The question for the origin of the huge hierarchies in masses and mixing angles of standard model fermions has been puzzled theoretical physicists since the discovery of the muon. Many underlying theories have been proposed, but since the Yukawa couplings are dimensionless, the scale at which they are generated by a more fundamental mechanism can be arbitrarily high. I will discuss experimental consequences of such a mechanism and future prospects to discover it for very generic flavon models. A very predictive class of models in which the scale of flavor symmetry breaking is irrevocably tied to the electroweak scale will be the focus of the second part of my talk.