Women, tired of unattainable beauty standards, were voting with their wallets. Karolina Kurkova married Archie Drury in 2009 right before the couple had their first child, son Tobin. The happy family settled in Miami and added a third child to their brood, daughter Luna, in 2021. Karolina worked alongside fellow runway walkers Naomi Campbell and Coco Rocha as a coach on the modeling competition show “The Face” in 2013.
The Angels imagery, which once even appeared on store bathroom TVs, will be phased out. The company will still sell products like thongs and lacy lingerie, but its purview will expand, especially in areas like sportswear. VS’s main issue is perception, which is marketing, as well as it’s leaders’ actions . This is a grand brand experiment along the lines of ’90s Target, who went from a Dayton Hudson discounter to the hip “Tarzhay,” and even A&F more recently — whose business is still recovering after years of challenging a very set-in perception mode. But in this case, other than missing the bra-let, VS’s product performance is still solid , so there’s more room. Again, the fact that they still have a dominant market share helps inform that belief.
The company brought in a new executive team in November, and all but one of the new directors for Victoria’s Secret’s upcoming board will be women. Victoria’s Secret has signed deals with new brand ambassadors from diverse backgrounds. How it went from a tasteful catalog company to an acceptable soft-core entertainment vehicle to what it is now. Sign Up NowGet this delivered to your inbox, and more info about our products and services. The company in late December reaffirmed its previous guidance that called for sales to be flat to up 3% compared with the prior year’s $2.1 billion.
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The company could provide more details when it reports its fiscal fourth-quarter and full-year results after the market closes Wednesday. The launch of Love Cloud is yet another sign Victoria’s Secret’s is serious about working to overhaul its image — from racy and exclusive to tasteful and inclusive. And, importantly for skeptical investors, it could help to propel sales in the coming quarters. The stock has fallen more than 20% over the past six months, bringing the retailer’s market capitalization to $4.8 billion. The line is focused on all-day comfort, with minimal frills, the company said. The seven women, who form a group called the VS Collective, will alternately advise the brand, appear in ads and promote Victoria’s Secret on Instagram.
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I am happy to see this step forward and look forward to walking into a store and seeing how they mirror this in the staff and experience. It is going to be very interesting to watch this brand reinvent itself, and much needed. Women will wait to see if the brand’s dramatic transformation is genuine. The 22-year-old, who has been in a long-term relationship with her beau Johannes Jarl since school, shared the story of her rather intimate moment during a radio interview on the Kyle and Jackie O Show on Wednesday.
At this stage, VS will be moving into a brand space that has been created and well curated by CPG and other fashion brands. It will not be as impactful as the move once was and it risks getting lost in the wave of “me too” activities instead of creating and owning a unique brand position. It’s a big, expensive risk to turn around the iconic yet tarnished Victoria’s Secret brand name to get with the times. It sounds and feels like they are moving from one extreme to another. Yes, they need to broaden their appeal and sell more than a sexy look, but it needs to be done strategically. These are all accomplished women, but where is the “girl next door,” the fresh-faced young women I consistently see shopping in Victoria’s Secret stores at the mall?
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As long as this is holistic, transparent, and echoed across the company — if they can create real change that shows female empowerment isn’t just a marketing stunt — then this will carve out their success. For too long we’ve been watching brands use social messages as a stepping stone — again, Thinx comes to mind — but if a brand with this much legacy power can leverage their ambassadors in a way that really resonates with the everyday consumer, I think they stand a chance. Mr. Razek and Mr. Wexner will not be a part of the new Victoria’s Secret, which will split from L Brands and Bath & Body Works to become its own public company this summer. (The pandemic scuttled a sale to a private-equity firm and swallowed $2 billion in revenue.) There are more women in charge, including a new chief marketing officer, Martha Pease, who has led the Collective initiative. The stores that survived a year of culling are becoming lighter and brighter, and mannequins — which have typically been a size 32B — will come in new shapes and sizes.
Alessandra Ambrosio was chosen to wear the exclusive Fantasy Bra in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in 2012 and 2014. In 2017, she decided to retire from her famous gig and walked in her final Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show that same year. She has two children with former fiancé Jamie Mazur — daughter Anja and son Noah — from whom she split in 2018. When Victoria’s Secret becomes its own publicly traded company later this year, it will be led by a board where six out of the seven directors are women, including its chair.
The truth is, there’s no single answer and certainly no single brand with the answer to what is sexy because that is up to each individual. Yet the dominant images of lingerie are still those of binaries and extremes. It’s either thongs and naughty maids on Jessica Rabbit bodies or comfortable cotton undies in neutral tones on lots of bodies. BofA also found that the PINK brand, a division within Victoria’s Secret that caters to younger females, has maintained its brand image more steadily in recent years. The biggest complaint among consumers for PINK, the firm found in the same survey, is higher prices. Victoria’s Secret is betting a chunk of its marketing budget that persuading such unexpected personalities to join its cause will in turn convince consumers, and potential investors, to similarly believe in its shift, giving a new meaning to halo effect.
Germany native Claudia Schiffer started modeling at 17 and soon after moved to Paris where Karl Lagerfeld recruited the 5-foot-11 bombshell to represent Chanel. Claudia joined Tyra Banks and Naomi Campbell on the runway at the 1997 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. And because those lines have celebrity female founders, ones who are themselves famously sexy, they are treated as somehow other.
New models who look more like the retailer’s customers are a start, but Victoria’s Secret still has a lot to prove to shoppers in order to grow its market share again. The company is going to be working on changing its messaging to be more inclusive. “For a long time, Victoria’s Secret set a powerful standard for aspiration and beauty in this country and, globally, that drove billions of dollars in sales and generated a lot of buzz for the company,” she said. “But it was blind to how culture changed over the last decade, especially in the post-MeToo era. Today’s shoppers want to see themselves in ads, and they want to know that brands have some kind of value system that aligns with theirs.” The collective — which includes soccer player Megan Rapinoe, actress Priyanka Chopra Jonas and plus-size model Paloma Elsesser — will work on new product lines and multimedia content, as well as supporting women’s causes for the company, according to a press release. Schaffer’s appointment also notably came during a broader shake-up at Victoria’s Secret.
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She also ventured into the clothing business, partnering with a pal to launch the clothing line Christensen and Sigersen in 2006. The beauty has returned to the runway numerous times in recent years, walking in the Balmain show in February 2020, for Michael Kors in April 2021 and more recently in the Off-White show during Paris Fashion Week in February 2022. When you think of Victoria’s Secret models, some of the world’s most iconic beauties come to mind, from Stephanie Seymour and Gisele Bundchen to Tyra Banks and Alessandra Ambrosio. Her first credited modeling shoot was with famed photographer Arthur Elgort for Teen Vogue. Karlie continued to make a name for herself in the years that followed, signing with IMG Models and repeatedly renewing her contract with Christian Dior. The 6-foot-2-inch stunner went on to work with Victoria’s Secret on a summer swimwear video in 2013.
The first is all maximal provocation in its game-playing, the second mostly minimal wabi-sabi (even if Skims, with its new swimwear ads featuring the newly divorced Ms. Kardashian as a camp California Stepford wife, seems to be edging into more cinematic territory). Forgotten that strutting around in stilettos, bikini bottoms and a push-up bra with a skirt of balloons attached to your heinie was not really a dream outfit for anyone. Forgotten that the wings could weigh up to 30 pounds and made adult women look like naughty putti. That such inane outfits were part of what created a culture where men in power (including men in power at Victoria’s Secret) saw the young women around them as playthings to do with what they desired. The VS Collective includes women famous for their achievements and not their proportions, like the soccer star and gender equality advocate Megan Rapinoe.
However for VS, changing the brand positioning drastically is a risky deal. They need to redefine what is “sexy and glamorous” in the minds of today’s consumers, applying the same design skills that made them an aspirational brand in the past. I feel that they are taking a step in the right direction, EME Hive but I hope they don’t deviate too much in terms of their core positioning. That’s good news for Victoria’s Secret, which was on a three-year downhill streak at the start of the pandemic, losing revenues, market share and shoppers to other intimates brands that emphasized inclusivity and comfort.
