Aritzia Inc. (ATZ) Earnings Call Transcript

Hello, everyone, and welcome to Aritzia's first-ever Investor Day. My name is Tom Tames, and I've had the pleasure of working with Aritzia for the last 14 years, leading our Global Events and Employee Experience portfolios. It's great to welcome you all here to our Vancouver support office. Thank you for coming. Before we begin, I would like to acknowledge that we are situated on the unseated traditional territories of the Musqueam, Squamish and Tsleil-Waututh nations. I will now pass it over to Aritzia's Vice President of Investor Relations. Beth Reed. Beth?

Hi, everyone. Good morning. As Tom said, thank you so much for being here with us in Vancouver at our first Investor Day. For those of you on the webcast, thanks for joining as well. First, of course, I would like to remind everyone we'll be making forward-looking statements today, and disclosures are up on the screen. So today's agenda, you'll be hearing from our senior leadership team about the company's core differentiators, our key strategic drivers, and of course, our updated financial targets. Brian is going to kick us off. Then you'll hear from Jennifer and other members of our senior leadership team. And then we'll conclude the presentations with Todd going over our updated financial plan. We'll give you a couple of breaks along the way and then wrap up with Q&A. After that, we'll go down the hall to our A-OK Commissary for lunch, and then followed by a tour of the support office here. And then for those of you who opted in, we'll head out to the distribution center and our Metrotown boutique. So without further ado, I'm happy to introduce our Founder and Executive Chairman, Brian Hill. [Presentation]

Thank you. Thank you, Beth. Thank you, Tom, and thank you, everybody coming today. As Tom mentioned, it's our first ever Investor Day here at Aritzia. For those of you who don't know me, Brian Hill, I'm the Executive Chair and Founder of Aritzia. When we went public 6 years ago, we gave 5-year guidance. And although we ran head first into a pandemic, we stretched our results to 6 years and have had to delay our current outlook today that we've all seen. I think it was posted today. But as everybody knows here, we exceeded our goals, and we're super excited on our progress and are looking forward to achieving or exceeding our goals going forward again here, too. Today, Jennifer and the team are going to lay out our outlook for the following 5 years, as I mentioned. But before I begin, I'd like to mention a couple of things. Although you're the investor community and financial goals are the utmost important, I'd like to remind everybody that we measure our success in more than just our financial goals. We measure our success through our brand strength, our operational infrastructure, our internal culture and of course, our community objectives. We've been in business for the last 38 years. We've always built an organization with a long-term vision, and that's not going to change. These financial objectives we're laying out today are a point in time in our journey. And therefore, I'd like to emphasize that although we are not sharing our 5-year goals on brand, culture, operations and community, we will continue to invest in these throughout the 5 years and beyond. And therefore, the representation of our revenues, gross margins, SG&A and CapEx will reflect roughly the same composition they always have. For those of you who are familiar with Aritzia, I ask for your patience. For those of you that are new to Aritzia, I'll just quickly go through the last 38 years. In 1984, my brother and father and I saw an opportunity in the marketplace and founded Aritzia, opening our first store in Oakridge Mall, which is about 15 minutes that way. After a dozen years or so and Jennifer had been here for almost a decade. Jennifer, I and the leadership team, many of us still with us here today, realize that we had an opportunity to expand nationally. To do that, we needed to create a vertical supply chain, computerize. It was like Jen and I joke all the time that we actually weren't on computers. We had no computers, we had no data, we had nothing, everything was manual. It was crazy. We had to design our store functionality, which ironically, even today is very similar. And finally, we had to design an operating model because we weren't going to be able to be there in every store and everything at the same time. As I mentioned, a lot of these haven't even changed to date. The premise and the basic foundation of what we put in place 27 years ago is still valid today. In '99, after completing these goals, worked on them for a few years, we opened up in Calgary and Toronto. They were supposed to be a year apart. They ended up being a couple of weeks apart as it turned out. And we still have those stores today. In 2005, we partnered with Berkshire. I got asked a lot initially about Berkshire and the private equity and private equity can sometimes be a bad name. And whether they're pushing us and telling us to accelerate our business and growth and everything else. And really, they didn't. They're incredible partners. And what they just did is they changed our mindset a little bit, because we've been so successful, but we are running our business from a defensive perspective, and they changed our perspective saying, you have a huge opportunity, have more confidence in what you're doing and start running your business from an offensive perspective, grow, build infrastructure, do what you need to do, but start thinking about your business in an offensive manner, which we did and we still do to this day. We opened our first 2 stores in the United States in 2007 in Bellevue and Santa Clara. We still have those 2 stores today as well. They're bigger now, both are bigger, and we've expanded both of them. And we pride ourselves that we don't close stores. We reposition stores, but we've never come out and closed a store. In 2011, we opened our first flagship store in Manhattan. Karen is going to talk about that in a few minutes when she shares our real estate strategy with everybody. In 2012, after trying to figure out for years how we can figure out or duplicate retail experience online, we opened up our e-commerce site, which at the time was a best-in-class responsive website. In 2016, we went public, as most of you know now, and we've had an overwhelming positive response, and we're very grateful about that, the support everybody has given us. And so thank you for that. In 2020, the pandemic hit. We're extremely proud of how we handled it. We didn't furlough anybody. We had financial continuity for all our teams, and it's turned out to be really great for our culture and loyalty within the organization. And in 2022, it's my favorite part. Jennifer Wong got promoted to CEO. And I got a new boss. After almost 6 months in the new position, we couldn't be more excited about our bright future ahead that she's going to be leading with her at the helm. It wasn't a huge step for her so far. She was already the President. She was already running a large portion of the business and doing so incredibly well. And so the transition up to this point in time has been seamless for her. I'm struggling a little bit more with it, but. And over and above being super proud of her, I'm extremely proud of our whole team. We have a picture of the team up here and our future. They've all been here a long time. Loyalty is one of our core values here at Aritzia. And we've always felt that if we're loyal to our people, they will show loyalty back to us. And so now we have 250 employees that have been here for 10 years or longer, which is almost unheard of in retail. The group on the screen, I believe, has almost an 18-year term. And so we're looking forward to working together as a team going forward for a long time. And that's it. So I'm going to pass the microphone and the stage over to Jennifer Wong, who is going to share with you today what are we planning on doing for the next 5 years. So thank you, everybody.

Thanks, Brian, for those very kind words. Good morning, everyone. Clearly, my roots run very deep here at Aritzia. It was 1987 when I was first hired in November as holiday help. It was in store #3, which is actually just up the way here on Robson Street. And never did I imagine that it would be the beginning of the most exciting journey to build Aritzia with Brian and the leadership team. And certainly, I didn't envision way back then that I would be CEO of Aritzia. It only took 35 years, but that's beside the point. Brian's vision for everyday luxury even back in 1984 was an aspirational appeal that spoke to me as a client and then eventually as a style adviser. He's a brilliant businessman. He's an exceptionally inspirational individual. And under his leadership, we have built an incredibly successful brand, all based on Everday Luxury. So it's his vision, and I even want to say it's some of his persona that is embedded in who we are. Okay. So the slide says we are strategically positioned, but I often like to say that we are uniquely positioned in the global fashion landscape of Everday Luxury. The positioning is based on 2 dimensions: fashion and price. Everday Luxury is about our product being a high-fashion product. It has a high fashion quotient. It's a luxury product. We offer a luxury level of customer service and our brand proposition is Everyday Luxury. Yet all of this is offered at an attainable price point. So Everyday Luxury is based on 5 beliefs. You may have heard some of this already before. Product is at the center of everything we do. It is the heart of Aritzia. We believe in quality. We use all of the highest quality materials in all of our products, many of our raw materials are sourced from the same mills and suppliers as the luxury designers source from. Our products are beautiful. There's a depth of design, the quality of construction, the detailing, and an impeccable fit, and this is what we have become known and loved for. Second, our environments, both physical and digital, are aspirational and inspirational. You walk into one of our boutiques, I'm sure many of you have, I heard some of you already were in the stores yesterday, you feel the energy of the store, you hear really cool music playing. You see our style advisers hustling around with their energetic and amazing personality shining through. We have lounges and there's a picture on the slide there of one of our lounges where boyfriends and girlfriends and friends, husbands can sit while they wait for their partner who's trying things on in the fitting room, probably don't mind sitting there watching what everything is going on. There's WiFi. They can be on their phones. And our newest concept are the A-OK Cafés that are in some of our newer stores and really, really received well by our clients. And of course, all of this is digitally represented on aritzia.com online. We reflect this through our beautiful photography, the clever copy, and just basically the Everyday Luxury experience. So regardless of what store you're in, whether it be an actual physical boutique or our concierge, we have made it our ultimate commitment to ensure you're getting exceptional and engaging client service. We pride ourselves on a high-touch personalized service that our style advisers, again, whether they're in the boutiques or our concierge would offer. Many of our style advisers have formed relationships with our clients such that they know about them, they know what they like. Oftentimes, if we get something new and in a season, they'll put something aside and call them in because they know that this item or this style is something that their client will love or they know they bought something before in the past that goes perfectly with it. I once read an article, I think it was soon after we opened our SoHo store. The reporter was writing about her experience in that store shopping. And I think she said something along the lines of, it's like shopping with your best friends. And so many times I'd like to think of our style advisers as that, your friends will tell you exactly what they think and it's their job to right service and right sell to our clients. And fourth, we believe in communications that resonate and are relevant to our clients. We pride ourselves on a unique tone of voice for Everyday Luxury that translates seamlessly across both channels. There's Everyday Luxury in everything they may hear, see or read. And fifth, we believe all of these touch points with the customer should be attainable and available and accessible to everyone. That's Everyday Luxury. So it's this approach to Everyday Luxury and this mindset to Everyday Luxury that has generated the tremendous results that we have enjoyed in the past. As long as I've been with the company, we have consistently grown. And as far back as our records go, which isn't quite as far back as I go, we have had positive revenue growth in every single year. To give you a clear picture of how our growth is accelerating, particularly as of late, it took us 37 years to reach $1 billion in sales. That was in 2021. And then less than 4 months later, we ended the fiscal year at $1.5 billion in sales. I know it's actually $1.495 billion, but I'm rounding up to $1.5 billion. What's $5 million between friends. Then 12 months later, we are projecting to reach $2 billion in net revenue by the end of this fiscal year. So it goes without saying how excited we are about our business, how proud we are of it, leading up to now and how excited we are going forward. You can see from the slide, the majority of our stores right now are in Canada, but the growth in the coming years will be primarily from the U.S. Our country mix is 50-50. Our mix between e-commerce and retail is 65-35. And for many years now, our brands, our exclusive brands have made up 95% of our product mix. Okay. So we slipped this slide in the very last minute, I insisted, because this tweet was sent to me a few days ago. It doesn't matter who Barry is. I'm just saying, he said it, not us, I'm just saying, and it is, in fact, true. So of course, all of these fantastic industry-leading results couldn't be possible without the principles of how we operate. Brian touched on these in his opening remarks. They're made largely possible because of how we operate. Brian founded this company on some of these key operating principles. They all stand true today. It's really important we tell you about them because this is why our business is so strong. They are fundamental to our success today. We will continue to build upon these strengths that have made us successful. Over the years, we've honed these strategies in various areas. Together, collectively, they form our overall business strategy. These are things that give us our competitive advantage and collectively set us apart from the competition. When we get asked, like how do we do it? It's not any 1 thing. The saying, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, I think, is absolutely true in our case. And our long-term success, Brian talked about long term, our long-term success is dependent upon how we operate. So we've been very patient and very disciplined in our real estate and building our real estate portfolio. Every single location is highly considered, and it's not just the location or the market that we select. It's actually the site within the street location or the shopping center. It's the site itself, it's the size of it, it's the footprint or shape of it. And then, of course, the terms that go along with it, we're very, very patient. I think if you were with us in 2016 at the IPO, we would have taken you on a store to our up street at the Pacific Center mall. It's actually a mall that's been around for over 50 years. It's our sixth store in Vancouver. And I think we chased it maybe for almost 20 years, Brian, I don't know 15 or 20 years. There's a location in the mall that has an exterior entrance to a very busy street. It also has an interior entrance just off of an escalator, it's adjacent to an escalator, and it's also right off of the main entrance into the mall. Traffic for traffic eyeballs couldn't be better. It's arguably one of the best locations in that mall, if not the best. A long-standing Canadian retailer had occupied that space for many, many years. And it wasn't until 2009, even though we first started the company in 1984, it wasn't until 2009 when we opened our sixth store here in Vancouver. So that's just an example of how patient we are. And certainly, it was worth the wait. Of course, fast forward to today, we're not waiting around like that. Based on our tremendous results as well as because our stores are so beautifully designed, we are highly sought after by our landlords, and they are now coming to us. And so Karen Janes will tell you a lot more about that in her section. I would say, we believe that we have the best real estate portfolio in retail. And it's not just the curb appeal. Once you're inside the stores, you experience that wonderfully aspirational store environment. Each store is designed with some uniqueness. No boutique looks exactly the same, but there are processes in each of our stores that are standard and are the same. And so we believe in form and function. And by putting in these processes, it allows our style advisers to exclusively focus on the client. Our retail stores do work from both a form and function point of view. They are aspirational and efficient for the customer. And of course, we want this Everyday Luxury experience to translate online. In 2012, we launched our e-commerce site. It is our biggest store in terms of it offers the full assortment and it's open 24/7. Of course, none of this would be possible without our talented team. There are so many more than those who are in the room here today. We have an exceptional talented team. What I would say about our team is they're smart, creative and nice. I love working with them. Some are very long tenured. Some of them have joined us more recently and bring their outside experiences to Aritzia, which I think complements the tenure really, really well. We always strive for world-class talent, whether we're hiring best and brightest or seasoned professionals. And one thing I want to note here, we're very proud of the diversity in our teams. We are primarily women. We're 85% women, we're female led. I think 65% of our team identify as BIPOC. When I'm asked why I've stayed here for so long, there's 2 reasons. Well, there's actually 3 reasons, but 2 of them are because of our people and because of our high performing culture. As I said, I love working with our people. They're smart, they have a high bar for themselves, they have a high bar for others. When you're working with them, they challenge you, it's intellectually stimulating, and they make you better. So of course, it's great to have this tremendous growth, but it's really important that you have the infrastructure to support it. Brian mentioned in his opening remarks, how important the infrastructure is in enabling our success. We've been very intentional in building our infrastructure, intentionally insofar as it's lock in step with the growth. We try our best to build it. In some cases, we'd like to build it slightly ahead of the growth curve and enable the growth. But it's really important that we put in this world-class infrastructure that is foundational and it's something that we can scale and something that we can build upon as we continue to grow. Essentially as COO, my main gig was to build the infrastructure. Very proud of what we've built. And it goes to the fact and speaks to the fact that we've always had a long-term view of our business, and it's always been part of our strategy to build infrastructure. And of course, with the incredible growth that we've had over the last couple of years and the growth that we anticipate in the coming years, we will continue to invest in our infrastructure. So I haven't said anything about product because next, we're very happy to have Heather McLean, who is our Executive Vice President of Product. As I mentioned, product is at the center of everything we do. We're so happy that Heather is here. I would like to introduce you to her. We've recently celebrated her 20th anniversary here at Aritzia. I remember the first day I met you, Heather, and we hired you to work in the inventory department. And I cannot think of anyone better to give you a deep dive into our product other than Heather.

Thank you, Jen. I also remember that day very, very clearly, because I left the office and said, if she works here, I want to work here, too. And that was 20 years ago. So thank you for the inspiration, not only for me, but countless other members of our team. And welcome, everybody, to our office and especially special for me. This is our design studio. So welcome to our design studio. In this room is where we make all of our key product creative and business decisions. And Brian and I are privileged enough to work with our team right here in this room. So welcome. We have a world-class tenured product team that is 350 people. We have 26 unique product departments. We have a world-class tenured team made up of those like me who built their career internally with us here, combined with professionals that have joined us with exceptional expertise from around the world. Together, we work cross-functionally to deliver our beautiful product to our clients. Our merchandise planning team is accountable for all of the business aspects of product. They do all the numbers, unique merchandising strategy that we've honed over many years and many seasons. Our processes allow us to be entrepreneurial, nimble and focused. I can speak for hours about the processes within this area, but it's very much part of our secret sauce, so I'll leave it there. Our creative development department imagine up and architect all the collections every season. They work tirelessly throughout the season to elevate every single style we do to Everyday Luxury through passion for details and live fittings. Everything is fit on a live fit model. Our manufacturing team works with world-class partners through our direct sourcing and manufacturing strategies, and we are very passionate about our qualities, and like Jen said, sourced from absolutely the world-class mills and factories. Our product integration team guides us through a robust seasonal life cycle of checkpoint calendar to ensure that we stay on track and unite all 26 departments together. We have doubled our style count in the last 5 years and grown our product catalog. We've launched our extended sizing initiatives to include additional links in our pants and coats and a more inclusive size range for our product. We've increased our color offering so that we offer diversified color assortments in each of our boutiques and online exclusive colors. Our clients have responded very positively to our initiatives, and we continue to evolve the product as the seasons go on. We test our product, we get our clients' feedback, we make our own observations, and then we read sales and continue to evolve. We conceive, create, develop and retail fashion brands. There are 2 elements to our exclusive brands. One is that you can only get them on aritzia.com and within our retail boutiques; and two, that we have a multiclient approach that we've honed over many years. Our exclusive brands represent 95% of our sales. Over the years, we've created a portfolio of brands that caters to a range of different clients and their lifestyle. Our clients are at the center of everything that we do. What sets us apart is the fact that our multiclient strategy allows us to be fluid and agile as new fashion and business opportunities arise. We can create new brands, we can accelerate or decelerate current brands depending on what we think is important for our clients. We cater our store assortment by region, by store, by style, color, so no store is the same and our clients experience our each locations in a unique way. And we pride ourselves on balance. Balance across our product categories, clients, styles, colors and prints. That said, in real life, we know our clients' experience each of the brands in their own way. Many of our clients shop fluidly between the brands and have most or some of our brands in their closets. Babaton represents our professional client. She wears Babaton to work during the day and Ten by Babaton when she goes out at night. Wilfred is our whimsical modern fashion brand. And wilfred free offers that client a more casual wardrobe. TNA is our useful lifestyle client, TnAction our Activewear client, and Sunday Best is designed for our youthful fashion client. We even have our very own denim brand, Denim Forum, which we focus on traditional denim and exceptional washes. Super World. I love a good story about how we created these brands. And so this one is an interesting one and I'm going to tell it to you. So it was fall 2016. It was an exciting time for us, as you all know from being here today, and our product had launched for fall/winter. Every Monday, our product team, including me, rush into the office to review the sales. It's what we live for, knowing what's selling in our brands, what's working, what's not working. I was at my desk. And outside my office, it's one of our creative groups. And I looked out, I looked out from my report, reading all the sales and looked out and there was a red puffer jacket hanging on each of the back of their chairs. And I'm just always going to remember that for as long as I live, because I looked at and realized, oh my god, something is going to happen here. I went out to talk to them about that. They kind of gathered around. They started talking about this jacket, that was new jacket, small buy, tiny little thing. They were talking about how the fit is amazing. It's so warm. It's perfect. Everything about it is perfect. And somebody said -- in the group, someone said, it's a super puff, that's what it is. And so that became our working title of this item. Next morning, we went into Brian's office for my update, and he got really excited. There is nobody in the world better to work with on stuff like this and I have to tell you. He's entrepreneurial, creative, crazy business mind. Together, we turned this into a cross-functional, not just in product, but across the company opportunity. We got marketing involved. We got retail involved. We worked the whole year to perfect this item, and we turned our working title into a new brand, Super Puff. We launched the style. We got right behind it and it worked. It's now become iconic to our brand, helped us get famous in the U.S., and multiple influencers, including Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and countless others, like Emma Chamberlain, are seen wearing the Super Puff. The item and brand has become iconic to us, but for me, I always remember seeing those coats. Why do I share these stories? Why am I sharing this here today? I think it illustrates some of the ways that we excel. One is how we use data and analysis to drive opportunities and maximize our sales. Two, is our flexibility and agility and our multiclient strategy. Three is how we unite together as a cross-functional team, get behind things. And four, we always have fun, we're entrepreneurial, and we're creative. But we're not a one-trick pony. We do offer a very well-balanced product assortment. We balance our product across brand, client lifestyles, and categories. We excel in T-shirts, blouses, sweaters, jackets, coats, shorts, pants, skirts and dresses. As we have opened new stores in warmer weather climates, we have created a product selling strategy and development strategy to meet the needs of our clients all across our stores and online. This strategy has been very effective for us and we're really pleased with the results, and we'll keep growing that. Our demand-driven strategy allows us to have the right product at the right time in the right quantities. We focus on maximizing our full-price sales, and we effectively manage our inventory. Like Jennifer said, we elevate our product across all of our key product elements. Everything we do starts with the quality first. We are driven by our commitment across all of these product elements. Every single style we work on, we endeavor to elevate. This would include our high-quality fabrics, sophisticated construction, considerate detailing, and superior fit and function. We partner with best-in-class suppliers, and with our growth, we've leaned into suppliers that can offer us flexibility through their ability to produce multiple product types and produce in multiple countries. Over the past few years, the volume of units we are producing has grown in scale and in relation with the size of our business. We follow a robust long-term sourcing strategy that focuses our relationships with those that can produce and deliver, in a timely fashion, the best materials, while ensuring that we diversify our portfolio. We have continued to focus and put effort into bringing lower impact fabrics and trims into our assortment mix. Today, I'm proud to say that well over 60% of our styles contain lower impact raw materials. We are committed to improving that number every season. Reigning Champ. We have accelerated our entry into our menswear market through the acquisition of Reigning Champ. Reigning Champ is a leading designer and manufacturer of premium athletic wear, utilizing unparalleled materials and craftsmanship. Rooted in classic timeless garments, Reigning Champ is sold in some of the most influential, digital and retail locations in the world. Our plans are to grow Reigning Champ from $25 million to $75 million in annual sales by leveraging our world-class infrastructure and expertise. This is a long-term acquisition. Now while this is exciting growth, it remains a small percentage of our overall business. We incorporate and we integrate responsibility to our community in everything that we do. We've had dedicated leadership in this area since 2011, and I'm proud of the fact that we have really moved the needle in this area in the last few years. A big part of the reason for that is our VP of Sustainability, Rebecca Loyo Mayo. She has really progressed our efforts in terms of our corporate responsibility over the past 6 years. She was a senior leader in this area at Burberry and understands fashion and ESG. She's incredibly knowledgeable and insightful, and I am pleased to introduce her now to tell you more. Rebecca?

Thank you. Nothing more humbling than organizing an apple box. Thanks, Heather. Good morning. So my job today is to talk you through some of the ESG and responsibility programs that we have here at Aritzia. We've chosen to house them under a framework that we call Community, which captures all of the environmental and social contributions that we make as an organization. But before I move on, what I would also like to just mention is what it's been like working with the leadership team here at Aritzia. Because obviously, when you're trying to integrate responsibility programs into a corporate strategy, it's so important that you have that commitment and you really have that handholding from the very top. And I've been really lucky. And when I first arrived 6 years ago, sustainability wasn't new exactly, but there was no strategy. It wasn't embedded. There were sort of disparate bits and pieces here and there. And what I've enjoyed so much is working alongside all of the leaders here to actually define what our priorities are going to be, build a strategy, and now really integrate them into our corporate priorities. So it has been a fun 6 years. The structure of my next few slides, I'm going to give you a high level overview of Community, People and Planet. I'm going to start talking a little bit about our materiality assessment and where we are with that. Then I'm actually going to start with Planet. And I'm going to talk about 1 material impact there, just really focusing on it, and then move on People. And within People, I'm going to talk about a couple of the material impacts that we see in the social area, looking at our supply chain, but also our own teams and the communities that we live and work amongst. And then finally, I'll touch on some updates on disclosure and reporting, which I'm sure is top of mind for everybody. So materiality. Like many, this is where our journey started. And back in 2017, we conducted our first materiality assessment. And it gave us a really good blueprint, a bit of a road map for the first 5 years. And it helped us to build systems. And during that time, we were able to deliver better management systems for the working conditions in our supply chain and the environmental performance in our suppliers. We also, as have mentioned, we set internal targets. They were internal at the time to really drive the adoption of lower impact materials across our product. And we redesigned our retail and e-commerce packaging to incorporate certified materials. But now we're in 2022, 5 years later, and we're in a process of a materiality refresh. It's a bit different this time. We've actually solicited input from a wider group of stakeholders, including yourselves. So thank you to all of you who participated in the survey. That input is really valuable for us. I just want to touch on our clients briefly as well, of course, because everything that we do ultimately is to meet their demand. And what we're seeing is that our clients are expecting this, especially with our product quality, our product price point. This is now a business as usual expectation. Our clients want to live better. They want to purchase better, and we want to be one of the brands that they can build that affinity and that loyalty with. So this is a full stakeholder expectation from our employees, investors and also, of course, our clients. Moving on to our environmental impact. So our planet priorities. So what we've heard loud and clear from our stakeholders, of course, is that environmental management is a really high priority. It's an opportunity. We know it's also a potential risk. And coming out loud and clear on top of that list is planet. And with upcoming regulation on greenhouse gas emission disclosure, I just want to touch a little bit on where we are on that. We have now completed 3 CDP climate reporting cycles. That has helped us hone and improve our data management systems and also our disclosure processes. But it's also helped us really understand where those leverage points are, those impact points are. And of course, a company like us, a retailer, are big in our Scope 3 emissions, particularly raw materials and manufacturing. On raw materials, Heather mentioned, we have been working hard to incorporate more lower impact raw materials into our product offering. And in that very short period of time, we've managed to get to 60%. And Heather mentioned, we want that to continue to grow. Just to marry that on our e-commerce on our client-facing side, we have invested in building out capabilities for our clients to search, filter, to be able to find these products that we're offering to them. It helps us drive demand, and it also helps us really capitalize on the investments made there. In terms of manufacturing, big impacts are where we make our products and where the fabrics are processed and produced. We have an environmental monitoring program. It is an industry best standard monitoring program. Many brands use it alongside us. That collaboration is really key. For us, we cover this across 100% of our finished goods suppliers and our strategic mills. And one of my colleagues right now is out visiting our strategic suppliers in country, working actually understanding about the implementation of this program and really trying to identify how we can improve that partnership, that collaboration, where the opportunities are and where the gaps are. And we can really support them to lower their own impact as well. Moving on to our social impact or people priorities. Of course, our business impacts people across our full value chain. So we have 5,000-plus people that we employ directly. But of course, there are also people across our supply chain, the people and communities that live and work around our suppliers. And in total, we have over 100,000 people in our finished goods suppliers alone. I'm going to cover a few things in this section. I'm going to talk about working conditions in the supply chain. I'm also going to talk about employee engagement and giving and ED&I, equity, diversity and inclusion. And I'll start with that internal piece. So as Jen mentioned, we do have an incredibly diverse team, something that we are really proud of, something that I'm really proud of too is the leadership portion. In our managers and above, 80% of those people are women. And for me on a personal note, to be able to work with an executive leadership team with such heavy hitting women is an absolute honor and now to be able to say that my CEO is a woman is just wonderful. More generally, I hope you'll be familiar now with the commitment that we have made around ED&I, which we have mentioned and communicated previously. We really want to strengthen the strategy and we now have a team in place and the Chief Equity, Diversity and Inclusion Officer, that's really trying to drive that change from within. We made a big investment at the beginning, $1 million, and we are now building out programs like employee resource groups to really try and engage and make that connection with our own people. Moving on to our supply chain. I know that working conditions is very high material issue risk for organizations in the retail industry. Our supply monitoring program. So we do have a robust process. We cover 100% of our finished goods. And now again, we are moving into Tier 2. We work with independent social auditors in country, they're experts, they are local, they understand the local context, speak the local language, and they conduct audits on our behalf. But alongside that, and thanks to the relationships that our product and manufacturing team have built with our suppliers, and really they are some of the world's best suppliers, the social impact team are able to really partner with our suppliers and make sure and monitor their compliance to meet our standards and our code of conduct. Much closer to home. I wanted to touch on something happening right now around engagement. We are currently in the process of completing our sixth Aritzia Asks employee survey. We have an 88% response rate from our employees, which is well above the industry average. And that tells me that our people are engaged and they want to feed back to us, which is a positive thing. The results help us to understand how we can further engage with them and retain that world-class talent that Jen mentioned that helps us drive our growth. And it's not just that, of course, that keeps our people here. We offer rich learning and development opportunities, and also, I think, world-class well-being programs. And I think you'll see that as you go through the office this afternoon. And last, but not least, and this has been going on well before my tenure, way beyond 6 years, giving, the philanthropic work that we do. So alongside all of the work that I've mentioned, we are really proud of the investment that we make in our communities in and around our offices and stores, but also broader in the U.S. and Canada. We've invested $40 million through product, financial donations and volunteer hours. Or if you look at it through another metric, we've impacted 445,000 individual people over our time. And just to round out and finish off on disclosure and reporting as promised. So as we launch the next 5 years of now our community strategy, we have formed an environmental and social board committee, and we have leaders both within the retail industry and in other industries that will advise us as we hone and focus in on our priorities. And at the same time, we've established an internal executive community committee. We have representation across the organization from product through to store development. The idea being that this leadership team can help really drive, deliver and integrate this into their own work and to the day-to-day strategies that they have. In terms of disclosure, this year, we published our inaugural community report. I hope you've all been able to at least take a click through. And we also completed our first UN Global Compact Communication on Progress report. For me, both of these felt like huge milestones and really great progress to finally be able to start to share this in a more comprehensive manner. And so finally, to finish and looking forward, now undoubtedly is the right time for Aritzia to start setting some external ESG targets, to share and to really place them across the portfolio, planet, and people. Having nearly finished this year's materiality assessment, the executive committee team that I mentioned is now working on a set of comprehensive and ambitious targets. I'm really confident they are going to resonate well with our clients, with our investors, and also our people. And we are all really looking forward to sharing it, and I am in particular, really looking forward to being able to share more details on that. And that's the end of this section and thank you all so much. I do just want to say, if there is anything that either yourselves or your ESG leads would like to discuss in any further detail, I'm always available, alongside my colleagues, in giving ED&I and people and culture. And I will pass you now on to a break and a cup of coffee. Thank you so much. [Break]

All right. Thanks, everybody. We're going to be starting in just under 30 seconds here. If we can get everyone to retake your seat. Thank you so much. Excellent. All right. Please welcome back Chief Executive Officer, Jennifer Wong.

Okay. Welcome back, everyone. I just want to say a word about Rebecca, because she mentioned how great it is for her to work with a leadership team like us. And I just want to say for the leadership team to work with Rebecca is an amazing thing. She, if you can tell, is balanced and practical and knows the fashion business. And so what I will say is we are committed to integrating ESG into our operations and into our plans. And there's no one better than Rebecca to ensure that we do right by our people, right by the planet, and right by our business. So before the break, we talked a lot about the growth that Aritzia has achieved in the last almost 4 decades. And what is amazing about past growth and strategy that brought us through the last almost 4 decades means you have a proven strategy, a proven plan, something that is tested, a blueprint, if you will, for that growth. And so essentially, what we're here today to share with you is we will continue on with that business strategy, with that growth strategy, with that blueprint to grow even further in the next 5 years. And if we go to the next slide. Essentially, our business is strong, and we're powering stronger. So we will continue with this strategic plan. There's 3 growth levers: Geographic expansion, e-commerce growth and increased brand awareness. And so I'd like to introduce to you, to tell you about the first growth lever, Karen Janes, our Executive Vice President of Real Estate. She was formerly the Global Head of Real Estate for companies like the Gap, American Eagle Outfitters, Ralph Lauren more recently. Karen is somebody who we met actually probably about 20 years ago. She is someone we asked to come join our team over 20 years ago. Obviously, being the best in the industry, you have lots of opportunities before you. So here's another example of our patience and our perseverance. It was 5 years ago when Karen Janes finally agreed to join Aritzia. She's also currently a trustee on the International Council of Shopping Centers. And you can imagine, when you're as discerning as we are about our real estate choices and the markets that we go into and the sizes and the spaces that we go into, you log a lot of miles on the road. So couldn't be more thrilled to have Karen off the road for a day and come here in Vancouver and join us to tell you about our real estate strategy. Karen?

Thank you, Jen. Thanks for that kind introduction. I'm fortunate to be with Aritzia, and I couldn't be more excited to continue the growth of our incredible real estate portfolio. I don't have some of the same tenure as my colleagues, being here only 5 years, but I do feel connected to Aritzia for more than 10 years. About 13 years ago, Brian and I, I was on the other side, and we worked on the sublease of Spring and Broadway in SoHo, and that was Aritzia's first Manhattan store. Not only it was Aritzia's First Manhattan store, but we still have that store today, and it is the #1 store in our portfolio. I also had the pleasure of working across the table from Brian on a store in Chicago on Rush Street. He beat me, but I think he wanted to beat me because he paid more rent. Given the strong demand for our product and high productivity and quick payback, we will continue to accelerate our geographical expansion. Our focus remains on growing our U.S. boutiques. By the end of fiscal 2023, we would have grown our U.S. boutique count by over 40%. In Canada, we forecast our boutique count to be flat. Our current mix of 113 boutiques in Canada right now is at 60% and the U.S. is at 40%. This will reverse by the end of fiscal 2027. You'll see 60% of our boutiques in the United States and 40% will be in Canada. We will capitalize on our premier real estate locations. We are disciplined and patient and do not compromise on our real estate selections. We look for AAA real estate, whether that be in a shopping center, a street, or a lifestyle center. We choose locations that have high productivity, heavy traffic, and top-performing adjacencies. We have a prioritized target list that we go after. Our target list takes into account the total value of a new boutique opening, which includes both boutique sales and the incremental lift that we see to our e-commerce sales. Not a lot of retailers can say this, but all of our stores are profitable. Aritzia is highly sought after by landlords and we have a tremendous amount of opportunities to choose from. We're able to negotiate favorable economics and lease conditions as a result of our exquisite boutiques and great sales productivity. During COVID, we maintained our real estate expansion, which enabled us to capitalize on excellent real estate at well below market value. We will open 8 to 10 new U.S. boutiques annually in new and existing markets. While our target payback is 12 to 18 months, most stores that we have recently opened are paying back in less than 12. And this is due to our high sales performance, our management of our build-out costs, and landlord allowances. By the end of fiscal 2023, we'll be in 26 U.S. markets. We will grow our new markets by 70% to 44 by the end of fiscal '27. For each new boutique we open in a new market, on average we see an 80% lift to our e-commerce sales in that market. I think that's a pretty big number. In addition to the new boutiques we mentioned, we're also going to do some expansions. So we're looking to expand 3 to 5 boutiques annually. In the U.S., we're beating our payback target, which is 18 to 24 months; and in Canada on our expansions, we are on target. We are doubling the size of some of our boutiques and it's really, really paying off. Our larger boutiques are beating all of our sales projections and the economics are compelling. Our customers love the new boutiques, and we see an average increase in incremental sales of approximately 80%. Our landlord partners want the latest Aritzia boutiques and have been contributing meaningfully to our store build-out. By the end of fiscal 2027, we will have approximately 150 boutiques with an increase of total square footage of 60%. Also very exciting is post fiscal 2027, we also see a tremendous amount of opportunity for further growth in the United States. We continue to elevate our boutique design. We deliver a fully immersive experience as some of our key investments are in state-of-the-art sound systems, beautiful fixtures and our lighting. We have a curated art and vintage furniture program. To enhance our sensory experience, we've added our A-OK Cafés in select boutiques. Our beautifully designed A-OK Cafés deliver an entertaining, engaging food and beverage experience. We add our A-OK Cafés in select boutiques and the offering can vary from coffee and tea, to coffee, tea and food, and in our most recent cafe, we added the sale of alcohol. We currently have 9 cafes going to 11 by the end of fiscal 2023. The A-OK Cafés will continue to be part of our -- will be considered in our new boutiques going forward. We are currently focused on flagships in the right location at the right economics. We have outgrown some of our oldest flagship locations in Manhattan. So we are relocating 2 of our flagship stores to better locations in iconic buildings on the busiest street corners in the city. We were able to negotiate these deals near the end of COVID and prior to the resurgence of traffic and sales. The economics of these deals are compelling and lucrative for Aritzia. Once these new flagships open, we will not only see a large spike in sales, but a meaningful increase to our contribution as a direct result of the new rent economics. Our stores will be almost 3x as large the size, but paying significantly less than what we pay today. We also will be adding a new flagship to our portfolio on the best corner in Chicago. The first of our 3 flagships, so Fifth Avenue. We are relocating our current Fifth Avenue location to a superior location in one of the most highly trafficked stretches of Fifth Avenue, surrounded by Rock Center and across the street from Saks Fifth Avenue. This 30,000 3-foot level location gives us the proper opportunity to brand our store and showcase our expansive product selection. Our previous locations had restrictions on how we can treat our storefront, which made the signage and visibility challenging. Our new flagship will also attract international customers and increase our brand awareness abroad. As mentioned previously, we let this premises at a significant rent reduction from our smaller and inferior location. The second flagship I'm going to talk about is in Flatiron in New York. We are relocating our mid-block smaller location to a better location on the corner 5th and 19th, one of the busiest corners in Flatiron. Our current location has an inferior layout with a small ground floor and a challenging second floor. We will double our ground space, create easy access to the second level, and create an elevated Everyday Luxury experience that will drive productivity. This beautiful building is a standout and is perfect for a new Aritzia flagship. The economics are favorable for this relocation and we aim to open it in 2024. The third of the flagships is on North Michigan Avenue in Chicago. In our opinion, we have selected the best real estate in Chicago. So arguably in the Midwest. We have taken over 40,000 square feet on the corner of North Michigan Avenue and Ohio Street. We have leased the entire building on the Magnificent Mile, which is highly visible and has strong traffic. We have a track record in this market with our Rush Street store, and our performance Rush Street continues to outperform most of our boutiques. Our new Michigan Avenue store will take pressure off our Rush Street store, but also appeal to the masses and be able to hold a greater assortment and allow for a café and possibly other extensions. The economics are compelling and we will deliver an immersive experience to our Chicago land customers as well as our domestic and international tourists. I'm really proud to be here at Aritzia, and I'm really proud of all our team's accomplishments. We continue to innovate and deliver with excellence. And in my opinion, we have the best real estate portfolio in North America. Thank you for your time, and now I'll pass it back to Jennifer to discuss e-commerce.

Hello, again. Thank you, Karen. As you can see, clearly, we are focused on the U.S. with our growth in the next outlook period. We're getting more and more famous in the U.S., and we see this as an entree and a prelude to our international. I want to remind everybody that we have an international website. We do ship to over -- I think it's over 220 countries around the world. And this is our international presence at the moment. We do get lots of questions on international. I heard somebody already asked a question on international. So I'm going to tell you right now that we believe in order to be a wildly successful and internationally known brand, you have to be famous in the U.S. So it is our mission, and it is part of our plan. And remember, we have a long-term view of our business. It is in our plan right now to get famous in the U.S., and with Karen's fantastic real estate strategy and the synergistic complement to increasing our e-commerce penetration, we will build a critical mass in the U.S. that sets us up for success internationally beyond 2027. So we have proven during the pandemic year that Aritzia's e-commerce business is legit. Our e-commerce business grew by 88% in that COVID year. And so we view e-commerce as both a strength and an opportunity. The strength of our e-commerce business right now comes from a few factors, some of which we've already mentioned. We have an exceptional product catalog and assortment. We have proven that we can exceed our clients' expectations by fulfilling and delivering in 2 to 3 days. And if you live in a major center like Vancouver or Toronto, a lot of the times you're getting it the next day, and certainly with our concierges providing the engaging and exceptional client service. So now we're focused on growing e-commerce and we will grow our e-commerce business in the range of $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion in net revenue. And I love this chart because it shows that in fiscal year '13, when we launched e-commerce in November, right before Black Friday, we did in that year, and granted it was only 4 months, but it was the 4 busiest months of that year, we did $3.8 million. It's not on the chart. I don't know if it's disclosed, but I'm telling you right now, it's $3.8 million in that whole year. I showed this chart to our internal team, and it was Scott in technology, of all things. He said, holy, $3.8 million, we do that on any given week day now today. So that gives you a flavor and a sense of how we've grown our e-commerce business. From the full year of fiscal '14 to fiscal '22, it was a 50% CAGR. And so as we get bigger, the bars get higher, we're really looking forward to more than doubling our business today. It's probably closer to 2.5x to be in that $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion range. And by the end of the outlook period, that will be a 45% e-commerce penetration. It will make up 45% of our total sales. And another way to think about it is at the end of this plan, the e-commerce business alone will be as big as the total Aritzia businesses as of today. So this growth will be driven primarily by traffic and some improvement in conversion. We believe the key to increasing e-commerce revenue close to 2.5x is e-commerce 2.0. This statement here is our vision statement, and it is what we aspire to be. The team worked on this for a while. I will read it to you. And then if you bear with me, I'm going to break down every single word, because every single word was placed there with intention. And vision statements, I know you write them, you read them fast, you post them and you forget about them. I really want to break this down for you. So we will connect customers to Everday Luxury, offering beautiful product, tailored experiences, and endless inspiration to be a leading e-commerce business, and I will now break it down for you. So we will connect customers to Everyday Luxury describes how we will seamlessly define and deliver Everyday Luxury digitally. We've established Everyday Luxury quite well in our stores and the 4 pillars we must define and deliver this digitally. Offering beautiful product describes putting product, which we do best, at the forefront. It's about treating every single style, and remember it is our biggest store that carries the full assortment. It means treating every single style like a hero. And tailored experiences describes curating experiences to the unique needs of every individual client. Endless inspiration describes the blend of shopping and content. We want aritzia.com to be a destination much like our boutiques are in the mall. If you go to the mall, often we hear how our store is the busiest store in the mall. We want aritzia.com to be a destination. We want our customers to almost get lost in aritzia.com, scrolling and discovering amazing new things. The longer our customer lingers on aritzia.com, the more likely she is to add more to her bag. And to be a leading e-commerce business describes that we are still in the fashion business. It emphasizes business that we are on the world stage and ready for the world. World-class meet world. So the strategy behind e-commerce 2.0 is based on a value proposition with 3 components. This is our North Star that will guide our road map. And the first pillar of the value proposition is tailored product discovery. This is a nod to personalization. This is recognizing that we have an amazing assortment of product, that we do have a broad customer and that we do strive to elevate our clients' world through Everyday Luxury and that Everyday Luxury is for everyone. But not everyone wants to look at everything. So we will ensure that we deliver a tailored product discovery. We will deliver creative innovation. When we launched e-commerce in 2012, we launched it with something called responsive design. It was a newer design concept and it was about the design being responsive to whatever device you were on when you entered aritzia.com. It didn't matter if you were on a mobile, a tablet, a desktop, our design would fit whatever device it was that you were on. No fashion company had done it yet. We were the first. Now it's 10 years later, we want to innovate what our next iteration of that might look like, but creative innovation actually applies more to just design. It might also mean creative merchandising solutions. It may mean creative technology solutions. It's about creatively innovating and putting aritzia.com at the forefront. We will redefine the norms when it comes to creative. And third, we will deliver an intuitive experience. This means, well, actually what I'll say is that sometimes we describe Everyday Luxury with the word effortless. This is the digital translation, interpretation of effortless. We want to make sure that every single touch point on aritzia.com has an ease of use and is highly shoppable and we believe that all of these things together will form the value proposition behind the Aritzia e-commerce 2.0 strategy. I will tell you that we have done extensive evaluations of the landscape. The team spent a lot of time evaluating the landscape. We know that there are many players out there that do each of these things really, really, really well. But we firmly believe no one is doing all 3 really, really well and are the best. So Aritzia e-commerce 2.0 in the center of that Venn diagram is e-commerce 2.0. That is how we will reach $1.5 billion to $1.7 billion in net revenue. So as I mentioned -- oh, is there another slide? There should be another slide to let you know that the vision, the value proposition is what we will use to guide our e-commerce road map. Some of the initiatives that we're looking forward to involve a complete refresh of the creative design. We will be upgrading our technology environment and ecosystem and look forward to a customer app, these types of things. So as you can see, our business is strong and we are powering stronger. With that, I will give the floor over to Brian Hill to tell you about our brand awareness.

They've tried to get me to change this picture a bunch of times. I said, "Why do I want a picture that's 5, 6 years old, change it to 1 that's current. I don't want to do that. I'm too old." So I won't let them do that. And I'll tell you another funny story about Karen. So I used to go to the real estate conferences in both Canada and the U.S., and always the hardest working person in show business, it was Karen. And she would go to the dinners, but I noticed she never would really have a drink. And first I'd go to an early meeting the next morning and the only person who would ever beat me there was Karen. And so I offered her a job 21 years ago and she kind of laughed at me. And so I think she was working at the Gap. I think she was running Canada and part of the U.S. or something, all the leasing at the time or real estate or whatever. Anyways, she laughed at me because we were a small company at that time. And so then I approached her again about 6 years later. I think she was still at the Gap. She laughed at me again, listened a little bit more, but said thanks, and patronized me. So then she went to American Eagle Outfitters and she was running all their real estate leasing, design, build, everything like that. And she kind of smiled and was polite to me and blew me off again. That was probably about 10 years ago, 12 years ago. And then she went to Ralph Lauren. I offered her another job. No, nothing doing. But I stayed with it. And after 16 years of trying, I finally convinced her that she should come to Aritzia. And I kind of said to her, now in hindsight, I said, it's going to be a lot easier for you. You're not going to be flying all over. We're not going to have all these hundreds of stores. We only have like 30 or 50 stores here. You're not going to be shutting stores and opening stores and expanding into all over the U.S. and you'll be able to stay put. And I was sort of laughing to myself as I spoke to her. I don't know, it was about 3 months ago. And our Head of Leasing, Sasha Crosse, who has worked with us for about a decade. I said, "Where are you guys anyway because the phone is cutting out." I think they were driving in between Kansas City and St. Louis or something like that in a small little rental car. So I completely tricked her. But I do think we have the best. And so when she came, she said, -- actually, she had a chance to look at all our leases and all our deals and stuff. And I kind of prided myself in the leasing stuff. And I said, so how have we done here? How is our leasing, how are our rates and everything? She looked at me and said, "do you want the truth or do you want me to just smile" and I said, just smile, and that was the end of it. So she's still undoing some of the deals I did back in the day. She doesn't criticize me too much. But she still said, when I said to her, because our sales in Rush Street store that we're negotiating each other have double or even maybe triple what we thought they'd be. And she looked at me and said, but we're still paying too much money there. So anyway, I'm going to talk to you a little bit about marketing. Our marketing strategy at Aritzia has always been about our brand. We never really had an advertising strategy. It's always been a marketing strategy. And it's based on the fact of what do our customers see. And our customers don't see our IT, although we have incredible IT division here. They don't see our HR departments. They don't see our distribution centers. They indirectly experience them. But what they actually see and what they come in contact with is our beautiful product, our aspirational environments, our engaging customer service and our captivating communications. And that's what they touch. Those are the 4 brand pillars they touch. And it's been that interaction with those initially for the last 38 years that they've done that in our retail stores, and that has really defined our brand. We haven't done a lot of advertising. And before e-commerce, people weren't seeing our brand outside of our retail stores. So it was all about that. And so strategically, as Karen touched on, we always wanted to be in the AAA locations, whether that be in the shopping center, that be on the street, or whatever, because that's where the customers were and that's where we wanted to engage with them. But then the Internet came along and all of a sudden are best-in-class retail locations were marginalized, because customers weren't actually shopping on the street as much as they were in our locations. So as we expanded in the U.S., we were having a hard time being famous. I mean we opened in the U.S., I think it was 2007, I believe, 2008, when we opened in the U.S. And so we had a hard time becoming famous. We didn't have a large enough retail geographic footprint. And our e-commerce platform, that's one of the things with e-commerce, unless you're going to pay for digital marketing, all your sites are created equally. You don't have a better location than someone else might have. So we're actually at a bit of an inflection point. And about 5 years ago, or 4 or 5 years ago, before the pandemic, because our e-commerce wasn't growing, you saw from the chart, it's really picked up in the last 5, 6 years, we were really analyzing digital marketing, because we were looking at some of the people and the competitors, particularly some of the people in the pure plays that were spending $10 million, $50 million, even $100 million a year on digital marketing. And we weren't spending any -- it's not really digital marketing, it's advertising, and we just never really advertised in the past. And then this pandemic thing hit. And all of a sudden, our online presence became more ubiquitous. But then what surprised everybody, I think everybody hear, including us, when the pandemic ended, people came back in retail, shopping at retail like none of us had ever expected they would. I mean the digital people were saying, so retail's dead, the pandemic would have suggested that it was, and then they come back and they've come back. And so our comp sales compared to now compared to where they were prior to the pandemic are meaningfully higher than what they were, particularly in the U.S. So we continue to open stores, and we continue to open stores through the pandemic, because as Karen touched on, we couldn't resist some of the economic deals that were out there. I mean, I was looking at deals that we were paying like $0.30, $0.40, $0.50 on the dollar what we would have paid a year or 2 before that. So we kept on opening stores. And in hindsight, it's turned out really well for us. And actually, I'll touch on that quickly, because it wasn't just the economics, but it was the stores that were made available. Some of those flagship stores Karen just showed you today, those are -- in our dreams we would ever get those kinds of locations. And the fact they are even available to us now is incredible. So we've now had stores, and we didn't really have stores. We didn't have this geographic footprint everywhere. We are in Northern California and the Pacific Northwest, we're in the Midwest and we're in the Northeast. But we didn't have stores, which we do now, though, in Southern California, Florida, Texas, and right across the United States. And it's been really fantastic. Because in places like Florida, we didn't even have stores 2 years ago, we've seen both our stores do well beyond any of our expectations, which gives us a whole bunch of more opportunities to open stores, but we've seen our e-commerce. That 80% Karen refers to as average, but e-commerce is triple-digit expansion in places like Florida and Texas compared to where it was. So our stores have become -- they used to be sort of our own sales channel and now they've become this brand-propelling, marketing, almost -- I use the word, juggernaut. I tried to look it up on source. I couldn't find a word that was appropriate. So I'm just going to go with Juggernaut. It's a little aggressive, fair enough. But they showcased these 4 brand pillars I talked about, which is beautiful product, aspirational environments, engaging customer service and captivating communications. And they drive our customers to our e-commerce site. The one other thing I'd like to note is they are also our #1 acquisition tool. Over the last 2 years, our clients have doubled. Our client base that we have on record doubled. So we have all their names, addresses, phone numbers, et cetera, not every single detail in every single one. And in the U.S., our total has tripled, our U.S. clients have tripled over the last couple of years. So we now have these stores that are sales generating for sure, but they're also brand propelling and client acquiring. And so our customers are talking. And they're talking so much that the marketing vehicles of our stores now have actually now been surpassed by that of our customers talking. And I think some of you may know, there's been some articles written that Aritzia now has over 2 billion views on TikTok. And so role in marketing has been really -- people are always saying, what's your strategy in marketing? What's your strategy in marketing? Well, first of all, our retail strategy around marketing was planned. We did not plan to have 2 billion people look in the U.S. on TikTok. That is a complete fluke, and I'll say that today. So we didn't go out and do anything to do that, except that when we look at what the customers do, and I'll get to that in a minute. So our customers are talking. We have 2.2 billion views. And so our role really is now to augment and help support both our retail stores and marketing, what the marketing they're doing, and our customers who have now become our #1 marketing vehicle for us at Aritzia. So we're augmenting and amplifying their talking and things like that. And so we have a few sort of complementary experiences or the things that we're doing to augment that. One is we're tailoring their experiences. I think we've talked about something today. We have our new VIC, Very Important Client program that we're going to be launching this year. We have customer segmentation, and Jen, I think, just spoke about customer personalization. We will continue to build on the social community by gifting thousands of influencers and we have hundreds of paid ambassadors that also enhance what we're doing. And we will continue to be selective with our digital marketing initiatives. We don't typically spend a lot of money on advertising. But I think there are certain things that we do and we think are selective that we do, and so we're going to continue to do that too. So what I'd like to sort of leave with you today is that this isn't about a complex marketing strategy. I get asked that all the time. I know Jen is being asked that and put on the spot, and she's kind of come to me and said, "how do we describe this?" It's not a complex marketing strategy. It's about our client experience. And clients now have vehicles to talk to, to each other and to other clients and everything else, and the most powerful tool out there is social media. And so provided we continue to deliver on that client experience, a beautiful product, engaging service, aspirational environments and captivating communications, that's actually the hard part. That's a hard part of what we do. Having great customer service across our fleet of stores or when customers call in, that's difficult. Creating a supply chain and creating beautiful designs that fit, that are constructed well, that are going to last, we're not a fast fashion company, and that are going to last, that's the hard part. And our real estate division of creating beautiful stores and creating beautiful website that Jen just spoke about, that's the hard part. So I think while we've kind of come to the conclusion of here as far as our marketing go, if we continue to deliver that to the customer, which is hard, it's really hard because that's what we do every day. That now the marketing, our clients themselves are going to look after our marketing. Our stores themselves are going to look after our marketing. Our e-commerce site will look after its marketing. And our concierge center will look after its marketing. And so then our job is actually quite simple. It is just to augment these, augment some digital marketing, augment the customer, give them the tools, help propel a little bit within TikTok and these social channels and have a presence. And provided we do all those things, we think it's going to look after itself, and it's proven to look after itself. So I'm sorry, I'd love to stand up here and talk about some massive innovative new marketing strategy, but it's really the same thing we've always done and has made us successful, and we're going to continue to do so. Okay. Am I passing this on to Todd? Oh, we have a little video from our friend, Emma.

Hey, everybody. I just wanted to say I love all of you, and I love working with Aritzia. It has been the most amazing, incredible experience. You guys are the best. And I'm just a lifelong fan and I appreciate you all. Peace and love.

Good morning, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here with you today. And great to have all of you here in our office and looking forward to showing you the space later on today as well as our DC and store tour. So thank you for taking the time to come. I'm incredibly proud to be a part of this wonderful team that, as you can hear today, is always striving for excellence and has a high bar, as Jen said. This is a high-performance culture, and it's such a wonderful place to be. I'm going to spend a little bit of time talking about our infrastructure. So one of our corporate objectives is building infrastructure. This ensures we operate as effectively as possible. This can range from, for example, like when today is over, we will have the processes and road map for our next Investor Day, 3 or 4 years from now, and we'll have that locked and loaded. So something as small as that to as large as building a 550,000 square foot distribution center in Toronto. Every facet of our business, we're always working to ensure we have the infrastructure to support and drive the business regardless of the scale. We also follow the philosophy of investing in our infrastructure in lockstep with our growth. And most recently, I would argue that one of the reasons we successfully navigated the pandemic and all the associated challenges was this strong foundation of infrastructure across all of our areas. We break our infrastructure into 4 key components, our people, our processes, our technology, and our space, which are obviously all critical to our growth. Starting with our most important asset, and you can see a lot of them around here today, is our people. Our high-performance team is incredibly capable. We continue to add world-class talent and grow our people across the business. Our talent acquisition strategy is to focus on hiring both best and brightest and seasoned professionals. We source best and brightest talent from our stores, our other workplaces as well as externally. An example that has recently proven successful for us and has really been a well of best and brightest talent is our internship program, which last year had 5,000 applicants for 50 positions. I think it shows you the strength of our brand right now and the desirability of our work environment. We also target seasoned, best-in-class professionals from leading companies around the globe, who bring specialized industry experience to elevate our functional expertise. We are focused on developing our talent pipeline through training, mentoring and succession planning. And we are attracting, investing, and retaining top talent to drive our business today and to support our long-term growth. We will continue focusing on hiring in key areas, in product, e-commerce technology. You've heard us talk about that. But we know that we can only accomplish our goals with the right people and the right roles across the entire organization. Turning to processes. We're working hard to ensure that our processes across the company are built to scale and that we can seamlessly deliver and grow as a multibillion-dollar business. One example of this is how we are evolving our technology team's operating model to create capacity, to better leverage our existing technology, and increase the speed to market for new initiatives across the business. We're always looking beyond the status quo, and we're always striving for continuous improvement when it comes to our processes. From a technology perspective, we will continue enhancing our ecosystem of top-tier technology solutions to ensure a scalable platform for growth. We have always invested in top-tier technology, implementing platforms that can scale with our business, ensuring we do it right the first time. I know we've all heard the story, I think, of how Jennifer implemented SAP at maybe the chagrin of our private equity firm at the time in 2007, '08. And obviously, that's fared us well from -- I think we were roughly $200 million at the time, and it was a bit of a large investment that maybe wasn't required to support the business then, but obviously, today it is critically required. And that's just maybe a big example of how we look at all of our technology decisions. Looking forward, some of the key technology solutions we're looking at implementing are our omnichannel functionality, our merchandise planning software. We're also looking at a new labor planning tool. And we're also, as we have talked about on our earnings calls, expanding our data and analytics capabilities. This team will provide insights to data-driven decisions for personalization, product development, client acquisition and retention. We have over 50 people on this team now, and we are poised to really capitalize on all of the opportunities across the business from a data and analytics perspective. Along with the growth of our business comes the increasing need for space. So you, again, get to see our beautiful office here today, but it's -- right now, this building holds 700 people approximately, and we have 1,200. So it's good that work from home has become a thing because it's required. And we are and we will be expanding down the street, expanding our campus here, adding approximately 80,000 square feet in a new building that's being constructed down the street. So that's one of our key components of our growth in our space, obviously, our stores as well, but putting those aside and focusing on the infrastructure, our distribution centers and the network. We have 3 distribution centers today. We're building a new 550,000 square foot distribution center in Toronto that will be completed next year. And we are also planning to build and open in the next 2 to 3 years, a new distribution center of potentially even larger size than the 550,000 square feet, assuming we can find a suitable building in Western Canada. So all these investments are critical to fuel our growth and deliver on our powering stronger plan. This all ties back to our best-in-class infrastructure. And you need a strong foundation to grow, and we will continue to invest for the long term in our infrastructure. So now I want to walk you through what we will achieve. First, I'll take you through some of our accomplishments from the IPO and then share more details on our financial outlook, driven by the strategies you've heard about this morning. As you can see from the graph, we're in the midst of a period of incredible growth that has been achieved while navigating a global pandemic, ongoing supply chain issues and other macroeconomic challenges. We're entering our next 5 years from a position of strength with powerful momentum in the business and considerable runway in front of us. We delivered on all of our IPO growth metrics. We opened 5 to 6 new stores per year, really totaling 6 new stores, 4 to 5 expansions in repositions, effectively doubling our retail square footage through the period. We achieved and exceeded our e-com mix, hitting 38% on a target of 25%. And from a financial perspective, we also achieved all of our goals, achieving a net revenue CAGR from the IPO through the end of FY '22 of 18%, an adjusted EBITDA CAGR of 23%, and an adjusted net income CAGR of 28%. I think impressive growth by any measure. Our strong cash flow generation over the last 6 years has allowed us to invest back in the business and return cash to shareholders. We've invested over $350 million in CapEx. We repaid our term loan for $146 million and we've repurchased $187 million worth of shares, 8.7 million shares in that period. So great investment back in the business and also returning cash to shareholders. So our business is strong. Jennifer already told this, but we passed a major milestone of $1 billion at the end of the third quarter last year. And we're well on our way and poised to exceed $2 billion by the end of this fiscal year, just 15 months later. So again, looking ahead, our business is strong. Our team has never been more capable. We are delivering the Everyday Luxury experience, which is resonating with our clients. We are fueling accelerated brand momentum in the United States. We're in the early innings of our growth with significant white space and we have a healthy margin profile that supports strong cash flow generation. We are well positioned with meaningful momentum as we enter our next multiyear plan. So we plan to fuel our growth with our powering stronger plan to drive $3.5 billion to $3.8 billion in revenue by fiscal 2027, representing a 15% to 17% CAGR from our outlook for fiscal 2023. The geographic split of the sales has been evolving for us over the last several years. We've talked about it. Our business in the United States made up 34% and of our revenue pre pandemic, and this year, it makes up 50%. So from a geographic perspective, we expect the majority of our growth to come from the United States. Almost all of our new stores are in the United States, and we have a meaningful opportunity to drive e-commerce. And therefore, we expect to more than double our business in the United States by fiscal 2027. Canada is a more mature market, and our new square footage in Canada comes primarily from store expansions. And our growth expectations for Canada are more modest, driven primarily by e-commerce. The dollar growth in our revenue outlook to fiscal 2027 is split almost equally between our sales channels, when you break it down by channel. So the dollar growth is roughly skewed to e-com, but almost equal between e-com and our retail channel. Our e-commerce business will more than double, driven by our Aritzia e-commerce 2.0 and our brand awareness strategies that you just heard Brian speak of. Our retail stores will produce revenue growth of over 50% by fiscal 2027. This will be driven by 8 to 10 new stores, 3 to 5 expansions and repositions per year, which will drive total square footage growth in the low double digits annually. Supported by modest comp growth in our existing boutiques that will also support that 50% growth in retail. And we've talked a lot about it today, but our stores remain critical to the achievement of our long-term objectives. They our are #1 client acquisition tool. They propel our brand. They drive and support our e-commerce business, and they're highly profitable with compelling economics. As you can see on the screen here, our average new store size is expected to be approximately 8,000 square feet with year 1 revenue of $1,000 per square foot in local currency, so USD for the stores in the United States, driving $8 million of revenue. We expect them to cost approximately $3 million net of tenant improvement allowance to build, and we expect them to pay back in 12 to 18 months. Although, as you heard from Karen, our stores over the last 2 years have been paying back in less than 12 months. We will expand our adjusted EBITDA margin to approximately 19% of net revenue by fiscal 2027, growing the bottom line faster than the top line. Supporting our margin expansion is an underlying benefit from the geographical and channel mix shifts we are seeing as we grow. First, our profitability margins in the United States are higher than Canada. Therefore, as our geographic mix shifts towards the United States, we expect our overall corporate margins to expand. Secondly, our profitability margins in our e-commerce channel are higher than our retail channel. Once again, our channel mix shift towards e-com will drive overall corporate margins to expand. While there are macro headwinds facing our business in the short term and investments in infrastructure needed to fuel our growth, we again expect our adjusted EBITDA margin to grow to approximately 19% of net revenue by fiscal 2027. Over the next 4 years, we will invest approximately $500 million in CapEx to continue to fuel our growth, representing 4% to 5% of revenue annually. $300 million of that spend will be allocated to our new and expanded boutiques. Approximately $100 million will be for the completion of our 550,000 square foot distribution center in Toronto, as well as the new distribution center planned for Western Canada, again, 2 to 3 years from now. I think it's important to point out that our distribution centers, while they support our stores, they're the primary capital investment required to deliver our e-commerce business. We will also spend approximately $20 million on other capital investments per year on additional technology, capital maintenance, and office expansion. So our cash flow generation remains strong. And by the end of fiscal 2027, after funding our operations and investing in our growth, we anticipate a cash balance of $1 billion plus, a portion of which will be used for returning cash to shareholders through the repurchase of shares. We are extremely excited about the strength of our business today and are focused on the long runway ahead of us. We are building from this foundation of strength, and we are investing for the future, while we manage our business to deliver sustained profitable growth while delivering meaningful shareholder value. With that, I'll turn it back over to Jennifer, who will have some closing remarks. Thank you.

Thank you. So this concludes the formal portion of our presentation today. Thank you all for your attention. I want to leave you with, clearly, our business is strong and we're powering stronger. We shared with you our core differentiators that set us apart from the rest of the competition. We're very proud of these strategies that we've honed over a number of years and decades. We will pursue our growth levers that we shared with you here today, we're very bullish on them, and we will achieve $3.5 billion to $3.8 billion in net revenue. I was supposed to end with our business is strong and powering stronger. So we'll take a bit of a break right now, 10 minutes. We're going to set up for some Q&A and have you all back to ask your questions. Thank you very much for coming today. [Break]

Maybe start with 1 question and a related follow-up and then if you have more, get back in the queue, if you will. So thank you.

Martin Landry from Stifel GMP. Thank you for putting the event together. Todd, maybe a question on your guidance on EBITDA margins. Last year, in fiscal '22, you did margins over 19%. You're talking about your U.S. expansion being margin accretive, your e-commerce sales being margin accretive. So I'm wondering a little bit what's the offset to these 2 that keeps your margins stable? You should also benefit a bit from scale, right? Your top line is going to more than double. So can you walk us through a little bit what offsets some of these?

Sure. I think it's important to look back at the environment last year and what was supporting some of that strong expansion. We've talked about it on our last call, which was we had very low levels of inventory. So our markdown levels were extremely low and our, obviously, bottom line benefited from that. As well, we were still receiving COVID rent abatements and COVID subsidies that were not immaterial. And so both of those factors really helped lift FY '22. And there's still a lot of noise today. But we believe, looking forward, that, again, as our U.S. business grows as well as our e-commerce as a percent of our mix, that we will see sequential improvements in our EBITDA margin from that. Thank you.

Stephen MacLeod here from BMO. Thanks so much for hosting today. Lots of commentary around the infrastructure investments and building the infrastructure to support growth. So I'm just curious, can you just prioritize for us where the infrastructure investments need to be made, how do you think about capital allocation towards infrastructure investments in order to support the growth that you need.

I'll start and then Todd can add. Infrastructure is 4 things, people, process, technology and space. And I often say on all of the calls, we're investing in our talent, we're investing in our people. We're continually adding to our world-class team. So we will continue with that. There's 4 particular areas that we will invest in, maybe that stand out, one is in creative product, one is in marketing, technology and e-commerce. Second process, we have to scale our business. I will say, for decades, it took us 37 years, we've been saying for decades, build the infrastructure to be a $1 billion company. We crossed that November 2021. We're doubling that come end of this fiscal year. So there is also some reengineering of our processes and making sure that we set them up to scale to reach $3.5 billion to $3.8 billion by fiscal '27. And then in technology, we're always building upon our technology ecosystem. The great thing is -- thank you, Todd, for the plug on SAP way back when. We're building on a solid Tier 1 foundation. But as you know, in technology, things change, and the world moves fast, and so we're having to upgrade in many areas and many areas need to be systematized. And then in space, we went through the space pieces. So I would say, if there's one thing that we are, we're balanced, and we're going to invest in a balanced way across all 4. If you want specifics within technology or specific sort of with our spaces, we can certainly share that. But the important thing to note is we're balanced across all 4. They're all 4 equally foundational.

Mark Petrie with CIBC. I wanted to ask about product. And I think it was Heather. You mentioned that the SKU expansion or the SKU doubling over 5 years, that's effectively complete. So how do you sort of think about further opportunities from here in the assortment? Is it more categories? Is it simply sort of depth of further cuts and colors? Or is there other opportunity with regards to breadth of the assortment.

Thanks, Mark, for your question. Nice to see you in person. I hear you on all the calls. It's good to see you. As far as our SKU expansion, we have doubled and we've invested in a number of initiatives, like I said, that have really helped us propel our growth. And now we're just analyzing sales, figuring out what works for us and building on our successes. So I feel really confident that we have the flexibility and the agility to go where the business needs us, and we're set up with our team to execute on any opportunities.

And maybe just a follow-up. I don't know if you could talk about some of maybe the most important pieces of that strategy over the last couple of years, and I'm thinking maybe of something specifically like denim. How has that sort of executed versus your expectations? And what sort of further runway do you think you have?

Denim is actually one of our most important and exciting things that we're working on this year. So we have a multipronged approach on how we're going to handle that within our own brands and then also partnering with some world-class denim brands as well, so a third party. So denim, I feel like we have a long runway, and we're going to run fast on it. I don't know, Brian, if you have anything to add to that. Denim connoisseur, starting his career in denim over at Hills.

I did. I think Heather has been humble here, though, too. I think that some of the initiatives on inclusive sizing, colors, and building on existing styles that we already have that are working for us in certain fabrications and building more styles within those fabrications and more variations within those styles. And I think that's why Heather has done such a remarkable job on increasing our SKU count that was a 5-year plan that she managed to get there in about 2 years. So I think we're probably, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I would presume we're going to continue along that route, too, because that's actually the lowest hanging fruit, and it's given us the best ROI here. So I suspect we're going to continue along that on top of some of these other product categories.

Irene Nattel, RBC Capital Markets. Obviously, another big piece of the growth strategy is the geographic expansion in the U.S. How should we be thinking about existing geographies versus new markets? And what does the footprint look like by the end of '27?

Karen, would you like to take that?

Sure. As we mentioned during the presentation, our focus is on the United States. And so what we do have is our prioritized hit list that I mentioned. And so how we look at where we want to go next is we look at what's the value of a store. And the value of a store is not only what we do in the 4 walls of the store, the value of the store includes the growth to e-commerce. So we look at all the markets that we're not in. We prioritize it based on, is it the best of the best AAA real estate, what do we think we're going to do from it? What is e-comm today? What will it be in the future? We add that up. We put our list down, and then we go after the best of the best. None of our boutiques that we pick should be a surprise to anybody. They're all in the, like I said, the best of the best locations. But the end of FY 2027, will be at between 80 to 90 stores in the U.S. And the majority of them will be in new markets because the new markets do bring us the most volume in totality. However, there are some existing markets out there that we either went in a lot smaller or not fully penetrated like large markets in L.A. We're doing more bigger stores in New York that you heard. And so we will focus on those key cities as well.

And follow-up, if I may, in a related topic, because you mentioned e-commerce, I'm going to sneak this in. So the investments that you're making in e-commerce, obviously, the personalization, the tailored experience. From a customer perspective, how am I going to experience that? And what is the objective in terms of incremental spend per customer?

I'll take the first part. You take the second. Well, I can point you to an example that's happening right now. During the transition between summer and fall, when weather is variable across all of the regions where we operate, whether you're in the Southeast or Florida or up here in Eastern Canada or the West Coast, we've done things. This is the beginning of some personalization. We do what I think is called geo-targeting, where we split the map up into 4 different quadrants. And if your IP address or if you were situated in Florida versus being on the Pacific Northwest here, even though we experienced kind of a warm late summer, but much different than down in Florida, you would have a different page if you entered aritzia.com. So what we're trying to do, it's like the concept in our stores when we say we want it to be aspirational and efficient for the customer, both form and function, it's the digital interpretation of that. It's making sure because we have such a broad assortment, we've done such a great job of our product expansion and doubling our styles within half the time we set out for ourselves. And because we do have such a broad appeal to a customer set between 15 and 45 and the modern customer, the more youthful customer, it's important that we respect their time and tailor an experience so that when they enter the website, it is more fitting to what their preferences are and also it will be based on data and analytics based on their past behaviors if they've shopped with us before.

Hi, Irene. I'll take the second part. So our look forward is not predicated on increases in AOV. As Brian mentioned, we've more than doubled our client count over the last couple of years, and it's really fueling that growth is where we expect our increased revenue to come from. So continued growth in our client base, continued growth, therefore, in transactions. There will likely be some benefit from the implementation of the different components of the e-commerce 2.0 plan, but we have not put any of them into the plan as of today.

Thank you. Geospatial works, by the way.

This is Alice Xiao from Bank of America. Thanks for all the additional detail today. I had a follow-up question for Todd on the EBITDA margin bridge. So on the e-commerce channel, how much higher are those margins currently? And do you see room for improvement as you continue to invest in that channel? And then on the U.S. mix shift, within your guidance, how many basis points of benefit are you factoring in to bridge that 19%?

Yes. Thanks for the question. So we won't get into specific details around that. But I can tell you that our e-commerce business, as I said, is more accretive from a bottom line basis when it's fully loaded than our retail business. However, and I think I've pointed this out before, that on a marginal basis, so the next dollar after rent is covered, they're actually relatively equal. So it is that growth in the overall base of e-commerce compared to retail that will be driving incremental margin improvement. And then from a U.S. perspective, again, same thing that the profitability in our U.S. business, especially with the growth we've seen in our comps in retail over the last couple of years, that our stores are more and more profitable than they've ever been in the United States. And so as that mix shifts, again, we expect to see benefit.

Just curious on the e-commerce piece because it seems sort of like the most ambitious part of all of this. And I love this idea of -- I think you should take, Brian, on the road, you're marketing sort of philosophy. I think that's something that is lacking in the industry. But more tangibly then, what's the best way to think about how you're arriving at an e-commerce number? Is that simply the 80% lift you see in new markets, and so you can extrapolate out where you're putting new stores? How are you kind of driving that traffic beyond the less tangible?

It's exactly linked. So the increase in net revenue will be primarily driven by traffic. As I mentioned, there might be a slight improvement in conversion. We are assuming a consistent AOV. And with Brian's brilliant marketing strategy between stores and our own customers, we are confident we will drive that traffic. We are seeing it happening right now.

Okay. And then a lot of the imaging here today kind of focus on the athletic side of things.

I was going to say, I think there's also a top down, I mean, from my perspective. I was actually going to lean over to Jen, so I'm glad I'm not the CEO anymore, because I don't want to answer that question. But I think there's a top-down view too, and that we're doing more or less the same amount of e-commerce business in Canada as the United States, and there's 10x more people there. And so if in 5 years we can grow our e-commerce business in the United States to be double what it is here in Canada, so what the number is, double or triple? If it would be double of what it is here in Canada, we're doing something wrong, because there's 10x more people. And so if we continue to get famous and things, that's always been my top-down view of it as well.

That makes sense. And then there was just kind of more of a product question. A lot of imaging here on the athletic side. Is that a big opportunity? I don't know if you've ever disclosed kind of the penetration there, but how you view that? Or is that accidental or deliberate that we're seeing more rock climbers?

We are really excited about our new active wear, but it's our core product that we're actually the most excited about and spend most of our time developing and working on and perfecting over time and evolving over time. So we always have new and exciting opportunities, but we don't take our eye off the ball of what's really driving our business.

Great. And then last one for me. The $1 billion in cash on the balance sheet by 2027. Are you going to wait until you see that number before you start returning? Or should this be sort of something that...

Thanks, Dylan.