Estée Lauder

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Estée Lauder puts lipstick on a customer.

Estée Lauder (birth name Josephine Esther Mentzer , first name in the Esty family , which later became Estée ; * July 1, 1906 - she always gave 1908 as the year of birth - in Queens , New York ; † April 24, 2004 in Manhattan , New York) was an American cosmetics entrepreneur who worked her way up from the simplest of beginnings and left a billion-dollar company that made her name known worldwide.

Familiar

Her parents came to the United States as immigrants. The mother, Rose Schotz Mentzer, was of French-Catholic, Hungarian and Slovak-Jewish origin, her father, Max Mentzer, of Czech-Jewish origin. Estée Lauder left behind two sons when she died of cardiopulmonary failure in her Manhattan home in old age: Ronald Lauder and Leonard Lauder .

Your beginnings

In order to boost sales of her products, Estée Lauder distributed free samples of cosmetics to her customers for the first time and thus created a powerful marketing idea (she had been rejected by advertising agencies because of an allegedly too small budget). She thus became the pioneer of the cosmetics industry and was soon considered cosmetic -Queen ( cosmetics queen ).

Fascinated by the way her uncle John Schotz, a chemist and pharmacist from Hungary , handled various beauty ointments, Estée Lauder herself mixed a skin care cream based on her uncle's recipe in her parents' kitchen. She convinced her customers of the benefits of the family-made ointments, creams and oils at housewife parties. Beauty salons and hotels were her next stop when selling the creams. The first successes spurred them on to ask the high-end department store Saks on New York's Fifth Avenue to offer some of their cosmetics on a trial basis. Soon afterwards her goods were also available in other department stores in the city.

In 1930 she married Joseph Lauter (the surname changed to Lauder in the late 1930s), a commercially unsuccessful silk, button and haberdashery dealer. She divorced him in 1939 and remarried him in 1942 (she said: I was married very young. You think you missed something out of life. But I found that I had the sweetest husband in the world ). In 1946 she founded together with her husband as CFO, the company Estee Lauder Companies and built it in the following decades into a globally successful cosmetics - Group from, despite competition from established companies Helena Rubinstein , Elizabeth Arden and Revlon .

The breakthrough

With her friend and later managing director Arnold van Ameringen, she created a bath oil from flower and herbal extracts in 1953 under the name Youth Dew ( Tau der Jugend ), which was awarded the preservation of beauty and lasting youthful freshness. The bath oil became a product hit, especially since it could be applied more generously than the expensive perfumes common at the time. In 1962, Esty , her youthful nickname, had stars and supermodels with their faces advertise their products well-paid for the first time. Other well-known perfumes: Clinique Aromatics Elixir 1972, Lauder White Linen 1978, Aramis Devin 1978, Lauder Spellbound 1991, Lauder Pleasures 1998 and the like. a.

Today the group is one of the world's leading manufacturers of skin care, make-up and perfume in the prestige market. The Estée Lauder Group now includes more than 25 brands, including Aramis, Aveda, Bobbi Brown, Clinique, Donna Karan, Darphin, Jo Malone, Kiton, La Mer, MAC, Michael Kors, Tom Ford and Tommy Hilfiger.

Remarkable personality

With her persistent and charming manner, Estée Lauder achieved that she could also count exclusive customers such as the Duchess of Windsor and Princess Gracia Patricia of Monaco among her circle of friends. US guests like Mikhail Gorbachev and his wife Raissa stopped at the company headquarters on Fifth Avenue.

Lauder was very enterprising and retired in 1996 from the company management back. In her professional life she spent a lot of time coaching beauty consultants at the sales tables and also advising customers personally. Her children and grandchildren are now active in the company.

She was considered one of the richest women in the world at her death and was listed as the only woman among the 20 most influential business people of the 20th century by US TIME magazine in 1998 .

2004 gave US President George W. Bush her the Medal of Freedom ( "The Presidential Medal of Freedom"), the highest civilian honor in the United States.

Lauder was committed to social and cultural purposes and made donations to hospitals, museums and universities.

Quotes from Estée Lauder

  • The most beautiful face in the world? It belongs to you!
  • Perfume is like love. A bit is never enough.
  • I haven't worked a day of my life without selling something. If I believe in something, I sell it and I sell it emphatically. (I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard.)
  • Beauty is an attitude. There is no secret. Why are all brides beautiful? Because they pay attention to how they look on their wedding day. There are no such things as ugly women - just women who don't care about themselves or who think they are not attractive. (Beauty is an attitude. There's no secret. Why are all brides beautiful? Because on their wedding day they care about how they look. There are no ugly women - only women who don't care or who don't believe they're attractive.)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Estée Lauder About Estée Lauder. Retrieved October 9, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Claudia Fromme: Queen of Free Trials . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2010, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed December 6, 2018]).
  3. ↑ Dafna Kariv: Female Entrepreneurship and the New Venture Creation: An International Overview . Routledge, 2013, ISBN 978-1-136-49607-3 ( google.de [accessed December 6, 2018]).
  4. ↑ "Beauty is an attitude" . In: sueddeutsche.de . 2008, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed December 6, 2018]).
personal data
SURNAME Lauder, Estée
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Mentzer, Josephine Esther (maiden name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American businesswoman
DATE OF BIRTH July 1, 1906
PLACE OF BIRTH Queens , New York City
DATE OF DEATH April 24, 2004
Place of death Manhattan , New York