The popular women's brand had decided that after decades of focus on models, fashion, and high-quality glam, it would give in to the divisive politics of social justice. Almost overnight it went from focusing on sexiness and beauty to proclaiming that sexiness and beauty were just tools of the patriarchy to keep women down. They abandoned their world-famous "Angels" and began putting up transgender and hefty models front and center instead. 

In one fell swoop, Victoria's Secret murdered its own culture and replaced it with a strange one that not everyone appreciated. While they thought this would endear them to the greater populace, it only drove customers away and the brand's revenue began to drop like a rock. 

Victoria's Secret abandoned women. While they still sold clothing and accessories to women, the overall culture of the company turned its back on them by turning its back on femininity. As such, women turned their back on Victoria's Secret, effectively saying that if the company no longer wants to be a hub of feminine beauty and sexiness and instead focus on a perversion of femininity, then so be it. 

There were a lot of moving parts that got Victoria's Secret to that point, including going beyond VS's brass and into the investment firms that owned high amounts of stock in the company such as BlackRock and Vanguard. Suffice it to say that what these groups made was a series of bad business decisions. 

BlackRock and Vanguard might be very good at buying up stock and pressuring companies to behave in certain ways, but overall, the people who make these decisions aren't very good at business, and you can see it in the decisions made by companies they invest heavily in. 

Disney abandoned family-friendly entertainment to push the same social justice nonsense on the people, even going so far as to directly introduce feminist and LGBT concepts to kids. Bud Light tossed aside its "good ol' beer for good ol' boys" culture and began leaning into the transgender community, as did Target, only Target was pushing that stuff on kids to the disgust of the mothers that shopped there. 

They all abandoned their cultures, which is odd. Embracing your culture is "Good Business 101." 

Victoria's Secret is now course-correcting, which is good. They should embrace the fact that women like feeling sexy and beautiful because feeling sexy and beautiful gives them confidence. Sure, men like looking at sexy and beautiful women, but that doesn't mean that a woman wanting to look good is playing into the hands of the patriarchy. Even men like looking good from time to time but no one accuses them of playing to the matriarchy. 

Victoria's Secret should have kept providing women with what they wanted: confidence. That's what they truly sold at the end of the day, and they abandoned that culture at the behest of bad businessmen trying to push politics on people who just don't want it. 

And the decision has cost them billions. 

The lesson here is pretty evident. Corporations should never abandon their culture because doing so is abandoning your customers.