775: Back to the Future | Joan Hilson, CFO, Signet Jewelers Limited

Of all the CFO career routes that our finance leader guests have shared with us, very few have have rendered a path as circuitous as the one blazed by Joan Hilson, CFO of Signet Jewelers Limited, the world’s largest specialty jewelry company.

When Hilson assumed the CFO role at gem giant Signet in 2019, she was entering a business that had charted several evolutionary chapters—including an early one that she knew only too well.

Back in the mid-1980s, Hilson had left public accounting to become controller of a 100-store chain of jewelry stores known as Sterling Jewelers. The regional chain would soon thereafter complete an IPO that put it on a path to grow to more than 1,000 stores, a feat that it would accomplish in part through the acquisition of several chains, including Kay Jewelers. Later, the business would be rebranded as the Signet Group.

In 1992, when Hilson left the jewelry retailer to accept a vice president of finance position with Limited Brands, she had no clue that her career would eventually lead her back to the fast-growing, ambitious jeweler that had first whetted her appetite for retail. Thus, when executive and specialty jeweler were reunited in 2019, Hilson’s career journey took on the storybook quality—seldom achieved in corporate finance—that derives from the protagonist returning to close a figurative loop.

For Hilson, though, the intervening years were perhaps less of a loop and more of a 27-year stint of diligent career-building that included CFO tours of duty at Limited Brands’ Victoria Secret Stores (2003–2005), American Eagle Outfitters (2005–2012), and David’s Bridal (2014–2019).

Asked to supply us with her 2022 CFO priorities, Hilson responds: “To continue to grow my team and create an experience that allows them to grow personally as well as professionally.”

It’s perhaps not surprising to hear such team-oriented goals as the priorities of this finance leader, who, during her 1980s career chapter with the jewelry giant, became the company’s first female vice president. –Jack Sweeney