Selling Sexy by Lauren Sherman

Author:Lauren Sherman
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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Despite Pink’s unstoppable growth and profit margins (as high as 70 percent in some categories), the brand struggled to mature out of its pseudo-start-up phase. Even by the mid-2010s, it remained a scrappy operation, and within Limited Brands, it was always considered a second-class business next to Victoria’s Secret.

In the first decade of the 2000s, Victoria’s Secret was essentially three independent and fiercely competitive companies: Grace Nichols’s Columbus-based stores division; the New York City–based catalog division, run by Cindy Fedus-Fields’s successor Sharen Jester Turney; and the New York City–based beauty division, led by Robin Burns. Pink would have fit naturally within the stores division, but Nichols and her merchants did not want it. They had little time to deal with an entire new category, for one, but they also knew that giving Pink room to grow would mean sacrificing square footage already reserved for other, more established collections under the Victoria’s Secret label. A key factor in a particular bra line’s sales performance was simply how much physical space it had on the floors of the more than one thousand Victoria’s Secret stores. And no one wanted to sacrifice any of their category’s space for Pink.

Pink clearly merited its own dedicated division of merchants, designers, and marketers. Holman-Rao’s team launched it but would need to hand it off to permanent leadership. Rao hoped to be the one to lead Pink, and she shared her wishes with Len Schlesinger, then Wexner’s chief operating officer. It would not be so, and she was confused when, without warning, Schlesinger hired an outsider as Pink’s first CEO in 2005. That executive lasted less than a year before being terminated.

Fed up, Holman-Rao surprised Wexner by resigning in 2006. She never told him that Schlesinger had passed her over, which had forced her decision. The central design team she led, so integral to Pink’s development, carried on a few years before Wexner disbanded it and reassigned its team into the divisions.

Eventually, Pink found its permanent leadership in Denise Landman, a former hosiery merchant. Unlike many of the top executives who arrived after the influx of consultants at the Limited in the late 1990s, she lacked the pedigree of an Ivy League MBA. But Wexner greatly respected her and formally appointed Landman as Pink’s chief executive.

Pink retained a plucky start-up attitude as it grew. Helpfully, Razek barely involved himself in Pink’s marketing. He had bigger priorities, so Pink could ignore many of the Victoria’s Secret brand codes. Its college ambassadors served as local influencers in a pre-Instagram era. Its press events did not always revolve around the models, either. Instead, Pink hosted outdoor parties in New York City and Miami with age-appropriate musical performers like Ashlee Simpson. Guests were given coupons to draw them into stores.

Pink’s distinct aesthetic took inspiration from the fashion photography style dominating the mid-2000s, thanks to photographer Terry Richardson: studio-style snapshots with bold lighting and an undone quality that communicated authentic glamour. Richardson, however, leaned into hypersexuality in his images, often encouraging models to remove their clothes and allegedly sometimes assaulting them.

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