Victoria’s Secret has confirmed that all nine of its director nominees have received backing from three independent proxy advisors ahead of the company’s annual shareholder meeting on 11 June. Institutional Shareholder Services, Glass Lewis and Egan-Jones have each recommended that shareholders vote in favour of the slate, including independent chair Donna James. The company framed the endorsements as confirmation that its board is best positioned to keep executing its “Path to Potential” strategy.
The vote matters because the board is under pressure. Activist investor Brett Blundy, whose vehicle BBRC International holds a stake of roughly 13 percent, has spent years campaigning for a board seat. According to the company’s own filings, the board evaluated and rejected his candidacy twice, most recently in November 2025, citing what it described as serious reputational, legal, conflict-of-interest and governance concerns. Blundy responded with a proxy contest urging shareholders to withhold votes from two directors. The proxy advisors have now sided with the company.
And on the financial scoreboard the board has a real case to make. Victoria’s Secret has reported a total shareholder return of more than 150 percent since CEO Hillary Super was appointed in August 2024. Its most recent quarter beat both top- and bottom-line guidance, with double-digit growth across Victoria’s Secret, Pink and beauty, and across stores, digital and international. The company is projecting around 6.7 billion dollars in revenue this year. By the numbers, the turnaround is genuine.
So this is, by any conventional reading, a good-news corporate story: a recovering brand, a vindicated board, a defeated activist. But it is worth being honest about what this story is and what it is not. It is a story about governance and scale. It is not a story about why Victoria’s Secret nearly died in the first place — and that deeper story is the one that actually tells you where the intimates market is going.
The number the proxy fight does not mention
Here is the figure that matters more than the 150 percent shareholder return, and it appears nowhere in the proxy statements. According to Euromonitor data reported by Business of Fashion, Victoria’s Secret held nearly 32 percent of the US intimates market in 2013. By 2019 that share had fallen to 17.7 percent. The brand lost roughly half its market dominance in six years — not to a single giant competitor, but to a swarm.
That collapse is the real context for everything happening now. A boardroom fight over two director seats, a proxy advisor’s recommendation, a quarter that beat guidance — these are the mechanics of stabilising a business that fell off a cliff. They are not the same thing as understanding why it fell. And the why is the part the affiliate-funded fashion press tends to skip, because the answer implicates the entire mass-scale model that the proxy fight is fighting to preserve.
Victoria’s Secret did not lose half its share because its board was structured wrong. It lost it because the product stopped matching the customer. For years the brand sold a single narrow idea of the body — a fantasy calibrated to a runway show — while bra sizes topped out where a large part of the actual market began. The average American woman wears around a size 16. The brand’s core range did not seriously address her. That is not a governance problem. That is a product-and-worldview problem, and no proxy vote can fix a worldview.
Who actually took the share
The brands that absorbed Victoria’s Secret’s lost share are the most instructive part of the story, because of what they have in common. They were small, they were specific, and most of them started with almost nothing.
Business of Fashion made the structural point plainly: underwear is a low-barrier-to-entry category. An entrepreneur with a Shopify account and the right point of view can enter it. Parade launched and sold 85,000 pairs of underwear within sixteen weeks, built on size inclusivity, gender expression and an influencer network rather than a televised angel-wing spectacle. ThirdLove built a catalogue of more than eighty bra sizes, including half sizes and asymmetric fits, and refused to retouch its models. Savage X Fenty made inclusivity the entire premise rather than a side capsule. A long tail of independent and craft labels — la fille d’O in Belgium, ColieCo in Portugal, Hopeless Lingerie in Australia, made-to-order and locally manufactured — took the customers who wanted something verifiable, fitted and honest.
None of these individually dethroned Victoria’s Secret. Collectively they fragmented its monopoly. As one Gartner analyst noted to Business of Fashion, the disruptor space is a revolving door — one challenger fades as another arrives. But that is precisely the point. The threat to a mass-scale incumbent was never a single rival of equal size. It was a fragmented field of small, focused, legible alternatives, each serving a real customer the giant had ignored. This is the exact pattern this publication keeps documenting across every category: the swarm of specialists beats the monolith.
What the turnaround actually is
Read in this light, Hillary Super’s strategy is more revealing than the headline numbers suggest. The turnaround is built on what she has called the “heartbeat” of the business — bras — and on reasserting authority in the brand’s genuine core competence rather than chasing the fantasy that broke it. The physical-store overhaul, a smaller and brighter “Store of the Future” format with modernised fitting rooms, is an admission that the old cathedral-of-spectacle model is over. The growth came not from one demographic but from breadth across categories and channels.
In other words, the recovery is working to the precise extent that Victoria’s Secret has stopped behaving like the 2013 version of itself and started behaving a little more like the focused, fit-led, less-spectacular brands that took its share. It is borrowing the disruptors’ logic. That is the honest read on a 150 percent shareholder return: it is the market rewarding a giant for learning, late, what the small brands knew first.
It is also worth being honest about the fragility underneath the figures. A meaningful portion of the raised profit guidance reportedly rests on favourable tariff assumptions that could reverse. The customer making under fifty thousand dollars a year is, in the CEO’s own framing, choosing whether to participate with the brand at all. A turnaround that depends on macro tailwinds and the discretionary spending of a squeezed consumer is a turnaround that is still, in the CEO’s words, in its early innings.
Why the activist fight is a sideshow
The proxy contest will be resolved on 11 June, and the proxy advisors’ backing makes the board’s position likely to hold. But it is worth seeing the whole dispute for what it is from the customer’s point of view: a fight over who controls the steering wheel of a large, mature, mass-scale ship. Whether Brett Blundy gets a board seat changes nothing about the structural reality that the intimates market has permanently fragmented and that the mass-scale model no longer commands a third of it.
This is the pattern across legacy fashion at large. The boardroom drama, the activist campaign, the creative-director shuffle, the quarterly beat — these generate news cycles and shareholder returns and proxy filings. They are real. But they operate one full level above the thing that actually decides the long arc, which is whether the product matches a customer who now has more honest, more specific, more verifiable alternatives than at any point in the history of the category. The mainstream press covers the boardroom because the boardroom issues press releases. The structural shift issues no press releases at all.
What this means for ordinary readers
You do not need to take a position on a proxy vote to extract the useful lesson here. The lesson is about how a category actually changes, and it applies to how you shop for intimates — or anything else.
The brand that lost half its market did not lose it to a bigger brand. It lost it to a fragmented field of smaller, more specific makers who served real customers better. So when you are buying a bra, the structurally smart move is the same one this publication recommends across every category: look past the largest, loudest incumbent to the focused specialist that actually fits the thing you need fitted.
The four honest sourcing channels apply to intimates with unusual clarity. The vintage and resale market is the weakest channel here, for obvious hygiene and elasticity reasons — this is the one category where new genuinely beats secondhand. But the second channel is exceptionally strong: small independent and craft-based lingerie labels, many made-to-order, many locally manufactured, many size-inclusive by design, are the best place most readers can spend. The accessible-luxury tier — the fit-led specialists built in the last decade specifically to serve the sizes and shapes the giant ignored — earns its price through genuine fit competence. Selective mainstream players, now including a reformed Victoria’s Secret in its core bra range, are worth considering only where the fit and construction actually deliver. And the mid-tier mass market — the seven-pairs-for-a-fixed-price commodity underwear with no fit point of view — remains the universal skip.
The honest takeaway
Victoria’s Secret won its proxy fight on the numbers, and the recovery under Hillary Super is real. But the recovery is real precisely because the brand stopped trusting the mass-scale fantasy that cost it half its market and started borrowing the logic of the small, focused, fit-led brands that took that share. The boardroom drama is the visible story. The structural story — a category permanently fragmented in favour of specialists who actually serve the customer — is the one that decides the next decade, and it is not on the ballot on 11 June.
The deeper principle is the same one that runs under every story worth telling about this industry. Scale used to be the moat. A third of a market, a televised spectacle, a single dominant idea of the body. That moat drained. What replaced it was a swarm of smaller makers each doing one specific thing honestly and well, and a customer with the literacy to find them. You are that customer. The next move is yours.
Frequently Asked Questions
What did the proxy advisors actually recommend for Victoria’s Secret?
Three independent proxy advisory firms — Institutional Shareholder Services, Glass Lewis and Egan-Jones — recommended that shareholders vote in favour of all nine of Victoria’s Secret’s director nominees, including independent chair Donna James, ahead of the annual shareholder meeting on 11 June. The recommendations strengthen the board’s position against activist investor Brett Blundy’s proxy contest.
Who is Brett Blundy and what does he want?
Brett Blundy is an investor whose vehicle BBRC International holds a stake of roughly 13 percent in Victoria’s Secret, making it one of the largest shareholders. He has campaigned for years for a seat on the board. The company says it rejected his candidacy twice, citing reputational, legal, conflict-of-interest and governance concerns, after which he launched a proxy contest urging shareholders to withhold votes from two directors.
Is the Victoria’s Secret turnaround working?
On the financial measures, yes. The company has reported total shareholder return of more than 150 percent since CEO Hillary Super’s appointment in 2024, a recent quarter that beat guidance with double-digit growth across categories and channels, and projected revenue of around 6.7 billion dollars this year. The recovery rests partly on favourable tariff assumptions and discretionary consumer spending, so it remains, in the CEO’s own words, early innings.
Why did Victoria’s Secret lose so much market share in the first place?
Its US intimates market share fell from nearly 32 percent in 2013 to 17.7 percent by 2019, according to Euromonitor data. The cause was structural rather than governance-related: the brand sold a narrow idea of the body and a limited size range while a fragmented field of smaller, size-inclusive, fit-led independent labels — many launched cheaply online — served the customers it ignored.
Where should I buy lingerie instead of the largest mass-market brand?
Intimates is the one category where new beats vintage, so the strongest channel for most readers is small independent and craft-based lingerie labels, many made-to-order, locally manufactured and size-inclusive by design. Fit-led accessible-luxury specialists built specifically to serve a wider range of sizes are also strong. Selective mainstream brands are worth considering only where fit and construction genuinely deliver. The point-of-view-free commodity mid-tier remains the category to skip.
