The Estée Lauder Cos. has confirmed that Tracey T. Travis, executive vice president and chief financial officer, will retire.
As WWD first reported on Thursday, Travis will exit the publicly listed company at a time when speculation continues to swirl over the future of chief executive officer Fabrizio Freda.
Travis’ retirement will be effective as of June 30, 2025, at the end of Lauder’s next fiscal year. The company said a successor has been identified and will be named in the coming weeks, and that Travis “will work closely with this person to ensure a smooth and successful transition.”
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In her role, Travis oversaw global finance, accounting, investor relations, information technology and strategy and new business development. She joined the company in 2012 from Ralph Lauren Corp., where she was senior vice president of finance and chief financial officer. She also served as a member of the executive leadership team and investment development committee. Travis began her career at General Motors as an engineer, and also held leadership roles at Limited Brands, American National Can and PepsiCo.
“Tracey has been an invaluable business partner and a trusted adviser to me, our executives and board of directors, as well as a mentor and role model to many across our organization,” Freda said in a statement. “She has built and led a robust, integrated global finance and strategy organization that has served as a valued business partner across the company and has helped to optimize delivery of our financial plans. Her financial acumen, discipline and operational excellence have been essential to our company’s growth, and so many areas of our organization have her valuable imprint on them.”
In an internal memo obtained by WWD, executive chairman William Lauder and Freda lauded Travis’ transformation of the company’s Global Finance & Strategy organization, writing that she and her team solidified Lauder’s core planning process with an emphasis on executional excellence.
“Working alongside senior leadership, Tracey and her team have implemented and driven a progressive end-to-end mergers and acquisitions strategy and value-driven empowerment and integration, including many strategic acquisitions such as Deciem and Tom Ford,” they wrote, noting that she also led New Incubation Ventures team to enable the “sourcing, building and growth of the brands of tomorrow.”
In a statement, William Lauder said, “Tracey has had a remarkable impact on driving our business forward by leading our portfolio strategy, but also by developing our talent, cultivating a culture of inclusion and continued learning, and advancing initiatives to foster a more diverse and equitable workplace and marketplace.”
Travis is among a small group of women to reach the CFO position in a large-cap company — according to the S&P 500, only about 15 percent of CFOs today are women. At Lauder, Travis cofounded the Women’s Leadership Network in 2017, which has more than 2,000 global members.
“Our younger female generations, from what I’ve seen, certainly at Estée Lauder, do have more confidence, which is terrific,” she said, during a fireside chat at the WWD Women in Power conference in 2022, noting that there is still much work to be done in tackling gender disparities in the workplace.
She spoke of the importance of her engineering degree, noting that it taught her how to be a problem solver. “I love to effect change, and engineering really teaches you how to do that,” she said.
Travis has received numerous awards during the course of her career, including Best CFO from Institutional Investor magazine; Top 100 African Americans in Corporate America and Most Powerful Women in Corporate America by Black Enterprise magazine; the CEW Achiever Award in 2019, and WWD’s Women in Power in 2022. This April, she was honored with the distinguished alumni award by her alma mater, the University of Pittsburgh Swanson School of Engineering. She currently serves on the board of directors of Accenture plc and Meta Platforms Inc.
A mother of two daughters, Travis has always championed the concept of women being able to balance a high-powered career with a robust family life, as long as that’s their personal choice. “I’m a big ‘no regrets’ person. I’ve made conscious choices,” she told WWD in 2022. “My youngest daughter started her career in one of those [demanding] jobs and very quickly decided she wanted more balance. I want them both to live a full life, and that includes having a career that is their choice.”