Pink by Frankies Bikinis Marks New Swim Collaboration
Francesca Aiello, creative director of Frankies Bikinis, is bringing some of the brand’s flair to Pink with a collaborative label that has her leading both design and creative direction.
Pink by Frankies Bikinis includes, well, bikinis, in addition to minidresses, lace sets, maxidresses and loungewear essentials in prices ranging from $24.95 to $59.95 and sizes from XS to XXL.
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The partnership features multiple product drops sold internationally and exclusively through Pink’s stores and website. Products start to go live to the brand’s loyalty members on Tuesday and then to all customers on Wednesday.
Supporting the line is a marketing campaign featuring Aiello and her friend, model and entrepreneur Devon Lee Carlson.
It’s a collaboration that is helped along by Victoria’s Secret & Co., which owns and operates Pink and invested in Frankies in March 2022.
Greg Unis, brand president of Victoria’s Secret and Pink, said in an interview: “Since we made the investment, we’ve really just been a partner to Francesca and her team to help champion what they’re doing. We sell the Frankies Bikinis brand on our website. Our customer loves it. She’s a very, very loyal customer. She’s done really interesting things on bringing her brand to life through other collaborations and the marketing she controls.”
Now, Unis said Aiello has “pretty significant license to create her vision of what a Pink by Frankies Bikinis would look like.”
“The product is obviously a very important component of it, but it’s really the whole telling, the entire narrative is really what she’s amazing at,” he said. “And what we love about the idea of this collaborative label is that it allowed us to do that in an unfiltered way.”
Pink by Frankies Bikinis will make up the majority of Pink’s offering in swim — a category that the brand exited in 2018 in an effort to focus the offering that didn’t go well.
“We didn’t lose the customer, but what we lost was the volume, the trip and the other things that she bought,” Unis said. “So when she bought swim from us, she didn’t just buy a swimsuit, she bought other things and it was those other things, the stickiness of that, that’s what we lost. And so in the math of it…it was just a dimension of the brand that we lost.”
Pink and Victoria’s Secret — both in the midst of major transformations — are looking to build back and in a stronger position.
“A lot of that work is starting to take hold now,” Unis said. “If you look at our site now, you’ll get a sense of the spirit and feel of Pink. And when you think about that customer and how Frankies fits into that aesthetic, they work really hand in hand together. We all have the same brand DNA that we’re drafting off of and building from that, the story that was created, it dovetails together beautifully.”
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