Heritage
A house, in its own words
Roy Raymond founded Victoria's Secret in 1977 after struggling to buy lingerie for his wife in a comfortable setting. The original Stanford graduate student opened five lingerie stores designed to make shopping approachable for men, naming the brand after his wife Gaye's Victorian-era aesthetic preferences. Raymond sold the five stores to Les Wexner in 1982 for approximately $1 million. Wexner transformed the business, repositioning it as an accessible luxury lingerie brand and expanding aggressively into American shopping malls throughout the 1980s and 1990s. Wexner personally oversaw store design, filling locations with English floral wallpaper circa 1890, gilded fixtures, classical music, soft lighting, and sachets with old-fashioned scents. He insisted on elegant perfume bottles that resembled grandmothers crystal. The brand executed a landmark ten-page glossy advertising insert in November 1989, appearing in Elle, Vogue, Vanity Fair, and other major magazines to announce its expansion into toiletries and fragrance. By the early 1990s, Victoria's Secret had grown to 350 stores nationwide. Intimate Brands Inc. created the Intimate Beauty Corporation in 1998 specifically to manage and develop the bath, fragrance, and cosmetic products for Victoria's Secret. The company has since grown to over 1,000 stores across the United States. Victoria's Secret has maintained a presence in American malls for over four decades, becoming synonymous with mainstream glamour and accessible luxury.
Victoria's Secret approaches fragrance as an extension of personal identity and sensory experience. The brand markets scents as enhancing a woman's natural beauty through carefully blended notes that adapt to individual body chemistry. Rather than working with a single signature perfumer, Victoria's Secret collaborates with over 30 perfumers including Annie Buzantian, Yann Vasnier, Aurelien Guichard, Quentin Bisch, and Carlos Vinals, selecting specialists for specific fragrance concepts. This rotating roster allows the brand to cover diverse scent profiles from fresh aquatic to warm vanilla. The brand creates fragrances named for its clothing lines including Dream Angels, Very Sexy, Body, and Pink, as well as romance-themed and lingerie-inspired collections. Scents typically balance sweet, floral, and sensual characteristics, often built around musk as a foundational base. Victoria's Secret describes its fragrances as sophisticated and glamorous, designed for everyday wearability rather than special occasions alone. The brand emphasizes that each fragrance interacts uniquely with the wearer's skin chemistry to generate a personalized scent experience.