The Strat · Episode 39 · Objects of Desire
27 August 2026 · 8 min
Bath & Body Works
Sell a cheap thing that smells like a memory, and rotate the range so fast the customer has to come back.
From the show notes
How did a brand build a whole empire on cheap soaps and candles?
Published as
39- How Bath and Body Works works
§01 — What to listen for
Bath & Body Works was launched in 1990 inside Les Wexner's retail empire, alongside Victoria's Secret, and outlived its sibling's glamour. Listen for the machine: a candle costing a few dollars to make, sold at a price the customer thinks of as a treat, with seasonal scents retired and reissued so that scarcity exists in a product that is anything but scarce.
The semi-annual sale is the tell. It is not a clearance, it is an event, and the company has trained a customer base to plan around it. When the two brands were separated in 2021, Bath & Body Works was the one carrying the profits. The episode is about how unfashionable a very good business can look.
The episode tells the story. The written case does what twelve minutes cannot: the business model, the moat, the statements, the valuation, and a verdict. Read the Bath & Body Works teardown.
§02 — The strategy, named
The mechanisms this episode demonstrates, in the same vocabulary the case library uses. Where a pattern has been written up, the claim is here; otherwise the tag is still in the queue.
- scarcity engineering
Deliberately supplying less than the market demands can be worth more than the revenue it forfeits.
- sell the meaning
The most durable consumer companies charge for what the product says about you, and treat the object itself as the delivery mechanism.
- franchise the operation
Tagged across the library; the write-up is in the queue.
§03 — Go deeper
Bath & Body Works
Narrow moat · Watch it
The founders
Les Wexner
“Wexner's gift was seeing what a store was actually for before its owner did. His failure was holding to a definition of the customer for a decade after she had changed — and the question of what he saw, and did not see, is now permanently attached to his name.”
Daniel Heaf
“A brand that only sells through its own doors eventually only reaches the people who already walk through them. Heaf's bet is that being easier to find matters more than being exclusive about where you are found.”
Your turn
Your customers can already buy you on Amazon — just not from you. Do you open your own store there, and give up the idea that Bath & Body Works is only found in Bath & Body Works?
Daniel Heaf · 2025
Verdict
Watch it
Two consecutive quarters of positive total sales growth in 2027, with stores flat or better rather than marketplaces carrying the whole gain, would tell me the core customer is coming back and I would move to own it. A third year of decline, or a cut to the dividend, would move me to pass.
§04 — More from Objects of Desire
How an ordinary object becomes a craze, and what the company does when the craze ends.
- 25LabubuLicense one artist's monster, hang it on a pop star's handbag, and let the resale market set the price.13 min
- 26Pop MartSell the box, not the toy. The customer is paying for the moment before they know what is inside.14 min
- 37JellycatRetire the designs, raise the prices, and turn a soft toy into something adults collect.8 min
- 38Victoria's SecretBuild the most valuable fantasy in retail, then watch the customer stop wanting it.8 min
- 40Hydro FlaskLet a subculture adopt you, sell the surface it decorates, and know the wave will pass.8 min
- 41StanleyFind the customer your hundred-year-old brand never noticed, and let her sell the cup for you.8 min
- 42OwalaEnter a saturated market late with one genuinely better feature and a colour drop calendar.7 min
- 43CrocsStop apologising for the product. Make ugliness the point, and sell the customisation.7 min