Curious about how far his idea could take him

Curious about how far his idea could take him, Wexner bought a U.S. map and a compass. He drew a circle to see everywhere he could get from Columbus in a day. Commercial airlines had just started using jets in the 1950s, significantly extending the radius of Wexner’s compass and bringing 70% of the U.S. population within two hours of headquarters. Leveraging his centralized location and jet travel, Wexner decided he could build a national chain. By 1973 Wexner was well on his way, with 41 stores selling $26 million worth of pants, skirts and blouses.

Having proven that narrowly focused stores appealed to female customers, he set about creating new companies, built in The Limited’s mold. He launched Express in 1980, targeting younger women with more colorful, casual clothes. And he also got curious about a small chain of lingerie shops he had seen in San Francisco called Victoria’s Secret. He never could find out much about them because their owner, Roy Raymond, clammed up every time Wexner started to ask questions. But in 1982 Raymond called up Wexner and finally wanted to talk. Raymond was on the verge of bankruptcy and was hoping Wexner would buy his six stores before the sheriff took them. “I literally flew out that afternoon and met him in the evening and bought the business,” says Wexner. “I didn’t know anything about it.”
His financial advisors had warned him that $1 million was too much for the business. Wexner let Raymond run it under The Limited’s umbrella for a while, and his deputies rolled their eyes as it bled millions more. When they examined the financials more closely, they realized the only way Raymond had been making any money before the acquisition was from a secondary business selling mail-order sex toys. Wexner fired Raymond and moved headquarters to Columbus. (Raymond’s next business went bankrupt in 1986, he got divorced in 1993, and he jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge later that year.)

Wexner got to work restructuring Victoria’s Secret. “I had never seen a lingerie specialty store,” Wexner says. “But then when you look at it from a business point of view, it wasn’t really a business.” Wexner threw The Limited’s operational know-how behind the business and cleaned up its broken-down finances. “Roy just didn’t get that piece,” admits his former wife, Gaye Raymond. “There weren’t a lot of stringent limits and boundaries on spending or planning.”

In typical fashion, Wexner didn’t dream up the idea for America’s first lingerie chain; he just followed his curiosity, played with the concept for a few years, and ended up thinking about it in a new way. The same sort of experimentation was behind the launch of a low-key lingerie fashion show in 1995. “The idea just came from trial and error,” he says. “I can’t tell you how many different kinds of print media or electronic media or just things we tried.”
Lover Fashion sexy club wear
What he ended up with is one of the greatest coups in marketing history. Instead of Victoria’s Secret paying for television time, CBS reportedly pays Victoria’s Secret over $1 million a year for the rights to air what is essentially an hourlong infomercial. Last year Taylor Swift belted out songs from a glittering runway while audience members like baseball superstar Robinson Cano and Maroon 5 lead singer Adam Levine gawked from the front row and millions more watched on TV.

The spectacle–really more panty party than fashion show–attracts more viewers than all other fashion shows combined. The impact multiplies on social media, where the models are heavily followed. Aggregate its models accounts, and Victoria’s Secret has 33 million Twitter followers, more than Twitter itself.

LOTS OF THINGS have changed in the 51 years since Wexner founded his business, none more so than Wexner himself. At the start of his career, he was working 90-hour weeks, leaving no time for anything else. Ask him what his favorite band or movie was from the 60s and 70s, and he shakes his head. “I don’t remember much about movies or music or what was going on,” he says. “By the time I’m in my early 30s, I’m, by most measures, enormously successful. And the more successful I was in terms of business achievement and accumulation of income, the more ineffective, unhappy I was.”

As the company grew, people around him started to tell him he was a great leader. Wexner didn’t see it. He wasn’t tall. Wasn’t outgoing. Wasn’t particularly well-educated. Wasn’t even sure what a leader really was.