Luiza Trajano revela a nova aposta da Magazine Luiza para crescer no Brasil #EP46 De frente com CEO

Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here with you.

My routine is very variable. I go from A to Z, doing many different things. But my routine, normally on Mondays I arrive very early because we have a ritual that's been going on for many years. So on Mondays I get here at 7:00 or 7:30 because we all gather downstairs in the grand hall, where we've sung the company's national anthem for over 30 years and also review the results. Each week we discuss themes, and this is done everywhere, in all 15 regions. Here at 8:00 or 8:30, there's a shopping meeting at 10:00, but every Monday everyone goes through this ritual we've had for over 30 years. So on Mondays I arrive early, it's a day I try to stay more internally. I don't go out much, unless there's something specific, but it's a day of a lot of dispatches inside. But I don't get much into the operational side of the company. I'm a different kind of board chairwoman because I know what happens here, I give advice, there are things I step in to help with, but not as the CEO of the company, the one responsible. I'm part of the company's board, but a different kind of board, where you see I'm in the operation, but also a different kind of operation. So Mondays are more or less like that, but I always have commitments outside. After 6 PM I have the Women of Brazil Group, I'm invited to many things, right? I have an assistant who only schedules my calendar because she spends the whole day doing that, and I try to be in different places too. I don't just select big places, those kinds of things. Then on Tuesdays, normally I wake up early, 5:20, and I do exercise twice a week, from 6 to 7 at my house in Pires, because if I don't do it after 7, I start procrastinating. And then normally when I don't have an outside meeting, like tomorrow I'm going to Sorocaba because I'm helping a bit with the marketplace, with the commercial association. So I don't come here because I go straight there. Once a month I have lunch with the outstanding team members who aren't directors or managers, they're base-level staff, this has been going on for a long time. So yesterday I had lunch with 40 outstanding people from here. Last Friday I had lunch at our, we have a very nice facility in Franca where we have almost 3,000 employees, and I had lunch with the outstanding people from there. So it's a way for me not to be in a bubble, to be with the team knowing why they're being recognized. So this has been going on for a long time. So yesterday I spent about two or three hours with them because they tell their stories, why they were recognized, I take photos, individual photos. So it's a way for me to be with them and not be distant from the front lines, right?

So today my children are all grown up, two live abroad with their grandchildren, right? It's different. The hardest part is when they were all little. I had three children in three and a half years. I never felt guilty because I gave the best of myself, I knew it wasn't the best they could have, but I couldn't give up. But I'm the same person you see here, that you see at breakfast at my house, that you see at my house at the dam. I might be wearing less executive clothing. Very young. I started working, I made a pact with myself to not have to keep changing roles and following checklists. This helps me a lot at this age. So I'm not now I'm the president, now I'm Luiza Helena, no, now I'm the friend. It's the same thing I am, same person, of course, with different agendas, but with the essence, the way, the way of dealing. If I'm not well, I'll tell you I'm not well. If I need to cry, I cry. I don't put on a cape. This helped me a lot, following this profile of, now you're the president, you can't say you made a mistake, you can't say. This helped me a lot to reach this age and feel whole.

Yes, not just them, but also entrepreneurs now who say: 'Luiza, how do you carry purpose and business together?' I say: 'I carry them together.' Because people see that it worked out, right? It could have not worked, and I'm not saying it's the only recipe, right?

It's interesting. I fight for women, not even because of my family, because in my family the woman was already strong when I was born. So I was raised, I wasn't raised to get married, where at the time they made a trousseau since the girl was born, right? So there were four very united sisters. My mother had only me, my aunt had only one, another aunt had only one, and my aunt who founded the company had none. So in reality, we were raised with this family unit, right? My aunt had great intelligence, entrepreneurial, and my mother had great emotional intelligence. So I was able to have both worlds. So speaking now about how it was, at 12 years old, even being an only child, I loved giving gifts. To this day I love giving gifts. And my mother said: 'You like giving gifts?' 'I do.' 'Then go work and earn money and buy the gifts.' So I heard very few 'no's, because it was an entrepreneurial family, right? 'Oh, you can't, you don't have it.' What does it mean to be an entrepreneur? To find solutions. So I went to work because of that, and at the time I bought many gifts, I even saved my first savings, and I saw that I had a knack for being a salesperson, for liking people, for serving customers. And they also saw that I had a knack for it. So every vacation I went to do that. It's interesting that later my cousins started going, then my children went, and I had a very interesting thing. Today I have a granddaughter who's already at GV, and at 12 going on 13 she looked for a store and went to do that without being asked. And she also bought a lipstick for grandma, bought I don't know what. And I never preached this, but it was interesting how you inspire others, right? Without you realizing it, work is a very enjoyable thing. Then at 18 I went to college at night and already took on roles, not as a director, I didn't have that career plan. I'm preparing to do that. I was a salesperson, then I became a store manager and stayed in that for many years, where now I'm going back to the gallery, I'm serving customers, I'm staying there, I'm setting up an office for myself, until with artificial intelligence what will remain is the front line. So I'm making it more human, right?

And this gallery is the new store, right, that you created at the end, where Livraria Cultura is, it's a new store concept, right? You enter through the Pinacoteca on one side, on the other side you enter through the digital. So it's a meeting of the old with the new. I put many places for people to sit, so people will meet each other, there's a very nice café and there's a bookstore too where we brought in five companies that were ours. So it's a meeting point and people want to meet again, even though they're there many times on their phones, but they bring their families, it's impressive how it was a very strong place for São Paulo city. And we kept many things there, kept the kangaroo, kept where it was written Livraria Cultura, the theater is called Eva, which is also a trend, to bring the modern but not eliminate the old. So it's a new style of department store and we're learning to deal with it.

There's a location on Paulista Avenue that was very important for us, and Livraria Cultura appeared, and we have an ecosystem today. We have Kabum, we have Estante Virtual, we have Época Cosméticos, we have Netshoes, we have several companies that we can show physically because you know we managed to get very famous brands there, because when you have the physical space you can show the ecosystem. So one of the goals is our first physical ecosystem store, which now we're learning to put a lot into, that's why it's called Galeria Magalu, it has the theater and during the day we have, we have the first partnership with YouTube to have a YouTube room there for influencers. And at night we have a regular theater. It's always this meeting of the two. It's a new experience.

We have more than 20 stores that have the size to do this, but first we're consolidating, learning, and it's also a bigger investment, right?

By title, but I already was in practice. It was another thing I found very important. I say a lot, when you become CEO by title, you think it doesn't change much, but it changes a lot.

My degree was in law.

I'm not like many women who think she's never prepared. I'm an only child, I think I am. I've been working with many women who say: 'I need to prepare, I need to prepare.' You don't see men saying that, right? So I've been working with many women. I always thought I was prepared. Otherwise I wouldn't have taken on the role.

I come from a family where women always worked, so my model isn't that model. And I was just telling someone, my mother had great emotional intelligence, as I told you. When I had my first child, she said: 'There's no recipe. Common sense, lots of love, and the most important thing in your life, don't carry guilt.' And I'm not one to carry guilt, and I teach women not to carry it because you give the best of yourself. And if there were a recipe, I would stop and follow it. Because there's nothing better in the world than having children who are on track with purpose. It's your greatest fortune, but there's no recipe. So I did what my heart told me.

Nobody believes that I never told him to be the CEO of Magazine Luiza. Only those who are very close to me know that. Of course, as a mother, you get much more involved. He went to events. Since he was little, I took them to things together. You end up having a very strong connection with the business because I also started early. Not that they started, he went to study abroad, I still lived in Franca, he came to do GV, entered very young, worked 8 years in the market abroad. And I never said: 'You will have to work at Magazine Luiza.' But also at the end of the year they worked, because I worked, they wanted to work at the end of the year, them and my nephews, nephews meaning children of others who were only children, and they worked. And one day he said: 'I'm going to set up a digital, set up a website.' I already had the virtual store that in '91 we created the electronic store, brought to society the store of the year 2000 that already worked first with TV and video and then with multimedia, which was already a store that didn't have products displayed, much ahead of its time. And he said, many people at the time of Nasdaq would come to me to separate those 15 stores to be able to enter Nasdaq, because the digital was very separate. So when Nasdaq came, I already had experience, he said: 'I don't believe in that.' Because we talked a lot, right? Because he was already in the market, in a company, in a fund, in a technology company in a fund. So he said: 'I don't believe the soul works outside the body.' I think he was a bit afraid I'd be upset. He came to set up the site and ended up taking care of it, which we set up in 2001, so it was much earlier. You can see that we're one of the few companies that were born physical, that had been physical for a long time, and we still have, today we have everything in our own cloud, and we kept the physical store, which I think we were criticized for a period, but today we know that if you go to NRF, physical stores are coming back with a new look, it's not the same, I tell entrepreneurs this a lot, but it's a new look. You buy on the internet from us in Belém do Pará, and in two hours you can go to one of our stores and pick up the product.

We always believed in that. We suffered because there was a time, I joke that the NRF, when I went there, I still go today, but it put the physical store in the ICU, buried it, and now it's resurrected, because in the last two years everyone is talking about physical stores again, a new way. NRF is the biggest retail fair that exists.

Very good. And speaking of digital too, today e-commerce surpasses in terms of sales.

There were several. First, giving it a new professional face. The family went to a family council. Getting everyone to understand that the company needed to have, even though we had always been very serious, we never took money from the company, it was never a family slush fund, we never had two little drawers, it was a very serious family, but giving it a bit more governance structure without losing, because I always believed a lot in the family business. So the first period was that, and I also felt very much that the market was going to have a big change. So in '92 I already removed all the offices in the company when nobody was talking about that. It's draining when you do something people were used to, little manager offices and such, and you do something way ahead of its time. So it was tough, there were many challenges of showing. I remember I would receive, wow, this is new. I changed salespeople's salaries that were only tied to margin. There was a company that put in attendants, I didn't believe it. Changing a salary in a law, wow, is a big challenge. We created the electronic store and we also entered a lot, I always believed people were very important. So we always entered so that, it's been 32 years that we've been among the five best companies to work for. The first year we entered was in '97. It's a challenge when you're a company from the interior that nobody talks about, to enter a ranking. It was the best thing I did, because they give a very good report and we tried to improve every year, and today we've been third, second, first, but in 2003 it was the first time a retail company in the world won first place. So it was a celebration for us and at the same time, how are we going to continue? It was another challenge. You're asking about challenges? On to the next challenge.

It's interesting, right? Because every award I'm very grateful, no matter how simple it is, and at the same time I'm very responsible, because I represent a minority of women in strong leadership. So, besides everything, I'm a person who is seen as a protagonist of Brazil. So I have these two responsibilities that I brought upon myself, to be a protagonist, to defend Brazil, to be with Brazil and to be fighting for Brazil. So at the same time that I'm grateful, every diploma I receive, every thing I receive, increases my responsibility. Now, there were some that were very memorable, right? There's an award given by the Brazil-US Chamber of Commerce, in the state I went to 20 years ago, when I became a partner of Unibanco, where Pedro Moreira Salles was receiving the title, and it's called Man of the Year. So it's received by a Brazilian businessman and an American businessman. A beautiful party. I went all shy the first time. The partnership with him had just ended, he was receiving the award, and I never thought that 20 years later I'd be receiving, it changed to Personality of the Year, I was receiving the award, and we like him a lot, him and his family there, and more than 80 women from Brazil. So it's a milestone to change from one award to that, and an award that 20 years ago you never dreamed you'd receive. So it's not that the award is different, it's a surprising award, right? Because it wasn't an award for Entrepreneur of the Year or Businesswoman of the Year. It was an award like that. And I think it's an award that demands a lot from me, that I have to be very careful. I think being ethical isn't easy. You can easily slip from one side to the other. It's the reputation award. So I was one of the first women to enter the top 10, among the top 10. And I've been in for 9 consecutive years, entering first place, which is also an award given in Spain, in Latin America, and it's hard for a person to stay 9 years in a row. So, once again, I have a commitment as a woman, to be on a list among all leaders. So it's an award, it's not easy in a moment of great market difficulty to maintain. But I've been very careful my whole life. I say you're on a tightrope, you can easily slip from one side to the other, but all the awards I win in my city, that I win outside, that I win, I'm almost, I'm a citizen of almost all the Northeast states. I'm missing just one for me to receive. Which one? Maranhão, which I haven't been to yet, but I was supposed to go. But I'm already a citizen of almost every state. Imagine my responsibility of becoming a citizen of Pernambuco, of Ceará, of becoming, so from the North, right? Except Amazonas, I've received from almost everywhere. There are places where I receive from the state, even here in São Paulo state always. And I receive from the city too. So it's a lot of commitment, right? I see myself very committed to every award I receive.