Victoria’s Secret’s Secret

The man behind the company that made lingerie mainstream and mall-friendly.

Perhaps most unusual is that Wexner never wanted to go into retail. He spent his childhood watching his parents run a clothing store, named Leslie’s after him, and he was turned off by how they worked 80-hour weeks and barely scratched out a living. “Growing up I knew you were supposed to have a profession,” he said in 2003, “and something that was better than being a shopkeeper, which is what my parents were. I didn’t want to go into the retail business. I hated it.”
Wexner enrolled in law school, only to find that he wasn’t creatively stimulated enough, so he spent study breaks drawing designs for stores and storefronts. (“Some people made erotic drawings or wrote their girlfriend’s name,” he has said. “I did stores.”) He soon dropped out and began pitching in at his parents’ store, where he discovered that the business profited most by selling skirts, sweaters, shirts, and blouses—typical sportswear separates—not by selling dresses and coats, as his father believed.

It was the entrepreneurial epiphany for a store that Wexner, then 26, wanted to call Leslie’s Limited and refocus to sell women’s sportswear separates. Wexner had been an entrepreneur since he was 9 (early for-profit ventures include cutting grass, shoveling snow, and selling stationery, T-shirts, and toys), but the months before the opening of The Limited in 1963 were harrowing. He had recurring nightmares and was diagnosed with an ulcer. Wexner, as his parents had, invested inordinate hours, working from 7 a.m. to midnight, washing the store’s windows and doing his own bookkeeping. But it was his idea that paid off the most. Women wanted separates and appreciated a new, more modern way of buying clothing. Wexner opened another five stores in the following years and took the business public in 1969. Ten years later, he had 300 Limited stores and began to demonstrate an appetite for acquisitions, buying and growing brands like Lane Bryant.

It was on a business trip in San Francisco in 1982 that Wexner discovered Victoria’s Secret, founded by Roy Raymond, a Stanford M.B.A. graduate. “It was a small store, and it was Victorian—not English Victorian, but brothel Victorian with red velvet sofas,” says Wexner. “There wasn’t erotic lingerie, but there was very sexy lingerie, and I hadn’t seen anything like it in the U.S.” Months later, with Victoria’s Secret on the verge of bankruptcy, Raymond called Wexner and asked if he wanted to buy the company. Wexner got on a plane to San Francisco that day and agreed to purchase the four stores and a catalog for $1 million.

Wexner says he had “intuition” that it would be a good business, but he didn’t know anything about lingerie and he had no immediate plans for the company. He had just bought Lane Bryant and was growing a new brand, Express. “[Victoria’s Secret] didn’t make any money,” he says, “but I saw ingredients in it. What if we mixed it up differently?” Wexner then began thinking—as a bachelor. (He got married about 10 years later.) “Most of the women that I knew wore underwear most of the time, and most of the women that I knew I thought would rather wear lingerie most of the time, but there were no lingerie stores,” he says. “I thought if we could develop price points and products that have a broader base of customer, it could be something big.”

The company moved Victoria’s Secret to its headquarters in Columbus and infused the brand with its retail expertise—boosting the selection of merchandise from just one model of everything to a large assortment with colors and textiles that related to the fashion industry. It focused on consistency of fit, which created customer loyalty. The company expanded nationally, opening its boudoir-style stores in areas in which it had catalog customers. “The marketing was pretty primitive,” says Wexner, “but it worked.”

They finessed the formula, moving bras and fitting rooms from the front to the back of the store (“Being in the front made for some odd moments flashing the world,” says Wexner. “We had to take the fact that people were in their birthday suits into consideration.”) They played classical music and soon customers began requesting the compilations, and the company began to sell CDs. The famous fashion show, with legendary supermodels strutting in lavishly jeweled bras and feathered wings, became a cultural moment. A steamy commercial during the 1999 Super Bowl sent millions of visitors to the Victoria’s Secret Web site, and a billion people in 100 countries logged on to watch the show.

“The great thing that Wexner did was recognize the huge white space in the market that was unspoken for, and he brought in innovation,” says Craig Johnson, president of Customer Growth Partners, a retail consultancy in New Canaan, Conn. “He made sexy mainstream. That was his genius.” But Wexner, still a reserved Midwesterner who has been the chairman and CEO of the company—now known as Limited Brands and including brands such as Bath and Body Works, Pink, La Senza, and Henri Bendel—for more than 45 years, doesn’t see anything “genius” about it. “I didn’t invent anything. I didn’t invent the bra or stores or the name,” he says. “I just see things differently.” Still, when it comes to how women think about the most pragmatic items they wear, that’s made all the difference.

Fonte: News Week
www.newsweek.com/2010/06/09/victoria-s-secret-s-secret.html