Having a daughter, I have been forced to go to the mall over the years. Thank God for the pandemic. I have never seen a man walk into victoria secret alone and 99.9% of the people going in are female. Women like to buy sexy underthings even the ones that don't look like malnourished runway models.
I mean ... I get it, what you are saying, but ... well, I've got three grown daughters, all in their 30s and 40s now ... plus an ex wife ... plus a current wife ... plus in-between marriages I dated a woman who was a manager sales person at the local VS in the mall here back in the days ....
In the 80s and 90s Gift Card sales accounted for a massive portion of VS' overall sales and VS targeted men to use gift cards as stocking staffers.
By the 2000s online sales was booming for VS to the point where their online AOL store, opened in 1996, was doing 10s of millions and was one of the first big specialty niche retailers to use the privacy factor to expand sales and fill a niche.... that was also when Internet port and sex toys sales boomed.
As of the 2010s with the collapse of the mall stores and the online retail boom ... VS has been doing more than 70% of their sales online. Men buy a lot of lingerie for their women ... but I agree, we have never been ones to shop with, or for, our women in stores when it comes to lingerie and unmentionables.
Just a fwiw Adam & Eve is very close to surpassing VS in online sales. Their toys, video, lingerie market is expanding faster than VS' is collapsing and I suspect THIS is the real reason VS is scrambling, desperately, to save their brand and find a new market.
Is it smart business .... yeah, it us up until the point where you [bleep] on your loyal existing fan base in the process.