Victoria's Secret is the American lingerie retailer founded by Roy Raymond and his wife Gaye on June 12, 1977, with a first store at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto, California. Les Wexner bought it in 1982 for $1 million and built it into the largest lingerie seller in the United States; since August 2021 it has been an independent listed company, Victoria's Secret & Co., based in Reynoldsburg, Ohio.
A Victorian Boudoir in Palo Alto
Raymond, a Tufts graduate with a Stanford MBA from 1971, started the company out of embarrassment. Buying lingerie for his wife in a department store, he felt like an intruder among racks of nylon under strip lighting. His answer was a shop designed for the male customer: dark wood, a mock-Victorian boudoir, and a name meant to suggest nineteenth-century propriety with something hidden underneath.
He raised $80,000, half from family and half from a bank. The first year brought in about $500,000. A mail-order catalog followed, and by 1982 the business had five stores, a catalog of around 40 pages and annual sales of roughly $6 million. It was also short of money.
Les Wexner's $1 Million Purchase
In 1982 Raymond sold to Les Wexner, founder of the Ohio clothing chain The Limited, for $1 million. Wexner's change of direction was the decisive one in the brand's history. He moved the shop's attention from the nervous husband to the woman buying for herself, kept the English-sounding name and the boudoir styling, and rolled the format out through American malls.
Growth was fast. By 1986 there were 100 stores and Victoria's Secret was the only national lingerie chain in the country. Sales passed $1 billion in the early 1990s. By 1998 it held about 14 percent of the American intimate apparel market, and by 2006 it had 1,000 stores and accounted for roughly a third of the category. Revenue peaked at about $7.78 billion in 2016.
Raymond did not share in any of this. His later businesses, including the children's shop My Child's Destiny, failed, and he died in 1993.
The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show
The first Fashion Show took place on August 1, 1995, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. Four years later a webcast of the show drew about 1.5 million online viewers, a very large audience for the internet of 1999. Network television followed, and the 2001 broadcast reached about 12.4 million viewers.
The show made celebrities of the contracted models known as Angels, among them Tyra Banks, Heidi Klum, Gisele Bündchen and Adriana Lima, and it gave the brand an annual piece of theater, the jeweled Fantasy Bra. In merchandising terms the format was blunt: push-up bras, padding and a single idea of glamour, sold at mall prices.
The 2018 Collapse
The decline came quickly once it started. Audience figures had already fallen to about 9.2 million by 2014, and the 2018 show drew about 3.2 million. That November, chief marketing officer Ed Razek told Vogue that the show should not include transgender or plus-size models, and the backlash landed at the same time as competition from brands built on wider sizing and comfort. Razek left in August 2019, and the show was canceled in November 2019.
Wexner's long association with the financier Jeffrey Epstein came under intense scrutiny after Epstein's arrest in 2019, and shareholder complaints filed in January 2021 returned to it. In February 2020 L Brands agreed to sell a majority stake in Victoria's Secret to Sycamore Partners and Wexner stepped down as chief executive. The Sycamore deal was abandoned within months.
Victoria's Secret & Co.
On August 3, 2021, L Brands spun the business off as Victoria's Secret & Co., listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with Martin Waters as chief executive. The Angels had been retired that summer in favor of a VS Collective of ambassadors that included the transgender model Valentina Sampaio. In November 2022 the company bought the size-inclusive online brand Adore Me for $400 million. Hillary Super later became chief executive.
The show came back in stages: a documentary-style special on Amazon Prime Video in September 2023, then a live runway show in New York on October 15, 2024, hosted by Tyra Banks, and another New York show in 2025. The company that had canceled its runway for being out of step now runs it again, with a different cast and the same name.
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- en.wikipedia.org: Victoria's Secret
- en.wikipedia.org: Victoria's Secret Fashion Show
- en.wikipedia.org: Roy Raymond
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