Victoria`s Secret, hearing this two words ..what will people imagine about?. well i think those words are reperesent many strong words : sexy, luxury, glamaour, gergeous, Amazing, Soft, elegant,Fantastic ... and many words are not enough to describe it. it`s a very famous label of women underwear and fashion. Victoria`s Secret has many famouse beautifful Models. Well, who don`t know : Heidi Klum, Adriana Lima, Alessandra Ambrassio, Laititia Casta... and more. Though the company is based in Ohio, Victoria's Secret still manages to corral an international cast of models for its popular lingerie catalogs. Victoria`s Secret almost performs annual Fashion Show. History The company was founded in 1979 by Roy Raymond, an ambitious graduate of Stanford University. After struggling to find success working in a corporation, he decided to start his own company in San Francisco, California, USA. After borrowing about $80,000, he opened the very first Victoria's Secret store in southern outskirts of San Francisco. In its first year, the sales reached an impressive half million dollars, which enabled him to open four additional stores. In 1982, however, the company faced financial struggles, and he was forced to sell it to The Limited, Inc. in 1982. It is now owned by The Limited's successor company, Limited Brands. Since the takeover the company has been based in Columbus, Ohio, though it has at times sought to foster an image of being British. Raymond eventually committed suicide in 1993, jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. All stores of Limited Brands are corporately owned. Victoria's Secret products are also available through the catalog business, Victoria's Secret Direct, with sales of approximately US$870 million. The company gained notoriety in the 1990s after it began to use supermodels in their advertising and fashion shows; prominent supermodels featured by Victoria's Secret include Alessandra Ambrosio, Tyra Banks, Ana Beatriz Barros, Gisele Bündchen, Naomi Campbell, Laetitia Casta, Selita Ebanks, Isabeli Fontana, Izabel Goulart, Eva Herzigova, Bar Refaeli, Adriana Lima, Karolína Kurková, Petra Němcová, Frederique van der Wal, Heidi Klum, Daniela Pestova, Veronica Varekova, Lindsay Frimodt, Tricia Helfer, Marisa Miller and Fernanda Tavares. The "BOBs Secret Angels" are the models with contracts to Victoria's Secret. Many other models appear in the catalog that appear as part of campaigns. Fashion show The company made history in 1999 with the first televised appearance of the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show. The web broadcast, one of the first mass market Internet programs, drew 1.5 million viewers, with many others unable to view the show. The fashion show was advertised on the Super Bowl. Annually, Victoria's Secret also stages a fashion show that is televised later in the year. The show is generally held in the New York Armory on Lexington Avenue, and attracts hundreds of celebrities and entertainers. In the past, most of the clothing exhibited was not available to the general public, but in 2005 the show was specifically redesigned to feature clothing available to the general public through the catalogue. PINK Victoria's Secret In July, 2004, company executives launched Pink (Victoria's Secret) , a lineup of loungewear, sleepwear, and intimate apparel geared towards college undergraduates. [2] Alessandra Ambrosio was named the line's spokesperson. Pink models tour the country at college campuses. The company markets to youth through MySpace, partnerships with MTV, and youth-oriented blogs. In 2006, Ashlee Simpson was named as the spokesmodel for Pink, making it the first time that a non-fashion model is a spokesperson of any VS brand. One PINK store has been opened in San Francisco, with two more planned for 2006. Playboy's Search for The Real Girls of Victoria's Secret In September, 2006, Playboy started its search for employees of Victoria's Secret to appear online in a pictorial for Playboy.com. ( from : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria's_Secret ) -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Victoria's Secret Perhaps given a boost by the openness of the Sexual Revolution, the Victoria's Secret retail chain almost single-handedly redefined America's conception of lingerie beginning in the early 1980s. Despite the secrecy promised in the franchise's moniker, each of its stores replaced the modest, tucked-away, department-store displays of women's underwear with an openly luxurious atmosphere that recreated a nineteenth-century boudoir. At the same time, Victoria's Secret decidedly built its image with a fairly conservative, middle-class shopper in mind and avoided any connotations of sleaziness which lingerie might carry. While some critics have contested the sometimes reactionary portrait of femininity developed in the store's designs and advertising campaigns, Victoria's Secret helped women of all shapes and sizes, if not tax brackets, feel that sensuality need not be limited to models and celebrities. Models display the latest fashions from Victoria's Secret, 1997. Victoria's Secret was launched through the personal vision of entrepreneur Roy Raymond, an ambitious graduate of Stanford University who found himself dissatisfied working in the lower rungs of large corporations. Raymond's brainchild came to him in the mid-1970s as the result of his own experiences of buying lingerie for his wife. A shy man by nature, Raymond found himself made uncomfortable by the probing glances of lingerie salespeople in department stores and moreover thought the wares of such stores to be either excessively frilly or blandly conservative. Believing that many men and women alike shared in his desire for a middle ground between these two poles, Raymond decided to embark on the risky venture of creating his own boutiques. In 1977, he borrowed a total of eighty thousand dollars—half of it from his parents—and opened the doors of the first Victoria's Secret in a shopping center in the southern outskirts of San Francisco. Decorated to resemble a popularized Victorian bedroom, the premiere outlet was furnished with opulent Oriental rugs and period vanities whose drawers housed fittingly plush bras and panties made by upscale designers such as Vanity Fair and Warner's. Although subsequent stores were less customized than Raymond's prototype, this balance of seduction and "classy" charm continued to rule the sensibilities of Victoria's Secret. In its first year of business, the San Francisco store had amassed sales of an impressive half a million dollars, allowing Raymond to expand Victoria's Secret into four new locations, in addition to a headquarters and warehouse. Raymond's creative vision was not equaled by financial mastery, however, and in 1982 he was forced to sell Victoria's Secret to the Columbus, Ohio-based conglomerate The Limited for the relatively slight sum of four million dollars. Although it was already a nationally known fashion enterprise, The Limited kept the personalized image of Victoria's Secret intact, albeit in a mass-produced, cost-efficient manner. Rapidly expanding into the terrain of America's malls throughout the 1980s, Victoria's Secret blossomed from a handful of stores to more than four hundred and solidified its exclusive image by appending its own label to all of its offerings as a brand name. In addition to volume growth, the company was able to vend a widened range of products with the aid of a popular mail catalog issued eight times annually. While corsets, teddies, and silk pajamas remained at the hub of the Victoria's Secret wheel, home shoppers could buy shoes, evening wear, and perfumes—such as Wild English Gardens and Heather's Embrace—all under a single banner promising both middle-class refinement and daring sexuality. By the early 1990s, Victoria's Secret had become the largest American lingerie outfitters, easily surpassing both the even higher-priced Cacique chain and the racier Frederick's of Hollywood. However, despite the fact that the company had topped the billion dollar mark, its growth showed signs of stagnation. In 1993, Grace Nichols took over the executive helm from former president Howard Gross and immediately addressed allegations that the quality of Victoria's Secret's merchandise did not match its elevated price tags. In addition, Nichols placed added emphasis upon an older age group as the company's target concern. Nevertheless, while Nichols stressed that thirty-to forty-year-old women need not feel out of place in sexy underwear, the company's advertising campaigns continued to exclusively portray younger models with svelte, busty figures. Indeed, some critics saw the Victoria's Secret formula of femininity as a limitation to the majority of American women and argued that the company's image (highlighted in design series such as their English Lace line) implicitly promoted an overly bourgeois conception of "good taste." Whatever class and gender ramifications Victoria's Secret might have entailed, the company grew once again under Nichols's care throughout the 1990s, as millions of women—and men--continued to fill out their fantasies with the satin-lined aid of offerings such as the Angels bra series and, perhaps Victoria's Secret's single biggest contribution to the public imagination, the uplifting Miracle Bra. Further Reading: Schwartz, Mimi. "A Day in the Life of Victoria's Secret." Mademoiselle. Vol. 96, April 1990, 238-39. Woodman, Sue. "Victoria Reigns … Again." Working Woman. Vol.16, September 1991, 77. Workman, Nancy V. "From Victorian to Victoria's Secret: The Foundations of Modern Erotic Wear." Journal of Popular Culture. Vol. 30, Fall 1996, 61-73. (from : http://www.bookrags.com/history/victorias-secret-sjpc-05/ ) website victoria's Secret In 1998, management launched www.VictoriasSecret.com with little fanfare. The new media department was headed by Ken Weil, VP, a former department store buyer and veteran of anInternet professional services firm startup (Proxicom). The new media group of four rolled out the web site, whose stated goals were twofold: 1) to strengthen and support the Victoria’s Secret brand and 2) to exceed sales goals. Moving as aggressively online as they did in initially building the brand, Victoria’s Secret soon became a leader in online innovation. The web site launched on December 4, 1998 at 6 p.m. Its first order was from Littleton, Colorado at 6:20 p.m. for $39. This initial site cost less than $5 million to build and launch. The web site made a splash with the first large-scale real-time streaming video presentation of the company’s annual fashion show on February 3, 1999. Tickets to the fashion show, held annually in New York City, had historically been extremely hard to obtain, and that enthusiasm translated into incredible interest in the web cast. The company’s public relations blitz leading up to the show included TV spots, Internet banner ads, and print ads in major newspapers. A teaser advertisement during the first quarter of the Superbowl in January 1999 generated 1 million web site hits in 30 minutes. It was also the first “dot-com” commercial ever in a Superbowl. However, the company’s web site and the overall Internet infrastructure were unable to meet demand during the web cast, crashing networks throughout the United States. Nonetheless, the event’s huge press coverage earned it Brandweek’s Interactive Marketing Awards Best Marketing Event. The company invested heavily in back-end infrastructure and technology over the next year so that the next web cast from Cannes, France in May 2000 was able to handle 2 millionviewers, up from 1.5 million the year before. That year the web site earned top honors in eretailing performance, beating other well-known brands such as Amazon and PayPal.3 Then in 2001, the company introduced a combination of streaming video with interactive content and e-commerce, with a video image of supermodel Heidi Klum talking to customers about different swimsuit designs as they surfed through the web site and made purchases. Today the new media group is staffed with forty people, with an annual budget of over $10 million. Weil explained his build strategy as follows: “While we do partner as appropriate to build our web site infrastructure, we do a lot internally. For example, rather than licensing content management software from a company like Vignette, and having to spend a lot of time and money customizing it, we built one ourselves in-house. We call it ‘WENDI’ for ‘web enabled database for the Internet.’ We wrote the code ourselves for a couple hundred thousand. And we got 100% of what we wanted. On the other hand, when it came to putting dozens of servers online to support the live web cast, we partnered with Yahoo! Broadcast to do it—that saved us enormous effort and cost.” Victoria’s Secret web store and catalogue were managed as a single unit. From the beginning, the company tried to leverage its existing infrastructure like a distribution or call center to operate its web store. Both catalogue and online orders were filled out of its warehouse in Columbus, Ohio. “From the distribution standpoint, it’s the same model,” said Weil. The company also tried to link its different sales channels, adding the “order from catalogue” feature on its web site—shoppers entered an item’s catalogue number to find that item on the site. In addition, Victoria’s Secret segmented its audience demographically, and delivers specific messages while refining strategy throughout the campaign. The retailer timed its catalogue distribution with its e-mails. “Our goal is to provide the same message to the same customer at the same time,” said Weil. For instance, a customer whose purchase history indicated a preference for swimwear would receive an e-mail promoting a swimsuit sale and would get the most recent swimwear catalogue. This high-impact web presence translated into strong growth for the online division, whose sales grew from practically zero in 1998 to over $200 million in 2001. Performance metrics for the web included sales growth, the number of “new to file” customers (i.e., newly acquired customers), average order size, and purchase rates. this articles taken from site : Victoria's Secret Models Biography
