Martin Waters is the British retail executive who ran Victoria's Secret from November 2020 to September 2024, the years in which the brand split from L Brands, dropped the Angels and tried to rebuild itself after the end of its televised fashion show. He came to lingerie from health and beauty retail, not from fashion.
Boots and the L Brands international business
Waters spent the early part of his career at Boots, the British health and beauty chain, rising to managing director of Boots International. Profiles put his time there at roughly 1992 to 2008, though those dates come from low-reliability sources. In 2008 he joined L Brands, then the owner of Victoria's Secret, and led its international division, which handled the company's business outside the United States.
Named Victoria's Secret CEO in November 2020
In November 2020 L Brands named Waters chief executive of Victoria's Secret Lingerie, replacing John Mehas. WWD, FashionNetwork and TheIndustry.fashion all reported the appointment that week. He took over a brand in trouble. Victoria's Secret had canceled its runway show in November 2019, and its Angels-era marketing was widely seen as out of date.
The spin-off and the end of the Angels
On August 3, 2021, Victoria's Secret was spun off from L Brands as an independent public company, Victoria's Secret & Co., and Waters became its chief executive. The same year the brand retired the Angels, the contracted models who had fronted it for decades, in favor of the VS Collective, a more diverse group of models and influencers chosen as spokespeople. RetailWire covered the turnaround plan built around that change in 2023.
The fashion show comes back as a film
The televised show had been the brand's best-known asset and, by 2019, its biggest liability. Under Waters it returned in a different form. In 2023 he announced the Victoria's Secret World Tour, a reimagined fashion show and the brand's first since it canceled the runway event in 2019.
Replaced by Hillary Super in 2024
On August 12, 2024, the Victoria's Secret & Co. board appointed Hillary Super, then chief executive of Savage X Fenty, to succeed Waters, effective September 9, 2024. The company's Form 8-K, filed on August 14, said that he was terminated as CEO and resigned from the board, and Business of Fashion and Bloomberg reported it in those terms. The choice of successor said something about where the market had moved during his tenure: the brand that had once set the rules for lingerie marketing hired its new chief from the label built in opposition to it.
Last updated