Daniel Heaf

Heaf did not found Bath & Body Works; nobody really did. It was opened in 1990 as a beauty offshoot of Express inside Les Wexner's The Limited, and it spent its first thirty-one years as the quiet, profitable sibling of Victoria's Secret. By the time the two were separated in 2021, the company that kept the corporate shell, the debt and the cash flow was this one. Heaf is the first chief executive hired to run it who comes from outside both mall retail and packaged consumer goods. He spent his career in digital and direct selling: chief digital officer at BBC Worldwide, then senior vice president over digital, marketing, analytics and customer service at Burberry, then Nike, where he ran Nike Direct — a business the company says doubled to $22.3 billion over five years — and finally served as chief strategy and transformation officer.

He arrived in May 2025 in an abrupt transition. His predecessor, Gina Boswell, had been chief executive since 2022, had taken medical leave in March, and left in what a securities filing described as a termination without cause; the board's chair credited her with stabilising the business after the pandemic. Six months later Heaf gave investors a diagnosis that was unusually blunt for a new chief executive: the brand was 'not fulfilling its potential', every core category had declined in the quarter, total customer growth had stalled, and the company had put too much into collaborations, promotions and adjacent categories and too little into the body care, candles and soaps that built it. Some of its best-selling fragrances, each worth over $250 million a year, were sitting unmarketed at the side of the store. The shares fell by about a quarter in a day.

His plan, the Consumer First Formula, has four parts: return to product leadership in the core categories, spend to reignite the brand, widen the paths by which a customer can discover it, and take out $250 million of costs over two years to pay for the rest. The visible moves have been quick. Hair and men's grooming were dropped. The company, which had never sold through anyone else in the US, opened an authorised store on Amazon in February 2026 — partly to take back an estimated $60–80 million a year of grey-market sales already happening there — and then began selling at Ulta. A new brand identity launched with it. Buybacks were stopped so the cash could go to product and debt. The early evidence is mixed in the way turnarounds usually are: in Q2 2026 direct sales grew for the first time since 2021 and the new channels grew fast, while the stores, still three-quarters of sales, fell 5.4%. Heaf has said growth will not return until 2027. Whether the man who scaled Nike's direct business can make a mall brand thrive by selling through other people's shelves is the question this case leaves open.