
Hillary Super’s winning streak as chief executive officer of Victoria’s Secret & Co. continued in the second quarter.
The intimates giant saw double-digit, top-line gains while profits topped expectations and the outlook for the full year was strengthened.
Sales for the quarter ended Aug. 1 rose 10 percent to $1.6 billion, near the top-end of the forecasted range. Comparable store sales increased by 9 percent.
Net profits tallied $183 million, boosted by more than $140 million in tariff refunds.
Adjusted earnings totaled $80 million, or 95 cents a per diluted share — well above the 77 cents analysts figured on, according to Yahoo Finance.
“Great quarter, great flow-through, strength across all three business units, Victoria’s Secret and bras being star of the show, followed by broad-based success in Pink” was the way Super summed it up in an interview.
The company has been on a remarkable bounce back after several years of missteps under prior management, but Super said there’s still plenty more room to grow.
“We have around 25 million active customers,” she said. “At one point in time, we had 35 million and the population has expanded since that time. So we know we have a long runway of customer acquisition ahead of us — building that customer file is the flywheel for everything. Market share, if you just look at bras, when I started, we were in the high teens. We’re now in the low 20s. At one point we were in 36 percent market share in North America.…Pink used to be a $3 billion brand. It’s less than $2 billion right now.”

Hillary Super
Courtesy of Victoria’s Secret
While there’s been some speculation that GLP-1 weight loss drugs would be a tailwind for brands like Victoria’s Secret, Super said the company’s not seeing a huge impact.
“We’re seeing about a 3 percent uptick in existing customers sizing down,” she said. “And those customers sizing down, they’re primarily in the medium and small size range, so medium to small, small to extra small. It is not on the larger side of the scale so far.”
In the short term, Super is looking ahead to the Victoria’s Secret runway show next month, which will see the blockbuster event evolve.
It will be held in Los Angeles this year, instead of New York, and is being pumped up by a docuseries called “Angels Among Us” that follows the process of finding the brand’s next runway star.
“This idea of fandom, we just hear so much from our consumer about wanting to be a part of it, wanting to see behind the curtain,” Super said. “We wanted to give them an opportunity to truly be a part of this community.”
This year, Victoria’s Secret is partnering with YouTube instead of Amazon.
“Much more democratic, much more where the young consumer is,” was how Super described the change. “Also, the connectivity of paid marketing and YouTube — because it is all primarily through Google — is going to be very powerful for us.”
In a statement, Scott Sekella, chief financial and operating officer, said: “We continued to benefit from stronger regular-price selling and disciplined execution, while navigating ongoing tariff uncertainty. Given our strong first-half performance and continued momentum entering the back half, we are raising our full-year net sales and adjusted operating income outlook.”
Victoria’s Secret is now looking for sales to range from $7.1 billion to $7.2 billion this year, up from the $7 billion to $7.1 billion previously forecast.
Adjusted operating income for the year is expected to increase to $560 million to $590 million, up from the $550 million to $580 million previously forecast and last year’s take of $403 million.








