How the fashion industry is weathering its rightful reckoning

Want to develop a business strategy that connects with all sorts of women? Then stop making us feel like shit, writes Majbritt Rijs

Commercial failure is usually the outcome of complex situations overlapping to create a perfect storm, rather than the result of a single event or trigger. That’s likely true for the current decline of Victoria’s Secret.

Certainly the lingerie maker has battled criticisms of poor quality and customer service for some time. Indeed, operating in an increasingly-crowded, competitive market, where high street retail underperforms relative to digital channels, probably didn’t help matters for its stores.

Above all, though, Victoria’s Secret didn’t help itself by failing to consider current cultural and societal trends. Lingerie brands that have – such as Savage X Fenty and Heist – are cropping up all over the place to great public and consumer acclaim.

These new entrants listen to what customers want: comfort, inclusion, and empathy. In the age of online shopping, they offer free delivery and unlimited free returns policies, unconstrained by physical geography. In the context of a highly competitive marketplace, it’s madness for a lingerie brand to ignore what women want and continue to represent a fantasy defined by a very narrow male demographic

So what do women want? It’s not as complicated as some would have you believe. They want to see themselves and the people they know, love, and understand, represented in the world around them. Half of women in the UK (and a third of all Brits) want fashion companies to start showing real women and stop photoshopping them in their advertising and to embrace women of all sizes, shapes, ages and ethnicities.

Inclusion isn’t an optional add-on. Already 40 per cent of women say plus size shouldn’t be a niche market, while one in four actively want brands to embrace LGBTQ people, for example. [advert position=”left”]

Women want to set their own ideals and standards. But above all – quite frankly – women don’t want to be made to “feel like shit”. That is, without doubt, the most commonly occurring phrase that’s used when I speak to other women about how they feel about this subject. They’re made to feel like shit when they go shopping or watch TV; like shit when they watch a fashion show or, more generally, when they fancy reading anything except for a novel. It’s that simple. Don’t make us feel like shit.

And how do you do that? For a start, make products that fit all of us and allow us to be comfortable in our own skin – in all our glorious different shapes, sizes, and beings. Some of us have big bums, others big arms, others are 4”6.
For some of us, ‘nude’ means practically blue. For others, it’s dark. Some of us don’t have arms or legs – so develop adaptive ranges. Let us practice the religion we choose and help us express ourselves within those belief systems.

Once you’ve done that, celebrate us. And let us celebrate our differences. And celebrate men and remember that they too, love and want differences. Show us all in all our glories. Represent us all in your visual imagery in body-positive ways so that our daughters and sons can see that variety is normal. We want to see the old, the breastfeeding, the disabled, larger bodies, different ethnicities and religions.

Remember that some of us are still working through fluid gender identities and sexualities and help us on that journey by giving us access to women and men who have been through the same things, and who can inspire us to keep on trucking in the quest for self-validation and confidence. Respect these people by including them in the work you do, rather than disenfranchising them from ‘normal’ or telling them they aren’t good enough to fantasise about. There is no normal.

In the words of one of the amazing women who I have the honour of working with “confident is the new beautiful”.

So how do businesses do this, functionally? Fundamentally, business must support the belief that all women have beauty and are the directors of their own lives – through their product lines and their communication, imagery and tone.

Ah, but there’s the rub. Doing that authentically is bloody difficult at the best of times, but impossible if, as a business, your staffing and leadership policies don’t have inclusion and diversity at their heart. We all know we need to listen to our customers. But if we cannot understand them because our realities and experiences are so fundamentally different from theirs, then we are in no position to empathise with their realities or translate their needs into our actions.

This stuff works inside out. You want to connect with all kinds of women? You need all kinds of women in your business – making decisions and being listened to. You want to represent the LBGTQ community earnestly and fairly? Don’t exclude them, bring them in to help. Represent the world in your business and the world will be represented in what you do.

Victoria’s Secret was a business built in the seventies by men, for men who wanted to buy lingerie for their wives and girlfriends. And it worked. Then. But so did the Marlboro man, and we’ve since all accepted that he belongs in the Museum of Brands.

I don’t know the ins and outs of Victoria’s Secret’s people strategy – so I can’t comment on that. What I can say is that it behoves all fashion brands to accept that one, unattainable, male-generated view of what a woman should be simply isn’t fit for purpose anymore, and to change that we need to change the way in which we run our businesses and give power and decision making ability to different groups of people.

If some people wish to adhere to the seventies’ way of shopping that’s fine. Victoria’s Secret could try to make it its niche, but I suspect that if men want to buy pants for their wives or girlfriends, a lot of them are more likely to do so online in the comfort of their own pants than in a Victoria’s Secret store. Which I suppose could work in a different kind of way for the brand too.

Majbritt Rijs is managing director of The Numbers Lab

The research in this article was carried out on 1,000 British consumers and was conducted by The Numbers Lab on 22 – 23 March 2019.