Pink Rolls Out HBCU Apparel

When Victoria’s Secret Pink visited Florida A&M University (FAMU) last fall to announce that the historically black university would be included in Pink’s roll out of its collegiate collection–the largest retail distribution that has ever been given to an HBCU collegiate apparel–the students responded by buying out every single item at the makeshift Pink pop-up campus store.

So it’s no wonder that Richard Dent, CEO of Victoria’s Secret Pink brand is expecting huge returns when Howard University, Hampton University, North Carolina A&T University, and Southern Louisiana University joins FAMU in the second phase of Pink’s collegiate collection, which already includes 33 other schools that were launched in June 2008.

“Students at Howard and FAMU went crazy for it after the initial press release and campus tour. It was one of the best sales from a campus pop-up store ever,” says Dent, noting that Pink preproduction samples with FAMU logos could be viewed on models but were not available for purchase. “The students wiped out the merchandise within a few hours. We had to go get merchandise from another store. We don’t know how much we could have sold because we ran out of product. I think that our experience so far will validate what people have been saying for many years–that African Americans are a strong and viable commercial entity that has been very underserved by major corporations.”

The Pink brand is geared toward young, college-aged women and includes t-shirts, sweatpants, sweatshirts, underwear, and other apparel. Its Historically Black Colleges and Universities apparel is now available at Victoria’s Secret stores near four of the universities and will be available online Dec. 23. (Hampton apparel will appear in stores mid-January because they submitted approval late, according to Dent.) Pink is in discussions to partner with the Tom Joyner Foundation and Black America Web to do a joint promotion for the HBCU line of clothing under the Pink brand.

Additionally, a portion of the royalties from the sale of the merchandise will go back to each school. The percentage varies from school to school depending upon royalty agreements.

Pink is attempting to form relationships with the schools by offering paid marketing internships and scholarships. .

“Through the rollout of this program it allows us to be in a position to give back to HBCUs,” says Dent, a graduate of Florida A&M University’s business

school and a member of the school’s board of trustees. He hopes the scholarships and internships will allow the company to give beyond what they are able to sell commercially,”  “That is the thing that gets me excited about [the launch]. It allows me to satisfy the commercial objective of my day job but also allows me to satisfy the passion that I have, which is giving back to HBCUs and influencing the education of young black women and men.”

Nevertheless, there are some who believed that Pink should have included HBCUs in the first roll out of 33 schools that occurred in June.

Last July, Amelia Reid, a sophomore at Howard University wrote a letter to Pink to express her dismay at the absence of HBCUs in the fall line. Reid, a Pink fan and an employee of Limited Brands, Victoria’s Secret parent company, received from the company a response that she described at the time as “sugarcoated” and dismissive.

Her disappointment materialized into a crusade to bring Pink into the black, and she launched a blog called “HBCU Ladies Wear Victoria’s Secret Pink Too” on Facebook in an effort to encourage people to write to the company and state their dissatisfaction with the HBCU oversight. Reid’s fan base grew significantly and her group has more than 700 members.

Dent contacted Reid through the Facebook group. “I reached out to her because she was a fan of the brand. I wanted her to know that we were not being insensitive,” Dent said at the time.

Dent said that the company had been in contact with many of the HBCUs months prior to Reid’s Facebook site and that she did not play a part in their decision to launch the line of HBCU apparel.

Tina Wells, CEO and founder of Buzz Marketing Group, believes that Reid played a larger role in getting the product to market than Dent will admit.

“I don’t think they anticipated that what she did would get so many young women passionate about this,” Wells says. “It goes to show the power of not just social networking but what happens when the beauty of the Internet puts communication in the hands of consumers to go direct to brands and say, ‘I want something to change.’”

“We didn’t know if this entire concept would work. So in order to test it we started with the schools that were the biggest, had the biggest appetite for collegiate apparel, the biggest revenue generation, and the biggest alumni population,” Dent says. “We weren’t being short sighted we were just seeing if the whole concept would work.”

After learning about the oversight, many black advertisers, including Bob Dale, CEO of Chicago-based R.J. Dale Advertising & Public Relations Inc., said in an interview in July that using school size as criteria for the first round automatically excludes minority populations without considering their spending potential.

“The African American consumer is brand loyal and will spend a lot of money on the brands they love,” Wells said. “It was a huge oversight on their part not to have [included HBCUs initially], but they are doing it now, and I think it is going to be really successful.”

Dent says in the future, the schools they choose won’t necessarily be the bigger schools but the ones that have the most interest. Even before Reid’s Facebook activism, the company set up the Pink Website to get input from customers about which schools to add next, Dent says.

“I think this is a seminal moment in retail for HBCUs and African Americans,” Dent adds. “I think our foray into this market will demonstrate not only to ourselves but to other companies that this is a very viable constituency that needs to be addressed more seriously by lots of retailers.”