Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Ralph Lauren's Investor Day 2025. I'm Corinna Van der Ghinst, Head of Investor Relations here at Ralph Lauren. We're so excited to have all of you here today, both in the room here in New York City as well as on the live stream. Before we get started today, we're going to share some disclosures with you all. While you are diligently studying these disclosures, I'll share the program with you. We've got a great lineup of leaders speaking to you today. We're going to have a lunch break where I encourage you all to check out the insanely gorgeous product displays that our team has put up for you guys. Enjoy some Ralph's Coffee in the hallway, and during those breaks, feel free to roam around and meet your colleagues as well, and so, like I said, we have a great lineup for today.
I would like to ask you to go ahead and silence your devices before we get started. Thank you all for joining us. Let's have a great day. Thanks.
I think the collection is stunning. I always say classic. It's the best.
When I think of Ralph Lauren, I think sports, style, and cool.
That's the incredible power of Ralph Lauren. Good morning to all of you here and on the webcast, and thank you for joining us. So, eight years ago, we began a journey of transformation. Ralph and I believed that this brand had a future worthy of its legacy. We made clear choices. We focused. We put the consumer at the center. We brought together the right team, many of which are in this room. And we delivered. We were motivated to do this because we knew one thing with absolute certainty: this company is unlike any other in the world. Think about it. Ralph Lauren has a distinct brand position that's clear, consistent, relevant, and emotionally resonant. A legacy of leadership in fashion, in culture, in innovation, and a proven ability to execute with discipline, precision, and creativity. That's a formula for creating value.
And it's how we'll unlock our next chapter of growth: brand, leadership, execution. So, let's start with our brand, who we are, why we exist, what we have uniquely and consistently stood for 58 years. Ralph has never been about clothes, although you are surrounded by clothes. Ralph has never been about clothes. He's inspired by possibility, by optimism, by a vision for a better life, and by helping others see themselves in that vision and step fully into it. It's right there in our purpose to inspire the dream of a better life through authenticity and timeless style. This isn't about selling clothes. It's about offering possibility. That is the foundation of our brand: timeless, elevated, inclusive. Indeed, Ralph Lauren stands for a different kind of luxury, one that is grounded in meaning, not materialism. We call it inclusive luxury. It's not about status, but self-expression.
It's not about exclusivity, but individuality. And it's not about wealth, but aspiration and personal style. It's luxury that welcomes you in and stays with you throughout your life, whether you are a kid getting your first Polo Bear sweater for back- to- school at our store in Tysons Corner, decorating your Mayfair Townhouse. I know many of you have a Mayfair Townhouse in this room with our home collection at New Bond Street in London, or wearing a Polo dress as you say yes to a lifetime together. We're there for all of life's moments, delivering consistency and quality with warmth, joy, and optimism. And Ralph Lauren is the only inclusive luxury lifestyle brand with the DNA, scale, and emotional resonance to inspire millions around the world. That distinct position is what has fueled our leadership over decades.
As always, Ralph says it best: "The excitement of being in this business is not following. It's about leading." And we have led again and again. Over 40 years ago, Ralph was the first clothing designer to launch an all-encompassing home collection. In the '80s, we redefined retail when we opened our Madison Avenue flagship, recently renovated. You're all welcome to join us after this there. In the '90s, we first stepped into hospitality with our RL Restaurant in Chicago. And today, we have restaurants and coffee shops that have become iconic destinations. You should see the lines at our coffee shops. And I know many of you have actually complained to me about how long they are. So, apologies for that. That's not going away. And 25 years ago, we trailblazed e-commerce with polo.com, the first online lifestyle platform of its kind. Recognize these two young men?
Bill Gates and someone you're going to see in just a few minutes. Time and time again, we have led. You're going to hear about some of our more recent innovations today. What's more, we drive leadership across markets. We cut through from New York to Dallas, Paris to Milan, Shanghai to Tokyo. Across cultures, I see the love for our brand wherever I travel, from Madrid to Miami. Across generations. I want to pause on this point for a minute because this is a real differentiator as you look at the industry that we participate in. What other brand serves every stage, every milestone, every moment of life, from babies to Gen Z through to the silver generation?
After nearly 60 years in business, we see generations of family living in Ralph Lauren, parents who grew up wearing us, are now, maybe some of you are doing this, are now dressing their children, and maybe, and I doubt any of you are doing this yet, but their grandchildren in Ralph Lauren. We often hear stories from our customers that start with our iconic Polo shirt, a way for a child to choose their favorite color, an early act of self-expression. And over time, our pieces weave into the fabric of life's memories: first day of school photos, family holiday cards, and eventually, maybe wearing that same color of Polo shirt, likely a few sizes larger, on the golf course after retirement. This is the enduring power of Ralph Lauren: timeless style that transcends generations. We also drive leadership across channels, consistently innovating everywhere consumers are: digital, social, wholesale, and our own stores.
Across product, where we have one of the most powerful portfolios of core products in our industry. Across lifestyle, and I'll pause here for a moment. As I just mentioned, we were one of the very first to enter categories like home and hospitality in our industry. If you want to sit down, John, there's a seat for you. It's going to be a long day, so I don't want you to stay standing up all day, and while these categories. Good morning, and while these categories are today a small portion of our total business, they are important channels for our brand, giving people a tangible way to step into Ralph's world. We don't just talk lifestyle. We deliver it at scale, with integrity, and unmistakably Ralph Lauren. Leadership is not just in our DNA. It is not just in our history.
It is actually in our DNA: pioneering, innovative, and original. And if you think about it, there aren't too many originals in the world. There aren't too many brands who can say they are the only one who can do what they do. And you know, it reminds me of this famous quote about the Grateful Dead. Are you all familiar with the Grateful Dead? The older part of the group is saying yes. If not, please come and see Bob Ranftl, our Chief Operating Officer. At the end of the session, he'll give you some insights on the Grateful Dead. And the quote is, "Why be the best when you can be the only? Why be the best when you can be the only?" We embody that spirit at Ralph Lauren.
So yes, Ralph Lauren is an icon, so much so that you probably know exactly what it means when someone says something is very Ralph Lauren. It conveys an instantly recognizable lifestyle vision. It's not about a single product. It's about a world Ralph Lauren has created. So we've recognized our legacy of leadership, and we've reflected on the enduring strength of our brand. But you'll recall that there's a third component in the value formula I outlined earlier: execution. Because even with a powerful brand and a history of leadership, none of it matters if we don't consistently execute with excellence. And at Ralph Lauren, when we commit, we deliver. Now, that doesn't happen by chance. It happens because of the 23,000 employees around the world who are dedicated to executing Ralph's vision every single day.
And I'd like to take this opportunity to actually give them a big round of applause for everything that they've done that's enabled us to be here today. You're going to see several of us on stage today, but we represent our global team and their pride in and love for our brand. And since 2018, this team has driven towards strong, sustainable growth and value creation. We did not waver, even in the face of headwinds and challenges, whether it was the pandemic, freight disruption, inflation, or tariffs. Promises made, promises kept. Since our last Investor Day, we delivered on both our strategic and financial commitments. We grew our top line high single digits annually. We expanded margin by over 300 basis points, and we delivered mid-teens EPS growth annually.
We generated over $2 billion in free cash flow, over 100% return on invested capital, over 100% on total shareholder returns, and we gave back around $2 billion through share buybacks and dividends while continuing to strengthen our balance sheet. I'm going to let you digest these numbers because they are the foundation for the rest of the day, but what we've accomplished so far is really just the beginning. If there is one word we want you to take away from today, it is this: opportunity. Opportunity. We have accelerated our own momentum over the past few years, and we have laid the groundwork for growth well into the future. We are about lasting value, and we are now more elevated, more consistent, with multiple drivers of growth. That's an exciting position to be in, so let's dimensionalize the opportunity.
The total addressable market we play in across premium and luxury is more than $400 billion and growing. We are a $7 billion company today and growing. And if you did the math correctly, less than a 2% market share, less than a 2% market share. Okay? That represents an incredible opportunity for this company, not just for the next three years, but for actually decades to come. So the past three years have been our proof of concept. And we are now in a position of real brand strength. And you'll hear a lot about this later today, but just some top lines. The consumer around the world is telling us that today we are the most trusted fashion brand in the world. We are the most considered fashion brand across demographics. We have the most loyal customers in the industry.
And on top of that, our value perception has continued to strengthen. With this strong foundation, we're going to continue to drive leadership in everything we do. This is our Next Great Chapter: Drive. The word drive matters here. It means pushing forward, not cruising, navigating, not meandering, staying in control of where we're headed, even as the terrain shifts. That is how we will lead, and that is how we will deliver our next phase of growth. At first glance, our Next Great Chapter: Drive strategy, will look familiar. It should, because our current strategy is working. Our three diversified strategic growth drivers remain consistent. I think you know them well by now. One, elevate and energize our lifestyle brand. Two, drive the core and expand for more. And three, win in key cities with our consumer ecosystem. So what's new? Well, you've heard us talk about our brand.
Now you'll hear how we're carrying our brand desirability into the future with sharper insights to recruit new customers and deepen relationships with our existing customers. You've also heard about driving the core and expanding for more from a product standpoint. Now we're accelerating even further into the opportunity with women's, serving her across our lifestyle portfolio. And you've heard about our top 30 cities. And now you'll hear about how we're expanding our ecosystems and laying the groundwork for the next 20 cities, with digital becoming an even more powerful surround sound in the future. All of this is powered by our five key enablers. They allow us to be agile, resilient on offense. First, it all starts with our people. Our engagement surveys show that our employees are proud to work here. Our scores well exceed industry benchmarks. Culture drives performance.
We will continue to inspire and engage and empower our teams. Second, our key enablers also include our industry-leading operations, like our diversified sourcing strategy and the strong sourcing partnerships that have been established over the past few years. These afford us incredible agility, speed, and risk mitigation. Third, we've invested in advanced tech and analytics, including AI. We understand the consumer better than ever. We're applying superior tech and AI to enhance creativity, engage our consumers, and drive productivity across our operations. Fourth, to drive our success over the next 60 years. While today is about the next three years, our lens is much longer than that. We have to future-proof our business. This requires supporting the resilience of our partners, our communities, and the resources that enable our purpose and our growth. We do this through our citizenship and sustainability strategy.
I am pleased to share that we're ahead of schedule on our key commitments in this space. Fifth, and I know you all care deeply about this one, not that you didn't care about the other four, but you care deeply about this one, our strong, powerful balance sheet, flexibility, resilience. These enablers are all real competitive advantages in our industry. They turn our ambitions into superior performance. Let me share how all this translates to our financial algorithm for the next three years. In case you're interested, mid-single-digit top-line growth, continued operating margin expansion, all while increasing our investments behind our brand and strategic initiatives, and remaining committed to strong shareholder returns. You're going to hear a lot more from Justin later on about this.
Let's come back full circle to where everything started: Ralph's story, optimism, a vision for a better life, dreaming. We believed in Ralph's dream when we started this transformation eight years ago. Ralph and I knew that our best days were still ahead of us, and we're proving it. In fact, after our fashion show last week, Ralph and I talked about how his vision is coming to life around the world more powerfully than ever, leveraging the distinctiveness of our brand, leaning into our legacy of leadership, and executing with excellence at every turn to create value. We are on an open road with so many opportunities ahead: brand, leadership, execution, value. Keep all this in mind when you listen to all the presentations throughout the day. We have a rich day planned for you, full of the details of our strategy and our building blocks.
You're going to hear from some familiar faces, and you also get a chance to meet some of our newer members on our team. We actually also have a lot of our team members here in the audience today, including some of the designers who designed the amazing products that you've seen throughout the room and downstairs. Maybe you can grab them over lunch for style advice. Later, we're going to address the key questions that I know are on your mind. How will we sustain brand momentum over many years to come? How will we ensure our products, our timeless products, fit today's and tomorrow's consumer preferences? How will we grow geographically from Chengdu to Munich to Los Angeles, where the games are happening in a few years and beyond?
Underpinning all this, how are we harnessing tech to support how we work and how we engage with consumers? Thank you for being here and spending the day with us. I look forward to seeing you later for our Q&A session. Now, let me turn the stage over to someone who literally has this brand in his DNA, who believes in our company's potential as much as I do: Mr. David Lauren.
Thank you. Thank you, Patrice. Thank you for your leadership and for your partnership. Thank you for helping us to unlock our potential and really to envision a better future, so thank you very much. I'm David Lauren, and I'm very proud to be here today to talk about the power of the Ralph Lauren brand. My father started this company nearly 60 years ago in a tiny apartment in The Bronx where my mother and my grandmother sewed the labels into the backs of every tie that he designed, and on the back of each label was the word Polo, and even though my father had never been to a Polo match before, he picked the name because it conjured up an image of elegance and aspiration on and off the field. Quite simply, it conjured up a dream of a better life.
Now, from those ties, my father was able to grow an entire world: menswear, women's wear, children's, home, hospitality, and so much more. And behind every product were stories. And these stories became the backbone of our marketing and our advertising that you know today. And many would say that the images and the ads we've created have become as iconic as our products themselves. My father has always said that he's more than a designer, that he writes to his clothes about the dream of a better life and a way of living. And that's what's inspired people to be part of his world. Now, this past year, I had the privilege of joining my father as he was honored with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. It's the highest honor that can be given to a civilian.
And he's the first and the only designer to ever be given this honor. And he was given it for his business leadership, his trailblazing entrepreneurship, for his philanthropic efforts, and for literally helping to define American style and culture. And while this moment was incredibly emotional for me, and you can imagine that, perhaps it really hit me when I had the opportunity. Europe and America, it's been an incredibly busy, busy, busy, busy year. But I think it hit me as I met people, and they told me stories about how our products had become a part of their lives and how they literally wanted to live inside the Ralph Lauren ads that they had seen. They wanted to be a part of our culture.
Perhaps that's because we take them from the skylines of Manhattan to the Great Plains of the West, from the fashion-forward streets of Milan to the iconic fields of the Hamptons, from the untamed beaches of Montauk to the racetracks of London, from the boardroom to the classroom to the intimacy of your home. It's always been about community, people wanting to be inside of Ralph's world, be together. Ralph has always made it inviting. As Patrice talks about, it's about inclusive luxury. People dress up to be a part of this world. They dress up to go to our stores on a Saturday afternoon because our stores are not stores. They're homes where people gather to be a part of a culture. They come to our elegant restaurants. Maybe they'll see Oprah or see some cool influencers.
And they wait in line for our coffee, like you might see outside here or up on 72nd Street, where it's not unusual to see a line of people waiting for coffee. And maybe it's because they've seen people like Selena Gomez, who's the most followed woman on Instagram wearing Ralph Lauren, or they've seen us dressing the stars at the Met Gala. Maybe they've seen Beyoncé or Billie Eilish, or perhaps Mark Lee, one of the great K-pop stars, wearing Ralph Lauren on stage. And of course, we've dressed some of the most iconic stars in amazing roles, from Michael B. Jordan to Anne Hathaway. Now, I want to stop and just tell you about one example of where we've really brought people into a world that no one else can do, something that only Ralph can do. And Patrice talks about that a lot.
I've grown up in the Hamptons. My father has always loved the Hamptons. It's been a part of a theme that he's returned to quite often. In this instance, we created something even more spectacular. We created something that really felt like Ralph's Hamptons. What Ralph Lauren did is he created an amazing fashion show. You probably heard about this: men's, women's, and children's across many of our brands. Then we created a world around it. We enveloped our customers in this: horses running in the fields. Karen, you remember this. Beautiful cars, vintage classic cars. We even built a Polo Bar and surrounded people with hospitality. That was just so you can take care of the people who were there that day. It was an incredible experience that felt like you had stepped into the world of Ralph Lauren.
No one can question what this dream is about. But then, while this was incredibly viral, we built an ad campaign around it, which we've brought to the entire world. And I want you to just take a second and see if you can feel enveloped in it. It's about love. It was about family. It was about aspiration. It's about warmth. And once we knew that that had really connected and the campaign had taken off and the event in the Hamptons had taken off and really connected with people, we started to organize events around the Hamptons, all around the world, from Germany to Dubai to Shanghai, where we did our first-ever Ralph Lauren fashion show. And we brought the show over there, including a live fashion show, including a Polo Bar experience. And they loved it.
There were cheers in the audience, and people felt like they were connecting with our brand. It was resonating all the way in Beijing with 30 million people watching Ralph Lauren live. It's an incredible experience. Now, you could get a sense that just this campaign alone garnered over 20 billion earned media impressions. It was a staggering reach for a single campaign. And we're very proud of what we've accomplished. Now, it's one thing to outfit a fashion show, but perhaps an even more exciting fashion show is the Olympics. In front of a billion people, we dressed Team U.S.A. as they walked in front of the entire world, representing the best of America. We outfit Wimbledon on and off the field. We just celebrated 20 years of a partnership with the U.S. Open.
And of course, our partnership all the way on the other side of the planet with the Australian Open. And the Ryder Cup, which takes place next week. We dressed Team U.S.A. in front of the entire world. Lando Norris represents our fragrance, one of the great racing car drivers that's happening today. And I hope you'll catch him on television because he keeps winning. And so does Ralph Lauren. My father grew up in the Bronx, and his dream was always to play for the Yankees. And he literally had the opportunity to throw out the first pitch. And from the time he walked from the pitcher's mound to the dugout, our capsule collection with the Yankees had sold out. And from the Major Leagues, Aaron Judge, one of the greatest players in history, is the face of Ralph Lauren fragrances.
From the Major Leagues to the Digital Leagues, this is G2, where we outfit some of the greatest gamers online. We created an entire world of Ralph Lauren on Roblox to talk to another generation. While the digital world is important, integrating it with our retail experience is important. My father has always created an experience, an experience inside of our stores. So to see our store windows become holographic, interactive bears for holiday was incredible. In many stores all around the world, you could walk up to the windows and wave, dance, and the bear will wave back to you and dance with you. It was a fun experience, but it created something that was very viral and very fresh. Of course, it's cool to do digital things, but windows are only so big.
Why not blow up your fashion show to a football field and a half tall and create a drone show that would walk along The Bund in Shanghai? As I ran after these characters, there were crowds taking pictures. Again, another 20-something million people just taking pictures and posting across social media. It was an unbelievable and original experience for Ralph Lauren, showing how a classic brand can be thoroughly modern. Of course, you can see that our reach has been absolutely essential across all these programs in a single year. Now, all of this is possible because of our values. Now, behind every product with Ralph Lauren is meaning and values. That is the new luxury. It's not just about price point. It's about what these products mean to people, how they resonate in a very personal way.
With Pink Pony, we're very proud to connect with our consumers as we promised and now committed and successfully opened five cancer centers across the United States and research centers across Europe, and now working very closely with our team in Asia. This has been incredibly successful, and we're so proud of our partnership and what we've done to fight cancer. We've expanded our portrayal of the American dream with our partnerships with Morehouse and Spelman. We're constantly trying to learn about new stories and new ways to tell the story of what America and different cultures are about. This is Naomi Glasses of Navajo descent. She's come into our offices to help train and educate some of our designers about her culture. We've always loved what her culture is about, and we've always paid homage.
But now we've taken it to a new level of authenticity and credibility. And we're very proud of this relationship and many others as part of our artists in residence. Now, this is all just the beginning. In the next six months alone, we've just shown our fashion show, and we're about to create an entire book about 60 years of Ralph Lauren Collection. And that book will be sold all around the world as the fashion show is then emulated and brought to our stores this coming spring. We just launched this past weekend a new fragrance with Usher, the great superstar, and the fragrance is just out of the box, literally. My son has it and smelling a little bit because he's only nine. And we've just launched something called Ask Ralph, which is a partnership with Microsoft to celebrate 25 years of our digital innovation and leadership.
We're very proud of this. This is literally a style guide. It's Ralph Lauren in your pocket. You wake up in the morning, you want to feel confident about how you're getting dressed, how to put together a look of clothes. Ask Ralph. He will tell you what you need when you need it. And of course, you can shop from it. It's us leading in the world of artificial intelligence and leading in the digital space again. And we continue to do that. And there's a lot more coming behind this. And of course, we're going back to the Olympics and what promises to be the biggest Winter Olympics of all time in Cortina and in Milan this year in January. So you know what can I say? You know I can say a lot. I've worked in this company for 25 years.
In many ways, I've grown up in this company, literally playing under the desks of our designers as a little boy. And this company has never been stronger and more relevant than it is today. As I've said, Ralph Lauren is more than a designer. He writes to his clothes about the dream of a better life and a way of living. And it seems like today everybody wants to dress like Ralph Lauren. So I thank you very much. And now I'm going to turn this over to Iris, who's my partner in crime, to talk about how some of these marketing initiatives are connecting with people all around the world. So thank you very much.
David, thank you. Do you realize that we've been working together for 16 years, but time flew by because of the dream?
You and Ralph always ask us to dream with you, and we do. But we don't only dream, we deliver. Hello. Lovely to see you all again. Since we last met, our teams throughout the world have propelled the brand to new heights, from Paris to Milan, L.A. to Miami, Tokyo, Shanghai, Seoul, all the way to Sydney. I have never witnessed so much excitement and momentum behind the brand. And this momentum is scalable. I know you're going to ask me that question, and I'll repeat again. This momentum is scalable. So what's behind it? First, it's our art, our iconic brand that stands the test of time. Two, it is the deep trust we have built with our customers. And three, it is our scientific approach. That combination is unique, especially in a disrupted world where luxury has been redefined and AI has shifted customer expectations and behaviors.
The lines between inspiration and commerce are blurred. People want to entertain and shop at the same time. They want to watch a movie, buy the hero's look, and have a conversation about style, quality, and price all at once. And whether they are in a store, on social media, or talking to ChatGPT at midnight, they want it to feel effortless. But they also want to shop a brand they trust, a brand that is authentic, that is genuine. And this is where we lead. We have the most loyal customer in the industry because we have earned it over 60 years, thanks to our timeless consistency and because we know how to build deep, long-lasting relationships with our customers. We are built for this moment.
Today, I'd like to explain to you how we are positioned to lead not just right now, but in the world that is coming next. Over the last three years, we have delivered concrete results: brand desirability. We have the highest and the fastest brand consideration in luxury and premium fashion. Put simply, more customers want to buy us than ever before and more than any other brand. Isn't that remarkable? Let me say it again. We have the best brand consideration in fashion. Second, quality customer growth. In only three years, we have added more than 16 million new customers to our DTC business. It's not about volume, right? Customer value is up, and we have a record-breaking NPS. Customers are more satisfied. They shop more with us, and they stay for longer. That builds lifetime value. I'll come back to that a few times.
Let me be clear. This success didn't happen overnight. This result was built progressively, season after season, quarter after quarter, year after year, with discipline and consistency. This is why they are so solid. I'm extremely proud of our team. They are performance-driven. I know they are watching, so congratulations to everyone. Let me now go a level deeper into that notion of art, trust, and science. First, the art. At the core of our enduring success is our unique brand positioning, inclusive luxury. We have one of the largest penetrations in the industry. Yet 79% of customers see us as a luxury brand. This combination is absolutely unique. Very few brands can have both scale and luxury at the same time, but we do. In parallel, we have elevated our AUR and kept one of the highest value perceptions in the industry again. This is inclusive luxury.
And this inclusive luxury builds trust. So now let's talk about trust. When we recruit a customer, it is for life. We serve customers for every stage of their life. But they don't only shop with us. They live the Ralph Lauren lifestyle for themselves, their friends, their family, their homes, and their kids will do the same. And their grandkids will do the same from one generation to the next. We take lifetime value literally. While the industry tracks loyalty over two or three years, we measure it in decades. We have the most loyal customers in the industry. And listen to this. Almost 50% of our customers have been with us for more than 10 years, and almost 25% for over 20 years. This is loyalty. This is trust. And this trust translates into demand. We have the highest demand ever across all commerce platforms.
But what's most exciting is that we have high traction in new digital spaces: Gemini, DeepSeek, YouTube, Kakao, Line, Douyin, Reddit, you name them. Wherever customers are migrating, we are cutting through. And this is all possible thanks to our science. We started our AI journey nearly a decade ago, and we are now embracing agentic AI. We're using AI to improve customer experience, lifetime value, and our team's productivity. And we are ahead of the AI game because we have one agile tech that evolves fast as we do: sizable rich data that understands our customers deeply, talented data scientists that blend AI with style, working hand in hand with our creative teams. And finally, sophisticated AI models that have been running on our brand DNA for more than seven years. They don't behave like robots, but like real stylists.
We've also been using AI to refine our investment framework. So our in-house predictive models identify top value creation drivers for every marketing dollar we spend. We can then test and learn and pivot in real time with great confidence. Our investment strategy is a subtle orchestration between brand impact, customer growth impact, and profit impact. And the impact is real. We have increased our ROI over the last three years. And this is why we will be increasing our marketing investments. But we will be doing that with great diligence, pacing ourselves. As Ralph says, we don't want to be too hot. We don't want to be too cold. We need to protect the brand authenticity, the brand integrity. Branding is a very long-term game. The other bold move that we've made is in our organization.
We have shifted from centralized models and invested in talents where the expertise lies. So we have four hubs. It all starts in New York with Ralph and the creative leaders setting the vision. In Shanghai, we have our social commerce team. No surprise there. China is the most advanced digital commerce market. In Paris and Milan, we have our luxury hubs. And finally, in L.A., we are embedded into entertainment, close to studios and talents. So we have our unique inclusive luxury positioning and a timeless iconic brand, the art, the highest lifetime value, the trust, and an organization deeply rooted in AI, the science. We have great fundamentals. So let's now dive into the opportunities ahead and the strategies. We are the leader in menswear, no doubt.
And actually, over the last three years, we have widened the gap with the competition, and we will continue to do so. I'm looking at our menswear designer. Congratulations. You did it. But our biggest acceleration is coming from women's wear. Karen, here we go. From the next generation and from high net worth consumers. And the potential is still immense. Our women's wear desirability is the strongest ever. Look, when Taylor Swift decides to get engaged in a Polo dress, that says it all. And the next generation, they absolutely love our authentic brand, and they're not shy about it at all on social media. We are their favorite brand. High net worth consumers, as the luxury market evolves, they are deepening their engagement with us because they value our consistency, our integrity, and the quality of our products. And the results speak for themselves.
But above all, today, our biggest opportunity is our lifetime value. This is the beauty of our lifestyle business. Over a quarter of our customers cross shop brands and categories. But thanks to our data and analytics and our art of styling, we know we can deepen that penetration much further. So we have clear acquisition and retention opportunities. Now let's spend the last five minutes talking about the strategies to grab these opportunities. So the market has evolved. The frontiers between inspiration and commerce are blurring. People want entertainment, convenient shopping, and service all at once. And our response is very clear: entertaining and styling at scale. This is marketing fulfillment reimagined and driven by five strategies. It all starts with culture. David talked about it. We don't infiltrate culture. We shape it. Fashion, sports, art, music, lifestyle. Our brand is there leading with power and authenticity.
Let's take the example of sports. In a world shaped by AI, people crave real human emotions and moments. And sports delivers exactly that. It's live. It's unscripted. It unites people around values and dreams just like we do. And our investment in sports drives high reach and conversion. Over the last 20 years, we have built the largest sports portfolio in the luxury industry. We are the most established luxury brand in sports. That's power. Let's now talk about my second strategy, top cities. This is where we invest the most. Why? Because they have huge lifestyle authority and a high concentration of affluent shoppers. We understand each city's zeitgeist and pulse thanks to our connected teams on the ground. Let's take an example, randomly, Paris. We invest in bold media on the Opéra de Paris, retail theater in Saint-Germain-des-Prés, glamorous events during the fashion week.
And that creates cultural impact. When we go in a city, we go deep, we go wide, we go with intention and precision. And that's cultural impact that fuels social conversation, which leads me to my third strategy. In the last three years, we have transformed social media. And the results speak for themselves. We do it with a data-driven approach and a platform-native approach. But what really drives our success is the unique power of our cinematic brand and all our cultural dimensions. They perfectly fit the algorithm. Our movie-like campaigns cut through the algorithm on your feed. And whether you follow sports, fashion, art, music, we will appear on your feed on a regular basis, authentically, organically. This is cultural impact. But people don't just watch our content. They engage with it. They share it. And they even become creators.
This is the power of the Ralph Lauren community, a community of passionate fans who spread the word on our behalf. The result: huge, organic, authentic reach and clear leadership in social commerce. On Douyin, viewers of our Shanghai show were not just watching the fashion show. They were shopping in real time with style advice at their fingertips. This is proper, entertaining, and styling at scale, and Shin will elaborate on that later on. We piloted this in China, and we are now scaling it across major Western platforms, which brings me to my fourth strategy, styling at scale. Personalization is table stakes. We have elevated personalization to something much more meaningful, the art of styling. Our recent example is Ask Ralph that David mentioned. This is proper styling at scale, marrying our art of styling with our Agentic AI capabilities.
By styling customers, we increase basket size, and we build these lifelong relationships with our customers back to that lifetime value. The core and final pillar is that we are always on. Our rolling thunder of marketing activities moves at the pace of culture and anticipates consumer needs all year long, translating into commercial impact. This is the intensity of our brand. Ten days ago, we were at the U.S. Open. On Wednesday, we hosted our fashion show. On Saturday, we had an event with Usher Downtown. We're also at Goodwood near London. Today, we are launching our new fall campaign. I am with you. That's the highlight. And then in two weeks, we will be at the Ryder Cup. This is cultural impact. This is brand momentum that translates into lifetime value and fuel sustainable growth. So to close, Ralph Lauren is uniquely positioned to continue winning.
We deliver what very few can, that seamless blend of art, trust, and science. We don't just market. We entertain. We don't just dress customers. We style them. But above all, we've earned something very rare: deep trust and brand love that create loyalty for life. This is just the beginning, and now I'd like to invite to the stage Halide Alagöz, my great partner and friend. He's a Chief Product Officer, and our teams together work very closely to fuel that brand momentum and lifetime value. Halide.
Okay. Thank you. Thank you, Iris. Your passion and expertise always inspire me, and I'm so proud of how our teams work together to deliver a consistent, powerful message for our consumers. So thank you for your partnership. If the storytelling is what inspires, product is how you become a part of the dream.
I feel very fortunate to be here speaking to you today about product because since 1967, that's how Ralph has invited consumers all around the world to join his vision. It's that vision that continues to guide everything we do, a vision rooted in quality, timelessness, authenticity. While we never waver from that foundation, it's our job to put that vision into context. That means knowing and understanding your customers, as Ralph said, who they are, where they shop, and how they live. When it comes to product, we start with vision, our timeless vision, our anchor of consistency and authenticity. We then marry this vision with insights. We have more precise data and insights than ever before. Today, we know not only how to meet our customers' functional needs and experiences, but also about their emotional aspirations.
As Patrice said in the beginning, we have one of the most powerful portfolios of core products in the industry. They are the foundation of any wardrobe, and they are the foundation of the signature Ralph Lauren style. This is such a differentiator for our brand. And then ultimately, we bring those products to life in uniquely Ralph Lauren ways: clear, consistent, compelling across marketing, product, and channels. This connected execution is so powerful. Like Patrice said earlier, I bet you know what I mean when I say something is very Ralph. And we work together in every turn to deliver that. This simple, proven framework and approach works across our business. It's embedded into how we frame and deliver our product strategy, whether it's one of our well-established businesses like men's or our high-potential growth areas like women or in a specific category like handbags.
As you know, we have a unique balance of foundational strength and market leadership in core and high-potential growth areas where we are already seeing traction. Together, our high-potential categories: women's, outerwear, and handbags delivered a combined sales of 40% increase over the last three years. Outerwear continues to be a very important category, a high-potential growth opportunity for our company because it's a very important element of our customers' wardrobes, and it enhances our lifestyle proposition. Our women's business continues to be our largest growth opportunity over the next three years and beyond. Today, I will walk you through how we apply our approach into these areas. First, let's look at core. Since our last Investor Day, our revenue in our core products increased by 33%.
Our gross margins followed suit, up by 390 pips through better connecting our supply and demand so we have the right product at the right time at the right place, and we have delivered 30% AUR growth, improving quality and value for our customers. We have offered core in higher price points within a category. For example, in our sweater category, our cable-knit sweaters in cotton, wool, and cashmere help us build a price architecture, and through our core, we also trade customers up and across to higher AUR categories like outerwear as the customers pick their outerwear to pair with their gorgeous sweaters. Our core products are at the heart of our success, and they will continue to be a part of our biggest growth opportunity ahead. Take Polo Men's, where we are well-positioned in the market, and we still have significant growth opportunities as an example.
We offer timeless products that transcend seasons and define the essence of the Ralph Lauren lifestyle: Blazers, Polos, Chinos, Oxfords, the Polo coat, and more. These are the products customers know and trust, and they are willing to invest in them. Our core is a reliable foundation that delivers consistent performance and profitability. They represent 70% of our business, which means 70% of our business demonstrates remarkable resilience across business cycles and maintaining full-price sell-throughs. And while our core is iconic, it is not static. We innovate with fabrication, quality, and design elements while preserving the authentic heritage of our icons. We inspire consumers to wear these classics in new ways relevant for different occasions in their lives. They are worn together in iconically Ralph ways. The look is never an Oxford shirt alone.
It's that oxford shirt worn beautifully with a beautiful Bweed blazer or with a very soft cashmere sweater with a beautiful chino pant under a beautiful functional windbreaker for an ultimate comfortable and sophisticated style. You see many examples of those amazing core and how we style them with other amazing products to give you the Ralph look. And our unique point of view in styling supports not only our core, but it also trades our consumers up and across our portfolio. So our approach is effective in core, and it applies equally well to one of our greatest opportunities, women's. And for women's, let me start with where we are with the business. In fiscal 2025, our women's business reached $2 billion, a credit to our brand and AURs. And women continues to represent one of our most significant long-term opportunities for growth.
We are one of the few women apparel brands that hit the $2 billion mark, and yet we are only 1% of the global premium market, a market that's highly fragmented, and no surprise, I know the women in the room will agree with me, women are the powerhouse consumers of our brand. They are frequent shoppers, they are deeply engaged, and they are less price-sensitive, and this creates enormous opportunities across our portfolio. We expect our high-potential categories, including women, to grow at an accelerated rate over the next three years and beyond, outpacing our total company growth, so let's see how we apply our approach to women's. As we touched earlier, our comprehensive consumer segmentation analysis has provided us deeper insights into our target consumers. This rich global data has given us clear direction and confidence in understanding how to engage and inspire her.
Based on these insights, we have then strategically aligned our brand portfolio to target each of these target consumers, or as we call them, muses. Let's take each of our brands in turn, starting with Women's Polo. This is our biggest and fastest-growing women's business and continues to be our largest opportunity of growth in the company. Polo is the reference point for joyful, warm, refined American lifestyle for women around the world. You see in these images how she elevates classic items with a unique twist in styling or preppy colors. She's not interested in following trends. She leans into style and confidently expressing who she is. Polo Women says, "You can pair this navy blazer with a wrap trouser, and it works." Moving into our next fastest-growing brand, Ralph Lauren Collection.
Collection is the destination for this elegant, sophisticated woman who strives for excellence in all aspects of her life. We are so excited to see the high levels of business growth in Collection, and we expect to deliver strong double-digit growth this year in Collection business. How are we doing it? We're doing it by leaning into iconic core styles to build a foundation of everyday sophistication, and then we complement it with special occasion dressing. The Collection woman gravitates towards elevated fabrics, unique product details, and high levels of artisanal craftsmanship. Coming into Lauren. Lauren is the destination for trusted classic feminine lifestyle for this modern woman, dressing her for every occasion. Over the past eight years, we have continued to elevate the Lauren brand from an opening price point position to a premium brand destination with a very strong value proposition.
We have been expanding our reach, and we will continue to expand our reach through new points of elevated distribution. The Lauren woman is also a very high-value customer for us because she not only shops for herself, but she also shops for her significant other, for her kids, and for her home. And finally, you might be familiar with our cult favorite, Double RL brand. Double RL is there for this confident woman with an individual sense of style, with the opportunity to add pieces that she loves to her collection. Double RL really resonates with this customer who really values personal style, elevated quality, and authenticity as she collects and curates her wardrobe with unique pieces. Each of these women is proud to wear Ralph Lauren in her own way, and we are so proud to be a part of their life.
Our approach works in our large foundational categories in women, where we continue to find new ways to delight her. And it's also the means by which we're taking share in a very important acceleration category for women, handbags, where we have great traction, and we're just getting started. Handbags is a powerful acceleration category. Since last Investor Day, we have delivered more than 40% growth in the category across our brands. Yet handbags still represent a small single percentage of our total company business and less than 1% of that global, highly fragmented market. Within Polo specifically, the fastest growth is in this $500-$1,500 segment, a sweet spot where high quality meets accessibility. And it's delivering compelling value with significant white space for profitable growth. This category is not only a growth driver, but also a powerful entry point for our next-generation customers.
So it supports both of our new customer recruitment, but also brand awareness. You see many of our beautiful handbags also in the product pads. Please go and have a look. It's soon holiday gifting season, so you want to spoil yourself or buy gifts for your significant others. So now I talked about core and highlighted women's and handbags. And beyond apparel and accessories, we need to talk about one more group. And that is our complementary lifestyle categories. They enhance our portfolio and cement our position as one of the only true lifestyle brands in the world, from home to sleepwear to fragrance and gifting. When you enter our world, it's not just about what you wear. It's about how you live. One great example, which many of you got to experience here this morning, is Ralph's Coffee.
As a Turkish person, I can confirm our coffee is really good. So with locations all around the world, our coffee provides a fun, inclusive, and joyful way to step into the brand. And it's one of our most Instagram experiences worldwide. These categories create opportunities for our consumers to discover and engage with our brand, which drives relevance and excitement. Okay. Before I wrap up, I want to take a minute to touch a point that I know is top of mind for many of you, and it happens to be something I'm very passionate and proud about. And that is how we bring all these products to life through our supply chain. We have built a powerful supply chain over the last 10 years. We don't let global disruptions get in the way of our ability to meet our consumer demand.
From pandemic challenges to trade uncertainties, we were agile and resilient. In fact, not only once did you hear us highlight supply chain as an excuse on an earnings call. Our model hinges on creating a responsible supply chain that creates optionality and agility so that we can adapt quickly to changing conditions. Coming into this year of extreme disruptions, no country comprises more than 20% of our production. That creates structural stability. We have multi-country sourcing for all of our core products. This creates optionality. We reduce our SKU count by 20%. That creates productivity. And while we were doing that, we increase our ability to chase by 40%. This enables responsiveness. We also continue to bring our supply chain future forward by integrating digital, AI, and machine learning in everything we do, from product design and development to supply-demand balancing.
We have built-in flexibility to deliver consistently without compromising on quality, sustainability, or cost. And we will continue to future-proof our supply chain. I want to leave you with this. Our product strategy is a uniquely powerful blend anchored in the enduring strength of our core while accelerating growth through our high-potential categories that have already proven their ability to scale. This combination of a steady foundation and a dynamic growth engine sets us apart. And it's further enriched by our lifestyle portfolio, which keeps us in the center of how people live, dress, and express themselves. Together, this creates a strategy that's both resilient and expansive, rooted in what only we can do while boldly seizing opportunities ahead. And with a supply chain that's designed to deliver everywhere, every time, we intend to keep delighting our consumers and unlocking growth. Thank you.
Thank you, Halide, and thank you all for joining us. We're going to stop for a quick lunch break. Again, I encourage you to check out our gorgeous product displays. You can also test drive Ask Ralph, which you've just heard about this morning. We will reconvene here for the webcast live at 12:20 P.M. See you guys soon.
Hello. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome back from lunch. Do we have everyone back? Well, I hope you had a nice little break because this afternoon is going to be exciting, just like the morning session. So it's great to be here with you. My name is Shin. I'm really excited to tell you and talk to you about the great progress that we have made in Asia Pacific over the last three years and discuss the future opportunity in APAC.
But before we do that, let me just, on behalf of the regions, share with you our global key ecosystem approach, the third pillar of NGC Drive. You heard from these speakers this morning, my colleagues this morning, that we put consumer in the center of everything we do. Of course, with the channel approach, we do the same. This comes back to our inclusive luxury positioning, ensuring that we show up in a consistent, elevated way for all our customers, wherever they are, across geography, price points, and channels. Since we last spoke, we have done a lot of work to sharpen the role of each of our channels. Let's first start with digital. This is the window to our brand. Naveen will speak more about it later, of how we made it a surround sound for the brand. Next, social commerce.
Anyone shopped on social commerce recently? I did. This is becoming increasingly important, particularly in China, where millions of women are shopping every day, every minute, across platforms like Douyin, WeChat, full-price stores. This is where our customers will experience the world of Ralph Lauren with an elevated assortment, hospitality offers, and styling services. And we will continue to expand here. And finally, wholesale and outlets. We have done a lot of work here over the last three years. They remain important channels for access and new customer recruitment. And we will continue to elevate here. From a market perspective, we will focus our investment in our top cities with high fashion influence, high-value customers, and of course, new store opportunities. We will continue to build into our top 30 cities in black while investing in our next 20 cities in blue.
You will hear more from my colleagues from Ashley, from Mercedes, about how this all shows up in EMEA and also North America, but first, I want to give you a glimpse of how we bring this to life in APAC, so let's start with some context. APAC is 60% of the world's population. It's crowded there. We have 40 countries and 3,000 different dialects and languages. 3,000. I speak three and a half. Over the last three years, our teams have really succeeded in connecting the consumer to our brand, and the results are super clear. APAC has grown 17% CAGR over this period. 17%. And this is an exceeding plan, and in fiscal 2025, we reached $1.7 billion annual sales, or 25% of our total company's revenue. We've been busy, and thank you, Karen and team. We opened 275 new stores.
Now we have the largest fleet of DTC directly operated stores globally. These stores are highly elevated, differentiated, showcasing our broad luxury portfolio of brands. We're commanding the highest AUR globally. This is still growing at double-digit. What's more, we're winning across generations from Gen Z to Silver Spenders. What's next? I think I'm going to get the same question as Iris. Are we going to keep up with the momentum? The answer is yes. Why are we so confident? What gives me such confidence is actually the proven playbook we have in China. This playbook can be scaled across the other market. Let's start here with China. It is a standout success over the last three years. Our revenue nearly doubled. China's penetration to the total company grew from 5% to 8%.
During this period, we have expanded our operating margin by 15 points while continuing to invest in building the brand, driving brand awareness, and investing in innovation that's going to support our future growth. We opened 100 new stores here. These are not just smaller dual-gender stores. These are also complemented with emblematic stores in key locations and top malls. Today, we have more than 250 stores across Greater China. We still maintain the number one AUR globally and, of course, growing double digit year- on- year. If we look at digital, where we focused from the beginning, we are very proud to say that we are the number one luxury brand across Tmall, JD.com, and more recently, Douyin. We've reached this impressive result by focusing on the following three key areas.
That is amplify the brand locally, drive across the full funnel, and tailor our offering to consumers. So let me share with you a few examples of how this looks like. We know what Ralph Lauren stands for. David spoke so much about it. It talks about aspiration, authenticity, timelessness. And I think most relevant today is optimism. We know that these values are universal. And so when we premiered our very Ralph documentary in China, it was the largest ever campaign in the market. We went big, really big, because we knew that what Ralph stands for would really resonate, especially if we deliver it in a powerful, localized way. We had a full takeover of Shanghai, a stunning, beautiful drone show across the beautiful Bund. And of course, we telegraphed the livestream across multiple digital channels, reaching and touching the hearts of 22 million Chinese consumers.
This is a great example of how we have successfully leveraged global content and campaigns to go big at the top of the funnel to grow our awareness, and in this case, by four points. The full funnel execution was key here, as it will be in my next example, which David spoke about, our first ever Resee Fashion Show in Shanghai. In one night, we brought Ralph's Hamptons show not only to the privileged 200-odd guests in the room, but to 37 million livestream viewers across China. And what's more, it wasn't just an Resee Show in Shanghai. We added a See Now, Buy Now Show. We had live shopping backstage where the runway models and a professional host were presenting looks for consumers to shop online immediately. This drives additional four million viewers. And we took this brand event as a content hub.
We leveraged it as a content hub, producing content for different channels. As a result, we drove our digital sales by 80% during the month of the show. The full funnel approach and model reaps high returns both in brand and commercial results. It is something that we can do and will do and replicate it across the other markets. Lastly, let me talk to you about how we are engaging in our key target consumer, namely women. Halide spoke about it this morning. In China, we are traditionally known as a men's brand. From the time we re-entered, we have strategically positioned and focused on winning with women. We have intentionally created dual-gender format stores, prioritized locations in the malls where there are high-value women consumers, and we offer a balanced men's and women's assortment.
Today, China has the most balanced gender sales mix globally. Chinese women like me are highly engaged on their social platform, on Reddit, on Douyin. And so we launched lots of efforts, campaigns to reach them there to help us grow our brand awareness, our desirability, and of course, strengthening the women's consideration. And over the last three years, we grew a CAGR of 40%. So I think you've seen that we have a clear formula of success in China. And we expect China to continue to grow and to deliver high growth in the next three years. But what's more exciting is that these key learnings can be scaled across APAC, where there remains significant opportunity. So let's talk about it. Let's start first with digital acceleration. I'm really excited about this.
Building on our digital success today, we aspire to drive half of mainland China's digital acceleration through social commerce, so we need to talk about Douyin when we talk about social commerce, so Douyin, commonly known as TikTok outside of China, is already the second largest e-commerce player after Tmall. Our Douyin store was opened in April this year, and since the last few months, we've been tracking really, really positive results. Most of the consumers, majority of the consumers are new to the brand, and when compared to industry benchmark, our store delivers higher average order value and stronger customer engagement through time spent and click-through rate, but what really stands out is our approach on Douyin. While others are focused on pricing and promotion, we are focused on bringing our brand storytelling to life and using this channel as a source of style inspiration for Chinese consumers.
The social commerce opportunity is beyond China. In fact, we know it. It's global, and we will start to replicate the success of China around the world. Next, clienteling. Our ability to do effective clienteling is going to be our turbocharger in this DTC strategy. Our DTC fleet in APAC allows us to own the customer relationship and to unlock the first-party data that allows us to be more precise with customer acquisition, so three years ago, China spearheaded the company's first e-clienteling app embedded in the WeChat ecosystem, so this application or platform allows our store associates to connect with the customer one-on-one every day, 24/7, if they want, so this, of course, drives higher and deeper connection with the brand, and of course, the result is higher lifetime value. The capability that we have built has already contributed to one quarter of the growth in China.
So, over the course of the next few years, we will invest in technology and data infrastructure to unlock the growing database with predictive AI technology to drive clienteling at scale across APAC. Now, let's talk a little bit about geography. First, by starting with Japan, our biggest market in APAC. In this market, we expect to continue to drive solid growth over the next three years. In fact, next year, we celebrate 50 years anniversary in Japan. 50 years. That's impressive. Given our history, we have a really high brand equity and also strong luxury perception in this market with a really loyal and sophisticated consumer base. But yet, we have lots of opportunity to elevate Polo and to make it the style reference brand in Japan and to the rest of APAC. We also look to meaningfully scale digital. Here, our digital penetration is only single digit.
Imagine the opportunity. Next, moving on to Korea. This is an iconic cultural fashion capital of the world, and the last 10 years, we've seen the rise of K-pop culture across the globe, and did you know that there are 250 million K-pop fans around the world? 250. I'm one of them, so we have a solid business here for 40 years, and we will continue to grow over the next three years. We will continue to optimize our K-culture partnerships and leverage the K-talent globally where it's relevant. As you've seen on this video, we have recently shot the Polo Women's Global Campaign featuring Winter from aespa. She was at the show last week, and this is the first time we shot a global campaign in Asia, and similar to Japan, we have aggressive digital growth plans.
In fact, in the coming year, we will launch the RL app, the first app to be launched outside of North America in Korea. This will allow our consumers to be able to access our brand and product much more quickly and much more personalized, so today, one last point in Korea is that our business in Korea is dominated by Polo in department stores with smaller footprint, so we have a lot of opportunity to grow and freestanding stores and luxury through new distribution expansion, so as we look across APAC, despite having the largest distribution of DTC stores globally, we still have a lot of meaningful white space opportunity to continue to expand our city, our network across the cities. This holds true for the top eight city ecosystem in black and as well as our next top city in blue.
And as we focus on our top city clusters, this is very key because it enables us to focus and to consolidate our resources so that we can dial up marketing activations and to ensure our brand shows up in the most elevated possible way here. Over the next three years, we target to open 150 new stores, 150. And this reflects a balance of targeted new openings with improving productivity in existing top locations through square footage expansion and operational discipline. So as we scale and elevate, I am confident that APAC will continue to lead the enterprise at an anticipated high single-digit CAGR and while continuing to expand our operating margins over the three-year horizon. Our three drivers of growth will be China, digital acceleration, and continued AUR expansion as we continue to elevate the brand.
From a market perspective, our top three largest markets are well-positioned to lead APAC's growth, with China expected to continue growing at a low double-digit rate and further solid growth in our mature markets like Japan and Korea. So in conclusion, we are well-positioned to maintain our momentum and continue to drive sustainable, profitable growth in the region. Our teams are highly engaged, and our playbooks are proven. So I'd like to end off with a quote from Ralph: "Love what you do, be passionate, work hard, work together, and aspire to the best." This is the Ralph Lauren way, and this is also the secret sauce of our success in APAC. Thank you. So I would like to hand over now to Ashley, who's a dear friend, but also a very keen competitor.
But I do admire him because after more than 30 years with Ralph Lauren, his love and his passion for the brand is so undeniably contagious. Welcome, Ashley.
Please, smash the heart. Thank you very much. Thank you, Shin. That was spectacular. What you've been able to achieve, actually, swimming against the tide, is fantastic. Of course, it does add a little bit of spice into our competition of who's going to have the best month and quarter. Time will tell, so I hope you're ready to hear of our journey in Europe and what we call emerging markets. That is primarily a story of elevation, about creating balance in key city ecosystems to engage with the consumer at every touchpoint, and by embracing the fact that they have a choice and knowing who they are, where they are, and where they shop.
By ensuring every time they engage with us, they get a uniquely Ralph Lauren experience. Before I go into too much detail, I just want to give you an overview of our region: $2.2 billion last fiscal year, over 130 countries, 100 currencies, 60 languages. We are complex, yet we're diversified, and we've benefited from that diversity as we grew and tried to navigate these geopolitical and macroeconomic environments that have been pretty heavy in our region. We deliver our global brand strategies in a localized way. That's been a key part of our success and enabled us and contributed to us having the highest operating margin globally.
I'm delighted to say that despite that volatility, we have been able to deliver ahead of expectation across both the top and the bottom line by achieving a revenue CAGR of 10% while expanding our operating income by close to 500 basis points. We've enhanced our brand position through many initiatives, including pricing power and a reduction in discounts. That's enabled us to grow our AUR by over 30%. That is eight consecutive years of AUR growth. How are we able to do that? Simply put, by building these key city ecosystems and putting the consumer right in the middle, by investing across the portfolio, by accelerating our marketing spend across key cities and key countries, and knowing that when we impact Paris and Milan, fashion icon cities, we are making global statements, not just local ones.
By being bold in growing digital across our own websites and through wholesale partners and ensuring every channel consistently represents who we are, whether that's across stores, across digital, or across wholesale. We have done that through new openings, through renovations, and when required, through closures. Let's take a closer look at how we have been able to embed ourselves in these key European cities: Paris, the fashion capital of the world. Through strong marketing and store statements, we have been able to grow our visibility and our credibility. I love this image. Here we are planting our women's flag, bang, right in the middle of this strategic city. London, a model ecosystem, actually, with 12 of our own stores and internationally recognized department stores, and where we have the highest VIC penetration in our region. We have built a scalable clientele model that we are going to roll out.
If you were in London for Wimbledon, you would have seen a fantastic example of how we activate a city. In Dubai, the shopping and tourist center for the region, where we focused our attention, delivering differentiated experiences in this highly competitive luxury landscape. We opened a Ralph Lauren Pop-up Beach Club. We entertained on a superyacht, and we took over a luxury villa and recreated the Hamptons. This is what we mean when we say that Ralph Lauren is a storyteller and a dream maker. A large part of our success is the very healthy balance we have across our channels, which is about 50% DTC and 50% elevated margin accretive wholesale. Because we know the consumer is channel agnostic, and we own that fact. We ensure that our stores, our website, and wholesale complement each other and speak with the same tone.
And that's allowed us to deliver consistent revenue and profit growth across all channels. I'd like to talk about digital for a moment, and we've spoken about that quite a bit today. It's a really powerful pillar of our story. But it's not just about revenue growth. It's about customer acquisition, particularly NextGen. And we've done that using two vehicles, really: our own website, and we're now in over 70 countries. And that's delivered accelerated growth and through strong partnerships with our key pure players and brick-and-click retailers. And leveraged their extensive database and expanded our reach whilst growing our market share. And just like Shin, we've been busy opening stores. We were under-penetrated and knew we had to build that direct route to the consumer.
Since the last Investor Day, we have opened over 60 stores, including a magnificent men's and women's flagship on Via della Spiga in Milan and across the street, a standalone children's store, our largest children's store in the world, actually, in London on the prominent Sloane Square in Chelsea. In fact, that store has been so successful, we're going to expand it next year and making new investments in cities where we didn't even have a store: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Bordeaux, Prague, Istanbul, further elevating those city ecosystems. Just as a side note, Istanbul has a population twice that of New York, London and Paris. We've only just started that journey, opening our first store there last December. That store, like Sloane Square, has been so successful, we'll be expanding that next year. It's not just about opening new stores.
It's about continuous improvement, working harder with what you've got. And so we've been able to drive greater productivity through our existing brick-and-mortar fleet, through initiatives, a number of them, actually, space optimization, by replacing cash registers with mobile points of sale. And that very simple act across the entire fleet is like opening new stores in terms of retail space gained, by engaging with our retail team, our ambassadors, our frontline workers, our largest population, and ensuring they have the right tools to deliver a one-of-a-kind service, and leaning into our assortments towards core and high-potential categories, particularly women's wear. And the roll-up of that is more efficient use of space and better engagement. Outlets, we have to talk about outlets because they are a really big part of our inclusive luxury positioning. I'm really proud of the role that they play.
They're often the first place we engage with the consumer, and sometimes the only place, so it's imperative we deliver an elevated service in that Ralph Lauren world. We started a complete renovation of the fleet, and that's enabled us to drive quality comp growth and narrow our pricing gap to our full-price stores. It's also allowed us to reduce our third-party liquidation to a single-digit percent of sales through better inventory management and better leverage of that elevated fleet. Wholesale, I said earlier that it was 50% of our business, and it's been pivotal on our journey from an exposure and a profit perspective. We've exited literally hundreds of doors, and that's enabled us to elevate and build a healthier platform for growth. That reduction in distribution has enabled a higher quality of sales while showing spectacular growth.
And we've built stronger partnerships with those who shared our aspirations and became mutually more productive. I'd like to bring these ecosystems to life by using two fantastic but very different examples of how we've been able to transform the consumer's perception of our brand: Germany and Italy. Let me start with Germany, our highest growth market, the biggest economy in Europe, and the biggest population. And we only had four full-price stores and a wholesale presence that really didn't represent us appropriately. So we went to work. In Munich, we expanded across all channels and introduced our first Ralph's Coffee in a European department store. We refurbished our flagship, and we added a second store in that city very recently. And in Berlin, we now have a store on the Ku'damm, the Berlin Madison Avenue, and another store in a mall. And we have a very elevated wholesale presence.
From Düsseldorf to Hamburg, we further elevated our wholesale presentations through immersive takeovers. Germany has also played a pivotal role in our digital growth. We've worked very closely with the digital natives, deepened our luxury credentials, and expanded our reach across Europe. Italy is completely different, where we've re-energized and reshaped our brand. In fiscal 2018, frankly, we had too many outlet stores and only one full-price store. That was in Rome. It wasn't even in Milan. In this high-equity market, we weren't representing Ralph properly. We were underwhelming the consumer, and that was reflected in our results. With Italy not having a sizable department store group, it was even more critical we opened stores. We embarked on an opening program, and we've now added 15 full-price stores.
I mentioned the two in Milan earlier, but also we opened in key resorts like Forte dei Marmi, Lake Como, and Capri. And we notably increased our marketing investments across the country through activations. And now Italy has the highest brand consideration in all of Europe in our last fiscal year. So that's been our story for the last three years. I'm really proud of what we've been able to achieve. We've set the stage and laid the foundations for what is ahead. And we have data to support significant opportunities and white space to harvest.
So for the next three years, we'll build on this with even more purpose and focus, lean into where we've been the most effective, and we're going to continue to run the play through a number of initiatives: outpacing investments in marketing, scaling to more top cities, increase market share in digital, and expand our productivity initiatives, accelerate our store opening program. Let me talk in a little bit more detail about some of those initiatives, starting with marketing. David and Iris spoke about the power of cinematic storytelling. At Wimbledon, we inspire across generations, and we will have the same impact in the upcoming Winter Olympics in Milan-Cortina as we did in last summer's Olympics in Paris. We're going to be expanding the scale of our activations from our top five cities to new cities like Madrid, Frankfurt, Hamburg, and Mumbai.
Digital will remain a powerhouse and will lead our growth over the next three years. We already have the highest digital penetration globally, but we still see so much opportunity. We're going to continue scaling our online flagships and reach new consumers. And with digital wholesale, we'll continue leveraging our high-reach accounts and our high-equity accounts. And with the stores, we'll broaden our reach from our top eight cities to our top 15 cities, including in statement cities like Vienna and Zurich, and reaching further into Germany, but also in more mature cities like London, where between now and Christmas we will open two more stores and further expanding in Paris. So we'll accelerate our full-price openings to 75 stores over the next three years, increasing our desirability and reach. So where's that going to take us?
By fiscal 2028, we're going to build on this strong growth, and we're projecting a mid-single-digit revenue CAGR while expanding our operating income. As a result, since the start of our Next Great Chapter journey in fiscal 2018, we would have opened 200 full-price stores, elevated our outlet fleet, reshaped wholesale, acquired millions of new DTC consumers, increased our revenue by almost $1 billion while increasing our operating income. As I come into land, let me just headline this. This has been and will be and will always be a story of elevation. As we look forward, we won't be short of choices or options, and we're really optimistic about building on what we've built and prioritizing where we will have the highest impact. Thank you for listening.
And now it's my pleasure to introduce to you today our newest leader, Mercedes, who's joined at just the right time to lead North America into its new future. Thank you.
Thank you, Ashley. Great job. Thank you so much, Ashley. The way that our teams and EMEA have delivered Ralph's vision is truly inspiring. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be here today for my first Ralph Lauren Investor Day. I just celebrated my six-month anniversary with the company, so I'm a little younger than my colleagues up here on the stage. What an unforgettable and exhilarating six months this has been. It's taken me across the country to visit our stores, meet our wholesale partners, see our teams, and visit our incredible distribution center in action. I also went to China and to Europe, where Shin and Ashley kindly welcomed me to see the way that Ralph Lauren shows up in such an authentic way. Every place I have been, what has stood out for me is that we have the most passionate, exceptional teams who are obsessed with our customer.
Across my career in luxury hospitality and retail, I have seen firsthand the difference it makes when you create welcoming environments, when you elevate service, and when you deliver undeniable value to the customer. It is what keeps people coming back throughout their lifetime, like Iris spoke about earlier. Who does that better than Ralph Lauren? In fact, I believe we have the opportunity to connect and scale this even further in North America. It is a main reason I joined Ralph Lauren is because I believe the company's best days are ahead of it. Many of you have been on this journey with us as we successfully undertook one of the most challenging and ambitious resets in our company's history, one could argue without clear precedent in the industry.
So over this most recent leg of the journey, I'm proud to say we have pivoted the region to a healthier foundation for long-term sustainable growth. So today, I will walk you through how we are creating the best consumer-centric, curated experience for our North America consumers, not one size fits all, the significant opportunities for growth that still lie ahead, and of course, the key building blocks that we will deliver on. So let me start with some context on where we are today. North America remains our largest region in the company with $3 billion in revenue. Throughout our elevation journey, we have delivered on our highest brand awareness, value perception, and now luxury perception globally. We are starting to deliver healthier, sustainable, long-term growth because of fundamental repositioning work that the team has been underway with since 2018. So some highlights.
Let's take a minute to digest this slide. There's a lot of numbers. So we have transformed our online business from a discount site into a true digital flagship and one of the best expressions of our brand, driven by full-price sales growth. We have rationalized our wholesale and outlet presence, focusing on Tier 1 doors and reducing our reliance on off-price sales. And we have expanded and continued to accelerate our full-price store portfolio, which is now our fastest-growing channel in our ecosystem. So all of this has resulted in increased brand desirability with our consumers. Our AURs have more than doubled over this period, even as we continue to grow our value perception. And I can't help but mention that this has all stabilized North America in revenues and operating margin amid all this repositioning, the pandemic, inflation, and the list goes on.
The business is in a much healthier place today. How have we started to think about driving solid, consistent growth? First, in digital, we've brought in new leadership who you'll hear from shortly, bringing a focused approach to our strategies in product, marketing, communications, and also the site experience. Demand is there, and we have not yet fully grown into our potential, especially as we further connect our digital experience with our in-store experience. Second, our full-price stores. We started this elevation journey in FY 2018 with 40 stores. We spent the last three years developing and testing a highly disciplined model for new store growth that is driving a more profitable key city ecosystem. We're focusing on productivity across the board of space, of product, and of our people.
So we've added about a dozen new stores with a focus on very disciplined economics, opening stores in the right centers, the right adjacencies, and with the right financials. We've also renovated several of our key flagships here in New York, also in Chicago, and we have invested in small locations around the country for increased productivity in certain areas. Now, I'm sure you've heard we purchased two flagship locations this year, Prince Street in SoHo, not far from here, and Newbury Street in Boston. We will remain highly selective and look at opportunities in our most important top cities going forward. So next, our outlet environments. These are working really well for us. The channel has an important role to play in how we reach consumers in North America.
You may not know, but our average household income in this channel is over $100,000, and the outlet is a local channel. So we've invested in the client experience in our more elevated environments. Woodbury Common, not too far from here, is a great example. I was recently there to check in on back-to-school activity, and it was so incredible to see the warmth of how the customers and our teams are working together, the demand for coffee, the engagement around our create-your-own offering, and the customers' traffic spanned generations and demographics. As we have elevated the experience here, we have brought the consumer along with us, expanding the consumer base and our audience. We are also initiating a segmentation focus in the outlets, tiering based on local dynamics and local demographics. So we have more local doors and some that are more driven by international tourism.
We've responded with agility to drive value, service, and targeted merchandising. And as I mentioned, in some of the more elevated locations, you will see things like coffee. All of this has resulted in driving positive comp growth in seven of the last eight consecutive quarters and AUR growth of 20% since 2022, with still more opportunities ahead. Now, within wholesale, we have focused on a more disciplined inventory management to align sell-in to sell-out. We invested in our top doors and elevated our assortments. We grew our AUR and reduced promotions. Promotions are down 50% vs pre-pandemic, and our AUR is up 30%. We increased penetration in luxury department stores with increased brand strength in those doors and more performance. We're continuing to reduce our off-price unit volume, which is down over 75% since FY 2018 and down 45% since FY 2022.
Now, all of this has resulted in us further elevating our presence in this channel, improving quality of sale, and building proof points for share gains across all of our families of business. So now that we have started to drive solid, consistent growth, how will we build on it? It's not lost on me that a person named Mercedes is driving the North America region into the future, something I never used to like as a child, but now it's a great name for this time. We will build on our foundation in North America by first, putting even greater focus on the consumer, second, evolving the role of digital, and third, building into the white space ecosystem expansion opportunities. So let me dive in. You've heard today from many of my colleagues that we now know our consumer better than ever.
We will leverage regionalized insights to deliver more precise and informed engagement and communication and precise product selections to our consumers. We can now tailor communication not just for the North America consumer, but to specific consumer cohorts. And in digital, you'll hear shortly from Naveen how we've been pivoting the role of digital and the need for a 360-degree brand presentation across your shopping journey. We've optimized the balance between brand building and performance-driving investments. We've harmonized our product assortment and inventory, shifting from wide and shallow to focused and deep, resulting in bigger average baskets. And in the experience, we've created elevated friction-free journeys, enabling product discovery and brand engagement. This is on top of the work that the team has already done to increase marketing effectiveness, quality of sale, and the site speed and performance.
This has resulted in sequentially improving comp sales growth over the past year, and these actions have put in motion even more opportunity ahead. So moving to the wider ecosystem, our full-price stores serve as an extremely important touchpoint for consumers. They discover our brand, they're served, they get immersed in our world and the styling that is so unique to Ralph Lauren. As you've heard from my colleagues, it's not just about a Polo shirt or a sweater, but it's the mix that reflects your personal style. From the start of our key city journey, we disproportionately focused our investments on the top stores, our investments in marketing and store expansion on our top 14 cities in North America that you see here on the map.
Over the next three years, we'll expand our focus to include an additional six cities where we will start to plant the seeds for longer-term growth. We plan to add approximately 15 more Full-Price stores in the region over the next three years, and we see further comp opportunity in our existing store base as we use our current momentum to fuel further changes to increase that productivity, leverage data and AI to understand the consumer better, and lean further into the market-specific learnings that we're gaining. We also cannot leave out that very important one-to-one client relationship building that comes from the very special Ralph Lauren engagement I mentioned earlier. Our teams are amazing at making you feel a part of Ralph's world, and that is the true definition of Inclusive Luxury, so our outlets remain important for new customer acquisition.
It's a local store for many and an entry point into the brand for others. We've been increasing store productivity, leveraging the data analytics here to drive the segmentation and price architecture across North America ecosystem. We've leaned into clienteling and capabilities to cater to this channel's high-value clients who shop with us very frequently and build on that lifetime value. We're still in the early innings of this, but empowered by all this data, we're leaning on future productivity gains in this channel as well. And finally, let's talk wholesale. It remains a strategic channel for brand discovery and new customer acquisition in North America. Of course, we are mindful of the broader secular challenges, but we'll continue to manage with discipline and exit a modest number of lower-tier doors season by season.
We plan to drive sustainable growth in wholesale through a combination of share gains and comp growth in our go-forward premium doors and expand into newer top-tier luxury accounts where we're targeting a double-digit increase in luxury department store doors over a small base in the next three years. And then finally, let's dial into a specific white space opportunity for ecosystem acceleration, which is the Los Angeles area. Needless to say, L.A. is a center for global entertainment and rich with opportunities to tell the stories that reach well beyond L.A. Today, we have built incredible presentations in iconic shopping locations like our Rodeo Drive flagship and Double RL on Melrose, as well as outlets throughout this region. But with over 10 million people in L.A. County alone, we've really only just begun. Our ambitions for L.A. are bold and long-term.
What better place to tell the story of Ralph's world and feel that you're in the movie set that he is creating? We are investing in deep local insights to understand the market's unique cultural dynamics, shopping behaviors, and preferences, and they will guide our execution. We actually have five new stores in the pipeline for California already. Very excitingly, as mentioned earlier on, we are building a drumbeat of engagements as we head towards the L.A. 2028 Olympic Games, where Ralph Lauren will once again proudly outfit Team USA and serve as an official sponsor. This historic moment represents not only a significant commercial opportunity, but also a powerful platform to reinforce our legacy at the intersection of sport, style, and culture. Beyond L.A., we believe we have white space across the Southeast, the Midwest, the Pacific Northwest, and also Canada.
So how does this all roll up? As we drive this plan into the next three years, we will go after more full-price opportunities with a targeted market-specific approach from L.A. to Chicago to Miami. We are targeting a low single-digit revenue CAGR led by D2C, including digital. And this outlook incorporates our caution embedded in the current FY 2026 guidance for the second half of the year, with broader industry-related tariff pressure expected into the first half of FY 2027. So to be back where I started, it's a great time to be at Ralph Lauren and a great time to be a leader in North America. We have spent almost 60 years building an incredible emotional connection with customers in North America. We have now positioned our business to better capture that market opportunity, and we are going after it.
This is a game of execution, and of course, we know the devil is in the details. The experience of every customer in every channel matters. The team and I are already hard at work about bringing that vision of Ralph and that feeling of warmth, service, and value to every customer coming through our doors or touching us on our digital touchpoints. As we've mentioned, digital does play a key role in our success. So to tell you more about that, I'm pleased to introduce you to another new member of the Ralph Lauren team, Naveen Seshadri.
All right. Thank you, Mercedes. Good afternoon. It's so good to be here with all of you today to talk about our digital strategy. I joined the Ralph Lauren team a little over a year ago, having worked for some strong consumer and retail brands like Disney and Foot Locker.
Even before I joined the company, I admired the innovative ways in which Ralph Lauren was engaging consumers in Ralph's cinematic vision. It was clear to me that when Ralph and our leadership team talked about being in the dreams business, they understood that digital was a very core part of this. Digital is so much more than a sales channel. It is one of the most powerful ways that you can immerse and inspire people to step into their dreams. But before I share how we will extend that Ralph Lauren vision even further through digital, I'd like to showcase the incredible momentum our global digital team has built over the last three years. A big round of thanks. A big round of thanks to our digital and technology teams all around the world for driving and enabling this business.
As you can see, we've been rather busy, and we have built an incredibly strong digital foundation. The question now is, how are we building on the top of this foundation? Let me start with how we think about digital. As I said a moment ago, we think of digital as so much more than just a commercial channel. Digital is an always-on, always-connected cross-current that permeates across every aspect of what you heard from my colleagues earlier today. It connects every thread of our business, and it powers a journey that puts the consumer at the center of everything that we do. That perfect loop, that perfect infinite loop of commerce and engagement, regardless of how they engage with us or transact with us across every touchpoint and in every single market.
Every interaction is an opportunity to connect, to engage, to elevate, and to convert, not just once, but over an entire lifetime. Our mission is to integrate and accelerate agile digital thinking into every aspect of how we work and do so in ways that are sustainable well into the future. So let's get into that a little bit. I'm first going to focus on our digital business. Digital commerce is now 26% of the company's overall revenue, up from the low teens when we started this Next Great Chapter journey. And it's now outpacing brick-and-mortar growth. And our digital revenue mix is diversified across all channels. We're elevating the brand, not through promotions and discounting, but through design, through storytelling, and through premium positioning. That discipline is paying off. We hold leadership positions in all three channels, and we continue to grow.
Within our own DTC channels, which now comprises over 40% of our digital business, we've meaningfully repositioned and elevated the role of our digital flagships, resulting in more than 25% AUR growth. We have also driven a significant reduction in promo days since our last Investor Day. 20% of our online sales in North America now come from our RL mobile app, which we also launched in 2022. This is home to where our most loyal, highest-value customers shop. Wholesale, digital, and Pure Plays also remain extremely important in our ecosystem. They enable us to recruit new customers, particularly younger next-gen customers, and scale into new markets with speed and precision while presenting our brand in an elevated and consistent fashion. To maintain our leadership and continue to drive growth, our focus is clear.
We will stay at the forefront of consumer expectations and deliver a seamless, elevated shopping experience agnostic of the channel. How we do that comes back to the same inherent point, which is to think about digital well beyond commerce alone. As you've heard throughout the day today, our consumer is always at the center of everything that we do. Our strategy is built to deliver a frictionless, personalized, connected, and consistent Ralph Lauren experience wherever, whenever, and however the consumer chooses to engage. And again, doing it in a way that is fit for today but proven for tomorrow. So let's talk about what that looks like. There are five key areas where we're focused on evolving. I'm going to walk you through each one of them. First, on content and design, as you've heard throughout the day, Ralph Lauren is not just about clothes.
Rather, it's about inspiring people to dream. The way that we are seamlessly integrating immersive content right into the consumer's purchase flow empowers just that. Take our shirt shop, for example. We embed content in situ to drive enhanced product discovery and inspire our consumers, guiding them down this seamless path to purchase. Our ability to adapt and improve is enabled by the investments we're making in our platform and technology through a composable architecture. So let's talk about Composable Commerce. Composable Commerce is how we're shifting from a one-size-fits-all e-commerce platform to a modular way of building technology. Think of it as building with LEGO blocks instead of buying a pre-built toy. This gives us the flexibility to pick the best-in-class tools with things like search, content, checkout, and anywhere across the consumer funnel.
And then we assemble them in a way that fits our brand and consumer experience perfectly. This also enables increased scalability, faster speed to market, and improved innovation. But what does that actually mean in practice? So in the past, it would take months to integrate a preferred payment system into our digital flagships. And now, when we see a new platform like a cloud and arctic route, for example, we integrate that in weeks, not months. In other words, you don't have to throw an old toy away. You can just reconfigure the LEGO blocks or replace a couple of bricks and create something brand new. Third, putting the customer at the center of everything that we do means that we truly have to understand them and their preferences. And now we can do that with much greater precision than ever before.
With a more holistic and focused view of the consumer, we can reach the right person with the right message at the right time, consistently and at scale across platforms and across media. Fourth, let's move to digital in our stores. You've heard a little bit today from my colleagues about how we're deepening the connection with the consumer through clienteling. Digital helps power this at scale. We're investing in a modern, intuitive clienteling platform that enables personalized, high-touch service, not just in stores, but across channels and across touchpoints. What was once a highly manual process is now being transformed into a digital turnkey experience. This empowers our teams to do what they do best, which is to build long-lasting relationships with our customers, offering thoughtful styling advice while delivering the aspirational service that only Ralph Lauren can provide.
Finally, let's pivot to a topic that I'm sure is on everyone's minds: AI. A lot of what I walked you through leverages the power of AI already. It is the cross-current or the surround sound, as we say, in so much of what you've heard from us today. I want to highlight a few examples. From a forecasting and analytics perspective, we're enabling AI and machine learning to connect product attributes directly to search algorithms, improving product discovery and showcasing the right content at the right time to the customer. We're also enabling predictive buying and forecasting, which is helping us to buy smarter, align inventory with supply and demand trends, reduce markdowns and discounting with the ultimate aim of improving profitability and customer satisfaction.
Second, from an employee-facing perspective, AI is transforming how we work across teams and functions, enabling us to move faster, make better-informed decisions, and spend more time on strategic and creative work. One example is how our design teams, led by John Wrazej, are leveraging AI for mood boarding and concept creation, supporting the design process while staying true to the Ralph Lauren ethos, tone, and voice: human-led, AI-augmented design. And then, of course, we are unlocking the power of AI for our customer. David mentioned upfront the new AI-driven styling experience, and hopefully you had a chance to try it out during lunch, Ask Ralph, that we launched in the U.S. app last week. We see opportunities ahead for it to support clienteling, support in-store training, and a plethora of other use cases. And eventually, we'll bring it to consumers well beyond the U.S. shores and across platforms.
In parallel, we're also applying AI in our contact centers, transforming customer service by reducing wait times, resolving issues much faster, and delivering a model of care that feels more personal and more seamless to our customer. Together, these innovations allow us to meet the customers where they are, with interactions that are more intuitive and always centered on them, the customer. Now, as you can see, we're applying digital across everything that we do. And what makes our approach really unique is that we use it to bring Ralph's powerful way of cinematic world-building and storytelling to life. We're applying it in ways that are relevant, consistent, and connected, not just for today, but well into the future. Now, it is my pleasure to cede the stage to someone who you all might know very well.
I've learned a lot from him during my time here at Ralph Lauren, and I admire his 20 years of experience with the company. I am grateful for his partnership, grateful for his support, but most importantly, I'm grateful for him unlocking funds for our digital strategy. Thank you, and please welcome our Chief Financial Officer, Justin Picicci, to the stage. Thanks. All right.
Amazing. Thank you, Naveen. Good afternoon. Great to be here with you all. Over the past year, as CFO, I've had the privilege of meeting with many of you. And we've really had some thoughtful conversations about our business, our strategy, and our future. But my connection to Ralph Lauren began long before I assumed this role. Growing up as a kid in Queens, New York, I was captivated by Ralph's vision, by the idea that clothing could be more than just what you wear.
It could be a gateway to the life you dream about. I still remember pulling on my first Polo shirt as a teenager in our Woodbury Common outlet, purposefully about two sizes too big. Remember Queens, 1990s? Don't judge. Now, that first Polo was big, but that moment, it made me feel like I was part of something bigger, something aspirational, at the same time really personal. My own journey reflects what Patrice spoke about earlier, how Ralph Lauren resonates across generations, from those very first Polo shirts to the bear sweaters I began collecting in the 1990s. Some of you out there know about that, to the Purple Label suit that I'm wearing today. This brand isn't just about clothing. It's about a way of life.
Now I dress my five-year-old son in Ralph Lauren, and seeing him in the same Polo pony that I once wore, it reminds me just how timeless this brand truly is. I've also grown up professionally within the company, spending nearly 20 years in various leadership positions. One of my most pivotal experiences was helping to launch our elevation strategy in China. Now, that work shaped not only how we protect and grow the brand in one of our most important markets, but also how we approach brand elevation globally with both the courage to evolve and the care to preserve what makes us so special. Those early connections with the brand as both a customer and a leader continue to shape the way I think about our company and the opportunities that lie ahead of us.
And our teams are powered by people who share that same passion and purpose to come together every day to bring Ralph's vision to life. As we think about what's next, it's this collective dedication and resolve that gives me deep confidence in our path forward. We've strengthened our foundation, and we're leading with conviction. We're reinforcing our brand desirability all around the world. We're leaning into our core strengths while also investing in our high-potential categories. We're cultivating new growth markets and channels, and we're driving agility across our operations, our supply chain, and our expense structure. This is what gives me confidence, not just in our ability to deliver the plan for this year, but in our ability to deliver sustainable, high-quality growth and value creation in the years ahead. And we'll get to the financial outlook shortly.
But first, let's take a step back to recap what you've heard from our speakers today and highlight the progress we've made since our last Investor Day in 2022. Over the past three years, we continue to strengthen our brand desirability and attract high-value consumers globally. Our investment in marketing has driven a step change in our top-line growth and full-price sales as we scale in a highly elevated way. We also further elevated our brand positioning, with AUR up strongly since our last Investor Day and more than doubling since 2018, driven by our proven strategy to elevate our customer engagement, our product, our ecosystems, and our price value proposition. We transformed our business model to be more consumer-centric and DTC-led, while at the same time reshaping our wholesale business towards healthier, more strategically aligned growth.
We became a more internationally diversified company, with Europe and Asia outpacing total company growth and now comprising well over half our revenue. And we've sharpened our focus on our top 30 key cities. As you heard from our team today, Ralph Lauren is a stronger, more international, more DTC-oriented, more full-price, and importantly, more profitable company than we were in 2022. We delivered on all of the key commitments of our three-year plan from top to bottom, all while staying true to Ralph's vision and what our brand stands for. At the same time, our teams have done an outstanding job embracing a diversified set of growth drivers and a mindset of agility, productivity, and resilience, allowing us not just to navigate volatility in the global operating environment, but to turn disruption into opportunity. As you heard from Halide, we've built a more responsive and agile supply chain.
We've adopted a disciplined, demand-driven inventory model, enabling us to mitigate risk, but also, importantly, to chase into opportunities. And we have a proven track record of realizing and leveraging cost efficiencies to reinvest back into our business. We've generated around $400 million in gross savings over the past three years, with more opportunity looking ahead. These savings have helped fund our key strategic priorities, from marketing and ecosystem expansion to enhancing our talent and digital capabilities. In short, we're creating our own fuel to power growth. Our plan is delivering, and our growth engines are durable and built for the long term. The past three years have given us powerful proof points that validate our strategy for the next chapter. And these proof points give us confidence in our ability to continue to deliver consistent, sustainable, healthy growth.
As we look ahead to the next three years, today, we'll walk through the building blocks of our growth and profitability, the key enablers that will support this growth while also helping us future-proof our business as consumer behaviors evolve, technologies accelerate, and our operating model continues to scale. And finally, our financial outlook and capital allocation principles. Let's begin with our top-line building blocks. We remain focused on what we can control, creating demand for our brand and our products, and how we show up for consumers as we execute with agility in a dynamic operating environment. We're introducing a three-year guide of mid-single-digit revenue growth in constant currency. We're also reiterating our fiscal 2026 guidance, as shared last month on our Q1 call, with this year's outlook of low to mid-single-digit constant currency growth roughly aligned to that longer-term trajectory.
Importantly, this is a balanced and diversified plan backed by multiple engines of growth. Starting with our top line, our future revenue growth is grounded in a balanced mix of three key drivers. First, high-value new consumer recruitment and retention. Second, AUR growth with a continued focus on delivering a compelling value proposition to our customers. And third, targeted unit expansion, notably in our DTC and international businesses and accelerator categories consistent with the last three years. Together, these drivers reinforce our focus on growing consumer lifetime value in a way that only Ralph Lauren can. Now, in the near term, we expect our top-line growth to remain a bit more AUR-led, especially as we navigate newer cost inflation pressures. But over the longer term, we're focused on scaling all three revenue levers, activating each in a high-quality, branded creative way to drive durable, profitable growth.
As you've heard today from my colleagues, our growth is diversified across multiple dimensions, from geographies to consumer segments, and we're pursuing opportunities across each of these areas with discipline, intentionality, and confidence in our ability to execute. Let's now walk through how these drivers shape our outlook by region. We expect each of our three geographies to contribute to our three-year growth. Asia is expected to remain our fastest-growing region with a high single-digit CAGR. Our outlook reflects growth across all key markets led by continued expansion in our top cities across China, Japan, and Korea. This is followed by EMEA up mid-single digits with healthy balanced growth across our elevated DTC and wholesale businesses. North America continues to reflect a more cautious outlook, especially in the current fiscal year.
While our brand and recent trends remain strong, we continue to assume a more challenged consumer backdrop, notably in the second half of the fiscal year. Moving to margin, we've significantly increased our gross margin since the start of our elevation journey, and we expect further expansion ahead, supported by drivers broadly consistent with the past three years. Pricing and promotion remain the most meaningful contributors, with pricing actions to mitigate cost inflation and increased promotional effectiveness driven by stronger targeting and personalization. We continue to benefit from the ongoing elevation of our product assortment, as well as from favorable channel and geographic mix, and productivity remains a key enabler of margin expansion with increased efficiencies across our supply chain and inventory management operations. Our guidance also reflects continued investments in product quality and sustainability, alongside expected headwinds in tariffs, incremental labor, and overhead inflation.
Taken together, we expect these proven drivers to deliver modest gross margin expansion annually over the next three years, and this is on top of the nearly 800 basis points of expansion we delivered since the start of our Next Great Chapter plan. Moving to our enablers for the future, our superior operations are a foundational part of our culture and a key competitive advantage. Over the past eight years, we've been intentional about institutionalizing this mindset, embedding productivity and discipline into how we operate each and every day, and this focus on productivity isn't just about cost savings. It's what enables us to fuel our future growth. Now, we delivered on our commitment of $400 million in gross savings across our cost of goods sold and operating expenses over the last three years, and looking ahead, we're targeting an additional $400 million + in gross savings through fiscal 2028.
We have a broad range of productivity initiatives underway. Let's talk through a few of the more notable work streams. First, our next-generation transformation or NGT project, where we are reimagining our end-to-end operating model, which I'll come to shortly. Second, vendor cost optimization, leveraging our dedicated cross-functional team focused on reducing cost and driving discipline across geographies and categories. And third, as you heard from Naveen, we're continuing to scale the use of AI and advanced analytics across both the front and the back ends of our business. The savings from these initiatives and more will fund our strategic investments to continue to elevate our brand, to expand our digital commerce and store footprint, and to build and strengthen our operational capabilities and talent.
This is all part of our ongoing commitment, not only to be more efficient as an organization, but to better serve our customers through richer experiences, more exceptional product, and deeper engagement. Double-clicking on the NGT project, this is a critical initiative designed to modernize our core operations and future-proof how we run our business, enabling greater agility, better decision-making, and more seamless consumer experiences. The project is made up of three key components. First, implementing a globally unified ERP system. Second, transforming our logistics operations. And third, integrating and automating our buying and planning processes. Together, these three transformative initiatives will position us to operate faster, smarter, more effectively, creating the infrastructure to support our DTC-led, AI-enabled future. So, taken collectively, our operational enablers set us up well for meaningful, consistent profitability gains over the next three years.
We're guiding further operating margin expansion of 100-150 basis points in constant currency by fiscal 2028, driven by a combination of gross margin improvement and disciplined operating expense leverage. This implies operating profit growth at an average annual rate that is outpacing our top-line growth. Over the longer term, while we're not putting a ceiling on profitability, we remain committed to balancing operating margin expansion with the ongoing investments required to support our strategic priorities and deliver sustainable, profitable growth for our stakeholders. Moving to our capital allocation plans, a key enabler of our business and one of our most enduring strengths and important differentiators is our robust balance sheet. We entered this fiscal year with $2.1 billion in cash and short-term investments, with low financial leverage, and with inventories well-positioned to meet consumer demand in each of our regions.
Our capital allocation priorities have remained largely consistent over time, reflecting that same discipline and long-term mindset as our balance sheet philosophy. First, invest in our business. We're targeting capital expenditures of 4%-5% of sales, mainly to support new store openings, renovations, and upgrades to our digital infrastructure. We're also pursuing selective real estate opportunities that strengthen our brand presence in key global cities. I think Mercedes talked to a couple of those in North America. Second, return excess free cash flow to shareholders through our dividend, which we typically increase with durable net income growth, and with the remainder allocated to share repurchases, an important component of our balanced capital return strategy. We're targeting at least $2 billion of total returns to shareholders over the next three years. Third priority, maintain responsible debt leverage.
Finally, the strength of our balance sheet gives us the ability to be selective with our strategic investments, including any potential capability-focused M&A. That said, our top priority remains investing in our brand to continue growing organically across our full lifestyle portfolio. With the strength of our balance sheet, we're well-positioned to deliver sustainable value creation. Now, let's summarize what this all means from a financial perspective. Our Next Great Chapter: D rive plan is designed to deliver solid growth on both the top and the bottom line. Our healthy, durable revenue growth reflects our best assessment of the current operating environment, balancing macro considerations with the strength of our brand and the diverse growth opportunities we've created across regions, channels, and categories. We expect to drive further operating margin expansion through a balance of gross margin improvement and operating expense leverage, as we discussed.
Now, we are already leveraging in year one as we begin to scale multiple years of investments in our talent, in our key city ecosystems, and in our digital infrastructure. And this leverage is expected to more than offset planned increases in marketing, which, as you heard from Iris, is expected to ramp up from an average of 7% of sales over the past three years to 7.5%-8.5% over the next three. And as I mentioned earlier, these investments will continue to be funded through productivity initiatives. And importantly, we've built in the optionality to adjust our expense base as needed, depending on how the external landscape evolves. So, bring it all together before we go into the Q&A.
In a global operating environment that will continue to evolve rapidly, our priorities are clear: stay agile, execute with discipline, and invest behind the multiple engines of long-term growth that set us apart. Our confidence to deliver rests on three things. First, our iconic brand, timeless, resonating across generations and elevated into a rarefied space we created, not followed. Second, our growth drivers, proven, now scaling across categories, channels, geographies. And third, our operating discipline and fortress balance sheet, which gives us the flexibility to invest for the future while navigating near-term volatility. And underpinning this all is our team's proven ability to execute with agility. We've had an amazing few years, but we believe there's still much more road ahead for Ralph Lauren. We've built the foundation, earned our leadership position, and have the talent, tools, and capabilities to continue to drive high-quality growth and value creation.
We're not just managing through uncertainty. We're shaping the future of inclusive luxury lifestyle, connecting deeply with consumers and inspiring them to dream, just like I did when I put on that very first Polo so many years ago. With that, let's take a quick pause to reset the stage, and then we'll invite the team back, and we'll start the Q&A. Thank you.
Joining us on the live stream. Once you ask your question, please stand up, state your name, and firm. And if you could please limit your question to one per person, then we can try to get to as many of you as possible. So let's take a quick scan of the room. Why don't we start right in the middle here with Matt? That's good.
Matt Boss, JPMorgan. So thanks, and really appreciate the great day. So Patrice, a clear theme today was elevation.
So with more companies starting to imitate your elevation playbook, what are you doing to differentiate yourself going forward? And as you execute the Next Great Chapter strategy, where are you putting the most organizational focus and investment relative to the last plan? And then last for Justin, could you just help bridge modest annual gross margin in the plan vs the 400 basis points of expansion that you saw over the last three years?
Thanks for your question, Matt. It's always good to inspire the industry. It goes back to our legacy of leadership. Our core strategies are evergreen. I suspect when we get back again in a few years, we'll still be talking about the elevation, driving the core, and expanding for more, and winning in key cities, and then we're evolving how we execute it, so the elevation never stops.
One of your colleagues from the media actually asked me this after a fashion show a year, I think a couple of years ago. When does the elevation stop? The elevation never stops. There's always an opportunity to do better, to provide the customer with even more elevated storytelling, even more elevated product, even more elevating shopping experience, whether that's in-store or online. Obviously, the key thing we need to do as we do that is keep an eye on the value equation, make sure that the consumer who is smart continues to say, "This is worth it." But if you go back to the history of this company, Ralph launched this company with the tie 67 years ago with a luxury positioning, right? The tie was 2.5x the price of a Christian Dior tie.
There's still a lot of room to kind of get back to the essence of that brand positioning. Elevation will continue to be at the very heart of this company, again, with a focus on making sure that the consumer sees the value and feels like this is a worthwhile investment to make, not just a worthwhile purchase, but a worthwhile investment. In terms of key priorities for investments going forward, one is we're going to continue to build our brand and invest in our brand. One of the things I'm most excited about is the fact that this company eight years ago spent around 3.5% of revenue on marketing. Now we're at 7%-7.5%. You heard us talk about going from 7.5% - 8.5%. Iris, that's a lot of quality money to spend to build the brand.
Counting on you and David to make sure we're putting it to good use as you have been so far. So, brand, continue to build on the core, right? This company has an incredible rock with its core, 70% of the business. We expect to continue to build that. And so we're going to continue to invest there. Third, and you and I talked this a little bit during the lunch break, women's, right, and the women's opportunity. Now, what's exciting about the women's opportunity, you heard Halide kind of frame it, is we're a pretty sizable business in women's today. $2 billion. There are not many companies in our price tiers that have a $2 billion women's apparel business. There are a lot of accessory companies that have that kind of size, but not many apparel companies.
We have scale, but we have so much upside because we're less than 1% market share. Third area is expanding our footprint from a key city standpoint, so store openings. We have some really exciting ones coming up that we will progressively reveal as we get closer, but a lot of exciting things coming up from a store opening standpoint. And then finally, tech, right? You heard Justin talk about our NextGen project, so ERP, automation, what we're doing on IBP. That's obviously a very meaningful investment. As I was just chatting with one of you, if you think about this company for the years to come, that's going to be incredible infrastructure for this company to continue to create value well beyond the next three years.
So there's a lot of fundamental investment here that isn't just designed to pay off next year or the year after that. It's to set this company up for success for the next 10 - 15 years. Yeah, go ahead.
On the gross margin expansion. So we've guided for the three years, to your point, modest expansion. Because if you look at the cadence of that, it's really going to be most pressured in year one due to the cost inflation pressures. And then as we go into years two and three, we expect that to pick up. When you think about drivers, on the plus side, our durable gross margin drivers remain. So whether that's product mix, elevation, geo, and channel mix, whether that's promo pullback and discounting reduction, or whether that's like-for-like price, those drivers remain.
I think from a headwind perspective, the notable headwind that gets added to the mix alongside, I would say, continued reinvestment back in our product and alongside labor overhead is tariffs and cost inflation, right? So that's really, I would say, and that's also an uncertainty, right? That continues to evolve. So when I look at sort of the risk profile going forward, it's both a risk and an opportunity as we look ahead. So watching that closely as we move into fall.
Thank you. Why don't we head over here to Jay, please?
Thank you. Jay Sole, UBS. And let me add my thanks also for a great day and a great presentation. Justin, my question is for you. How are you thinking about the cadence of your three-year algorithm on top line and margins, and what could cause you to become more positive on growth looking ahead?
And conversely, what do you see as the biggest risk to your forecast? And I would also add one extra run to that is you mentioned marketing as opposed to sales as 7.5%-8.5%. How do you think about the difference between what would drive that 7.5% number vs what it would take to get to that 8.5% number? Thank you.
Perfect. And maybe we can have Iris handle that last one. But I think when it comes to the cadence of our growth algo, I would say that in both revenue and from a gross margin perspective, in the first half of our three-year plan, we expect to be slightly below that overall algo.
That's really due to the pressure we're calling for in the second half of this year, primarily in North America, due to the cautious macro environment and the pricing environment that the customer is entering into. As you go through the three-year plan, I think we expect growth to normalize as you get to years two and years three. That's true for both top line and for gross margin. I think when it comes to risks and ops, or what can be better, what can be worse, on the positive side, I think the macros cut both ways, right? Our brand has momentum. It's strong. We know that we're going into a pricing environment where we're going to see what's going to happen with the consumer, right? The rubber hasn't really fully met the road just yet. That could be a plus.
It could also be a bit worse than we expected if we have a prolonged economic downturn. I think on the other side of the plus side of the ledger, I think about the work that Iris talked about around segmentation, personalization, clienteling, still early innings, and we could potentially take a bigger share of closet and higher retention coming out of that. And then our international businesses, I see as a potential upside. We've been outperforming. We're entering into new key cities and expanding and deepening our ecosystem. I think that's something that we're watching as a potential upside. And then on the downside, aside from the economic environment, I mean, geopolitics are still very much a real thing. And we've seen disruption not just to business, but to supply chain. So that's something we're also watching and monitoring very closely. And then your question on marketing, maybe, Iris?
Yes. So I'm very confident about increasing marketing investment while continuing to improve ROI. We've developed great capabilities in order to do so. We have now in-house predictive models that help us to really optimize each marketing dollar we spend, test and learn. And it's always a subtle orchestration between brand impact, customer growth impact, and profit impact, always balancing the short, medium, and long term. And we have huge opportunities for additional, I would say, investment. And I see three areas where we can invest further with great impact. One, it's behind the great customer opportunities that we have. So women's wear, the new generation, and high net worth individuals. Two, it's geographically. So it's behind our top cities. Today, we're very well funded in our top 10 cities. I think we have another 20 cities where we could invest further for further cultural impact and commercial impact.
Then finally, it's all of these sports sponsorship and cultural platforms. I mean, we've had a massive impact with the Olympics last year with all of our tennis properties, with golf. We can deepen our investment to have even more global reach. That's democratic reach. That's huge impact in terms of brand desirability and business impact immediately.
Thank you, Iris. Let's come over here to Laurent.
Laurent Vasilescu from BNP Paribas. Thank you very much for a great day today. I just wanted to ask about North America, Mercedes. With your retail experience in luxury, I'd love to hear what you have to say ultimately for this channel in terms of store exposure, elevation strategy. How do we think about the mix between wholesale and DTC? Then Justin, I have to ask a financial question.
The $400 million of gross savings, you achieved that three years ago. You've talked about that. For this incremental $400 million, how do we think about those gross savings across COGS and SG&A? And should we think about it as a linear format? Thank you.
Thank you, Laurent. So first of all, I think our full-price businesses are where we see the opportunity right now in North America. We're already recruiting the less price-sensitive customers, so we expect that to continue. That's one of the reasons we're so excited about building out the store footprint. We know that there's white space opportunity to add more stores and to really reach our consumer where they are. So we're looking for those organically as we can do that. By channel, I think retail and DTC in general, so retail plus digital are where the opportunities are.
But there's still opportunity in wholesale to gain share in healthy wholesale and share gains in the great wholesale channels that we're in.
And then I would say on the $400 million + that we're expecting, I would say between COGS and SG&A, about evenly split. You think about the drivers, and I would say a little bit front-weighted in terms of the three years. So year one, probably a little bit more than years two and year three in terms of total. When you think about the drivers, it's really the three big ones would be the NGT project benefits. It would be our advanced analytics and AI application. And it would be the vendor cost optimization, both, I would say, indirect and direct costs. So those are the three big buckets, about an even split between COGS and SG&A, and a little bit front-weighted on the three-year.
Okay. Let's go to the back of the room with Dana.
Hi, Dana Telsey with Telsey. Thank you for the terrific day today. As you think about the last Investor Day you had and you go forward to this one with the three-year plus , you talked about new customer acquisition, AUR growth that's still to come. For each of the different regions, how is the next three years in the different buckets going to differ from the past three years?
Should we start with maybe Shin and Ashley? We'll come back to North America.
Yeah, I can take that first. Right. We're really excited about the momentum that we're seeing in Asia. And I think you've seen from the earlier on presentation that we're also very excited about the proven playbooks. So as Patrice mentioned, the strategy isn't going to change that much.
We are not going to fix what's not broken. So we'll continue our play. And we have identified also significant opportunities to continue to pursue. So they are mainly China continues to be a growth engine. We have solid growth coming from Japan and Korea. We will double down on digital. And of course, we have a really disciplined approach in terms of store opening across the board, balancing both new store opening with protecting brand equity. So I think the momentum is really encouraging, and we'll continue to take that forward. Ashley?
Yeah, as I said in my presentation, we've had a very productive three years. And so we don't see any reason to change that path. We're going to continue to run the play with more focus and really lean into where we've been the most successful.
But I think we've got opportunities by channel because they've all delivered growth. By geography, every geography we split our region up by sectors has shown tremendous growth. Germany is leading that, but we see lots of strong growth in Italy and France and Spain, etc. And then by brand, and we see lots of opportunity, not just by brand, but women's wear is definitely leading the charge. But children's wear, we've elevated our children's and repositioned that. So we'll see considerable AUR growth in children's wear. But also new categories. We're looking to lean into outerwear. And I think there's a huge opportunity for us as a brand in that category.
Thank you, Ashley. And then for North America, I think the last three years have really been about resetting the foundation for a very sustainable business in North America.
So now we can pull on all the proof points that my colleagues have been already executing in the other two regions. So it's DTC first, building out the ecosystem, the women's business, the ultra-high net worth. So lots of opportunities still in North America.
And Dana, if you kind of look at the three building blocks of revenue growth, right, by region, you can expect those to stay relevant across all three regions: new consumer recruiting, AUR expansion, and select unit growth. You've all been very kind recently. You haven't asked us about our ability to continue to grow AUR. So thank you for that. It's taken us, whatever, 40 quarters to get to that. But obviously, we expect to continue to expand AUR, right, to match earlier question on elevation.
We're going to do that as a result of the elevation work that we do so that the consumer still sees the value. But a number of you had question marks a few years back on our ability to continue to expand AUR in Asia, right, where AUR is the highest. And if you look back at what Shin and her team have achieved over the past three years, we've seen very healthy AUR expansion in APAC. So we expect to continue to drive growth across the three regions, across these three vectors.
Thank you. Why don't we stay over here, Calista, and go with Michael Binetti?
Hey, thanks for everything. Michael Binetti with Evercore. Thanks for a great day, guys. So Justin, surprise, I got a couple for you. You gave us maybe a hint on this earlier, but you have a history of guiding us pretty conservatively.
Back half looks like you've taken some conservatism in North America. To the extent that we do see an upside scenario and margins outperform this year, do you continue to expand margins 33-50 basis points after this, or is there a natural limit at 16% where you start to say over the three-year period, if we do outperform early, we start to manage more for sales? Help us think about that a little bit. And then just at the last analyst day, I think you gave us $2 billion in shareholder returns as well. You're a much bigger company today and gave us, I guess, $2 billion with a plus sign at the end of it. How do you think about philosophically? What do you think you should grow that at as this business becomes a larger business?
Sure. Thanks for the questions, Michael.
So on the first, and you saw this in the past three years, we're going to continue to balance delivering on, or in the case of the last three years, exceeding our profitability commitments with reinvesting for longer-term sustainable growth, right? You saw us do that. That playbook's not going to change. So I think as we think about the second half, it's going to be a balance, right? It'll be a balance of honoring our current year commitments and also putting it back behind our business and brand in places like marketing, in places like our key city ecos, in places like talent so that we can build out that longer-term sustainable growth algorithm. That I think you could certainly count on. On your question on the $2 billion +, which to your point, yes, we are taking it up a notch from the last three years.
One thing that we recognize, and it's a high-class problem, we have a lot of strong opportunities to invest in our business in front of us. You see us, whether it's the NGT project, whether it's all of our new stores, whether it's the stores that we're purchasing, which are strong ROIs, not just from a longer-term perspective, but from a short-term rent vs depreciation perspective. So we've got a lot of opportunities that are in front of us that we want to be able to act on. So part of the balance between returning cash to shareholders via the dividend or via share repurchases and reinvesting back for that sustainable top line, that's a dance that we're going to continue to navigate as we move forward. We feel that the opportunities we have, first and foremost with capital to invest in our business, are very compelling a nd that's our top priority.
And Michael, we will not cap our profitability at 16%. But exactly to Justin's point, we're here for the next decades. We want to invest to make sure we're delivering growth, and we don't just have a wonderful three-year period and then start to struggle. And you've seen that a lot in this space, right? And so we're very conscious of the fact that we have to invest for the long term, but we're not going to cap our profitability at 16%.
John Kernan, over here.
Thank you. And John Kernan, TD Cowen. And yeah, great presentation. Congrats on all the success. Justin, Europe and APAC saw a lot of margin expansion in the last three years. Is there any region you see more opportunity in as we get over the next three years?
Yeah, I mean, I think in general, the algo assumes continued margin expansion across the board. Now, I think North America is a bit more pressured, right, due to just the second half of fiscal 2026 environment that we're expecting to carry over into the first half of 2027. So I think that international is positioned to lead our growth over the three-year period. But I think if you take a step back and you think about what's driving our operating margin expansion, it applies to all three of our regions, right? Scaling our fixed investments, right, driving quality of sales and AUR. That's going to result in expansion across all three regions.
Excellent. And quick follow-up for David. Your father is a global icon. How do you make sure his legacy endures in future years and Next Great Chapter plans?
How do we make sure?
How do you make sure his legacy endures into the future?
Well, I think we are practicing that right now, obviously. I think the goal at Ralph Lauren is to build on the stories that he tells. There's a philosophy in our design that there's always a story behind the creation of a product. And that is a unique part of what our company is about. It's not just about a shirt or a tie, but it's about the dream of a better life. And as long as we're clear on our mission and our purpose and our philosophy, our job is to animate that, amplify that, and make sure that the stories are compelling. Often people compare Ralph Lauren to Walt Disney because it is about really making movies. We're writing through our clothes. And I think that philosophy is enough to unify this team.
And you can see it at our retail stores. You can see it in the marketing. You can see it in the technology. You can see it across every single person on this stage and 25,000 employees around the world. So I think we're doing well. And I think we just got to keep building on that better and better.
Just to build on that, John, Ralph's philosophy, our brand position, what we stand for, I think is very well defined. And our lead designers who work with Ralph, Dane, and Dejal, John, Karen, bring that to life. In many companies, you see designers kind of bring in their own perspective and a different point of view. And sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't. The benefit we have is, I think, the clarity of what we stand for.
To David, what you just mentioned, our responsibility is just to keep bringing it to life in a way that's interesting, that's fresh, but consistent. Because if you look back at the history of this company, it's had a pretty consistent performance throughout the past 58 years. You can attribute that to just the clarity of what we stand for, the loyalty to the core values, and the broad understanding of what we need to bring to life across the teams.
Thanks. We'll move over to Chris.
Thanks, guys. Chris Nardone and Bank of America. So can you just remind us how you're approaching price increases globally in this current plan?
And then just on the promotional cadence here in the U.S., if we do see a little bit of pressure in the lower kind of income consumer, the value consumer, how are you balancing kind of maintaining the current promotional rates that you guys are running the business today while also at the same time lifting that premiumization and increasing AURs over the long term?
Sure. I'll tackle the first one. Maybe Mercedes, you want to just input on the second. So we don't look, Chris, at price in a vacuum, right? And if you think about our AUR, you heard is up more than double since 2018. There's a lot of things going into that. But what's up alongside that is value perception, luxury perception, right? We keep a keen eye on our consumer and how they're feeling about what they're getting, that price-value proposition, right?
So pricing is honestly really just another output of the elevation strategy as we elevate marketing, as we elevate product, as we elevate experiences and environments. So we're running our elevation strategy, and price is a part of that. It's one part of that, right? So I think if you think about fall, we had a proactive pricing plan for fall just from a normal market-based pricing approach before the newer cost inflation pressures. Now, we've refined that a little bit. But that's just the elevation strategy at work. For spring, we've got some time, and we're assessing. And it's one of our many levers we have to offset cost inflation pressure that we're assessing. And we'll update you more as we get closer to that decision date.
On the promo cadence, I'll just start by just saying we have no plans to walk back our brand elevation journey and the progress we've made on promotions. I don't know how many years it's been, but it's been many that consistently season over season we're pulling back on promotions either meaningfully or to some extent, right? That's not going to change. Again, that's another product of our elevation strategy, and even when the environment around us is pretty aggressively promotional, I'm thinking about Europe and the outlets in North America, we remain true, and we're seeing our consumer, which is a bit of a more elevated consumer in those channels, come along with us on that elevation journey as we elevate up. I don't know, Mercedes, do you want to add anything on that?
I think you said it very well, Justin. I think the consumer is coming along with us in North America, and we are watching it carefully. We're using our price elasticity models to make sure that we're pricing things appropriately. But they're seeing the value in what we're delivering, and I fully concur we're not going to walk back our strategy, so we will remain true to it and go where the consumer is.
The one thing I'll just add is we do have our price architecture after many years of elevation does afford us the ability to be able to be flexible when needed to maybe cater in key selling moments to some of those more value-oriented consumers, right, in channels like outlet. So you will see us flex that to retain knowing that the macros are not going to be here forever, right? But that's a flexibility that we're very particular and selective about.
Thank you. Let's come over here to Brooke.
Hi, Brooke Roach from Goldman Sachs. Thanks for taking the question and for hosting the event today. I'm curious, Patrice, what your view is of what's different about your plan to win with women in this chapter vs the Accelerate plan. And how do you drive new customer acquisition specifically with women? And then for Justin, you mentioned that AUR is going to drive a little bit more of the growth of your three levers in the first half of the plan vs the back half. Can you elaborate on that?
So Halide and I are going to tag team on the women's question. I think, Brooke, one of the key differences moving forward is much more precise segmentation and brand positioning within our portfolio.
There's been a lot of work done over the past 18 months on understanding the women consumer around the world, segmenting her around the world, understanding where we want to play and how we leverage collection, Polo Women's, and Lauren along with that. There's some work that's just been finalized that we actually rolled out across the entire organization that now puts us in a wonderful position, I think, to further take advantage of this opportunity around the world. That's a big structural change. There are other things Halide will shed some light on.
Like you said, Patrice, we have data on what our existing consumers are doing. We also have data on the consumers we don't have are doing.
So I think the power of that precision of data shows us all the white spaces in different price points, in different sensibilities, in different categories and product styling. And it really opens a really good book for growth when it comes to women. And the dedication or the direction of each brand targeting a specific sensibility and the target consumer will help us both build loyalty with the woman we have today and go deeper in her wardrobe and continue to recruit the new ones through our acceleration categories, specifically outerwear, handbags. We're seeing this is where many of our new consumers are entering the brand.
And then on top of that, there's a footprint evolution. We were chatting about a little bit over lunch, right, where now being clear on which brand appeals to which consumer group, then we know where we want to be from a store opening standpoint, from a department store presence standpoint, from a digital standpoint. And so you will see us continue to expand the women's business geographic footprint, which will be a further accelerator to the performance we have so far.
And from an AUR perspective to your question on AUR, I would just say that we expect healthy AUR growth over the course of the plan. I think what's a little bit different about year one, first, we delivered mid-teens AUR growth in Q1, and we've guided for high single in Q2. So a really strong start to the year.
And we also have cost inflation that we know those pressures are on the come for the second half. I think as we move through the plan, while we don't expect AUR growth to go away, we expect it to abate a little bit, be a bit more balanced along with new customer recruitment, retention, and our targeted unit growth as we get into year two and year three.
Thank you. We'll head over here to Paul Lejuez.
Hey, Paul Lejuez, Citigroup. Justin, love the Queens shout-out, by the way.
Queens. Queens in the house.
You very clearly laid out the three-year algo. Everybody always assumes there's some conservatism built into any algo that you put out there.
I'm curious if there are any numbers that you think are going to be pretty tough to hit as you look at the numbers up there, as you've thought about it, which do you think you're going to have to work hardest to hit? And then I want to flip that for Patrice. Patrice, when you think about all these numbers, when you look back at that algo three years from now, which are you going to be pretty disappointed if you don't exceed?
So I would say that, and I alluded to this, I think, in Jay's question. I would start with the fact that there's a lot that's outside of our control. So we built this agility model. We feel good about it. We have diversity of our growth drivers, which we feel really good about and helps us navigate. But the environment is choppy, right?
So I would say what's going to happen to the consumer in the second half of this year, fall holiday in the U.S. is a question mark, right? That's a question mark. What's going to happen where we land ultimately with the cost inflation pressures? That's a question mark. It's still not resolved as we sit here today. So I think those are the areas that we've really built the plan. And we built the plan, as you would imagine, we built it with a broad range of scenarios. So we've had some upside scenarios where the macros are a bit better, some downside scenarios where the macros are a bit tougher. And that's sort of how we've shaped the plan. I think that's really the big, in my mind, the big, I would say, risk to the downside is the macros are a bit worse than we're calling.
Paul, on your question, first of all, you heard me say this morning, we believe very much in promises made, promises kept, right? So that's a guiding principle for us. So the commitments we're putting out there today are commitments that we're very determined to hit. In terms of what would be disappointing if we didn't exceed, one of the things I really like about our performance now and over the past few years is how diversified it is. It's not dependent on one region. It's not like, oh, it's all China. It's not dependent on one category. It's not like it's all women's. It's not dependent on just one consumer group, oh, it's all Gen Z, right? It's actually quite diversified. And across all these vectors, whether that's consumer group, geography, channel, you're seeing growth.
So this plan is not dependent on can we hit women's out of the park or not, right? This plan is not dependent on can we accelerate growth from a DTC standpoint in the U.S. Those are important building blocks, but we have a series of building blocks. And I think that's what's helped us navigate what's been up to now a pretty volatile environment and will likely continue to be pretty volatile are these multiple diversified drivers of growth. Now, if we sat here three years from now and our brand perception had gone down, I'd be very disappointed by that, right? And Iris and David know that. But we've got amazing momentum. We're spending in the right way, and we're going to continue to expand new consumer recruiting.
But I think the key thing you need to take away from our game plan is this notion of diversification and the fact that we've got growth drivers that are strong, that are proven, and that are very different so that if one of it hits a snag, we're okay. And listen, you've seen us deliver, even though not everything is necessarily delivered every quarter the way we expected it to. But we've got this portfolio of activations that enable us to deliver consistently across all of these.
Thank you. Let's go over to Paul.
Thanks for taking my question, Paul Kearney, Barclays. I'm just curious on the investments that you made into the operations of the business, the ERP system, the increasing agility, diversifying the sourcing.
Are there any specific metrics you can kind of point to, whether it's inventory allocation or speed to market, and how this is driving returns for the business over the long term?
Sure. Yeah, I mean, I think it's really our returns are pretty broad-based. I'll give you an example. So inventory is a great example. So when you think about the way we've been able to navigate the choppiness in the macros, think about things like the Red Sea disruption, even coming out of the pandemic, Halide and her supply chain team, the investments we've made to digitize the supply chain, right, to enable us to flexibly receive inventory, get inventory right time, right place, allocate it out, have inventory when others did not have inventory, right, get inventory into the channel on a more real-time basis, leveraging our core, which is 70% + of our assortment, right?
Those investments you see pay off in our inventory availability, and that translates, obviously, into sales and market share gains when others are not able to leverage that muscle. I think when you think about some of the top-line growth that we've been seeing for the past few years, a lot of that is the investments that we've been making in the key city ecosystems and in our marketing, right? That some of those returns don't necessarily come in the short term, right? They take sometimes 12 months + to come to fruition. I mean, whether it's a beautiful new store or it's one of our global brand amplifications that often have both short and longer-tail implications from an ROI perspective, we've seen that rolling thunder of always-on marketing build up, and now it's incrementally returning upon itself so that we're seeing both the longer-term tail and the shorter-term pop.
So I think that if you think about where we're focusing our investments, right, so digital, marketing, our key city ecos, these are the areas that are driving our sustainable top-line growth.
Justin, can I build on that?
Please.
The digitization investments are great in both areas of implementation. But what we're doing very differently is connected digitization and end-to-end digitization on the operation. So it's not about making supply chain faster, but our read and react faster so we can respond to the market needs. So the ultimate KPIs are always top-line and bottom-line, besides the secondary KPIs that follow. And I think what makes our operations unique is they are connected.
Thank you. Up front here with Marni.
Thank you. Thank you, guys. Marni from The Retail Tracker. And David, by the way, I think it's time somebody gets Anna Wintour on the phone. The Met Gala.
Anna Wintour. The Met Institute should obviously be honoring Ralph Lauren at this point. I don't know what they're waiting for.
You should put in a good word.
I have as well. I have a couple of very quick questions. First, Corinna, this won't surprise you, but could we just talk a little bit about the handbag business, where you think it can actually be over time, the two separate brands? And I'm very curious to see what the response is in Asia to the handbags and in Europe. I'm curious what that looks like. And then just on the marketing side, getting Gen Z in. I know Patrice's growth across the board, but Gen Z, I live with them. I know them. They're discovering your brand, thrifting. I love the vintage tab. I looked at it. I checked it out.
But I'm curious how you are getting them into the brand, where their entry point is, and then how you kind of, I guess, move them further and further into the brand, if that makes sense. Thank you.
Good.
Should I start and you begin your build? On the handbags business, the acceleration started where we decided to make it an impactful category for our business. And handbag then shifted from being an accessory to apparel to a business of its own. And the precision of the insights that we have talked about earlier, now we know what target consumers need, what type of handbags at what price points, and where are they shopping those handbags. So in each of our brands, we have identified those spaces.
And if you follow the foundational playbook that I was going through, the second piece is make sure every brand for those target consumers really build a strong foundational core. We are now at that stage in our Polo business, in our Collection business, in our Lauren business. We have very strong core handbags to continue to build on now. And with a very impactful and connected marketing strategy, we were able to grab her attention and really tell inspirational stories, inspiring stories, and how to make use of our handbags. So all in all, connected. Now we see a great traction in every part of the world, but we really heavily lean into APAC, with Shin's data coming first. And we've seen a great traction, created a lot of learnings, test and learns there as we really expanded to the other regions.
So maybe Shin, you can now build on the APAC part of it?
Yeah. I think we're very excited about handbag growth in APAC, predominantly led by Polo. Very exciting, as you saw from the video earlier with the Winter campaign. It was featuring our new Polo Play, and it was a resounding success. We wish we could have more. And I think the momentum and traction in handbag really gives us really strong confidence that we are building women's consideration and growing that, right? Because for women to consider to carry a handbag on her arm, she desires this brand. And so we've seen it also across generation, from my daughter, which is 16 years old, to myself, much older. This desirability is across generations. So it's very encouraging, and we will continue to build on this to become a true pillar of our business.
Ashley, you want to add perspective on Europe?
Yeah. We've had great success across all of our channels, wholesale and retail. And it's no surprise that when you put great product, which we now have, into our stores, a dedicated space and windows, the consumer responds. So we've driven great sales through our own stores, but also wholesale. Those accounts, they don't have to buy our product. They only buy it because it's productive. And so that's really a good bellwether for us. When they come in and they're seeing other brands, they say, "Wow, this is really significant improvement." So as we've just finished selling our Spring 2026 numbers, one of our highest growth categories was our women's handbag business. So that really gives us confidence for what we're doing.
Okay. For Gen Z?
Yes. Hi.
So listen, first of all, we are a multi-generational business.
And what we have seen is our growth recently has been really driven by all consumer groups, all generations. But yes, our customers are getting younger each quarter. And the population with the highest growth are the Gen Z. So we're extremely excited about that because it's the basis of our sustainable growth, as we know that we have the capacity to keep them for life. And it's back to that notion of lifetime value. And we've developed a lot of data and analytics and art of styling to really try to keep them in the brand and encourage them to cross social brands and categories. In terms of what are the strategies to get the Gen Z, I think one, all of the partnerships and our cultural platforms are redesigned to be multi-generations. And all of our sports platforms are actually very young.
Whether you have tennis or gaming, these and Olympics, these really attract the new generation. And we do it in a way that they reconnect emotionally with us. Second, we are really leaning in through social media across all platforms, whether the Western platforms, so the Meta of this world, the YouTube, but also, as you saw, Douyin, WeChat, Reddit, Kakao, LINE. So throughout the world, we have a tailored approach by platform, which is data-driven, embellished by our storytelling. And we're cutting through culturally. And so many Gen Z actually post on our behalf, right? We don't even have to pay them or do any part of it. They do it. So that's the second. And third, I think we have a very attractive brand portfolio, and they really connect with our iconic products.
So yes, they do connect with our fashion lines, but they're really in love with our iconic products, whether it's the cap, whether it's the cable knit sweater, the bear sweater, so the Oxford shirt, and more and more of the women's wear handbags and key products. So we are confident that these iconic products are permanent and will continue to attract them.
Actually, to bring it over from a digital perspective, if you look at the handbag category and Gen Z customers, that's been a runaway success on e-commerce and digital channels by a long shot. I mean, we're talking double-digit women's growth, but then multi-like higher double-digit sort of handbag growth.
So I think that model that Iris was talking about, where you attract the customer, but then you scaffold them and bring them into the digital ecosystem, there's no disconnection in that process. The top of the funnel and the bottom of the funnel are highly superimposed right now. And we've sort of got that connective tissue where we can bring them in, sell them an ad, bring them in, and completely sort of light up the experience in the best way possible. And it's showing in our numbers right now with those categories.
Thank you. Let's go over to Tom.
Thanks. Tom Nikic with Needham & Company. Congrats on all the success, and thanks very much for a great day. Thank you. I want to ask about the digital business. It's been said that digital is a tough channel to sort of replicate the luxury experience.
So can you talk about the way that you're working to elevate e-commerce as a channel while you elevate the brand? And then also a follow-up for Mercedes. I believe you're the newest addition to the team, at least among the people up on stage. What have been the biggest surprises that you've seen since joining six months ago? Thanks.
I think it's a great question. From the way we look at digital, we look at digital very differently from how other brands would typically look at digital, right? If you look at something as simple as our pages where we list products, you saw from the shirt shop, I mean, the way we're trying to embed content and experience within the actual selling journey is the most important thing.
And the idea is to inspire you every step of the way, whether that is through Iris's top of the funnel, social media model, whether we bring you into the site. The idea here is to give you a full-fledged experience of what you would experience in the store. And that was the exact inspiration behind why we even started Ask Ralph, right? The idea has existed for 25 years. David knows this because we've tried to do that over and over for 25 years. But now with the embedding of AI into the journey, it makes it so much more easy to just light up that experience in the right way and inspire you every step of the way.
So the idea at the end of the day is to convert, but how do we bring you along that journey in a very, very seamless fashion is exactly what we're doing. And we're taking that, mixing it with the store clienteling and journey. It's seamless. The customer can shop online, offline today, and it's only going to get better. So it's not like we're resting on our laurels in any way.
Thank you. Oh, sorry.
I would just like to add on digital commerce. We have a lot of pressure in China to promote, to do pricing. We have big campaigns like 11.11, 618. But we choose to protect the integrity of the brand. And this is again, year after year and year after year.
And now, without having to promote and price differently, we are number one on Tmall, JD, and Douyin as the number one luxury brand. And I think it's the choice that we make to stay true to the brand, to express the brand storytelling through digital, which is the window of the brand. And I often say to the team that digital is where millions of consumers are engaging with the brand. And this is where we need to show up the purest and the most right.
Thank you for your question. In terms of surprises, I get asked this a lot. And really, the great news is there weren't any surprises because the storytelling that the team does very well here is the same story that was offered to me as a reason to join. But also, let's think about it. We've all grown up with Ralph Lauren.
And I think the best surprise is that there's still so much potential and also that there's so much passion and loyalty from both our customers and our teams.
Thank you. We have time for one more question. We'll go to Rick in the back.
Thank you. Rick Patel from Raymond James. Appreciate all the insights today. I had a couple of follow-up questions on the $400 million of savings. So first, how do we think about where those savings are coming from as we think about U.S. vs international vs corporate? And second, it implies a pretty big margin tailwind as we think about the next three years. You framed the investments around marketing, but can you help us understand the other expense buckets that you see as being partial offsets?
Of course. Thanks for the question, Rick.
I would say three main buckets for the $400 million+ NGT project buckets. That's all three pillars, right? That's the ERP, integrated business planning, and then also our logistics transformation. Then you also have our vendor cost optimization, which again is, I would say, indirect cost optimization. So challenging SG&A across categories, geographies, and again, global, much like the NGT project is. And also direct cost, right? So the input cost, right? Challenging that as well, which has obviously taken on a greater significance with some of the pressures we have on cost inflation in the last six months. And then, as you heard Naveen and Iris talk about AI and analytics and scaling that out broadly across our organization to drive cost efficiencies in connection with enabling us to do things and enhancing how we operate as a company in both front end and back end.
So those are three categories. They are all global categories. So I wouldn't say one, I would look at our overall expense mix, and I'd probably apply that same pro rata in terms of what gets what benefit. But it's not like these are North America focused or corporate focused. They're broad-based expense savings initiatives that are going to cut across over our three-year plan. In terms of some of the other investments that we're making to offset some of that, well, one, you have the cost inflation pressure. So some of this, especially the direct, is tacked up against that cost inflation pressure as well as our continued investment in our product. So it's one of the reasons why our gross margins, whenever we get the question, "AUR is up double digits, why isn't your gross margin up more?" Our answer usually is because we're investing in our product, right?
We're investing in our product. We're going to continue to run that play. You'll also see us, so the marketing investment, that's a part of it. So investing behind marketing. And you're going to see us up our investments, I think, about our Europe new stores, which are accelerating year- over- year. So as we think about the key city ecos and going from 30 to expanding to the next 20, that's also going to get some of that incremental investment.
I appreciate that several of you are asking about that cost-saving bucket because we're really focused on, of course, quality, top-line growth that's sustainable over time, and productivity. And we've talked in prior forums that this industry isn't necessarily known for its focus on productivity as much as FMCG might be, for example.
But we are driving a culture in this company of every dollar matters, and every dollar is going to get challenged to make sure that we're getting a return on it. And so that helps fuel the $400 million we just delivered and the $400 million + we expect to deliver moving forward.
Thank you, everyone, for your questions. This concludes our question- and- answer session. And with that, I will turn it over to Patrice.
Do I need a clicker? No, I don't need a clicker. I just need an update here. All right. Thank you, Corinna. Hard to believe the day is almost over, at least with us. Listen, as I close and at the risk of overstretching the drive analogy, we're driving. We're not cruising, okay? The tank is full with a strong brand. The roadmap is drawn with a clear strategy to lead.
And the crew, our team here and on the webcast, is the best in the business, ready to execute with excellence. And finally, as I mentioned earlier, with all the opportunities, and we talked a number of them during this Q&A session, the road ahead is wide open for us. So across our 60-year history, we have proven our ability and our agility and our experience to handle whatever lies ahead. And certainly, the past three years have been quite eventful with many unexpected things. And we expect the next three years will probably serve us the same thing, okay? We recognize the world around us has a lot of volatility. But there's one thing that Ralph Lauren has always stood for: Optimism. And we are optimistic about our future, about the power of style and authenticity, about the human connection at the heart of our brand.
And ultimately, it really is what uniquely positions us to create value: value creation that is strong, value creation that is consistent, and value creation that is sustainable. So we talked a lot about the next three years, but this for us isn't just about the next three years. It's really about the next 30 and beyond. That's the legacy we want to leave as a leadership team. So if you reflect on today, hopefully what you take away is this is only the beginning for our brand. And I want to thank all our teams here and around the world and just say, "Buckle up. Here we go." Thank you for being here today.