  ATLAS and CMS have reported an excess in the flavor violating decay of the
Higgs boson, $h \rightarrow \mu \tau$. We show that this result can be
accommodated through a mixing of the Higgs with a flavon, the field responsible
for generating the Yukawa matrices in the lepton sector. We employ a version of
the Froggatt-Nielsen mechanism at the electroweak scale, with only the leptons
and the flavon transforming non--trivially under the corresponding symmetry
group. Non--observation of charged lepton flavor violation (LFV) in other
processes imposes important constraints on the model, which we find to be
satisfied in substantial regions of parameter space.
