Lauder, Estée

(b. 1 July 1908 in New York City; d. 24 April 2004 in New York City), beauty expert and business woman who built a home business into a multibillion dollar international cosmetics empire.

Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer at home in Corona, Queens, New York City. The youngest child of Hungarian immigrants, Lauder had one full sister and five half brothers and a half sister from her mother’s previous marriage to Abraham Rosenthal. Lauder’s father, Max Mentzer, a tailor by trade, ran a hardware store in Queens, where the young Lauder received training in salesmanship and merchandising. Her mother, Rose (Schotz) Rosenthal Mentzer, a homemaker, was very concerned about her skin and wore gloves and carried a parasol for protection against the sun’s rays. Lauder was embarrassed by her mother’s parasol as well as by her parents’ foreign accents and European customs. She wrote in her autobiography, Estee: A Success Story (1985), “I wanted desperately to be 100 percent American.”

Lauder grew up Jewish in the mostly Italian neighborhood of Corona. In 1913, when her father registered her at the neighborhood school, the principal misspelled her family nickname Esty as Estee, a name that stuck. At the outbreak of World War I, Lauder’s uncle, John Schotz, a chemist who experimented with skin care treatments, arrived from Hungary to live with the family. Lauder watched with interest as he produced fragrant lotions from chemical mixtures in a makeshift laboratory set up in a stable behind the family’s house. She helped him sell his homemade products.

As a teenager attending Newton High School, Lauder experimented with her own mixes, bringing high-school friends home to try her newest concoctions. Years later she wrote, “I always felt most alive when I was dabbling in the practice cream.” When Lauder began promoting her products to beauty salons in New York City, Florence Morris, the owner of the House of Ash Blondes on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, was so impressed by the determination, ambition, and creative salesmanship of the five-foot, four-and-a-half-inch-tall blonde with lovely skin and immaculate grooming that she hired Lauder to operate the beauty counter in one of her new stores. Lauder soon began her own operations, expanding to resort areas outside New York City where she came into contact with wealthy clients. Lauder gained a following of loyal clients by handing out extras with each purchase. She had learned the trick from her father, who each Christmas gave wrapped gifts of hammers and nails to his customers. Lauder gave free demonstrations to women waiting under hair dryers in beauty salons. She even stopped women on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and asked them to try her products. A master of merchandising and promotion, Lauder once declared, “If you put the product into the customer’s hands, it will speak for itself if it’s something of quality.”

On 15 January 1930 Lauder married Joseph H. Lauter, a garment district businessman, whom she had been dating since 1927. Lauter, whose parents had emigrated from Austria, later changed his name back to the original Lauder. The Lauders’ first son, Leonard Allen, was born on 19 March 1933. Estee’s ambition and success soon caused severe stress in the marriage. As she wrote in her autobiography, “I did not know how to be Mrs. Joseph Lauder and Estee Lauder at the same time.” The couple divorced in 1939, and Lauder moved to Miami Beach, Florida, expanding her growing business there. She remarried Joseph on 7 December 1942, and the couple went into business together. Joseph dealt with the financial details, and Estee took charge of sales and marketing. The couple had a second son, Ronald Stephen, born 26 February 1944, and stayed together until Joseph’s death on 15 January 1983.

After incorporating her company, Estée Lauder, in 1946, Lauder applied her energy to selling her products to the best department stores. In 1948 Robert Fiske, a buyer at Saks Fifth Avenue, the upscale store in New York City, purchased an order of her products. The Lauders spent hours in their laboratory, a converted restaurant, mixing up creams and lotions. Saks sold all Lauder’s items in two days. Following this success, Lauder expanded her products to Neiman Marcus in Dallas and then to other stores around the country. Her empire had been born. Lauder opened each store herself and trained the saleswomen who demonstrated her products. Lauder insisted the saleswomen maintain an impeccable appearance and appropriate demeanor so they would be walking advertisements for Estée Lauder products.

In 1953 Lauder introduced her first fragrance, Youth Dew, a bath oil with a scent that doubled as a perfume. Customers began using Youth Dew, which sold for $8.50 a bottle, lavishly in their baths. The new product raised the Estée Lauder sales volume from $400 a week to more than $5,000 a week by 1955. The increase in income allowed the Lauders to move into their first town house, on East Seventy-seventh Street in Manhattan. By 1958 sales had climbed to more than $800,000 a year, an amazing figure because the Lauders did not have a sales force at the time. Lauder relied on her own judgment and creative salesmanship and in so doing used marketing techniques soon to be copied by her rivals. Lauder created slogans for her products, calling her lotions and creams “jars of hope,” advising women to “start the New Year with a new face.” She never missed the opening of the store counters—spas she later called them—where her products were sold. She touched her customers and offered them free samples along with personal beauty advice.

Another marketing device Lauder created was the gift with every purchase. The Lauders had been advised by an advertising agency that their $50,000 budget was not enough to attract a sufficient audience, so they used the money to give away free samples through the mail and at charity events. Lauder used the same successful marketing strategies to expand her company’s operations abroad. In 1960 the company opened its first international account at Harrods in London. It followed with Galeries Lafayette in Paris and other major department stores around the world.

In 1962 Lauder introduced still another marketing technique to package her products, the Estée Lauder woman. Unlike her competitors, who chose models packaged as sex objects, Lauder chose to personify her products in the vision of one woman, the same model in every advertisement. The Lauder woman was classic, sweet, and independent, a sophisticated yet very accessible woman. Karen Graham, the Lauder model for many years, was succeeded by Elizabeth Hurley, Carolyn Murphy, and Gwyneth Paltrow.

Over the years Lauder added several new brands to the company’s offerings: Aramis (1964), a line of fragrances and grooming products for men; Clinique (1968), the first allergy-tested, fragrance-free cosmetic brand; Prescriptives (1979), a collection of highly individualized products; Origins Natural Resources (1990), a line of skin care products; and Sensory Therapy products (1990), which combined age-old natural remedies and advanced science. Youth Dew was followed by some of the best-known brands of fragrances, such as Aramis, Aliage, Private Collection, JHL, Beautiful, Pleasure, and Beyond Paradise.

In 1973 Lauder became chairman of the board of Estée Lauder, ceding the title of president to her son, Leonard, who opened individual retail outlets, expanded the company into Estée Lauder Companies, and took the company public in 1995, by which time it was worth more than $4 billion. Leonard later became chairman of the company, and his younger brother, Ronald, became chairman of the international division and of Clinique Laboratories.

Even though she had turned daily operations of the business over to her sons, allowing her more time to consolidate her position in society, Lauder kept her hands in the company’s affairs. She pitched the newest line of products, such as Lauder for Men. She also played an integral part in the various acquisitions undertaken by the company in the 1990s, such as MAC, Bobbi Brown, Aveda, Jo Malone, and Bumble and Bumble. Lauder also was active in acquiring for the company the exclusive licenses for distributing the fragrances of Tommy Hilfiger and Donna Karan New York.

Lauder’s public corporate life dwindled after she broke her hip in 1994, so she devoted her time to two other passions, entertaining friends and philanthropy. Lauder enjoyed an active social life, often pursuing friendships of the rich and famous. Among her friends were the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Princess Grace of Monaco, Nancy Reagan, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., and the Begum Aga Khan. Lauder became celebrated herself for entertaining dinner guests in a grandiose manner. She enjoyed playing hostess to her wealthy friends every Saturday night at her town houses in Manhattan and London, her Villa Abri in the south of France, and her twenty-seven-room oceanfront home in Palm Beach, Florida. Lauder was the first hostess to receive permission to hold a private party at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, for her friend Florence J. Gould.

In 1962 the Lauders established the Estee and Joseph Lauder Foundation, a medical and educational philanthropy benefiting Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York City and the University of Pennsylvania, which houses the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies, set up in 1983. Lauder received worldwide recognition during her lifetime. In 1978 she was made a member of the French Legion of Honor, and in 1979 she received the Gold Medal of the City of Paris, that city’s highest honor. President Richard M. Nixon offered Lauder the ambassadorship to Luxembourg, but she declined. In 1999 Lauder was the only woman on the Time list of the twenty most influential business geniuses of the twentieth century. In 2004 she was awarded posthumously the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the highest civilian award in the United States.

Lauder died of cardiopulmonary arrest at her home in New York City. She is buried in the Lauder family plot at Beth-El Cemetery in Paramus, New Jersey, the cemetery her family had once owned and at which her father had once worked.

Lauder’s autobiography, Estee: A Success Story (1985), often neglects facts in favor of an idealized portrait of the subject. Lee Israel, Estee Lauder: Beyond the Magic (1985), is an unauthorized biography complete with dates and facts omitted in Lauder’s book. Obituaries are in the New York Times and Washington Post (both 26 Apr. 2004).

John J. Byrne