In her eight years as CEO of Ulta Beauty, Mary Dillon nearly tripled the cosmetics, haircare, and skincare chain's sales and store footprint in one of the most successful runs in modern retail history. When she stepped down in 2021, Ulta's revenue was at an all-time high of $8.6 billion. So Dillon, 61, could have chosen to relax and spend more time perfecting her tennis stroke, playing pickleball (her new passion), and sitting on corporate boards.
Instead, Dillon, unable to resist the challenge of restoring an illustrious company's luster and still feeling too energetic for a slower-paced life, accepted the CEO job at Foot Locker last year, a retailer that, while not broken, has been underperforming for years. "I didn't realize how much I would miss having one big thing to focus on and how much I would miss leading a retail company," Dillon told Fortune in a March interview at the Shoptalk conference in Las Vegas. In taking another CEO role, Dillon became the third woman to ever run two Fortune 500 companies, after Patricia K. Poppe (CMS Energy and PG&E) and Meg Whitman (HP and eBay.)
