Lauder, Estee

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LAUDER, ESTEE

Estee Lauder (c. 1910–) epitomizes the American success story. Born Josephine Esther Mentzer, the daughter of poor Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, she built a small line of homemade face creams into a billion-dollar cosmetics business through perseverance, ingenuity, and hard work.

Estee Lauder grew up in the Corona section of Queens, New York, the youngest child in a large family. Her mother's brother was a chemist who specialized in developing skin-care preparations. Lauder's lovely complexion was her uncle's best advertisement for his special face cream. After marrying Joseph Lauder in 1930, she worked on her own kitchen stove to refine and improve her uncle's face cream and other beauty products. Soon she began to sell her creams and lipsticks at upscale beauty salons in Manhattan and resort hotels in the New York area. A perfectionist, Estee Lauder insisted on producing only the highest quality cosmetics. Typical of her attention to detail was her decision to market her products in attractive packaging in a distinctive color she called Lauder blue.

Lauder possessed an intense, single-minded determination to make a success of her cosmetics business. Grace Mirabella, former editor of Vogue and founder of Mirabella magazine, writing in Time (December 7, 1998), said of the cosmetics tycoon, "She simply outworked everyone else in the cosmetics industry." Her ambition extended to her social life. Lauder cultivated affluent people in influential social positions who could help her in her business. She donated sample products as favors at charity balls and made sure that socialites had her lipsticks in their evening purses. Before long, the elegant Lauder was appearing regularly at fashionable dinner parties and charity benefits and her name had become associated with glamour and celebrity.

By 1946 Estee Lauder, Inc. was formed with Joseph Lauder handling the financial end of the business and Estee concentrating on product development and marketing. They were the firm's only employees and when the company acquired a coveted sales location at Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in 1948, the couple had to work night and day to produce and package enough face care products to fill the allotted counter space.

The association with Saks opened the door for Estee Lauder products at other prestigious department stores across the country. Lauder traveled to each store and personally trained her handpicked saleswomen in customer service and personal grooming. She pioneered the concept of including free sample gifts with a cosmetics purchase, a practice ensuring the customer would be introduced to a whole range of products she might otherwise never have purchased.

It was the bath oil, "Youth Dew," that launched Estee Lauder, Inc. into the front ranks of the cosmetics industry. The sweet, persistent scent that doubled as a perfume was an affordable luxury for most women. Youth Dew enjoyed phenomenal success in the 1950s and 1960s and it put the company on the map for good. In the mid–1960s Estee Lauder introduced several new product lines, including Clinique, the first line of both hypoallergenic and fashionable cosmetics, and Aramis, a line of colognes for men. Her fragrances, particularly "White Linen," became perennial successes.

By 1998 the Estee Lauder, Cos., still a family-owned business run by the two Lauder sons since their mother's retirement in 1973, was selling cosmetics products in 118 countries and commanded 45 percent of the U.S. cosmetics market. The companies listed $3.6 billion in sales in 1997, and the Lauder family's shares in the business were reported to be worth more than six billion dollars.

Although officially retired for the last 25 years of the twentieth century, Estee Lauder's influence in the family business remained strong, particularly in planning promotional campaigns and creating new fragrances. With more time available, however, she was free to entertain on a grand scale at her townhouse in Manhattan, her villa in the south of France, her flat in London, England, and her oceanfront home in Palm Beach, Florida. After the death of Joseph Lauder in 1983, Estee Lauder carried on the philanthropic work the two had begun two decades earlier. The Lauder Foundation has made significant gifts to many causes including cancer research.