Roy Raymond

Victoria's Secret began as Roy Raymond's idea: a lingerie shop that a man would not be embarrassed to walk into. Raymond, an American businessman born in Connecticut in 1947, opened the first store in Palo Alto, California, in 1977 and sold the company to Les Wexner five years later for $1 million. He died in San Francisco in 1993.

Tufts, Stanford and a department store errand

Raymond was born on April 15, 1947, graduated from Tufts University in 1969 and took an MBA at Stanford in 1971. The founding story, as he told it, came from an uncomfortable shopping trip. Buying lingerie in a department store, he felt like an intruder among racks of nylon under strip lighting, with staff who seemed to treat a male customer as a suspect.

His answer was a store designed around that customer. The interior was a mock-Victorian boudoir in dark wood, and the name was chosen to suggest nineteenth-century propriety with something hidden underneath.

Palo Alto, June 1977

The first Victoria's Secret opened on June 12, 1977, at the Stanford Shopping Center in Palo Alto. It was co-founded with Gaye Raymond. Raymond raised $80,000 to start it, $40,000 from a bank and $40,000 from his family. The store took about $500,000 in its first year.

A mail-order catalog followed, and three more stores opened in San Francisco. The catalog mattered as much as the shops. It let a customer buy lingerie without facing a sales assistant at all, which was the point of the business in the first place.

Selling to Les Wexner in 1982

By 1982 the company had five stores and a 42-page catalog and was taking about $6 million a year, but it was short of money. Raymond sold it that year to Les Wexner, founder of the Ohio chain The Limited, for $1 million.

Wexner kept the name and the boudoir look and changed the customer. Under him the store was aimed at the woman buying for herself, and the format was rolled out through American shopping malls. By 1986 there were about 100 stores, and sales passed $1 billion in the early 1990s. Raymond had no share in that growth.

Roy Raymond after Victoria's Secret

In 1984 he put $850,000 into My Child's Destiny, an upscale children's store in San Francisco. It filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 1986, and the failure cost him heavily. He died on August 26, 1993, in San Francisco.

The company he started is still trading as Victoria's Secret & Co., an independent listed company since 2021. The name, the Victorian styling and the catalog all go back to the Palo Alto store. The decision to sell to women rather than to their husbands was Wexner's, and it is the reason the brand became a national chain.

Last updated October 7, 2026