Victoria's Secret is using fragrance nostalgia and entertainment positioning to recapture shoppers who left during its long brand slide, according to Retail Dive. The strategy centers on two moves: reissuing heritage scents that defined the brand in the 2000s, and tying new launches to pop culture moments that feel adjacent to the nostalgia wave. The brand has seen fragrance outperform other categories in recent quarters, a reversal after years of share loss in the body-care aisle.
The mechanics are straightforward. Victoria's Secret brought back discontinued fragrances like Bombshell and Love Spell with minimal reformulation, promoted them as "back by demand," and paired the relaunch with user-generated content from shoppers who remembered the originals. Simultaneously, the brand launched new scents positioned around entertainment trends—think collaboration-style packaging that echoes the aesthetic of viral moments or trending shows—without paying for formal licensing. The nostalgia products anchored credibility; the entertainment products gave current shoppers a reason to post.
This works because it solves two problems at once. Nostalgia is a trust signal. A shopper who bought Bombshell in 2008 knows what it smells like and knows the brand delivered it before. That memory short-circuits the skepticism a lapsed customer feels when a struggling brand asks for another chance. The entertainment layer gives the nostalgia buyer a reason to stay: she came back for the scent she remembered, but the brand is now participating in the culture she cares about today. For the retailer, fragrance is a high-margin, low-return category with fast repurchase cycles, so reactivating even a modest cohort of lapsed buyers produces immediate lift.
The underlying mechanism is permission to return. Brands that lose customers often lose them quietly—the shopper doesn't announce she's done, she just stops going to the store. Nostalgia gives her a reason to come back without admitting she was wrong to leave. The product itself is the excuse. Entertainment positioning keeps her there by signaling the brand is no longer stuck in the past, even though the past is what brought her in.
The steal for a small physical-product brand is to identify your own discontinued or heritage SKU and pair it with a cultural moment your customer is already talking about. First, survey your past catalog. Find the product people still ask about in comments or DMs. Reissue it with no changes and no apology—just "back by request" in the product copy. Run that SKU as the hero in one email and one organic social post. Mention the year it launched and let past buyers tag friends who remember it. Second, launch a new SKU or colorway that borrows visual language from a trend your audience is already posting about—a show, an aesthetic, a meme format—but don't pay for a license. Use your own branding and let the resemblance be implied. Pair the two in the same campaign: one product is the anchor, one is the bridge. Cost is near zero if you already have the heritage SKU's formulation and can produce a small batch. The entertainment product can be as simple as new packaging on an existing base.
For a brand with more budget, test both products in paid social with interest-based targeting: retarget past purchasers with the nostalgia product, and target lookalike audiences who engage with the entertainment trend. Measure which cohort has higher LTV after 90 days. The nostalgia buyer should have better retention; the entertainment buyer should have better virality. Optimize spend accordingly and consider a subscription offer for the nostalgia SKU to lock in the reactivated customer.
The broader pattern is that nostalgia is a reactivation tool, not a growth tool. It brings people back, but it won't bring new people in. Entertainment positioning is the opposite: it attracts attention but doesn't build loyalty on its own. The combination gives you both. Run them together, in the same window, so the customer who returns for memory stays for relevance.
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