Thank you. Good morning, everybody. It's great to be here. Really appreciate you guys taking time to be with us today. We don't take it for granted. We're a fairly new company, fairly small company to have you guys attend. It's a real honor. Thank you so much. So I am Michel Brousset. I'm the founder and CEO of Waldencast. I started Waldencast. It's going to be six years this April. And I'm here today with Manuel Manfredi, my colleague and Chief Financial Officer. We'll be happy to take questions at the end or any time in one of the breakouts.
Our ambition as Waldencast, when we started Waldencast, is to build a global best-in-class beauty and wellness multi-brand platform by both creating brands as well as acquiring brands, and then accelerating and scaling these brands that we believe are the high-growth, purpose-driven brands of tomorrow. There's a couple of things here that are important in this, in what we're trying to do. First is a multi-brand platform. There is a number of benefits in beauty, which is, I always think, one of the most beautiful of businesses, if not the most beautiful of businesses in the sense that it is highly resilient, high growth, extremely strong economics, but that each individual brand and each individual category can fluctuate.
The importance of having a multi-brand platform not only allows us for great portfolio management, but also to develop capabilities that would be very difficult to deliver on a single brand basis. And those capabilities allow us to generate the growth and the profitability that you will see down the line. And what we mean by next-generation high growth is we are a platform built for growth. There is. Many times I get asked a question, "Is this a platform for synergies or for cost savings?" And yes, there is some synergies, and yes, there is some savings. But fundamentally, we built a platform that is focused on growth and the growth of these brands internationally. Our expertise is in managing global beauty brands at scale.
Most of our senior management team, including myself, come from long-standing experience in the industry, in my case, over 30 years, building and running brands like these. In the case of Manuel Manfredi, our CFO, over 20 years. He and Sebti, my co-founder, over 25 years, running global big beauty brands at scale, and I think what distinguishes ourselves, when we created Waldencast relative to the company we worked before, I was, for example, Group President of L'Oréal North America, the biggest business of L'Oréal worldwide. We tried to build a company the way you would build a beauty company in the 21st century, in a way that is asset-light, that is nimble, that is very responsive to the market, without all the difficulties and legacy issues that the big companies have in terms of distribution footprint, asset-heavy structures, capital-intensive, etc.
And what we've done is we built a company that is really built on growth, as I said, and performance. And we align our management incentives to exactly reflect that long-term value creation on the company. Today, we have two brands. This is the beginning of the journey. We're just at the beginning of the journey of the company: Milk Makeup and Obagi Medical. And I am sure that, well, given the demographic of this audience, perhaps not exactly the demographic of Milk Makeup, perhaps more the demographic of Obagi Medical. These are two brands that are leaders in their field. Milk Makeup is a cult favorite makeup brand, especially among Gen Z consumers. It was really built on an organic following, a diverse community, and known for not just its iconic products, but also its cultural relevance.
It's a company that does not have great products, but also values that align very well with Gen Z. We are the number two clean makeup brand at Sephora, which is our primary customer today, and an incredible big, long, organic following of consumers that are just fanatics of the brand. Obagi is a brand that has been in the market now for 36 years. So it's a brand that has been in existence for some time. It is the number one U.S. physician-recommended brand. This is a skincare brand that is sold primarily through physicians, through dermatologists. And it's the number one physician-recommended brand for those things that matter when you go to a physician. These are things like pigmentation, fine lines, sagging skin, etc., which account for over two-thirds of the reasons why consumers go to a dermatologist to find a solution.
It is very much a science-based brand. As you can see, two very different brands in what is the first start of our portfolio that was going to be built over time through both creation of brands as well as acquisition of brands. How we do it? We are a little bit different in a sense than kind of traditional beauty groups, in the sense that we maintain the independence of the brand on anything that we call is the front end. Anything that touches the consumer, the customer, product development, the brands are completely independent from each other. They're based in different places. Obagi is based in California. Milk is based in New York. They have their own management team with their own reward structure, rewarded exclusively on the results of the brand, not some minimum common denominator of the group.
And the reason that is important. It allows us to preserve the DNA and autonomy of the brand, which allows us then to fuel entrepreneurial spirit and have the same level of ownership as these brands were independent. When we build a company, one of the most important differentiators that we wanted to build for the company is speed and speed to market and reactivity. And this independence, as well as our asset-light structure, the fact that we don't have big factories, big distribution centers, big laboratories, but just purely in the areas of the business where the value creation is done, allows us to be very fast and responsive to market.
And then what we have, the benefit of the platform, is it allows us not only just to share best practices, but allows us to build capabilities that would be very expensive to build on a single brand basis. And of course, it starts with the easy things of finance and payroll and supply chain. But more importantly today, anything that is media and data and e-commerce and algorithmic trading allows us to be done on a scale basis. And this is a capability that would be very expensive to build, again, on a single brand basis and allows us to compete with larger companies. We started in Milk and Obagi, and as I said, we'll be adding other brands in the future. So now, what is our algorithm for long-term success? What is what we do when we buy brands? First, we're brand people. We're brand and product people.
It starts with acquiring structurally attractive brands, real brands, not performance marketing engines that masquerade as brands, not collections of products that have a common brand name. Real brands in which there's a strong emotional affinity by the consumer to the brand or by the community to the brand, and then what we do first is attack gross margin, drive operational efficiency into gross margin, increase gross margin substantially. As an example, Milk Makeup, as a brand that when we acquired, had a gross margin in the low 40s. Today, it has gross margin in the low 70s. Obagi had gross margin in the low 60s. Today, it has a gross margin in the 80s. We have software-level gross margin on businesses like Obagi, and then what we do with that gross margin is we invest that into sales and marketing.
Highly efficient, high marketing ROI investment because these, again, real brands with real strong communities that respond strongly to marketing input. So gross margin that is invested into sales and marketing that drives top line, that further drives gross margin and dilutes G&A. And that is very simply, it's very simple to explain. It goes through, there's one million things that go into it. But very simply, the algorithm of the company that results in high growth, very high gross margin, high marketing ROI, dilution of G&A. Okay? Now, where we are today is we have Milk and Obagi. We obviously participate in skin and color. We're in the U.S. Professional. The black boxes is where we are today playing in a meaningful way. And the other boxes are places we're not touched yet. We have skin and color. We're not in hair yet. We're not in body.
We don't have brands in wellness or fragrance. We're just entering APAC and Europe. So there's plenty and plenty and plenty of places to go. And as a result of this algorithm of where we are, again, these are some of our figures. Okay? Our revenue growth for Q3 is 34%. Our guidance is north of 25.7% on the year. So very high growth compared to our average, very high growth compared to our peers. We are one of the fastest growing, if probably the or among the fastest growing, maybe number two now, fastest growing company in the space. And importantly, we have the best gross margin in the industry.
That strong operational focus on gross margin, combined with very high marketing ROI, results, despite the fact that we are still a very small company whose G&A weighs heavily into a P&L, is still with that size of the company, we're already at average profitability in the industry. You can imagine that as you go forward with this level of growth, with this algorithm of high gross margin, high marketing ROI, dilution of G&A, how we can create a substantial amount of growth over time. This is just with the existing brands. We're not talking about yet brands that we can develop, that we can acquire and apply exactly the same playbook. There is a repeatable playbook into our businesses. Now, this is our financial profile. This is a comparison of 2022 versus 2023. We grew about 15.3%.
We started building that gross margin from where you see 48% to 69%, and we ended up driving profitability in the company at 11.2%, Adjusted EBITDA. This is a comparison for the first three quarters, year to date, Q3. We have not published our Q4 yet. Our growth rate for this year, we accelerated growth to 27%. It's nearly 75% gross margin on a year-to-date basis. Continue to accelerate gross margin, and we continue to accelerate profitability, again, while investing substantially in sales and marketing on these brands, so this gives you a little bit of a sense of kind of where we are today as a company. As I mentioned, our outlook for the year, we expect to be above 25.7% of growth for the full year and finish the year with an EBITDA margin in the mid-teens. Now, let's talk a little bit about the brands themselves.
That's at the corporate level, our performance. The brands themselves, with Milk, is what we want Milk to be is the number one beauty choice of the next generation. This is a brand that has the bones, the DNA to do to makeup what perhaps MAC Cosmetics did to makeup in the early 2000s, late 1990s, early 2000s, or perhaps Maybelline did to makeup in the 1980s. This is a brand that has incredible products that are leaders in its own categories, even though we're just starting with a few products. But importantly, the values and the community that represent the future of beauty. Our growth strategy is very simple. It's expand our community. We're still a relatively small brand, a bit north of $100 million, but still in the whole scheme of things in the beauty business, relatively small. We want to expand the community, continue to innovate.
This is a brand that today, the average Sephora, just to give you a number, has about 180 SKUs of Milk. With people that are not familiar with makeup, sounds like a lot of SKUs, but that is a very small number of SKUs. So we have plenty of room to innovate. We're not present in a number of subcategories within makeup that are big chunks of business that we can grow. For example, liquid foundation, as an example. The biggest category of makeup, we're not present. We don't have a liquid foundation. So big opportunities to grow as we continue to build. We're expanding our footprint. When we bought the business, it was essentially a North America Sephora business, essentially, with a bit of dot-com business. Our customer continues to be primarily Sephora. We're expanding this distribution outside of Sephora in key countries.
For example, this year, we expanded in Scandinavia, where we were the number one brand at Sephora into Lyko, which is another customer. We're number one or number two, depending on the country in Scandinavia. We expanded in the U.K. with Sephora, but also with Boots and Space NK, so outside of the exclusivity of Sephora in the U.K., and we have better rankings in the U.K. than we do in the U.S., showing and demonstrating the appeal of the brand globally. We just recently launched, as well, in Latin America with Blush-Bar in Colombia and Chile and in Mexico. We're the number one brand or number two brand in this number one brand in makeup across all the countries and number one or number two brand in total across the retailer in those countries.
So it just demonstrates that this global appeal of a brand that has very charismatic products, the values that it represents, that in many ways represents the values of New York City, a brand that was born in New York City that can expand globally. And then lastly, leverage our platform by integrating a lot of our media buying capabilities, algorithmic trading capabilities at the center. It has a huge community. We had 7.7 billion impressions, 1.7 billion of those on this is on traditional PR. It is a brand that is loved by journalists throughout our community. We are ranked today in the U.S. as the number 14 brand in EMV. This is earned media value. For those of you who are not familiar, this is a standard measure of the total interaction that happened in social.
This is a brand that was ranked 22 when we bought it two years ago. It ranked number 6 in Q1. And it's one of the best predictors of future growth in beauty. It has about a very high correlation between EMV growth and future growth. And it's a brand that is growing substantially. We are the fastest growing brand in the top 20. And it's very simple. The recipe is very simple. It starts with products. This is clean, cool beauty that works. It's breakthrough innovation that delivers. It's utilitarian. It's good for you. It's clean, vegan, cruelty-free. And that represents and relates to the consumer, not just in the performance of the products, but also, as I said, in its values. We have iconic products. We have leading products in certain subcategories of makeup, for example, primer, lip and cheek, etc. We are beloved by journalists and editors.
We have 17 awards in fiscal year 2022, 31 awards in 2023, and year to date, 27 awards, and we still, our season has not started yet for this year, so really loved by journalists. These are just a little flash of our last two launches, Hydro Grip and Glow, for those of you that wear makeup. If you have not tried, do yourself a favor. Try Hydro Grip and Glow. It will change your life. It is an incredible product that gives you luminosity and a lot of grip, underneath luminosity on your face by using Grip and Glow. It is very multifaceted. Then if you are in any way familiar with the makeup business, unless you were under a rock, you must have seen our Cooling Water Jelly Tint. I have been in this industry for over 30 years.
I may have come across a launch like this maybe four or five times in my career, so it's an incredible launch that has been incredibly successful just by tapping into the culture and what's happening at that moment, all expressed in a product that is really innovative and new. We continue our international expansion. We launched recently in India with Sephora, so we continue to roll out the brand across the world, and plenty, plenty of opportunity around international expansion, so now, from the world of great makeup and fun cult makeup to the world of science and Obagi, our global vision for Obagi is to become the number one physician dispensed dermatological brand in the world, and it's easy to write it, but what is the reason to believe? Why we think this is achievable? First, because our strategy. We are doubling down on our brand DNA.
As I said before, Obagi is the number one physician-recommended brand in the U.S. And the reason that is important is that the U.S. dermatology industry affects the world, impacts the world. When we survey dermatologists in countries where Obagi is not even present, and we ask them, "What is the best brand for skincare?" The number one brand in many of these markets is Obagi, even if the brand is not there. And the reason for it is because dermatologists and estheticians come to the U.S. for congresses, read American journals, etc. So it gives us that ability, that inherent positive predisposition of physicians and other practitioners towards the brand. And we're doubling down on that brand DNA and committing strongly to our growth in the medical industry. We are accelerating cutting-edge science-backed innovation. This is a brand that has one of the reasons we bought.
It has an incredible brand, incredible products, incredible reputation, but for some time had not been perhaps marketed in a modern way. So we are accelerating innovation not just in terms of products, but also in our go-to market, our digital capabilities, etc. And then lastly, we're growing the brand awareness and its footprint. Again, this is a brand that unless you were in the beauty industry or unless you went and visited a dermatologist, you never heard of it. It's a brand that you discovered as a dermatologist. So today, we are still primarily, and will always be a primarily physician-dispensed dermatology business. But what we're doing is we're marketing the brand outside of dermatologists' offices through modern means, digital and CRM and precision targeting and all of those things to get consumers into dermatologists' offices asking for the brand.
That is what is feeding a lot of our growth on the brand. We have a dedicated medical aesthetic advisory board, Dr. Suzan Obagi, who is the daughter of the founder, a renowned leading board certified dermatologist and surgeon, is our Chief Medical Director. That impacts a lot of our business. We just launched ELASTIderm, our medical-grade lifting power. This is one of our latest launches. It is a tremendous new launch that impacts. It's the first Obagi launch that is typically being a treatment brand into what we call day care creams, which is the largest side of the business with a technical product.
And that is our ELASTIderm business, which has launched in a quite 360 way with best-in-class education to all touch points among doctors and consumers and so on and so forth, and has really driven a lot of, again, these are EMV growth, 165% EMV growth. This is a brand, again, that it is now not just in dermatologists' offices, but really being fed and built in social channels and getting consumers to buy into the business. So in summary, just kind of with a few more minutes, it is very simple what Waldencast is. We are relatively young and new in the space. We are creating a company that has the operational scale of a multi-brand platform that is only going to get better with the more brands we add, with a repeatable model that creates a flywheel of growth and profitability that is very, very strong.
Expertise, everybody in the company. It's a company that has a very strong, deep expertise in this pure-play beauty of managing global beauty brands at scale. We have a balanced portfolio that allows us to weather the fluctuations between brands and categories in the overall broader beauty category with an asset-light, nimbleness, and efficient structure that allows us to have a very strong return on capital, very strong profitability, but importantly, very strong speed to market. An incentive program for all executives that is really focused not on vanity measures like big companies have, but really on value creation and long-term value creation for the company. So I say thank you very much. I stop for questions. Questions? That was very eloquent. Seemed like it. Yeah. Go ahead.
Speaking of the acquisition market, you obviously have much larger players also in the space. How are you differentiating your dollar from their dollars?
Great question. First, dollars are dollars. So love is good, but money is better, typically. It's very simple. The beauty industry has always been an acquisitive market. If you take L'Oréal, for example, I think they have 36 international brands, 34 have been acquired, two created. Lauder, I think has 29. They keep closing brands, so I don't know. 29 brands, I think. Two of them have been created. The rest have been acquired. It's always been an acquisitive business. The reality is that there are more acquisition targets that could be part of our platform than there are buyers. That's number one. Number two is the beauty industry is a very, very big industry.
But at the same time, it's a very small industry in the sense that executives and founders, I can probably call right now any of the founders or CEOs of most of the independent brands immediately. It's people that I have worked with, who have worked in the past. But importantly, we don't have to buy. We don't have to compete necessarily with the big companies, number one, because there's plenty of assets. Number two is it's very much a relationship-based way of getting in. And number three, one of the ways where we're different, and I can speak this with authority relative to my time at L'Oréal, is that our approach to acquisition preserves the brand DNA and the spirit of the brand.
For example, Mazdack Rassi, the founder of Milk, works in the company, still works in the company, and only has a role in Milk, has an important role within Waldencast overall. Versus the larger company tends to acquire brands and then change them, and if they're lucky, make them successful. If they're unlucky, not so successful, but eventually dismantling a little bit of that brand spirit, the brand DNA. So there's as much dollars, to your point, as it is a cultural similarity and a cultural way of approaching the acquisition of brands that allows us to be a bit more human and a bit more growth-oriented and preserving that brand DNA. Other questions? All right, so just on time then. Well, thank you very much.