Over 25 brands in stores in 150 countries, and sales exceeding seven billion dollars –in the second semester of 2017- are some of the impressive numbers of the american company estée lauder companies.
Among its labels are Clinique, Tommy Hilfiger, DKNY, Prescriptions, Lab Series, Origins and Bobbi Brown. Lauder is a world leader in makeup and skin care; however, the company began with the initiative of a woman who barely gave samples and tried out her products for free in beauty salons. “I never believed that success would come alone, I worked for it”. Josephine Esther Mentzer remained true to that motto that led her to become Estée Lauder, one of the richest and most influential women in the world. Daughter of immigrants, Estée, nickname by which everyone knew her, was born in 1908 in Corona, in the county of Queens in New York. According to her biographers, she spent her childhood in an Italian working-class neighborhood, where she used to say “one day I’ll have what I want”. And she achieve it. Her son Leonard, summing up the philosophy that drove his mother, said “she liked to think about beauty and was determined to give women the opportunity to feel that way”. As a teenager, she became interested in the work of her uncle John Schotz, a chemist who created cosmetic products with a gas stove at home, and she helped him sell them. In 1946, with her husband Joseph Lauder, Estée officially launched the line that bears her name. Then there were four products: Cleansing Oil, Cream Pack, Supernutritive MultiPurpose Cream, from her uncle, and Skin Lotion. From the beginning she became the soul of the business and her ability to sell guaranteed her success.
Hope in a jar
The cosmetics industry’s pioneer loved her products. “I love touching my creams, smelling them, looking at them, carrying them with me. A person has to love his or her harvest if he or she expects others to do it”, she once admitted. Thus, she convinced twentieth-century women that her beauty remedies were “jars of hope”. Lauder didn’t hesitate to take the creams from her bag and rub them on the skin of a potential buyer. She was her own publicist, often showing up in New York’s beauty salons to make image changes to women while they were sitting under the hair dryers. When the company was in the making, Estée devised creative marketing strategies: she was known in the industry for offering free samples and applying the concept of “gift with purchase”. The business took off after World War II, when she persuaded Fifth Avenue’s Saks to allow her to establish herself in the prestigious Big Apple store. Her salesmanship, and the launch of a bath oil called Youth Dew in the 1950s, assured the firm as a world leader. In the ’60s, the expansion of the company to Europe began and from there to the rest of the world. From her humble beginnings, Estée Lauder went on to build a global company valued at two billion dollars when it began trading on the New York Stock Exchange in 1995. Three years later, she was the only woman included in the list of “The 20 most influential commercial geniuses of the twentieth century”, published by Times magazine.
Three tips from Estée Lauder
Estée Lauder died on March 24, 2004 leaving a solid company in the hands of her children, and three basic lessons for entrepreneurs:
• Let your products speak for you: She hoped that the quality of her products would attract the customers who tried them. Today the company maintains this strategy and allows people to test the products in any of the stores.
• Diversify on time: When the appropriate time came, Estée expanded her product portfolio and opened up to new markets. The companies Clinique and Aramis, for example, responded to the needs of cosmetics specialized in skin treatment and for men.
• Know how to sell Undoubtedl: Estée’s best lesson is to be creative when it comes to creating advertising campaigns and designing marketing strategies. In explaining her success, the queen of cosmetics once said: “I have never spent a day without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it, and I do it aggressively”.
