Victoria’s Secret brand CEO Amy Hauk, who was also CEO of the company’s Pink brand, announced this week that she is leaving the company after less than a year on the job.
“Amy Hauk will be stepping down as CEO of Victoria’s Secret and Pink in order to spend more time with her family in Florida,” a spokesperson for the company said. “Amy has graciously agreed to a managed transition between now and the end of March. There are no plans to replace her role.”
The Daily Wire reported over the summer that the company did away with the iconic Victoria’s Secret Angels, replaced models with the likes of soccer star and liberal activist Megan Rapinoe, and even hired the company’s first biologically male transgender model — but, unsurprisingly, the wokeness has not paid off.
Victoria’s Secret fired 160 management-level employees over the summer at its Ohio headquarters in an effort to save the business $40 million.
Notably, sales at the lingerie company dropped by 4.5% to $1.5 billion earlier in 2022, the New York Post reported, adding that comparable sales from the same period in 2021 had declined by 8%.
“When we first announced our repositioning, we got a significant amount of mail from people who said, ‘This is terrible, you’re scorching the earth, you’re spoiling your brand. We love the way it was before. Why are you changing it?’” Victoria’s Secret CEO Martin Waters said, denying the changes hurt the company.
The company in 2019 hired its first transgender model, Valentina Sampaio, a biological male who identifies as female.
The move came as longtime VS chief marketing officer Ed Razek, who criticized the idea of hiring transgender models for the company’s fashion show, resigned.
“It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in the show?” Razek told Vogue in 2018, when asked about so-called inclusivity. “No. No, I don’t think we should. Well, why not? Because the show is a fantasy. It’s a 42-minute entertainment special. That’s what it is.”
And by 2021, the iconic VS Angels were dropped, replaced with a new promotional campaign called the “VS Collective,” The Daily Wire reported.
“Fashion is a business of change. We must evolve and change to grow,” CEO Leslie Wexner said in 2019, announcing the end of the Angels fashion show broadcast. “With that in mind, we have decided to rethink the traditional Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show.”
Rapinoe was tapped as one of the women to be in the new campaign, apparently based on her activism and achievements rather than her body or looks.
The soccer star notably slammed the company she teamed up with for its “patriarchal” and “sexist” past.
The marketing was “patriarchal, sexist, viewing not just what it meant to be sexy but what the clothes were trying to accomplish through a male lens and through what men desired,” she complained to The New York Times. “And it was very much marketed toward younger women.”
Rapinoe added that the VS Angels were “really harmful.”
Amanda Prestigiacomo contributed to this report.