“Angels” are being returned to the podium – Kommersant FM

Lingerie brand Victoria’s Secret returns to classic beauty standards. After experimenting with a body-positive agenda, famous “angels” will return to the catwalks, writes CNN. Over the past two years, plus-size models, girls of different nationalities and with disabilities have begun to participate in the company’s shows. The brand has also collaborated with a soccer player and LGBT activist, as well as a transgender model.

It was assumed that in this way the company would be able to attract a new young audience, but this had a negative impact on its revenue. Over the year, the figure decreased by 5%, to $6.2 billion. In 2020, the company earned $7.5 billion.

However, abandoning the topic of body positivity would be wrong, noted the founder of the communications agency PR Inc. Olga Dashevskaya. In her opinion, the brand needs to find a middle ground: “As a marketer, I am always against any sudden movements. There is already a successful company with many years of proven experience, which somehow quickly succumbed to trends and immediately rebuilt everything.

You could just add body-positive women and not completely abandon beauties with ideal figures. After all, underwear, no matter how tolerant we may be, certainly fits better on girls with the usual standards of beauty. If they did this, they might still get an additional target audience.

Without calculating the consequences, the brand lost its fans, its main customers who had been loyal to it for many years.

Probably, now it would be wrong to completely return the old shows and old advertising, there must be some kind of balance.

The body positivity craze, when it was worth more than $1 billion, of course shows that you shouldn’t follow fashion trends so much and use them in marketing, because it doesn’t stimulate sales.”

At the same time, the company released a collection of gender-neutral clothing, Pink, and in 2022, for the first time, a man became the brand ambassador. Now Victoria’s Secret plans to increase annual sales by $7 billion, as well as develop other clothing categories.

What caused such drastic changes? Fashion editor of The Symbol website Anton Gulevsky attributes this to the company’s lack of understanding of the modern market:

“The main problem with Victoria’s Secret and the change in their strategy is that all these changes are very late. Unfortunately, the brand showed a complete lack of understanding of the current agenda and an inability to respond to it. The past management of the company, of course, significantly spoiled its reputation.

Now all efforts to save her look a little like trying to put out a fire that has already flared up. The reference point for them was probably Rihanna and her lingerie line Savage X Fenty, which has been practicing everything that Victoria’s Secret is doing now for several years.

This isn’t exactly a flattering comparison for them, since Rihanna and her team managed to figure out which direction the wind was blowing much faster, while maintaining a great balance between an inclusive agenda, conventional beauty and something that is understandable to the masses.

At the same time, we see the recent launch of the Icons advertising campaign, which exploits the theme of Victoria’s Secret “angels”, models who have worked with the brand in the past. This is probably an attempt to retain the brand’s former nuclear audience. That is, it seems that they let go of their old audience, but were unable to win over the new one.”

Meanwhile, Victoria’s Secret remains the largest lingerie retailer in North America, accounting for a quarter of the market. In Russia, the brand suspended operations after the outbreak of hostilities in Ukraine.

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Elena Tyuleneva