Hello everyone, welcome to another episode of the series 'Conversa com quem decide' here from BB Investimentos, where we talk with the main personalities of the corporate world, exploring a bit of their trajectory, leadership aspects, and the challenges of the segments they operate in. Well, today's episode is quite significant for us, as we have the first female guest of the program. In fact, today I have the pleasure of conducting this chat alongside two women who are references in their respective fields. On one side, Andréa Nar, our analyst for the retail segment here at BBBI, and on the other, as you've already seen, today's special guest, Luiza Trajano, one of the main references in Brazilian retail and a highly recognized leader for her business trajectory. It's a huge pleasure to share this moment with you, André and Luiza.
Thank you. Thank you, Vittor. Luiza is so well-known that she practically needs no introduction, right? Currently, she holds the position of Chairwoman of the Board of Directors of Magazine Luiza. And to complement Vittor's words, it's worth mentioning that Luiza is also highly recognized for her ability to inspire and transform people, right, Luiza? It's a joy for us to have you here, it's truly an honor.
Thank you, everyone. I have a very strong connection with Banco do Brasil. I'm very happy to see Banco do Brasil doing well when I see that Banco do Brasil belongs to Brazil, it's ours, and I have a very strong professional and personal connection with Banco do Brasil. It's a joy to be with you here today, especially being the first woman, right, everyone?
Perfect.
Well, before we start our chat, I'm going to briefly recall your story, Luiza. Luiza is a law graduate with extensive experience in retail, worked for decades at Magazine Luiza until becoming CEO, and since 2016 has been Chairwoman of the Board of Directors. She was also responsible for the leap in innovation and growth that consolidated Magalu among the largest retailers in Brazil. She also serves as a board member on various institutions, right, Luiza, and presides over the Women of Brazil Group. In this beautiful trajectory, she has received many awards, being the only Brazilian executive to join the global list of the World Retail Congress and was elected, for the ninth consecutive time, the leader with the best reputation in Brazil among men and women by the consultancy Merco. What a great story, Luiza, it's an honor to have you here.
Thank you, everyone. It's a great pleasure to be here with you.
Great. To start our conversation, I'd like to talk to you about International Women's Day. I saw a post of yours on social media and I thought it was beautiful, right? And I'll take the liberty of quoting a phrase here to start our conversation. You said: 'On this Women's Day, we ask not just to be celebrated, but to be listened to, respected, included. Because when a woman occupies her space, it's not just her who grows, it's an entire world that evolves.' So, in your opinion, Luiza, how does this female presence, right, in large corporations? What impact does it have on the performance and results of companies?
It's very important for us to raise our level of awareness a bit. For many years, management in companies, in corporations, was very mechanical. And then we have to understand also the role of the man himself. He couldn't say he didn't know, he couldn't say he was sick, he couldn't say he had a problem here, you're a professional. It's very difficult to have a problem at home and come and brush it off. So, this very mechanical management in the 90s began to be questioned. There was reengineering, there was an option for natural things, and suddenly there was a much more organic, less mechanical management. In this aspect, it's important for us to understand that for us women, it was much more permitted for us to be more organic than for men, because we didn't have such a great ascent in the labor market as men did. So he was very much placed with this mechanical thing. You see, when did they do a customer satisfaction survey? The Consumer Code was a very important milestone for this relationship with what we depend on, which is the end consumer. All of us, even the bank only succeeds if we have an end consumer who gave us the condition to have a profit here. So it's very important for us to understand this first, and with that, there was a lot of difficulty. So to answer your question, where our fight is not to take the man's place, on the contrary, we want to be together with him, because I end up participating throughout my life because I was raised a bit differently. I was raised with women, already being an entrepreneur when I was born. So, I had a slightly different upbringing. But what's important to understand is that I was the only woman who participated in the 2016 Olympics Committee. So, when they needed a woman, they invited me. It wasn't because I was Luiza Helena, right? It was my experience that mattered, but I saw that I contributed to the board. So, why don't we have more women to contribute? So, especially in a management that today is much more organic than mechanical, especially after the digital era and now the artificial intelligence era, starting in 2022. So it's very important to understand that today the management environment itself demands it. But it's so heavy, so many years of beliefs that limited, 'women aren't fit for this,' of culture, that we end up, I need, we fight a lot in the Women of Brazil Group so that women are very prepared to take on such a role. You don't see men saying that. So, there's a lot of struggle, and the sexism, which is not intentional for many, is ingrained for decades. You see when women started voting. It was in 1935. It's still very little time. It's not even 100 years yet. And for a period, she needed a man's authorization to vote. So there's a whole history there that we need to fit in and that we cannot regress, because it's good for men, it's good for the family, it's good for the country. I see how important it is to have the presence of both in anything, in any place. So that's what I think our fight is for, really not against men, but in favor of women. That is very important. Together, right? Look, and this fight, to tell you the truth, for you two, for those watching us, it's not a fight I had to win, because I was already raised in a family where I was raised to work, I was raised to lead, I didn't even have a trousseau. Imagine in my time, I started making a trousseau, all tiny, already born a girl, already making a trousseau. I got married, I didn't have any trousseau, it was totally out of the question. But my fight is for this balance of the feminine with the masculine, which I think is very important and I see it in many places, because I have the privilege of working a lot with men and when women are seated together, how good it is. The difference, right? How we gain from diversity, right? Luiza, excellent. And in fact, I think your leadership at the magazine, Luiza, right, corroborates this vision of how relevant the female role is, how it is transformative, which was also recognized in this award we mentioned in the introduction, you won for the ninth consecutive time the leader with the best reputation in Brazil. And I wanted to take this theme and ask you how this is reflected within Magazine Luiza, right? How this award is reflected and how it can influence the company's culture in some way.
Look, I don't think an award influences, an award endorses the attitudes you can have. So, today I was asked, I've already received several awards, I'm very grateful for that. I have two attitudes towards any award, no matter how simple. Now I'm going to talk about reputation again. Because I think I have the title of citizen in almost all the northern states. I received a title that was 'Man of the Year,' it became 'Personality of the Year,' which is given by the Chamber of Commerce. It's a title that I have a lot of responsibility for, because I'm representing a layer of the population that is 50-something percent, which are women. And I'm also representing the gratitude for having received it. So, I have a lot of responsibility with all these titles and a lot of gratitude. Now, the reputation title is very interesting because, first, there wasn't even one woman until recently in Latin America among the top 10, thanks to God there are several now. So I was one of the first women to enter the top 10 in reputation, which is a vote by journalists, by subscribers, it's a vote that also has a very popular side, of a layer. And on the other hand, I'm very careful and I tell everyone to be very careful with ethics. I say that ethics is like a tightrope walk. You have to be always very attentive, because being ethical is not just stealing or not doing something, it's the way you cut in line, the way you don't respect people. So, I have, not that I am, but I'm very careful with myself all the time, because I know it's very fragile, this tightrope, you jump to one side, to the other, very fragile. So, I'm very careful with that and I've always said that. I'm very happy to be a woman who is for the ninth time in a row among all the leaders, not just in reputation, because it's not an easy thing. You have to be watching yourself for a long time to really be careful with that, because it's very serious. And there's also something I say a lot, power is more serious than money. Power really corrupts and you don't realize it. I say it's a bacteria that enters like this. The less you notice, right? Sometimes you're already thinking you're something. Exactly.
And really, depending on the culture, right, we were just talking about the company's culture, the construction of this reputation, right? We see that depending on this culture, some companies are more or less prepared to face certain situations, right? Now, for example, thinking about what you already mentioned, the innovation of AI, the entry of artificial intelligence, with everything since 2022, how do you see all this innovation coming into the retail sector? How do you see the next few years?
Look, speaking a bit about innovation in general, now we'll talk about technology innovation. Everything new is very scary, but I come from a family where innovation... my aunt only had money for four sisters. My aunt didn't have a daughter, I'm Luiza because of her and Magazine Luiza is because of her. And she bought the magazine. She only had money to pay for the first installments and she never missed a payment. And we have, I'm making a memorial for her in Franca now. One of the things she used to say was, paying on time is an obligation. So, I come from a family where some of our concepts are very serious, but we are very open to innovation. As I told you, she had money only for the down payment and some installments. She held a contest on the radio, she had worked at a very traditional firm before, to choose the name of the magazine, which is already an innovation with a prize. So, I come from a family of innovation. We face innovation, it's not that we're afraid. So, Magazine Luiza in '91 created the Luiza electronic store, where there was no product on display. Magazine Luiza brought the year 2000 store to your city. So it's very much a culture of innovation, because innovation is very scary, innovation is not cool, often doesn't succeed, gets stuck in a lot of planning. Now, when we have three very serious transformations after the industrial era, the knowledge era, which is the digital itself, which is the phone when it became accessible to everyone and when it arrived at the company. I mean, it was an innovation. And now it's AI. We think AI will be a tsunami in people's lives. It's very serious. So, what does Magazine Luiza do? First, we come from a physical store, don't forget that. When digital arrived, we already had more than 40 years of physical stores. But we believed in digital and we didn't stop believing in physical stores. We were even criticized for that sometimes, but we didn't stop. So, with AI, I do a lot to not stay too closed off in a room. After I stepped back from operations, because I'm always there giving advice, I don't go to meetings, I receive the plans, but I created a direct line with the customer on my social media, because I've always had very easy access. And it's interesting, people, that they send me messages like: 'I admire you a lot, you've grown, but you've lost it, my product didn't arrive.' I open my social media to hear what I don't want to hear. And there's a direct line with the basic team about culture. We have five non-negotiables in our culture and we don't give them up, and everyone re-signs, signs and re-signs once a year. We even have a code of ethics that is mandatory, but what rules are the five non-negotiables. And we take that very seriously. So, the only thing, telling all this to say, if you see a video of Frederico, of Marcelo Silva, is that everything changes at Magazine Luiza, it's a very innovative company, we just created the only Brazilian cloud that opened to the market, but the only thing that doesn't change are our principles and our cultures. Our purpose, it doesn't change. It has been refined. My aunt was very much about honesty and ours is very much about relationships with people. It doesn't change at all. And I tell you, during the pandemic and the last three years of the pandemic, after one year and two years, we doubled our revenue. That's a danger of losing the culture. It's not easy. It requires double the care, right? Double. And look, I'll tell you, I'm often asked what keeps you awake at night. What kept me awake was when the magazine went from 20 to 40 billion in revenue, now it's at 65, but that leap from 20 to 40 was still during the pandemic when people couldn't be at the company. So it was a lot because, to tell you how much we care about culture. Cash flow is very important, it breaks a company, lack of sales, care. You have a closer relationship. But culture is not as tangible as cash flow, as debt, as revenue. So we take great care, in many ways. We have several rituals, we have councils that are not directors or managers in all stores, elected by the group. We have a lot of things, but it's not easy when you grow a lot.
Perfect. And I think taking advantage that we're talking about innovation, all this transformation that Magazine Luiza has been going through in recent years, right, it transformed, right, it started with the physical store, but nowadays we can say it's an ecosystem, right? So within Magazine Luiza, we have furniture, appliances, clothing, cosmetics, logistics, and even the cloud. Books. Exactly. And even the cloud, as you just said, the first Brazilian cloud with global scale, right? I imagine that the decision to innovate wasn't easy either, right? So, tell us a bit about how this transformation process was, this decision to transform so much from the company to be much more than the physical stores it initially was.
I think the company also has to have a bit of luck, right? Luck helps. I said that luck only appears for those who are in motion, and we are always in motion. So, in the 80s, we already hired Biru, a company in the interior, to have computers, we were already starting to work with that. We already launched a credit card in '87, we even hired Martinho da Vila. For money, money, for money? That song of his, he was the one who launched the credit card. So, first, I want to wish for this entrepreneurial spirit of being ahead and having the courage to test new things, right? Then, I have three children. I never told my children to work at the company, no one believes it, but my oldest son, at 17, joined GV and he worked for 8 years in the market, outside. I never thought he would come so soon, but we talked a lot, because I already had an electronic store, 17 electronic stores, which at the time in the 90s was NASDAQ as a stock exchange that was famous. And people were always looking for me, separate these electronic stores. Then Facebook started to come, after '95 it started to get strong, these social networks, not as strong as today, but stronger at the time. And he always said: 'Ah, I don't want to, I think you can't separate.' He went to work representing a fund in a technology company. We talked at night, he said: 'I think you can't separate.' When it was 2001, he decided to leave. He lived in São Paulo, our headquarters was still in Franca, and said: 'I'm going to go build the Magazine Luiza website.' So I think he was very responsible for this digital part, not for the modernity, but for the innovation we had, because he was afraid that every day someone came wanting us to separate the 15 electronic stores. At the time they were called electronic stores, they couldn't even be called digital stores. And for that, he started building the site and since he worked in technology, he has a very strategic vision of digital, very strategic, and was created in the physical, right? Because he was created inside there. So he contributed a lot to our entire digital part. Logistics, built the team. Today we have very strong people, we have a very strong director, a very large team, we have several very large laboratories, but the starting point, that's what I want to tell you, was when he realized that we could separate and not do it, but he realized and left everything here, went to build a site. So, Lu, our most famous character in the world today, she was born in 2003. She was born quite ugly, as I tell the staff, start, keep doing it, don't aim for perfection, have an idea, keep doing it and reformulate it when it's ready. So I think there are many things, then it's a whole team and it's a spirit. The family has this spirit of innovating. It's not easy to build a cloud in any way. It's a big weight. We have a marketplace, we have a laboratory, and in the 2000s, we bought several technology companies, and today we have an ecosystem, including a company called Maga Log, which is a transport company that not only transports us, but we transport other companies too. And we even bought a system like iFood in the interior to learn to deliver fast. Wow, cool. Because it's funny. Oh, I'm hungry. The name is cool, right? 'Que Fome' (What Hunger). Just so we can deliver fast.
