Companies continue to make the same dumb political mistake.
They pander to radical leftists who despise them.
Now one company went “woke” and just got some bad news.
For some mind-numbing reason, Victoria’s Secret thought it was a good idea to upend its entire business model and pander to far-left radicals who hate capitalism and pretty much everything else.
The company substituted its legendary Angels for something called the VS Collective, which featured “woke” activists like U.S. Women’s National Soccer Team player Megan Rapinoe.
Victoria’s Secret also hired a transgender model.
Lo and behold, the company is now being forced to fire executives because the move was a financial disaster.
The Daily Wire reported that “Victoria’s Secret is firing a whopping 160 management-level employees at its Ohio headquarters, an effort to save the business $40 million. Notably, sales at the lingerie company dropped by 4.5% to $1.5 billion in the most recent quarter, the New York Post reported, adding that comparable sales from the same period last year have declined by 8%.”
The backlash was very predictable, but leftists do not care about reality.
They believe they can cram down their worldview on everybody else without any resistance.
Victoria’s Secret CEO Martin Waters shrugged off concerns about the change as nothing more than complaints from people “who don’t subscribe to the values that we subscribe to.”
But Victoria’s Secret’s values are beautiful supermodels in lingerie, or at least that’s what they used to be.
Waters said, “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?’
His dismissive tone was completely wrong.
At least one executive saw it coming, and he abandoned ship.
Longtime Chief Marketing Officer Ed Razek said in a 2018 Vogue interview, “It’s like, why doesn’t your show do this? Shouldn’t you have transsexuals in the show? … 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.”
He later resigned his position.
Rapinoe, one of the VS Collective, made one comment that proved why the change was such a horrible idea.
Rapinoe said to The New York Times that the company’s 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…And it was very much marketed toward younger women.”
Rapinoe added that the Angels were “really harmful.”
But she took the company’s money.
Rapinoe hated the company and had no affinity for the product, yet she is the audience Victoria’s Secret tried to appease.
Each individual company that destroys its brand in order to cater to a vanishingly small “woke” minority deserves to go broke as soon as humanly possible.