and of course, the accelerated growth in our digital sales channels. The brand evolved and has taken a strong market share positioning across multiple product categories and multiple regions. I think that's one of the differences looking at the Tommy Hilfiger brand versus other brands who are perhaps leading in one single category or in one specific region.
I think the strength of the Tommy brand is the diversity of its offer and the diversity of its market share, leading market share positioning across the globe. That gives us a competitive advantage. We can be agile, flexible, responsive to changes in consumer demand and changes in consumer behavior and capitalize on those trends. Now we benefit from a high brand awareness across the globe with acceleration opportunity in mainly Asia, in China, I have to say. That's an important takeaway from this slide. What I think is even more important is how we drive consumers to the purchase funnel and are able to translate and convert that high brand awareness into purchases in each market that we operate in.
Now, consumers are at the heart of everything we do, and every year we welcome more than 200 million unique visitors to our stores and our online platforms. Our brand really resonates with the global consumer. Our DNA really resonates with the global consumer. We reach a wide audience because we have two distinct labels, Tommy Hilfiger and Tommy Jeans. Through those labels, we reach a wide audience in age group as well between the core target group of the 18- to 45-year-old. From a gender perspective, we have high awareness both with male and female consumers. When it comes to conversion of the female consumers, we see opportunity to grow through being relevant in the key female product categories and drive elevation within those. Now that brings us to the next chapter of growth.
Light up the Future is our key, our strategic framework towards 2025. We unlock the full potential of the brand by focusing on the three strategic pillars, product, consumer engagement, and consumer experience. While doing that, we continue to future-proof our brand and our operations through our Waste Nothing, Welcome All sustainability philosophy. Looking at it from a regional perspective, there is the growth opportunity within each of the regions. There is perhaps a different momentum, but we see strong growth opportunities within all. Everything we're doing, we're doing through the lens of those two lifestyles, Tommy Hilfiger and Tommy Jeans. With that, I hand it over to Avery. We will walk you through the first growth pillar, win with product.
Good morning, everyone. Really happy to be sharing with you today some of our key strategies around how we're gonna win with products, consumer engagement, and experience, because first and foremost, we are super passionate about product. We know that Tommy is really at its best when we are at the intersection of aspiration and accessibility. We're always very focused on maintaining the balance between these two components. Our key product strategies are really oriented around elevation, how we're gonna continue to effectively manage marketplace growth through segmentation and through the expansion of our two brand labels. Because we really are aiming and know that we can continue to grow consumer desire for our products and ultimately strengthen the premium positioning of Tommy Hilfiger.
The good news is that we're well underway on these key strategies, and we see that it is adding significant improvements to our global brand cohesion and strengthening our overall elevated positioning. To start with, we've got two labels in which we engage with two quite different consumer groups, and we see a lot of opportunity to continue to grow with these consumer audiences. Sharpening the differentiation of how we bring our Tommy Hilfiger label and consumers to life, and how we speak to a differing consumer group through our Tommy Jeans label is really critical for our future success. We know that we have a very wide fan base of audiences who resonate and love the heritage of the classic American aspects of Tommy Hilfiger, and the Tommy Jeans business really taps into the nostalgic and modern American street aspect of Tommy.
Today, that accounts for about 25% of our business, and it's very, very strong today in the European region. We've had significant growth with this Tommy Jeans business, but we see major opportunities, especially with young consumers who continue to be really passionate about the streetwear aspect of our heritage in North America and also in the Asia region. Within each of these labels, we not only offer apparel, we've got a full lifestyle product offering, including footwear, accessories, and close to body. And as we sharpen the differentiation of how we bring these labels to life, we are certain that we're gonna continue to bring completely relevant product and consumers' experiences to life for these important audiences. Talking about elevation and segmentation, these are really critical aspects of our win with product strategy. Number one for us is product elevation.
Our teams have spent an incredible amount of time, and continue to do every day, to ensure that we are modernizing our silhouettes, that we're elevating our fabrics and our fits, and that every garment represents that signature Tommy detail and DNA that we know our consumers love and expect from our brand. The fall 2022 collections, which have yet to hit the market, are a big step forward in these areas of elevation, and we've seen a phenomenal response from global retailers with sales up 21% versus prior year and up 60% for fall 2022 versus fall 2020. Segmenting this growth to ensure that we strengthen the presence of the brand in better and best level accounts in Europe and Asia is a critical opportunity, and we believe that as we continue this segmentation, we can unlock more premium distribution opportunities in the North American region.
As Martijn said, we've got a highly diversified offer of products across many categories, as well as the gender opportunity. For example, apparel, of course, is our strength, but footwear and accessories are one of our most high performing businesses. Footwear in the global collections is the number 3 performing category for the brand. Also women's. I wanna emphasize the fact that we believe there is significant growth opportunity to continue to be had with women's consumers. We're seeing really great response and traction on sell-through as we introduce more new products and silhouettes to the market, especially softer silhouettes like dresses and skirts and more trend-oriented items. We really believe that this will continue to be a big growth driver in all of our future efforts.
Underpinning all of this is an incredibly strong foundation for the brand in these iconic American inspired essentials that actually have global appeal. We are obsessed with making sure that our classics are constantly refreshed, that they're relevant, that they feel current. We know that actually quality is the number one attribute recognized by consumers around the world for the brand. That's an amazing anchor point to continue to grow the core foundation of our business. When we refresh our most important core programs, which we do frequently, such as the men's 1985 program of polos and chinos, which is now offered in fully sustainable materials, we see a major uplift with consumers. Sales for that franchise alone were up 20% year-over-year.
Of course, seasonal newness is super important, so we always have monthly drops that bring that newness and that freshness to the consumer. At the top of our pyramid, we continue to believe that pinnacle, selective, strategic, limited edition product drops, often done in collaborative partnerships, drive that brand heat and relevance that we need to really cut through to consumers today. As Stefan mentioned, hero products is a super critical opportunity and strategy for how we're gonna win with product. We know that as we continue to really build relevance and refresh and add sustainability around our most iconic products and put them at the forefront of our communications, that consumers really respond.
I think the Tommy Jeans Alaska Puffer program that I'm showing on the slide here is a great example of how we've done that recently, where we've refreshed one of our core styles and tiered that throughout the assortment offer, so that from core all the way through to pinnacle and a style that was part of our TommyXTimberland collaboration, all of which have been made in 100% recycled materials. The consumer is loving it. One silhouette alone actually drove $20 million worth of wholesale value. We have an astounding opportunity to continue to build on this strength.
Of course, at the heart of everything is our commitment to Light up the Future and our vision to be a brand that actually can and must drive positive impact in our industry and for our consumers. At the heart of Tommy Hilfiger is always a belief in inclusivity. We've always championed that, and we endeavor in our efforts to be a brand that Waste Nothing, Welcome All. Not only are we living our values, but we're acting on them more and more each day because we know that it's table stakes today for consumers to be part of a brand and to want to be a part of a brand world where they're taking responsibility for making this world a better place.
We will continue to champion equality and opportunity, both for our associates and for our consumers on a global basis. It doesn't stop, of course, with our efforts around inclusivity. What we're doing in the areas of sustainable innovation is also absolutely essential to drive fashion forward for good. We're really proud of the progress that we've made at Tommy Hilfiger on our sustainability efforts, which we have not been very public about yet with consumers. There's not a lot of recognition today, and that's about to change because in about two weeks time, we're about to launch a new global brand partnership long term with an ambassador who will help to put the spotlight on our sustainability efforts for the first time with consumers. We will, by 2025, have 100% of our products made more sustainably.
In fact, we're making an amazing progress already today. In our Tommy Jeans global collection today, 99% of the styles are made with sustainable materials. By 2025, 100% of our styles will be designed within 3D. We see a lot of exciting acceleration in this area. Let's jump now to consumer engagement. One of the hallmarks of the Tommy brand and the fact that we've been around for almost four decades is that we've remained constantly refreshed, and we have an ability to evolve and to stay relevant for consumers, in large part because of the relationship that the brand has always had with pop culture. You heard it from Martijn, and we're very inspired by Tommy himself because we don't look back, we always look ahead.
Part of that is our incredible focus now on connecting with what we call future makers. Future makers are the people that are shaping culture. They are the leaders in their communities, they're the pioneers, and they're the ones who influence the masses, and our key target consumer groups. As we focus on engaging with a wide group of consumers and doing this through the lens and the voices of future makers, the brand is increasingly present in cultural moments that really matter to our consumers. We're offering more and more exclusive capsules and drops and programs around important moments such as Chinese New Year and Pride. We're spotlighting the voices of today's heroes, such as Indya Moore and Anthony Ramos and Halima Aden in our marketing and engagement efforts.
Our brand campaigns, which drive global cohesion and relevance, are also adapted, which is super important given the regional differences today of consumers and cultures, so that we remain relevant for local audiences. I would be remiss if I didn't mention future makers and the metaverse in the same sentence. Who knows where it's all gonna go, but what we know is that we need to be where consumers are and where they are going. As a brand, we have always pioneered to be early adopters into these new spaces. Recently, we've done a lot of testing and learning, and we were part of the Decentraland Fashion Week just a couple of weeks ago, and we saw that actually within one hour, our digital wearable NFTs sold out. Lots of interesting things to explore as we continue to connect with these new audiences.
Collaborations are one of the trademarks I think that's been a hallmark of the Tommy Hilfiger brand, because from the very early days of the brand origin, we have been partnering with individuals and brands in pop culture, from Coca-Cola to Gigi Hadid, to David Bowie, to Vetements, you name it. One of the hallmarks of these partnerships has always been the deeply authentic aspect of the collaboration. We know that that matters more than ever before to today's very savvy consumers. We will continue to highlight our iconic products and allow them to be reinterpreted by creative voices that are really relevant in culture today. We believe that the newness and the storytelling around this will be important as we drive our business forward.
For example, the AAPE program that Stefan mentioned had 87% sell out before we even launched to the public on tommy.com, which also shows the power of exclusive offers for our future membership community. All of these stories are great, but we really need to make sure that they are amplified, that we are cutting through in that crowded landscape. We're doing that through, first and foremost, an increased investment in the area of consumer-facing media. In 2022 alone, we're increasing our media investments in the European region by 49%, in the U.S. by 19%, and on a global average by 25%. A second key area of amplification for us is membership.
We see amazing traction with member opportunities in Europe, that our members are driving 35% more business, that they spend between 20% and 60% more per transaction, and that they have double the retention rate of our average consumer. We are doubling down on membership as a key strategic proposition on the go forward. Lastly, amplification is enhanced by our really strong cross-channel presence, which is incredibly healthy and strong in Europe, in Asia, and we're excited to be diversifying that by strengthening the digital opportunities in North America in the years ahead. Speaking of that, coming to consumer experience, you've heard it from Stefan, but leading with digital is our number one priority. In today's world, we know that actually experience is everything for our target consumer.
We're focusing our energy and our investments to make sure that we keep up with how the technology is developing and with where consumers are going. We are very oriented on making sure that at every consumer touch point, we truly deliver on the premium proposition that is and must be the Tommy Hilfiger brand. Leading with digital starts first and foremost with DTC. That is our number one priority, and today, DTC accounts for 26% of the Tommy Hilfiger business globally. Of course, a key driver of that is e-commerce, and we've seen amazing growth, particularly in the European region, on our e-commerce site during the last few years of COVID. Significant investments to grow the scale and the sizeability of that business will be happening going forward.
We're very oriented around elevating content, user experience, increasing exclusive offers for our consumers, and getting that consumer data flywheel going. Additionally, the strong strategic partnerships that we have on a global basis with pure players in the digital space are a real key driver for leading in digital. We see amazing consumer response in programs that we've done with dedicated marketing and product drops for Zalando, for ASOS, for Tmall, for example, when we partner with them in their innovation center. On a recent pilot around our polo program, we leveraged their speed and their capabilities and their data to make the Tommy Hilfiger polo in China on Tmall the number one polo on their entire site during the pilot program. Connecting with consumers through digital is not the only way.
Of course, we have an incredibly powerful retail footprint and physical presence for the brand around the world. Hopefully, one of these days you'll all be able to go out and see this and physically experience it. We've got over 2,000 retail doors and flagships that are amazingly strong and compelling in many of the key cities globally around the world. We're constantly refreshing these store networks and refreshing these store concepts so that we're delivering on the expectations of next-generation consumers. The brand visibility is enhanced not only through our controlled retail presence, but also through the strength and positioning of our key wholesale partnerships. We're very focused on strengthening that presence and that presentation in better and best level doors on a global basis. We've made great progress through both the Tommy Jeans and the Tommy Hilfiger label.
Lastly, leading with digital, of course, is also about leading throughout the entire value chain. Tommy Hilfiger has always been quite an early adopter in the digital space. In fact, we started selling our collections completely digitally well before we even knew what a pandemic was. Now today, we sell almost all of our collections globally, completely virtually to customers around the world. We're also leveraging digital innovations in our retail experiences and how we engage with our consumers in our channels, in our stores, with things such as live shopping and constantly testing new areas. 3D design, as I've mentioned, is a critical driver to continue to accelerate our speed, to offset and mitigate a lot of the global supply issues that we see and challenges, and to help us achieve our important sustainability goals.
I'm gonna turn it back over now to Martijn to wrap up the story for the Tommy Hilfiger brand.
Thank you. Thanks, Avery. To conclude with this strategic plan, we are confident we can drive the global business to $6.4 billion net sales by 2025, which represents a high single-digit growth CAGR, similar as we have seen over the past decade. We're confident to execute on this and unlock the full potential and drive that elevation strategy while leveraging our unique brand DNA. Here in this slide, I've just summarized below these three strategic pillars, the key initiatives of our strategy. We will win with product through that label differentiation, through the expanded lifestyle offering, building those iconics while having the positive impact through sustainability, inclusivity, our values, and behaviors.
We will win by owning that consumer relationship, making those relevant connections with the future makers, those that shape culture, through exciting new collaborations and amplifying our visibility and impact. Finally, we will win with experience, mainly through supercharging digital and D2C, but also in brick-and-mortar with those elevated store experiences and having our stores connected to our online platforms. Finally, in the true spirit of the brand, we pioneer innovation. We've always done so, we will continue to do so. Whether it's in the digital area for 3D product development or whether it's in the area of sustainability, we will continue to innovate. With that, keep stretching the brand to be the best version of itself. Thank you very much. Then I almost forgot, but now I have to introduce Trish, who's gonna present Calvin Klein. Thank you.
Hello, good morning. I'm Trish Donnelly, the CEO of PVH Americas and Calvin Klein Global. I've been in role a little over a year. Prior to joining PVH, I was Global CEO of Urban Outfitters Group. During my seven years with Urban, we were hyper-focused on creating consumer-centric environment and building a best-in-class digital experience. Prior to that, I was at J.Crew, elevating their e-commerce experience, and I spent over a
decade at Ralph Lauren focused on product and merchandising across categories. My background blends experience in both North America and in global roles, working for brand and product-focused organizations that know how to win with the consumer. I'm thrilled that my career has led me to PVH, and I'm so excited to be here with you today, sharing why we are so optimistic about the future of Calvin Klein.
We'll start with this quote: "My dream when I started was to create a brand that could go on long after I'd finished working, and it's still going." I wanted to start with this quote because it's one that deeply resonates with me. Calvin Klein started this brand over 50 years ago. True to his dream, the brand is stronger today than any other time. In today's environment, as Stefan mentioned, it's become increasingly easy for new entrants to gain notoriety, but it is harder than ever to build a brand with true staying power. Not only did Mr. Klein's dream come true, his brand became one of the most iconic brands of all time. He instilled in this brand a DNA and an aesthetic that is ageless, timeless, and really rooted in modern simplicity.
After 50 years, we continue to work with, inspire, and be inspired by the cultural creators of our time. Notably collaborating with Drake, Justin Bieber, the Kardashians, the Jenners, Kate Moss, Pete Davidson, Kaia Gerber, Millie Bobby Brown, Frank Ocean, and Jennie Kim, just to name a few. It is thanks to this unique ability to remain timelessly rooted in culture that we remain one of the very few truly iconic global brands in the industry today. By sales, the brand is almost 3.5 times larger than when it was acquired in 2003, and this equates to annual global retail sales growth of 6% in the 20 years since we've owned the brand. During this time, we acquired Warnaco to bring in-house our previously licensed underwear and jeans businesses, and we scaled our businesses both in Europe and in Asia.
In 2021, we drove an accelerated recovery, which was fueled by growth in digital and in international markets. Our recovery efforts helped the business to rebound with global revenue numbers back to 2019 levels at $3.7 billion. From a market share perspective, we are now positioned as the number one global men's premium underwear brand, the number seven global premium jeans brand, and the number nine global premium apparel brand. Our brand awareness and our recent purchase scores remain very high globally, outperforming most of our key competitors across regions. While awareness is strongest in the Americas and in Europe, we have made significant improvements in Asia, and in particular China, where we have seen a 10 percentage point improvement in prompted awareness since Q4 of 2019. I will now take you through how we will unlock the full potential of Calvin Klein.
Leading into the strengths of the Calvin Klein brand, we have set an aspirational and achievable goal that by 2025, we will have grown the total revenues to $5.4 billion, increased our brand relevance even further, and be in a position to continue to drive to sustainable, profitable growth. Our three key value drivers will guide everything that we do. Product, consumer engagement, and brand experience. I'll go into detail on those momentarily. To achieve our goals, we are taking a targeted approach for each region. We are building on the strengths in Europe, we are accelerating the growth in Asia Pacific, and we are unlocking the opportunity in the Americas. Here's how this comes to life. With a relentless focus on these three value drivers. Product, consumer engagement, and brand experience.
First and foremost, we will win with product, and we have already started to create the best, most iconic, most desirable essentials for our global style-aware consumers. We're driving pricing power by amplifying these hero product essentials across lifestyle categories, satisfying the consumer's full wardrobe. Next, we will win with consumer engagement by connecting our product concepts to key consumer moments, driving cultural relevance and brand heat, and we'll continue to partner with both aspirational and emerging talent in new and innovative ways. Then finally, we will win with consumer experience by delivering a consistent and seamlessly connected and well-executed experience across all physical and digital touchpoints. At this point, I would like to hand it over to our Executive Vice President, Global Head of Design, Jessica Lomax. Jess joined us in 2020, and Spring 2022 marks the launch of our new product direction under Jess.
Thank you, Trish. Hi, everyone. We just wanted to start with this image as we're starting to talk about product. It's from our Spring 2022 campaign, which just launched very recently. Calvin really believed in finding inspiration in the world around us, and I love this image because I think it shows that featuring Dominic Fike from the popular TV show Euphoria, surrounded by his friends. For us, it always starts with the consumer, and here you can see a subset of our target customers. They're young in attitude, fashion-aware, and they aspire to have really high quality essentials that are designed with purpose. Today, we're really capturing this consumer with our close to body categories like underwear, fragrance, and bras.
Really to connect with this audience even more in our other categories, we're doing a lot of things like focus groups, qualitative research to really understand what they're looking for from brands and from the product that they wear. Our ultimate goal is really to translate our success in underwear across all of our different categories to win with Gen Z and millennials from all different identities and backgrounds. At 21% of our business, underwear is really our entry point into this consumer's closet, opening up a significant growth opportunity for us in other categories, including denim, casual, refined, and athleisure that you can see here, and really in both apparel and accessories.
The reason that this is so exciting and we feel really good about this opportunity is that these demand spaces where we really have the right to play and win, and a clear point of entry with our target customer, represent a huge market opportunity. In the markets where we have already started to do this, like in Europe and Asia, it's been well received, and we've built really strong business. The success of this product strategy really hinges on creating the best essentials. These are those must-have items for our customer, really true to our brand DNA and better than our competitors. We're really, really focused on building hero products across our consumer's entire closet, from things like instantly recognizable graphic T-shirts to the must-have hoodie, sneakers, bags, denim, dresses, jackets, and workout wear.
Really, once we've built those hero products, it's about amplifying them. This is critical to create newness while maintaining the iconic strength of our product. Here you can see our modern cotton. Jennie Kim's wearing it. We just shot her recently for Spring 2022. Really it's about taking these very iconic hero programs and then building on them through things like color and print, halo and hype, inclusivity, sustainability, and innovation. This will really open doors for us across different regions and channels. It will really allow us to play into those key consumer moments that Trish mentioned, create product segmentation while tapping into seasonal trends and colorways. We also understand the importance of driving brand heat in order to keep our most style-aware consumers engaged.
While our hero product and amplified essentials are really our core foundation, we can also create this kind of halo effect with these seasonal capsule collections. These can be brand-driven or in partnership with culturally relevant collaborators. Our new product ventures team is really focused on discovering and partnering with icons and artists that really share our target audience as well as our brand values. Our most recent collaboration that Stefan mentioned, CK1 Palace, just launched on Friday with record sellouts and high consumer engagement across the globe. We know that building a sustainable and inclusive business is critical to our future. Really building on PVH's Forward Fashion platform, we've identified the causes that are closest to our consumer, and we're focused on embedding those into our brand ethos.
In terms of our inclusion efforts, we'll really start with offering expanded ranges of new products each year that really meet our consumer's lifestyle needs and wants, with a particular focus on sizing and gender inclusion. This season, you can expect to see more inclusive underwear size ranges, as well as expanded representative colorways in both our Pride and Naturals collections. Our Calvin Klein Naturals collection really stands for sustainability across material, dye, and process. We also just recently transitioned our Calvin Klein men's underwear boxes in North America to recycled paper, saving close to 650,000 pounds of plastic. We're really excited to keep delivering more innovation and positive impact in this space. With that, I'll pass back to you, Trish. Thank you.
Thanks, Jessica Lomax. In addition to our own and operated businesses, our licensed partners play a vital role in allowing us to bring the full lifestyle of Calvin Klein to our consumers. To our consumer, however, the full world of Calvin Klein is perceived as one brand, and as such, we are working closely with our licensing partners to bring them along on our journey. We recently held a licensing summit where we took our partners through our strategic plan, which was very well received. We're working closely with every one of our partners to make sure they follow us on our consumer-centric, product-focused strategy. At the same time, we're able to leverage their unique category expertise. When this is well executed, it is truly a win-win. Here you'll see pop star Jennie in our current campaign for spring.
Jennie was featured with her friends wearing our Calvin Klein standard logo tee and denim. This campaign, and this moment, in particular, had a really unique and authentic realism because we invited Jennie and our other talent to bring their friends to the shoot, regardless of their gender, their body type, to be part of this special campaign. We understand the recipe for consumer engagement, and it starts with knowing our target consumer. As Jessica mentioned, we engage in dialogue and leverage quantitative research to truly understand our consumers and to understand what our brand and our product means to them, and everything stems from this. This slide illustrates how we tie our product to consumer engagement through monthly concepts. For example, in February, our product focus was denim, and this image shows Vince Staples in our iconic denim hero product.
This imagery not only showed up in our store windows in February to support our front-of-store denim display, but it also led the digital experience, featured prominently on landing pages, in social channels, and also in emails. Another incredibly important ingredient to consumer engagement is culturally relevant collaborations. We collaborate with creators to bring new and unique perspectives to the world of Calvin Klein. These collaborations index high in media, they influence our top-line growth, and they bring energy to our key items and our focus categories. They create buzz and talkability within the industry and across our target consumer base. Let me walk you through how we brought our most recent collaboration with Palace to life. For the week leading up to the launch, we executed on multiple strategic marketing teasers, including short films and social media posts with key talent to create hype and interest.
The image here is a street takeover in Hong Kong featuring the Palace crew and model and influencer, Adwoa Aboah. At the launch this past Sunday, the lines for the Palace store were around the block, emphasizing the global reach and the cultural transcendence of the brand. Here's an example of some of our wild postings with Lourdes Leon, Willem Dafoe, and Dame Joan Collins, and Shawn Powers, a member of the Palace skateboard crew. On the day of launch, the same imagery was featured on our Calvin Klein websites globally. The collaboration, as you heard, was an incredible success. Our disruptive grassroots teaser approach generated high global influencer earned media value, and in the first 24 hours post-launch, we sold through over 70% of our apparel, and 85% of the purchases were either new to our site or reactivated consumers.
In addition, these particular consumers drove a greater value, spending over 60% more on average than our current consumer. The Palace collaboration really highlighted the potential of a strategically executed social media strategy focused on increasing our reach with Gen Z consumers. To that end, we'll focus our attention on social platforms where Gen Z consumers will see us, such as Instagram and TikTok, and we've already begun to redefine our platform strategies, delivering innovative content and channel behaviors. Our impressive following of over 21 million on Instagram outpaces our competitors and enables two-way dialogue with our consumers. You'll see here some of our most successful posts over the past 12 months. Squid Game actress HoYeon took over our Calvin Klein Instagram account, taking photos in #mycalvins, generating a record 6.7 million likes.
Pete Davidson and Machine Gun Kelly also hacked our account over the holiday, generating a reach of over 5.1 million. Our Palace post featuring Willem Dafoe generated in just two days over 225,000 likes and a reach of 1.8 million. We're just getting started. We'll continue to drive relevancy with Gen Z and millennials by tapping into the cultural zeitgeists, creating disruptive and interactive initiatives. Finally, we're gonna talk about how we bring all of this together for the consumer across all of our channels and touch points in one coherent and elevated experience. Leading with digital, we work hard to have our consumer experience the world of Calvin seamlessly at all touch points.
Represented here is the full 360-degree experience that we are bringing to our consumer now, right now in spring 2022. Our campaign imagery in-store and on-site experience and our digital marketing are all purposefully and holistically connected, backed by our key hero products for the season, which the consumer will see and experience on every part of their journey. Here's another example of our 360-degree execution for our collaboration with Heron Preston last fall, featuring billboards, in-store setups, digital assets, all focused on hero products. Whether we're launching a large campaign or supporting an emerging collaboration, we are intensely focused on creating a cohesive, authentic, and iconic experience end to end. From Chile to Tokyo, we bring the world of Calvin Klein to consumers through premium global touchpoints in major key cities.
Here are just a few examples of our owned and operated storefronts and our wholesale partners around the world. To wrap up, through this plan, we will unlock the full potential of Calvin Klein as a global fashion lifestyle brand. I would like to leave you with these three points. Number one, we are focused on our product strategy. We are anchoring in essential hero products that leverage the brand's DNA. We are building out full lifestyle assortments across growing demand spaces. Number two, we are partnering with aspirational and emerging talent that is connected to culture and regionally tailored, and we're innovating our social media strategy to focus on our Gen Z consumers. We have proven our ability to drive consumer engagement through product collaborations.
Lastly, as it relates to the consumer experience, we are driving a cohesive journey across all touch points, digitally led and complemented by our energized physical presence with more modern, engaging in-store experiences across not only our own stores, but with our wholesale partners as well. Thank you so much for your time today. We are so grateful for this opportunity to share with you our excitement for and our confidence in the future of Calvin Klein. With that, I think you get a break now.
Welcome back everybody. Changing hats now, PVH Europe. We're gonna dive into the region now. I start with this statement from Stefan Larsson that Europe is building from a position of market leading strength. I've been diving into that and distilled like five proof points that I think underscore this statement. In the first part of this presentation, I will walk you through each of those five proof points. Consistent profitable growth, high brand awareness and premium positioning, a strong consumer base, leadership in digital, and having that systematic repeatable way to execute with excellence. To start with the consistent profitable growth. Here you can see some numbers of the last five years where we grew revenues with an 11% CAGR, and both brands significantly contributed to that.
Tommy, we were benchmarking on that lifestyle product offer, that portfolio, and the strength that sits within that. In Calvin, the story is slightly different in the sense that following the Warnaco acquisition in 2013, we had to significantly reposition the brand in Europe. We cleaned up distribution, cleaned up the store portfolio, and repositioned Calvin Klein Jeans. Since then, the growth story for Calvin in Europe has been phenomenal. Underlying all of these is an operating platform in Europe that is supporting both brands. It's fueling the growth, it's helping them leverage on investments around digital or around the infrastructure. The platform itself, that leveraged shared platform is very important for the success of our brands in Europe. I think this page is perhaps the cornerstone of the success.
This speaks to the high brand awareness and the premium positioning. Awareness of above 80% for both of our brands. Strong market share positionings in the key product categories. Over 80% of all our distribution is full price distribution. So what we call full price is everything except our outlet stores and except some clearance of excess stock. So the foundation is really that premium full price distribution. Then our consumer base. It's strong, it's growing. We talk about 180 million unique visitors to our stores and our digital platforms in Europe. Significant growth we've seen in terms of visitors on our digital platforms and still growing today with millions more new customers entering the platform last year. That wide reach of consumers.
Both brands have those two distinct labels, and they speak to this wide range of young consumers. The product we bring to the market really resonates with the consumer. That's an extremely solid foundation for the success in Europe. Digital pre-pandemic, our digital penetration was about 20% in 2019. The infrastructure was there. We had made the investments, we've made the connections between our stores and our own platform, between the stores and partner platforms. When the pandemic hit and we were facing all these lockdowns, we were able to accelerate our digital infrastructure and to really leverage that to where it is today at 35% of our total business. Later on, you will see it doesn't stop there.
We still see this within Europe as our largest growth channel, and we expect that by the time we hit 2025, our digital penetration might be close to 50% of our total business. Now, looking at our business from a slightly different way, 35% of our business is direct-to-consumer business, and 65% is wholesale. D2C, extremely important as we own the consumer journey, we own the first-party data. Within D2C, digital plays a crucial role. Our own platform plays an extremely important role there in the growth and the connectivity between the offline and the online worlds. The wholesale business is very important for us. We have long-standing relationships with all key premium department stores across Europe and with all major pure player platforms. That relationship is very important.
The reach that those wholesale partners have and the point of distribution they have to raise our brand awareness and to showcase the best of our brands is critical. Within that wholesale space, obviously, the digital sales through pure players or third-party dot-com is the largest growth driver as well. Then when it comes to that systemic, repeatable way of operating, the backbone is that positioning. That premium distribution, that high awareness, that connection with that large, diversified consumer base. Equally important is how we are organized internally. Our organization is built around brand management, is built around the consumer, is built around product development. Everything we do every day, the first thing we want to secure is that premium positioning. We think about the brand first.
From a product development point of view, the organization and the processes are in such a way that we work extremely closely between the commercial side of the business and the product development side of the business, that we leverage all the insights we can get from all the channels. Through that, we always find that sweet spot of that unique product market combination to drive sales in each of the European countries that we operate in. Also part of that internal structure is that operating platform. Digitalization has been so important for us. Digitalization when it comes to digital product development. Yeah. For speed and efficiency, but also digitalization when it comes to digital selling tools to service all those wholesale accounts.
We have over 6,000 wholesale accounts in Europe that we service, and we have developed digital selling platforms through which we can sell remotely to all 6,000 accounts. We've had seasons during the pandemic where 90% of our seasonal orders were done remotely through those digital platforms. Digital is, of course, also about data. Data, consumer insights, data analytics. It's so crucial in today's business that you understand the consumer, that you have all the data point needed to make informed decisions and to be able to, and to have the data also fast so that you can pivot and respond fast. With that current position of market-leading strength, we're very confident about the next growth chapter for Europe. Towards 2025, we see our net sales growing with $1.3 billion, which represents a high single-digit growth rate.
Our strategies for Europe for the coming years are centered around product engagement and the digitally led marketplace. In the next slides, I will zoom in on each of those. I start from a product and brand perspective, starting with the Tommy Hilfiger brand. You've just heard it in the global presentation that distinction between the two labels is very important. I just want to reiterate why it is so important. Because they speak to a different consumer, and it's a different collection offer. What we should avoid is that there's cannibalization between those two labels. Okay? What we should ensure is that our product development teams have very clearly in mind, like for which consumer am I developing this product? Each label has their own design teams.
If we execute that well, in the coming years, we can grow each of those labels in parallel with mid-single-digit growth numbers. Now, this is one of my favorite topics. It's about segmentation. I always say we need segmentation for growth. On this slide, you see a pyramid and think about that pyramid as the total premium sector in which we operate in Europe. I've used the example that Avery just showed from that Alaska Puffer jacket, that iconic style. Avery spoke about how from a product perspective, we are tiering the offer. We come from a core offer all the way up to a very pinnacle and fashion-forward offer, which is a more premium style, a more elevated style, more expensive materials, trims, et cetera, better local execution.
There is tiering happening from a product side. Now, if we step towards the commercial side of the business, our distribution in that premium segment is not all the same. We have good distribution points, we have better distribution points, and we have best pinnacle distribution points. We want to play in all of these, and we want to grow in all of these. The segmentation from a product side and the segmentation from a distribution side, and to marry those two is extremely important because if we do that really well, we can grow in each of those segments, in each of those tiers.
Being present in those higher tiers, the tier one and tier zero, you might say that's a small part of your business, which it is, but it's very important to drive the halo for the brand, the halo that drives volumes and sales in those lower tiers, points of distribution. The other beauty about segmentation is that you can play with exclusivity. Certain styles you only show in a certain tier, and with that increase the desirability of the brand. Yeah, when it comes to consumer engagement, it's interesting what's happening. There's this ongoing blending merger of the physical and the digital worlds. We need to engage with the consumers where they are, which means in all of those segments.
Whether it's in the physical world or it is in the digital world or whether it's in the virtual world, we need to be there with aspirational collaborations, with hero product campaigns. Recently you might have seen it, we started experimenting Web3. We were in Decentraland, and it's testing and learning in the Web3, but you do feel that its opportunity is there. You do feel that the consumer is going there. We don't wanna miss it. We want to understand it. We want to learn. There's a fire alarm. Oh. Can somebody stop my timer? Because I have a lot to tell. Are we good?
Yeah. Okay
One of my other favorite topics, and Avery also touched on it here from a global brand perspective. It's about membership. Membership is not new; we have it, but with that acceleration in the digital channels and through that enormous growth in those digital channels, our consumer base just exploded. It became so much more bigger, so much larger that we now feel it's now the time to double down on membership. The value proposition is very easy when it comes to higher repeat purchases, higher first transactions value, longer relationships with the brand. The value proposition is super clear, and also for the end consumer, the value proposition is clear because we offer exclusive product, early access, hyper-personalized targeting, and so on.
That's super clear, so we double down on it. It's not just from a commercial point of view that membership is important. Membership is also important because it generates a wealth of consumer insights, and those insights we can leverage across our business. We can leverage it to increase our marketing efforts, we can leverage to improve our product development, and with that, also support other parts of our business, right? The pure-player business, the wholesale business. This membership is not just a D2C game.
Yeah, a picture says more than a thousand words, so for Tommy, just some images on how we show up in a premium way across the digital channels, our own channels and the pure-player channels, and also in brick-and-mortar through our full price stores and with our key department store partners. For Calvin, it's simple. It's all about expansion. There's so many white spots or white spaces, I always use the wrong word here. We can expand the lifestyle offer of the Calvin business in Europe. There's this extremely strong foundation in underwear, and we've successfully repositioned jeans, and it's growing really strong. The next chapter of growth here is the sportswear business, the footwear business, and the accessories business. With introducing those, we complement that lifestyle offer.
We're now at the point that we also start to invest in distribution with our partners in shop-in-shop environments, but also in our own stores to showcase that lifestyle offer. We don't have it yet today. We have underwear stores, we have jeans stores, but we don't have lifestyle stores, and similar in the wholesale business. This is an enormous opportunity, and we so much believe in this because the Tommy brand is extremely successful in sportswear, is extremely successful in lifestyle. We know how to do it, and we have the relationships to do it. Expansion for Calvin true lifestyle is a key growth driver. That expansion will be supported by driving brand heat.
We, of course, have the phenomenal support from the Calvin Klein global team, where you've seen some examples of the powerful brand campaigns, and we take those, and we apply those in Europe. On top of that, we also adapt it to our regional needs. We do create specific content, for example, for a partnership with Zalando, and we might even make specific product for that. We have customized digital assets for our pure players and for our own site. In our store environment, we do super nice activations like wrapping here the Paris store with global brand campaign images. It's the combination of taking those global assets and adapting them and adding to it specific needs to drive that expansion in Europe.
Also for Calvin, we have that premium positioning, so in digital and also in the brick-and-mortar environment through stores and partner stores. That's from a brand and product side. Now let's look at the growth from a channel perspective. The biggest growth is definitely in our D2C channels and the digital channels. I've officially earmarked in Europe D2C as our number one priority channel. Why did I do that? Because we have there such a unique combination of assets that we should leverage. Because we are the brand owners, we own full price stores, we own a premium digital platform, and we own the consumer journey and the consumer data. Now, that's a hard to replicate set of assets. Not everybody has that. Not all our competitors have that. I want to bank on that and leverage that unique strength.
It's of course also the place where we can showcase our brand in the most aspirational way. It's also the place where we build the strongest connections with our end consumers. In that context, that membership program that I was just alluding to is critical to further accelerate in our D2C world. Digital. First and foremost, we have our own dot-com channels, and we see opportunity to gain further market share to grow from that 35% penetration to 50% penetration by 2025. It doesn't go naturally. We need to make a lot of investments in the platform, in digital assets, in the backbone, in terms of logistics operations. There's a lot of investments happening to drive that market share growth. The good news is that the return on investment is there.
It's super clear. It's very profitable. To make these investments is, for us, an easy decision to do, and through that, we will further gain and drive market share. On the partner side, it's a bit more a strategic play. We grow very fast with the pure players, but we want to make sure that we grow in a brand right way, that we protect our premium brand positioning on their platforms, that we protect our pricing power. We have to be strategic about the types of partnership models that we engage on, and we have to be very strategic here also on segmentation. What do we offer on which digital platform? How much volume do we want to have on each of those platforms?
Looking at those growth drivers, D2C and digital, here you see how they relatively grow compared to each other, with the digital channels growing the fastest, followed by our D2C channels, and then the wholesale channel also shows consistent growth. The mix will obviously shift because of these different growth rates over time. Translating all of that into numbers. I've mentioned we plan to grow with $1.3 billion by 2025, that high single-digit growth CAGR. Looking at the absolute growth, both brands contribute roughly equally. Calvin has that higher growth rate because of that enormous expansion opportunity. The shift, we will shift a bit in terms of share between Tommy and Calvin from today, 65/35 to maybe 60/40 by 2025.
From a channel perspective, I've mentioned it, D2C and digital, they will drive the growth both in relative and absolute terms. In summary, PVH Europe, it's about perform and grow. We're super focused on continuing to deliver that profitable, sustainable growth. We come from a very strong base, so we are confident that we can execute on this strategy, and by doing so, that we can achieve these ambitious growth targets, leveraging and building on our strong, proven consumer-centric operating model. Thank you very much. Next is Tom to talk about Asia Pacific.
Good morning. My name is Tom. I'm the President for PVH Asia Pacific. I'm very excited because this is my long flight, international flight since the post-pandemic first started, so I'm very giddy here. Please forgive me. I took on this role 2 years ago, and prior to that, I was the head of our Japan market for about 6 years. Before joining PVH, I was also the head of Hugo Boss Asia and GODIVA Chocolate Asia. Before that, I was also with Nike and also with Prada. My whole experience has really been in the fashion industry. Today, I'll walk you through how we plan to unlock our full potential in this exciting region. Today, PVH Asia represents 16% of total PVH revenue and represents long-term growth potential for PVH.
Within this dynamic region, we operate in a very strong and profitable business. We're present in 15 markets. Our top three directly operating markets, China, Australia, and Japan, represent 75% of PVH Asia's revenue. We have built a strong, healthy, and balanced full price and outlet business. Our store network is sizable and profitable, and we have a rapidly growing digital business. Despite some of the lingering headwinds, such as the COVID lockdowns, border closure, and supply chain disruptions, especially in China, we are seeing clear proof points in product, consumer engagement, marketplace for our strategic priorities. Over the last decade, PVH Asia has grown through both strategic acquisitions and organic growth. Since 2017, we have grown at 8% CAGR for top-line revenue, and we see growth opportunities accelerating even further as we go forward.
Throughout the region, we have been able to accelerate e-com growth, provide a better product assortment, increase brand equities, and are in better place than ever before. Our powerful brands, Tommy and Calvin, have a clear premium brand and product positioning in the region, with opportunity to grow further in all markets. Both brands are sizable and growing robustly in the region. One of the largest opportunity is to further increase overall brand awareness, especially in China, where both Calvin and Tommy are under-penetrated relative to their potential. At the same time, our Australia and New Zealand market already enjoys some of the highest level of brand awareness globally for both brands. In order to unlock further the potential of both brands, we continue to tap into millennial and Gen Z opportunities by strengthening our connection with our targeted consumers.
Our digital strategy is to unlocking our next phase of our growth in the region, and we focus on building even stronger partnerships with the key existing digital partners such as Tmall, JD.com, and new digital partners. For example, we are increasing our partnership with Tmall Innovation Center for the upcoming June 18 consumer moment and will continue to expand. As Avery mentioned earlier, our previous partnership that led to the Tommy Polo style becoming number one in the Tmall Polo categories. We continue to innovate by accelerating new platform for digital commerce, including social commerce. We see growth with recent commercial and brand launches for both brands on Douyin, which is the version of TikTok in China, and we'll continue to scale up this platform.
Our initial results have exceeded our expectations as we engage with the younger consumers, and we see opportunity to drive further sales through the key consumer moments. We continue to pursue other digital opportunities, such as digital gamification, personalizations, and unified clientelling. We see continued success in consumer engagement and sales transaction coming from varieties of live streaming formats, including from our own stores. While China is a main focus of our execution, we're just scratching the surface, and we see other opportunities in all markets in the region to drive digital engagement and partnerships. We see opportunity to grow PVH sales in Asia by over $1 billion through 2025. Our key objective is to grow a deeper brand relevance across Asia, especially in mainland China, while still driving growth in other high-growth markets such as Southeast Asia, Australia, New Zealand, and opportunity with Calvin in Japan.
We're driving growth from a position of strength. In product, we have built up strong hero product program within Calvin and are starting to establish Tommy hero program that resonates locally. These key must-have styles already represent 10% of our sales, and we are increasing in share. We have engaged consumers with successful celebrity campaigns with Asian celebrities, including exciting retail activations, unique Asian product capsules. There has been significant investment in digital marketplaces such as Tmall and new brand website launches in Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia. To position the region with success in mind, we continue to ensure underlying digital platforms and systems support the business, embedded with sustainability, inclusivity, and speed across the region. For Calvin, we're aiming to provide a modern, youthful, and culturally relevant brand experience.
In terms of product, we have created Asia-specific capsules such as the Lunar New Year of the Tiger collection. We are further increasing our sourcing product in Asia for the Asia markets. In the past year, we have had many successful regional ambassador partnerships that resonated very strongly in Asia. We plan to continue to leverage these key talents to drive further relevancy, engagement with our targeted consumers. For example, we saw incredible results from our partnership with global celebrity Jennie from the BLACKPINK. This partnership drove huge social media engagement, further increased our brand awareness and relevancy, and double-digit sales growth in key product category in our CK underwear. We continue to engage the Calvin consumer through social and digital platform innovation, such as WeChat gaming, live streaming, content and unique retail moments, such as the successful House of Denim interactive activation in Shanghai.
Overall for Calvin, we have built a strong premium world of Calvin in our region across our channels. As mentioned earlier, we'll continue to enhance, elevate, and digitalize all of our channels from designing concept innovations and exciting pop-up in our full price channels, to rolling out our global platforms and improving content online to better product offering across the board. Now moving on to Tommy. For Tommy, we connect with our consumers through both the Tommy Hilfiger and Tommy Jeans label, and drive brand heat through differentiated Asia-limited capsules that reflect each label's personalities. For example, you can see here the Year of the Tiger product capsule for Lunar New Year, which is a key holiday and sales period in China and other part of Asia. This product resonated strongly with our local consumers, driven by online and offline engagement with social commerce sales via WeChat and gifting moments.
We had strong local relevant global product collaboration, such as what Avi mentioned earlier, the Tommy Jeans x AAPE, which also resonated very strongly with our local consumers, generating near sellout in such a short period of time. As we look forward, we're establishing Asia hero product programs unique to each label, elevated and better communicated with our brand DNA to our consumers. Our hero product and capsule will be animated by locally relevant regional talents and celebrities. Like Calvin, we take a digital-first approach to Tommy consumer engagement, focused on interacting with our target consumer where they most enjoy spending their time and attention. We're focused on social engagement on all digital key and social accounts, relevant brick-and-mortar store activations, CRMs, and loyalty programs.
As an example, one of our most successful digital consumer activation was our Double Eleven on Tmall live streaming in China, which we supplemented with both executive live stream with our PVH China President, as well as over 90 minutes of in-store live streaming. At the same time, we're also activating this moment in our physical stores. You can see here our iconic Tommy flagship store in Tokyo's Omotesando. With a strong brick-and-mortar store presence, we'll also continue to capture consumer traffic, engaging new consumer, and offer a best-in-class retail experience. In totality, for the world of Tommy, we have established a strong footprint across multiple consumer touchpoints. Offline, we plan to focus on high consumer energy zones with better store concept and products, and online, leveraging our global platforms, ensuring data-driven decision-making, and focusing on social.
As a region, for both Tommy and Calvin, we'll leverage our distribution scale to elevate our brand desire by creating a compelling and coherent consumer journey across our touchpoints with enhanced executions. With our focus on consumer, we continue to enhance an exceptional, consistent, and seamless experience for our consumer, no matter where they shop. Our CRM and loyalty members today already drove over one-third of our business in the region, and we see further opportunity to increase more in this going forward. We remain adaptive to the rapid changes in consumer behaviors and continue to be present where our targeted consumers shop, which remains very localized. Our initiatives range from enhancing, refreshing our existing channels, implementing new omni-channel services, to accelerating new platforms relevant to each of our markets.
With a strong focus on digital growth and engagement in all markets in Asia, we'll continue to extend key digital partnerships and further increase our digital share of sales growing at over 25% CAGR through 2025. DTC will continue to be over 70% of our overall business mix, allowing us to control product assortment, pricing, inventory, and presentation, and continue to elevate our brands. We continue to invest in our e-commerce presence, both on our branded.com and through third-party sites in terms of digital marketing systems and people. At the same time, we believe our stores remain a foundation asset for the growth as they continue to grow and strengthen our holistic direct-to-consumer positions.
Overall, we plan to further unlock this opportunity by expanding and enhancing our e-com network, ensuring exciting best-in-class product content on all of our digital touchpoints, accelerating digital innovations, adapting a digital-first approach, and enhancing data and analytic capability to drive decision-making. By FY 2025, we plan to grow the Asia business by over $1 billion to achieve $2.5 billion net sales, with growth driven in almost equal parts by Calvin and Tommy, and 80% of the growth coming from direct-to-consumer. This sales increase represent a 15% CAGR, a further acceleration from our 8% CAGR over the last 5 years. Mainland China is expected to be the majority growth of FY 2021 to FY 2025. However, there is a significant growth potential with Japan, Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand market.
Direct-to-consumer channel will drive most of the growth, where brick-and-mortar stores will remain a strong foundation for our e-com accelerations. We plan over 21% digital penetration in FY 2025, with potential for the upside opportunities. To capture market share, we are focused in creating hero product that our consumer in Asia want to buy. We are connecting our consumer and engaging them with localized marketing and communications. Most importantly, we continue to win in a digital marketplace by meeting our consumer where they wanna buy, especially online through our branded stores. Finally, as we unlock this growth through enhanced platform, systems, and people, I want your takeaway today is we see huge, huge growth opportunities across our region in Asia. Thank you for your time.
Hello again. Hello, and welcome to our PVH Americas presentation. In this session, I will take you through how we are unlocking PVH Americas to drive long-term sustainable growth. It's important to recognize first that we have leverageable brand strengths that are very difficult to create, that are unique to only us and a few of our very key competitors. We have two of the most iconic, recognized, and beloved brands in North America, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. Both born in America, these brands have remained relevant with the American consumer for decades. Because of this, we have significant strength with our large consumer base, and we have earned the right to play and win across big and growing categories. We are close to body and underwear and fragrance.
We are renowned for our work in apparel, and our consumer further enjoys our brands in footwear and handbags, eyewear, watches, among other categories. You can see the strength in our awareness scores, where 8 out of 10 men and 9 out of 10 women in the United States recognize our brand name. Beyond this, over 50% of the population considers purchasing our brands when on their shopping journey, and this number is closer to 60% for men. Of our competitive set, only Levi's tops us for consideration with men. While we remain highly relevant with today's consumer, we recognize that we have underlying business challenges that we are addressing. First and foremost, we have not put enough focus on winning with our domestic consumer. Because of this, we have been over-reliant on tourism and our international consumer.
Prior to the pandemic, international consumers made up 30%-40% of our total business. Because of these two challenges, when the pandemic grounded flights and forced would-be international tourists into lockdown, we lost a significant portion of our sales base, and we lacked the strength we needed to recover with the domestic consumer quickly. Finally, we have underinvested in growth channels where the domestic consumer shops, like e-commerce and owned and operated stores, and we have driven too high of a penetration in the wholesale value channel, which made up 1/3 of our retail sales in 2019. We know this is not where we should be.
To address these challenges, we will intensify our focus on the domestic consumer, we will be ready to welcome back our international consumer, and most importantly, we will rebalance our distribution footprint in North America to drive higher quality sales and long-term sustainable growth. I'm going to take you through how we will make this happen, but first, I wanna spend some time on what we mean when we say rebalance our distribution footprint to drive higher quality sales. It is all about focusing on where our consumer wants to shop our brands, and for us, it starts with digital and direct-to-consumer, where we are in control of the whole experience. Today, we are underinvested in owned and operated e-commerce. To just put this in perspective, in 2019, our owned and operated e-commerce made up only 3% of our total revenue.
We know that digital is where our target consumer is increasing their shopping the most, so we are leading the rebalance of our distribution strategy with this channel and significantly looking to grow the penetration. From a retail perspective today, we have no full price owned and operated stores in North America. We know, though, that to successfully drive brand relevance and brand heat, we need to have an exciting and innovative full price experience that we can control for our customers to experience physically. The way we lean into this channel is through a test and learn approach with the goal to have a few brand-building locations by 2025, all within key power cities that are important to our consumer. Where we do have a large, strong presence today is in our factory stores.
We operate and fully control approximately 200 stores for brand, where our consumers can physically experience our brands. We see a huge opportunity here because historically, we have underinvested in the store experience. We have set in motion a plan in place to enhance and optimize our full factory fleet through investments in updated technology and in new fixtures and in enhanced product storytelling. We will enrich our shopping experience and significantly improve productivity and the quality of sales. From a wholesale perspective, we are strengthening our relationships with our key partners to improve the overall quality of our sales with a digital-first mindset. Today, a little over a third of our full price wholesale business comes from our partners' dot-com businesses.
Through elevated product, exclusives, and improved product placement, we will work with our partners to jointly move this towards 50% as the consumer shifts further and further online. Moving on, full price brick-and-mortar wholesale is one of our largest distribution strengths today, and our key partners create increased physical reach for our brands, providing our consumers with the opportunity to see, feel, and touch our products as part of their omni-channel consumer journey. While we don't see brick-and-mortar as a major growth vehicle, we wanna continue to enhance and optimize this channel through reduced promotionality, improved execution, driving increased pricing power, and greatly increased profitability by 2025. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we know today that we drive too large a share of our business through the wholesale value channel.
This impacts our pricing power across the market, and without sufficient product segmentation, it creates cannibalization, and it creates lower quality sales. In order to be successful, we must greatly decrease our share of business within this value channel to one that is sustainable. We will continue to capture quality sales from our value-oriented style-aware consumers, while also creating room to grow our focus channels, which are owned and operated in third-party e-commerce, as well as our owned and operated stores. Through this plan, we will shift towards significantly higher quality sales by 2025. First and foremost, ck.com and tommy.com are becoming the pinnacle brand experience, and it all starts with product. We will lead on our owned and operated dot com with exclusive products, with capsules and collaborations. As an example, you heard about our Palace collaboration.
This product was only available on ck.com and on palaceskateboards.com. On the day of launch, it drove a 200% increase in demand sales over last year. On the back end, we are actively investing in consumer capabilities that will create the versatility and the flexibility our consumers are looking for, including ship from store, vendor drop ship, and more. Finally, we are updating the digital experience with elevated imagery, assets, fit guides, and a mobile app that will make the shopping experience for the consumer easier and more personalized. In 2021, we saw triple-digit growth for Calvin and Tommy over pre-pandemic numbers, with more profitable sales driven by higher full price selling. This, coupled with significantly higher conversion, led us to improve our gross margin by several hundred basis points for both brands.
Third-party e-commerce, in addition to our owned and operated business, digital wholesale will play a major role in our success, and this includes both pure players and the dot com portions of our key omni-channel wholesale partners. We recognize the need to think about this business differently, and so our focus areas are truly targeted at growing digital sales, and these include having the right assortment at each account so that we can build equity in hero products, drive brand heat through exclusives, collaborations, and capsules. Maximizing our content in a consumer-centric way where the consumer doesn't have the benefit of touching or seeing the product in person, and then making very purposeful choices in the imagery that we select for our ad placement, ensuring that it captures our focus categories and represents an elevated depiction of the brands.
We will be optimizing our marketing mix and digital spend to make each dollar go further, and we are changing our ways of working to embed an agile test, learn, and scale approach in our digital organization. We have significantly increased our digital penetration of full price wholesale since 2019. We're actively partnering with Amazon to rapidly deploy a series of tests on their site to improve sales and margin growth. So far, these tests have proven to be very successful, with small tweaks like product descriptions and product bundling driving greater than 20% lifts in the test groups. We are now at the point of scaling some of these successes, and we anticipate doubling our apparel sales on Amazon over 2021.
If we move into retail, our strategy is anchored in improving our factory store execution in order to drive higher quality, significantly more profitable sales. We are tackling this from multiple angles. As I stated previously, we're enhancing our in-store experience, we're updating our visual merchandising to create compelling marketing stories, and we're investing in new fixtures and imagery and technology to improve the consumer shopping experience. It is thanks to these changes that we drove positive comparable traffic comps with domestic consumers for Calvin Klein in 2021 compared to 2019.
Our AUR for both brands achieved nearly double-digit growth in 2021 compared to 2019, driven by our strong hero product focus. In addition, we are building out an innovative, thoughtful, full price experience for both brands that is focused on top product with a drop-based assortment strategy that drives brand heat and newness for our most style-engaged consumers. Beyond just digital, we are changing the way that we approach all of our wholesale partnerships, and we will work jointly together with them to build pricing power and to strengthen the profitability of our business through proactive data-backed planning based on hero product and segmentation guidelines, improved execution and compelling visual merchandising, exclusive channel right capsules and collaborations, reduced promotional cadence and depth, and increased breadth of categories in our top-of-funnel marketing.
Through these wholesale partnerships, we have been able to increase our AURs by double digits across all of our wholesale businesses since 2019. To support the rebalance of our distribution and drive higher quality sales, we will better leverage the strength of our brands by building product strength, driving consumer engagement, and taking a segmented approach to each channel. Let me take you through what this means in more detail. First and foremost, we will build on product strength. Our product strategy is anchored on developing hero products, top products in the market that our brands are known for. We have leveraged consumer research and market research to improve on fits, on fabrics and silhouettes, and our updated hero products are just hitting the market now.
We have institutionalized stronger discipline in our creative development process, increasing our forecasting accuracy and reducing the total choices we present to the consumer. This allows us to focus the consumer on the hero products and the key looks and the top essentials that we most believe in, cutting through the noise. Since 2019, we've cut our total SKU count by over 30%, reducing total markdowns and improving gross margins. Combining these two efforts will allow us to shorten our lead times and increase our share of business that we have on never out of stock, which opens up capacity and space for increased read and react capabilities. I now want to walk you through how we're already bringing this to life for Calvin Klein. As you heard earlier, spring 2022 marks the first season of our new brand direction.
Our first global chapter launch, Reimagined Heritage, which you can see here, is performing across channels in both underwear and in apparel, and our relaunched hero product tees are driving significant AUR improvement, with the standard logo tee surpassing our total tee AUR by 34% and the archive logo t-logo tee by 40%. Despite our strength in intimates, we continue to improve and enhance our hero products in this category as well, and our relaunched hero product bras were up 70% to 2019 in March, while our men's underwear hero products were up 75% versus 2019. We are really excited for the launch of our Naturals collection in stores and online, which will take these hero products across tees and intimates and dimensionalize them across a range of skin tones made with sustainable dyes and sustainable materials.
We've taken the same approach in Tommy Hilfiger, focusing on enhancing our hero products in key categories across genders and leveraging the strength of global product performance to inform our investment. We're so energized by the response that we've seen. For both men's and women's, new spring 2022 hero products have risen to the number one spot in terms of product sales, all a result of taking prior season's global bestsellers and assorting these styles in our North America factory stores this season. In women's, our new French Terry Hilfiger hoodie came in on top and is driving 29% of our total fleece business.
In men's, our regular fit polo was our number 1 product in March, despite only being on the floor in all doors for 3 weeks, sold at an AUR that was 60% higher than our average polo AUR in 2019, and it led the overall polo category to a 51% increase in AUR over 2019 for the month of March. Overall, our global products drove 52% of our total March business on only 38% of the inventory, but by fall, these products will be 90% of our investment. To win in the market, we must connect these hero products to the consumer through product-based assets, images, and messaging, and we must do it during the most important key consumer periods.
To cut through and to make this resonate, we'll partner with culturally relevant talent and collaborators and create domestic consumer loyalty programs focused on personalized access and shopping experiences. Let me give you some examples of how we're leveraging the emotional strength of our brands to connect the product to our consumers. Our most recent Palace teaser campaign drove engagement in the hundreds of thousands every day leading up to the launch. This engagement ultimately led to our 3 times performance in sales versus last year in the first 24 hours. This was not our first collaboration. Our first drop with Heron Preston proved that when we connect product to key consumer moments and culturally relevant talent, our brand cannot be stopped. Our top three apparel products sold at an AUR over $180, and our average order value was 3 times benchmarks.
On the Tommy side, 90% of our Tommy x AAPE collection sold out in 36 hours, and our collaboration with Timberland, our most successful Tommy Hilfiger collaboration in North America, proved the power of two iconic brands joining forces. To reinforce our efforts to rebalance our distribution, we must take a segmented approach to our product assortments. Our hero product-based assortment will allow us to maintain the integrity of our brand across channels, and the dimensionalization of these products through seasonal prints, colorways, and innovations, as well as our collaborations and capsules, will allow us to differentiate across channels, giving our consumers a reason to shop our better and best essentials in our full price focus channels. We will minimize overlap across full price and value channels to protect and to drive healthier sales while still allowing our more value-oriented consumers to participate in the brand in a sustainable way.
No part of this strategy will work in a silo, so we are leveraging the strength of our brand and bringing together our initiatives across consumer, product engagement, and our rebalanced distribution to win in the digitally led marketplace. By 2025, in owned and operated digital, we will drive towards 4 times our 2019 revenue and 2.5 times our 2021 revenue. We will open a few strategic full price stores, test and learn into the best, most innovative formats in power cities. We will have increased the productivity and the AUR of our factory stores significantly versus 2021. Third-party digital will represent at least 40% of our full price wholesale revenue, increasing our total third-party digital versus 2019 by 2.5 times.
Finally, we will increase our penetration of full-price wholesale while cutting the penetration of the wholesale value channel by approximately 40%. This rebalancing will take place over several years as we work in parallel to grow our wholesale and our owned and operated businesses. We are committed to supercharging our digital and DTC growth while sustainably growing our wholesale brick and mortar, significantly shifting our penetration from value to full price. By 2025, we will deliver $1.1 billion worth of higher quality, digitally driven growth, significantly improving our operating margins and recovering beyond our comparable 2019 sales. In conclusion, we are leveraging an industry-proven approach, focusing on a domestic consumer, building product strength, driving consumer engagement, and rebalancing distribution to win in the digitally led marketplace. We are unlocking the full potential of PVH Americas. Thank you.
I will now turn it over to Zac Coughlin.
All right. Thank you, Trish. Quite a high standard is set by the team. I was commenting in the back earlier, it's great not to follow Avery and Jess. It'd been a tough bar to set. Just to start by saying how excited I am to be here with everybody today in my second week with the company. I think in general, while being newer here, I think my experience, just a little bit about me over the last few years, has probably been useful in getting onboarded here.
You know, I started a few years ago working with Nike and Converse, you know, being a part of the sort of product-led rebasing of the marketplace with Converse, and then most recently with LVMH, working for DFS, being around some of the most amazing brands in the world, and really honing, you know, my retail experience in that regard, which is so important as we saw from the DTC. I think in some ways, starting new, but I think in a number of ways, having had the last few years of time really getting ready for this moment in time. I think I'm really excited to be here, grateful to Stefan for asking me to join the leadership team and be a part of this next phase of the growth journey.
Now enough about me, probably the least interesting thing for today, and then to the most interesting, the financial model. Here's what we're gonna see today. First off, Stefan mentioned earlier, we're coming off of a great 2021. Record-setting financial results and really moving forward, you know, with growth. I think the three major parts of the plan. One, this is a growth plan. Sustained growth over time, but starting from the top line. Secondly, we are going to unlock the income statement with gross margin expansion and SG&A leverage. Finally, driving strong profitability, strong cash flow, and ultimately great returns for the shareholders. That's what we're gonna talk about here today.
Now, before we get into the specifics, I wanted to start first here with the commitment that this leadership team is gonna make to the investment community around how we're gonna engage and communicate. First off, simplicity. Second, transparency. Third, long-term focus. Simple KPI, financial KPI, delivered consistently and repeatedly to all of you. Also, while not walking away from our short-term commitments financially, extending our view, planning over a longer horizon, and making sure we're making those investments that drive long-term and sustainable growth over time versus a shorter term focus from there. That's our commitment to all of you. Now getting to the specifics, and you saw some of this from Stephan earlier. Starting first and foremost, this is a growth strategy. High single digit growth, strong and sustainable.
Secondly, not just growth for growth's sake, but growth also driving profit improvement and improving operating margins. Third, returning value to the shareholders through EPS growth greater than EBIT growth. Lastly, you know, in some ways, most importantly, fueling all of this plan, strong free cash flow that allow us to both invest in opportunities and return value. We take a look at what that means from actually the commitments perspective. Again, you saw these also earlier from Stefan. $12.5 billion in revenue by 2025. That's a 37% increase versus 2021 we just finished. 15% operating margin, so strong profitability. Free cash flow greater than $1 billion in 2025. Again, our firm commitments, and I gotta go back to those ideas of simple, transparent, and long-term.
Now let's talk a little bit more about the composition of that. Again, being a growth plan, starting from the top line here, and you saw this in each of the individual plans. I wanna talk a little bit further about the global picture, what this looks like. I think starting out from a brand perspective, good strong growth across both of our brands. Good balanced growth from there. From a regional perspective, we see strong growth in Europe off of a very high base, successful marketplace we've built.
Tom talked about mid-teens growth in Asia and underpinning that, again, as Tom mentioned, growth across the region, but a really powerful focus on China and specifically China e-com, where the growth rate over time we expect to approach 40%, and the business will be over five times larger by 2025 than it was in 2019. Making our big bets in the safest growth market segments anywhere in the world. In North America, as Trish mentioned, strong growth and more importantly, in some ways, good growth, moving towards that full price selling price points across all of our segments. Again, good balanced growth globally as well. Finally, from a channel perspective, DTC driving the growth.
We talked about putting the consumer at the center of our focus and really making sure that we focus on those channels that allow us to sort of address them directly, most directly from there at that point in time. Strong growth, low double digits%, in DTC and wholesale growth as well. I'll talk about that more in a moment. Again, I think overall, good balanced growth. We've got our priorities, of course, but overall, not reliant on any one single point, taking advantage of that idea of really having a portfolio both in brands as well as markets around the world. Now going just a little bit deeper in terms of looking at the channel mix.
We talked about digital being the focus, and you see that in the growth rates, and we see that across the world there, outsized growth across all the regions. When you take a look at the split between DTC and wholesale, DTC growing around two times higher than wholesale across the markets also. Now, to address wholesale will remain, you know, an important and vibrant market for us. Absolutely. I think what we're talking about now is really focusing more and more on our best partners and on their digital platforms as well, and really moving towards this idea of full price as the approach we wanna take from there. Again, good balanced growth. Now we should talk a little bit about margin. We're gonna talk the next couple of slides to lay out the rest of the income statement structure.
We'll talk about gross margin. We're gonna talk about SG&A, and then ultimately how that comes together in terms of EBIT. Starting with gross margin, and just to ground everybody, in 2021, we ended the year strong, 58.2% margin. We do expect the PVH plan, though, to drive margin improvement, landing somewhere, a little bit greater than 60%. The biggest driver by far, and you can see that on the top of the page here, is channel mix. We've talked about earlier driving DTC towards almost half of the business by 2025 and the powerful margin improvement we get from there. Below that then, and that's worth probably about two-thirds of that margin increase.
Below that, regional mix, you know, Tom's Asia markets growing at a faster rate, and they are relatively our highest margin markets in the world. Underneath there, from there, I think we talked about, you know, great brands, great product, a sharpened marketplace perspective. We do expect that to drive pricing power. A smarter, more agile supply chain allowing us to get closer to the customer faster, allowing us to drive savings there as well. In spite of the fact that we obviously, you know, look and see inflation or in exchange rate pressures, we expect as well to drive the other approximately a third of that margin improvement in gross margin out of those items. Again, landing gross margin at something a little more than 60%.
Talking just a little bit underneath of this around North America margins, which I know has been a point of contention or a point of discussion. North America overall, we expect to grow gross margin by around 500 basis points over the same time period, and very much focused on the same drivers. About half of that 500 basis point gross margin improvement is tied to that full price mix across all channels that we're looking for. Around 150 basis points or so is tied to a stronger movement toward DTC. Especially in North America, we've talked a lot about some of the supply chain challenges we've been facing, not annualizing some of that as we work our way through that over the next year to year and a half of another 100 basis points.
Around a 500 basis point gross margin improvement in just North America as a key part of this. Next on SG&A. Again, grounding ourselves in 2021, 47.4% for SG&A. And as we move forward, you know, a couple points. We wanna make sure this is viewed as an investment-driven plan. We will drive efficiencies. We'll talk about that in a moment. First, the DTC growth brings with it expenses, store expenses, e-commerce platform expenses, and we expect that to be around 150 basis points. Just to sort of point that back towards the strong growth we saw there and the margin expansion. A good balanced plan. We do have some targeted key growth initiatives. Obviously, the plans that we laid out in front of us earlier, those don't happen just sort of naturally.
We're gonna be driving those improvements, investing in the e-commerce experiences that our customers expect, the supply chain that allows us to drive with speed, and the digital marketing that allows us to connect closer and closer to the customers. We expect that to increase SG&A by around 150 basis points also. You see the long bar down in terms of efficiencies, scale and efficiency. I think, you know, that equates to over 500 basis points of improvement, and I think important to highlight. One, you know, especially in a place like North America, where we have a sizable fixed cost base, we get significant scale leverage just by returning to the leverage we lost in the COVID period. Beyond that, a couple key places.
Stefan mentioned earlier sort of working differently, working smarter, and we expect that to drive improvements. We see our people-related costs growing, but at a rate less than sales. Then also importantly, inside of our rental and occupancy space, we get a lot of scale across there as we drive out of a great fixed cost base around the world, and at the same time, working closely with our most important landlords to drive win-win solutions. The result of all of that is landing SG&A at a number approximately 45%. Let's see here. Where does that land us? That's what gets us to the 15%. Strong growth, over 60% gross margin, about 45% SG&A landing us at 15% global operating margins. From there, a 5-point improvement from where we landed.
almost 5-point improvement where we landed in 2021, and about half in gross margin and about half at, in SG&A improvement. I also wanna talk just a little bit about the regional mix from there. You see in North America landing in the low teens. That is an almost 10-point improvement. As you know, Trish laid out a strategy to go to market in an entirely new way there. Again, we talked about margin already. Of that 10 points, margin is around half of that at about 500 basis points. The other 500 basis points coming out of SG&A leverage, really predominantly about growth off of you know, driving scale off of a baseline that we had really in 2019, regaining that leverage that we had pre-COVID at that point in time.
Again, a good balanced margin improvement plan in North America. Then as we look at our international markets, you know, landing in the high teens. You know, it may look a little bit like we're maintaining to only slightly growing, but I think one important note from there is this also incorporates a, you know, non-annualization of a Russia business which we've exited that we had in 2021 that we're assumed to not be in by 2025. If you know, look away from that for a moment, we are growing our international markets as well from a margin operating margin perspective. Good, strong operating margin expansion around the world. Now, before we go into talking about cash in a moment, just wanna talk a little bit about tax. Obviously, there was...
We gave tax guidance earlier in the guidance earnings release that talked about an increase in rates up to 29%-30% from our historical high teens rates. Just wanna explain again quickly on how, you know, why we're seeing that increase. First, we've had a couple of favorable tax regimes internationally in some of our other markets that rolled off in 2021 as global tax reform has come into place. Second, we had a non-cash tax regime as well tied to the purchase of Calvin Klein brand all the way back in 2003. That finished in 2021. Those two factors alone would have driven us up to about 25%.
The last piece is really the way our regional profitability mix right now leans more towards Europe and away from the U.S., pushes us up into the 29%-30% range. I think, one, I wanna make sure it's clear here, we do not expect the rate to stay at that level through the plan. Initially alone, the work that Trish and the team are doing to drive North America to better profitability, we believe by about midpoint of this plan, we'll bring rates down to about 25%. That is a starting point.
We're working on long, medium, and shorter term, you know, strategic planning that will allow us beyond that to drive down to, we believe, into the low- to mid-20s% for a tax rate by the end of 2025, which is where we believe because of global tax equalization the market will rise up to. Just to give a little bit of clarity around that. Now I'll just talk a little bit about sort of cash and investment. You know, as mentioned, growth doesn't come for free. We are gonna drive the growth that we're talking about. With that it's gonna come a requirement for increased CapEx. We see on the left-hand side, we're targeting about 4% of sales, which we believe is competitive and more than sufficient to both drive this growth plan as well as sustain it importantly ongoing.
What you see here is an increase from historically around $300 million a year up to $400 million. That stairstep function really first off, you know, into 2022 is a matter of for the COVID era, we've restricted back on spending a little bit for financial and operating reasons. We've got a bit of catch up to do from there. Sustain that level, and then by the time we get to 2025, I would look at that as more indicative as really where we wanna land is about that 4%. I think that's the overall plan. Good, you know, capital spending. From a composition perspective, significant growth in digital and technology.
We've got to invest in the e-com experiences our customers expect from us and the technology to put the tools in the hand of our associates around the world to drive smarter, faster decision-making. Another 40% on stores as we've got a sizable global network of over 1,600 freestanding stores that requires both rejuvenation and store expansion. Between those two buckets, I wouldn't get too caught up because there obviously is a lot of blurrier lines between, you know, what is stores and what is e-commerce. The business model that Martijn has built in Europe shows that seamlessness coming through and, you know, the connectivity from there. Then lastly, 20% of the CapEx on the key enablers.
Obviously, we don't wanna, you know, forget about the things that are actually underpinning all that growth with a heavy focus on supply chain as, again, as we get faster and shorter to market. A good balanced approach with capital spending. Lastly, and also quite importantly, is cash. We expect the plan to deliver significant amounts of cash, over $3 billion of free cash flow from 2022 to 2025. Here's sort of a framework of how we're gonna think about investing. First and foremost, we will continue to invest in ourselves. We wanna fuel every opportunity that we can find, and you've heard many of them today here. That's first and foremost. Secondly, we have a great balance sheet. We want to maintain the strong balance sheets that gives us that flexibility and agility to adapt as we look forward.
Then thirdly, and probably most powerfully in some ways, we will return excess cash to shareholders. You may have seen earlier this morning, we announced an extension of our share buyback program for another 3 years, another $1 billion. We expect to return significant value to the shareholders through predominantly share buyback. Again, a balanced approach there that we will execute sort of agilely as we work across our way from there. With all of that, just to sort of wrap up before handing back to Stefan, I think again, we look at what is the algorithm, what you can expect from us ongoing. High single-digit growth resulting in $12.5 billion in sales by 2025. Expanding operating margins resulting in 15% by 2025.
Strong cash flow, which will result in over $1 billion in 2025, which all of that will allow us to be driving EPS and shareholder returns at a strong level over this plan from here. With that, I'll turn it back to Stefan and for the closing remark. Thank you very much.
Thank you, Zac. Hard to follow those numbers. Accelerated financial performance. Wrapping it up before we take a quick break and then switch over to the Q&A. Having spent my whole career building brands, winning with the consumer, driving, going for high performance, this growth opportunity that we shared today is the most exciting that I've seen. Let me just as a wrap-up, share the key reasons why. The first one is the power of the iconic brands. If you have one of those today, you are lucky. If you have two, like we have, and are able to leverage the strength of both those, we have an incredible advantage. The connection that I hope you have seen today from my team, that we connect those brands in a very strategic way.
The second reason that I'm so excited about this opportunity is that we have a value-creating plan. Especially when we move into an economy that sometimes goes up, sometimes goes down, it's never been more important to have a clear value-creating plan. It's also never been more important to have strong brands. We have the strong brands, we have the plan. Lastly, what excites me the most was just when we prepare for something like this, we are all in it and do it together. This is the first time I had the opportunity to sit and see my team present. It gives me goosebumps because I know that the team that we have has the capability to execute.
We won't always get it right, but to Zac's point, we will be transparent, and we will quickly learn and adapt. That is something as a leader that I've always driven with my teams to say, "Let's be really clear on the vision, really clear on the plan, and continuously learn." Because then the compounded effect of continuously learning and improving, we should be able to deliver the financial targets Zac just went through and beyond. Just wanted to wrap up that way and share my excitement and the invitation to you all to follow us on this journey. The next step on this journey is a quick break, and then we wrap up with Q&A. Thank you. Oh, wow.
It's pretty great.
Welcome back from break. We have, as I shared earlier, 45 minutes for your questions. We have two mic runners, one on that side and one on that side. Please just raise your hand and then please wait for the mic, given that we have a lot of people remoting in through the webcast.
Hi, Stefan. It's Michael Binetti. Nice to see you. Thanks for all the detail today for the team. I wanted to ask about North America margins. I think the guide was low teens, from about 3% in 2021. You gave us the guidance on 500 basis points from gross margin. I'm just curious. I think, in particular, I'd love to know a little bit more about the channels and how we build up to that and where the biggest opportunity is as we think about the channels. I think for some time it's been the focus on wholesale, so maybe if that's an unusually low number today, given the conversation about the mix of revenues through the value channel that you're trying to improve, that seems like it would be easier to understand low-hanging fruit to reverse.
Maybe just some thoughts on the components of the build there in the U.S.
Yeah, absolutely. Zac, do you want to start from a financial perspective, and then there is, of course, a connection to the business side?
Yeah, of course. I mean, I think overall from a channel perspective, we don't get into, you know, laying out channel-specific profitability. I think what we can say, though, is the plan that we've built, and that Trish and the team have laid out, is ultimately grows and delivers strong profitability across all of the channels. I think for us, from our purposes, we want to make sure that regardless of where the consumer is choosing to shop, that we've got sort of the economic and financial model built across those. I would say as we look at where that improvement is coming from channel by channel, we would see, largely speaking, that level of improvement coming across all the channels as we have them today to deliver, again, strong profitability across all the channels that we have moving forward.
Yeah.
The va-
Sorry.
No, the key value drivers will be coming from the key growth drivers, starting with product. What Trish was sharing was the proof points and the examples. When we start to become more disciplined on focusing on the key growth categories, the hero products, we see the response immediately in AUR, and we see that flowing down to margin. We see that increased product focus cut through across all channels to Zac's point. Then there is, of course, always ways to optimize, simplify how we work across bringing that product to market, driving that consumer engagement, and winning across all the channels.
Because it's really about winning more across all the channels with the domestic consumer first and driving that full price penetration D2C first, and then supported by strengthening our key wholesale partnerships.
Hey, everyone. Simeon Siegel, BMO. Thank you for all that information. I was hoping we could talk about licensing a little bit. Licensing is a very key part of your history, and obviously both from product and in housing and in leading. As you think about the future, the revenue number you had for licensing was a little bit. Wasn't very much. Curious how you want to view that. Then also, Zac, the same conversation, as we think about the gross margin from the channel mix, you think about that being maybe a bad guy. How do you think about the impact from licensing not growing as much? Thank you.
I can start. Thanks, Simeon. Our licensing strategy is simple, which is it's the same as our overall strategy, which is to win with the best products in each category we play to win in, and make sure that product shows up in the right channel mix to drive brand accretive, more profitable sales growth. What Trish was sharing is that we have invited our licensees on this journey, and the initial response has been very strong.
Yeah.
Because from a consumer, we have everything we do has to start and end with the end consumer and winning more with that consumer. That's why there is a PVH+ Plan that then is the same PVH+ Plan and priorities for our owned and operated and for our licensed business.
Okay.
Hi, Jay. Hi, Jay Sole, UBS. I have a two-part question. The first part is, if we think about the trajectory and the cadence of the earnings growth over the four-year period, do you feel like the growth will be more sort of weighted to FY 2024 and FY 2025? In other words, is there a big investment that we'll be having this year or next year where you'll see really acceleration in the EPS maybe in the outer years? And secondly, on marketing, when you think about the investments that you're going to make in SG&A, what % of sales do you expect marketing to be? And do you expect that to grow over time, or how do you expect that to play out? Thank you.
Yeah. Let me take that one. I think the overall, we would expect that the trajectory of growth, we've given guidance for 2022, and that trajectory from 2022 to 2025 we expect to be relatively linear. The growth plan we've laid out drives relatively linear over that time, and the investment plan as well is paired to that. I would say not just in terms of what's written down, but actually in terms of the planning we're putting in behind that to make sure that, you know, if the market runs ahead of us a bit and we can invest in behind that more heavily, we'll be able to do that. If it runs a little flatter, we'll be able to adjust.
I think not only have we planned it linearly, but I think the operating plan behind that will allow us to move the levers in such a way that we should be able to see that rate improvement on SG&A over time at a relatively steady improvement between now and then. This is not a hockey stick plan at the end. We would expect to see improvements in the middle and the longer parts of the plan. From a marketing perspective, as a total % of spend, you know, I would expect overall, we see that sort of migrating up, but nominally. I mean, you know, it's an improvement point from there. I think the key points in the SG&A piece is that it's a point of—you know—investments into the business. We do not see marketing as a leverage point.
I mean, as we talk about a new consumer strategy or driving closer to them, that's gonna require investment. As we drive, even as we scale overall, scale the business up, we wanna make sure that that's not a point that we're using to drive some of that for scale and efficiency, that we maintain the growth in spending commensurate and then slightly above where the rates of spending that we have today are.
Stefan, good to see everybody in person. Thanks for all the colors. John Kernan from Cowen. As you think about a demand and data-driven model with 15% operating margins, $1 billion in annual free cash flow, how much does the supply chain evolve? You obviously have a lot more experience in supply chain than many of the other CEOs in this space. It's been a major pain point for the sector. How do lead times, costs, and the supply chain change in this model? Then I have a quick follow-up for Zac.
Well, thanks, John. I'll come back to it. It's one of the most asked questions I've received since I spent half of my career, a little bit over half leading out of Europe or global business and then in the U.S. Ever since I've been leading from within the U.S., I've received that question all the way and all the time, and it comes about speed. I think, again, what's important is that there will be a lot of value to unlock eventually in speed, but it starts with the product creation discipline. You already have some of that in Europe.
Maybe, Martijn, you wanna just give some examples, because once you start to work as disciplined as we are in Europe, and we still have a lot of improvement to do in speed, but you can start to break away from one long lead time and be much more flexible in some parts of the sort.
Yeah. I think that's where the unlocks hit. It's stepping away from that one monolithic, almost heavy process for all product creation that you do and starting to break it apart. Because for some parts of our business, like, there is no need to have as a primary objective to increase speed. But to have a speed lane available where you can respond fast and to have a continuous core replenishment stream available, that's essential. I agree that, yeah, speed is important in certain pockets of the business, but it's definitely not the overarching objective.
No. It's like speed is the outcome of working closer to demand and having a very disciplined product focus. The supply chain, back to your question, it all connects back to the discipline of winning with product. Because we are growing two lifestyle brands across, say, 5-10 key growth categories, and then developing a hero product strategy to have the best hero products within each category. Each category has their own sourcing connection because it's different if you make a T-shirt or if you make jeans or if you make underwear bras. Developing that key category focus, hero product focus, and then connecting the supply chain improvements to that.
It's one of the biggest unlocks I've seen from a value creation perspective, eventually getting to shareholders from supply chain work is actually the cross-functional work. Historically, we have led with the designer being one silo, the merchandiser in one silo, the planners, the sourcing. Bringing everybody together around back to that category again and say, "We are a category team that's gonna crush it with the best product." The designers and the sourcing experts up front knows exactly what they set out to do. Then you can unlock speed, and then you can unlock value.
Thank you. Zac, quick question. Three billion dollars in free cash flow is almost 60% of your current market cap. How does share buyback play into the EPS algorithm as you go into fiscal 2025 and the reduction in share count?
Yeah. Without a doubt, we try to recognize in the presentation significant free cash flow generated from this. I think the framework we tried to lay out is meant to be less prescriptive and more as the set of tools that we would expect to lean into. Again, we wanna start first and foremost with the idea of investing in ourself first. The idea is to have to drive growth, to drive that flywheel. I think is priority one, making sure the balance sheet stays strong. Then that obviously will leave significant amount of spending for the share buybacks. I think that's why the announcement this morning was so important, authorizing an incremental $1 billion over the next three-year period. You know, we're not being prescriptive right now about how that'll go, because again, we wanna leave ourselves the flexibility.
It makes it a lot easier knowing that there's gonna be substantial cash flow generated to do that. It's left us comfortable committing that EPS growth will be ahead of profitability growth over this plan because we have the levers to be able to do so.
Thank you.
We have Dana back there. Dana Telsey. Oh, okay.
Okay.
Sorry. First.
Hi there.
Dana, hold. I'm
Okay.
Yeah.
Hi, Brooke from Goldman Sachs. Thanks for taking the question. I'd love to hear a little bit more about the cadence and the plans that you have for eliminating some of that value retail in North America over time and the offsetting growth that you're getting in the rest of your core wholesale business. What embedded growth rates are you assuming? How should we think about the sequencing of that throughout the timeline of the plan?
Yes. Let me just start with my experience from having done this before and seen it before. It's. There are really two moving parts here. One is in the North America unlock. One is the rebalancing of the channels, and that goes with one speed. That, to Trish's point, goes over the three, four years that we have laid out for 2025. You should see that gradually happening. Then what has faster value creating opportunity is the improvement in product, consumer engagement. It's the parallel pathing of those two that is the proven model that I've been personally involved in before and seen successfully being executed. That's the path that, again, all our biggest competitors and best brands have, at one point in time, been in this situation in North America.
The way they have approached it is the way we will approach it.
I think you covered it.
What gives me confidence in this is two things. We have a really clear fact-based understanding of where we are. Trish shared with you the strength of our brands in terms of awareness going all the way to relevance. The improvements in product and engagement that Trish and team is already doing, we're constantly getting green shoots for that. Of course, on top of that, I've seen it being done before, and I've been part of doing it before. It's just gonna take time, and from back to your question on channels, it's we are growing e-commerce really fast.
We are partnering, intensifying our partnerships with our full price wholesale partners, and we maintain a strong partnership with our value partners. It's just that balancing, and it will happen over the next 3-4 years, step by step.
The fact that it is a multiyear journey allows us to be very deliberate and very thoughtful about how we go about it, and it's not an overnight. It touches every channel, so we just wanna be mindful and deliberate and thoughtful.
Trish, when Trish and I walk stores, and you, as you shared, you were a part of building the growth and the success with the young consumer, with Urban Outfitters and driving. I believe when you left, you have an industry-leading digital-
Yeah
... experience and very strong connected retail experience. When we walk stores and take the test of the 10 most essential products, then we see how much opportunity we have. Like, we have so much opportunity to tap better into any given time, the 10 best essential product for the consumer in every channel. Just that in itself, those kind of improvements coming in parallel with the rebalancing.
Mm-hmm.
That's what gives us the confidence, and having done it before.
Hi. It's Dana Telsey from Telsey.
Yes.
As you think about what you've done before, Stefan, in terms of the systematic repeatable processes that incorporates the speed model to drive margins, in the journey that you're on here in terms of speed, how do you think of the timeframe in terms of what is it here compared to what it's been in your other, where you've been before, and where are you furthest along that could positively impact the margin go forward? Thank you.
Yeah. Thank you, Dana. That's a good question. I would say it's early innings in the value unlock from a demand and data-driven operating model. We have the benefit of having market-leading strength already in Europe and growing, accelerating from strength in Asia. The benefit we have is that we have two brands and a global presence and where we have a lot of proof points internally where we are working closer as one team than any time before.
Sometimes one team is a slogan, but for us it's real, that we say Trish is picking up the phone and calling Avery and Martijn and say, "How are you working with this speed pipeline when it comes to this product?" We are sharing knowledge, and we have the benefit of having the market-leading strength to tap into. Again, yes, there are differences between the American consumer, the Asia consumer and the European, but the underlying value there, and that's why the framework is so important. That's also why when we engage the top 100 leaders, it's around the framework. It's the same language. We can say somebody who is really good at full price wholesale in Europe is now gonna join Trish's team to support on her team to just bring best practice and share that.
That's a little bit of how we are approaching it, but early innings overall.
Hi. Hi, [Will Gartner] from Wells Fargo. I was wondering if you guys could just talk a little bit about your store opening and closing plans. I think you mentioned you had 2000 stores globally. You know, how is that split between Tommy and Calvin, and what are your plans for openings and closings going forward? Thanks.
Yeah, absolutely. In terms of the store portfolio, what you heard from every region is that we are optimizing over the coming four years. We're enhancing the physical store experience and optimizing the portfolio. We are standing slightly different in each region, but the underlying approach is the same, which is we're optimizing the store portfolio to make sure that in each geography, that we have the right store exposure and balance between our stores, our wholesale account stores, and our online business. That's gonna be an ongoing work for us. That is our approach. We have strength. Why I was hesitating, Tan, there was like we have strength in the store portfolio.
Stores, to Martijn, I believe you shared it, and Tom, you shared it, the store experience is gonna be really important even though we lean into digital first. Because it's gonna be increasingly about connecting digital with the stores. That's why we also from an investment perspective, as Zac showed, that we're gonna invest in the stores. As Trish shared, we have underinvested in our outlet fleet in North America. That's. That won't work. We will lean in to invest in making sure that our outlet fleet in North America is on par with the strength of the brands in the eyes of the consumer.
Hi, Alex Straton from Morgan Stanley. I just wanted to drill down quickly into your owned e-commerce business. I think some of the stats you gave were, I think it was owned as well as the wholesale.
Yeah.
I just wanna understand what is it as a percentage of your total revenue, whether that varies by geography, and then how you think about your owned digital strategy versus your wholesale digital strategy.
Yeah.
If it's different or what you have there.
Yeah. No, thank you. Super relevant question. I would say where we are leading in the company is in Europe. Perhaps, Martijn, you can just share a little bit of how we are growing both and the different roles they play.
Yeah. Yeah. What I shared in my presentation is that our owned and operated e-commerce, that's the area where we're gonna heavily invest, and we want to continue to accelerate the growth in that channel. That's also the platform that connects with our store. It very strongly links to that D2C strategy, to that segmentation strategy, to that elevation strategy. That's important to invest. We have the proof points that we can invest in it and we should drive that business further up. The partner side of it, so the pure players and the third party dot coms, there we have to be much more strategic. There's huge growth opportunity, but there is a risk that you lose grip of it, especially the third party marketplaces.
It's like everybody can offer a product there. We need to be strategic there. We need to control that. That can be through different partnership models, but also their product segmentation is super important. It's a completely different approach, but the opportunity for both is equally big. Our third party dot com and our own dot com will grow at the same pace and will both contribute significantly to our overall digital penetration.
Hi, it's Bob Drbul from Guggenheim. I guess two questions really. The first one, in North America, the distribution changes that you're talking about, can you just talk about, you know, the Kohl's opening and sort of how that's gone and sort of the future of the Macy's relationship just in terms of, you know, any changes that you're making, I guess in either of those two?
The second piece of it for Zac is on the tax rate. I was wondering if we could just sort of unpack it a little bit more based on I think you commented that North America, you know, the profitability in North America, the game plan in North America over the next several years to get, you know, that, you know, 10-1100 basis points of profitability. How much of your longer term tax rate is reliant on North America getting to sort of a mid-teens type operating profit? And are there any other plans around the Netherlands exploitation? Can you go back and get a new relationship? Will you consider moving to Switzerland?
Like just in terms of some of the buckets to help us to get you to a more competitive, longer-term credit rating, and that would be great. Thanks.
Two very different questions. We'll try to start with the first. I mean, both I'll hand it over to you, Trish, to give some more texture, but great relationships with Macy's, great relationships with Kohl's. We have tested Kohl's and I'm sure you can share a little bit, Trish, but both-
Yeah.
Both are starting to really step up in terms of true omni-channel digital-first and again, long-standing great partnership.
Strong partnerships, both emerging and growing e-commerce as well. We'll continue to tap into that as that's one of the tenets of our strategy as well. Those accounts particularly, we're starting that product segmentation that we talked about as well, so less overlap, but that's part of the greater, you know, growing the wholesale distribution, not being as reliant potentially on the value channel and sort of working with our really strong partners and accounts to grow not only brick and mortar, but their digital as well.
we are very much aligned with our key wholesale partners. Take Macy's and Kohl's as an example about the importance to do it in a brand and creative way.
Mm-hmm.
To do it with pricing power. That's why it's so exciting to see how our teams are coming together and really making that happen. From there to Zac.
All right. On the tax piece, and I promise not go into too much detail and put everyone to sleep, here. I think what we see overall with the U.S. tax changes in 2018, there was a lowering of the rate overall, but one of the underlying elements was for companies that have unbalanced ultimately more foreign earnings than local, there's a mechanism inside of that to try to capture some of those taxes that happen overseas. I think it's not, you know, it was not targeted at companies like us that are unbalanced for right now operationally from a profitability perspective, but we get caught up in that.
I think as Trish and the team, you know, drive back to profitability, which we're confident in. You have to get all the way back to equal with the rest of the world. That will drop the rate from the high 20s%, almost 30%, down to 25%. That piece, actually, we're very confident in that element of things getting to there. Beyond that then, as you talk about things like the Dutch ruling and things of that nature, overall, I think that, you know, we take a look at tax reform around the world with the OECD rules. The idea of a race to zero, those days are over, right? I think overall, we expect. Extending some of the programs that were in place before may be difficult.
That doesn't mean that we're sort of throwing our hands up there and saying mid-20s% is it. Absolutely not. That's why I said, you know, tax planning over that window, more toward the back end of the plan that we've laid out here, working with determining where it is that our value-add processes are. This will tie to a lot of sort of the work that Stefan was talking about earlier in terms of how do we build that entire value chain, and where is that work most efficiently done. We believe will drive opportunities for us to take advantage of more favorable rates around the world, which we think will get us down into, like I said, the low- to mid-20s% there at that point. I think it's really the two pieces. One is earlier, and we're highly confident in.
The other one, longer term, still confident in, but a bit more work, and that's why the timeline's a bit longer. We will end the plan here with driving rates significantly lower than where we're experiencing in 2022.
Hey, guys. Christopher Nardone from Bank of America. Can we talk about China for a little bit? I think it's 6% of the business. You have a plan to, I think, grow that 5x for 2019. Can you just talk about how you're gonna, you know, increase brand awareness above that 50% level? Just talk about the competitive dynamics, right? A lot of your competitors are kinda going through the same strategy. What gives you confidence that you can win in that region over the medium term? Thanks.
I mean, thank you. Tom, you have been doing with the team such an incredible job in the most difficult macro COVID situation that we are still dealing with. Underlying that, do you mind sharing a little bit about our approach of driving digital first, the partnerships with the big JD.com, Tmall, Douyin, et cetera? Just give some texture because I know you're deep into that.
Sure. Thank you for the question. I think first and foremost, we are winning with our product, especially hero products. Our focus on increasing the share because it's all full-price selling. That work, we are really seeing traction and also early proof point. When it comes to digital, third-party players, they're also fact-based that we can see and track all those big consumer moments on Double Eleven, on 618, on the Chinese Valentine's Day. All the brands do participate, and they do get the ranking, and we're always coming up on top. Already we are seeing the proof point, the track records. As you mentioned, our brand awareness in China is still low, really comparing to our potential.
If we compare to the other marketplace where Australia is in the 80%-90%, Europe is in the 90s, China is in the 50s. If we start moving, improving our brand awareness, our growth potential is huge in China that we haven't really. As I mentioned earlier, we're only scratching the surface of where we are at this moment. More connected to our consumer, the Gen Z and the millennials. The new Douyin, the new TikTok, is actually making the Tmall and JD.com very nervous. Our partnership with Douyin is really proven to be so successful in the early stages that we believe that share, not only with our brand, but in the whole market share in China, is gonna change the dynamic in the whole digital landscape in China.
Hi, Tom Nikic with Wedbush. I want to ask about the tourism recovery in North America. Are we assuming that the tourism business recovers completely, and how do we think about the pacing of that? Following up to that, is there any concern that, you know, part of your international strength the last couple of years has been specifically because of the lack of tourism in North America, and that as, you know, foreign visitors return to the U.S., you know, maybe it cannibalizes some of your international sales? Thank you.
Yeah, no, absolutely. Two really important questions. The first one, Zac, do you wanna...
Yep. From a pacing perspective, you know, we've tried to build the plan as we presented in a way that was not overly aggressive. We wanted a balanced plan. One of those assumptions we took was the return of international travelers. We've assumed the international traveler doesn't really return in full until toward the end of 2024, actually into 2025. Just to make sure that we're not. You know, we're focusing on the rest of the core tenets of that plan, the domestic consumer and product for North America. If that comes back early, that's a windfall. At the end of the day, making sure that we're pacing it with what is likely to be, as we're seeing with the COVID-driven disruptions lagging.
I think our assumptions are very much in line with a relatively conservative assumption going into 2024, into 2025, late 2024 into 2025.
My management team will smile because I'll ask the second question quite often to them as well, calling Martijn sometimes late, his time, because I don't think about Europe even though my European background. I mean, you're polite, so after a while, you remind me that it's late. What we have seen historically is that the tourism business in North America from European and Asian tourists, and also big South American, it's been accretive. We haven't seen that. What we have seen is that when that has been strong in North America, we have been equally strong in the regions. That's. I have called you and asked the same question three times.
Yeah.
What you answer the same every time.
When COVID started, we actually tried to analyze data to understand how big the impact is actually for Europe. Also, for Europe missing international tourism.
Mm-hmm.
Because we also have North America, we have South America, we have Asia also traveling a lot to Europe. So there's actually quite a lot of key cities in Europe that also have a level of dependency on tourism, most notably in the capitals around Europe. Those stores were heavily impacted, and there we see now slowly also getting an improvement from return tourism in those cities as well. Yeah, overall, we don't feel now that when the markets will open up, that net-net, that will result in a negative for Europe.
It's very consistent with the three other times I asked the question. No, because I also don't think, given that I'm based here, I don't think about the big cities and the tourists and coming-
Yeah.
that normally comes into Europe, it's not coming in, and that will come back. Plus when we go back and look at the data overall, we see that we have been able to drive performance across all regions. Yes.
Hi, Janet Kloppenburg, JJK Associates. I wanted to ask a question about the supply chain in North America, both from a standpoint, what's happening with some of the backlog you have and how that may be resolved in the near term. Secondly, as you elevate the product and move away from the value chain, I'm just wondering if there were any structural upgrades that may present a near-term challenge to, you know, elevating the product and getting it to where you want it to be. Thank you.
Thank you, Janet. I'll take the global supply chain question-
Yep.
I'll hand it over to you, Trish, for the North America one. On a supply chain basis for North America, we have been increasingly disproportionately hit because of COVID-related sourcing disruption and then logistics disruption connecting to those sourcing countries that serve North America more than other countries. We are seeing that disruption now, and we are not expecting it to be fully back until end of this year. This is something that we gradually have to work ourselves out of. Doesn't help that we have long lead times, that's where the work that we are doing with cutting lead times, cross-functional go-to-market work, where we are. Because if you're already having long lead times, you get extra exposed by this. It's something that we are working through.
It's gonna take some time, and we see it being better in the back half than the first half.
Yeah. Janet, when we talk about elevation, it's expanding our the volume that we do in sort of a Macy's or a top-tier account. I don't want the perception to be elevation, meaning that we're raising prices significantly. It's the elevation, it's the expansion in wholesale partners and wholesale partners.com and our own.com as a pinnacle experience for the brand. Yeah, I just, when we say elevation, we're talking about elevating experiences. I just wanna be clear with that too.
also building on that, what Trish is sharing, from my Ralph Lauren experience of what you can see now, Ralph is doing really well is, they are really clear and having a lot of those most essential products true to their brand DNA.
Yeah.
We still have a lot of value to unlock by being as disciplined. They're a little bit ahead of us. We are in North America.
Mm-hmm.
We have the benefit of once we execute what we have set out to do, we know with our brand value, mix, that we have the proof point from Europe that we can outperform them and outperform on the highest level. In Europe today, we perform from a-
Yeah
From a market growth perspective on with the best sports brands. That's why when, again, we are walking stores digitally, physically, and seeing, okay, we have X% left to do there, and that's why I'm so excited and Trish is so excited about, like, unlocking this step by step.
Hey, guys. Michael Binetti. Just a quick follow-up here from your other question. I guess one for Martijn and one for Zac Coughlin. Martijn, on potential for a recession in Europe, hard to think of a company with a better pulse in Europe. How should we think alongside you about the range of scenarios if we do see that unfold in the macro, relative to your high single-digit growth rate that you've talked about in that plan today? Then, Zac Coughlin, on the size of the buyback with the stock at about 8x earnings today. I think the timing of the buyback could be very, very significant, whether you do it today, whether you do it in the future. Maybe you could just help us think about the pace that you think is appropriate.
'Cause I mean, I think it's safe to say if you hit these numbers and if you believe in these, the stock's probably not gonna be here for long. I would love to know how you think about the value of returning that to shareholders today versus pacing it slowly and giving yourself flexibility on earnings over time. Okay.
Should we start there?
Okay.
[crosstalk]Give come fresh.
Let's talk about it. Of course, I mean, you saw the plan as we laid out from there. You compare that to where we're valued in the marketplace today. We obviously agree that at this point in time, the plan that we're seeing should show significant growth at that point. I think we're not laying out sort of a prescriptive blow-by-blow on timing, because we wanna make sure that we leave ourselves the flexibility to adapt accordingly from there. This business model, not just in the future, the business model today generates substantial cash flow as well.
I think that's why getting the timing of the extension of the program and the increase done now. We're not even run through all the program that we have in place, but just wanted to make sure we expanded it from there at that point in time to make sure that we could take advantage of whether that's in the short term here, we see an opportunity, or whether that's over the medium or long term at that point in time.
Yeah, I think the discussions around a potential recession for Europe are clear indeed. The concerns I think are, to a degree, also real. From our brand performance, what I'm seeing is that the interactions that we are having with the brand, the transactions that we're having with the customers, we're seeing that consumer confidence still when it comes to our brands. I think that if I also look back in time, because of that strong position of our brands in Europe, we've always been that go-to brand. We are known for the quality. So even in times of recessions over the past decade, our brands have always performed really strong.
If the recession worsens and that comes into play, what will be the effect? Difficult to say. What I do know is that our brands have always done really well under those circumstances.
When we travel in Europe together, Avery, this might be a question that ties into the brand. What resonates with me is that the positioning of aspirational and accessible and that feeling of great value, of like a great product at a really great value. It's not the lowest price, it's a great value. In recessionary times that you really go to great value. You work hard with that in terms of delivering, always delivering the product and the price to get that value. I don't know if there is something you wanna say.
No, I think that focus on really leading through the premium space has been a sweet spot for Tommy and also for Calvin in the European region and globally. While we're leaning more currently into the aspirational aspect, because that really drives consumer demand, and we believe that we need to show up in the most premium way in our products and experiences, it's always with that balance in mind. Because the core of our businesses is in these essential core products that are quite timeless during more difficult economic times, there's still kind of longer term value in those purchases that we think really shores us up should the macroeconomic conditions continue to change.
Sure.
Hi, thanks for taking my questions. Paul Kearney at Barclays. Two questions. First, I was wondering if you can provide longer term what you think the margin differentials will be between the channels of owned and operated digital, owned stores, and the wholesale channel after it's kind of cleaned up. Second, it's back to licensing businesses, two parts. One, are you doing anything differently with your licensed businesses to ensure that they're kind of coming along with you on this journey to clean up the channels? And then two, do you still view it as a long-term opportunity to take some of these businesses back in-house?
You want me to take the first one?
Yeah. I think from a channel perspective, and I'll go back to what I had said earlier. I mean, at the end of the day, the plan that we looked at earlier delivers strong profitability across all the channels, digital, wholesale, and the stores. I think that's actually what's most important, right? As we build a plan out here, it's not sort of the relatively speaking, all of them will be growing to points of strength. I think what's most important for us to forecast where the customer is going to be 3, 4 years from now in terms of how they're shopping or where they're shopping. You know, I think we've got a hypothesis, but that's likely to be fluid from there.
I think what's most important is that we're able to satisfy them with the strategy we have wherever they are. Then coming out from there is an economic model that allows us to drive profitable growth across all of them. I think that's really what we've delivered here across, again, each of the regions, each of the channels inside the regions themselves as well.
To the licensing question, it's similar to the distribution question in terms of what's your distribution strategy, and you always answer, follow the consumer. When it comes to the licensing strategy, it's the same strategy. That's the most important. We are end consumer focused, winning with the end consumer in a brand and creative way. Yes, we are, as we mentioned, both Trish and I are taking every licensee on this journey, saying, "Here's where we are setting out to drive the brands. How can you help us deliver the best products in a brand and creative way?" That work has already started, so they have actually got a preview to what you see now. They got a preview.
Yeah
A month ago.
In early March.
Yeah.
To answer your question, are we doing anything differently? That in itself is the biggest change. Actually bringing our licensees along on the journey, explaining the plan, having that two-way dialogue about how we're gonna connect on it. That is. It's a very new approach.
This long-term growth plan is a long-term growth plan that's set out to win with the consumer in a sustainable way across all channels, licensed, owned, and operated. From that comes the power of once we execute that with discipline, then that shows up with the consumer, and then we starts to win, and it becomes win-win partnerships. Like we see when we lean into digital with Macy's, digital with Kohl's, Amazon, Zalando, About You. It's being clear. We see so much strength of being clear on this is the path for us to win with the end consumer and unlock that strength. It's
Again, there is not a single person you can speak with in social setting in North America that doesn't have a perspective on Calvin and Tommy and has some underlying brand love. That's, you know, having my experience of a number of now iconic American brands, like, when you have that's, like, impossible to replicate. Then as soon as you turn the knob on more relevant product, more engagement.
Mm-hmm
Better balance in the distribution, the consumer follows. Yes, we are 27 seconds away from finishing our 45-minute Q&A. We'll of course stay back and be available. For those of you who are here in person, there are products, hero products, represented right next to here. Management team will be here. You can continue to ask us questions. With that, I actually feel like we. It's not what I feel, the timer says.
Zero.
We are out of time, but I just wanna, again, thank you all for joining us. This is the beginning of a really exciting journey. We love to take you on it, and next step is we just join you and follow up in the product section area. Okay. Thank you very much.