''It gives you a finished, clean, natural look,'' she said of her make-up. She has unswerving faith in cosmetics, and unstinting praise for her own. ''After three, six months, they run out of my ideas,'' she declared. She complains that competitors raid the group for staff, hoping to poach its creativity, but to no avail.
She denounces rival products - ''Lancome is nothing,'' she said, of the French cosmetics company regarded as one of the Lauder group's toughest rivals. (Because Lauder and Revlon are major tenants, wits call it the General Odors Building.) Lauder frequently visits the group's offices and retail outlets, and when she is in New York, comes to work daily at the group's headquarters in the General Motors Building. She loses little time in ushering a female visitor into her private marbledand-mirrored bathroom and painting her with Country Market and Regatta, two recently introduced Estee Lauder cosmetics lines. It is difficult to determine the extent of her involvement now, but her presence at the group's offices is hard to ignore. Lauder, who still has a copy of her first order, for $1,045.44 from a Philadelphia distributor in 1946. In large measure, the company has got where it is through the considerable energy and creative talents of Mrs. The company's strategy has always been to sell top-of-the-line products through top-rated outlets, for top dollar, rather than through drug stores and discount chains like Woolworths and K marts. That is the choice that the Lauders made from the first, and to which they have adhered. In fact, he added, ''prestige department stores set the tone, and they make the manufacturers pay for it'' by, for example, offering more and better discounts. ''There's a fallacy that if you sell through department stores, you're better off,'' said Mr. Related to that is Estee Lauder's heavy reliance on department stores. ''It's a very expensive proposition,'' Mr. The technique is known more elegantly in department stores as purchase-with-purchase or gift-with-purchase, in which customers who buy a certain amount receive additional items at reduced prices or free.
Salzman, an analyst for Smith Barney Harris Upham & Company, is that the company was built on a pattern of discounting. Profits are an even more speculative matter, but the picture is decidedly less rosy: Estee Lauder's profit margins are believed to fall below the 5 percent mark. Leonard Lauder says only that the group has had a compounded annual growth rate of 20 percent in its 36 years. The figure is neither confirmed nor denied by management. But the rest of the industry and Wall Street, which watch it closely, estimate that revenues currently approach $1 billion. It is still privately held by the senior Lauders, their two sons and their four grandchildren. More precise measures of the group's success are harder to obtain. ''I'm the only one left,'' she said last week. ''You're kidding.'') has outlived her rivals: Charles Revson of Revlon, Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden. Lauder, a blonde, hazeleyed woman on no specified side of 70 (''Age?'' she hoot ed, when the subject was broached. It accounts for an estimated 30 to 50 percent of department store sales of cosmetics and fragrances. The group has approximately 10,000 employees worldwide. Its Youth Dew is one of the nation's top three selling fragrances. Indeed, it is perhaps the family's proudest boast that the younger and older generations have worked together long and well, almost from the founding of Estee Lauder Inc. ''What we are doing is setting the stage for the next 20 years,'' said Ronald Lauder. Lauder also made it clear that she is not stepping down anytime soon from her active chairmanship, nor is her husband, Joseph, withdrawing from management of the group's factories. Although the entire family granted one of its rare interviews to publicize the promotion of the ''sweet boys,'' as their fond mother described them, Mrs. Leonard Lauder, the 49-year-old president, also became chief executive officer his brother, Ronald Lauder, 38, executive vice president, assumed the additional title of chairman of the company's substantial overseas operations.Īs befits a cosmetics business, however, there were signs that the changes were mainly skin-deep. Last week, with a fanfare it normally reserves for a new body lotion, the group announced some executive changes.
Lauder has nailed her color to the company's mast, she has stamped her personal imprint on the group, by some measures the most successful cosmetics company in the United States. Blue is the personal trademark of Estee Lauder, as pink was Elizabeth Arden's. Blue is the color of the headquarters of the Estee Lauder group, from the midnight blue elevator banks to the blue walls, blue carpets and blue-and-white overstuffed sofas of the reception area.
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