Les Wexner

Les Wexner: The Blizzard That Built a Retail Empire

Legend has it that Les Wexner discovered the business model that would make him a billionaire by studying his parents' struggling clothing store ledgers during an Ohio blizzard, and noticing that the slow-moving, high-priced coats bled money while the cheap, fast-turning items quietly made it. He built an empire on that one insight, then spent the last years of his career explaining to investigators, journalists, and a documentary crew how he had handed control of his fortune to Jeffrey Epstein for more than a decade without, he insists, ever knowing what Epstein was doing with it.

A Peddler's Son in Dayton

Leslie H. Wexner was born September 8, 1937, in Dayton, Ohio, to Harry and Bella Wexner, Russian-Jewish immigrants; his father had been born in Russia, his mother the first of her family born in the United States. The family moved often as his father chased retail jobs from city to city, and Wexner attended somewhere between eight and ten different schools before college, working from around age nine doing lawn-mowing and babysitting jobs. He earned a business degree at Ohio State University, served in the Air National Guard, tried law school briefly, and found it unfulfilling.

The Blizzard Ledger

At 26, working through his parents' store finances during a snowstorm, Wexner concluded that their profit came almost entirely from cheap, high-turnover items aimed at young women rather than the higher-priced merchandise the store was built around. His aunt Ida put up $5,000 in collateral so he could secure a bank loan, and in August 1963 he opened his first store in Columbus under a name that described his strategy outright: The Limited, a shop selling only a narrow, fast-moving slice of women's fashion. First-year revenue came in around $160,000. The company went public in 1969, and Wexner expanded it methodically outward from Columbus in what he described as concentric circles, testing that a winning store format could be replicated across markets with similar customers.

Building an Empire of Brands

By 1976, The Limited had grown to roughly 100 stores. Wexner's real coup came in 1982, when he bought Victoria's Secret — then a struggling, roughly a dozen-store lingerie chain on the edge of bankruptcy — for about $1 million and rebuilt it into the dominant intimate-apparel retailer in the United States, with more than a thousand American locations by 2006 and a brand eventually valued above $7 billion. He launched Bath & Body Works in 1990, built or acquired Express and Abercrombie & Fitch along the way, and beginning in 1995 turned the Victoria's Secret Fashion Show into an annual televised cultural event that ran until 2018. The various holdings were consolidated as L Brands in 2007, and total annual sales across the group eventually topped $12 billion across more than 3,800 stores worldwide.

New Albany and the Wexner Foundation

Wexner's ambitions extended beyond retail into remaking the Columbus suburb of New Albany, Ohio, where his real-estate venture, the New Albany Company, helped grow the town from about 1,600 residents in 1990 to roughly 11,000 and drew an estimated $8 billion in private investment to its business park. He became one of Ohio State University's most significant benefactors — chairing the university's medical center board, serving as founding chair of its foundation, and giving his name to the Wexner Center for the Arts and the Wexner Medical Center — while the Wexner Foundation he established focused on developing Jewish community and public-sector leaders, working with institutions including Harvard's Center for Public Leadership. He holds honorary doctorates from Brandeis, Hebrew Union College, Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and several other institutions, and has received honors including the Alexis de Tocqueville Society Award and the Woodrow Wilson Award for Citizenship. He is married to Abigail Wexner and has four children.

The Epstein Years

Wexner met Jeffrey Epstein in New York in the early 1980s and, by his own later account, gave him full power of attorney over his business empire and personal finances, a relationship that lasted until 2007. Epstein allegedly used his access to pose at times as a Victoria's Secret recruiter; company executives reported the behavior to Wexner in 1993, and Wexner has said he told Epstein it violated company policy and ordered him to stop. After Epstein's 2019 arrest on sex-trafficking charges and subsequent death in custody, Wexner issued a statement saying he was "NEVER aware of the illegal activity" and asserting that Epstein had "misappropriated vast sums of money" from him — a claim that has since drawn scrutiny from investigators and journalists examining the broader Epstein files. Wexner stepped down as chairman and CEO of L Brands in February 2020 and sold a majority stake in Victoria's Secret for $525 million, remaining chairman emeritus of Bath & Body Works.

Why Les Is Called a Genius

Wexner is sometimes credited in business coverage with a kind of retail genius, and the claim has real substance behind it: the insight that drove The Limited — that narrow specialization and rapid inventory turnover beat broad, high-margin merchandising — was not obvious in 1963, and his replication of that model across Victoria's Secret, Bath & Body Works, and Express built one of the most successful specialty-retail conglomerates in American history from a single $5,000 loan. That is a genuine, demonstrated pattern-recognition skill applied with unusual discipline over five decades, closer to an entrepreneurial instinct for consumer behavior than to intellectual originality in the abstract sense. It sits uneasily, though, alongside the honest counter-case: the same man who read his parents' ledgers with such precision handed total financial control to Jeffrey Epstein for more than twenty years and says he never noticed what was happening with his own money — a gap between his professional acuity and his personal judgment that has become the second, unavoidable half of his public story.

Legacy

Wexner's retail legacy is concrete and lasting: he did more than almost any single retailer to define how American mall-based fashion worked for four decades, and he reshaped an entire Ohio suburb and a state university's medical and arts institutions with the proceeds. That legacy now shares space permanently with his role, however passive he claims it was, as the financial benefactor who gave Jeffrey Epstein the money, access, and cover that enabled years of documented abuse — a pairing that has made Wexner's name, for many people encountering it for the first time, inseparable from both stories at once.

Achievements

• Notable work: Mega Group
• Educated at Ohio State University and Bexley High School
• Worked as entrepreneur, chief executive officer and art collector