Decoding retail: Why male customers are prized at Victoria’s Secret

Business Insider has in interesting report on an interaction with a former Victoria’s Secret sales person who shares why men, and not women as one would expect, are the customers sales people prize the most at the store. 

Talking to Business Insider, the former Victoria’s Secret employee said that workers at her Chicago-area store were trained to treat male customers differently from female ones.

“The general feeling about men is that they would buy anything in order to get out of the store as quickly as possible,” the worker, who wished to remain anonymous, told us. “That means they would spend more money.”

While workers tell women about promotions like 5 for $25 panties, they are more likely to sell men full-priced merchandise, the worker said.

“Women are more value-oriented, and so we were encouraged to show them deals,” she said. “Men would buy a couple of $50 bras without questioning us because they felt awkward.”

The competitive landscape in stores meant that associates would often fight over male customers.

She goes on to share how Victoria’s Secret managers use headsets to communicate with workers and encourage them to make sales goals.

“We would always be reminded of how much we needed to sell, and so when a man walked in, it felt like a lucky break,” she said.

Interestingly, the feeling of discomfort that male patrons feel in a lingerie store, which the sales at Victoria’s Secret is now capitalizing on, was originally the problem Victoria Secret  founders aimed to solve. The founder of Victoria’s Secret created the company as a place where men could buy lingerie for their wives without feeling awkward.

The Victoria’s Secret page on Wikipedia says:

“Victoria’s Secret was founded by Tufts University and Stanford Graduate School of Business alumnus Roy Raymond, and his wife Gaye, in San Francisco, California on June 12, 1977. Eight years prior to founding Victoria’s Secret, Raymond had been embarrassed when purchasing lingerie for his wife at a department store. Newsweek reported him looking back on the incident from the vantage of 1981: “When I tried to buy lingerie for my wife,” he recalls, “I was faced with racks of terry-cloth robes and ugly floral-print nylon nightgowns, and I always had the feeling the department-store saleswomen thought I was an unwelcome intruder…Raymond studied the lingerie market for eight years before borrowing $40,000 from his parents and $40,000 from a bank to establish Victoria’s Secret: a store men could feel comfortable buying lingerie.”

Click this link for the complete article in Business Insider