Get started here. I'm Brendan Hoffman, CEO of Vince Holding Corp. With me is Yuji Okumura, our CFO, and Akiko Okuma, our CAO, so welcome. Excited to update you on what's happening at Vince. There's the disclaimer. I'm not going to read it, so you might have seen this morning we announced holiday sales and gave an update. I'm really excited about our performance through the end of December. We were up almost 10% in our direct-to-consumer business, driven both by stores and by e-commerce, but particularly strong was e-commerce, where we saw gains of over 20%, and we'll talk a little bit more about some of the things that are driving that, that I think provide great momentum as we look into 2026 and beyond, but just as a little bit of an overview, we do about $300 million in revenue, about $15 million in Adjusted EBITDA.
And that's after the royalty we pay our friends at ABG, which is about $12 or $13 million. And I'll talk a little bit more about the partnership. We are widely distributed across the world, over 800 points of distribution and 60 retail locations, most of those in the U.S. So usually we'll go through the numbers a little bit more in a bit. We're almost 25 years old, and we're a dual-gender brand, men's and women's in apparel. So some of you might know this is my rebound back at Vince. I was at Vince for five years, from 2015 to 2020, left to pursue another opportunity and came back a little bit less than a year ago. And the question I get all the time is, what brought you back to Vince?
First of all, it starts with the product and the brand, something I've always had an affinity for and great energy around. I think the other reason is this chart here. It's the management team. As I like to say, I am both insulted and gratified that most of them stayed around after I left, but now clearly gratified. It was a big pull to why I wanted to come back, because I saw not just the opportunity at Vince, but the broader opportunity to use our platform to do other things, which we'll talk a little bit about. Besides Akiko and Yuji, which I mentioned, the three key people are Caroline Belhumeur, who's our creative director, our head of design, her partner in crime, Marie Fogel, who's our head of merchandising and manufacturing, and Jill Norton, who's our head of commercial, wholesale, retail, et cetera.
And the reason I point them out is I think the continuity in having them together is a great advantage to Vince. Having been here 10 years ago, we went through some creative and design changes. It really puts you in limbo. You're waiting about a year and a half while the new product comes to market and how it's going to be received. We don't have that. We have this team that's stable and been together and just continued to grow. I think there's two things that can happen when you have that sort of tenure. The product can become stale and you start to lose your edge, or the product can continue to evolve. And obviously, I couldn't be more thrilled with the way the product has evolved.
Having been gone for five years and while I kept an eye on Vince to really dive back in and just see the progression, both men's and women's, has been really energizing to me. And it's showing in the results, and it's showing in the elasticity of our brand as we talk a little bit about tariff mitigation and price changes. And again, what this team can do beyond Vince as we move forward. So we do have a strategic partnership with Authentic Brands Group. This was something that happened while I was gone to help shore up the balance sheet and find new ways to grow the brand. I couldn't be more pleased with the relationship with ABG. Jamie Salter has been somebody I've known for a long time. He has great affinity for Vince, the brand.
He has great affinity for Vince, the company, and he has great affinity for me and our partnership together. So I've been spending a lot of time with him and his team. He has a very deep team figuring out different avenues that we can grow the business and the holding company together. But at a very high level, one of the benefits, we still own 25% of the IP, so we do benefit as they increase the royalty stream as a recurring cash distribution that flows to the bottom line. There's incremental revenue upside, and this is something that's a little bit newer for us, and I'll talk a little bit more about it in e-commerce. But as they're growing with different categories, we're in beyond apparel. It's opened up opportunities, particularly in our direct-to-consumer, that directly benefit Vince Holding Company. I'll talk a little bit more about that.
But I think more broadly, it's always great for a brand like Vince to have more categories. It creates more texture, more interest in the brand. It was something, quite frankly, I struggled a little bit with during my first tenure here was finding the right partners to match our apparel, because our licensed product tends to be a little bit more accessible than our apparel product, which really goes after a luxury customer. But that's a real positive in my mind, because it gets more people aware of the brand. And so I think they've done a great job, and it really does create this flywheel effect. And I even got fooled the other day. I was walking through Bloomingdale's pre-Christmas, and I was in our men's section.
I looked to the side and I saw another Vince logo up on the wall, and I'm like, what the heck is that, and realized it was the men's tailored clothing that's done by Peerless. And we were sitting right next to the great brand name. So I give great credit to what ABG is doing. And again, I think there's opportunity we'll talk about to do other partnerships with them. Since I've been gone, you hear a lot, if you talk to me now, about the before and after, because again, I'm in such a unique position to see how the business has transformed. And one of the things is this transformation that the team went through. It was a big priority over the last couple of years, recognizing that after COVID, the business had lost some of its profitability, expenses had bloated.
And the team did a great job, which I inherited, going in and focusing on increasing gross margin through sourcing and less promotions, increasing EBITDA quite a bit, and dramatically reducing the long-term debt, both with the deal we did with ABG and the deal last year to purchase from Sun Capital. So the one thing I want to call out here is how we've navigated the tariff headwinds. So in April, we were hit with the tariffs at the time with China, which was over 60% of our sourcing came from China. The team was immediately boots on the ground over in Asia and all around the world, figuring out how we could rebalance that, not knowing exactly where the best place to be, because it was a bit like Whac-A-Mole. But we just decided we couldn't be overly reliant on any one country.
And even though China has been so good to us in terms of the manufacturing, working with our partners there as they sourced in other parts of the world, particularly Asia, to not only try to mitigate some of the tariff exposure, but also just to de-risk on some of the geopolitical issues that are out there. So that was kind of step one. But step two, and I mentioned this on our earnings call last month, was we had to take selective price changes. We had to pass some of this on to the consumer, and there was just no way we could absorb everything or ask the factories to absorb everything. So very strategically, we went through product by product and looked to where we thought there was some opportunity to raise prices, knowing that our peer group was doing the same thing.
But nevertheless, it's still unsettling to do. And as I mentioned on the earnings call last month, the price change, the elasticity of our product and the strength of our product showed in the fact that our unit sales haven't dropped off. In fact, many categories have increased. So the price changes, which on average are about 7%, but fluctuate, it's not across the board, really has just dropped to the bottom line, so to the top line revenue and help mitigate the tariffs. So when you hear me say that we're up 10% in direct-to-consumer, price change is a big part of that, and the fact that the product has warranted the consumer still being excited about it.
And so that, along with some other things as we go into 2026, gives me a lot of confidence that we've kind of done some things to have a step change here in the business. And likewise, at wholesale, our business at the register, the price changes haven't seemed to have an impact other than positive. So speaking about wholesale, we're fairly well balanced between our wholesale and direct-to-consumer. Wholesale has grown a little bit faster over the last couple of years as we've gone full bore with Bloomingdale's again and continued to grow Nordstrom's. Obviously, the Saks Global situation is something that we are monitoring on a minute-by-minute basis. And there's another slide in here that says they're about 7% of our overall business, so not immaterial, but not nearly as large as some of the other accounts that we've been growing. You can see a dip in 2023.
In 2022, we had gotten very promotional, and so both in our direct-to-consumer business and in our wholesale business, we made a concerted effort to get back to selling regular price, and you can see how that paid off in 2024 and into 2025. Here's what I was just talking about. You can see a little pie chart of how our business spreads out. We are global. We have some of the best names around the world in addition to the U.S. International growth is something you'll see as a priority of ours, and I'll talk a little bit more about that, but having this diversified portfolio allows us not to be over-reliant on any one account. Direct-to-consumer, I mentioned up 10% this last quarter.
This chart here actually understates what 2025 will look like, because it's trailing 12 months ending Q3, so it doesn't take into account the bump we've seen in Q4. I'll get into, besides the supply chain, some other things that I think are driving that. It's great to see that we have a really healthy direct-to-consumer business, because I think ultimately that's the best reflection of how the brand is being received, because it's our messaging, it's our team. This really was one of the best Christmases in terms of not having to sweat out the flash every day. You just very rarely get into a place where you just know business has taken this uptick, and every day it's going to be strong. It was quite nice to go through a Christmas like that.
And that just feeds into our omnichannel business. We are well-rounded and well-balanced now between our stores and our e-commerce. We have 60 stores. Two of them are in Europe, which I'll talk about, but 14 outlets. And we're constantly rationalizing the store base, making decisions to open and close based on the profitability, based on how we're seeing the consumer move. We opened two stores this year, one in Nashville, one in Sacramento, smaller markets for us than we typically had been in. So a good experiment to see not only what can we do in the four walls there, but also how it grows our e-commerce business and some of our other partners around the metro area. We did open two stores, one store in London, which I'll talk more about. We do have plans to close five stores later this month, three full-price stores, two outlets.
Again, just based on decisions looking to rationalize the portfolio. I would assume, or I would expect we'll open a couple of stores later on this year. We want to kind of keep the store base flat, but again, not chase bad real estate decisions. That's something the company has done in the past, and we're going to be a lot more disciplined as we move forward. So I mentioned international. We have a showroom in Paris, which is kind of our hub to handle the accounts across the globe from Asia to Europe to Latin America. We have two logistics centers, one in Hong Kong, one in Belgium, to service. We opened up our first London store when I was here in 2019, and it's been okay. It's been a little bit disappointing.
In fact, I was surprised when I came back in February, and we had another London store that we were getting ready to announce. I don't think I would have had the confidence based on the results to have done that. But fortunately, I wasn't here yet and making the decision. So we opened up in Marylebone, and it's just been fantastic. So it's really opened up my eyes and the team's eyes in terms of what other opportunities are there across Europe. And I'll talk a little bit more about that, along with the shop and shops that we have throughout the world. So global owes us more, and we're going to try to make some investments there to grow the business internationally.
So strategic priorities: grow e-commerce, grow our men's business, expand international, as I just mentioned, and then maximize Vince Holding as a platform, as I teased earlier. So just to go a little bit further into these. So one, the team has done a great job refreshing the e-commerce site. It looks so much more elevated and elegant than it did when I was here the first time, and I think it really matches the level of the product. The social media, the Caroline, our Creative Director, helps curate. It's noticeably different than it was even a year ago, but certainly five years ago. And also embedded into the site are just some investments we've been able to make to improve customer experience using AI as we get more into that, and we've seen that pay off in conversion.
I think the middle box is the one that I'm most excited about as we think about 2026, because what we did three or four months ago was add the capability of dropship, so what that means for us is we can now take all these licensed partners that ABG is signing up, and we don't have to take the inventory risk. We can showcase it on the website, and it ships directly from them, which is an enormous opportunity for us and enormous service for our customer, and I mentioned this on our earnings call. We launched this with shoes, with our partner Caleres, and shoes is actually a legacy license that we've had for a long time. Hopefully, you're familiar with our shoe business, but it was always tricky to have to own the inventory and manage it on the website.
Speaking from experience, you don't want to be long in shoe inventory. So adding dropship was a great opportunity for us, but we underestimated what the opportunity was. And just at a very high level, we did over $400,000 in demand during Black Friday week. The year before we had done $50,000. Our shoe business going into adding dropship was down double digits. It's now up over 20%. And it's not just offering more sizes. It's breadth of assortment. So consumers are buying higher fashion items than we would have even carried on our site. So as we look forward, we now have a full year of being able to run this business. But more exciting is we're going to add other categories. So we're going to add tailored clothing. We're going to add handbags. We're going to add accessories.
As ABG signs up licenses, which we're very involved in, they're very respectful of what we think, this will get added to the site and ultimately to the stores, and I think can be a huge driver of growth for our e-commerce business. And then coupled with that, I think the reason why, while our store business was really good for the reasons I mentioned, our e-commerce was through the roof, was we were able to invest in some mid-funnel marketing, really working with Google and driving fresh traffic to the site. So we saw an enormous amount of new traffic come to the website when we launched this in the back half of the year. And so as this goes into 2026 and we continue to refine it, I think the trends we're seeing in e-commerce are sustainable. So really excited about what e-commerce is going to look like.
Scaling the men's business, we are a dual-gender brand, but men's has always been a little underpenetrated. So we have a goal to get this to 30% from the low 20s where it is today. Big piece of that is the growth we're seeing in our wholesale partners. So we are now all doors in Nordstrom's and Bloomingdale's. When I left five years ago, well, we weren't in Bloomingdale's at the time, but with Nordstrom's, we generally just had like a T-stand of clothing. Now you walk in, we're in the best space, and we have a real assortment. It's almost like a mini shop-in-shop. And so we've also taken that to look to grow our own direct-to-consumer business by giving more space to men's in stores. And I think the men's product just has continued to evolve and looks fantastic.
Getting men's up to 30%, expanding the international business. I touched on this. We will need to make investments here. I think that's what we'll have to decide. Is this where we want to make the investments? I do feel more enthusiasm about opening up some other stores in some flagship gateway cities like Paris and maybe in Germany somewhere, both to four-wall profit, but also just to provide that more exposure for the brand. As I said, we are underpenetrated compared to our peer base in terms of global. We have an opportunity to make the investment and get Vince to truly be a global brand. Then, as I mentioned a couple of times, maximizing the Vince Holding Corp platform. What do I mean by that?
We sold our IP, so that's why we call ourselves Vince Holding Corp, because technically ABG owns the Vince brand. But we do have this Holding Corp platform, and we do have this incredible team and list of capabilities and competencies that we can bring to market for other brands. So that likely could be something with ABG as they're out there buying brands or have brands that need a home with some of the things we do. And I think it's just a great way from a Vince Holding Corp potential to have another revenue stream that allows Vince, the brand, to grow and run and hopefully break out of this $300 million collar we've been in, but then have this other revenue stream or streams that take advantage of everything that the company has created.
And so we continue to talk, and I think we would have had something done now if not for tariffs and some of the other headwinds. So looking forward to seeing what we can announce in 2026. And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Yuji to talk a little bit more about the financials.
Thank you, Brendan. Hi, my name is Yuji Okumura. I'm the Chief Financial Officer at Vince. So Brendan touched earlier about strengthening our financial and operational foundation, and this slide kind of recaps a lot of it in terms of how we were able to really strengthen our operational foundation. And when you look at the left bottom, as you can see in gross profit, we were able to rise from the 38% that we had in 2022 all the way back up to 50% in gross profit. And this is with the royalty expense that we have starting to incur starting in 2023 with the Authentic relationship. So when you think about how much that is, in 2024, we had our royalty expense and our cost of goods sold for about $14 million. So that was the headwinds that we had to recover from the gross profit.
And a lot of that was accomplished through the transformation program, as Brendan mentioned earlier. We focused on lowering our product and indirect costs and through really streamlining our production and manufacturing capabilities. And we've also lowered our promotion and discounting cadence. And as well as this year with tariffs, we strategically price adjusted, which also has been accepted well by the customers. And when you look down to the profitability, some of the transformation program also focused on really streamlining and being disciplined on our expenses. And with that, as you can see in the Adjusted EBITDA numbers, we are able to grow about $31 million or so from the 2022 to the LTM of Q3 2025. And then when we think about the DTC performance as well, we're comping positive this year. So we are continuing to drive the momentum in our DTC channels.
And with that said, earlier this morning, we announced our holiday results, as Brendan mentioned, and we're very pleased with the performance that we had this nine-month period, nine-week period. Our nine-week period performance was net sales was up by 5.3% versus the same period last year. And to highlight, direct-to-consumer net sales growth was up 9.7% over the same period last year. And based on this and the holiday sales performance, our company net sales have been trending in line with the prior stated guidance. And our adjusted EBITDA as a percentage of net sales, as well as adjusted operating income as a percentage of net sales, have trended more or less in line and to the higher end of the prior guidance for the fourth quarter and full year fiscal 2025. The company continues, as Brendan said, monitor the situation with our wholesale partner, Saks Global.
This guidance does not reflect the outcome of its reported status. Saks Global represents about 7% of the sales. I'm very excited about the over the past seven years that I've been with this company. I've seen the company go through and overcome COVID, as well as various headwinds and changes that brought it, as well as the tariff headwinds that we faced this year. With that, even despite that, we were able to show growth over this past few years and really improve our core foundational business. We are really, really excited to take that momentum into 2026. With that being said, if you would like to know and find out more about us, we do have a breakout session, I think, later this morning as well as tomorrow. We do have a booth right outside this hallway.
You can actually see our latest spring 2026 products. We're also doing some free giveaways. Passing back to Brendan.
Yeah, don't get overly excited about the free giveaway. Please do come by the booth, and just last thing, on the wholesale net sales growth, it's always a little misleading. Our business at the register was up quite nicely with our core accounts. This reflects shipments, and some of it is some of the shipments we've had to hold given while we monitor the Saks situation, but touring our wholesale partners, just the enthusiasm they had on the sales floor when I tell them I'm from Vince and just really getting their reaction shows me that our business at wholesale is as strong as ever, so as Yuji said, we have a couple of breakout sessions. I believe 9:30 A.M. this morning is our first one, and then again tomorrow, and hope to see everybody around. Thanks for your interest in Vince.