Limited Brands

Limited Brands was the name carried for most of its listed life by the Columbus, Ohio retail group founded by Leslie H. Wexner as The Limited in 1963 — the parent, at various times, of The Limited, Express, Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, Abercrombie & Fitch, Lane Bryant and Henri Bendel. The company shortened its name to L Brands, Inc. in 2013. In August 2021 L Brands spun off Victoria's Secret & Co. and took the name Bath & Body Works, Inc. (NYSE: BBWI) for the remaining company, closing the Limited Brands chapter of the story.

Company Profile

This page's own record is a pointer: it states that the company changed its name to L Brands Inc. and directs readers to the L Brands page for the full profile. That brevity is itself the historical point — 'Limited Brands' was a holding-company name, and the substance always sat in the chains it owned, above all Victoria's Secret, bought for about $1 million in 1982 and built into America's largest lingerie retailer, and Bath & Body Works, founded in 1989.

The group's wider history explains why two financial pages exist for one lineage. Wexner's 1980s acquisition run — Lane Bryant, Henri Bendel, Lerner and Abercrombie & Fitch among them — made Limited Brands the defining American mall-retail holding company; the divestments and spin-offs that followed, ending with the 2021 separation, unwound it chain by chain until only Bath & Body Works remained under the same stock-market listing.

The range behind the name is women's specialty apparel, intimate apparel, personal care and accessories through its chains. Its customers are women in malls across the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Limited Brands in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Limited Brands with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Renamed — Limited Brands became L Brands, Inc., which on August 2, 2021 spun off Victoria's Secret & Co. and renamed itself Bath & Body Works, Inc. — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

The stock record matters because Limited Brands sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following the same women's specialty spending, recorded under the group's earlier name. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.

History in Brief

Limited Brands' own financial record is a name-change notice: the company became L Brands Inc., and its dated summaries are carried on the L Brands profile in this section. The lineage — The Limited (1963), Limited Brands, L Brands (2013), Bath & Body Works, Inc. (2021) — is set out in the profile above.