Lately, lingerie behemoth Victoria’s Secret is trying to claw its way back to relevance after a spectacular crash. How did a brand that once defined the culture fail to keep up?
Lately, lingerie behemoth Victoria’s Secret is trying to claw its way back to relevance after a spectacular crash. How did a brand that once defined the culture fail to keep up?
Our guests, Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez, tell the story of a retail giant’s rise and fall in their new book Selling Sexy: Victoria’s Secret and the Unraveling of an American Icon.
They chart the company’s evolution from a fledgling sex toy business to a global fast-fashion pioneer. But when social media transformed the meaning of sexy, and the CEO’s association with Jeffrey Epstein made headlines, the fashion shows got canceled and the shares crashed. We’re asking where that leaves Victoria’s Secret today... and who is Victoria anyway?
Plus, Vass reveals her new advertising partnership with an underwear brand from her youth.
Subscribe to the Lately newsletter, where the Globe’s online culture reporter Samantha Edwards unpacks more of the latest in business and technology.
Find the transcript of today’s episode here.
We’d love to hear from you. Send your comments, questions or ideas to lately@globeandmail.com.
Vass Bednar [00:00:01] This episode of Lately is sponsored by BMO Investor Line, self-directed. With BMO Investor Line Self-Directed. You don't just trade. You trade with confidence. Their easy to use direct investing platform gives you access to research and watchlists right at your fingertips. Their analysis tools let you benchmark, customize, and track your investing performance and you get commission free trading on over 90 of Canada's most popular ETFs. So you can trade online confidently. Learn more at bmo.com/investorline. Terms and conditions do apply here. BMO Investor Line is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Bank of Montreal and it's a member of the Canadian Investor Protection Fund and the Canadian Investment Regulatory Organization.
Vass Bednar [00:00:50] I'm Vass Bednar and I host this Globe and Mail podcast Lately.
Katrina Onstad [00:00:54] And I'm Katrina Onstad, the show's executive producer. Vass let me ask you an incredibly personal and intrusive question at the top of the show today.
Vass Bednar [00:01:01] Sure.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:01] Do you remember when you got your first bra?
Vass Bednar [00:01:05] I do remember. I mean, obviously, I didn't purchase it for myself. I had no purchasing power. My mom bought it for me. Thank you, Mom. You cannot make this up. The brand was called Vassarette. V-A-S-S. It's still around.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:17] Amazing
Vass Bednar [00:01:17] It came in a little box. It was stretchy and put me on the path to womanhood. What a day.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:22] Do you think they'd be interested in sponsoring lately? Do they do a little cross promo? You can be on the box, Honestly.
Vass Bednar [00:01:30] Let's find out.
Katrina Onstad [00:01:31] Vass presents Vassarette. And here you are. Be great. Well, I'm kind of surprised that you didn't get that Victoria's Secret because you are the millennial pink generation, aren't you? I mean, Victoria's Secret. There's a brand of your youth. Of my youth. At one point, the company was providing more than half the bras sold in the U.S. And in 2016, Victoria's Secret recorded a peak worldwide net sales of 7.78 billion. Huge company.
Vass Bednar [00:01:55] That's that's a lot of cups. Now Victoria's Secret only opened stores in Canada in 2010, but they were omnipresent in the 90s and early 2000s even without bricks and mortars here. They're a global brand and their catalog used to come to so many people's home. They were also fundamentally like early adopters of the fast fashion model of production.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:17] For better or worse.
Vass Bednar [00:02:18] For better or for worse is right. But really, it's kind of all about their fashion shows. They had pop culture presence. They're not just entertainers like Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga, but also, you know, the Spice Girls, who are an important band for me. Phil Collins, Cher...
Katrina Onstad [00:02:36] Wait so Phil Collins walked on the Victoria's Secret fashion show? That was probably not a great year for them.
Vass Bednar [00:02:41] I don't know how mobile he was during the show, but he definitely is one of the performers.
Katrina Onstad [00:02:47] Yeah. So big, big stars. But I mean, Phil Collins aside, most of the people on the runway were like, super skinny, hypersexualized supermodels. This was the era of the Amazonian supermodel, right? They had those wings strutting down the runway in their underwear like, very, very poorly. Yeah, but then the 20 tens hit and the angels were suddenly being scrutinized a little shade for cultural appropriation. Unrealistic body standards, to say the least. Lack of size, diversity, racial diversity. And the brand became a little bit of a punch line.
MUSIC [Jax] [00:03:18] I know Victoria's Secret going on. I believe she's an old man who lives in Ohio making money off of girls like me cashing in on body issues
Selling skin and bones with big boobs. I know Victoria's Secret. She was made up by a dude.
Vass Bednar [00:03:44] That is social media influencer Jacks with her viral 2022 song Victoria's Secret. Okay, why are we talking about bras and panties on lately?
Katrina Onstad [00:03:55] Very good question.
Vass Bednar [00:03:56] The company is an incredible business story. It is a global retail empire that fell in a spectacular fashion and is clawing its way back. You may remember the headlines because of CEO Les Wexner's Association with sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. But mostly, Victoria's Secret is a case study on how consumer expectations and power shifted as beauty norms matured and what happens when a business completely misreads that moment.
Katrina Onstad [00:04:25] Yeah, and all of this is examined very closely in a new book that we're reading. It's a book that's been getting a lot of attention. It's a really propulsive read. When I was reading it, I was thinking of the movie Social Network, like one of these business stories that's so well told, so character driven. It's called Selling Sexy Victoria's Secret. And the Unraveling of an American Icon is a deep dive into the lingerie retail giant's history by two business journalists, Lauren Sherman and Chantal Fernandez.
Vass Bednar [00:04:49] And the book has great timing. So last fall, you and I were crunching through leaves. The Victoria's Secret fashion show came back, retooled for a more inclusive age. But two mixed reviews. So can a tarnished brand return from the dead and regain its relevance? Let's talk to Lauren Sherman, who's currently the New York editor of the Business of Fashion, and Chantal Fernandez, currently a features writer for The Cut at New York magazine, the authors of Selling Sexy. Put on Your Big Girl panties. This is lately. Chantal and Lauren, welcome to Lately.
Chantal Fernandez [00:05:40] Thank you for having us.
Lauren Sherman [00:05:41] Thank you.
Vass Bednar [00:05:44] Chantal , I'll come to you first. What was Victoria's Secret to you when you were growing up?
Chantal Fernandez [00:05:50] I was part of the pink generation, so that came right on time for me when it launched in like 2000, three, 2004. So I went in my local mall. It didn't seem like there was any other place that I could shop for bras and underwear that, you know, at a good price and
was a decently fun place to go. I remember going to the Macy's lingerie section and feeling depressed and wanting to get out of there as quickly as possible. But Pink was like a safe space where there was polka dot dogs and all those things.
Vass Bednar [00:06:21] Lauren, what about for you?
Lauren Sherman [00:06:23] So I was a teenager like 94 to 2000, and that era was like five for 25. It was really when Victoria's Secret became the Victoria's Secret. We know today and I wore a lot of Gap Body because I was much more into the sort of like minimalist 90s vibe. But I was definitely in the Victoria's Secret store and understood that it represented a certain, like monoculture view of attractiveness.
Vass Bednar [00:07:01] For a lot of people, maybe people who are under 30 to 35, these three words, Victoria's Secret catalog might be something they've heard more like a joke in a sitcom ride about like a pervy dad. Maybe we could set that scene a little bit in that kind of initial offering or phase. What kind of sexy were they selling?
Lauren Sherman [00:07:22] Well, there were many phases. The business started with a catalog. This couple, Gay and Roy Raymond, they had founded a sex toy business in the 1970s that was sold exclusively via catalog. And that was really taboo. It's like, unleash those taboos. They made it feel almost clinical. You need a sex toy for your health. And they had a great business in that. And Roy really believed he was a Stanford Business School grad. He believed in the idea of white spaces, and he saw that the same way they had made like sexual wellness, as we would say today, accessible to more people. And this was also during the rise of catalogs. And so with the lingerie, it was sort of the same thing. But in the early days, you know, the catalogs, they definitely don't look pornographic. A word that a lot of Victoria's Secret executives would use is tasteful. The early days, it was very inspired by, like, Victorian era boudoir, the films of that era, the sort of like sepia toned pretty baby, that type of thing. And then every iteration was different. The next generation was much more like ballsy, straight forward 80s raunch almost. So it's interesting, like we called the book selling sexy because every generation of executive did ask the question like, what is sexy now? But certain executives would say that like sexiness or trying to look sexually desirable was only like one part of what they were doing. And you could see that reflected in the catalogs, which, like told a story of culture at that time in every iteration.
Chantal Fernandez [00:09:13] And told a story of Victoria. Like the character, Victoria really came to life in the pages of the catalog and then extended into the store and then later into the commercials in the fashion show. But this idea of who this woman is and in the early years when it was still run by the founders, you know, the catalog was written in the Voice of Victoria saying like, please come to my store, you know, signed Victoria.
Vass Bednar [00:09:35] So Victoria is ultimately a fiction. Can you tell me a bit more about her character? Like, who is she? Who was she? And maybe like, what is her secret?
Lauren Sherman [00:09:47] Yeah. So the story, the gay and Roy, they would say that they were on the Orient Express or some train fancy train in Europe, and they were sitting with this woman. Roy tapped her on the shoulder and said, like, What's your secret? And she said, Great lingerie. She was English. At one point. She was married to a barrister, and every iteration of executive would sort of tweak the story. Yeah, It was.
Chantal Fernandez [00:10:14] Once Les Wexner, who was the founder and retail tycoon behind the Ltd and a really large portfolio of of mall chains. Once he acquired Victoria's Secret in 1982, when they were really thinking like, how can we scale this brand beyond mall stores? They sat down and thought a lot about the Victoria's story and there's an incredible brand book that some of our sort. Mrs. shared with us. It has so many photographs and background about her life, how often she exercises her son's name and how she became interested in business and growing up with her father. Sitting in his study and hearing about how the world works. It was really rich story that doesn't always translate to the customer, but I think says something about how how they thought about world building through this brand.
Vass Bednar [00:11:04] You mentioned Les Wexner came in and bought Victoria's Secret for about $1 million. Can you tell me a little bit more about him?
Lauren Sherman [00:11:17] He's a he's a huge character in the story. He's sort of the founder or the proto fast fashion. People think of fast fashion coming from Europe. But he really very, very early in the 60s on started producing overseas, producing with much shorter timelines than many fashion companies even used today. And so he realized that the consumer just wanted like trendy, cool clothes, fast and cheap, and he was able to execute on that very quickly. And he did it with a lot of different businesses. And so by the time he bought Victoria's Secret, he already was a billionaire. And what he did really well was took their idea, which was essentially like a whole Renfrew of lingerie. This like really high end, beautiful boutiques. I think the business was doing like $6 million a year. But he took all the ideas like the antique furniture and the esthetic and what they had in the store. And he set up manufacturing overseas. He started making in-house stuff. He scaled it. So like the esthetic was similar but done more cheaply. And the early executives loved to talk about this $20 red teddy that was introduced when he started and how that like was so the antithesis of what the Raymonds were trying to achieve. And he is just was great at like seeing a pattern or a trend in the market identifying it, executing on it and scaling that execution like almost seamlessly. But like if you think of Bath and Body Works, which he incubated and also Abercrombie and Fitch, which he identified Mike Jefferies as an executive, brought him in to run that business and that transform before it spun off. So he almost is like one of the fathers of the American Mall.
Chantal Fernandez [00:13:15] And when we talk about the American Mall, we're really talking about specialty retail, which is a form of selling that really disrupted, especially the department stores in the 60s, 70s and 80s, This idea that if you had a specific esthetic, you know, like Abercrombie or Banana Republic, you know, think about all these brands that we grew up with, You would go there, everything from the sales associates to the store design. It would all reflect this esthetic versus going to a department store where you could have access to a million different brands in a million different categories. It was about limiting and scaling through that limited focus. It was not a business model that he invented, but he perfected it, arguably.
Vass Bednar [00:13:55] He also later brought up whenever the brands executives, and you write this in the book, suggested highlighting things like fit or comfort less would repeat what you describe as an old maxim. We sell hope, not help. What was less Wexner trying to articulate and how did that ethos shape the brand?
Chantal Fernandez [00:14:14] He wanted to turn a utilitarian category, which is buying bras and underwear into a fashion category. So you were here for fun, for self-expression. You know, you didn't have to have a Barneys New York spending power to have 15 different bras that, you know, brought you pleasure just because maybe they made your husband happy or whatever. Touching on all these psychological things that we can debate that he clearly had strong feelings about. But the ideas that he was synthesizing in those statements really wasn't unusual in fashion at large. You know, a lot of it was this idea of we're selling something that other people can't have because of the price point or the size. You know, that's been a motivating factor for selling fashion for decades.
Vass Bednar [00:14:57] For sure. And in fact, their chief marketing officer, Ed Razak, had said pretty bluntly, actually, that we don't want to be for everybody. And, Lauren, we had an echo of this in Canada back in 2013. I don't know if you remember that, but Lululemon founder Chip Wilson was responding to women complaining that some Lululemon pants, the leggings in particular were becoming see through. And he sort of tried to say, well, it's nothing about the fabric or the quality, but actually some women's bodies, quote, just don't work and called for these clothes. And yet, you know, as you say, maybe all fashion is predicated on exclusivity. Just. A little bit. So I have to wonder, is it really so bad to choose a niche?
Lauren Sherman [00:15:42] Yes, I will never forget that. And I don't think anyone else will either. Even to this day when Lululemon is even more ubiquitous than it was then, people remember the share pants comments. I would say that the idea is if you can be very specific but actually be universal. So like you have something that you say is not for everybody and then everybody wants it. I think that what Wexner's idea, I hope not help or Chip Wilsons idea of like we're only for people who are actually in shape or whatever. I think what they miss is that like social mores have changed and that sort of line of thinking is not acceptable anymore. And so the key for retailers today is to still be very specific, but to appeal to a lot of different people. A great example is like an Alo yoga. That is a very specific look. But they've managed to reach a lot of different kinds of customers. Then again, if you look at something like Brandy Melville, they have limited sizing. They don't really care to cater to anyone. And yet there are lines out the door of that store every single day. So it can still work. But I do think that what is okay and what is not from a. Societal perspective has changed dramatically in the last ten years in particular. And Victoria's Secret waited very long to change. And so you can see the sort of difficulties they've had reflected in how consumers consume it today.
Vass Bednar [00:17:28] I want to talk about the fashion show. I want to talk about who it was for and what it accomplished. Victoria's Secret launched the fashion shows in 1995, and then in 1999, they streamed it online, which does seem like really forward thinking in hindsight. But the servers weren't able to handle the traffic, and the genius marketers there sort of spun it as quote unquote, breaking the Internet. Was that a significant evolution in marketing for them to have this higher end fashion show as they were seeking broad appeal? Shontell Maybe I'll go to you.
Chantal Fernandez [00:18:01] Absolutely. You know, regular Americans, so to speak, were not watching fashion shows. It was an industry closed event for the most part, but there was a lot of interest in the fashion world that was growing. You could see it through MTV's House of Style, and there was VH one Fashion Awards. So there was interest in this world and the characters that it produced, but there wasn't that much access to it. And I think what Victoria's Secret came across is they tapped into sort of a voracious appetite for a glimpse into the glamor of that world. So it was not kind of avant garde dresses and they weren't scowling. It was it was a more digestible version of what was happening on the runways in Europe. And it was trumped up to a thousand with musical performances and dancers and acrobats flinging from the sky. So they were early into a trend of turning fashion into entertainment or harnessing where those things overlap, which now is so common within fashion, and especially in high fashion, to see brands turn their their runway shows into social media content that can go viral. It was really effective for Victoria's Secret as a way to say we're a legitimate brand and we stand for something beyond just underwear.
Vass Bednar [00:19:16] So who were the shows ultimately for? On the one hand, they are kind of democratizing that fashion world or opening it up. And they also brought in a lot of men. Wasn't it just basically like a little bit Pawnee?
Lauren Sherman [00:19:31] Yeah. I mean, in the 90s in particular was definitely like a New York insider, a social event where Donald Trump types were out leering at these women. I'd say it it turned into especially with the Cannes show and the live streaming into the bigger marketing event that we know it as today. So I would say it was like one giant commercial and it was for the women who shopped the store for sure, but it was also for the men who potentially shopped the store or just they wanted it to be like almost like the Sports Illustrated catalog. Like just these women are icons that you rip out and you put on your wall and you fantasize about. And in that way, a question Chantal and I asked ourselves many times while writing and researching this was was Victoria's Secret making the culture or was it reflecting the culture? And I think at the peak of the show, they really believed they were setting standards of beauty. So yeah, I think it was for everybody, but it was done through the idea of like what a man would find attractive.
Chantal Fernandez [00:20:51] And just to add to that, going back to the beginning of our conversation, Lauren, when you were remembering like as a teenager, that Victoria's Secret represented this beauty ideal, I think that you can trace that back to the fashion show and the commercials that advertised it, you know, during the Super Bowl. Victoria's Secret wanted to be a brand that hit across all of culture, not just appeal to women. Their strategy was to appeal to everyone and then get women and make them feel like there's no other place that they can shop. And it was really effective.
Vass Bednar [00:21:30] In 2018, Rihanna's first Savage Buy Fenty show was held during New York Fashion Week, and looking back, it feels like a bit of a revelation. How did Victoria's Secret's competitors maybe start to beat them at their own game?
Chantal Fernandez [00:21:45] Yeah, I remember going to that show and being so struck by how she approached the sort of fundamental problem of like, women parading around in their lingerie. You can't really get around the awkwardness or weird connotations of that. And this is like a post MeToo era Trump era. It just heightened time. And what was so fascinating is that they turned it into the sort of dance performance art and the models, many of them were not runway models. They were like athletes or clearly professional dancers. And you really appreciated the way that they could move in this lingerie. And it felt like a very feminine space, not something for just to appeal to, you know, the Michael Bay vision of femininity. And I think by then we had already started to see with the success of Aerie and Skims had launched even just like the existence of Kim Kardashian in general and the kind of different vision of sexiness that she was putting forward into culture indicated that the world of Victoria's Secret had so perfectly commercialized, had sort of moved on, and they had probably not done enough to move with it. But when you're running such a giant business, you know, this is a market leader. At its peak, more than 8 billion in annual sales. It's hard to identify exactly what should change when it can feel like a huge risk, especially if your bonus is very, very closely tied to not taking risks.
Vass Bednar [00:23:15] Maybe I can talk about ideals and cup sizes for a second bra size. So when Victoria's Secret was at its height, you report how breast implants were also increasing at an incredible rate. But also, as we said, Victoria's Secret didn't want to make offerings beyond Double D, back to that quote were not for everyone. So they missed a huge segment of the market. That all kind of comes to head with your friend and mind the bralette. How and does the bralette sort of maybe stand in for what Victoria's Secret got wrong?
Chantal Fernandez [00:23:51] Yeah, we feel like the bralette is sort of an existential threat to the Victoria's Secret business at its peak, this idea that women no longer necessarily wanted their bras to make their boobs look bigger or perkier, or that they needed their bras there to always have this molded cup shape. You know, that's another trend that's changed over the last ten years is, you know, a lot of women want a softer cup that has a more natural look. But Victoria's Secret for years and years had pushed this very specific vision of what a bra looks like and what it does and what we need out of it. And that was part of their market advantage because an underwire bra is very complicated to make a bralette. It's almost like a T-shirt top like anyone can make it, but it's a different type of product. It's less expensive, the margins are lower. Victoria Secret's bread and butter. You know, coming out of the 2008 financial crisis, one of their most successful bras was the bombshell bra, which gave you two extra cup sizes of padding. You know, culturally, that was working for a really long time. And I think once the trend started to shift, they felt like they could control and mitigate that by staying in their lane, still pushing these underwire padded bras, and they held on to it too long. Meanwhile, the bralette was growing in popularity, and then in the pandemic it became even more popular. You know, working from home or maybe you're wearing a sports bra more on a day to day basis. All of that is bad news for the business model that had worked so long for Victoria's Secret.
Vass Bednar [00:25:24] There has been a lot of reporting, of course, on Wexner's relationship with deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who was his financial advisor. In the book, you describe Wexner's close, almost codependent relationship with Epstein and how Epstein falsely portrayed himself as a Victoria's Secret scout. Unbeknownst to the company, they declare. But despite Epstein's horrific public downfall and revelations of his predatory behavior with young women, you don't really credit his association with Victoria's Secret with the company's dramatic downturn. Do you think that association had any effect on the brand's reputation?
Chantal Fernandez [00:26:05] We feel like it had a reputational impact with some customers who were tracking that story close enough to understand that connection. And I think when all the Epstein News started unraveling, particularly in 2019 and 2020, couldn't have been worse timing for Victoria's Secret and for Wexner personally. And it increased the pressure that led to him eventually stepping. Being away from the business and it was sort of a huge elephant in the room, but it wasn't the reason why the brand was struggling to begin with. That was a distinction we wanted to make really clear, but it certainly added to those problems. You know, it continues to be something that gets brought up in the conversation around Victoria's Secret because of the public interest and fascination in Epstein and how there's still so many questions around who knew what, when and all of those things. So it's it's really interesting the way that that has played into the Victoria's Secret story.
Vass Bednar [00:27:04] They stop their fashion show abruptly after that Rihanna show in 2019. But suddenly, as you said, it came back just this October and they were trying to announce a new era. Right. More inclusive body sizes, the first trans model. But a lot of the media response has been pretty scathing. Writing for Essence, Sophie Camp called it a spectacle of irrelevancy. And the recent New York Times headline was The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show Returns It Shouldn't. So not a great reaction from some quarters. Is that fair?
Lauren Sherman [00:27:37] Look, it's totally fair. Everybody's allowed to have their own opinion. And and I think generally their relevancy point is well taken by us. I will say, though, I just talked to someone last night and they said they're super happy and like blew expectations in terms of the amount of conversation online. I'm sure that if the sales are really good the week of the show, they will talk about it in their earnings calls. So we'll see if they bring up the sales specifically. But in terms of exposure and people talking about the brand on that level, it was very successful. What I would say is that like. Is it going to make people buy Victoria's Secret on a regular basis and at full price, which is one of their biggest issues, is that everybody buys everything on discount and they can't really make a good profit off of anything. I think the answer is probably not. And Shontell and I both I didn't think it was like terrible. And people who were at this show actually had a fun time and, and enjoyed it. I think because the models were so fun. Like not only was it a little more diverse, I mean definitely felt a little tokenism, like to plus-size models, to trans models like that type of thing. There was very diverse in terms of age, which is an interesting point. And also like one interesting thing is Kate Moss was always seen as sort of not sexy or not voluptuous enough to be on that runway. And she was there and she looked great. I'm sure that they will think of how they use their marketing dollars differently this year. They have a whole new executive team and maybe, maybe they won't do that again. But I think that, like, it's very easy for us to see those headlines and also to see the feedback in the comments and think, this is so bad for them. But there is that whole adage that all press is good press. And so I do think the fact that, like anyone even cared, says something about the strength of the brand and the opportunity that they do have to turn it around, not saying they're going to, but there is a possibility that they'll be able to make this work again.
Vass Bednar [00:29:56] You mentioned Kate Moss and Victoria's Secret sort of straddle that shift away from worshiping supermodels and towards online influencers that maybe came with their own built in audience amassed through a smartphone. Shontell Did sexy really shift through social media?
Chantal Fernandez [00:30:16] Yes, I think it did, and in subtle ways. You know, the male gaze that made Victoria's Secret so successful in the 2000s, you know, people still care about fulfilling those beauty standards for the most part. But I think what social media brought that Victoria Secret missed out on that we saw other brands tapping in. She was even just a performed vision of authenticity and grittiness or something that was imperfect, that made it more approachable in terms of marketing images or content or videos or even the celebrities that we care about. And I think that was one of the things that they that they missed out on is someone put it to me as other brands, the celebrities, whoever they were, could speak for the brand. But a Victoria's Secret, the brand always spoke for the models. And that, I think, created a distance that was part of the problem in their marketing around 2018 2019.
Vass Bednar [00:31:13] What is the mainstream perception of sexy now? What kind of sexy sells and who decides?
Chantal Fernandez [00:31:21] I think part of what's so tricky about this moment for a company like Victoria's Secret is that sexiness is super fragmented. There are some cultural divisions happening there. And and I think that extends to what we see as beautiful or what makes us feel good. I think what has sort of replaced those traditional ideas of selling a fantasy or selling exclusivity in fashion is this wellness idea selling a better version of yourself? Buy this cream and you'll be a better version of yourself. That concept is probably a successful place for Victoria's Secret to invest in, but they're still going to have to contend with what is the beauty standard that they represent and how do they represented it and where? And are they covering enough of who they need to be covering? You know, it's I don't envy them in that sense because we live in a really fragmented culture. They benefited from.
Chantal Fernandez [00:32:14] Monoculture era of like the early 2000s, the 1980s. And that's over. It's it's so competitive now. It's very tricky time.
Lauren Sherman [00:32:24] Yeah. I think one thing that they need to do is right size the business which they've been trying to do. It's smaller than it used to be. A business like that should probably be like 2 or $3 billion a year in sales, not six. So I think one of the issues that they've had is they have just tried to get so broad and what they should take instead of the thing that a lot of brands do when they're having trouble is they look at the way things used to be when they were at their peak and say, we need to get that magic back. The way to get that magic back of when everybody loved you and everybody wanted to wear you or whatever is not to copy what happened in the past, but take the underlying ethos of what happened and apply it to like a modern day scenario. So for Victoria's Secret, I think they should just try to make. Like really beautiful, pretty large array. Find a few photographers that they love. Find a couple creative directors that they like working with and create content around that idea of like, We just want to make you feel good. But the challenge is finding the right people to execute that. It's really up to this new CEO, Hilary Super, to make these decisions and bring in the right team to to give it a give it a reason for existing because the last few years they just they haven't really known their reason and have sort of tried everything and, and nothing has stuck.
Vass Bednar [00:33:56] Lauren, Chantal. Thank you so much.
Lauren Sherman [00:33:58] Thanks for having us
Chantal Fernandez [00:33:59] This was so fun.
Vass Bednar [00:34:13] You've been listening to lately, a Globe and Mail podcast. Our executive producer is Katrina Onstad. The show is produced by Jay Cockburn, and our sound designer is Cameron McIvor, and I'm your host Vass Bednar. In our Shownotes. You can subscribe to the Lately newsletter where the Globe's online culture reporter Samantha Edwards unpacks more of the latest in business and technology. A new episode of Lately comes out every Friday wherever you get your podcasts.