Victoria’s Secret just posted its best earnings in years. Stock hit an all-time high of $80 a share, net sales jumped 15%, and Wall Street is doing backflips. Everyone is calling it a turnaround. I call it a brand that finally remembered it sells lingerie.
Before we get to the comeback, we need to talk about the crime.
Around 2021, Victoria’s Secret looked at its brand and decided the problem was its identity, not the Jeffrey Epstein association hanging over the founder like a very expensive cloud, not the board fighting itself into irrelevance, not the product, but the identity. So they cancelled the fashion show. They retired the Angels. They replaced Adriana Lima with Megan Rapinoe and a council of accomplished women advisors meant to signal female empowerment. They pivoted overnight from selling fantasy to selling activism for a lingerie brand, and in doing so managed to lose the customers who were actually buying their products while attracting exactly zero of the new ones they were chasing.
A lingerie brand decided its biggest problem was that it was too sexy.
It was one of the most expensive and transparent cases of woke-washing in modern retail history, and the market said so immediately. The stock cratered from $57 to barely $20 a share. The brand that once made teenage girls plan their mall trips around a signature pink bag was suddenly irrelevant to everyone, including the people it was trying to impress with its newfound social conscience.
Here is what most brands refuse to understand about woke-washing until it costs them everything. It does not fail because the values are wrong. Diversity, body positivity, female empowerment, none of those are bad ideas. They fail because audiences can feel the difference between a brand that believes something and a brand that is performing belief to survive a bad news cycle. Victoria’s Secret did not gradually evolve its definition of beauty. It did not build toward inclusion over time through the slow accumulation of choices that signal genuine conviction. It flipped a switch overnight because it was scared. The new CEO Hillary Super said it plainly on the record: “That natural human reaction is to want to stay out of controversy.” That is not a brand strategy. That is crisis management in a push-up bra.
A peer-reviewed study in the journal Corporate Social Responsibility and Environmental Management put it in academic terms: the abrupt, externally driven rebranding intensified consumer skepticism, alienated loyal customers, and failed to establish trust among socially conscious consumers. In plain English, they lost both audiences at the same time. The people who wanted inclusion did not believe it was real. The people who wanted the fantasy felt like it had been ripped away from them. The brand ended up screaming into a room full of people who had already left.
This is the woke-washing trap and it is not unique to Victoria’s Secret. Brands fall into it constantly, especially when they are scared. A controversy surfaces, the social media temperature spikes, and someone in a boardroom says we need to show people who we really are. The problem is that a rebrand cannot show people who you really are when it is triggered by external pressure rather than internal truth. It shows people who you are pretending to be, and in the age of receipts, that is far more damaging than saying nothing.
What makes this story worth telling is what the recovery actually looked like, because it was not what you would expect. Hillary Super, the first female CEO in the company’s history and someone who has actually worn a bra in her life, did not swing back to the 1999 playbook. She did not bring back the body-shaming or the six-foot-tall-only casting policy that made the brand a target in the first place. What she did was find the emotional truth of what Victoria’s Secret meant to its actual customers and build forward from there. The 2025 fashion show opened with Jasmine Tookes, a longtime Angel, in gold wings and nine months pregnant, on the same runway as WNBA star Angel Reese and Adriana Lima. Same wings, different world. That is not a compromise. That is a brand that finally understood the difference between its identity and its problems.
The identity was glamour, spectacle, and the particular kind of confidence that comes from feeling beautiful in your own skin, whatever that skin looks like. The problems were narrow casting, a toxic founder legacy, and years of fear-based decisions made by people who thought they could rebrand their way out of a reputational crisis. Super fixed the problems without burning down the identity. That is the whole lesson right there.
Brand values only work when they are true, and they are only true when they cost you something. Patagonia tells people not to buy their jacket and means it. That costs them short-term revenue and builds long-term trust. Victoria’s Secret told people they valued empowerment while making zero operational changes to back that claim up. That costs them credibility and builds nothing. The question every brand needs to ask before it plants any flag on any value is simple: has this conviction ever caused us to say no to something? Has it ever cost us money? Has it ever made someone in this building uncomfortable? If the answer is no, it is not a value. It is a caption on an Instagram post.
Today Victoria’s Secret is posting its fourth consecutive quarter of positive comparable sales. Gen Z is buying bras. The stock is at an all-time high. It took losing billions in market value, a near-revolt from activist investors, and a CEO with the clarity and the courage to say “that lacks authenticity” out loud in a Fortune interview to get there. All of that pain was avoidable. Every single dollar of it.
You do not have to wait that long.
If your brand is sitting on a position you adopted because it felt safer than your actual point of view, the gap between what you say you are and what you actually are is visible to everyone except you. At the end of the day, if you want to keep your sensitive bits covered, a brand is like a good supportive bra. It has to actually fit. If you are ready to get properly fitted, you know where to find me.
