Roy Raymond

Raymond was a Stanford MBA working in marketing at Vicks when, by his own account, he went into a department store to buy lingerie for his wife and felt watched and embarrassed. The store he opened in June 1977 in the Stanford Shopping Center — with $40,000 from a bank and $40,000 from relatives — was designed to fix that: Victorian wood panelling, a boudoir feel, sales assistants who would help a man choose, and a catalogue so that he need not visit at all. The name was meant to evoke a nineteenth-century respectability with something underneath it. Within five years there were six stores, a mail-order operation and about $6M of sales.

There was also no money. Raymond had built a business with a real insight and a mistaken customer — the man buying for a woman is a narrow, occasional buyer — and by 1982 it was close to bankruptcy. Les Wexner, whose The Limited had visited the stores and seen what Raymond had not, bought the company that year for roughly $1M. Wexner re-aimed it at women buying for themselves, took it into malls, and within a decade it was doing over $1B. Raymond took his million into a children's retailer, My Child's Destiny, which failed in 1986 and cost him most of what he had. He founded a children's bookseller after that, which was also unsuccessful.

In August 1993, at forty-six, Raymond took his own life by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. The story is often told as a parable about selling too early, and I am wary of that framing: he sold because the business was failing, not because he undervalued it, and the version of Victoria's Secret that became enormous was not the one he built. What he did do was see that the presentation of lingerie was the product, and that a store could be designed around how a purchase feels rather than what it contains. That insight survived him. The customer he designed it for did not.