Victoria’s Secret CEO Hillary Super Uses Runway Show to Usher in New Era

While Hillary Super will not be on the runway when the Angels walk down it for the Victoria’s Secret fashion show Wednesday night, the chief executive officer’s fingerprints will be everywhere. 

“It’s the biggest stage in the world, and I think this is an opportunity for us to really introduce this next era of Victoria’s Secret and Pink to everyone and to really put a stake in the ground about what this next chapter will look and feel like,” Super told WWD during an exclusive backstage tour of the show as it was coming together last week. 

After spending some time in the wilderness when it struggled to find — or embrace — its core, Super said Victoria’s Secret is back to being sexy again and comfortable with it.

“Sexy is not one single thing,” the CEO said. “It means different things to different women. We serve a global audience and beauty standards are different around the world. Cultural standards are different around the world and we need to reflect that to our customers. 

“The difference is that we are here to inspire you, to invite you into our world, to make you feel like the best version of yourself,” she said. “We’re not here to tell you, ‘if you don’t look like this, you’re not sexy.’ I think that is a big change.”

After an unflattering reexamination of the brand during the #MeToo era, the runway show was put on hiatus for several years before its return last year. 

The show had an immediate impact on the business, proving its worth. 

“We are an entertainment brand,” Super said. “We are painting an aspirational world.”

Now the runway is signaling just where the business is headed and how it’s evolved under Super’s leadership. 

Sales in the second quarter inched up 3 percent to $1.5 billion, with a 4 percent comparable sales gain. Adjusted operating income slipped to $55 million from $62 million a year earlier, but was better than the company’s forecast.

Super is making significant changes and, ultimately, is expecting a significant impact.

“The big building blocks are in place and it was a big lift and you still have to manage the day-to-day business,” said Super, who has had to contend with a temporary blackout on the website, activist investors and more. “The bones of this business, there’s so much to build on. Now we have a very focused strategy that is aligned with a refreshed leadership team and we are rolling. It’s really go time.”

Go Time, Show Time

If it’s go time for the company, the same is true for the runway show, which is being held in Brooklyn once again. 

In person, it will be a more intimate affair with 600 or 700 guests, a runway that lights up, pulses and shifts with the music and the models as they move down the catwalk. 

The theme of this year’s show is, fittingly, “Reawakening,” and there’s a round stage that descends from the ceiling, doubling as a metaphorical sun and lighting fixture.

It is clearly an enormous undertaking, although Super said “it’s not a high percentage of our total marketing budget.” 

Backstage, there is a room full of Angel wings, one set more ornate than the next, extravagant accessories and pinboards where models are matched with looks. 

Inside, there’s the occasional model being fitted and photographed, outside there are truck drivers, caterers, lighting specialists and many more milling around or scurrying about. 

At the center of it all is the consumer who will be out there on the other side of the phone as the show ricochets around the internet. 

“Our current customers love us,” Super said. “We are retaining customers at a higher rate than we have in a long time. They are more frequent shoppers. They’re spending more, more profitable per customer. 

“But we need to gain new customers, particularly younger customers,” she said. “There is no better way to get in front of eyeballs than to have this show. We are the original entertainment brand and we want to double down on that. That is how people learn about brands, through their phone and through being entertained. And we think we are very well equipped to do that.”

Entertainment Value

Adam Selman, executive creative director of Victoria’s Secret, has been living and breathing the show since April, when he jumped from Rihanna’s Savage x Fenty, where he was chief design officer — and where Super was CEO. 

Selman has created world tours and custom looks for stars like Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Lorde and Katy Perry and designed Rihanna’s looks for her Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show performances. 

He has been tapping into his Rolodex to pull together this year’s show, reaching out to Italian jewelers, a designer who specializes in outfitting Las Vegas showgirls, René Caovilla for shoes and more. 

Performances by Karol G, Madison Beer, Missy Elliott and Twice will make the show all the more clickable, drawing people into the worlds of both Victoria’s Secret and Pink, which will be in the show this year after being passed over last time.  

“Hillary and I both were very passionate about bringing Pink into this and giving Pink its own unique voice,” Selman said. “What does that look like for now?”

Pink, in Super’s telling, “smerged” into Victoria’s Secret and is now being set up with more of a distinct identity and a stronger emphasis on apparel to help differentiate it.   

As much as the runway show is a moment, Selman is aware that the moment will pass and is planning to get as much out of it as possible. 

“It’s not just the show to me,” he said. “It’s what are we saying around the show? And how does it all come to life as a brand? As opposed to just this one singular moment.” 

The Super Management Philosophy

While Super has been getting texts from Selman each day with pictures of how it was all coming together, the tour with WWD was the first time the CEO saw the space in person. 

Even without the models, the sample runway light show was sensual, inviting, synced with pulsing music. 

When asked if she was going to go diva and nix some part of the complicated display or demand some change, Super said no.

“I trust Adam,” she said. “There’s no one I trust more in the world for something like this.”

That kind of trust is a cornerstone in Super’s management style.  

“It is important to me to deeply know everyone that I’m working with,” she said. “That means knowing what’s important to them when they’re having a good day, a bad day when they need me to lean in, when they don’t need me to lean in, being able to have direct conversations. I just really think of myself as a conductor. I’m curating the team, I’m conducting the overall scene, and I’m helping when needed.”

Super can be hands off when things are working and right in the mix if they’re not. 

“I tend to trust until I’m given a reason not to,” she said. “If I sense that I need to lean in, I will lean in. If I sense that I need to dig deep, I’ll roll up my sleeves and dig deep. But I also want to make sure that people feel really empowered and great about the work they’re doing. And I think that passion ultimately shows up in the product. Adam is having the time of his life and he is flourishing.”

Likewise, Super has put trusted lieutenants in place as divisional presidents to push the company forward, including Anne Stephenson at Victoria’s Secret, Ali Dillon at Pink and Amy Kocourek in beauty. 

“What’s required in VS is something different that’s required in Pink and is something different that is required in beauty,” Super said. 

“Anne at VS, she is an intimates expert and she is a deep product creative person,” the CEO said. “But with Ali and Pink, it’s more of an apparel model and it’s about speed and digital co-creation.

“With beauty, we have a very healthy beauty business going on nine quarters of consecutive comps and we’ve done that without a single leader. We’ve done that without dedicated marketing and we’ve done that without, I would say, a deep innovation muscle,” she said, adding that Kocourek can change that. 

“When you look at the brand love around our beauty business, and you look at the fact that that market is four times the size of the intimates market and we own single-digit share in that market versus about 20 percent in intimates, we have a long runway ahead of us,” she said. “Putting that love and attention and strategic thinking and innovation power behind beauty, I think, is going to unlock a tremendous amount of opportunity.” 

The key, Super said, is knowing the executives and their strengths, matching them with the challenge ahead and aligning around a shared vision.

That kind of emotionally intelligent way of working was not seen as one of the old Victoria’s Secret’s strong points.

What Went Wrong at Victoria’s Secret? 

A lot of experts have weighed in on just how Victoria’s Secret got off track, but Super has had a chance  — the responsibility, really — to diagnose that from the inside. 

“If you look back many years ago…we were very focused on the sort of very sexy end of our business,” she said. “And then we kind of went to the opposite end and were very focused on the cleaner, more everyday part of our business.

“And it was sort of like we couldn’t walk and chew gum at the same time,” she said. “And women are — we have complex lives, we have fast-paced lives. We’re doing a lot of things. We’re juggling a lot of things. And we are not one thing. One day, we’re going to the office, one day we’re going to an event. We have a broad range of occasions and we want to serve all of those occasions. We haven’t been really communicating that and talking to her about our range of options.”

That started to change in July when the brand introduced its FlexFactor Bra, which she said was both “sexy” and “joyful” with a tag line — Better Than Braless — that connected deeply with customers. 

The company also fell behind changes in the cultural landscape and became flatfooted in its marketing. 

“We were underutilizing the brand and we were underutilizing all of the modern marketing techniques to reach our customer and to reach new customers,” Super said. “We’d pulled back a little bit. We had gone after efficiency and optimization, cost optimization and those sorts of things for a number of years. And we needed to really go back to the heart of what we do, which is innovation in bras and in the fragrance business.” 

Market Share and Mind Share

If it’s go-time for Victoria’s Secret, Super knows where she’s going — she’s following where the market share has gone. 

Victoria’s Secret controls about 20 percent of the intimates market in North America, including about 60 percent of the specialty store business in the market. 

“If you think about taking market share, yes, some of it can come from specialty, but really the majority of the share to be taken is going to come from value and off price,” Super said. “Those are the two that have gained share over the last several years.

“There are also new entrants, mostly digital pure plays,” she said. “They have mind share. So they’re doing something that’s either very specialized in terms of solving a specific problem for a customer or they’re doing something that’s capturing the zeitgeist. Most of those players do not have significant share. Are they biting at ankles? Yes.”

To go after the value sector’s share of the intimates business, Super is doubling down on brand. 

“Our job is to create the dream and to create a compelling reason to cross our lease line or come to our site,” she said. “We have increased the frequency of newness and fashion in both brands and we’re seeing very positive results from that.”

Pressed on Kim Kardashian’s Skims brand, Super said it certainly has mind share. 

“There’s room for both of us,” she said. “They do something very different than us, largely speaking. Our business is grounded in bras first and foremost, and we have a real technical expertise in  what we do. If you look at their assortment, it is more lounge. They obviously started in shapewear. That’s not a real sizable business for us.

“It’s good to have competition,” she said. “I think it makes you dig deeper, think about how you’re connecting with your audiences, think about that emotional connectivity.” 

Representing 

Super has taken on a tough job, reviving a sagging brand while activist investors send spitballs in from the outside and competitors look to take share. 

She is also very much in a C-suite minority. 

There are few women CEOs of major fashion companies and fewer still who are part of the LGBTQIA+ community. (When Super got the Victoria’s Secret job, her wife, Gap executive Michele Sizemore, hyped her on social media, saying: “Hillary has prepared her entire career for this appointment. I’m lucky to get a front row seat. It’s her turn.”)

That puts Super in a different kind of spotlight as well. 

“Representation is important,” she said. “And I think being able, it’s hard to be what you can’t see. When it comes to leadership and bringing the next generation of women along in particular, I think being a female CEO and being an LGBTQ CEO, it’s important for people to see that. And it’s important for people to see that I have all the same struggles that  everyone else has, that I live a pretty normal life. 

“It dispels stereotypes one conversation at a time or one meeting at a time because I just show up as me and I work very hard to be exactly who I am at work and to be approachable and accessible,” she said. “And I hope that that shows people that there are all kinds of ways of being and all of those ways are good.” 

And, bringing a certain symmetry to her career, that’s the same message Super wants Victoria’s Secret to send to consumers.