Pink spent a year getting ready to step back into the spotlight, taking over “halftime” at the Victoria’s Secret fashion show, livestreaming on YouTube Sunday.
Launched as Victoria’s Secret’s younger sister in 2002, the brand always targeted the college crowd, but suffered from inattention as its parent company struggled.
Now Victoria’s Secret & Co. is bouncing back under chief executive officer Hillary Super — and Pink is helping to propel one of fashion’s most high-profile comebacks having received some TLC, a more distinctive positioning and its first new bra style in three years.
Pink also played host at halftime during the show last year, but it was something of a fire drill, according to brand president Ali Dillon, who joined in May 2025 after a stint as president of Alex Mill.
Despite having just five months to really prepare, the brand managed to really turn up at the 2025 show, featuring Twice just as the group was basking in the success of “KPop Demon Hunters” on Netflix.
This year, Dillon has had a full year to prepare and was feeling ready in a before-show interview.
“We really have our own voice in the fashion show,” Dillon said. “It’s really an incredible break that happens midshow where Pink gets to infuse the playful, bold and irreverent spirit that the brand really represents. We have a bigger stage this year, but it’s the same fun kind of free spirit personality.”
While many of the specifics are kept under wraps beforehand, this year’s outing for Pink will feature models Gabby Moura, Yoon Young Bae, Jordan Leftwich and more.
“We have incredible creators, we have athletes,” Dillon said. “We just have a really amazing culturally connected crew of girls and women, and we’re so excited to showcase them.”
Under Dillon, Pink has really refocused on the 18- to 24-year-old crowd, which marks a return after the brand spent a decade growing older with its customer.
“It was really only servicing a 40-year-old,” Dillon said. “Then all of a sudden the 40-year-old’s like, ‘I don’t want that anymore.’ So I think we’re very careful about also saying that we’re not just going after Gen Z, because in a couple of years, Gen Z may not be my customer anymore — actually, Gen Alpha is [going to be] my customer.”
To build with that young, just-out-of-the-nest customer, Pink is looking to appreciate the full scope of who she is.
“We really want to connect with her in a way that feels like it’s fun,” Dillon said. “We get that energy that we know that she loves. Our girl is messy and she’s a little chaotic and we say we love her for that. We’ve got her back. We know this is a really dynamic time in her life. She’s going through a ton of different changes. Her day may begin one way and it ends a way that she completely did not expect. We’re there for all of that. We’re there for that chaos, we’re there for that fun, we’re there for the mischievousness and the energy that she brings and we celebrate her.”
Last year was the brand’s best in a decade.
“We’ve continued to deliver strong comparable sales in the first half,” Dillon said. “Q2 was a high-single-digit growth. It was our fifth consecutive quarter of growth. We’re gaining new customers specifically in the age demo that we’re going after.”
As part of the world’s largest intimate apparel company, which has about a 20 percent market share in North America, Pink has a lot of assets to work with, including a presence in 700 stores and social channels that have woken back up.
“We’re very social first and that’s incredible,” Dillon said. “That’s where this girl’s spending her time. Influencers have become a big part of our strategy. When I started, the comments on our social media were — crickets. There was not a lot of feedback.”
Now the brand is getting “a ton of connection,” which Dillon attributed in part to how well Pink has worked to understand and sync up with its target customer.
“We opened a SoHo [New York] store in May of this year — it was really important to us to be in SoHo,” Dillon said. “That is the center of culture, especially for this customer. When I started, our head of real estate said, ‘What can I do? What are you thinking about?’
“I want a store in SoHo,” she told him.
When he said, “OK, we’ll look at SoHo,” Dillon narrowed it down: “‘Let me be clear. I want a store on Broadway, specifically between Spring and Broome. That is where I want to be because that’s where that customer is.’ We opened that store on the one-year anniversary of my starting.”
The door puts Pink near Aerie, American Eagle, PacSun, Brandy Melville, Princess Polly, Abercrombie and more.
“This is where this customer is spending her time, and we really wanted to open that store to reintroduce the brand to the customer,” Dillon said.
Just over half of Pink’s business is in intimates; the rest is apparel, a category the brand is working to build back.
“There’s not many brands who can outfit her from the moment that she wakes up in the morning until the end of the day, completely head to toe for every single thing that she needs in her life as a singular brand,” said Dillon, adding that Pink checks all the boxes.
There’s consumer power in the combination.
“Our intimates, they earn her trust,” she said. “They also drive frequency, they build loyalty. She comes back to stock up on underwear. That is just the nature of that business. But we also have done things in the bra franchises that have been really exciting this past year. So we launched a brand new franchise, our marshmallow collection. It’s the first time we launched a new bra in three years.
“The reason we launched it is because we listened to the customer — 57 percent of her bra drawer was a comfortable bra, a really soft, comfortable bra, and we didn’t have it,” Dillon said.
That the brand hadn’t had a new bra in such a long time and that it’s now preparing for a prime spot in the runway show speaks volumes about the direction of the business now.
“Pink was underutilized,” Dillon said. “It had lost that part of its DNA. It had become bland. It didn’t have newness and innovation. It didn’t have that spirit of fun. It wasn’t a focus. We weren’t connecting with culturally relevant talent to bring the brand to life.
“Our growth [now] is sustainable — absolutely,” she said. “We have a really strong plan for how we’re going to continue to build.”