Estee Lauder, who started a kitchen business blending face creams and built it into a multimillion-dollar international cosmetics empire, has died. She was 97.
Lauder died of cardiopulmonary arrest late Saturday at her home in Manhattan, said Sally Susman, a company spokeswoman.
In 1998, Lauder was the only woman on Time magazine's list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the century. Her company placed No. 349 in last year's ranking in the Fortune 500 list of the nation's largest companies, with revenue at US$4.744 billion.
PHOTO: EPA
In explaining her success, the cosmetics queen once said: "I have never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I sell it hard."
Lauder sold her products primarily through department stores -- Saks Fifth Avenue, Bloomingdale's, Marshall Field's, Neiman-Marcus, Harrods in London and Galeries Lafayette in Paris -- the tonier the better.
"Beauty is an attitude," she once said. "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."
The company's product lines have included Estee Lauder, Clinique, Aramis, Prescriptives and Origins.
A favorite selling tool has been offering a gift with a purchase -- a giveaway that began out of necessity. Lauder started off without enough of an advertising budget to attract an agency, so she used the money instead for free samples.
She also courted the rich and famous.
"I don't know her very well, but she keeps sending all these things," said Princess Grace of Monaco, who became a friend.
Said Lauder: "If you have a goal, if you want to be successful, if you really want to do it and become another Estee Lauder, you've got to work hard, you've got to stick to it and you've got to believe in what you're doing."
She enjoyed entertaining in the grand manner in her Upper East Side townhouse, her oceanfront home in Palm Beach, her London flat and her villa in the south of France.
But that was not how she grew up.
Born Josephine Esther Mentzer in the working-class Corona section of Queens, she was the daughter of Max and Rose Schotz Mentzer. 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 center 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.
While in her home kitchen, "during every possible spare moment, (I) cooked up little pots of cream for faces. I always felt most alive when I was dabbling in the practice cream," she said.
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.
"If you put the product into the customer's hands, it will speak for itself if it's something of quality," she declared.
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."
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.
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