Neil Fiske
43, CEO, Bath & Body Works
By Barbara Kiviat
Fall 2005 Style & Design
Forget red gingham. Bath & Body Works (BBW) is swapping its down-home
country décor for white-walled chic, making room alongside the bottles
of cucumber-melon body splash for Henri Bendel candles, Biotherm
moisturizer and Nars lip liner. "We want to change the perception of who
we are," says CEO Neil Fiske, who is directing the makeover in an effort
to double sales at the $2.2 billion company in five years, with plans to
create a retailer positioned to go head to head with everyone from
Sephora to the department-store cosmetics counter.
BBW, a 1,600-store division of Limited Brands, was sinking when Fiske
came onboard in 2003, but last year he managed to spike same-store sales
12%. His formula: break BBW away from its single-brand,
single-price-point heritage. The Harvard M.B.A. has been beefing up R&D,
stealing prestige execs from the likes of Neiman Marcus and LVMH and
swallowing entire firms, like home-fragrance maker Slatkin & Co. He has
initiated partnerships with American Girl, L'Occitane, New York City
celebrity dermatologist Patricia Wexler and others to develop
destination brands, ones that shoppers will have to trek to BBW to find.
In addition, he bought the intellectual-property rights to New York City
apothecary C.O. Bigelow and is introducing top-of-the-line C.O. Bigelow
stores nationwide—there's one so far in Columbus, Ohio, with six more
due this fall—as well as a line of Bigelow-branded products that will
be sold at BBW.
A soft-spoken Colorado native, Fiske is an unlikely character to rewire
BBW. The former political speechwriter had never held a merchant job
before being poached from the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) by the
Limited's resident icon and CEO, Leslie Wexner. The transition from man
behind the curtain to man onstage has been "a little terrifying, a
little exhilarating but incredibly rewarding and energizing," says
Fiske, whom Wexner got to know as a consultant—a relationship that pops
up repeatedly in Fiske's 2003 new-luxury tome Trading Up, which he wrote
with BCG colleague Michael Silverstein.
The message at the heart of the book—that today more people are willing
to spend on premium versions of items that used to be considered
everyday—is part of Fiske's philosophy at BBW. But Fiske isn't simply
trying to create the Starbucks of cold creams. He's convinced that
there's untapped opportunity in combining on one sales floor feel-good
products for "inner beauty" (bubble bath, candles) and change-inducing
items for "outer beauty" (makeup, antiaging serums). Traditionally,
those two sorts of goods were sold in separate shops, which Fiske posits
is because of the evolution of distribution channels, not because of the
way women think about beauty.
It's an ambitious plan for a man colleagues consistently refer to as
humble, but Fiske—who has been known to quote Vince Lombardi—is no
doubt in it to win.
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