Good morning, good morning, good morning. Are we all here? Are we all sitting comfortably? Morning, Jim. Well, first of all, a big welcome to everybody. Welcome to our 2023 Annual Investor Conference. And I'm guessing for most of you here in the room, this is the first time you'll have visited our offices here at 55 Water Street, so welcome to the offices. We moved into this space in February 2022 from larger offices uptown, and this office is home to about 500 people in our organization across most of the disciplines of the company, but primarily in creative, in design, and in beauty. I will make our investors very nervous unless I start by reminding you of our safe harbor statement, which is, and I have to read this.
To kick us off, let me start with the usual formality, which is that I have to remind you that any forward-looking statements we may make today are subject to our safe harbor statements, which can be found in our SEC filings. So with that behind me, let me start by introducing you to the diverse and talented and experienced management team that are here with us today. Now, this is my leadership team, and most of these people are in the room today. Guys, do you mind standing up and waving your hands? Here we go. So look around the room. This is the management team. They are here to welcome you. They're here to host you. They're also here to answer your questions. So please feel free to chat to them, to reach out to them, to ask them whatever it is that you want to.
We believe in radical transparency. To the extent that we can answer your questions, we absolutely will. So whether it's this morning, in the coffee break or at lunch break or on the store tour, please take advantage of chatting to our people. And of course, you'll be hearing from Greg and Chris in detail. You'll also be hearing from Arun about international, and Morgan will be speaking today. And of course, TJ will be bringing up the rear with me. So that's the six of us that make up this morning's presentation. I thought I might just start by grounding us in a few facts about the company, which hopefully will be a reminder for those of you that are very familiar with us and maybe just a starter for those that are new to the company.
VS & Co is a $6.2 billion organization with $700 million of EBITDA on a trailing twelve basis. About 35% of our business comes from our digital channels, which is a result of the 500 million people that come to our site every year. And of those 500 million visits to the site, 85% are driven from mobile devices. We are the number one lingerie brand in North America. We have 20% market share. We have 25 million customers that we can identify, and of those, 18 million are now in our loyalty program. They're an incredibly strong followership inside the company, purchasing with us, but also following us around the world. In that with 85 million followers on Instagram, we're the second most followed brand on the planet, so pretty strong there.
And we are, of course, a global business with a presence in 65 countries, 1,350 stores, and that business is growing at an incredible clip of around 20%. And to dimension what that means for our total system, about 23% of our retail sales come from our international business now. So that's VS & Co by the numbers. If I take the sort of the softer side of who we are and what this company is about, this is a company for women, run essentially by women. I think 87%, 88% of our associates are female. Over 80% of our board is female. We have 60% of our leadership roles run by women, and I'm happy to say, in fact, I'm delighted and proud to say that we've achieved 100% pay equity in...
not just in terms of gender, but also in terms of ethnicity and the intersections of those identities. So very strong from that point of view. We're on the ESG journey. We made our first public report in 2022, our second in 2023, and we have another more fulsome report coming in April of 2024. So we're very much on that journey, and we're a company that believes in giving. We've given $10 million to women's cancers. We've taken a position on breast cancer for the first time in our history. We've given away over 700,000 items to women in need. And the combination of all of that is, I think, what makes this a great place to work.
Our approval rating from our 25,000 or so associates is very high, and we have, I'm pleased to say, over 85% of our associates say that they're proud to work for VS&Co. This is a good company, it's a good place to be, and I hope you feel that energy when you're with us today. Let's get into strategy. I think a good place to start the conversation about our strategy for 2024 and beyond is to look back. Those of you that were with us in Chicago a year ago will have seen this slide and the next slide. These are the slides where I dimensioned at the time what our overall ambition or goal is, and that is to be the world's leading fashion retailer of intimate apparel.
We talked at that meeting about there being kind of six keys to unlocking the potential of the brands of Victoria's and PINK. One was profitable growth from our core. The second was about strategic investments in other companies that could be additive. We talked about creating a market collection to broaden our reach and broader our customer appeal. We talked about international growth. We talked about establishing partnerships with companies like Amazon, and we also talked about the award-winning company culture. We framed that up in terms of the three pillars of our strategy, being: strengthening the core, igniting growth, and transforming the foundation of the company. Does that ring a bell? Nod at me if you remember that. That's what we talked about. As we've been giving updates to investors throughout the year, we talk about those three pillars.
Further, we talked about there being nine important initiatives that each of the members of the management team would be most focused on. I'll try and move around so those of you can see that. And then, of course, since our investor meeting in Chicago, we announced the acquisition of the Adore Me team. Fantastic addition to our family. Delighted to welcome Morgan. You'll hear more from Morgan later today. And the Adore Me initiative runs across all three of our strategic pillars. So if that's what we said a year ago, I think it probably makes sense for me to give you an update, be like a school report, on how we're doing against each of those three pillars. So let me unpack them one at a time, and I'll start in order of the least importance to our overall company.
The first of those would be transforming the foundation. Quite a lot to unpack here, so bear with me, but at the meeting a year ago, TJ identified $250 million of cost opportunity. I hope that number rings a bell. Many of you ask us on a regular basis, $250 million. We're delighted to say that $80 million of that $250 million that was over a three-year period has been realized in the current year. So we're bang on track with where we expected to be in terms of taking costs out of the system. That's essentially human capital, some in stores, a little bit in cost of goods. So feel good about where we are on that.
Second thing we talked about was getting faster in our supply chain, responding to a more normalized environment, and Dein Boyle and Chris Caliendo have done a terrific job at shortening the speed to market or increasing our speed to market, shortening our lead times, and building a program of how product will get to market throughout the next year or two. So really good progress there. Also, good progress on supply chain. Christine Rupp and her team doing a really good job of getting us back to the agility that we used to have, where we don't overcommit at the start of the season. We give ourselves chase dollars, and most importantly, we don't let inventory get ahead of us, so that we have to end up in a markdown mode. So very, very good management of inventory across that period of time.
If I think about what comes next, we continue to focus on our efficient operating model, and the biggest chunk of that will be in cost of goods. So if I refer back to the $250 million identified, of the balance, let's call it $170 million, the majority of that is in cost of goods, and we have identified a path to be able to deliver that, thanks to really good work in the team. So while I would say the most important thing in our supply chain is innovation, second most important is quality. Cost of goods does matter, and we felt that we were overpaying, and we've done something about that to bring that into line, and you'll start to see that flowing through the account as we move through the next couple of years.
Another important initiative is about establishing our talent on a global basis. So as you all know, not all jobs in our company need to be performed in high-cost offices in North America. So we've expanded our footprint in Bangalore significantly, and with the acquisition of Adore Me, we have partnership with an incredible office of engineers in Bucharest, where I was a month or so ago. So thinking about where is the best place around the planet that we can get the work done in the most efficient way. Also, thinking about our global footprint. In the old days, everything came through Columbus, Ohio. All merchandise came from Asia into Columbus and out from there. Doesn't make sense. We need to put inventory closer to customer.
So in our roadmap, we have a way of getting inventory closer to our customers on the West Coast of the United States, and in support of our international business, and Arun will talk about this a bit, we'll have a DC, and we'll have distribution coming in Europe to support markets that are closer, served from that destination. And also continuing to evolve the base of supply, so that our vendor base matches best-in-class sources around the world. So an enormous amount has been achieved in terms of transforming the foundation, and I would say that all of that, alongside the work of separating ourselves from BBW, which is substantially complete, substantially on time, maybe slightly ahead of time, and definitely within budget. So overall, for that pillar of, you know, how are you getting on with transforming this company and modernizing this company?
We feel really, really good about where we are. We give ourselves a kind of a green on that. On the second of the three pillars, Ignite Growth, we also have some really good stories to tell. We're gonna talk about international and the great work that's been done, but that business, in all parts, is now profitable and is showing growth in all areas. We see potential to double the size of that business during the life of this plan, so really good progress there. Secondly, our partnership with Amazon. You remember we tiptoed into the partnership with Amazon to just play it very gently and very carefully. We feel thrilled with that partnership. It's working extremely well for us.
They have been great partners to us, and we see a lot of growth, and now the growth that we are seeing is ahead of schedule. As it is in our curated marketplace, so that's bringing third-party merchandise into our system for customers to enjoy, where we get to customer groups where we're currently underweight, or we get to categories of merchandise where we're currently underweight. Again, that is ahead of plan. And finally, and incredibly importantly, you'll hear more from Morgan about this, the inclusion of Adore Me in our system is a very big deal for us. It's accretive in terms of sales, in terms of operating profit, in terms of cash flow. Most important of all is the capability that it brings to our company. You'll hear more about that today.... So in terms of igniting growth, we feel really good about where we are.
On the first two of the three pillars, really, really good work. The reality is, we all know the performance of the company, and there must be something that's not going to plan. It can't all be a green status, and the harsh reality is that the most important aspect of the work that we had to do in 2023, which was strengthening the core of the company, by which I mean our sales for Victoria's Secret and PINK in North America, are not where we need them to be. Despite everybody's best endeavors in this room, and some really, really good initiatives, particularly around the launch of loyalty, which, as I said earlier, has got to 18 million followers already, around some of the good launches that we've had, the Icon Bra was spectacular. Featherweight Max, really, really good.
We've had some great fragrance launches like Bare Rose. You know, some really good initiatives within the business, but in the end, in the end, not enough to carry the day. And so the challenges of operating in a market that's been shrinking, mid-single digit decline in the intimates market. The reality of operating in a consumer environment where sales are going backwards for most people, where the customer has less money, where the customer is skewing to a lower value item, have all been very challenging. We also see a blurring of categories, that traditional intimates retailers don't behave in the way that they did. There are more people coming into our space than there were, adding a different dimension to the way in which we go to market. And of course, a couple of things within our own control that we feel very, very bad about.
The end of 2022, we looked at the PINK business and said, "This is bad. This has got away from us. We are not proud of how the PINK brand is showing up, and how it's not meeting the needs of the original customer that it was intended to, to attach." So that the bottom line of all of that, and I, as the leader of the company, take 100% accountability for it, is we've been insufficiently differentiated in this difficult market in order to get paid through sales and through margin. That's what we've got to face into. It's all well and good, having us, you know, really good progress in growth. It's all well and good, getting our costs and our capabilities under control. If we don't address the reality of trade in our home market, we're gonna be struggling.
So with that in mind, how do we think about what our overarching strategy should be for the balance of 2023 and into 2024? The way I think about it is that the ambition of being the world's leading fashion retailer of intimate apparel is unchanged. We think that is our calling. That's why we exist as a company, and we believe that we will get to that place. So no change there. No real change in terms of the three areas of work. What is changing, though, is that not all three of those areas are born equally. Our resources and our investment in time and energy needs to distort, to not just strengthening the core, which sounds kind of defensive, but accelerating our core, actively, aggressively looking for growth in our core markets.
So the biggest area of focus, and it's represented as the biggest area on this chart, is accelerating our core, and Greg and Chris are gonna focus on that during their time this morning. The other thing I would say is that we're gonna try and think less about the work of the company in silos. You know, this is the work of growth. This is the work of transforming the foundation. Think of it all as one system, because in reality, our core business benefits from the growth initiatives. Our core business benefits from the foundational changes that we're making. So we're thinking about it in a virtuous circle, in a flywheel, where all areas are contributing. But the big takeaway would be, this is the area where we're gonna lean in most, and we're gonna put most of our collective energy. So what should we talk about today?
Well, I kind of teed it up there, that there are sort of five big areas. I call them the Big Five just 'cause it's easy for me to remember. But the truth is that the five things are brand, customer, product, go-to-market, and customer experiences. That is what will define whether we're successful in our core. That's the whole enchilada. That is the business of the business. So most of our energy today will be talking about the Big Five, with Greg and Chris coming up here to do a double act shortly. We'll then take a little break for coffee, and then we're gonna hear from Arun about international. We're gonna hear from Morgan about Adore Me and how Adore Me is integrating into VS&Co.
TJ will bring us home with the financials and talking about the enablers. I'll summarize, and then we'll do Q&A. Of course, there is a store tour later today for those of you that can make it. I've seen the store. It's really good. It's an articulation of Store of the Future in a way that wasn't built from the ground up. It's a cost-efficient way of applying the best of Store of the Future to an existing model, which is interesting in and of itself. More important in the here and now, in terms of getting confidence for the balance of this year, we've accelerated or pulled forward merchandise into that store to show you what holiday will look like come November.
So it's kind of faked out in order to give you a presentation that will give you a better sense of how our merchandise shows up, and we, we think it looks really spectacular, and we've had some great results from that store in the last couple of days. So before I hand the stage over to Greg and Chris, I did just want to talk about one additional very important thing, and that is the World Tour. I probably had more questions about the World Tour from investors, from analysts, from media, from family, from friends, from everybody and all, about how are you feeling about the World Tour? So I remind people, particularly inside our company, of the three objectives that we set out for ourselves in the World Tour. Objective number one:...
create a media frenzy, have the whole world talking about Victoria's Secret again, because we're a global, iconic brand, and everybody should be talking about us. So, number one. Number two, be relevant in popular culture. Get back to having a point of view about fashion. Get back to having a point of view about what drives popular culture, and at least be in the conversation about that. The third objective is to create assets. The asset could be a 20-minute video that will play in all 1,350 stores around the world to demonstrate that we're new and now and current, and we've got great talent. It's also a library of thousands of video clips and edits and products that we can use, not just during the month of September, but for months and months and months to come. So how did we do against that?
Well, there are some stats on the page. We had 17 billion media impressions from September through today, when we announced the World Tour. 17 billion. I was talking to a friend who works in media at the weekend. He asked me the same question, and I said: Well, you know... He said, "There's been a lot of media coverage. It's been, you know, tons." So I said, "Yeah, we've had 17 billion media impressions." He said, "No, no, you mean 1.7 billion." So I said: I don't think so. I think I mean 17. I'm pretty sure I mean 17 billion, 'cause I've seen it going up from 14, 15, 16, 17. So he kind of, huh, looked away and then he got on his phone and started texting people, and he came back and he said, "Oh, my goodness, you are absolutely right.
That is unbelievable!" So in terms of being visible about who this company is, very, very clearly a big hit. Social impressions, 800 million. Everybody was talking about what it was that we wanted to do. Cultural relevance, 14.5 million engagements, and I'll get to the sentiment in a second. The actual event, and a handful of you were at the event in early September in New York City, was really, really cool. We had the world's influencers, the best, in our opinion, the best models in the world, all in one room. It was a big deal. It was like rolling back to the best years of Victoria's Secret in 2014, 2015, 2016. So what's the sentiment overall? I bet everybody in this room has read a negative post or a negative review, right?
If you do the jobs that we do, that's our lives every day. This is a polarizing brand. Not everybody loves us, you know, shock horror. Not everybody is in support of the way that we go to market. But I was really encouraged by the fact that our sentiment, independently monitored, is 80%. Just to unpack that a little bit more for you, in the period prior to post us announcing the show and prior to the release on Amazon, we were 84%. Incredibly high. A lot of very positive energy about, "Ooh, goody, the show's coming back." At the time when the show actually started to air, and we don't know how many people have seen it, 'cause that's not one of our key metrics, but at the time when the show actually aired, September 26, 27, 28, through that week, we slipped to 63% positive.
A little bad. I mean, if it was an exam grade and you got 63, you'd probably, probably take it. Immediately after that week, went back up to being in the 80s. So the aggregate, in total, is 80%. Now, just to unpack that a little bit more for you in the center, depending on where you spend your life on social media, you might see different levels of, you know, affirmation. You may see different levels of positivity. It ranges from about 70 to about 90, depending on where you spend your life. Importantly, in these two charts here, the people who are in the viewer demographics, and I mean the view, not of the film, the view of all the content that we're creating, is overwhelmingly female. That's important. 93% female.
It's overwhelmingly young. 17%-70% between 18 and 24, 94% under 34 years of age. That's who we want to be talking to. The good news is we're over-indexing with Gen Zs. And just for fun, I'll show you the scroll, the TikTok that's rolling there in the corner, which is Amrezy, and a post that she did that hit, I wanna say, four... 11.5 million views, 1.4 million total engagements, was the most productive post in the history of Victoria's Secret by some distance. So there is advocacy for this brand. There is followership for this brand. There is a relevance to this brand. We're back in the conversation about popular culture. And I'm gonna finish off with a 90-second clip that just gives you a sense, for those of you that may not have seen it, of what the World Tour was all about.
So please, guys, if you would roll the tape, and then I'll invite Greg and Chris to come and join me up here.
... I just love that video. I think it speaks to the power of this brand. You know, I think that the idea that to wrap your head around 17 billion brand impressions, you know, we're a brand, when we say something, people are listening. Chris and I are really excited to be up here together today. We are going to tag-team this a bit. I'm gonna kick us off and talk about our brand positioning, where we're going as a brand, how we're thinking about the Victoria's Secret brand and the PINK brand.
I am gonna talk about all of the things we've been learning about our customers. We've got a lot of great insights, and it's driving a lot of our actions.
Great. And then I'm gonna bring it into the sort of the core of what we do: product. It's the reason that we're here. It's the main event of the conversation, and I'll bring it... I'll bring that home, talk about how we're thinking about this, making this shift from not just strengthening it, strengthening our core, but really accelerating it, returning to the place of growth. And then bring it into the next, which is, you know, that's good, but making it great is shifting how we bring it to market. How do we connect with our customers? Which is everything from how we flow product, to the marketing that we create around it.
Finally, we'll talk about how all of that culminates in customer experiences in our digital store, as well as in our physical store.
Great. All right.
Thank you.
So excited to talk about this. So, so I'm gonna kick us off with, with brand. So lots of work has gone into being clear about not just what the Victoria's Secret brand is, not just what the PINK brand is, but how they connect with each other. How do they complement each other? And I love this, this image because, you know, the way that it, that it talks about it is, you know, this on-ramp, that they, you know, they, they are two distinct brands, and as I talk about each one, I'll go into more detail on each one, they have a distinct point of view. They have a distinct customer target, but there's a connectivity between them. And when we're at our best, PINK serves as that on-ramp into the Victoria's Secret world. So VS. So I'm gonna just make one...
There's sort of one simple, bold statement here, that Victoria's Secret is a brand for women. Victoria's Secret is a brand for women. Martin referenced that. You know, it's such an important, simple statement. So that is one has been one of the biggest focuses of just how do we think about the filter of the brand? Going from, if you think about sort of where we were as a brand to where we're going, this idea of going from a pressure brand, where it's like there's sort of these unrealistic expectations of what it means to be a woman and these ideals that are really hard to actually achieve, to actually celebrating women, being a release brand. You know, actually sell, you know, making it, making people feel good about themselves. So at the core, that's the shift.
Three words that are up here that I think summarize this, and you'll hear this over and over: confidence, sexiness, and power. Confidence, sexiness, and power. The word Sexy is up here deliberately. You'll hear me talk about it. We love that word. It's an own-able word for us. We don't want to shy away from it, but sexiness can be inclusive. Sexiness can celebrate the diverse experiences of our customers, and that's what we're focused on in that shift. That's Victoria's Secret. As the saying goes, you know, a video says, expresses 10,000 words. I'm gonna just play a video that will say better than I do how we're thinking about the brand.
Sexiness, confidence, and power. I think that that's what's articulated there... Now let's talk about the PINK brand. You know, very clear, Victoria's Secret is a brand for women: sexiness, confidence, and power. PINK, we thought about in this complementary way. It's the on-ramp into the brand. PINK, conversely, is a brand for young women. It's a, you know, it's a fashion and lifestyle brand for young women. And honestly, I think that we've-- Martin spoke about this, with regards to the product and the apparel, but I think we also, you know, we lost focus on that. There's a, there's a vignette over here, which I'll talk about more, but I think it gives you a sense, and there's a great video I'm gonna show, about the resetting of the PINK brand.
So tons of work has gone into reimagining what the PINK brand means. It's about on-trend products that support the simple act of getting to know yourself. You know, this customer, Gen Z customer, she's in this vulnerable moment in her life, and our brand is a support to her. It's young women figuring out who they are and expressing it however they want. So there's a video that I'm gonna show. One caveat I'm gonna make with this video is that it's a beautiful beginning of an articulation of an evolution of the brand. We're much more at the beginning stages of this.
So while the VS video that I showed is content that's been created over the last year and a half, it's much richer, and I think it gives you a real sense of where the brand is. The PINK brand is newer in the redefining. So with that, take the video away.
Not bad for work that's been underway for not that long. Just a reminder, you know, again, this, the, the thinking about the two brands as being distinct but complementary, really, really important. That PINK is the on-ramp into, you know, into the Victoria's Secret world, really, really important. And one of the most important things, and it says it up here, and you'll hear us talk about the customer over and over and over, because everything that we've been focused on in the, the redefining our brand positioning, everything that we've been focused on in product, in go-to-market, and all-- obviously, in the customer experience, has the customer at mind. And so one of the things I'll say, and, welcome Chris on stage, is that I think that we know our customer better than ever, and Chris is gonna talk about that today for us.
Thank you, Greg.
Yeah.
All right, I'd like to share some of the things that we've been learning about our customers. Who is our customer? Let's start with how many of them there are. Of the 130 million U.S. women aged 18 plus, who bought apparel in the past 12 months, 34 million of them have bought PINK or Victoria's Secret products. She makes two to three trips to the store per year. She spends $165. Our best customers shop all categories. You know, here's something that we've learned. When we look at the behavior of our customer base, and we look at the behaviors by decile of how they spend, it's really interesting to see how customers come into our ecosystem.
When you look at that last decile, customers are starting out with some mist or some panties, primarily somebody that came to shop us in the mall environment, and then we watch how she walks up the ladder of buying more and more from us. And when you get to the top couple of deciles, she is buying everything we have to offer. Sure, panties and fragrances, but also bras, multiple bras per year, and she loves our apparel, and she loves our apparel, and she loves our marketplace apparel. She loves everything that we do. So what we're learning about is how customers walk up that loyalty ladder to purchase more. We are doing really well with Gen Z customers.
Gen Z customer market share is growing, and we over index in it, which means that as those customers continue to shop with us, we've got the beginnings of a great, loyal customer over a long period of time. And I'll also mention another place where our business has seen success, which is in digital, where we are also growing market share in intimates, in intimates. And when you think about loyalty, 18 million members for a program that we launched in June. This is a brand that customers love. So what's on her mind right now? We all know this. She has economic concerns, and we're watching very carefully how that affects her spending habits... and her bra choices are changing. You know, she has a lot more choices today than ever before, and she's going for comfort a lot more often than she used to.
You know, sports bras are a really important part of an assortment that brings comfort to customers. And also, the lines between categories are getting blurred. I don't know. What's a corset? Is it a bra? Is it a top? Is it innerwear? Is it outerwear? It's really blurry, and her body is changing. Customers in the United States are getting larger. Sizes 36, 38, and 40 bands are all growing in market share, and sizes 28 through 34 are declining. Finally, social is increasingly important to shopping. We talked here about the percentage of customers that are shopping in our stores, 68%, and the percentage that are shopping in digital, 48%. This isn't where they purchase, this is where they shop, so there's overlap.
But increasingly, customers are starting their shopping journey in social, on TikTok, Instagram, so we know that we need to tell our story in those places and make sure she knows about our brand. So we know the customer better than we have ever before, and what do we know about her behaviors? And this is an exciting study that we've done over the past year that I want to share with you. So when we look at her behavior in intimates, specifically, we look at all of the consumers in the United States and think about how to classify their behaviors into segments. And so we had a lot of different options for how we could segment their behaviors. And what we look for in doing that is: what is differentiating about the groups of customers that we put into these segments?
And what is a way that we differentiate their behaviors in a way that aligns with our brand and the products that we have to offer? And we looked and looked at this data, and we found some really interesting things. So the way we ended up deciding to segment behaviors is based primarily on two things. One is what she prioritizes to feel sexy, and the second is how she likes to express her personal style with her intimates purchase. And we found great differentiating behaviors across these segments. So now, we know the percentages that are in each of these segments, but we're not going to tell that secret sauce. But, what I will tell you is about their behaviors, so that you can go on the journey with us about how this affects all the other decisions that we make.
We've got six segments here, starting with the Fearless Fashionista. She's bold, trendy, she's an experimenter, she's sexy, and she is a shopaholic. The next one, the Modern Minimalist. She's very different. She's serious and refined. She likes basics and staples. She's understated, but she is brand driven. She is a brand loyalist. The Put-Together Passionista. She's confident, she's a leader, she's value driven, she's intentional, and she is stylish. The Intricate Idealist. She's light-hearted and youthful, compassionate, feminine, detail-seeking. Very different customers. And then, because we've recognized that these four are really our targets, there's two more that we decided are not primary targets, but I'd like to tell you just a little bit about them. One is the Reserved Realist. She's casual and practical. She is ease driven. She's brand agnostic. She's disengaged because she doesn't like to shop for this category.
It's a need for her, not a want. And finally, you've got the Tried-and-True Traditionalist. She's avoidant. She likes to buy products for their functionality. She's habitual, traditional, and cost driven. You can see why some of these words just don't align with where we're headed with our customers. So the next thing I wanted to share about this is that once we got done doing all of this analysis, we put together all of the data we got, hundreds of pages of data on these customers. We summarized it into what is actually a smaller book of data that everybody in the company is looking at to understand these customers and to make decisions. So this has become a little bit of a handbook that you see around the office.
I want to tell you about two of these segments in a little bit more detail so that you can see the kind of information that we've got on these customers. I'll start with the Fearless Fashionista. She is a socially confident individual who values self-expression and self-care. Now, I'm going to read some stats, so I'm just going to get my piece of paper out. Eighty-five percent of this segment really wants to feel sexy. Her definition of sexy, not our definition of sexy. She wants to feel sexy. Seventy-nine percent have a strong personal style. Seventy-eight percent prefer colors and patterns over neutrals. Sixty-two percent say the reason that they are shopping today is to treat herself. Thirty-seven percent say her definition of sexy, you're gonna be surprised by this: matching bra and panties. That's how she feels about sexy.
That makes her feel great. Of course, it's in bold colors, and she's treating herself. This is how she thinks about shopping in our category. This customer has bought 9.7 bras in the past two years. She loves the category. She overindexes in social media use, and African Americans overindex in this group. Now, let's compare that with the Modern Minimalist. The Modern Minimalist is a serious and hardworking individual who values loyalty, family, and making a positive impact on the world. 74% said the reason they bought something today, it's 'cause the old one was worn out. Her purchase behavior is entirely different than the Fearless Fashionista. 69% say they just wanna focus on the basics. 66% plan their purchases in advance in this category. 59% say their style is casual. 52% buy all from the same brand.
47% say what they think of as sexy... Any guesses? Matching bra and underwear. There's an overlap. She spends $47 per bra. $47. 21% shop at the mall monthly. She's coming back over and over again. And Hispanic and Asian customers overindex in this group. So you can see that we've been learning a lot. I'm just giving you a tiny sampling here. It's a lot to digest, but when you really think about the differences in their needs and behaviors, there really is a different way we have to speak to them. We can't have one message for all. And when I think about that, you know, we used to think about things like, we have a Victoria's Secret brand, we have a PINK brand, and when we send out emails, we'll send out an email every day to both customers.
So if you're a customer of both, you get two emails a day, and they all have the same content. Because we know what's launching, we know what the new products are, we know what the sale is. It was the same. It's not the same anymore, because now that we've gotten to know these customers, we're starting to create a different approach to content and marketing. So it's not a campaign for the launch of the Icon Bra. It's not just one campaign. It's many campaigns, because we're reaching many different people with many different needs. So when we talk to the Fearless Fashionista, we're showing her bright colors, and we're talking about, "It's time to treat yourself." When we're talking to the Modern Minimalist, we're talking about the neutral colors in the assortment, and we're asking if it's time for a replacement.
Those are very different ways of reaching very different customers. And I think even when you go out to Atlantic Terminal today, you'll see how elements of our assortment are appealing to different aspects of our customer population. So we're very excited about what we've been doing here, and when I talk about how we've revised our approach to email marketing as an example, we are, of course, seeing that we are distributing fewer emails, and we're getting more attributed revenue to the email channel because we're demonstrating how we know our customers. Thank you, and back to Greg.
All right, thanks. All right, so brand, our biggest asset, redefining that. Customer, we know her better than ever, in a very pointed way. Now, I'm gonna talk about product and how it actually comes together. So this is sort of the core of the core of the core of what we do in Accelerating the Core. I'm gonna go through insights that really were important in informing how we developed our product strategy. So five key insights, and I'm gonna go through these one by one 'cause they're synthesized, you know, lots and lots of data and lots of information. So number one, we're the dominant player in a fragmented market. We know that. We're 20% share, largest intimates brand, and the largest intimates retailer, and the market's shifting. So how do we address that?
Point one. Two is although customer... You know, the customer count is declining, our bra customers buy most of their bras from us. So our existing bra customers spend three-quarters of their total bra spend at VS. That's, that's great. They're very loyal, so concentration there. Third, brands that have a more significant apparel and sport presence are generating growth in the intimates market. That's really, really important. You're gonna hear this over and over today. Sport, we'll reference that a lot. A big shift that's happening in the market. You know, within-- So some facts, within the $134 billion women's apparel market in the U.S., intimates is the largest decline, and within intimates, brands that are winning have more of a significant apparel presence, so really important insight. Fourth.
Over here is, so we know from history that when we played in other categories, when we played in the swim and apparel markets, or the categories, that, that our customer loved us more. And it wasn't just about those categories, it was about what happened when they bought those categories, how it made them buy other things, how it made them buy our core. So interesting insight here is, and I think we've talked about this over time, is that when we exited the swim business, for example, we actually didn't lose the customer. She stayed with us. But what we did lose is the trip that she made to buy swim and apparel, and the spend on core.
And to quantify that even deeper, for every, again, in the swim category, for every $2 of swim that she bought that we lost, we also lost $1 of core. That's a big deal. That's a big deal. So we're shifting, we'll talk about that, how we think about widening our aperture, broadening our view into how our brand can play with our customers and categories. And lastly, Chris mentioned this, Martin mentioned this. It's a really, really important point. You know, customers are looking for pieces that serve multiple purposes. The separation of church and state doesn't exist anymore. Is it a bra? Is it a bra top? Is it a corset? Is it something I wear to dinner? Is it a sport bra, or is it a bra that I wear every day?
There's this real smudging that's happening in the categories. That is huge opportunity for us, and so it's really informed our strategy. So with that, three key product strategies. Number one is defining our brand pillars. So we have these two great brands. They have great brand positioning. We've talked about what that brand positioning is. Ultimately, they are made up of building blocks, and I'm gonna break that down between the Victoria's Secret brand and the PINK brands, and what those building blocks are. Ultimately, what is that gonna do for us? It's gonna create clarity for our customer. It's gonna create a distinct point of view between the collections, so that when a customer walks into the store, she's not overwhelmed.
She understands easily how to navigate through each of the components of the brand, and she's gonna be happy. It's gonna be easier for her to shop. Chris will talk about this in the end, when you talk about the customer experience and how you actually bring this to life. So brand pillars. Second is reinvigorating our core. It's 70% of our volume. It's... portion of our time is gonna go there. Getting this right is everything. It is the make and break of us, of being able to not just go from strengthening our core to actually accelerating it. So huge portion of time there. And then lastly, is refocusing and expanding our category lens. Thinking about life beyond bras and panties. Thinking about life beyond bras and panties, and fragrance.
There's this whole other world out there that is, that will work really nicely in a complementary way for us. I'm gonna jump into pillars first. Bear-- over on the right-hand side of the room, my right-hand side of the room, is a setup. I encourage you, at the break, to go peruse and kind of navigate, navigate the pillars as they've been brought to life for the Victoria's Secret brand, and to the left, for the PINK brand. I'm gonna break them down, and they're articulated up here on the screen. I'm gonna kind of talk through how we're thinking about the segmentation, the pillars. These loosely connect to the personas that Chris talked about. They are not one for one, but they loosely connect to those pers-- to that persona.
It speaks to the breadth of our brand. It, when you think about the video that I showed, the range of us talking to, you know, a mother and daughter tenderly on Mother's Day, to having a fashion show, you know, all within the same brand and it all makes sense together, it's because we actually have this subtlety that's around us. So I'm gonna break it down and make it, hopefully, it'll make sense to you. So sexy, it's our, it's the core, it's kind of the identity of our brand. You know, it's the, it's the thing that first comes to mind. I've talked about that as a word that we love.
But here's the thing is, you know, the definition of sexy is evolving, and the most important thing that we've talked about, and you'll see it up here, you'll see it over there, is that it's not just sexy, it's sexy on her terms. Sexy on her terms. This is where we have the most engaged customer. It's where we have the most dominant market share in terms of bra frames and subcategories of bras. But we have a huge opportunity to innovate and to evolve that, so big focus in sexy. Dream. So this is the most romantic expression of the brand. And, you know, interesting thing here, most of this, that part of the assortment is based in lace. Lace bras are not, you know. They're down trending.
As customers want things that are comfortable, they're not as interested in that category. We have this huge opportunity to think about comfort, and to think about glamour, and think about this creating an unmet need, and creating and driving the market, filling in white space. Big focus in Dream, as we think about the evolution there. It's also a space when you think about the fashion component of Dream, where we're showing mostly bras up there, but when you think about this extension into other categories, a lot of it will live into this world of Dream. Body. Body is our most universal, it's our most loved, it's our biggest collection. It's the broadest, it's the most inclusive, and it needs an update. You know, it needs to be elevated.
It needs to have new technology infused in it. Here's the great news, is that we've gotten after that really quickly. This coming spring, spring 2024, right around the corner, we will be resetting our body pillar with a whole new face, whole new technology, new frames that have been infused. So really exciting. The companion to that is this, the idea of sort of underpinning dressing, you know, as the surround, building out lounge, sleepwear as a companion to body, will also happen then. Signature. So this is our most iconic branded part of the assortment. It's also probably the most under-leveraged component. I've spent a lot of time visiting our stores around the world. Arun is gonna talk about the importance of our global growth, our international growth.
This segment is really, really critical for that ar-- in that world in particular. There's huge demand for our brand. There's huge demand to wear our brand. There's huge demand for the iconic stripe, and we're gonna build that out, and make it a, a bigger part of the assortment. Lastly, Sport. You're gonna hear sport over and over and over today because it's really, really, really important. This is sport as-- thinking about as, as a segment within Victoria's Secret. It's also important in, in PINK! We'll talk about it. We'll talk about it as a standalone category as well. It is the biggest opportunity. There's a shift that's happened. The sport bra has become an everyday bra. It's not just for people who are going to the Olympics, it's for people who live an Olympic lifestyle, and that's our customer.
The way that we're thinking about it in the Victoria's Secret brand is positioned under the, kind of the, the moniker of VSX. Thinking about it almost as a companion sub-brand within the Victoria's Secret house, which I think gives it a much, a much more distinct point of view than just having it blend into the rest of the assortment. Here's just facts. We lost this market. We had it. We were—at one point in time, we had a 16% share in sport bras. Today, it's 4%. It went from 16% to 4%. It was about a $500 million business at its peak. It's not that today. Huge opportunity in sport. PINK! The PINK house. This, referenced earlier, we're newer on the journey here, so we are...
The pillars of the PINK brand are more recent for us. It's more recently segmented and defined. So I'll break it down again over in the left. I invite you after the break to go check this out. So The Code is. This is kind of the foundation of the brand. It's the heritage, it's where campus classics live, and it's the biggest opportunity for us to modernize and redefine. You'll see new logo treatment, you know, still embracing our logo, but life beyond the kind of collegiate block that we really overly embraced. The Player. So this is PINK's participation in the sport world. It's more of an active spin. It's, you know, kind of where fashion and active collide.
So big opportunity in, in The Player. The Base, super interesting category, as a, as a pillar. The Base is all about the sort of the second layer, and when you think about a shift that's happening in Gen Z, and they're, they're wearing, you know, how, how they're wearing bras, that category has become almost a replacement to an everyday bra. It's become a replacement to a structured bra, and so thinking about that as a big, separate category is really important. Third category, The Base. And then the last is what we call The Wink. This is actually probably the newest com-- the newest part of PINK. This is PINK having a kind of a girlier side, a more feminine side. You, you...
Chris talked about that, you know, that's really important for this customer. So it's kind of pretty with an attitude. So that's the evolution of the Victoria's Secret pillars, the PINK pillars. Those will inform how we think about building out the product, step one. Step two is reinvigorating the core. So just a reminder, we lead the market with dominant incidence share. We have the number one fragrance in the U.S. So the good thing about this is actually we come at it at a place of strength, and we have a responsibility to amplify this. So reinvigorating our core, focused on driving innovation and launches, always leading with bras and complementing with panties and fragrance. So that's the kind of heart of this. Maniacal focus on newness.
I'm gonna go through this in detail, because it's 70-- it's more than 70% of what we do, which is broad brushstroke. Huge focus on newness and a huge focusing on editing. A huge focus on getting rid of the tail, the periphery, the thing that-- the things that don't drive the big volumes, which will make room for bestsellers to shine. We'll also add seasonal fashion pinnacle product, which we kind of lost. Collaborations will also be important to amplify the core. And ultimately, what's the goal? The goal is to drive emotion over promotion by updating our core, making it more relevant, and driving more full price selling. All right, so bras, it's the core of the core, as I like to think about it.
You know, it's, you know, given the power of our brand, you've heard this a little bit, we win with launches. We win when we do launches really well. Two examples I'll bring up. In Icon, it was us getting behind a launch in a really powerful and confident way, and the customer responded. Love Cloud, a launch from a while ago, similar. When we got behind it, we stood behind it, we were confident, customer responded, and it planted the seed for new bestsellers. We are focused on that. So the focus will be on innovating new concepts, amplifying and accelerating our launches. So expect that, to hear that from us. It also—this is, by the way, is mirrored by our shift in our go-to-market strategy.
You know, I'm gonna give you, you know, it's ultimately us thinking about bras for the future and of the future. Some examples of things, three things that I'll talk about. You know, maintaining our dominance in Body by updating and relaunching with new technology, coming into stores this spring. In the Dreamworld, blending technology with, you know, with comfort and fashion, focus further down the road. And in the PINK world, our really important Wear Everywhere bra, we will innovate there and relaunch, coming soon. We will also edit to amplify. Kind of, this sort of framework rationalization is really important, and using the pillars as a construct to think about that amplification is super important.
Focus is on making big, bigger and making room for new. And then lastly, you know, expanding our range with pinnacle layer to drive emotion and fashion. That's bras. Okay? It's the core of the core of the core. Panties, perfect complement to bras, driving match backs. You can see them on the models here. Super important, being focused on balance, a balance between good, better, best in our assortment architecture, and expanding the range of everyday programs across pillars to broaden our reach. Fragrance, beauty. It's a really interesting category to talk about for a second. You know, beauty, I think, is a, is a very interesting proof point around what happens when you get a complementary category right. Well, first of all, you can scale it to $1 billion, which we've done in beauty, but it, it's bigger than that.
Our customer who buys beauty, she loves us more, she buys more from us, she visits us more. Stat on that, beauty customers make 3.3 purchases per year, compared to 2.3 for customers who don't buy beauty. So when you have those things that are beyond the bras and panties, it's like, it's like magic for our brand. It ignites the emotion within our brand. Just to talk a little bit deeper about the beauty business. The current beauty business is actually quite strong. We're focused on continuing that momentum. Elevating beauty is a perfect complement to intimates and integrating it more into the brand. And you'll see a little bit of that when you walk around the pillars in VS.
You can start seeing how the fragrances start dovetailing really nicely into the subparts of the Victoria's Secret brand. In PINK, similar thing, where the focus is more on daily body care, and body mist. So that's our core. More than 70% of our volume, maniacally focused on that, innovation, launches, it's what drives our business. Next, let's talk about, you know, life beyond bras, panties, and fragrance. It's kind of exciting. So, this idea of widening our category lens is really, really critical. From winning in intimates to serving the style needs of women. Really, really important. That's a, like, a very, very important shift for us.
You know, it's the idea of going from only playing in the $14.4 billion intimates market, to thinking about a bigger swimming pool to swim in. Doing it with discipline, thinking about it in a very structured way, and I'll talk about that today. Here's some context. So on average, and so this is on average in the US market, our addressable market, women shop for lingerie three times a year, versus apparel, they shop for 21 times a year. That's a big difference. So the shift from three to 21, I like that math.
Second thing, we know from our own history. I referenced this earlier, but just a reminder. When we are in the apparel and sport world, our customer visited us 2.6 times a year if they weren't visiting and buying those categories. And when they were, they were visiting us much more frequently, 6.6 times a year. It drove incremental trips, and it drove a halo to our core. So this category has power beyond the volume that it drives on its own. It has this complement. So it's... You know, by expanding this lens, we reinforce our positioning as a lifestyle brand. It's creating a deeper connection with our customer.
You know, it's and that's about, you know, haloing our core, creating those natural adjacencies, driving trips and building baskets, and ultimately making this shift from relying on promotion to relying on emotion to drive our business, which results in higher full-price selling. All right, I'll unpack each one. It's a bit repetitive on the sport thing because it's so huge for us. So I'm gonna talk about it from a category lens. So I talked about it first from a sub-brand lens, the VSX, The Player, the two kind of building blocks of how we're going after it within the two respective brands. There's a shift that's happened, you know, the, a sports bra is no longer for the playing field, it's for, for everyday life. You know, she wears sports bras more than-- for more than working out.
25% of customers prefer sports bras to regular bras, which is up seven points to last year. That's massive, and that's like a structural shift that's happening in the market. For us, not having a, you know, having a smaller share there is a place of vulnerability, and so we're hyper-focused on doing it in the two zones. Our biggest new opportunity here, so in VS, it's VSX. The tagline, the filter that we're thinking about it, is where sexy meets tech. Where sexy meets tech. It's a differentiated point of view for us to enter into or to reemerge into that market. And in the PINK world, it's under the moniker of The Player. It's more light tech and fashion, with a focus on set selling.
You can get a sense of that in the mannequins and how we're thinking about that. Reminder, it was a $500 million business. We went from 4% share in sport bras, from 16% to 4%. Huge, huge opportunity. Swim is also an opportunity. You know, I think what it did in the past, where it was a reminder to love us in the spring and summer, it built out a lifestyle. We are focused on that, so it won't just be swim. It'll also be other complements. Apparel and sleep, similar. I won't... You know, this is also about building these out, these categories out, driving trips, building baskets. And then lastly, leveraging our market collection to fill in the gaps in our own assortment.
This has been a great business for us. Martin referenced it. It's more than $100 million this year. It's about reinforcing our bra dominance, leapfrogging into adjacent categories, and really outfitting the customer head to toe. The customer who shops here love us even more, so you get that theme. She's highly engaged. She spends three times more from us. She makes three more trips per year than the customer who's not buying third party. So when we add these extra ingredients in, she responds, another proof point for thinking about where we're headed. Lastly, I'm gonna close out before and we'll talk about the customer experience in a second, on how we're shifting, how we go to market. So three things here.
Number one is thinking like a product-led entertainment brand and delivering brand heat at scale. What does that mean? That's about richer storytelling that's more connected to contemporary culture. Martin referenced that, really important for us. Second is just shifting how we deliver products to customers. So going from this world of seasonal floor sets to a world of big, big, big product launches that are backed up with frequent drops and connection points with customers through drops and collaborations. And then lastly is evolving the content that we tell and just creating richer and richer content. What does it mean? Just to talk a little bit about this idea of, you know, what does it mean to be a product-led entertainment brand? It's about deepening our connection with our customer.
It's about shifting and how we tell stories—tell product stories, how we launch with power. Think about this as very, very, very loud launches. So, taking what we do and just putting a megaphone in front of it. We'll do this within our own channels and in our outside channels, through Amazon, driving sales and creating brand heat. Flow, I talked about this, the shift, you know, it's a balance of core, core plus, launches, drops with frequency, branded collabs. Then lastly, just closing this out, this is the content that will do it.
So this idea of me—you know, on a sliding scale of things that are massive, like we did with The Tour, that garnered 17 billion brand impressions, to big launches, returnable franchises that connect deeper with the customer, and then drops that are frequent, all kind of connecting with the customer at all times. All right, I'm gonna pass it to Chris, who's gonna bring it home and talk about how it all comes to life to the customer.
Thank you, Greg. Okay, so we've talked about how we know our customer better than ever, and we've talked about how that customer insight is, is leading in our brand strategy, product strategy, go-to-market strategy, and let's not forget our customer experience. What's important about this customer experience is that we make it personalized for her. So our experiences. Think about this slide as telling you what our job is to do. We will unlock a new set of behaviors, those of a product-led entertainment company, and those behaviors, our behaviors, are: we must excite her, we must know her, we must serve her, and we must connect her. Greg's already talked about how we're going to excite her. That's an important part of her shopping experience. But also, we need to know her, and I don't just mean by segment.
That's an interesting place to start, and it's gonna generate a lot of our content and experiences. But what she really wants, what our research shows leads to purchase intent, is when we show that we get her specifically. So we know that we've got work to do to make our experiences very personal and individual. And in doing that, then continue to provide an amazing service level in our stores. Make sure digital shopping provides the same level of service that she's always received in our stores. And finally, when we get to the end of that purchase, let's make sure we're signing her up for the loyalty program. We wanna stay connected to her because we want to be able to go back to her over and over again and help her choose the very next thing that she needs to buy.
So before I get started in telling you what we're about to do, I'd like to spend a few minutes talking about this slide, which is the one that I showed last year at our Investor Day. And for a few of you that I've talked to this morning, you may remember that I was about six weeks in to my experience here at Victoria's Secret last year for Investor Day. So now I've been here over a year, and I want to share some of the progress we've made in each of those areas. So we said that we were going to, Let me make sure I get that right. We said we were going to meet our customers where they are. And how have we been doing that?
Well, we've been working on digital integrations with Commission Junction and TikTok and Google and Meta and a lot more, because those integrations that we do give us better access to data that tells us what's working, so we can get the cost of acquiring customers down, and we can focus on driving more conversion with really targeted customers that are interested in our products. That's been a win. We also said we would leverage data to know our customers even better. So I've already talked about one way that we're doing that, but here's another way. Let's go back to that email example. Well, I told you how we were creating the content, but we also have a partner now, Movable Ink. And Movable Ink uses AI to take the content and match it to the customer. So our personalization in email is far better today.
The next thing we talked about is to be inclusive, authentic, and helpful in how we support the customer shopping experience. I told you that the customer's body is changing. It's important that we recognize that we need to offer expanded sizes, and we've been doing that. We've also launched a new, we'll call it store event, Fit Fridays. So you come in on a Friday, and it really is a great experience to get a fitting from a sales associate in one of our stores on Fit Fridays. We said we would offer more convenient shopping options to support our customers' busy lifestyle, and we are just a few moments away from launching our pilot of same-day shipping, and that's gonna be in a store on the West Coast.
Here's what it means: a customer that comes to our digital site to shop is suddenly gonna have the option, when she gets to the end of her shopping experience, of having the product ship in a couple of hours out of that store to her home. Finally, we talked about expanding loyalty to give our customers reasons to return again and again, and you've heard it a few times today. We're really proud of it. We launched our program in June, and we have 18 million members. Let's talk a little bit about the loyalty program. I said we have 18 million members, but there's a couple more data points I think you'd like to have. One is that 75% of our sales are attached to a loyalty member post the pilot.
When a customer comes into a store, there's a prompt on the register that's asking the sales associate to get the customer signed up for our loyalty program, and it's a highly effective place to do that. When you think about things like, you know, hey, you know, there are customers that we've lost over the years in terms of she was once signed up for us, and she isn't now. We're winning her back through this program, so that all of this information that we have about how customers shop, we can use that to guide her up, what I like to refer to as the loyalty ladder. We know where she starts shopping. We know what behaviors lead to future purchase. We know what to put in front of her in our customer relationship management programs.
So we've had a significant increase in personal shopping data, and that is gonna go on and on, and we'll use that data to make sure we're bringing her highly personalized experiences. There's one other thing that I want to talk about that's coming soon. If you remember when I was talking about the segments, one of the things I shared was that there was a reserved realist, and she does not like to shop. We've got an answer for that. I'm so delighted Martin mentioned that we acquired the company Adore Me in the past year, and they have some outstanding technology and programs that they're using to reach these types of customers. The Home Try-On customer is a customer that doesn't like to shop. So that reserved realist customer is going to have an option for no shopping, shopping.
A box can show up here, at her home every month. It's very easy to select the items you like and ship the box back for what you don't like. Now, I'm gonna give you one other piece of data. How big could this be? Well, we don't know, but we do know how much interest we're getting in this. We did a statistically significant survey across our customer base to ask who would be interested in trying this type of box. 32% of our customers in this survey said they would be really interested in trying this. That's a huge number. So these things really excite us about this program, and Morgan will come up later because he's the expert to tell you more about this program. So we have been working on our digital capabilities.
I'll roll back in time a little bit to a year ago when I started. Martin asked me to assess where I thought we were in our digital journey. So of course, I used some tools to try and figure that out, Gartner studies and all those kinds of things. You know, we really thought we were about a four out of 10 in terms of our digital capabilities. In other words, not really even at the halfway mark. However, we knew what we needed to do to improve that. And so we've been working on a number of digital capabilities that are advancing our overall capabilities for reaching her. And let me talk about those for just a minute. One is that the first thing we had to do was get more capacity to write more code, to get more things done.
We have expanded our team in Bangalore by hundreds of people, and that was a decision we made in January, and it's something that we executed on over the last several months. As of June, we're producing code and programs out of those offices in Bangalore. We have got expanded capacity to get the work done. I talked about the use of AI. I wanna talk for just a minute about digital navigation. One of the things I love to do in figuring out what a great digital experience would be is to go to the stores and watch the interaction between the sales associate and the customer. Because we're an expert at serving her in the store. We've been doing it for decades and doing it very well. How do you really mimic that in a digital environment?
Well, one of the things we saw that was happening is a customer would walk in the store and say, "I really love the bra that I've got. I'd really love help in figuring out which one that is." And the sales associate would say, "Well, just show me your strap." She'd pull out her strap, and the sales associate would say, "Oh, that's Body by Victoria. Let me take you right on over here." How easy is that? All right, but what happens in digital? 'Cause somebody can't help you that way. And so the first thing I thought was, "Oh, I've got a great idea. I'm gonna take a picture of every strap, and the customers can pick which strap they've got." No, that's a terrible idea. Nobody could do that. But wait, technology can solve for that.
So what we did do was we created a version of a visual search, where a customer can take a picture of any bra, our bras or anyone's bras, and they put that picture into our website, and we return pictures of everything that we've got that looks like that bra. So now she's got a little personal shopping experience of the bras that she was looking for today, and that's an example of how we're making shopping easier. So there's other features here we've launched. I want to get to the way we think about serving her in digital and the features that are to come. So this is a model for how we think about what we do for the customer. When she comes in, she needs to find what she's looking for. She needs a great fit.
80% of women out there are wearing the wrong size bra. She wants it fast, and she expects it to be fun. So how are we going to expand on the programs we've built to deliver on those things? So for find, we talked about Home Try-On, improved navigation and wayfinding. One of the things that I wanna talk about is richer content to help her decide. We're having a lot of fun taking all of that content from World Tour and embedding it in her shopping experiences, because that's a great way of helping her to see how this product is worn and used. When we talk about fit, one thing that I don't have up here is last year, we launched something called Verifyt, which is a digital fit tool. You can scan your body, and it will help you with sizing.
It's available in our app. 15,000 women have used this to find the right size for them. We're gonna continue to build on how to help her get a better fit, and another thing we're going to do is personalization in the app. We haven't done personalization in our app yet. Well, why not? Well, because we had two different code bases for the PINK and the VS app. We had to get it all together. We had a lot of foundational work. Now is when the fun comes, because now we can start building these integrated experiences. Fast. She expects convenience. We talked about shipping convenience, but you know, one of the most boring things that's on that piece of paper is site speed. Boy, that's boring! Why does it matter?
Because when you're at three to four seconds to render your pages, customers are popping out of the experience just like they would if you didn't take their drink order fast enough in a restaurant. So we have just completed a project, server-side rendering. It means that we have dramatically improved the speed of our pages, and that's just launched in the last couple of weeks. We're really excited about not just its impact on the shopping experience, but Google uses it for your search engine ranking, and so it's also gonna help us find more customers. And finally, fun.
I talked about some of the content that's come out of the World Tour that we're using to help make our shopping experiences fun, but also a behind-the-scenes look at all of the things that happened at the World Tour, how the models chose their wings, all kinds of fun content, because we have brand loyalists that really love to hear what is happening with the models and the wings. So let's get on to talk about stores for a minute. We have 830 stores, which, you know, in my mind, is like a little warehouse in 830 of the most important neighborhoods. When you think about that, how can we use that store inventory to serve customers in a way that they've got very convenient fulfillment.
It's a whole other view of how we can leverage that real estate in stores. In addition to the fact that any digitally native company would kill to have this acquisition method, especially when we were realizing that that tenth decile often finds us at the store in the mall. We also have 20,000 passionate and engaged sales associates, 95% of whom are women, and we have a signature bra fit experience by a knowledgeable sales force. You know, those words on that piece of paper are so dry compared to what actually happens when you go to a store. The most important thing that we can do, it's not the expertise, it's the empathy, because when she comes in for an experience of finding the right size bra, it is a very vulnerable and intimate shopping experience.
When we meet her in the dressing room to serve her needs, she's incredibly vulnerable in that moment, and if we do a great job, we walk out with an emotional connection with someone. This is not a transactional purchase. And finally, it's really exciting, the work that we've done on Store of the Future. I think, you know, the overall look and feel of the store has changed, and that is really beautiful. You'll see some wonderful things today at Atlantic Terminal. But the other thing is that we've opened it up, so it's much easier to cross-shop across the brands, and that's what's leading to the lift that we're getting in those environments. So I know we have an unmatched Omnichannel opportunity. So a few more things about the things we've been doing in stores.
I won't spend much time on this because you'll get to see it for yourself, but we are getting a lift out of the Store of the Future program. We have made store navigation easier. I invite you to come look at the wall where we show all of the bras we carry. This is a tool sales associates use all the time to help customers pick the right bra for them. And if a sales associate can't get to a customer or she prefers to do it herself, it's a great self-help tool. I don't want to forget to mention Crave. Crave is in 163 stores. That's this digitally assisted fitting rooms. You've got a picture of it here. Customers that don't want someone coming in and out of their fitting room are loving this tool.
So our stores are also a place where we're gonna deliver against find, fit, fast, and fun. And we've talked about many of the things that we're going to be doing. One of the things that I want to mention is fast checkout, because this is becoming really important in the store environment. So, you know, we're thinking more along the lines of what mobile registers can do to help assist in a situation where the line backs up. We also know that one of the reasons the line backs up is because returns are too complicated at the register. So we're gonna simplify returns. It'll cut down the size of the line. We'll be able to use mobile POS, and we'll have much faster line to serve customers in stores.
One other thing that I'll mention, because it's just too much of a hot topic to miss: operational simplification through AI. You know, we've all been hearing about AI and the power of it. What we'd really like to do is to bring that to bear, to simplify the work of a sales associate in store so that she has more time for customers. And we've got 1,000 ideas about how we're gonna be able to do that, but not having to have the sales associate do so much of the operational work, the research. What's the planogram supposed to look like? How do I look up my sales for this week or last week? Where's the opportunities in all of that? Bringing the power of AI to that is going to make her job much easier to do.
So when we think about experiences, there's just a couple of key elements that we're doing foundationally. One is customer insights. You've heard it a lot today, but it's really important that we base all of our work on the data that tells us what she's looking for. So what are we gonna do with that data, though? Because, you know, if you, if you can't store it in the right place, if you can't create an organized data estate, you can't end up using that data well later. But we have been moving to Snowflake, we've been stitching the data together, we've been investing in new data sources, and we've been asking her preferences, so we know her specifically. We're leveraging a data partnership with Epsilon PeopleCloud, and we're going to be able to target her very specifically in performance media channels.
When you put all of that together, now you have the right information to build world-class, Omnichannel customer experiences. When our customers are done shopping with us and they leave, we want them to feel that they were welcomed and they are welcomed back, that they are seen and understood, and that they are cared for. Our very best customers, those top two deciles, we're prioritizing them because they spend the most money. Here's an example: We just launched a new best customer program in our customer service unit. We know who they are. When they contact us, they get our best agent. They go to the front of the line, and if they have an urgent need, they get free two-day shipping on their products.
They are very happy with that experience, and we're gonna find lots more ways in all of our experiences that we take the best care of these customers.... And so, this is our job: excite her, know her, serve her, connect her. That's what we're here to do. Thank you. All right, now I get to announce a 10-minute break, and I'm sure you're grateful for that. Restrooms are on both floors, and refreshments are back upstairs, so please just be back in 10 minutes.
Ladies and gentlemen, we'll resume in three minutes. Once again, three minutes, we'll jump back into the program. Thank you.
Ladies and gentlemen, please take your seats. We'll begin the program here momentarily. Once again, if you could please take your seats.
All right. Thank you. Give folks another 30 seconds just to get back in their seats. Okay, so hope you guys are having a good morning so far. I'm going to be up here for about 15 minutes. I've been with the company about 7.5 years, and the last three years I've been leading international. I want to leave you with three key things to take away. First and foremost, that the international business is healthy, it's growing, and it's profitable. That's thing number one. Second, that the opportunity in the U.S. is obviously big. It's our home market, our most important market, but the opportunity outside the U.S. is even bigger. The third thing I want to leave you with is that we have a robust plan on how we're going to capitalize on that opportunity. Those three things.
Let me begin with saying that you heard Martin speak earlier about the three pillars of our strategy, and igniting growth is where I'm focused on, and the international business is, in fact, igniting growth for VS&Co. Our brand resonates globally. I can't tell you the number of times I've been on trips around the world, and no matter it's in a hotel, at a check-in, or just run into somebody on the street or you're sitting on a plane next to somebody, and they ask you what you do, and you tell them, "I work for Victoria's Secret," almost always generates an emotional response and usually a positive one. We just recently had our partner conference. This is when we pull our partners from around the world, franchise partners, travel retail partners.
They come in once a year, and we share with them how the business is doing. We share with them how product is progressing, where the brand is heading. I hope you had an opportunity during the break to take a look at Sexy, Dream, Body, Signatures, VS X, and all of the different pillars in PINK. We recently had our partner conference about 10 days ago in Columbus, Ohio, and the partners were absolutely blown away by what, what they saw and where the brand is heading. Super, super excited by the direction that we're going in. We have a very strong partner base. Many of our partners are tenured. They've been with us seven years, nine years, 12 years, so they have established the brand around the world for us and have a robust business.
We have a diverse operating model to reach our customers, so we have joint ventures in the U.K., where we have a minority JV. We're a minority partner. We have a majority JV in China. We have a digital business where we ship to customers around the world from the US with the dot-com business. At the same time, we also have franchise partners around the world, as I just spoke about. We have a travel retail business where we work with travel retail partners, so all the stores you see at the airports, train stations, cruise ships, those stores as well. So we can reach the customer where she is. We have strong performance year to date. This is the proof. Before I talk about what the plan is going forward, you can see that three years in a row, we've been growing our retail sales.
11% growth, 2022 over 2021. 16% growth over 2022 and 2023. That's our goal. If you look at that $1.5 billion of retail sales, which we aim to achieve this year, about half of that comes from franchise business. So our franchise partners around the world execute the brand. They deliver half the top line. China, which is a majority-owned joint venture with Regina Miracle, which gives us enormous capabilities in product development, speed to market, agility, and being able to respond to a customer's needs in a very sharp and focused way. So I'll speak more to that in a bit. Travel retail, I just spoke about. Superbly profitable business for us. It's a wholesale model, and on top of that, we've stacked a retail franchise. So the store looks and feels like any other store in the world.
At the same time, behind the scenes, it's a wholesale operating model, growing for us, profitable. We have fewer stores than we had in 2019. We have higher sales than we had in 2019, and we're much more profitable. The U.K. business turned around. Our joint venture with Next, where we are 49% partner. Next is in the driving seat. That business is back to the path of growth, and it is a profitable business for us. And then finally, the international digital business, which is us shipping goods to customers around the world from the U.S., and that's a profitable, growing business for us. But most importantly, that's one of the businesses that we're going to turbocharge, particularly in Europe, and I'll speak to that in a bit as well.
We had said last year at the investor conference that the opportunity outside is big, and our bold goal is to double the business. You saw the $1.2, $1.3, $1.5. We're at the halfway mark. We have to build another $1.5 billion in retail sales over the course of the remaining—remainder of this year and the next, next four years. We're about 20%+ of VS&Co retail sales. If you took retail dollars, and you heard Martin mention at the start that it's about 23%, so a little bit north of that 20%. I'm sure you've all heard... that company that put brown sugar water in a red can and sent it around the world. You've also heard of the company that says, "Just do it," which my son often misinterprets.
I have to tell him, "Just do it doesn't mean just do everything. But you can see very clearly that the best global brands get a majority of their sales and profits from outside their home markets, and that's our goal. That's where we wanna get to. Finally, we have to measure our performance in terms of market shares, because market share is, you know, markets are growing around the world and we've dimensioned all the key markets, and we set very clear market share goals, market by market. How are we gonna get there? And today, we have around 1% market share. If you took all of the markets outside the U.S., added them up, and if you took our sales. So it just gives you a sense of the size of the opportunity.
Just growing 1%, 2%, 3% market share represents a big number for us, and that's one of our key goals. Then, of course, digital is super important. We used to penetrate in the mid-teens, then we got to 20, we got to 25%. We think digital will become increasingly important and be about 30% of our business going forward. So how is this $1.5 billion gonna happen? Where is it gonna come from? Why is this believable? First and foremost, the growth is gonna be... Sorry, dry throat. So, stores. Stores are super important. They're a key part of the business, and we have about 515 stores right now. We will end this year at about 550. So we would have built 70 stores this year by the end of this year.
Last year, we built 35. Next year, and the year after, and the year after, we have planned to build about 100 stores each, and we have the pipeline to do that. So you can do the math simply with store growth being a key component. What's also important is that we grow comp sales. So we pitched comp sales growth at low single-digit levels as we expand on top the number of stores that we grow. This is largely with existing partners in existing markets. There's a whole lot of white space out there. We don't have a partner in Northern Europe. We're looking for one in Western Europe, and I haven't spoken to digital yet. So if you put all these things together, you can just build out the picture on what the growth opportunity is.
The other thing we've done internationally is initially we made the same mistakes. We had very large stores, and they were dark and mysterious, but we've gone about building smaller stores. So we have stores that go from 1,000 sq ft in the VSBA format, which only sell beauty and accessories, which is what you see at the airports, all the way to 15,000 sq ft, and I'll share an example of that store towards the end of my presentation. The main point here is, we have to build stores that are easy to shop, easy to build, easy to operate, and have great unit economics. And that's where we decide what kind of store fits best in this market. Who's the customer? What size do we need to go with?
And of course, they're all in Store of the Future format, so they're much, much more bright and fun to shop. The digital opportunity is huge, particularly in China, where we're growing rapidly 100% year-on-year growth in the digital space, right? So we think there's tremendous opportunity for us to capitalize on that. Second is in Europe. Today, we ship—so a customer in Germany orders product, and it takes us a week to 10 days to get the product to her. It's very difficult to return, as you can imagine.
So even with all that, the $115 million you saw on the, in the previous slide, which is our digital sales internationally, just shipping out of the US, I think there's a four to six times multiple to that if we could position our D.C. and our delivery and improve the customer experience, and put the product closer to the customer. So I'll be speaking to that in a bit as well. And then, of course, marketplaces, super important. Curated marketplaces, I mean, you heard about how we're doing marketplace on our own platform in the US, but if you think of Europe, there's Zalando, there's Otto, there's so many players. In China, it's Tmall, and now it's TikTok. So I'll talk to that in a bit as well. This is an example of one of our newer stores in the center of Turin.
It's 10,200 sq ft, gross space, 6,200 selling. This is an example of a great execution, speaking to the space we're in, the heritage of the building, and doing an outstanding job building a great customer experience. Our growth plan is also balanced. It's not lopsided in any one part of the world. If you think of Europe, we have partners in Southern Europe, so Italy, France, Spain, Portugal, we have one partner. We have another partner in Eastern Europe, that are doing all of the Eastern Bloc countries. We are now actively searching for partners for the Scandinavian belt, for Benelux, and also for the DACH countries. So it's just imagine all of that white space where we could build stores. In addition to that, we're putting a distribution center close to Amsterdam in Europe.
Think of where she's getting the product from today when she orders online. Tomorrow, she's gonna get it in two days or three days across much of Western Europe with the help of that D.C. It'll be easier for her to return product. Simply that act alone, I think, is going to give us an enormous lift in digital sales. Europe itself is a $23 billion market. We have less than 1% market share. That's where we think there's enormous opportunity for us to grow. Second, of course, is China, where we have a joint venture with Regina Miracle. They've been a supplier, partner for Victoria's Secret for over two decades. They have enormous capabilities in innovation, product development, and we're able to turn product from initiation and design to finished product in less than 60 days.
We're able to replenish products sometimes inside of a week, and that's super important in China's fast-moving digital space. We're also leveraging the power of social commerce. I'm sure you guys have heard of TikTok. Three years ago, it wasn't a big factor. Tmall was the thing. Today, TikTok, for us, is bigger than Tmall. So I don't know if you heard of a guy called Austin Li. Li Jiaqi is his Chinese name. He does live streaming. Last year, 11/11, one person did $1.5 billion in sales. We're working with him. He can help us sell 50,000 bras inside of 30 minutes. So the power to design product, source product, test it, scale it, and sell it through live streaming at scale. That's how we're getting that 100%+ growth in China on digital.
In addition to that, of course, you know, this is a huge market, $21 billion, so it's about the same size as the U.S. It's very, very fragmented. We're moving up the ladder. We're gaining share. The market hasn't been growing rapidly the last 12, 18 months, for obvious reasons. There was COVID, and this and that, but we are gaining share, and our business is growing at that rate. And thirdly, the rest of the world. $6 billion in Americas, outside of the U.S., $16 billion in the rest of Asia, and we're just getting started. In markets that we've been present for 10 years or more, for example, in the Middle East, we have market shares as high as 20%, high teens, mid-teens, so we think this is very, very doable on the back of what I just described.
Three enablers that will allow us to grow. Three areas that we're focusing on. First and foremost, very simple: go where the customer is and market like a local. You gotta show up everywhere she expects you to be, online, in stores, and connected in an omnichannel experience. So get the optimized route to market. Second is an integrated digital strategy. So we've talked about the importance of marketplaces, the importance of the dot-com site, the importance of positioning product closer to the customer, and then connecting it up with the store experience. And finally, this is a great example. In the picture, this is localization of marketing. So we have a global brand that needs to be projected around the world. At the same time, we need to speak to the nuances of local culture. The Middle East is a conservative market.
It's a modest market, therefore, we have to do photography, we have to create content, and sometimes we have to tailor that experience to that customer. So this is something that we're doing more and more of in order to sharpen the experience and land the brand where it needs to with that customer. Second is supply chain. So you heard Martin speak about this earlier. In the old days, all the product came from all the suppliers into the U.S. and went back all the way back out. Initially, we began 3 years ago by putting a distribution center in China, in Shanghai, so obviously, that supports the China business. A year and a half ago, a D.C. in the U.K., so now that supports the U.K. market.
The D.C. goes live early part of next year, close to Amsterdam in Europe, and that'll support all of our businesses in Europe. Europe's an important growth area. About $500 million of top line has to come out of Europe. Digital, it'll support the digital business, it'll support our franchise partners, it'll also support our travel retail partners, and that is coming up soon. After that, we're looking at... By the way, that will also extend to supporting the Middle East as we go forward. This is a crawl, walk, run. In the next 12-18 months, we'll have full capabilities on board. Finally, a D.C. in Southeast Asia is next on the cards to support that $16 billion opportunity I talked about in Southeast Asia. Finally, Fleet of the Future, design and execution flexibility.
So here's what I mean by this, is we have the BA format, the Beauty and Accessories, somewhere between 700 and 1,000 sq ft. Those stores are extremely profitable. Great way to enter the brand. As you heard, she buys fragrance and panties first, then she graduates to bras, then she buys the whole shop. So it's a great way for us to seed the brand and also for market intensification purposes. Then we've got the 3,000-5,000 sq ft format, which is the sweet spot for international, because rentals are higher, leases are shorter, and you need unit economics that work well. So you can't just take the U.S. box and supplant it and put it outside. So good unit economics, I'm a huge, huge believer in that. Every store has to make money.
Every store has to generate high teens, double-digit, four-wall. That's what we're looking for. Then, of course, scale to grow. We were at 500, just under 500 stores two years ago. We will be at 550 by the end of this year. 900+ stores by 2027. We will have more stores outside the U.S. than inside the U.S., and so that's how important this is. I'm going to leave you with a video. This video is of our remodeled store in Dubai, in Store of the Future format. It's about 12,500 selling sq ft. This is the number one store in the world. This will do north of $40 million. Let's roll the video, please.
So with that, I'd like to welcome my friend Morgan, who I met, I think it's been almost a year now with the VS&Co family. Superbly intelligent, smart, and very, very impressive person. I'd like to welcome him on board to share his story about Adore Me. Thank you so much.
Thank you, Arun. I'm blushing. My name is Morgan Hermand-Waiche. I'm the founder and CEO of Adore Me, and today I'm gonna tell you a little bit, tiny bit about me, a lot more about Adore Me, and even more so about the whole supercharge that we are in the process, and that we look forward to keep bringing to Victoria's Secret. About me in a minute, I'm the unique hybrid of sciences and business. Science, 'cause on my mother family side, I come from a history of scientists and doctors that led me to a triple major in math, physics, and computer science. And on my father's side, a history of retail businesses that led me to a few year at McKinsey, and symbolically, I actually started Adore Me from my years on the Harvard Business School campus.
So no wonder Adore Me came to become a very unique hybrid of being an incredible brand that I'm gonna tell you about, phenomenal values that I'm gonna share with you soon, and a real tech powerhouse. Actually, the joke has been running at Adore Me for many years that we are not really a fashion company, but we are a software company that happens to sell fashion. Starting with Adore Me. So these are our four main values: inclusivity, affordability, digital experience, and sustainability. On inclusivity, from the very beginning, we have catered to every single 77 sizes. Back in 2013, way before this was a conversation. And inclusivity doesn't stop at the size level. It's a matter of genre, taste, colorways, bringing a real, complete, inclusive experience of everyone, whatever their taste, whatever their shape. Affordability is another axis of inclusivity.
We are a mass market brand with an average price of $33 for a matching set, the top and the bottom. To compare to Victoria's Secret, this is about 40% less. So we address a very wide market. Digital, we have various digital experiences that we invented along the way, and that I'll share more with you soon. And about 81 million visits last year, which gives us a real voice on the online lingerie community, with Victoria's Secret, one of the loudest. And sustainability, we actually are taking social corporate responsibility at our very heart, and we were the very first company to be certified B Corp in the United States. So Adore Me in metrics and figures. Adore Me last year, about $250 million in sales, growing 20% year-over-year.
We've been growing for actually several years in similar pace. What's interesting is not the revenue, but the profitability. Adore Me has been profitable since 2017, way before being profitable was actually fashionable, even more so in the world of digital native brand. To build on that, we actually built the business with very minimal capital. We raised, in the history of the company, around $36 million, which makes us a much more nimble and efficient company than any of our peers, that generally raised several hundred million for ultimately still not a profitability reached today. The revenue itself is interesting. It's made of 40% of non-standard size, so we really walk the talk on inclusivity. And it's not just plus or smaller size, it's really every niche. Full busted is one, for instance.
Our customer is young, living fully the Gen Z and millennial. Two-thirds of the revenue is recurring, which is very interesting also, and I'll tell you a little more about our business model. Essentially, we have three: we have à la carte, we have subscription, and we have home try-on, and I'll tell you about all of those. Finally, we have an operating platform that we leverage in every way for operational leverage, which is proprietary. Talking about this more specifically, what you see here is a matrix of block. Each block represents hundreds of thousands of lines of codes we've developed to reinvent the whole fashion value chain, from design to merchandising, supply chain, customer engagement, user interface, and the likes. Pretty much everywhere, we've put our nose to build something that didn't exist and that help outsmart competition. Couple of...
Underlying to that, almost half of our team is made of tech people, engineers, data scientists, developers, which is really unique for a fashion company. Proprietary e-commerce platform, AI and machine learning, has been at the core of everything we do since 2016, and we roll out over 14 updates and software deploys daily. Which is really in term of example, for instance, when we look at a few of those blogs that I, that I expanded, the technology is not always where it seems to be, but it creates superior customer experience. An example is in size inclusivity. Lingerie is a very complex category, 77 sizes, lead times are extremely long, call it six months on average.
Many shapes, many colors, and so to navigate that maze, we have put technology at the core of it to actually build an engine that enabled us to date, given the high number of SKUs, to virtually never had any write-off. Similarly, if I take the example of marketing, it's interesting. We started advertising online, and then we figured we want to go beyond that, want to diversify. But offline advertising is complicated because you can't really measure it. We built back in 2015, 2016, a machine learning that would help us connecting with the channel TV logs to actually measure the return on marketing spends on television at the spot level. And doing so, we were one of the very first digitally native brand to actually scale up significantly with linear TV.
Home Try-On is something I'm gonna tell you in detail more soon, but overall, it's the magic of creating an experience when you can try the product before paying anything online. And sustainability, because we have the whole suite of software ready, we actually leverage new technologies to plug at every part of the chain and measure pretty much almost real-time life cycle carbon footprint, which is pretty exciting. But what is even more exciting is everything that we can bring to the Victoria's Secret ecosystem, generating incremental revenue, and I'm gonna talk about three of them. The first is the membership, the second is the Home Try-On, and the third is AI.
Starting with membership, this is something that we've been doing at Adore Me for some time, and we saw from the beginning that building retention at the core of the experience was the key to unlock a stronger unit economics. And through subscription, we give customers who are ready to shop a reason to shop. And so a subscriber, every month, gets a new drop of products that they can shop from, discounts on those products specific to their subscription. And ultimately, it creates pretty strong engagement. The figures are on the screen. We see over 100 increase, 100% increase in traffic, almost three times conversion, and this is during the very first week when the drop happens, and over the year, 70% more orders per customer. And so we look forward to supercharge Victoria's Secret membership with that.
The second piece, which is building up on top of the membership, is really home try-on. Membership was about building retention. Home try-on is the next big evolution. And which category, the very name of which is intimate, is best suited for an experience where online you can finally try the product before purchasing it? In store, that was easy. Online, it was very hard to do. And the way it works is really we let customers compose a box of product. They can handpick which one, or they can ask us to curate for those products. More often than not, they'll ask us to curate. They need advice. They want that guidance, even if they have a few things they really want to try. We ship that box of products, call it three, four, five, up to seven products at the customer's home.
They get to try the products. They keep what they like, ship back what they dislike, and ultimately, only at the very end, pay for what they keep. This magic, from a customer standpoint, got us tremendous amounts of congratulations and happiness. Every day, we receive notes from customers who either live far away from malls or, do not have time to shop because they work or have kids, or just sometimes just don't really know what to purchase, and they need more guidance, and they want to touch and feel the product. The convenience that this brings is incredible, and we, we see it in the emotions of the comments. But from a company standpoint, it is actually a mess to orchestrate. You need to be, a master of curation, à la Netflix.
You need to be extremely strong on logistics to handle the volume of return à la Amazon, and you need to be extremely strong on billing because charging only at the end creates a whole lot of problem that don't happen when you charge at the beginning. So this is an effort worth doing, because what we see is that a Home Try-On customer brings, on average, almost 3x more revenue than a regular customer. A Home Try-On customer not only purchase what's in the box, but upsells from what we give or from what they thought to purchase in the beginning. The cherry on the cake is we can run that business model with a similar profitability level to any other business model we've run in the past.
So if I keep increasing this in the next level, it's about rolling it out to the Victoria's Secret scale. And what's really, really compelling here is that we are not talking about the future, we're talking about doing this pretty much imminently in Q4. We are going to start with about $5,000 per week to cater a home try-on experience for Victoria's Secret, as early as in the coming few months. And we surveyed the Victoria's Secret customer. 32% of them say they are very interested in that type of experience. Imagine what it's gonna be to put the product in their hands when they know the brand, they love it, and we bring that level of convenience. What's really compelling to me is that Victoria's Secret is one of the greatest physical retailer in the world....
and combined with the power of home try-on, imagine, just think of it for a second, it brings the most comprehensive level fashion service in the world. We can find the customer anywhere she is, in store, at home. She tries, she buys, she ship it back, she bring it back. It's a level of convenience and of service that no other fashion company offers today. Moving into even more service to the customer, talking about AI. First, a pause here. Now that we've created the greatest retailer in the world, we're gonna supercharge it with AI. Let's go back 15 years in time when the iPhone came. At the time, we felt many, many categories could be disrupted by that new innovation, and today, with AI and generative AI, we feel the exact same way.
And we are super excited to actually already be a leader in AI and generative AI. Adore Me started to work using AI back in 2015, 2016, leveraging a first machine model learning for TV advertisements. AI is at the core of the Home Try-On experience, where we have all the data from customers that we put into some AI model to get to that curation of the product. We made our first API call to GPT-3, the ancestor of ChatGPT, right when it was released back in 2021. And if you don't take my word for it, just take your phone and Google right now, Adore Me generative AI. You'll see a laundry list of things we already do with artificial intelligence.
So now, if we look at what is really exciting, even more so, is to bring that to the whole ecosystem of Victoria's Secret. And I've put on the page here three examples of things that we are going to do. The first, and again, this is not about the future, this is already running live on Adore Me for half of our traffic, the personalized feed for you. It's a TikTok feed inside the app that brings product, entertainment, recommendation, very vivid, very live, and that basically generates about 17% more purchase per session. This is incredible. We look forward to do more of that, of course. The second thing is we are taking that level of personalization, and we move it from digital to the product itself.
How cool it could be to personalize a product that you receive home a few days later with a name, a happy birthday, a happy, anything mentioned, but not only the words and the name, but also the whole pattern on the product that could be generated by AI. You want some cupcakes, you want a jungle pattern, whatever you want, you can create it, and in a few days, you get it delivered at home because it's made in our warehouse, leveraging a sustainable printer. All of that for the price of any other bra. Imagine the PR impact, imagine the customer passion around this. And then the last one is generative AI shopping assistant. Everyone dream about a perfect generative AI shopping assistant, like in a store. We have it. We're gonna roll it out in the coming few months.
It is something that's gonna take customer reviews, customer purchase pattern, customer intent, and start suggestions such as, "It looks like you're looking for a strapless bra, and you generally buy black. May I suggest to you a few product?" And engage with the customer. A dream come true. And so what we look forward is to live into a new era with Victoria's Secret, and it's not that we look forward to the future, the future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed, and we look forward to bringing it to the whole ecosystem. So Adore Me, with that merger, is really going on a new orbit of growth, and we look forward to put Victoria's Secret in a new era on the tech side. So on this, I'll let TJ tell us more about the financials.
Thank you, Morgan. Super exciting, and hopefully everybody got a really good feel for the excitement that we've had for a long, long time around the acquisition of Adore Me. So Morgan, Blake, Ron, John, I know Romain and Bogdan, I'm sure the whole team is listening, and can feel the energy in the room around how Adore Me is gonna positively impact the VS business for years to come. So thank you. Thank you for that. So, I'm gonna take us through and kinda try to summarize everything that you heard today and what do we think it means for the future. But before I do that, I do think it's appropriate for us to kind of acknowledge where we are, as Martin mentioned earlier, acknowledge where we are in the present.
And the present is, if we do a little bit of a look back, over the last three and a half years, the business has absorbed a lot. There was COVID, there was post-COVID, there was supply chain, there was a macro environment. Now, we've got an intimates market that's difficult. The business has absorbed a lot, and our customers have absorbed a lot along the way. So it's been a challenge for us in this marketplace. However, as you can see on the screen here, in different difficult economic environments or just different environments in general that are challenging for business, we're still very large in size and scale.
Over $6 billion in different types of climates, generating EBITDA dollars, you know, north of $600 million, $700 million, $800 million, and operating cash flow, high generative cash flow model that we can make decisions on in terms of how best to invest it. So not on the screen here, but lining up to our guidance, you know, six and a little over $6 billion of revenue expected this year. EBITDA on the high side, around $600 million. Operating cash flow that's attached to that of about $400 million. We've chosen to continue to lean in and invest that operating cash flow, and I'm gonna talk about that in a little bit, but we are operating the business with the long term in mind. So that's a bit of a look back quickly. Where are we currently?
For those of you who might not have had the opportunity to see, last night, we put out a press release, not only announcing today and some of the highlights that you've already heard from us, but also summarizing where we are in the third quarter, where are we and how are we performing? And what we did was narrow up the range a little bit, a little bit more towards the better side of sales, the better side of operating income, because those are the results that we're seeing. We're a little over 10 weeks into the quarter, and I'm happy to share that, you know, August, as we talked about on our earnings call, was our best month of the year. September was better.
October, we're a week and a half into it, and we've got big plans to finish the quarter strong. October will be our best month of the year. So there is a build happening in our North America business, which is key. You heard a lot about the core today. Alongside of that, you heard Arun and Morgan just now, our international business is ahead of plan. Our Adore Me business is performing as we expected it to when we purchased the business. So, those elements are working, and we're starting to see the build in North America, which is what needs to happen to unlock the long-term potential of the business. So, you know, in addition to the third quarter, we left the fourth quarter alone, we left the full year alone.
The confidence around that is really some of the things that you heard earlier today, that we expected those items to positively impact our business as we rolled them out. One of my favorites is Chris's slide 51, which you don't have a reason to remember 51, but it had half a dozen things on there that just happened in the last few weeks that positively impact the digital experience. Those things add up quickly to drive better results and builds in North America, which we're super excited about. That's where we are in the current, so no surprises there. Again, loyalty, branding, digital, product launches. Very excited for you to see the store this afternoon. We saw it yesterday. Looks great.
Becky and her team did a wonderful job, along with visual and just a number of different parts of the business. Holiday is in full force in the middle of October at Atlantic Terminal. So, with all of that in mind, we've got the look back, we've got the current. You've heard a lot today. What do we think all of that means for the longer term potential of the business, is where I'm gonna finish with my comments here. So our goal: our goal is to double the operating margin rate in the next three years. We've guided to this year at 5%-6%. We think in the next three years, we can double the operating margin rate. How are we gonna go about doing that?
Mid-single-digit sales expectation, increased sales in the mid-single digits, half coming from North America, half coming from all the work that's being done in the core and all the work that's to come in the core, and the other half coming in the growth initiatives of international, Adore Me, and, and other things, but international and Adore Me, primarily. So mid-single digits. That's slightly different than what we told you a year ago. We were leaning in more to the growth pillar, and we, we didn't have as high expectations on the core. Now, we recognize, we understand a little bit better, we know our customer a little bit better, and we think the expectation ought to be that North America contributes equally with international and the growth pillar. Additionally, within North America, the digital business should lead and the stores will grow as well.
So digital will be leading North America. Stores are expected to grow. You know, the fun part about doing these presentations sometimes is we've, we've had... I won't tell you what version we're on, but this is not the first version of, of the presentation, and we learn a lot along the way. So one of my favorite stats I just learned today, I hope everyone picked up on, was at the end of the three-year plan, or in 2027, we will have more stores internationally than we have domestically. That's a big, big statement and a big, big opportunity. Think about what Martin talked about early on, where he showed digital is about 35% of our business. You play that out over the next three or four years, digital is approaching 40% of our business by the time we exit this plan.
The business is changing, and it's evolving, and we think it's for the good. And a lot of it's being driven by, again, customer insights, customer data, and market insights, which is great. Outside of sales, how are we gonna look from a margin perspective? Two things: gross margin, we think, grows faster than sales, so the rate's going up. We see no reason why the rate shouldn't be in the 39%-40% range by the time we exit this plan or by the time we end this three-year period. How are we gonna get there? Two ways: Chris Caliendo over here, Dean right here, they're leading our cost of goods sold initiatives, along with Anne and her team from a merchandising perspective. We know there's opportunity to deliver the same amount of quality, innovation, and do it at a lower cost. That's step one.
Step two, we think we need probably about a 1% or 2% increase in North America sales to leverage buying and occupancy costs. Not sure when the last time was we leveraged buying and occupancy costs in North America. That's in front of us from a gross margin perspective, and why we think the margin dollars grow faster than sales. From an expense standpoint, hopefully, I won't ask for a show of hands, but hopefully, over the last handful of quarters, we've demonstrated that we're serious about taking costs out of the business. Over the last 6 quarters anyway, our base cost in North America in PINK and VS, when you put them together, are down year-over-year. Again, 6 quarters in a row, those cost levels are down. There's a developing culture of discipline around costs and how do we become more efficient.
So I've got sales mid-single, I got gross margin growing faster, sales growing slower. I create this wedge where the profit or the operating income grows at a pretty healthy rate of about 20% or more over the three-year period. Again, please understand, this likely won't be linear. There will be things that happen sooner than others. There will be fits and starts along the way, but it's our expectation. We believe that a brand of our size and scale, with global reach, ought to be able to grow in the mid-single-digit range from a top-line perspective... restoring and accelerating growth in North America to catch up with international and the rest of the world. So doubling the operating margin rate over the next three-year period is the goal. Important to note, we've talked a lot about 2023. We're not talking about 2024 or 2025.
I'm not giving you guidance on any one of those three years in the future. We'll do that in March when it's appropriate, and our plans are finalized. But what I'm trying to help you understand is a longer-term look over a three-year period, what do we think the business profile ought to look like? Going a little bit deeper, just for a second. Sales growth, $1.2 billion, going from $6.2 billion to $7.4 billion, that's the mid-single digit number. Where is it gonna come from? Talked about it being evenly split, but going just one level lower, intimates market share. We believe we should be growing the intimates market share over this three-year period. How are you gonna get there?
Product and innovation from Anne and her team, customer insights that help and accelerate that product innovation, customer experience in the store from Becky and her team. It's not just about building a better product. There's a collective effort around Accelerating the Core and growing market share in the intimates category. Not to mention, I think Greg said sport 47 times, so we're gonna grow the sport bra business as well. So that's wonderful. A lot going on to help us feel confident that intimate market share growth ought to be the expectation for this business. Category adjacencies, acknowledging that it's easier for a customer to shop us more frequently if we can help her round out her shopping journey in other categories that, candidly, we have some experience in and we walked away from.
So reintroducing that, from our perspective, makes all the sense in the world. Category adjacencies drive the core. The customer experience initiatives, from a digital standpoint, as Chris mentioned, are really just getting started. Although the work has been happening, the customer is just starting to experience it, and we're starting to see it show up in our results here in third quarter. Loyalty membership, I don't know what our expectations should have been, but 18 million people in four months seems like a lot, and 75% of our sales in a four-month period seems like a lot also. And being able to communicate specifically to that customer differently and more efficiently and maybe even in a different way, promotionally, maybe more for certain customers, maybe less for others, that's all in front of us as opportunity to expand the business.
And then I think from the second half around growth, again, I won't do it justice like Arun and Morgan did, so I won't try, but just hopefully we've generated the confidence in us, in international and Adore Me, now that they're putting up results, that you should feel good about that element of the growth algorithm. From an operating margin standpoint, how are we gonna get there? Again, 5%-6% is the guidance for this year. We actually think there's more opportunity on the margin side, because we've been working on the expense side, and we're seeing that in results. As we move forward in the three-year period, the combination of cost of goods and leveraging buying and occupancy is important, so gross margin, structurally, should we be at 39% or 40%?
Yes, that's what we believe in this plan. Similar from an expense standpoint, should we be in the high 20s? Yes, that's what we're working towards in this plan, and we've got quarters of actual experience doing that, that hopefully gets you confident. It does get to low double digits. Important, the last column on this slide here, we don't wanna walk away from, to Martin's point, being transparent. The last time we were together, we gave you a vision of mid-teens. We're not talking about mid-teens in this three-year plan. Doesn't mean that we don't believe that it shouldn't be the goal of the company, it just means three years is about as far out as we think we can see or about as far out as we've strategized, and we think to double the operating margin rate in a three-year period is a pretty heroic effort.
Understand we've been there, but still there's a lot going on with the customer and a lot going on in the environment, and there is a lot of work that needs to be done in order to achieve just these numbers. So please don't walk away thinking we're walking away from the vision of mid-teens, just means in this three-year period, we think it's a double. Similar, where is that operating margin rate expansion gonna come from? We think it's fairly evenly split between the three priorities, three strategic priorities that we've talked about as a business. So Accelerating the Core gives you a couple of points. Ignite Growth based on the dollar revenue growth and the high flow through, particularly in our international business, gives you a couple of points of leverage.
And then the third piece is just delivering upon the balance of the Transform the Foundation savings goal that we set a year ago for you. So fairly evenly split between the three strategic priorities. And the sum total of it, if you remember back to the prior slide, this is a high cash generative business. Operating cash flow, even in this year, which is arguably not our best year, is—it's about $400 million. Again, we've chosen to reinvest that in the business, and I'll talk about investments in a moment, but a high cash flow model, healthy balance sheet. You got two big assets as a realtor—or as a retailer.
As a retailer, you have two big assets. One is real estate... and the other is inventory. It was referred to earlier. We've done a wonderful job managing inventory in an uncertain environment. You haven't heard us talk about coming in off of an inventory number. We've delivered on the inventory numbers that we said we were gonna deliver. From a real estate perspective, very healthy fleet. I'll touch on that in a moment, but 96%, 97% of our stores are cash flow positive and make money. Then ultimately, with the cash that's left over, what do you, what do you do with that? I'll touch on that in a moment as well. From a CapEx perspective, we think about 4%-4.5% of sales is a reasonable expectation for where this business should be longer term.
We'll be a little less than that this year. We might be a little more than that in certain years in the future, depending on what's going on. But what that affords us the opportunity to do, or why we think that's appropriate, is we do believe, as you heard earlier today, that real estate or stores are a point of differentiation among the competition, particularly the digital competitors, who would love to have the store base that we have and the point of distribution that we have. So we want to continue the Store of the Future program. We're gonna talk about that. From a technology standpoint, again, the amount of work and time and effort on the part of the team to separate us, VS&Co, from former parent L Brands, has been significant, particularly on the technology side. Couple of things I want you to know.
We're almost done. That's great. We'll be done in the three-year period, and it's gonna be done under budget. So wonderful work from a technology standpoint, which now frees us up to do more and more inside the business and Accelerating the Core now that we have that behind us. And you heard Arun talk about earlier today, Dean and Chris have some logistics and supply chain investments that we're gonna be making to really, again, shore up that core, but also, accelerate the growth internationally. So on real estate, Store of the Future. Let's talk about Store of the Future for a moment, because last time we were together in October last year in Chicago, we had had Store of the Future stores open for about a moment, and we didn't know as much as we know today. So what do we know today?
We want to talk about Store of the Future and updating the fleet, how it's impacted productivity, and also what that means for potentially diversifying our store base a little bit further as we move forward in this three-year view. I'd be remiss if I didn't mention that, the real estate team, the store design and construction team, that does provide some level of support to Arun and his partners around the world. Although they are primarily responsible for building out the stores, we do support them from a, from a design standpoint.
So that's important to note, so that there is the continuity of, of look and feel across the world. So where are we, where are we on the fleet currently? We've got about 830 stores. I think you've heard that number a couple of times today. It's a little over 7 million sq ft, on a gross basis. About 80% of our stores are in malls, and by the end of this year, about 10% of our store fleet will be in the Store of the Future format. So how are we doing with that? The Store of the Future format, we like green. We like green, so I got three green dots up here, and I got one yellow, but I think we're all pretty confident that's gonna turn into green.
So, diversifying the fleet, our existing fleet, going in and remodeling stores in location. So the store you see, if you go on the store tour this afternoon, is a store that is remodeled in location, was not downsized. We went in with the new Store of the Future format. That's what we're talking about here on the first bullet. So by the end of this year, we'll have about 30 of those stores completed. Based on the ones that have been completed to date and what we know, we're seeing sales increases in the low double digits. Pretty meaningful result.
Again, the store size is not changing, so the productivity is also going up in the low double digits, and the stores are more profitable. Feels like a pretty good do. The cost of the new store remodel is starting to come down, based on things we've learned along the way. That feels like a good do. The returns around the Store of the Future are actually two three times our weighted average cost of capital. So like Store of the Future a lot. Similarly, as we've learned more about the PINK pillars and the VS pillars, we think it makes sense to put a lot more stores together, so not having a VS standalone and a PINK standalone in the same mall.
When we do that, sales kind of sort of hover around flat, maybe down slightly, but productivity for a foot goes up 30% or 40%. Profit per foot goes up by a similar amount. It's a good do for the business. New stores. As we've opened new stores, we've been more successful with premium outlet centers based on the high traffic that's generated in and around our store. To date, we're probably a little more on the yellow side in power strip centers. If anybody has operated retailers in power strip centers, sometimes it's a slower build. That's what we believe is gonna happen. So we have every expectation that year two in the power center will be an outsized growth rate. So a lot of green on the screen here.
We like Store of the Future, supports the real estate capital that we think makes sense for the long-term health of the brand. What does the fleet look like by the end of the three-year period? Again, we do think this means there's probably a lower store count. As we've learned more about the business and how the brands operate together, and you heard about the on-ramp from PINK to VS, we think it makes sense to have more and more stores combined and less and less stores freestanding. So what that means is, actually, the store count and the square footage number will go down over this three-year period, but this metric here in the middle, called venue count, really means we won't be leaving venues. We'll just be putting stores together to be more productive.
We think that's a good do as well. From a technology standpoint, I kind of touched on it. Murali is right over here. You can ask him all your technology questions around VS&Co. Finalizing the business separation is a big, big deal. You heard Chris talk about the customer experience and digital initiatives that we're investing in from a technology standpoint. You heard Morgan talk a little bit about AI as well. From an Adore Me perspective, there's overlap with what we will do from an AI perspective in the VS and PINK brands as well, so we're providing for that capital there. What I want you to walk away with is most of the technology capital, we're gonna be focusing in on accelerating that core. That's super important. Similarly, we're gonna be doing the same thing from a supply chain standpoint.
So you've heard already, a mention of an international distribution center coming online next year. From a third-party perspective, we will likely have West Coast operations as well from a distribution center. So again, getting closer to the customer and supporting that, Accelerating the Core initiative. And when we put it all together, and just if we talk about capital allocation and financial strategy in, in totality, we think the best place, the best dollar we can invest right now is reinvesting in the business. We've got proven activity that we're accomplishing, particularly from a real estate perspective, particularly from a technology perspective. We want to lean in and invest in our business first for growth.
From a liquidity and leverage standpoint, we see no reason why, based on our current forecast in 2023, we could have the opportunity of actually paying down or paying off our ABL. We were left with two pieces of fixed debt, the largest of which is at a little over 4% interest rate, so that feels like a good deal in this environment. And then the other is a floating rate, but overall, about $1 billion of fixed debt. Again, fixed leverage point, a little less than 2x, we feel is appropriate for a brand and a business of our size. Having said all of that, we normally do this, and we have some cash left over. What would we do with that cash? That's really a management and board decision. Our preference to date has been share repurchase.
We do not have a dividend in place, but those conversations are more in front of us after we get through the holiday season, and actually after we start to see some of the accelerating in the core of the business, so we can make better decisions about allocation of capital. So with that, I'm gonna ask Martin to come back on stage with me. As he does... Again, I just wanna overemphasize the point here, because I know we spent a lot of time last year talking about an operating margin goal. We are talking about a low double-digit operating margin rate in this three-year period. I'll underline three-year period. The future vision, we've not walked away from the future vision that this business ought to perform in the mid-teens from an operating margin rate.
It's just in this three-year, three-year window that we're focused in on, we think doubling the rate is a, is a pretty monumental accomplishment. Boss?
Thank you. Stay with me. Stay with me.
I will. I will.
Quick time check. So our plan is to be out of here at 12:05. So we've got about 20-25 minutes left to play. I'd like to give at least 20 minutes for Q&A. TJ and I will stay on the stage, but we've got all of the leadership team in the room to answer questions. So whether they like it or not, they're all, they're all ready. So I'm not gonna give you a boring repeat of everything you've heard. You don't, you don't need that. But I do wanna make seven points of summary very quickly. Number one, brand and customer. It's about a customer-centric approach to our brand, driven by, driven by data and insight, leading to customer segmentation and personalization, Number one.
Number two, moving from a focus around winning at intimates to thinking about our category lens in a broader sense, that introduces more categories and more trips and more reason to shop at Victoria's. Plus, the very important segmentation of what was, frankly, an overwhelming and extremely complicated assortment into five pillars of Victoria and four pillars within PINK. Number three, go to market. It's about entertainment-led marketing, all coming from the benefit of customer insights that Chris talked about. Number four, new customer experiences. I really like the idea of the Four Fs. I think that gives us real clarity about where we invest our dollars and who those investments are pointing at. And there's room for opportunity in digital, as Chris said, and we're winning there.
We are gaining share in digital, and that's only gonna grow in stores and in the combination of the two. And then on the bottom row, tour de force presentations from Arun and from Morgan around just how exciting the growth opportunity is in international to double, and the two-for-one opportunity we have with Adore Me as a standalone growing company, but also so much technology to leverage and incubate into the future. And then finally, TJ bringing it home with what I think is a really credible financial plan that has significant stretch in it. We all believe we can do better, but I think it's grounded in the reality of where we are right now. And hopefully, you've seen all of that and got the benefit of seeing a pretty energized and pretty credible management team who believe in the direction we're taking the company.
So I hope that that helps. By way of summary, if you take nothing else away from today, it would be those seven points. So, we have ladies with microphones in hand, ready to take your questions. I see the first one right in front of us. If you can be super sharp with the mics, because we may need to go to some of our management. Hiya.
Hi. Good morning.
Can you turn it up?
Thanks. It's Lorraine Hutchinson from BofA. I, I would love some help just bridging where we are today on sales to get to the mid-single-digit growth next year. I know, obviously, this year the industry took a step back.
Yep.
In your expectations, do you have that growing again, the overall sector? Is it all market share? I guess if it's growing, what would change that trajectory from this year into next year?
Yeah. I don't think it's reasonable for us to assume market growth in our plans. So we're not projecting the market's gonna grow or not. My belief is that things will normalize, that there was probably an overtrade coming out of COVID, and there's a bit of an undertrade, and my guess is that it will normalize. Is there something structural about our intimates market that says this is gonna go... I don't believe that to be so. We're most focused on the stuff that's within our control, and that means focusing on the big five. If we really hit truly being different on each of those big five that Greg and Chris talked about, we'll win. And so that's really where the focus goes. TJ, anything to add to that?
No, I think that's all right. And I think that, you know, we recognize that nothing, not everything will go in a straight line, and, and we're not necessarily giving guidance for next year at mid-singles. But we do think, as we move through the holiday season, what's embedded in our fourth quarter shows improvement. We think we see steady improvement as we move into next year. Again, there's product-led and, and really customer-led initiatives that we're seeing work in our business today.
Great.
Great. Hi, good morning. I'm Mauricio Serna from UBS. So a couple of questions. First, following up on that, on that question about industry growth. You know, I understand that, you know, the three-year plan is not linear, but, you know, how mindful is the plan maybe about a, you know, potential recession over the next six to 12 months? Because that flows into 2024, I guess. And then, on the Amazon initiative, could you share with us about how much you're generating in sales, on, with Amazon? Thank you.
Yeah, I'll take the second question first. I can't remember whether Chris or Greg mentioned this, but, you know, our partnership in Amazon, Amazon will be north of $100 million in the next 12 months. To give you some sort of size and dimension to it. Broadly similar in size to our go-to-market endeavors. What's the potential for that? Much, much bigger than that. As it relates to, you know, forecasting recession or consumer, that is not our bag at all. I don't want to even comment on it because there are so many people in this room who are better qualified to comment than not.
What I will say is that I read a lot, and I read the same stuff that you do, and whenever people talk about, you know, student debt and student loan repayments, which is the brand that they talk about as being most impacted? It's, it's always us. So the market out there, the belief out there, is that times are gonna be really tough in the back half and into next year, and that probably we're gonna be more impacted than others because we target a relatively young consumer in Gen Z and young millennials. Nothing I can do about that. We just got to focus on smashing the big five that impact North America and building for a future where capability enables growth and where international and Adore Me enable, enable growth.
Yep.
Yeah.
All fair.
There will be some futurists in the bus on the way to stores who can answer that for you, I'm sure.
Hey, guys. Thanks. Simeon from BMO. Great job today. So, two quick ones on the frequency of shop and the basket size or the purchase size from the $165. How has that changed pre-COVID, intra-COVID now? So just historical. Then also, when you think about the loyalty customer, any metrics in terms of what they... how you think about them in terms of frequency and-
Yeah
... purchase size, and just how they differ from non-loyalty?
Yeah. So, frequency of shop has not changed materially. I don't have the precise stat at my fingertips, but it's not, it's not, it might be slightly upside down, but it's essentially the same. As it relates to loyalty, it's too big a segment to give something interesting. It's 18 million, you know, it's like the whole universe. What we're much more interested in is dividing into deciles and understanding how the deciles perform, and Chris talked to this a little bit about this. The top two deciles are phenomenally important to us, magically important to us, and it's a relatively small number of people, like one million customers, you know, who really control our destiny at the top end of the food chain. You know, we're super psyched by them.
The other new bit, where the data is only just starting to reveal itself, is how the four personas that we're really targeting are impacted. Chris said it, but I'll just reinforce the point. You know, the thing about those insights is not, "Oh, that's interesting, you know, there are different customers who behave in different ways." It's about speaking to them in different ways. No longer once it's one fits, one size fits all marketing, but tailored marketing and, and personalized marketing. And that's where I think that we'll start to see differences that we can be more articulate about. And reminder, loyalty is, like, three months old? Brand new.
Hi. Fantastic day. Thanks so much for having us. With the really impressive, the brand impressions from the World Tour, have you seen traffic increase, both whether it's digital or, you know, in-store traffic, as well as increase in sales from that?
I know, and that's the part that's so difficult about brand marketing. You know, when we do performance-based marketing, we read it instantly, obviously, in our digital channels and pretty instantly in stores. Brand marketing doesn't work that way. So no, it's an investment in the overarching halo of the brand that we hope helps us to sustain for years and years to come. Is it the appropriate amount of investment? I don't know. I mean, we just don't know, and, you know, I'm not being flippant about that. Our choice, our judgment was to rest brand marketing, primarily, around the fashion show from sort of 2018 and onwards, and then to bring it back after a five-year rest period.
It remains to be seen whether that really drives purchase intent and whether it drives, customer adoption, and whether it leads to sort of patterns of behavior that are favorable to us. I'm optimistic that it will do, but I cannot tell you that instantly, in the month of September, as a result of all of that media impressions, that business went up. I can't tell you that. Now, one of the things that we're working on, and Morgan touched on it a little bit, is getting better at using technology to drive attribution. Where do you spend your money, and how effective is it? And that's not just in digital, that's in stores as well. And I believe in the future, we'll be better at understanding that for brand marketing, but it's not right now. Chris, anything to add?
No.
No? Yeah.
Hey, Corey Tarlowe from Jefferies.
Hey, Corey.
Thank you very much for having us today. I wanted to ask about two things: PINK and international. So on PINK, there's clearly been some new product innovations. Could you talk a little bit about the resonance that you've seen from that, and how you see that brand turning over the next several years within the context of your three-year plan? And then international, obviously, you've spent a fair amount of time there, and TJ even underscored it in his remarks. So could you talk a little bit about how you see that expansion unfolding?
Yes.
The opportunity, the cadence of that opportunity, and then what that means in terms of the context for profitability expansion from going from five to six to-
Oh, I love that question, Corey. You, you're a plant. I'm gonna go to Greg on PINK, but let me—do you mind, Arun, if I take the international quick? Because with all humility and deference, you know, we replaced the idiot who used to run the international business with somebody really, really capable. There are, there are a handful of things that are different about the way we go to market now in international, than the way we used to have to go to market. One is smaller stores. Second is having stores that have a capital investment that the partners can afford, so they get a payback within a three-year period of time. Third is enabling digital capability. In the old days, when we started this business, we were just selling a franchise based on stores. Imagine doing that now! Nobody's gonna buy that franchise.
It's a digital world, so embracing digital within international. Those are the three really big changes. Arun talked about profitability. We think we can double the business. The rate, the OI rate, is significantly accretive to the low double digits that we talked about, significantly accretive, and that's because we have lower recorded revenue, driven by the franchise model, and a very high level of profitability and no capital invested. So it's really, really good for the long-term economics of the business. Did I miss anything, Arun?
No, I think that's quite accurate. The other thing, of course, the build... I have this, thank you. Is the build, right? So I think I shared with you the momentum that we're building up, and 35 stores, 70 stores, and we have the pipeline for 100 stores next year, so it's not just numbers we put on the board. So it's very believable. And getting franchisees to invest in a profitable model where they're seeing the returns, I mean, who wouldn't, right? So I just see very believable plan, very plausible plan to get to where we're trying to get to.
You did mention it, Arun, but product that's tailored to the market. You know, one of the beautiful things about our brand is, what works here in North America, works there. Bestsellers here are bestsellers there, for the most part. There are some differences, and so having China for China product and soon to be India for India product, and there'll be other localizations that will make sense as well. So getting better at that will help to unlock profit. Greg, do you want to take the PINK question?
On the PINK front, what I'll share is that we're at the very, very early innings of the resetting of the PINK brand. What you'll see in the store, for those who go to Atlantic Terminal, by the time we get to the holiday floor set, November first floor set, will be in a much more robust inventory position. What we've found, really was sort of the end of August, was the beginning of the beginning of the new PINK, is we're seeing incredibly high sell-throughs, number one, which is very encouraging. We're seeing, the flip side of that is, it's been a very piecey assortment. When you walk into a store, a customer impression isn't a full and abundant store, like you'll see in Atlantic Terminal today.
It's not as full and abundant as what you see on these mannequins. It's been bits and pieces. She's responded, she's buying at a very high velocity. We're very encouraged with where we're going. We're very reactive to make shifts, you know, as we come, go into the future seasons.
I think that, that's a key point, that we didn't think it was safe to swing for the fences on a big volume buy with a first time out to market. So we have bought this very conservatively. So there was regret immediately in the first week. We're like, "Oh, got that wrong. We should have bought significantly more of that." I think that's the right way to go, is to be as conservative as we can, because we've seen years and years of decline in that brand, and we've got to, we've got to rebuild it. Right?
Yep.
Where else do we want to go?
Right here.
Hi.
Janet Kloppenburg, JJK Research Associates. Two quick questions. On the accelerating pace of top line, we just heard that PINK was getting better. Can you help us understand, in the context of the industry being very soft, what has driven that improvement? And then second, as you look at this plan, what are your pricing strategies? What is the overall pricing halo you're thinking about for VS and PINK, given that even Adore Me has substantially lower price points than you, and some of the new entrants do as well? Thank you.
Yeah, great, great, great questions. I think, you know, what's helping to accelerate the business, where we're seeing acceleration, it's always the same... better product. You know, if, if, if we have good product, the customer finds it. We can bury good product at the, you know, the bottom of a pile in store at the very, very back or on the hundred-and-thousandth page of digital. She finds the best product. She finds it instantly. You know, a great example is the Featherweight Max bra, which we bought very light and was really nothing. It wasn't even a launch. Immediately popped, 'cause it's a great bra, and we have 20-25,000 associates who, when you walk into the store, will say, "I've just tried the best sports bra I've ever worn.
You need to try it." And so it just always is about product. You know, I broadened the lens to talk about the big five things we talked about, but overall, the most important of all of that is better product, better product. So, you know, that's what we've got to do. In terms of pricing, really, really important point: we are not repositioning the pricing of Victoria's or PINK. We don't think the right thing to do is to go to that bottom quadrant of the map. We should be an above-average-priced retailer. We're an added-value fashion retailer. We need to give consumers reasons to buy our product other than just, "It's cheap," 'cause we won't win. We won't win in that environment. You're right that Adore Me is... I think we decided between 30% and 40% lower price than Victoria's.
Not exactly apples to apples, but that's really interesting. That gives us an opportunity as a corporation to play in a lower price space, and one of the things that Morgan and team is experimenting with is also trying Adored by Adore Me for a lower price point in different channels of activity. So as a corporation, we're interested in all parts of the fashion-based market, but for Victoria's and PINK, there's no change in the price positioning. We need to drive high AURs, and our AUR is pretty healthy. They're kind of in line with our in line or better than our historical peaks.
Mm-hmm. Yep. Sure.
Yeah. Thanks for those questions, Janet. Hi.
Hey, Martin. Thanks for having us today. There seems to be a theme about returning to things that made VS great in the past. So along those lines, bra launches, we've all lived through in the past, where bra launches created very lumpy sales and conversations about comps will be down in the next quarter, 'cause we're going up against XYZ bra launch a year ago. How will it be different this time? VSX, we've all lived through VSX launches, stores, pullbacks. How will that be different this time? And beauty, which didn't really get much love today, but I noticed you have shampoo in your stores. So something's going on in beauty that you've not discussed today, so I'm curious how that will be different this time around.
Greg, do you wanna-
Greg, sure, I can take-
Take, take that.
Take those three. So bra launches, I hope that we have that problem to worry about honestly, because I think that that speaks to a really powerful launch. One of the things I would say behind the scenes that our team is maniacally focused on is creating continuity in the business, and so we have, you know, an eye on what's happening today and an eye on what's happening, you know, 18 months out into the future with a focus on innovation. So bra launches will be a focus. We want them to be really, really big, because that's how we create new bestsellers. We are very fortunate, 'cause we also have this very stable foundation of core, and we'll make sure that we're full and abundant on that. So that's one. Second, was around VSX.
Why, you know, how is this gonna be different? How it's gonna be different is 'cause we're, we're gonna stick with it. You know, the... It was a different time. You know, when VSX was at its peak last, sports bras were just sort of on the, on the beginning of the incline, and they're now at this—it's, it's fundamentally shifted, so it, it is—we are hyper-focused on it. I think I was... I think you've underestimated. I think I said the word "sport" 100 times. You know, it be—it's, it's a really important part of our business, both in the VS brand and in PINK, so we'll go after it in both places. Beauty, I'm sorry that I could have spent the entire time talking about it, 'cause I'm super passionate about it. 'Cause I, I think it is, I, I...
One of the things I said, I really mean is, I think it's a very, very encouraging proof point about what happens when you go after complementary categories in the right way. You get two bites of the apple. You get the volume from the category, in the case of beauty, it's $1 billion, and you get a deeper connection with the customer, which we love. The other things in beauty that you'll see in stores, you know, we like to test and try things. Hair, you know, hair care, skin care, we're a test in stores.
You know, ultimately, you know, our customer loves fragrance from us and the Victoria's Secret brand, so that's what we're most focused on and extending that, and we see you know, tons of opportunities still to continue to be hyper-focused on that, as the strongest lever for that segment.
Yeah. The other thing on, on VS, I know you—VSX, you mentioned it, is the focus is not on the outfit completers, the focus is on the bras. It all starts with the bras. Let's be best at the bras, and then you complete the outfit with other stuff, but it has to start with the best sports bras in the world. We've got time for a couple more, I think. Megan?
Thanks for a great day. I'm Alex Straton from Morgan Stanley. A quick one on the bra declines that you're mentioning in terms of spend in general. Do you know where that's going towards? Is it other areas of intimates? Is it just outside the category in general? Because there's a big focus today, obviously, on bras, so I'm trying to square that with declining spend-
Yep
... versus your focus.
Great question. You look like you had another one. Shall I answer this first one?
The, the-
Yeah
... second one is just on sports bras, particularly. Like, what's gonna be the differentiator for Victoria's there?
... technology and fashion. The juxtaposition of technology and fashion, and the Featherweight Max bra is it. Go and look at that bra, that's it. And that goes out the door at $55, I think. So this is not about reducing price, it's about, you know, much more than that. Let me try and square the circle on the bra business and I'm combining bras and panties. The market is down. It is. There are fewer units going out the door. Do we think that's structural long term? We do not. We think that's a relatively temporary thing. I think that will correct itself over time, thing one. Thing two, there is a skewing to lower price points. Maybe not surprising in a really tough economic environment, but in areas where you can make a trade-off, you do make a trade-off.
So we know specifically in panties, that panties, the people who are growing share in panties are the low price operators. It's easy to make panties. It's a cut-and-sew business. It's easy to sell a lot of them at a low price. Those, that's where the share has been building. So who specifically? It's the off-price, off-mall operators and some of the big box operators are operating at a low price point. Yeah. What else? Hi.
I understand that you can't control the top line. It seems like growth is gonna be very challenging over the next year or so. Could you talk a little more in detail in terms of, like, gross profit margins and then your, like, EBITDA margins overall? Because it seems like you said that, I think, it's gonna be a 2%-3% improvement each year, like, how do you achieve that? What do you actually do?
Yeah, very fair question. So I think I would separate it into two buckets. If I just think about gross margin first, what we referred to was, you know, from a cost of goods sold, we do expect the unit prices to come down based on some work our teams are doing, partnering with our merchandise vendor partners. So whether sales are up five or down five, the costs that are being negotiated and the amount of time and effort that it takes to make the item is going down. So those naturally happen, and the dollars show up. The opportunity then in gross margin is if we only need a one or two percent increase in sales to then provide further leverage on all the buying and occupancy costs. So that's kind of how the margin profile would work.
Hey, I'd also point to the slide that Martin had early on in his presentation, where he talked about taking $80 million of cost out here in 2023. That $80 million of cost was coming out, whether our sales were up 5% or down 5%. Those were actions that were within our control, to your question, and we made decisions to do that. We have certain things embedded in the plan that are actions we're taking, and then there are certain leverage opportunities that, yes, we need a 1% or 2% or 3% increase, depending on the item, in sales, to really see the leverage.
All right, I think we're right about at time. Christy, do you wanna help us with the admin on the buses?
I'm gonna hand it to the other Christy to do that.
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Great.
Thank you.
Thank you all so much for your contribution-
Thank you
... this morning. We appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you for being here.