Woke culture appears to have claimed another victim, as women’s fashion brand Victoria’s Secret has been forced to close hundreds of stores amid poor income as the company continues to focus on creating products that a popular to the media instead of focusing on their own customers.
Early last year, the company vanquished the Victoria’s Secret Angels, a group of the most famous supermodels that money could buy, and replaced them with more ‘body positive’ models like Megan Rapinoe from the US Women’s National Soccer Team. Transitions to woke, less traditionally beautiful models like Rapinoe have massively hurt the company’s bottom line, according to the Daily Wire.
Former CEO Martin Waters spoke to Retail Dive last March about this exact issue, saying the following:
“When we first announced our repositioning, we got a significant amount of mail from people who said, ‘This is terrible, you’re scorching the earth, you’re spoiling your brand. We love the way it was before. Why are you changing it?’”
He followed that up by saying that “the haters have gone away.” While at the time he probably thought this was a good thing, hindsight seems to prove that those “haters” who went away were actually the large silent majority of customers who were driven to stores by the Angels and the sexualized marketing style that the brand had used for many years before.
Brittany Martinez, a model and editor-in-chief at Evie Magazine, went on record with the Daily Wire explaining the real issue that Victoria’s Secret is facing, and it has nothing to do with their models being too attractive:
“Instead of lowering their prices or improving their quality, they killed the Angel and the entire fantasy along with it. They made a critical mistake many companies have made: they obsessed over their competitors and the media instead of obsessing over their customers.”
Of course, Victoria’s Secret has not grasped that quality and price may be driving their downturn. Instead, they seem to have surmised that it must be due to “haters” who do not abide by the company’s new view on body-positivity and its acceptance of different lifestyles.
On Fox News Radio, Tomi Lahren was echoing a similar point, saying:
Victoria’s Secret has been an iconic brand for decades but if you’ve shopped there in the last few years you may have noticed..shall we say…a branding change.
Mannequins are larger, the iconic “Angel” fashion shows are no more and the overall aesthetic is not what it used to be.
And perhaps that’s why the brand has been closing stores right and left for the last few years and now their latest CEO of woke- Amy Hauk- is stepping down.
Since, shares have tumbled 5.65% and there’s no telling if the company can rebound.
And, indeed, there is no surefire sign that the company will find its footing again, after going losing a CEO in less than a year. If Victoria’s Secret is ever going to recover, they need to go back to their bread and butter, the Victoria’s Secret Angels.
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