Intimacy Intervention: ‘Men Only Want Me For Sex! What’s Wrong With Me?’
Passionate Living Coach Abiola Abrams gives love, dating and self-esteem advice on the CW's Bill Cunningham Show and all over the web through her hit web series AbiolaTV. Now she wants to help you keep things spicy and fresh between the sheets. Are you in need of an intimacy intervention? Just ask Abiola!
Dear Abiola,
Men only want me for sex. What is wrong with me?
I'm a 22-year-old female. I know my self worth and I love me some me. I am an attractive girl with a model finish. I’m not cocky though; but I am stating this because I don’t fully understand why men only see me for sex.
I don’t dress overly sexy nor is my body language sexy. I know this for a fact because I don't feel comfortable in tight, short clothing.
Only guys with girlfriends or wives approach me, which I find weird. I know I am worth so much more. It’s not like I am a lazy, sexy, party girl so this has me confused. I am a working professional at a top bank.
Guys come after me like crazy but after I get to know them it’s just sex they want. I've never had a boyfriend and I want to grow with someone and have fun; not only casual sex. Help!
Signed,
Confused and Wants a Serious Relationship
Dear Sacred Bombshell,
Thank you for your letter. Your dilemma is that men see you as “Miss Right Now" and you want to be seen as “Miss Right.” You want them to invest their emotional currency with you while they only your sexual currency.
We are about to get all metaphysical up in here, sis. Sexual attraction is both an art and a science. Being sexy goes way beyond the shortness tightness of your clothes.
Let’s learn from two sexual icons. Of her scandalous stage show, Josephine Baker said, “I wasn't really naked. I simply didn't have any clothes on.” In other words, it was about energy not visuals. Marilyn Monroe once was invisible walking down a city sidewalk. No one recognized the megastar until she turned to a friend and said, “Watch this.” She shifted her energy from Norma Jean Baker to Marilyn Monroe and suddenly was mobbed with crazy fans. Again, energy.
You need to learn the shades of your own sexual power; and how to turn your divine feminine sexy energy on and off.
Here are your Goddess Action Steps:
1. Evolve your self-perception. You say that you are an attractive “female.” Try seeing yourself as a beautiful woman instead. The word female belittles the totality of your power. Any old animal can be male or female. These titles describe genitalia and scientific body assignments. Only a human being can be a woman. Own it -- and see yourself as more than just a “female.”
2. Become more discerning and better be able to read people. Who are these men you are spending company with? Where are you meeting them? Are you meeting them all in the club? On the street? At work?
Education, wealth, and age are not markers of maturity. However, where and how a man spends his time is. You’re still very young but as you want (and deserve) more, you may want to seek out a different social circle of men. For example, you might want to ask your friends and family to introduce you to worthy individuals. You can also meet men in settings where you share common interests, classes, meetups, conventions, or religious events.
3. Cut off the casual sex.
If you are casually casting your pearls to handsome swine, the time has come to close the gate. If you were looking for casual sex and it was working for you, I’d tell you to be safe and have fun. But this is not what you’re looking for.
You don’t say when you’re realizing that these men only want you for sex. If it is after you’ve casually had sex with them, that is too late. Make a commitment to yourself that you will date whomever you chose and not have sex until you are in a relationship.
There are some women who only want casual sex -- and if that works for them great. There are some women who forgo all sexual intimacy until formal commitment - if that works for them, great!
Let’s talk about the Tao of Feminine Sexuality No blame, no shame. If you want a Barack, you have to be a Michelle. if you want to be treated like a lady, you have to act like one. Do you -- with personal honor and integrity.
4. Learn to love the non-physical aspects of yourself.
The world is a mirror. This means that our experiences often reveal what we truly believe about ourselves. You are clearly gorgeous. Now, I want you to go deeper to discover what else you bring to the table in a relationship.
Start with a list of everything that you love about yourself. What are the things you value in yourself beyond the physical? What do you love about your mind, your personality, your spirit, and your emotional intelligence?
When you begin to see yourself as more than just a pretty face and a hot body, your suitors will too.
5. Learn to turn your sexual energy on and off.
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I had a one-on-one empowerment coaching client complain that every man she met online wanted to have sex. When we delved deeper, it turned out that in her first or second conversation she was already talking about sexual positions and preferences. Then once the sex genie was out of the bottle, she couldn’t get back to a place of where the man was just getting to know her.
Once you get to know your prince you can let your freak flag fly. Once he knows who you are as a whole person (and vice versa), you can regale him with promises that curl his toes. Until then, save the sexy talk for a later date.
6. What’s your flirtation factor?
You could be unknowingly sending out the wrong signals. We have all done that. You also may be naturally flirtatious. Many of us are. Don’t downplay your personality. Just become more aware of how others are receiving your attention.
7. Check your own availability.
A few years ago I had to face an ugly truth. Only unavailable men approached me because I was secretly unavailable. I say secretly, because I didn’t know it. I had been hurt and didn’t want to be hurt again so I had a sword and shield up. How open and available is your heart to a real relationship with a real man?
There are great, fully available men who approach us but they are invisible to us because we are not into them. What are the qualities that you are looking for? Do these qualities say ‘I am a superficial player’? Or ‘I am a commitment-minded adult’?
You are not broken or wrong, gorgeous one. You just need to weed out these boys and add a layer of wisdom to your sexiness. Your king is waiting for you.
Passionately yours,
Abiola
Abiola Abrams
Abiola Abrams is the founder of The Bombshell Academy blog, online school and web series over at AbiolaTV. Follow her on Twitter to continue the discussion about this week's hot topic, and then email her your burning questions now. Anything you send will be posted anonymously, promise.
Tuesday, September 29, 2015
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Crayola changed the name of its "flesh" crayon to "peach" back in 1962 - but Google "lingerie" in 2014 and you'll find the name "nude" still overwhelmingly refers to light-peachy-beige.
So a simple thing like wearing a white shirt to work isn't simple for a woman whose nude isn't "nude."
Do you wear white, and know it'll show? Or a close-as-you-can-get beige or brown ??? and know it will still show?
Nubian Skin, a new London-based lingerie/hosiery business that has just opened online, is creating quite the splash with its answer: Four shades of lingerie and hosiery that range from a golden caramel to a deep brown with just a hint of rose.
Maybe even cooler? Founder Ade Hassan has keyed each to mainstream makeup lines' foundation colors. So if you wear Mac's NW47 or Bobbi Brown's Warm Walnut, Nubian Skin's Cinnamon is the shade for you. If you wear Bobbi Brown's Golden or Bare Minerals in Warm Tan or Golden Tan, consider Caramel. (Your mileage may vary, of course. But it's more help than we've seen anywhere else.) Other shades are Berry, the darkest, and Cafe au Lait, the lightest.
Lashawnda Becoats, of Charlotte, N.C., calls the foundation-match idea "fantastic" _and the business overall "a really exciting thing."
Becoats, recently named editor of Pride Magazine in Charlotte and a woman who's written about fashion and lifestyle for years, says, "Most people probably don't think about it.
"You wear white under white and black under black. But to have something and to not worry 'Hey, can you see my underwear under this?' would be fantastic ... Every woman of color can definitely relate." (Yep: Hollywood's Thandie Newton and Kerry Washington have both posted about the place, even before sales began: "am excited!" and "Awesome," respectively. And Charlotte women say they've seen Nubian Skin all over Facebook.)
Becoats says she hasn't found anywhere locally that carries a color appropriate for her.
Charlotte fashion blogger Kenya Hunter, a Laurens, S.C., native who works in corporate IT during the day, says the lack of skin tone range "has always been a frustration," and she doesn't buy locally.
Since the rise of business-casual office dressing means many women don't feel required to wear hose, she says, hosiery hasn't been the problem it was five years ago. But the lingerie?
"I've made do ... by finding something that was 'close enough' and going with it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. (If) I could select something that would match my skin tone, I'd be open to making that investment. That's the way you have to look at it."
Prices range from about $50 to $60 for bras (which run 30B to 36DD/E, with more sizes promised) and $16 to $25 for briefs, etc. That's not too far outside mainstream upscale lingerie prices - but shipping to the United States tacks on roughly $25.
Hassan told British website Black Ballad she had worked in investment banking and finance before launching this company, at age 30: "When wearing clothes, especially in a professional environment, a large proportion of women's tops are sheer. When you are in that context you want to be taken seriously and not worrying if someone can see your black bra strap."
Says Becoats: "We've (been) missing out on a whole market of women who have needs but who have taken for granted that they have had to fit into the status quo. When you create a market that allows those women to see themselves, they're going to move toward that market.
"I'm going to look into it, so I can get out of wearing only black underwear!"
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So a simple thing like wearing a white shirt to work isn't simple for a woman whose nude isn't "nude."
Do you wear white, and know it'll show? Or a close-as-you-can-get beige or brown ??? and know it will still show?
Nubian Skin, a new London-based lingerie/hosiery business that has just opened online, is creating quite the splash with its answer: Four shades of lingerie and hosiery that range from a golden caramel to a deep brown with just a hint of rose.
Maybe even cooler? Founder Ade Hassan has keyed each to mainstream makeup lines' foundation colors. So if you wear Mac's NW47 or Bobbi Brown's Warm Walnut, Nubian Skin's Cinnamon is the shade for you. If you wear Bobbi Brown's Golden or Bare Minerals in Warm Tan or Golden Tan, consider Caramel. (Your mileage may vary, of course. But it's more help than we've seen anywhere else.) Other shades are Berry, the darkest, and Cafe au Lait, the lightest.
Lashawnda Becoats, of Charlotte, N.C., calls the foundation-match idea "fantastic" _and the business overall "a really exciting thing."
Becoats, recently named editor of Pride Magazine in Charlotte and a woman who's written about fashion and lifestyle for years, says, "Most people probably don't think about it.
"You wear white under white and black under black. But to have something and to not worry 'Hey, can you see my underwear under this?' would be fantastic ... Every woman of color can definitely relate." (Yep: Hollywood's Thandie Newton and Kerry Washington have both posted about the place, even before sales began: "am excited!" and "Awesome," respectively. And Charlotte women say they've seen Nubian Skin all over Facebook.)
Becoats says she hasn't found anywhere locally that carries a color appropriate for her.
Charlotte fashion blogger Kenya Hunter, a Laurens, S.C., native who works in corporate IT during the day, says the lack of skin tone range "has always been a frustration," and she doesn't buy locally.
Since the rise of business-casual office dressing means many women don't feel required to wear hose, she says, hosiery hasn't been the problem it was five years ago. But the lingerie?
"I've made do ... by finding something that was 'close enough' and going with it. Sometimes that works, sometimes it doesn't. (If) I could select something that would match my skin tone, I'd be open to making that investment. That's the way you have to look at it."
Prices range from about $50 to $60 for bras (which run 30B to 36DD/E, with more sizes promised) and $16 to $25 for briefs, etc. That's not too far outside mainstream upscale lingerie prices - but shipping to the United States tacks on roughly $25.
Hassan told British website Black Ballad she had worked in investment banking and finance before launching this company, at age 30: "When wearing clothes, especially in a professional environment, a large proportion of women's tops are sheer. When you are in that context you want to be taken seriously and not worrying if someone can see your black bra strap."
Says Becoats: "We've (been) missing out on a whole market of women who have needs but who have taken for granted that they have had to fit into the status quo. When you create a market that allows those women to see themselves, they're going to move toward that market.
"I'm going to look into it, so I can get out of wearing only black underwear!"
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The billionaire who single-handedly changed how America shops has an inner sanctum as enigmatic as he is: the corner of a nondescript office building in Columbus, Ohio, across the road from a garbage dump, behind a security gate festooned with “Do Not Enter” signs. While the communal spaces are properly blinged-out with pink walls, lacy bits of lingerie and a big screen rolling endless tape of nearly naked supermodels, the chamber itself is a confused mess of binders and papers straight out of The Absent-Minded Professor. Nearly every surface is devoted to knickknacks–a 3-foot-long pencil here, an Ohio State Monopoly board there–or stacks of books.
The irony seems lost on Leslie “Les” Wexner, who built Victoria’s Secret, Pink, Express and The Limited into one of America’s alltime great retail fortunes. “When I was a kid, before my first store, they talked about stores as theater and retail as theater. It still is,” says the 77-year-old, attired casually in gray slacks and a blue oxford. “Retailing is a free form of entertainment.”
Yet this impresario shuns the spotlight. He’s the CEO of a large publicly traded company, yet he rarely speaks on earnings calls. One of the legends of his industry, yet he almost never speaks to the press. Wexner is so elusive that most assume the brains of Victoria’s Secret is surely some female visionary in the mold of a Sara Blakely or Tory Burch, or else a Hugh Hefner lothario type.
In reality Wexner–net worth: $6.2 billion, good enough to make No. 80 on The Forbes 400–is an introspective guy who has been questioning his every move for decades. His professional success results from a compulsive restlessness and dissatisfaction that steer him away from the herd. His first great insight was focusing on a few products (The Limited) at the apex of the department store age. He expanded nationally when the biggest retail stores were regional concerns. When most competitors rushed overseas, he held back. And in his biggest score of all, he reimagined the lingerie business as a wholesome enterprise that could thrive next to the food court and the multiplex, rather than the boudoir and the peep show.
Being a chronic contrarian is not easy. About to open his first store at age 26, Wexner woke up screaming every night. In his 30s he was a distraught millionaire, searching for a purpose greater than adding more zeroes to his net worth. The money came easier than the fulfillment, and by his 50s he was running more than a dozen businesses, five of them doing sales of $1 billion or more. Then, characteristically, he decided he had it all wrong and from 1998 to 2007 spun off or sold The Limited, Limited Too, Abercrombie & Fitch, Express, Lane Bryant and Lerner New York. He kept Victoria’s Secret, betting that the brand’s emotional resonance would support higher margins in an increasingly commoditized apparel space.
“What I worry about is a fear that you won’t have the idea or that you have figured it out wrong,” he says.
Wexner now owns the only three bra labels that matter: Victoria’s Secret, Pink and La Senza. Together they make up 41% of America’s $13.2 billion lingerie market. Their next closest competitor, if you can call it that, has a 1% market share. Bath & Body Works, the world’s largest beauty retailer, is his, too. He holds all of them under his thriving parent company, L Brands.
The Forbes 400 Book
Find out how the .001% made their fortunes in these 20 unforgettable tales of America’s richest people since 1982.
L Brands’ 2,949 wholly owned stores sell over $11 billion worth of bras, panties, soaps and other such products a year. Same-store sales have increased in each of the last 19 quarters. Brilliant marketing, especially the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show , accounts for some of this success. But in the disembodied era of e-commerce, hands-on customer service matters, too. Shoppers can buy quality T-shirts and pants from a multitude of different retailers, both online and off, but bras are different. Eighty percent of women in America wear the wrong-size bra. Computers can’t measure them for a proper fit, and employees at, say, Target won’t. But Victoria’s Secret workers do, and women pay the company back with loyalty. Ninety-nine percent of L Brands stores turned a profit in 2013, and Victoria’s Secret’s operating margins are 17%, triple the industry average. In defiance of e-commerce evangelists, he opened 50 new locations in the last year. His online business is not the focus, but it’s doing just fine, accounting for $1.5 billion of his annual sales.
Those numbers have translated into huge gains on the stock market, where L Brands shares have shot up 11% in the last year, twice as much as the S&P retail index. Over the last five years L Brands shares have returned nearly 500%, more than almost any other retailer in North America (the two exceptions: Under Armour and G-III Apparel). “They’ve done such an unbelievable job dominating the market,” says Wells Fargo retail analyst Paul Lejuez. “I can’t think of anyone who has been more successful.”
And there are billions more waiting for Wexner outside of America’s borders. Victoria’s Secret is already famous around the world, not because of its stores but because of its scantily clad models, who hail from every continent except Antarctica. Viewers tune in from 192 countries around the world to watch the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on TV each year.
Yet Wexner has barely begun expanding Victoria’s Secret stores worldwide. “Our priority is our domestic business, but we could see that our international business could be as big or even bigger,” Wexner says. In 2012 Victoria’s Secret expanded its wholly owned stores beyond North America, opening two locations in London. Five more stores have since popped up in the U.K., and together they’re already grossing over $100 million.
Wexner is also taking the brand into Asia and the Middle East through a new
franchise model, with virtually no risk for L Brands. Wexner has more than 600 franchised stores around the world. L Brands invests no capital in the stores and is virtually guaranteed to turn a profit from day one, charging an outsized royalty of between 10% and 15%. The opportunity is big enough that, for the first time ever, Wexner is moving the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show outside of the United States, taking it to London this December. “They’re only scratching the surface of international expansion,” says Matthew McClintock, retail analyst at Barclays, who envisions a $10 billion business overseas within a decade. “It’s a gold mine.”
WEXNER’S REFLEXIVE questioning drew him into retail in the first place. After getting his undergrad degree at Ohio State in 1959, he dropped out of its law school and returned home to help around the small family store, Leslie’s, named after him. When his father left on vacation, Wexner tried to solve the riddle of why his dad had always worked so hard but never made any money. He found a stack of invoices, and on a piece of scrap paper began tallying the cost and profit from each item in the store.
The numbers added up to a counter-intuitive conclusion. Although big-ticket items like dresses and coats looked like they had huge margins, they actually made no money because they sat on racks forever. All of the store’s profit came from less glamorous items like shirts and pants. Wexner’s parents returned home to find that their son, with nearly no professional experience, thought he could run their store better than they could. Wexner told his dad to take out the coats and replace them with more blouses and pants. His dad told him to get a job.
He did, founding a rival store to his father’s with a $5,000 loan from his aunt in 1963. He put a limited selection of clothing in the store–only the shirts and pants that flew off shelves–and named the place The Limited. Wexner signed a lease for a second store before even opening his first, convinced that if the idea worked in one store it would work in another. Before selling a single shirt, he already owed his landlords $1 million. He had nightmares every night and eventually started getting belly pains. The doctor told him he was too young to have a stomach ulcer, but the X-ray clearly showed the hole that fear had eaten through his stomach.
He made $20,000 of profit in his first year, twice as much as his dad’s best. The secret was his focus on only a few products, a revolutionary idea at the time. Wexner says that Steve Jobs (or presumably it was Jobs–”what’s-his-name from Apple,” Wexner says off-handedly) was one of many to credit The Limited boss with inventing specialty retail. “Probably did,” he shrugs.
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.”
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.
So he started reading, searching for lessons. After work, he would tear through biographies of American icons like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John D. Rockefeller. What he saw was that the greatest leaders had perspective, understood society–and didn’t work 90-hour weeks. “If you keep your nose to the grindstone, you don’t have any nose,” says Wexner.
He began searching for hobbies, on a billionaire’s budget. He wanted to see more of the world, so he commissioned a yacht worth some $200 million that could take him anywhere he wanted and named it, appropriately, Limitless. He went to art museums, picked out a few favorite artists like Degas, De Kooning and Picasso, and began amassing one of the largest art collections in the world. Just as he limited his inventory in his stores, he eventually homed in on Picasso, buying as many of his works as possible (FORBES estimates his collection is worth $1 billion). He also liked cars, particularly Mercedes, Jaguars and Ferraris, and is said to have bought 100 or so initially, later settling on just red Ferraris built in the 1950s to mid-1960s. “That’s how I think,” Wexner says. “It’s kind of like panoramic vision and then zooming in.”
Wexner’s most enduring obsession is his quest to define leadership. He plows through 100 books a year–all nonfiction, mostly biography–getting recommendations from friends like Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough. He claims to have read every book on George Washington written in the last 100 years. “I find him just amazingly fascinating,” Wexner says. “George Washington founded the country–and he thought he could do better.”
After 51 years as CEO of his company, is Wexner thinking about retirement? He smiles, having known the question was coming. His wife first asked him to retire a decade ago, and investors have been asking him about succession plans ever since. (Wexner’s four children, the eldest of whom is still in college, are too young to run the business.) But as usual, he doesn’t give an absolute answer. Instead, he reaches to the papers sitting on his lap and hands me a copy of the poem “Youth,” written by an early-20th-century writer named Samuel Ullman.
“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind,” we read in silence. “Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul … Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living.”
Wexner looks up and grins. “If you start painting yourself into a corner, life starts shutting down,” he says. “There is always hopefully a next.”
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The irony seems lost on Leslie “Les” Wexner, who built Victoria’s Secret, Pink, Express and The Limited into one of America’s alltime great retail fortunes. “When I was a kid, before my first store, they talked about stores as theater and retail as theater. It still is,” says the 77-year-old, attired casually in gray slacks and a blue oxford. “Retailing is a free form of entertainment.”
Yet this impresario shuns the spotlight. He’s the CEO of a large publicly traded company, yet he rarely speaks on earnings calls. One of the legends of his industry, yet he almost never speaks to the press. Wexner is so elusive that most assume the brains of Victoria’s Secret is surely some female visionary in the mold of a Sara Blakely or Tory Burch, or else a Hugh Hefner lothario type.
In reality Wexner–net worth: $6.2 billion, good enough to make No. 80 on The Forbes 400–is an introspective guy who has been questioning his every move for decades. His professional success results from a compulsive restlessness and dissatisfaction that steer him away from the herd. His first great insight was focusing on a few products (The Limited) at the apex of the department store age. He expanded nationally when the biggest retail stores were regional concerns. When most competitors rushed overseas, he held back. And in his biggest score of all, he reimagined the lingerie business as a wholesome enterprise that could thrive next to the food court and the multiplex, rather than the boudoir and the peep show.
Being a chronic contrarian is not easy. About to open his first store at age 26, Wexner woke up screaming every night. In his 30s he was a distraught millionaire, searching for a purpose greater than adding more zeroes to his net worth. The money came easier than the fulfillment, and by his 50s he was running more than a dozen businesses, five of them doing sales of $1 billion or more. Then, characteristically, he decided he had it all wrong and from 1998 to 2007 spun off or sold The Limited, Limited Too, Abercrombie & Fitch, Express, Lane Bryant and Lerner New York. He kept Victoria’s Secret, betting that the brand’s emotional resonance would support higher margins in an increasingly commoditized apparel space.
“What I worry about is a fear that you won’t have the idea or that you have figured it out wrong,” he says.
Wexner now owns the only three bra labels that matter: Victoria’s Secret, Pink and La Senza. Together they make up 41% of America’s $13.2 billion lingerie market. Their next closest competitor, if you can call it that, has a 1% market share. Bath & Body Works, the world’s largest beauty retailer, is his, too. He holds all of them under his thriving parent company, L Brands.
The Forbes 400 Book
Find out how the .001% made their fortunes in these 20 unforgettable tales of America’s richest people since 1982.
L Brands’ 2,949 wholly owned stores sell over $11 billion worth of bras, panties, soaps and other such products a year. Same-store sales have increased in each of the last 19 quarters. Brilliant marketing, especially the annual Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show , accounts for some of this success. But in the disembodied era of e-commerce, hands-on customer service matters, too. Shoppers can buy quality T-shirts and pants from a multitude of different retailers, both online and off, but bras are different. Eighty percent of women in America wear the wrong-size bra. Computers can’t measure them for a proper fit, and employees at, say, Target won’t. But Victoria’s Secret workers do, and women pay the company back with loyalty. Ninety-nine percent of L Brands stores turned a profit in 2013, and Victoria’s Secret’s operating margins are 17%, triple the industry average. In defiance of e-commerce evangelists, he opened 50 new locations in the last year. His online business is not the focus, but it’s doing just fine, accounting for $1.5 billion of his annual sales.
Those numbers have translated into huge gains on the stock market, where L Brands shares have shot up 11% in the last year, twice as much as the S&P retail index. Over the last five years L Brands shares have returned nearly 500%, more than almost any other retailer in North America (the two exceptions: Under Armour and G-III Apparel). “They’ve done such an unbelievable job dominating the market,” says Wells Fargo retail analyst Paul Lejuez. “I can’t think of anyone who has been more successful.”
And there are billions more waiting for Wexner outside of America’s borders. Victoria’s Secret is already famous around the world, not because of its stores but because of its scantily clad models, who hail from every continent except Antarctica. Viewers tune in from 192 countries around the world to watch the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show on TV each year.
Yet Wexner has barely begun expanding Victoria’s Secret stores worldwide. “Our priority is our domestic business, but we could see that our international business could be as big or even bigger,” Wexner says. In 2012 Victoria’s Secret expanded its wholly owned stores beyond North America, opening two locations in London. Five more stores have since popped up in the U.K., and together they’re already grossing over $100 million.
Wexner is also taking the brand into Asia and the Middle East through a new
franchise model, with virtually no risk for L Brands. Wexner has more than 600 franchised stores around the world. L Brands invests no capital in the stores and is virtually guaranteed to turn a profit from day one, charging an outsized royalty of between 10% and 15%. The opportunity is big enough that, for the first time ever, Wexner is moving the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show outside of the United States, taking it to London this December. “They’re only scratching the surface of international expansion,” says Matthew McClintock, retail analyst at Barclays, who envisions a $10 billion business overseas within a decade. “It’s a gold mine.”
WEXNER’S REFLEXIVE questioning drew him into retail in the first place. After getting his undergrad degree at Ohio State in 1959, he dropped out of its law school and returned home to help around the small family store, Leslie’s, named after him. When his father left on vacation, Wexner tried to solve the riddle of why his dad had always worked so hard but never made any money. He found a stack of invoices, and on a piece of scrap paper began tallying the cost and profit from each item in the store.
The numbers added up to a counter-intuitive conclusion. Although big-ticket items like dresses and coats looked like they had huge margins, they actually made no money because they sat on racks forever. All of the store’s profit came from less glamorous items like shirts and pants. Wexner’s parents returned home to find that their son, with nearly no professional experience, thought he could run their store better than they could. Wexner told his dad to take out the coats and replace them with more blouses and pants. His dad told him to get a job.
He did, founding a rival store to his father’s with a $5,000 loan from his aunt in 1963. He put a limited selection of clothing in the store–only the shirts and pants that flew off shelves–and named the place The Limited. Wexner signed a lease for a second store before even opening his first, convinced that if the idea worked in one store it would work in another. Before selling a single shirt, he already owed his landlords $1 million. He had nightmares every night and eventually started getting belly pains. The doctor told him he was too young to have a stomach ulcer, but the X-ray clearly showed the hole that fear had eaten through his stomach.
He made $20,000 of profit in his first year, twice as much as his dad’s best. The secret was his focus on only a few products, a revolutionary idea at the time. Wexner says that Steve Jobs (or presumably it was Jobs–”what’s-his-name from Apple,” Wexner says off-handedly) was one of many to credit The Limited boss with inventing specialty retail. “Probably did,” he shrugs.
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.”
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.
So he started reading, searching for lessons. After work, he would tear through biographies of American icons like George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John D. Rockefeller. What he saw was that the greatest leaders had perspective, understood society–and didn’t work 90-hour weeks. “If you keep your nose to the grindstone, you don’t have any nose,” says Wexner.
He began searching for hobbies, on a billionaire’s budget. He wanted to see more of the world, so he commissioned a yacht worth some $200 million that could take him anywhere he wanted and named it, appropriately, Limitless. He went to art museums, picked out a few favorite artists like Degas, De Kooning and Picasso, and began amassing one of the largest art collections in the world. Just as he limited his inventory in his stores, he eventually homed in on Picasso, buying as many of his works as possible (FORBES estimates his collection is worth $1 billion). He also liked cars, particularly Mercedes, Jaguars and Ferraris, and is said to have bought 100 or so initially, later settling on just red Ferraris built in the 1950s to mid-1960s. “That’s how I think,” Wexner says. “It’s kind of like panoramic vision and then zooming in.”
Wexner’s most enduring obsession is his quest to define leadership. He plows through 100 books a year–all nonfiction, mostly biography–getting recommendations from friends like Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David McCullough. He claims to have read every book on George Washington written in the last 100 years. “I find him just amazingly fascinating,” Wexner says. “George Washington founded the country–and he thought he could do better.”
After 51 years as CEO of his company, is Wexner thinking about retirement? He smiles, having known the question was coming. His wife first asked him to retire a decade ago, and investors have been asking him about succession plans ever since. (Wexner’s four children, the eldest of whom is still in college, are too young to run the business.) But as usual, he doesn’t give an absolute answer. Instead, he reaches to the papers sitting on his lap and hands me a copy of the poem “Youth,” written by an early-20th-century writer named Samuel Ullman.
“Youth is not a time of life; it is a state of mind,” we read in silence. “Years may wrinkle the skin, but to give up enthusiasm wrinkles the soul … Whether sixty or sixteen, there is in every human being’s heart the lure of wonder, the unfailing child-like appetite of what’s next, and the joy of the game of living.”
Wexner looks up and grins. “If you start painting yourself into a corner, life starts shutting down,” he says. “There is always hopefully a next.”
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