Victoria's Secret

Victoria's Secret is an American retailer of women's wear, lingerie and beauty products. more...

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It is the largest brand and a segment of publicly traded Limited Brands with sales surpassing $5 billion and an operating income of US$1 billion in 2006. Victoria's Secret is known for its fashion shows and catalogues, which feature top fashion models.

History

Victoria's Secret was started in San Francisco, California in 1977 by Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus Roy Raymond, who felt embarrassed trying to purchase lingerie for his wife in a public and awkward department store environment. He opened the first store at Stanford Shopping Center, and quickly followed it with a mail order catalog and 3 other stores. The stores were meant to create a comfortable environment for men, with wood-paneled walls, Victorian details and helpful sales staff. Instead of racks of bras and panties in every size, there were single styles, paired together and mounted on the wall in frames. Men could browse for styles and then sales staff would help estimate the appropriate size, pulling from inventory in the back. In 1982, after 5 years of operations, Roy Raymond sold the company to The Limited.

The Limited kept the personalized image of Victoria's Secret intact. Victoria's Secret was rapidly expanded into the America's malls throughout the 1980s. The company was able to vend a widened range of products such as shoes, evening wear, perfumes among others with its mail catalog issued eight times annually.

By the early 1990s, Victoria's Secret had become the largest American lingerie retailer topping one billion dollars.

On 10 July 2007, Limited Brands sold 75% of Limited clothing chain to firm Sun Capital Partners to focus and boost sales growth on Victoria's Secret lingerie stores and Bath & Body Works units, which provided 72% of revenue in 2006 and almost all the firm's profit.

Marketing Strategy

Victoria's Secret is a specialty retailer of women's intimate apparel. It has about 1,000 Victoria's Secret lingerie stores and 100 independent Victoria's Secret Beauty Stores in the US, mostly in shopping centres. It sells brassieres, panties, hosiery, cosmetics, sleepwear, and more. Victoria's Secret mails more than 400 million of its catalogs per year. Under pressure from environmentalist groups, Victoria's Secret's parent firm and a conservation group have reached an agreement to make the lingerie retailer's catalog more environmentally friendly in 2006. The catalogue will no longer be made of pulp supplied from any woodland caribou habitat range in Canada, unless it has been certified by the Forest Stewardship Council. The catalogs will also be made of 10 percent recycled paper from post-consumer waste.

Read more at Wikipedia.org