Mary Dillon

Mary N. Dillon
Born	Chicago, Illinois, U.S.
Nationality	American
Education	University of Illinois at Chicago (B.S., marketing and Asian studies, 1983)
Occupation	Business executive
Company	Foot Locker, Inc.
Title	Former president and chief executive officer
Spouse	Terry
Children	Four

Mary N. Dillon (born 1962) is an American business executive. She was chief executive officer of Foot Locker, Inc. from August 2022 until September 2025, chief executive officer of Ulta Beauty from July 2013 to June 2021, and president and chief executive officer of United States Cellular Corporation from June 2010 to 2013. Earlier in her career she was global chief marketing officer of McDonald's Corporation and held marketing roles at PepsiCo, Gardenburger and Quaker Oats.

Dillon left Foot Locker when Dick's Sporting Goods completed its $2.4 billion acquisition of the company in September 2025. She has since become chair of the board of trustees of Save the Children US, a role she has held since 2025 after first joining that board in 2016, and she serves as a director of KKR & Co. Inc., a position she has held since September 2018, and of American Airlines Group Inc., which she joined in March 2026.

During Dillon's eight years as chief executive of Ulta Beauty, the cosmetics retailer's store count roughly tripled, its annual revenue rose from around $2.1 billion to more than $8 billion, and its stock price gained more than 250 per cent, making the company one of the few sustained brick-and-mortar retail growth stories of the 2010s. Her later tenure at Foot Locker was more difficult: the retailer's shares fell by roughly half during her time as chief executive as it worked through a multi-year turnaround plan before its sale to Dick's Sporting Goods.

Early life and education

Dillon was born in 1962 and raised in Chicago, Illinois, the fourth of six children of a father who worked as a steelworker and a mother who was a homemaker. She took her first job at age sixteen in 1977, working the candy, tobacco and cosmetics counters at a Jewel-Osco supermarket in Darien, Illinois. To pay her way through college she worked as a waitress at the Chicago restaurant R.J. Grunts, a bank teller and a house cleaner.

Dillon attended the University of Illinois at Chicago, where she earned a Bachelor of Science degree in marketing and Asian studies in 1983. She has been described as a first-generation college student.

Career

Quaker Oats and Gardenburger, 1984 to 2000

Dillon began her career at the Quaker Oats Company in 1984, entering through the company's executive training program on a starting salary of about $29,000. Over twelve years at Quaker Oats she held positions of increasing responsibility across several food and beverage categories, including as head of marketing for the Kibbles 'n Bits pet food brand. From 1996 to 2000 she was vice president of marketing at Gardenburger, Inc., at the time a publicly traded maker of vegetarian food products.

PepsiCo, 2000 to 2005

Dillon joined PepsiCo Corporation in 2000, after Quaker Oats' snack and beverage businesses had become part of PepsiCo. She served as vice president of marketing for the Gatorade and Quaker Foods brands from 2002 to 2004, and was promoted to president of PepsiCo's Quaker Foods division from 2004 to 2005. While running Gatorade's marketing she took up long-distance running herself, including the Chicago Marathon, to better understand the needs of the brand's core distance-runner customers.

McDonald's, 2005 to 2010

In October 2005 Dillon became executive vice president and global chief marketing officer of McDonald's Corporation, a role in which she directed worldwide marketing and global brand strategy for a system of roughly 32,000 restaurants in 118 countries generating about $23 billion in revenue. At McDonald's she created the "Global Moms Panel," a group of mothers from around the world convened to vet advertising and marketing campaigns before launch. Her tenure also spanned continued rollout of the "i'm lovin' it" brand platform that McDonald's had introduced in 2003. Andy McKenna, McDonald's chairman emeritus at the time, later said Dillon combined "data-driven rigor with creativity" and had "big ambitions" to become a chief executive in her own right. She left McDonald's in June 2010.

United States Cellular Corporation, 2010 to 2013

Dillon was named president and chief executive officer of United States Cellular Corporation, a wireless telecommunications carrier majority owned by Telephone and Data Systems, effective 1 June 2010, and was appointed to the U.S. Cellular board of directors under a letter agreement dated 3 May 2010. Her initial pay package under that letter agreement provided for a base salary of $725,000 through the end of 2010, a one-time payment of $450,000 on the three-month anniversary of her start date, a further one-time payment of $250,000 on the fifteen-month anniversary, a guaranteed 2010 bonus of at least $580,000, and grants of stock options and restricted stock units. Her base salary rose to $752,000 for 2011 and $788,000 for 2012, and she was paid a bonus of $650,000 for 2011 performance, about 108 per cent of her target.

At U.S. Cellular, Dillon oversaw an updated strategic plan, cost-reduction efforts, a multi-year overhaul of the company's billing and customer-relationship systems, and what the company called a "Dynamic Organization" model intended to make the roughly 400-store retail operation more competitive. She initially declined to offer Apple's iPhone in U.S. Cellular stores, a decision she reversed about eighteen months later as the device's importance to wireless carriers became clear. She left U.S. Cellular in 2013 to become chief executive of Ulta Beauty.

Ulta Beauty, 2013 to 2022

Dillon became chief executive officer of Ulta Beauty, Inc. on 1 July 2013 and joined its board of directors the same year. When she arrived, Ulta was a chain of beauty and salon stores known mainly for convenient strip-mall locations, wide product selection and heavy discounting; Dillon later recalled that when she mentioned the company to friends and neighbours, a common response was "Ulta? What's that?"

Six months into the job, during a family ski holiday over Christmas Eve 2013, Dillon worked an unannounced six-hour shift on the sales floor of an Ulta store near Salt Lake City. Overwhelmed by how little she knew about the store's roughly 20,000 products, she was assigned to the front of the store handing out shopping bags. A customer asked her to explain a stack of coupons with confusing terms and conditions; Dillon could not decipher them either, and the episode crystallised her view that Ulta's reliance on constant discounting, which she called a "race to the bottom," was undermining the brand. "It really hit me that day," she said. "I didn't want Ulta to be thought of as the retailer for discounts. I wanted Ulta to be known as a beauty retailer."

Dillon repositioned Ulta around store growth, e-commerce and its loyalty program. The company targeted around 1,200 stores by 2019, moved new locations closer to urban centres rather than exclusively suburban strip malls, and opened its first Manhattan store. Store count roughly tripled from 2008 levels, passing 900 locations by mid-2016 and around 1,200 by 2019, while net sales rose from $1.1 billion in the reported quarter of fiscal 2016 to a full-year total of $3.9 billion in fiscal 2015, with comparable sales growth as high as 14.4 per cent in some quarters. By 2019 the company's revenue had grown roughly 500 per cent over the preceding decade to $6.7 billion.

In May 2019 Dillon announced that Ulta would expand outside the United States for the first time, beginning with physical stores and e-commerce in Canada. "International expansion represents an attractive and incremental long-term growth platform," she said, describing Canada as "an attractive and logical place to start" after the company studied multiple potential markets, and calling it "the first step in becoming a global beauty retailer."

Dillon also rebuilt Ulta's loyalty program, Ultamate Rewards, shifting the company's marketing away from generic coupons toward personalised, data-driven offers; by the mid-2010s the program had more than 20 million active members generating roughly 80 to 90 per cent of company sales. She oversaw the addition of roughly 200 new prestige beauty brands, including Estee Lauder, Clinique, Clarins and Urban Decay, the build-out of in-store luxury boutiques, the launch of the "Glam Lab" virtual try-on tool, a co-branded store credit card, and investment in two new e-commerce distribution centres. The company partnered with Kylie Jenner's cosmetics line as an exclusive retail partner, which Barron's cited as a significant traffic driver for the chain. Fabrizio Freda, chief executive of Estee Lauder, credited Dillon with elevating perceptions of a retailer whose stores were still largely located in strip malls.

Under Dillon, Ulta's stock rose more than 250 per cent and its market capitalisation exceeded $15 billion by 2016, surpassing established chains such as Macy's, Kohl's and Nordstrom. At its October 2016 investor day the company raised its long-term guidance, targeting comparable-store sales growth of 7 to 9 per cent for 2017 through 2019, up from a prior 5 to 7 per cent, with Dillon telling investors the company held roughly a 4 per cent share of the $127 billion United States beauty market and had "an easy path" to double that share. Ulta was named a "Most Innovative Company" and Dillon herself was named to Fortune's list of the World's Most Powerful Women in 2016.

In April 2020, as the COVID-19 pandemic forced widespread store closures, Dillon voluntarily forgo her base salary from 19 April 2020 until stores substantially reopened and furloughed staff returned on 14 June 2020. Ulta's board rewarded the recovery generously: Dillon's 2020 annual incentive paid out at 409 per cent of target, and her total reported compensation was $8,100,164 for fiscal 2020 and $7,064,799 for fiscal 2019, following $14,245,418 in fiscal 2018 that included a large equity award.

In March 2021 Ulta announced a leadership succession under which Dillon would move from chief executive to executive chair of the board effective 2 June 2021, with President Dave Kimbell succeeding her as chief executive and Kecia Steelman, previously chief store operations officer, becoming chief operating officer. Dillon served as executive chair from June 2021 until June 2022, and continued as a member of Ulta's board of directors from 2013 to 2022.

Foot Locker, 2022 to 2025

On 19 August 2022, Foot Locker Inc. announced that Dillon would become chief executive officer, succeeding Richard Johnson, who retired but remained executive chairman of the board through 31 January 2023. Foot Locker's board also decided to split the chair and chief executive roles, with lead independent director Dona Young becoming non-executive chair from February 2023. Foot Locker shares rose about 19 to 20 per cent on the announcement, as investors hoped Dillon could repeat her Ulta turnaround at a mall-based athletic retailer facing a shrinking share of shelf space from its largest supplier, Nike. Dillon was also elected to Foot Locker's board of directors in 2022.

Dillon inherited a company in need of a turnaround, contending with an athletic-wear sales slump, an overreliance on Nike product and a store base heavily concentrated in shopping malls. On 20 March 2023, at an investor presentation ahead of the company's fiftieth anniversary, she unveiled the "Lace Up" plan, a multi-year strategy intended to reposition Foot Locker as a "sneaker and athletic community destination." The plan targeted growing annual revenue from about $8 billion toward $9.5 billion to over $10 billion by 2026, closing more than 400 underperforming stores, including roughly 200 in lower-tier malls, while opening new off-mall formats such as "Community" stores, "Power Store" flagships and the "House of Play" concept, and reducing Foot Locker's total store count from about 2,700 to roughly 2,400. As part of the plan the company wound down or closed its Eastbay catalogue business after 43 years, its Footaction, Sidestep and Runners Point banners, and exited operations in Hong Kong and Macau, converting its Singapore and Malaysia businesses to a licensing model, while cutting about $18 million a year in corporate costs.

Under Franklin R. Bracken, who was named president in March 2025 while Dillon continued as chief executive, the two worked together to accelerate execution of the Lace Up plan while Bracken took on oversight of global retail operations and merchandising. By mid-2023 Dillon reported that Foot Locker's brand mix outside Nike had grown to 36 per cent of sales from 31 per cent a year earlier, that off-mall store formats represented 12 per cent of the chain's global square footage, up from 9 per cent, and that the company was upgrading in-store technology. "While we're early in our multiyear journey, we're confident we'll evolve Foot Locker to be a competitive omnichannel retailer and drive sustainable and profitable long-term growth and shareholder value creation," she told analysts on the company's second-quarter earnings call.

On 15 May 2025, Dick's Sporting Goods announced an agreement to acquire Foot Locker for approximately $2.4 billion, or $24 per share, in a combination of cash and new debt, creating a combined retailer expected to operate more than 3,200 stores across about 26 countries with roughly $21 billion in combined annual revenue. Dick's said it planned to run Foot Locker as a standalone business, keeping its banners including Kids Foot Locker, Champs Sports, WSS and atmos. The acquisition closed on Monday, 8 September 2025, after the transaction cleared the mandatory waiting period under United States antitrust law; Dillon, President Bracken, Chief Financial Officer Mike Baughn, Chief Operations Officer Elliott Rodgers and Chief Human Resources Officer Cindy Carlisle all left the company on the day the deal closed, and Foot Locker's board members resigned as well. Rather than naming a single successor chief executive, the combined company placed Foot Locker's operations under Dick's executive chairman Ed Stack, with separate regional presidents for North America and international markets.

Leadership and management style

Dillon has repeatedly credited direct, first-hand contact with frontline employees and customers for shaping her decisions. At Ulta she made roughly twenty trips a year to stores around the country specifically to talk with associates, a practice she described as collecting "ahas": on one visit she learned from staff how long it took to unpack shipments from distribution centres, and had the centres reorganise shipping boxes to match store layouts so employees could spend less time on stocking and more time with customers. She worked loading docks in jeans and sneakers and took retail shifts, including the Christmas Eve 2013 shift in Salt Lake City described above, to understand the business from the ground up.

She combined that hands-on approach with data. At Ulta, teams under Dillon paired qualitative "shop-alongs," in which staff accompanied customers through stores to observe behaviour directly, with data from the Ultamate Rewards loyalty program to refine merchandising and marketing decisions across more than 20,000 products. Dillon also pushed for open internal feedback: after noticing at an early management meeting that employees were reluctant to ask questions, she introduced a quantitative engagement survey sent to Ulta's tens of thousands of associates to measure trust in management and openness of communication. Ulta's then-chief executive of Starbucks, Howard Schultz, who served alongside Dillon on Starbucks' board, said she "understands the theater and the romance" required in customer experience.

Colleagues describe an empathetic style paired with commercial discipline. Margaret Stender, a former colleague from Dillon's Quaker Oats years, said Dillon "uses her empathy to understand their hearts and what might motivate them." At the same time, Dillon has described herself as resistant to complacency: "We are never complacent. My job is to make us look ten years out and be prepared," she said of her approach to strategy at Ulta. During the COVID-19 pandemic she gave up her own salary for roughly two months while store staff were furloughed, before compensation for the top team resumed as stores reopened.

At Foot Locker, that same instinct for direct communication was tested by circumstances less forgiving than Ulta's decade-long growth run. Analysts who watched both tenures noted that turning around a mall-anchored, single-supplier-dependent chain during a period of softening athletic-wear demand required a different set of tools than building a growth story from a smaller base, and that it typically takes a new chief executive brought in from outside a company roughly a year to fully diagnose and act on inherited problems.

Major deals and strategic decisions

Dillon's most consequential strategic decisions took different forms at each company she led. At U.S. Cellular, her reversal of an initial refusal to carry Apple's iPhone, made roughly eighteen months after the device first became a competitive necessity for wireless carriers, illustrated a willingness to reconsider an earlier call once market conditions changed. At Ulta Beauty, the central decision was to de-emphasise the chain's historic reliance on blanket discount coupons in favour of full-price selling supported by a data-driven loyalty program, alongside an aggressive store expansion that took the chain from roughly 300 locations in 2008 to more than 1,200 by the end of her tenure, and the May 2019 decision to expand internationally for the first time, starting in Canada.

At Foot Locker, Dillon's defining strategic act was the March 2023 "Lace Up" turnaround plan, which combined store-base rationalisation (closing more than 400 underperforming stores while opening new off-mall formats), brand diversification away from dependence on Nike, and portfolio pruning that closed the 43-year-old Eastbay catalogue business and wound down or exited the Footaction, Sidestep, Runners Point, Hong Kong and Macau operations. The plan's execution culminated in the sale of the company itself: Dillon and Foot Locker's board agreed in May 2025 to the $2.4 billion acquisition by Dick's Sporting Goods, ending Foot Locker's history as an independent public company.

Financial and market performance

Ulta Beauty's growth under Dillon was substantial by most public retail benchmarks. Store count roughly tripled from 2008 levels to about 900 locations by mid-2016 and around 1,200 by 2019; full-year net sales rose from $3.9 billion in fiscal 2015 to $6.7 billion by 2019, a roughly 500 per cent increase over the decade; and comparable-store sales growth reached as high as 14.4 per cent year over year in some quarters of Dillon's tenure. Ulta's stock price rose more than 250 per cent and market capitalisation surpassed $15 billion by 2016, ahead of established department-store and off-price chains such as Macy's, Kohl's and Nordstrom. Dillon's reported compensation at Ulta totalled $14,245,418 for fiscal 2018, $7,064,799 for fiscal 2019 and $8,100,164 for fiscal 2020. A 2015 compensation package estimated at $18.6 million ranked her among the highest-paid female chief executives in the United States that year.

At Foot Locker, financial performance was markedly weaker. Same-store sales fell more than 9 per cent in successive quarters during 2023, the company swung to a quarterly loss of $5 million as revenue fell about 10 per cent year over year to $1.9 billion, and management cut its full-year earnings forecast twice before suspending dividend payments to preserve cash. Foot Locker's shares fell by roughly half, to about $18, between Dillon's arrival in September 2022 and September 2023, reversing the roughly 20 per cent gain the stock registered on the day her hiring was announced. Morningstar senior equity analyst David Swartz said the results made "management look really bad," adding that the company had "underestimated the weakness in their own business, but also the industry conditions." According to Foot Locker's 2025 proxy statement, Dillon's total reported compensation was $9,276,605 for the partial fiscal year 2022 in which she joined, $14,692,625 for fiscal 2023 and $12,501,074 for fiscal 2024, with a base salary rate that rose from $1,300,000 to $1,475,000 across that period. Her annual incentive payout for fiscal 2024 was zero per cent of target, and performance-based stock units granted for the 2023 to 2025 performance period were ultimately forfeited after the company's results tracked below threshold. The 2025 sale of the company to Dick's Sporting Goods valued Foot Locker at $2.4 billion, or $24 a share.

Board memberships and outside roles

Dillon has served on the boards of several public companies over her career, in most cases alongside her executive roles rather than after leaving full-time employment. She was a director of Target Corporation from 2007 to at least 2014, serving on its compensation committee, corporate social responsibility committee, and, earlier, its audit committee. She was also, as of 2012, a director of NorthShore University HealthSystem, a private integrated healthcare system serving communities in northern Illinois.

Dillon joined the board of Starbucks Corporation in January 2016, chairing its compensation and management development committee and serving on its corporate governance committee, and remained a Starbucks director until September 2022, when she stepped down around the time she became chief executive of Foot Locker. She has been a director of KKR & Co. Inc. since September 2018, sitting on its risk and conflicts committees. In March 2026, American Airlines Group Inc. appointed Dillon to its board as an independent director, succeeding the retiring Denise M. O'Leary; the airline's chairman said Dillon "brings valuable consumer, financial and strategic experience that enhances the Board's ability to support American's long-term objectives."

Dillon's non-corporate board roles have included membership of The Business Council and The Civic Committee of the Commercial Club of Chicago, an ex-officio seat on the executive committee of The Economic Club of Chicago, and a directorship of the Retail Industry Leaders Association. She joined the board of trustees of Save the Children US in February 2016, served through 2023, and returned as chair of the board of trustees in 2025, a position she continues to hold.

Controversies

In February 2018, former Ulta Beauty employees alleged in social media posts that they had been instructed to clean and reshelve used lipstick, foundation and other returned cosmetics for resale; two lawsuits seeking class-action status followed, and a former Ulta store manager separately told CBS News she had engaged in the practice. Dillon made no public statement addressing the allegations, and the company limited its response to a written statement asserting that its policy did not allow reselling of used, damaged or expired products, that the policy had been recommunicated to every store employee, and that an internal review left it confident customers would continue to receive quality products. Crain's Chicago Business columnist Joe Cahill wrote at the time that the episode, involving claims that touched on customer health and the integrity of Ulta's sales practices, was a "CEO-level" issue that called for more direct engagement from Dillon than the company had shown.

Dillon's tenure at Foot Locker drew sustained criticism over financial performance rather than any single scandal. Investors who had bid up Foot Locker's stock on news of her hiring, hoping she would replicate her Ulta results, saw the shares fall by about half over the following year as comparable sales declined, the company posted a quarterly loss, cut guidance twice and suspended its dividend. Commentary at the time attributed part of the shortfall to Foot Locker's structural dependence on Nike and its mall-based store base, but also noted that management had underestimated both company-specific weakness and broader industry headwinds. The Lace Up plan's restructuring, including the closure or wind-down of the Eastbay, Footaction, Sidestep and Runners Point businesses and roughly 400 stores, coincided with reductions in corporate and support staff as the company cut costs.

Personal life

Dillon is married to Terry, described in a 2016 profile as a biochemist who became a stay-at-home parent; the couple have four grown children. Dillon has said she deliberately sought to keep her career based in the Chicago area for her family's sake, a preference reflected in her choice of roles at Chicago-area companies including U.S. Cellular and Ulta Beauty, both headquartered in the Chicago suburbs. She has lived in the Chicago area, commuting into the city, throughout much of her career. Dillon has described her personal aesthetic as "Midwestern Put Together" and has called herself a "hair-product aficionado."

Philanthropy

Dillon has been associated with Save the Children US since February 2016, first as a member of its board of trustees and, since 2025, as the board's chair. In October 2018 she received the Sandra Taub Humanitarian Award for philanthropic leadership at the Breast Cancer Research Foundation's symposium and awards luncheon in New York, an event at which the foundation announced $63 million in new grants to breast cancer researchers.

Recognition

Dillon was named to Fortune's list of the World's Most Powerful Women in 2016 and again in 2023. In June 2019, Barron's included her among the world's best chief executive officers, citing Ulta's growth to $6.7 billion in revenue under her leadership. In October 2018 she received the Sandra Taub Humanitarian Award from the Breast Cancer Research Foundation.

See also

• Ulta Beauty
• Foot Locker
• United States Cellular Corporation
• McDonald's
• KKR & Co.
• American Airlines Group
• Save the Children
• Starbucks

External links

• Foot Locker, Inc. filings, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission
• Ulta Beauty, Inc. filings, U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission