The Truth About Victoria’s Secret Mailing List Opt-Outs

Victoria’s Secret stopped printing its catalog in 2016. Yet they continue to send promotional post cards and other marketing mail.

That gap explains most of the confusion around Victoria’s Secret mailing list and how to remove yourself from it. People remember the catalog, so they assume the mail arriving now means their opt-out failed, or that the catalog secretly continued. Neither is true, and the real story runs through one of the more remarkable rise-and-fall arcs in American retail.

PaperKarma has been filing opt-out requests with Victoria’s Secret on subscribers’ behalf for well over a decade, so we can describe what their opt-out process actually does from primary-source correspondence. Start with why so many people wanted one in the first place.

Most catalogs annoy people. The Victoria’s Secret catalog embarrassed them.

It was, by design, the most provocative piece of mail in mainstream circulation: hundreds of millions of copies a year of lingerie photography, delivered unsolicited to shared mailboxes, family kitchen tables, and office mailrooms. Plenty of recipients enjoyed it. A steady share did not want it arriving where their kids sorted the mail, and that discomfort made it a perennial target of removal requests.

Recipients bothered on those grounds have long held an unusual legal tool. Since Rowan v. U.S. Post Office Department (1970) and the Pandering Advertisements Statute, any addressee can file USPS Form 1500 against advertising they consider sexually provocative, and the recipient’s judgment is final. Provocative catalogs are the textbook case.

We tell the full story of that law in 7 Times Obscene Mail Scandalized America.

The Victoria’s Secret catalog was one of the biggest direct-mail programs in America: hundreds of millions of copies a year, at a reported annual cost in the $125 to 150 million range. In 2016, Les Wexner’s L Brands killed it, along with the swimwear line, to refocus the business on core lingerie. The business press wrote the obituaries that spring.

The catalog’s end turned out to be the opening chapter of a larger unraveling. The brand had been built on a single aesthetic, the “Angel” fantasy (manifested in rail-thin, extremely-tall super models), and taste moved against it. Sales faltered from the mid-2010s as shoppers shifted to bralettes and sports bras, and US market share slid from 33 percent to 24 percent between 2016 and 2018.

Body-positive rivals took the ground the Angels gave up. Aerie, ThirdLove, and Lively grew on inclusive sizing and unretouched marketing, and Rihanna’s Savage X Fenty arrived in 2018 with runway shows that celebrated every body the old brand excluded.

The controversy then came to a head. Chief marketing officer Ed Razek’s dismissive 2018 comments about plus-size and transgender models drew industry-wide fallout and preceded his 2019 resignation; the televised fashion show was canceled that November.

As mall traffic declined, the company closed up to 250 stores in 2020, and L Brands spun Victoria’s Secret & Co. off as a standalone company in August 2021. The comeback era since (the show returned in 2024) is its own story.

Two things in that arc matter for your mailbox. First, the catalog is genuinely gone, but the mailing list survived the brand’s every phase: promotional postcards, coupon mailers, and seasonal offers still go out to it, with a maintained removal process at customer care. Your opt-out request now goes to Victoria’s Secret & Co., a separate company from Bath & Body Works with a separate list.

Second, the inclusive brands that won the decade are mailers too. Plus-size and comfort-first labels, from heritage names like Lane Bryant to the newer entrants, court customers with their own catalogs and promotional mail.

Whoever wins the lingerie wars, the mailbox loses, and any addressed catalog opts out the same way. Our guide to stopping catalogs covers the whole category.

Victoria’s Secret honors written opt-out requests, including requests filed by a third party such as PaperKarma on a customer’s behalf, and replies with specifics: what was removed and how long the change takes. One line from their customer-service correspondence explains more “failed” opt-outs than anything else written on the subject:

Two details in that correspondence do real work. The email list and the postal list are handled separately, on separate timelines (days for email, up to 90 days for print). And the delay is mechanical rather than evasive: promotional mail is printed and staged far in advance, so removal from the list cannot recall pieces already in the pipeline.

Those two details are the anatomy of almost every “my opt-out failed” story, for any mailer.

Put the pieces together and the confusion dissolves into a short map.

A postal opt-out with Victoria’s Secret removes your record from their house mailing file. Their own future mailings stop once the preprinted pipeline drains.

An email unsubscribe removes your address from their email program. It touches nothing on paper.

A Form 1500 prohibitory order is the special case: a federal order against a specific mailer whose advertising you deem provocative, with the deeper history covered in our obscene-mail history.

None of these touch the shared layer: the rented and cooperative databases (Epsilon’s Abacus co-op is the best-known) through which retailers source prospect addresses. Records there are suppressed through the co-ops’ own processes, separately from any single brand.

That layered structure is not a Victoria’s Secret quirk; it is how retail direct mail works everywhere, for the inclusive newcomers as much as the Angels. PaperKarma’s role is to be the catch-all for that labor: photograph any mailer and we file the right request with the right party, and keep filing as new senders surface.

To remove yourself from Victoria’s Secret, find the most current procedure at our Victoria’s Secret opt-out page. Quoting the customer number printed near your address makes any removal request faster and more reliable.

For the whole mailbox, PaperKarma is the one-photo version: snap the mailer, we handle the sender.