Luiza Trajano

Luiza Trajano was born in 1948 in Franca, in the interior of São Paulo state, Brazil, into a family connected to a small shop that her aunt and uncle had founded. As a teenager she worked as a shop assistant behind the counter, learning the retail trade from the ground floor rather than from a business degree, in a modest regional store selling household goods to local families.

She took over management of the business, by then called Magazine Luiza, in the 1990s at a difficult moment, when high inflation and economic instability in Brazil made running any retail business a constant struggle to protect margins and inventory value from being eaten away overnight. She responded with unusually close attention to staff training and customer relationships, and with an early willingness to experiment, including opening stores without physical stock that took orders through catalogues and later computer terminals, an approach that let the company reach smaller towns cheaply.

Under her leadership Magazine Luiza expanded from a regional chain into a national retailer and, well before most Brazilian rivals, into e-commerce, eventually becoming one of the country's most valuable listed companies. She was known for promoting women into management at a company where most senior retail roles elsewhere in Brazil still went to men.

She later became a prominent public advocate for women's economic empowerment and against domestic violence in Brazil, arguing that the confidence she gained from being trusted early with real responsibility in the family shop had shaped everything that followed.