Fashion’s chasing growth through tech, Sephora shelves, and an AI voice—but which of those bets still looks expensive by Christmas? You’re listening to Fashion Business Daily. Today, brands are opening up, leaning on software, and trying to figure out who eats the cost when margins get thin. First, Victoria’s Secret is remaking its tech bench—and the timing says plenty. Here's DTC Dispatch:
Victoria’s Secret & Co. is rebuilding its tech leadership team. The lingerie retailer named Adrian Butler as Executive Vice President and Chief Technology Officer and added Gerri Martin-Flickinger to its board of directors, the company announced this week.
Victoria’s Secret hired Foot Locker CTO Adrian Butler and added former Starbucks CTO Gerri Martin-Flickinger to the board; her seat takes effect September 14. After the BBRC proxy fight, this feels less like routine succession and more like shareholder pressure turning into an operating plan. Two tech chiefs won’t magically make a bra fit better or a campaign feel less focus-grouped. Butler’s Foot Locker background is useful if he can make the site, inventory, and stores behave like one business. Q1 net sales hit $1.56 billion, up 15% year over year. Great headline number. But the tech case has to show up in conversion, repeat purchase, and loyalty as the rebrand hits tougher comparisons. Martin-Flickinger helped build Starbucks Mobile Order and Pay and Deep Brew; that’s a serious consumer-tech résumé. Victoria’s Secret should borrow the convenience, sure—just don’t turn intimacy into another app-notification factory. From Glossy:
On September 3, Byredo will launch at 24 U.S. Sephora stores and online. Sephora locations like the Aventura Mall in Miami, Newport Beach’s South Coast Plaza and the New York City Soho store will carry a “curated selection” of Byredo’s scented products, like perfumes and candles, along with its full body mist line.
Byredo at 24 Sephoras on September 3—yeah, I’m watching that closely. The Wooster Street ritual and an Aventura Mall gondola are very different ways to meet a scent. It’s a narrow launch: 24 U.S. doors plus online, so Puig is keeping the initial exposure controlled. But Sephora gets the full body-mist line and exclusive retail access to Alto Astral. That’s a meaningful product allocation, not a token placement. The phrase to audit is “curated selection.” Watch which perfumes and candles land there, and whether the shelves become a permanent full-line runway. That’s when the aura can get mall-fast. Sephora is clearly pushing further into higher-end fragrance, and Byredo is betting new customers will enter through a body mist, then trade up. The brand already has boutiques, department-store counters, and duty-free distribution; this adds a big discovery channel with very different economics. Glossy, with Zofia Zwieglinska:
The designer is considering adding an AI-generated version of his own voice to his online shopping experience, allowing customers to hear from Chavarria while browsing products and asking questions. “At some point, you may even hear my voice talking,” Chavarria said in an interview. “It would sound just like me and speak just like me.”
Willy Chavarria’s Swap rollout brought in 1,000-plus orders, a $249 average order value, and a company-reported two-times revenue lift. The virtual try-on has receipts. An AI Willy talking in your cart? Whole separate experiment. Exactly. Chavarria says he’s still figuring the voice feature out—and calls it “very weird” himself. Those commercial figures are for the launch and its above-site-average VTO conversion, not a designer-voice chatbot. I get why he’s considering it. McKinsey says emotional connection now leads luxury desirability in the U.S. and China. A designer’s voice carries the brand; if it starts answering wrong or sounding canned, you’ve put the brand’s personality on customer service duty. Chavarria’s version makes sense: let another voice handle routine shopping questions, and save his for selected moments. Measure conversion, order value, and sell-through—and keep the simulated intimacy clearly bounded. Here's Scott Thompson at Retail Tech Innovation Hub:
Causee, a new not-for-profit online marketplace that turns everyday buying and selling into charitable giving, is launching this autumn, with education charity Pepala announced as its founding charity partner. The UK-based venture will initially focus on secondhand fashion, enabling people to buy and sell pre-owned items, while also giving small businesses and crafters a platform to sell their products.
Causee wants secondhand fashion to fund charity without hitting you with the sad little checkout prompt. Fine. But a resale marketplace lives or dies on the clothes people actually want to list—and whether buyers trust the transaction enough to come back. The setup is clear: buyer-protection fees cover Causee’s costs, and remaining surplus goes to its charity partners, starting with UK education nonprofit Pepala. It launches this autumn in secondhand fashion, with small-business and crafter listings alongside it. Mixing pre-owned fashion with craft sellers can make the app feel less like a sharp resale destination and more like a very worthy internet flea market. Causee has to make the browse feel good before the mission gets any credit. Founder Tanweer Khan points to a UK sustainable-fashion market projected to reach $2.2 billion by 2033. Causee puts the charitable model inside the transaction. That’s more concrete than another sustainability campaign. Here's Modern Retail:
“We’re seeing a lot of margin erosion in the business,” said one attendee, the founder of brands in the fashion and CPG spaces. “From supply chain pressures to raw material costs to shipping costs, there’s all this pressure from the margin standpoint. We are in a space where pricing is really sensitive. We don’t want to risk our prices just to make up the margin.
Modern Retail’s dinner gets at the operating picture behind all those strategy decks: tariffs, raw materials, shipping, and third-party fees all cutting into margin at once. The executives are anonymous under Chatham House Rules, so this is useful texture, not a sector-wide scorecard. The telling quote is, “we don’t want to risk our prices” just to fix the math. Customers notice when a brand keeps nudging prices up while the garment, bottle, or service stays exactly the same. One founder raised prices a little. Another caps promotions at 10% for email capture and loyalty perks. It’s a narrow lane: protect full-price selling without teaching customers to wait for a markdown. “Rearranging the furniture” because Google and Reddit changed again—yeah, that’s the modern brand P&L. Everybody wants efficiency; meanwhile, the platforms have put a tollbooth on the road to the customer. If your team needs a daily briefing on competitors, your market, or your beat, Lantern makes private versions of shows like this for your whole team, delivered to a private podcast feed. Learn more at lantern podcasts dot com slash briefings, with a 14-day free trial.
Looking ahead: Byredo launches at 24 U.S. Sephora stores and online on September 3. Gerri Martin-Flickinger’s Victoria’s Secret board seat takes effect September 14, and Causee is slated to launch its UK secondhand-fashion marketplace this autumn.
Links to every story are in the show notes. Take a look at the pieces that caught your attention. That’s Fashion Business Daily for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.