Victoria’s Secret had tried every part. It killed the well-known runway present. It rolled out a splashy marketing campaign of achieved celeb girls advisors to advertise feminine empowerment—which was extensively derided as “woke-washing.” Because the singer Jax put it in her well-liked 2022 music “Victoria’s Secret,” the mall-staple lingerie retailer was “made up by a dude,” and it has been extensively seen as “Cashin’ in on body issues/Sellin’ skin and bones with big boobs.”
Enter CEO Hillary Tremendous. She joined the corporate in 2024 after profitable stints working Anthropologie and Savage X Fenty, which grew to become an edgy lingerie competitor to Victoria’s Secret. Tremendous, 53, remembers that when she obtained the decision, she was “keenly aware of what the perceptions of the brand were, positive and negative.” However her “first reaction was, ‘That’s the biggest transformation opportunity in retail,’” she says. “That was really appealing to me.”
In her tenure thus far, the CEO has fostered a self-assurance absent from the model in recent times. Her eye as a service provider has clearly been useful, following a stretch of management that was extra targeted on enterprise operations. Maybe much more crucially, she will speak authentically about and to girls. Whereas Victoria’s Secret has had feminine leaders earlier than, they have been largely overshadowed by highly effective male execs—and Tremendous is the primary feminine CEO of the brand new guardian firm Victoria’s Secret & Co. after a 2021 spinoff from L Manufacturers. “It’s hard to have an intuition about a category that you cannot put on your body,” Tremendous remarks.
Tremendous additionally likes to remind critics of the numerous girls who’ve by no means had an issue with Victoria’s Secret and its specific model of horny. Underneath her steering Victoria’s Secret has embraced this heritage—the glamour and spectacle of all of it, with out the body-shaming. There may be nonetheless a give attention to variety, however “without being performative, [where] we have to check every box and make sure every single thing someone could think of is covered,” Tremendous says, “because to me that lacks authenticity.”
Tremendous’s plan to show the corporate round seeks to handle long-standing shortcomings and identifies some extra bold alternatives. It has 4 pillars: proudly owning the bra class; recommitting to the Pink model; doubling down on Victoria’s Secret magnificence merchandise (a $1 billion enterprise in North America identified for scents like Love Spell and Bombshell); and evolving the model and go-to-market technique. She goals to achieve double-digit working revenue and construct a youthful buyer base.
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