Estee Lauder: From rags to riches

Lauder: household name

Estee Lauder, who built her international cosmetics empire from blending face creams at home, has died at the age of 97.

Her story was one of rags to riches. She was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in the working-class Corona section of Queens. Lauder never disclosed her birth date, but a company spokeswoman said she was 97.

Lauder said her family always called her Esty (pronounced ES-tee). When a public school official spelled it Estee, it stuck.

In 1930 she married a garment centre businessman named Joseph Lauter (later changed to Lauder), and they had their first son, Leonard, three years later.

During the 1930s, she began selling face creams that her uncle John Schotz, a chemist, mixed up in a makeshift laboratory in a stable behind the family house. And she began experimenting with mixes herself.

Lauder went to beauty salons where she gave free demonstrations to women waiting under hair dryers. More often than not, they became customers. Sometimes she stopped women on Fifth Avenue to try her products.

In 1939 she got a divorce and moved to Florida. Years later, she explained why: "I was married very young. You think you missed something out of life. But I found out that I had the sweetest husband in the world."

Remarried

She and Joseph remarried in 1942, had a second son, Ronald, and went into business together. Her persistence in selling paid off in 1948, when she persuaded a buyer at Saks to place a sizable order.

She and her husband filled the order themselves, cooking up the creams in their factory, a converted restaurant, and bottling them in attractive jars. In two days, Saks sold out and the company was on its way.

While her husband handled the business at home, she travelled to each new store that took her line and personally selected and trained the new saleswomen.

Packaging developed by Lauder in a delicate shade of greenish blue - chosen because it complemented virtually any bathroom decor - became a trademark.

Household name

Estee Lauder became a household name in 1953, when the company debuted Youth Dew, a bath oil and perfume. Over the years she added new lines and new products, fragrances such as White Linen and Cinnabar, the Aramis line of men's toiletries and the Clinique line of fragrance-free, allergy-tested products.

She duelled with archrival Charles Revson, who built the Revlon empire.

"She was the one competitor he set out to beat but couldn't," wrote Revson biographer Andrew Tobias.

As the privately held company grew, Lauder and her husband involved their sons in the decision making. Leonard Lauder took over as chief executive officer in 1982, the year before Joseph Lauder died, and nearly quadrupled annual sales by 1995.

Ronald Lauder left the business for several years in the '80s, serving in defense and ambassador posts in the Reagan administration and making a failed bid for mayor of New York. He then returned to the company.

In 1995, the company, long tightly held by family members, announced plans to raise $335 million in an initial public stock offering.

This year Forbes magazine estimated the net worth of her sons at $5.1 billion total, ranking them both among the top 300 richest people in the world.

Assets into trust

Lauder's assets, including her company stock and much of her real estate, had been put in recent years into a trust administered by her two sons and a longtime lawyer. Her public life dwindled after she broke her hip in 1994.

After being vague about her background for years, Lauder rushed her autobiography, "Estee: A Success Story," into print in 1985. Typically, she was out to beat the competition: in this case Lee Israel's unauthorized biography, "Estee Lauder: Beyond the Magic."

Lauder and her husband were active in philanthropic work, including contributions to Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York and the University of Pennsylvania, the site of the Joseph H. Lauder Institute of Management and International Studies.

Lauder's success lay in her ability to connect with the average American woman, said Eileen Ford, co-founder of Ford Models.

"Mrs. Lauder understood all women and what their beauty needs were," Ford said.

Source: dailymail.co.uk