Two technology hires in the same month, not one
Victoria's Secret & Co. named Adrian Butler as executive vice president and Chief Technology Officer, putting him in charge of the retailer's full technology function at a moment the company has publicly described as a turnaround. Weeks later, the board added Gerri Martin-Flickinger, who spent six years as Starbucks' chief technology officer, as a new independent director with a seat that takes effect in mid-September. Board chair Donna James framed both moves around the company's stated commitment to evolving its leadership, governance, and technology expertise, language that signals these two appointments were coordinated rather than coincidental.
The timing matters because it shows the board making a decision about where technology sits in its governance structure, not just who runs it day to day. A single new CTO hired without board-level technology literacy behind them often ends up fighting for budget and attention against competing retail priorities. Victoria's Secret appears to have concluded it needed both an operator inside the C-suite and an informed voice inside the boardroom at the same time, which is a meaningfully heavier bet than most mid-size retailers are willing to place.
Butler's resume reads like a checklist of hard turnarounds
Butler spent his most recent stretch as CTO at Foot Locker from June 2023 through April 2026, a tenure that ran directly through Foot Locker's acquisition by Dick's Sporting Goods in September 2025. Before that he was CIO at Casey's General Stores for three years, held a senior technology role at Dine Brands Global, the parent of Applebee's and IHOP, and spent four earlier years at Target. Every single stop on that path involved either a brand turnaround, an acquisition integration, or both happening simultaneously, which is a strikingly consistent pattern for a single career.
That pattern is the real story here, more than the Victoria's Secret brand name on his new business card. A board hiring for a turnaround CTO is not primarily looking for someone who can ship a new app or modernize a point-of-sale system in isolation. It is looking for someone who has already sat inside the operational chaos of a brand fighting for relevance, and who has specifically done it while a parent company or activist investor was simultaneously applying pressure from outside the building, exactly the conditions Victoria's Secret is operating under right now.
The board seat came out of an activist fight, not routine succession
Martin-Flickinger's board seat did not open through ordinary rotation. It became available after director Mariam Naficy chose not to seek reelection ahead of the May annual shareholder meeting, following a proxy battle waged by activist investor group BBRC. The board then ran what it called a comprehensive search with a nationally recognized executive search firm before settling on Martin-Flickinger, whose six years running global technology strategy at Starbucks included moving that company's entire technology organization onto a scaled, cloud-based architecture.
An activist-driven board search landing on a technology specialist, rather than another retail operations or finance veteran, is itself a signal worth reading. It suggests the board concluded that the gap activist investors were pointing at had as much to do with digital commerce and technology execution as with merchandising or store operations, and chose to answer that specific criticism with a specific hire rather than a generic governance refresh.
The business context behind both hires
Both appointments landed against a rough financial backdrop. CEO Hillary Super had declared the company in growth mode after operating income fell 34 percent year on year in the second quarter of 2025, and the company has since leaned heavily on a strategy it calls Path to Potential to revive sales, sharpen its brand identity, and win back younger customers who have drifted to newer intimates and beauty competitors. The company did report better-than-expected first quarter results in June, around the same period it began trading under a new ticker symbol following its spinoff structure.
Retail CTOs stepping into turnaround situations tend to inherit two jobs at once: modernizing a technology stack that has usually been underinvested in for years, and doing it while finance and merchandising teams are simultaneously demanding faster, cheaper delivery of new digital capability. Butler's specific experience at Casey's and Foot Locker, both of which required balancing exactly that tension under public market scrutiny, is precisely why his profile likely stood out during the search, well beyond generic retail technology credentials.
What other retail boards should take from this
The lesson for other retail boards sitting on underperforming brands is not simply to hire a CTO with turnaround experience, though that matters. It is to recognize that a lone technology executive, however capable, operating without an informed board-level counterpart often loses internal battles over budget and priority to merchandising, marketing, and store operations leaders who have historically held more boardroom credibility. Victoria's Secret addressed that structural weakness directly by building technology literacy into the boardroom at the same moment it strengthened technology leadership in the C-suite.
That two-level approach costs more political capital to execute than a single hire, since it requires the board to actively cede a seat to a technology specialist rather than another generalist director. But for a company already under activist pressure and trying to prove its turnaround story to skeptical investors, the combined signal of a credible new CTO and a credible new technology director is considerably harder for critics to dismiss than either appointment would have been standing alone.
