Victoria’s Secret returns to TV — but its challenges are bigger than branding

Victoria’s Secret, the American retailer that once parlayed a “sex sells” strategy into a $7bn-revenue empire of underwear, is heading back to TV screens. 

The brand is rebooting its annual televised fashion show after a four-year hiatus, with a new concept, aiming to reclaim its place in the cultural zeitgeist. The production comes after a series of difficult years for the business, with operating income falling by two-thirds between 2015 and 2018.

Even though the brand has stabilised under new management, it is still struggling to shake the perception that it has lost cachet.

Victoria’s Secret: The Tour ’23, the brand’s largest marketing investment since 2018, will be available to stream on Amazon Prime Video in the US, UK and more than 50 other countries from September 26. The documentary-style film follows designers and artists in Bogotá, Lagos, London and Tokyo as they create four fashion collections, which are then presented on models.

The result is a departure from the original Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show, which featured models known as “Angels” strutting down the catwalk wearing outsized wings and elaborate, often kitschy, lingerie-inspired costumes. In The Tour, models pose in stark industrial spaces and fields of tall grass as if in a Vogue feature. (Perhaps not coincidentally, Victoria’s Secret’s creative director Raúl Martinez is a Condé Nast veteran.) There is no traditional stage or cheering audience of delighted men. No one winks at the camera — at least not in the clips previewed at a premiere party during New York Fashion Week earlier this month.

Although Victoria’s Secret retired the term Angels in 2021, ex-Angels including Adriana Lima and Candice Swanepoel feature in the new film. They appear alongside women with a wider range of body types than the brand highlighted in its heyday. Most of the garments won’t be for sale, save for a selection designed by Victoria’s Secret’s own team.

“When this management team took over, we defined the challenge as being a complete repositioning of the brand,” said Victoria’s Secret CEO Martin Waters on an August analyst call. “I see [The Tour] as the reinvention and reimagination of what was probably the most important retail marketing device of the last decade in the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”

The retailer once seemed immune to the challenges that weakened most of its mall peers. Brands such as J Crew and Gap developed damaging addictions to discounting in the years after the 2008 financial crisis. Victoria’s Secret used glitzy marketing campaigns and dressed-up stores to maintain its brand perception and pricing power — until growth began to slow in 2016.

By the time the brand announced that its fashion show would go on indefinite hiatus in 2019, it had become a glaring symbol of fashion’s narrow beauty standards and lack of representation.

The narrative was exacerbated by scandals around the brand’s two most influential executives in the wake of the #MeToo movement. Les Wexner, the CEO and chair of parent company L Brands, was pilloried in the media for his close associations with convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Meanwhile, Ed Razek, Wexner’s chief marketing officer and architect of the annual fashion show, drew social media outrage when he said plus-size and transgender models did not fit the brand’s idea of “fantasy”.

Soon sales of Victoria’s Secret’s most important category, bras, had started to decline as women shifted to bralettes and sports bras. Efforts to strengthen the core business, including ending the print catalogue and dropping swimwear, further weakened the brand. In 2019, it registered an operating income loss of $892mn.

Activist investor Barington Capital Group pushed L Brands to sell Victoria’s Secret for the benefit of its other business, Bath & Body Works, but a deal fell through before its closing date in 2020. A year later, Victoria’s Secret & Company became an independent, publicly traded company.

Since then, the brand has had an uneven recovery. The company’s new management team — including Waters, who had previously overseen L Brands’ international division — began renovating stores, hired more diverse models and relaunched its operations in the UK and China with local partners. In 2021, boosted by pandemic-era inventory shortages, Victoria’s Secret brought in 63 per cent of the operating income generated in 2015, its best-performing year. 

But in 2022 and 2023, results weakened. In the first half of 2023, net sales decreased 6 per cent to $2.8bn and operating income decreased 72 per cent to $54mn. The stock price is down 47 per cent year-to-date. 

Most recently, Victoria’s Secret lost market share to lower-price competitors such as Walmart. Newer brands such as Kim Kardashian’s Skims and Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty also played a part, supplanting Victoria’s Secret as the cooler brands in the category. But these competitors are still tiny compared with Victoria’s Secret. Savage x Fenty, for example, represents only 4 per cent of the US intimate market, compared with Victoria’s Secret’s 19 per cent. (Executives at Victoria’s Secret once internally referred to these plucky competitors as “ankle-biters”.)

Simeon Siegel, senior analyst at BMO Capital Markets, believes that Victoria’s Secret is more resilient and popular than recent headlines suggest. “When most companies watch their brands go out of favour, sales collapse. When Victoria’s Secret’s brand was called into question, the only thing that dropped was their margins,” he says. “It is a brand that is perceived to be much worse off than it actually is.”

Today, Victoria’s Secret remains far and away the largest intimate apparel brand in the US, with more than $6bn in annual sales. 

“We’re on a journey,” Waters told analysts in August. He said his turnaround strategy is already showing positive results, despite the current economic environment in the US, where shoppers have turned cautious. 

The brand has seen its digital market share grow, boosted by a new partnership with Amazon and its acquisition of digital direct-to-consumer lingerie business Adore Me in January. Its international division sales are up double digits. Back home, Victoria’s Secret expects to open as many as 20 stores and renovate another 50 this year, as it expands outside of malls. 

Questions remain as to whether these strategies will be enough to push Victoria’s Secret to grow consistently again and what impact the marketing revamp will have on its sales. 

“I think the general perception among a lot of younger consumers is that [Victoria’s Secret’s] time has passed,” says Faye Landes, an adviser of consumer companies.  

The brand’s recent marketing shift has drawn sharp reactions on TikTok and Instagram. Some commenters find it phoney; others want the old “bombshell” Victoria’s Secret back, and others are excited to see the brand finally celebrate a wider range of women. Pleasing everyone will be impossible, especially in a category as emotionally loaded as lingerie. 

“Where Victoria’s Secret is going to have challenges is when the customers that they largely are serving don’t match up with the ‘arbiters of culture’ who are driving opinion in many contexts,” says Azelle Rose Harris, a strategist and founder of brand consultancy MAIA.

“Simply by virtue of what they are selling, they are going to be subject to a lot of opinion, good or bad,” says Siegel. “The company needs to figure out who they want to be and follow that path.”