Hillary Super powers Victoria's Secret to a record turnaround

On June 2, 2026, with nine days to go before shareholders voted on a board activists had spent the past year attacking — after openly questioning whether she was equipped to run a public company — Hillary Super answered with a number. Victoria's Secret posted first-quarter earnings of 0.60 dollars a share, nearly double the 0.32 dollars analysts expected, on net sales up 15% to 1.56 billion dollars. The stock surged 47% in a day — its biggest single-day gain on record — to a record closing high of 80.06 dollars. For a brand that had been written off as a relic, it was the loudest possible rebuttal.

Super, chief executive officer of the American lingerie company since September 2024, had described the job in those terms from the start. Recalling the moment to Fortune, she said she was "keenly aware of what the perceptions of the brand were, positive and negative." Her response was not caution. "That's the biggest transformation opportunity in retail," she said. "That was really appealing to me."

Background and early career

Super is, before anything else, a merchant. She earned a bachelor's degree in humanities from the University of Southern California and entered the industry in the late 1990s as a buyer at the American teen retailer Wet Seal, learning the trade on the shop floor rather than in a boardroom.

Over the following three decades she accumulated merchandising and operating roles across a roster of American chains, including Gap, Old Navy, American Eagle Outfitters, Ann Taylor and Guess, where she served as senior vice president for North America. That grounding shaped a conviction she still repeats: "It's hard to have an intuition about a category that you cannot put on your body."

Journey to leadership

Her ascent into the executive tier came at Urban Outfitters Inc., where she became global president and then global chief executive officer of the Anthropologie Group between 2019 and 2021, leading a turnaround of its womenswear and accessories business. From there she moved to the disruptor's side of the lingerie market, taking over as chief executive officer of Savage X Fenty, the inclusive brand founded by the musician Rihanna, in June 2023.

That made her appointment by Victoria's Secret in August 2024 a neat piece of irony: the incumbent hired the boss of its edgiest challenger to fix itself. Super succeeded Martin Waters, becoming the first woman to lead Victoria's Secret & Co as a public company. She inherited a business in distress; since spinning off from L Brands in 2021, the share price had collapsed from around 57 dollars to barely 20, weighed down by the founder's ties to Jeffrey Epstein, a marketing pivot widely derided as 'woke-washing', and tariffs.

Vision and strategy

Super's plan, branded 'Path to Potential', is recognisably a merchant's: recommit to the youth-focused Pink label, reassert authority in bras, grow the beauty, sport and swim lines, and shorten production lead times so the brand can react to demand. To execute it she restructured the organisation around three dedicated brand presidents.

The harder work has been positioning. Super has argued that some of the brand's recent decisions were driven by fear. "That natural human reaction is to want to stay out of controversy," she has said. Her fix was neither a return to the body-shaming spectacle of the 2000s nor more performative empowerment, but what she calls authenticity: keeping a focus on diversity, in her words, "without being performative, where we have to check every box," because that "lacks authenticity."

The commercial corollary is a 'promo-detox'. Rather than train shoppers to wait for the next markdown, Super is pushing full-price selling. "We are reducing promotions and markdowns and replacing promotional offers with compelling emotional messaging," she told analysts. "The result is a healthier, more brand-led business."

Impact and achievements

The turning point was theatrical. The Victoria's Secret Fashion Show had returned in 2024 after a six-year hiatus, and the October 2025 edition — its second since the revival — was where Super stamped her own vision on it. The model Jasmine Tookes walked heavily pregnant in gold wings among veteran Angels and new faces; the message, as one account put it, was the same wings in a different world.

The numbers followed. The first quarter of 2026 marked a fourth consecutive period of positive comparable sales, with Super citing double-digit growth in new-customer acquisition and Generation-Z shoppers returning to buy bras. The company raised its full-year adjusted operating income guidance to between 550 and 580 million dollars; over the prior 12 months the shares had nearly quadrupled. Super herself was characteristically measured, describing it to WWD as "a really nice quarter."

The recovery has been anything but smooth, however, and the headline figures flatter a turbulent ride. Through much of 2025 the stock sank to a 52-week low of about 17.53 dollars amid tariff fears, soft guidance, a security breach and the activist campaign, and most of the dramatic gains arrived in a single earnings-driven week, amplified by a short squeeze against the roughly 19% of shares sold short. Victoria's Secret still faces a roughly 90 million dollar net tariff impact on goods sourced from countries including Vietnam and Sri Lanka.

In the news

Super and her company are heavily covered, and rarely on neutral terms. Her repositioning was seized upon in some quarters as an 'anti-woke' victory, a framing she has consistently declined, casting the shift as a matter of authenticity rather than politics.

The most sustained story of her tenure has been the boardroom fight. The investment firm BBRC International, led by Australian billionaire Brett Blundy, built a stake of around 13% and, after the company adopted a poison pill in May 2025, launched a proxy contest urging shareholders to vote against the re-election of chair Donna James and a second director, Mariam Naficy, who subsequently chose not to stand. A separate activist firm, Barington Capital, had also pressed for a board overhaul during 2025, questioning Super's limited public-company experience.

The earnings beat strengthened her hand. On June 11, 2026 shareholders settled the contest decisively, re-electing all nine directors; James won more than 99% of the votes cast excluding BBRC, and over 83% including them. Tellingly, BBRC voted against every nominee but one — Super herself.

Personal dimension

Super is candid about her style of leadership. "I am very purposeful about the way I show up — 100% myself, usually unscripted," she has said, a contrast with the guardedness she diagnosed in the brand she took over. She is similarly unsentimental about the activist pressure: "You have to remember that none of these things are personal, that it's business."

Away from the company she lives in Palm Springs, California, with her wife, Michele Sizemore. Her self-assurance has reintroduced a confidence the brand had lost, useful ballast in a year that tested it.

For all the noise, Super frames the work as barely begun. Reflecting on having kept her executive team together for a full year, she told analysts that the contributions only start to compound once a team passes that mark. "We are early innings," she said — a deliberately modest claim from a chief executive whose first full lap has already turned one of retail's most doubted names into one of its sharpest comebacks.