Leonard Lauder, Legendary Beauty Executive, Dies at 92
Lauder built the beauty company founded by his mother Estée into a global giant.
Beauty has lost its master builder.
Leonard A. Lauder, arguably the most influential and respected architect of the prestige beauty business, died late Saturday at age 92.
Lauder spent his career molding the Estée Lauder Companies Inc., into the global leader of prestige beauty. The company that his parents — the ever quotable Estée (“When sex goes out of business, so will we”) and her husband Joseph — founded in 1946, their son shaped into a $15.61 billion giant in sales for the 2024 fiscal year.
What drove this empire building was an unquenchable desire to create a gold standard for the industry. In June 1995, five months before the company went public, the then-president and chief executive officer unveiled his vision to become “the preeminent supplier of upmarket cosmetics in the world.”
Then Lauder reached out for that goal.
Lauder once remarked, “Money doesn’t drive me. What drives me is to see that this great company continues its inexorable march to becoming the greatest company in the world. Not the largest, but the greatest.”
In that pursuit, he brought a passion and drive that were seemingly inexhaustible. Younger employees would flag in his wake as Lauder would visit store after store almost from dawn to dark, speaking with retail executives and customers to find out what the latest trends were. As chairman, he could walk onto a store floor anywhere from Los Angeles to London and immediately spot that a counter for one of Lauder’s brands was two inches smaller than a competitor’s, or not positioned correctly for a store’s new traffic pattern.
Even as his company’s success grew, Lauder would listen and question more than issue diktats. Throughout his life he retained a salty sense of humor – perhaps honed during his years in the Navy and Navy Reserve – and never lost his ear-to-ear grin or the twinkle in his eye, which immediately relaxed even the most intimidated person meeting him for the first time.
He was in the forefront of leaders defining and establishing the doctrine of the modern global prestige beauty business, particularly in department and major specialty stores. He was among the first to recognize the transcendent reach of globalization in the beauty business, coining its language and recognizing fundamental doctrines. His vision was driven by the role of innovation, the power of new product introductions, the purity of distribution strategy and the sanctity of brand equity. He viewed brands as living, breathing beings.
Those beliefs may have become thought of as old school as younger competitors came on the scene talking about triple-tier distribution, celebrity marketing, the power of influencers and their digital native brands. But Lauder’s tenacity of vision and Zen-like surety of purpose never faltered and his passion never ceased to fuel the vitality of the business.
Later in life, when asked how he kept his batteries charged, Lauder traced his deep reserves of energy to his practice of teaching his brand equity course to his young executives. He identified himself as Lauder’s CTO, or “chief teaching officer,” perhaps the title that made him the most proud.
“The thing that gives me the greatest pleasure and recharge is teaching,” he said once, noting that he had redone the syllabus “to make it something far deeper than I have ever done.
“The other thing is that a lot of the people who were low-level merchants a long time ago when I was more deeply involved with individual buyers and merchandise managers are now store principals, and what gives me pleasure is meeting with them and understanding them and talking to them.” He added with a grin, “I give them my advice, whether they like it or not.”
At least one person who heeded Lauder’s advice was Ralph Lauren. “Leonard’s life and mine have intersected for so many years and during that time I have called on him many times for advice,” the designer said in 2018. “He was always there for me. He is a man of honor, a man of integrity, a man of great energy and passion and what I’ve really learned and respected was his love and support of his family,” Lauren continued. “They always came first.”
Lauder tended to view the people who worked with him and for him as much more than employees. When asked in 2018 what was his proudest achievement, he replied that it was “the people we have brought up and who are running the company today…These are people who really started at a much lower level and they grew and grew and grew. These people are my proudest accomplishment. The wealth of a company is its people and we are a very wealthy company.”
Throughout his career, long before Lauder started teaching his classes, he was known for his mentoring skills. On more than a few occasions, a rising industry star might be asked with whom they would like to work for next. The answer was often, “Leonard.”
When asked about his reputation, Lauder, who prided himself on his ability to read people, replied, “Every time I’m meeting someone, I ask myself, ‘Can they grow into a great leader?’”
But the tricky part comes when giving someone a second and third chance, usually at the behest of their manager, when Lauder knew instinctively from the beginning that they wouldn’t work out. “I always regret that I didn’t push harder,” Lauder recalled in 2018. “I wanted to let the managers say, ‘let’s do it.’ But if you wait three or four years and the person still hasn’t produced, you’ve lost three or four years.
“I gave a speech some time ago to a group of people at Macy’s in California, and I spoke to them about this and ended with the phrase—‘Just remember this, dumb is forever,’” he recalled.
But he never lost his voracious curiosity. It was not unusual for Lauder to be lunching with someone in a restaurant like Michael’s in Midtown Manhattan and turn his questioning to his favorite subject —what promising start-ups are ripe for the plucking. His eyes would twinkle, he might borrow an order pad from a passing waiter to write on, then whip out a pen and furiously start jotting down names of companies.
Even at age 92, he was still in the game, thinking about how to get the group – which has been struggling over the last few years – back onto the growth track.
The word passion crops up often when associates reminisce about Lauder, particularly when his son, William P. Lauder, executive chairman, reflects about his days with his father. “My father demonstrated that a hugely successful business can be built on this simple concept: A passion for product, a passion for the consumer, a passion for the retailer, a passion for the brand, a passion for quality, a passion for people, and a passion for leadership. His passion for every aspect of building a lasting, world-leading cosmetics company has made our company great. His passion for teaching everybody around him has made us all better as a result.”
But that great passion was not limited to the beauty game. His other great love was collecting art, most famously the works of the Cubist painters. In 2013, Lauder sealed his artistic legacy by donating his world-renowned Cubist collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then consisting of 81 works by Pablo Picasso (34), Georges Braque (17), Juan Gris (15) and Fernand Léger (15). The choice of the Met as the recipient of the donation came as a bit of a surprise since Lauder had long been associated with the Whitney Museum of American Art. But that museum was devoted to American art and Lauder had been quite generous there with money and painting.
Lauder had considered many other museums, but he picked the Met partly because of the encyclopedic nature of its holdings — and its shortcomings. The Met had a sparse collection of 20th century art, a shortage he hoped to help remedy with the opening in the museum of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center of Modern Art that might inspire other collectors to step forward.
“I wanted to transform the Met,” he said, adding that his generosity was motivated by “my love of art and my love of New York.” Above all “I wanted to make it a gift to New York,” said Lauder, who was born in the city and grew up on the Upper West Side.
Lauder began his life of art collecting in a small way by buying Art Deco postcards at age 6. That fascination grew into a collection of 120,000 postcards, 700 of which were featured in a 2012 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
He first found a seat in the art establishment by joining the acquisition board of the Whitney in 1971, then became a trustee, rose to president in 1977 and finally the museum’s chairman in 1994. His gift of $131 million to the Whitney’s endowment was at the time the largest in the institution’s history. This was in addition to his gift of works by Jasper Johns, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly and Andy Warhol.
Years before he announced his choice of the Met as a next home of his Cubist collection, Lauder discussed his approach to collecting and drew a parallel between building his business and art collection. “I’m building my art collection not to possess it but to conserve it,” he said, because it’s all going to go to a museum. “Everything I buy, the question is where will it fit into my collection and into a museum.”
The same philosophy applied to the company he helped grow.
“My passion for this [beauty] business is not to make more money, because I have more than enough money for the next five lifetimes [his net worth was estimated by Forbes Magazine at $9.7 billion as of this year]. The passion is to build something great that can be conserved. There is a parallel as to what I do with my art and what happens with our company.”
This all-consuming passion was evident in every corner of his day, even when he was preoccupied with something else. He always had time to stop and talk shop, especially with retailers. Even into his 90s, he would still meet people regularly for lunch to talk business and trends. His eyes retained their sparkle and his grasp on their arm as firm as ever as he pulled them in close for a chat.
His instinct for spotting quicksilver changes in fickle consumer tastes was second to none. Lauder read the twists and turns of the market like a weather map.
He had a knack for perfecting in-store sell-through and promotional strategies.
Not that the Lauders invented every promotional tactic. He freely acknowledged that the ubiquitous gift-with-purchase was invented elsewhere. “Charles of the Ritz had been doing it for years.”
But Estée Lauder put her spin on sampling by giving a gift without any purchase, according to Lauder’s book, “The Company I Keep. My Life in Beauty,” which was published by Harper Business in 2020.
The Lauders took their entire $50,000 advertising budget and ordered huge quantities of full-sized products and mailed invitations to every woman listed on the charge account files of each store in the Lauder distribution. Drop by and get full sized box of face powder for free.
That worked so well that the concept was expanded to include sending postcards — paid for by the stores — to customers whenever Lauder opened a store. The quality of the full-sized gift and the personal touch worked like catnip.
“In every case, eager shoppers mobbed our counters — then spread throughout the main floor in a relentless tide, increasing sales on the entire floor, increasing sales by well over 100 percent. It was a win/win for both of us,” he wrote, referring to both Lauder and the retailers.
Gift-with-purchase and purchase-with-purchase became the engines for holiday selling, and the Lauders mastered the game. One of the more powerful promotional strategies was Lauder’s holiday blockbuster. The idea hit with such impact that some department stores reportedly used the blockbuster to kick off their seasonal merchandising attack.
In analyzing the dynamics of the department store market, Lauder put the consumer at the center of the question: Who owns the customer?
Lauder cited the acceleration of the pace of business for the need to have a future vision. Another driver was the ongoing wave of consolidations of not only brands but especially distribution. “[That touched off] a new war that we have to understand and that is the war as to who owns the consumer. If the beauty industry understands that they are in that war, they will be able to thrive. If they don’t, that’s curtains.”
He then explained, “If the manufacturers of the products own the consumer, they can put as much money as they have available into giving great product, great service, great advice and the business will thrive. However, if they give up ownership of the consumer to the retailer, as happened in the ’30s with Sears Roebuck and is happening today with many of the mass retailers both in the United States and in Europe, those mass retailers will demand greater and greater margin from you because they own the consumer, and you will not have the money to invest in the product.”
As an example he pointed to “the war” in Europe between perfumery chains that were then consolidating and growing larger, demanding more margin in the process. “They are bleeding the product and the ability of the manufacturers to drive customers into their stores,” he said in 2010. “Our key modus operandi is that we use our money to drive consumers into our retail outlets.”
When asked eight years later, in 2018, if a peace treaty had been struck, Lauder firmly said no. “When it comes to many retailers, they truly feel they own the customer [and the sales data] because they are paying the rent,” he said, adding, “this is a battle that simply has never been settled, and it goes on to this day.”
That acuity in spotting issues was a trait that Lauder long displayed and which was first honed in his youth at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School. He later served as a lieutenant in the U.S Navy, and at age 25 joined the family business fulltime in 1958. The next year, he married Evelyn Hauser, who also went to work at the company and eventually rose to senior corporate vice president.
Later she founded the world renowned Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Their marriage lasted 52 years, until her death in 2011. In 2015, Lauder remarried, to Judy Glickman, who survives him.
The story of the beginnings of Lauder, the company, was entrepreneurial in nature and humble in origin. First-year sales in the late ’40s amounted to $50,000, “almost all of which was eaten up by expenses,” according to Lauder’s memoir.
Estée Lauder began — like many industry start-ups — at the kitchen sink. Lauder recalled as a little boy watching his mother cook up facial creams. He never stopped working alongside his mother — the legend — even as the company took flight.
“Mrs. Lauder was deeply involved in the choice of the fragrances,” he recalled, “and I did the makeup and the treatment — and advertising.”
His father handled the finances. His younger brother, Ronald S. Lauder, who survives him, joined the company in 1964 and remains involved as chairman of Clinique Laboratories LLC. He retired as a board director earlier this year.
Decades later, Aerin Lauder, Leonard’s niece who held a top job at Lauder then left to create her own brand, remarked, “He knew just what makes an ad speak to a woman, what makes it beautiful and, most important, how it reflects and strengthens a brand.”
Those were also the yeasty days when the American beauty industry was emerging with bare knuckles flying. Competition was warfare.
“I miss the intensity,” Lauder remarked in 2010. “I miss the hostility. I miss the competition. I miss the love of product. In the old days, earlier on, you had Elizabeth Arden competing with Helena Rubinstein. Then you had Elizabeth Arden competing with Charles Revson. Then you had Charles Revson competing with Estée Lauder. Then you had Leonard Lauder competing against L’Oréal in some areas. It was a battle, really, of founders. As those founders have moved on, you now have professional companies, and the passion between an owner and a founder and a professional manager — as much as one would like to pump that passion in — that passion for competition is different.
“However, that doesn’t mean that things aren’t better, because there is far more professionalism in the products today — no product can come to market until it has been tested and retested and retested again and again and again. I see a great benefit to professional management.
“But that doesn’t mean I don’t mind the scrappiness of the old days.”
Years later, Lauder fondly recalled telling a buyer that his ambition was to rank number one in the U.S. market — then dominated by Revlon, followed by Elizabeth Arden, Helena Rubinstein and Charles of the Ritz — only to be met by skepticism from the retailer.
By 1960, he began making a mark. Lauder was running the daily operations as executive vice president. In that year, the Estée Lauder company opened at Harrods in London, its first step overseas. “We were the first American luxury cosmetics brand to enter the post-war European market,” he recalled.
Now Estée Lauder’s brands are sold around the globe. “In the early ’60s, I had the vision for Estée Lauder of being a multinational and multi-branded company,” he told WWD in 2010.
The first turning point came with the launch of Clinique in 1968. It was a more democratic upstart, compared to the glamour-driven Lauder brand, followed by the revolutionary MAC and a host of other upstart acquisitions, some of which have worked and others that did not.
“Clinique began the transformation of Estée Lauder into the multi-national, multi-brand company I envisioned,” he wrote in his book.
In the ’40s and ’50s, most major cosmetics companies marketed their products under a single brand name, such as Revlon, Elizabeth Arden and Helena Rubinstein. Lauder had another vision: “I hate to use the word today,” he remarked in 1995, “but it was in my mind then — a General Motors of cosmetics.” He continued, “The vision is to continue to expand our brand portfolio and our offering in our field, in our space, and to continue to try to take advantage of the changing world scene.”
Lauder attributed his success, in part, to a strategy of creating his own competition, rather than waiting for challengers to appear. “I created Clinique to compete against Estée Lauder,” he wrote in his memoir. “When we began to acquire other companies, we started with MAC and quickly followed with its polar opposite, Bobbi Brown Cosmetics. Le Mer competes against Estée Lauder’s premium product, Re-Nutriv. In the hair care area, we acquired Bumble and bumble to compete with Aveda.
“What I was trying to bring about was becoming the market leader, and we’ve done that: we are the largest supplier of prestige cosmetics in the world and we are the dominant player in almost every prestige market, largely because of that strategy,” he wrote at the time in his book.
But there was an Achilles heel — keeping your distribution in synch with your brand equity and demand. And the company stumbled with its 1979 launch of Prescriptives, which Lauder described as a super-scientific version of the Lauder brand.
“The strategic mistake I most regret was not cutting Prescriptives’ distribution,” he wrote, noting that the brand was overdistributed “by far. I wanted to cut our distribution to focus on high-end stores. But we recently had gone public and we felt that cutting sales would hurt our share price. The decision led to short-term gain but a long-term loss since we had to eventually close all the Prescriptives counters.”
Through it all, the company retained its original DNA, its prestige identity, its brand-driven nature and its affinity for creative innovation — all driven by a boost of adrenaline provided by a management change in March 2009. William Lauder, who was serving as CEO, moved to executive chairman and recruited Fabrizio Freda from Procter & Gamble to become the group’s CEO and president. Leonard Lauder became chairman emeritus.
In a subsequent WWD interview, Freda praised a long list of corporate attributes that characterized the company, but he made clear he wanted to instill more financial discipline.
During much of Freda’s tenure, the company soared, particularly as sales in China and the travel retail channel accelerated exponentially. The company’s stock price hit an all-time high of 351.13 in January 2022. But during the pandemic, Estée Lauder struggled and is today in turnaround mode under CEO Stéphane de La Faverie, who took the reins this January.
“Leonard Lauder was beloved by many and will be missed tremendously. To our employees at The Estée Lauder Companies, he was an inspiration and a champion,” said de La Faverie. “To the industry, he was an icon and pioneer, earning respect worldwide. His energy and vision helped shape our company and will continue to do so for generations to come. He was a deeply compassionate leader who cared profoundly about every person in the company. I feel privileged to have worked with Leonard, who has been the best mentor I could have dreamt to learn from. He will be remembered by all of us.”
As for Freda, after a few years at the company, he said, “The most lasting lesson I learned from Leonard Lauder is that even though we live in a world where products and consumers are more and more in control, the reality is brands and companies are defined by their distribution strategies and those strategies are built on trust and relationships.”
Relationships, indeed. Leonard Lauder made hand-written thank-you notes on blue cards ubiquitous. Jane Lauder, who held numerous senior positions at the company during her time there and Lauder’s other niece, pointed out that when he traveled, he left a trail of thank-you messages addressed to employees and acquaintances. “His famous notes found their way all over the world,” she said.
Lauder’s influence has always remained palpable. Back in the ’70s and ’80s, when the company was locked in a market share war with L’Oréal, he was known for his vision and maintaining a long-range viewpoint.
Lauder was long known as a lifelong innovator and ground breaker, overseeing the launch of one brand after another — such as Clinique, Aramis, Lab Series Skincare for Men, Prescriptives and Origins.
He also had a knack for generally picking winners to buy. During the indie boom of the ’90s, he led the company through a series of key acquisitions that later proved to be building blocks of the company’s future.
But the company was not always on the leading edge. The ’70s and ’80s was the heyday of designer fragrances, but Lauder seemed to sit out the licensing game. By the ’90s, Lauder said he had wished he had entered the fray sooner. “The only thing that I regret,” he said, “is that when the designer movement came in, I didn’t overrule the family and demand that we start taking up designer names.”
Lauder didn’t elaborate, but he later mentioned that the company had indeed signed a contract with a fashion designer, Emanuel Ungaro, in 1970. But there was a difference of opinion involving Ungaro and Estée, on fragrance direction. “I decided that there wasn’t enough room for two very, very strong points of view.” Lauder recalled in 1995. “So we quietly gave up the contract.”
Eventually, attitudes changed with a shift of winds. A deal was signed in 1994 with Tommy Hilfiger, ushering in a new era for the company, which by 2019 boasted seven designer nameplates, including Tom Ford, Michael Kors, Donna Karan, Ermenegildo Zegna and Tory Burch, all powerful brands. While most of those licenses are now owned by other companies, the Tom Ford brand has become integral to Lauder’s growth.
“Leonard was a father figure to me. We were very close friends for almost 40 years,” said Hilfiger. He was an amazing mentor to me throughout the years. We built an incredible fragrance business over the years, beginning with Tommy and Tommy Girl.
“After the success of those two, many more fragrances and perfumes followed,” Hilfiger recalled. “It was such an exciting opportunity to work with such a phenomenal family business.
“Leonard also taught me so much about art over the years,” the designer continued. “He was the consummate gentleman, and Evelyn was an unforgettable friend. as well. Words cannot describe how much I will miss him.”
But there were changes that ran deeper than nameplates. Lauder’s devotion to the prestige market meant that a different business model had to be invented. Unlike some multichannel companies like L’Oréal, which can cascade down ingredient innovations from higher-priced products to economical mass brands, thus amortizing the R&D costs, Lauder’s focus was strictly on the upper market. Thus the marketing attack was organized on a horizontal basis with sister and brother brands attacking competitors shoulder to shoulder as quickly as possible.
“Everything in the Lauder organization operates on cross-fertilization,” Lauder said. “A duty-free idea winds up in [the Lauder store] in Las Vegas. The Vegas ideas wind up at Color on Three [Bloomingdale’s cosmetics counter]. These ideas will wind up in Prague or Budapest and those ideas will perhaps wind up one day in China.”
This strategy was fine-tuned when it came to product development. A star example shone brightly in the early ’90s during the alpha-hydroxy and salicylic acid boom. Lauder launched one such product after another in one division after another as rapidly as the labs could churn them out.
“The Lauder corporation [got] extremely high marks for being fast on its feet with the alpha-hydroxy trend,” observed Allen Burke, then divisional merchandise manager of Dayton’s, Hudson’s and Marshall Field’s in Minneapolis. “It was the single biggest trend to hit the market in 10 years.”
Leonard Lauder once reminisced about some of the defining moments for the company. “If I had to choose one, it was probably about 1962, when the Estée Lauder brand started to really take off,” he said. “To see our business go ahead 45 or 50 percent per month per year was incredible. It was exhausting but incredible. That was the first major pivotal moment. The second was seeing the success of our international expansions and ventures.”
The third pivotal period came when Lauder’s multibrand strategy began to click, and the fourth came with the acquisition of influential, dynamic brands like MAC and Bobbi Brown and “seeing them hit a new stride and a new era of growth,” Lauder recalled.
In later decades, around 2014, the acquisition of a new wave of indie brands— like Le Labo, Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, Kilian, Too Faced, and Glamglow — brought a new Millennial audience. Earlier acquisitions, like Smashbox, gave the company a foothold in the newly booming direct-selling market. By 2019, Lauder listed a total portfolio of 29 brands on its website.
His curiosity, however, extended beyond new brands. His passport was well-worn; he was a ceaseless traveler. Lauder could just as easily be found in Hong Kong haggling with a publisher over a magazine ad placement or calmly sitting in Moscow’s Red Square studying shoppers bustling by.
He was the grandmaster of the prestige game and reveled in the global nature of the competition. He often said the beauty business for him was like playing “a multidimensional game of chess. You move along one plane, which is maybe your national plane. You deal in multiple other planes, which are different nations, different continents, different brands and different channels of distribution.”
That was an apt description of the kaleidoscopic mental moves required to compete on a grand scale with powerhouses like L’Oréal in Europe and Shiseido in Japan, not to mention Unilever, LVMH and Procter & Gamble.
Among the elements he mastered was the power of language and Lauder chose his words carefully in giving interviews.
One of his favorite sayings was, “If you can’t see the future, you can’t get there. It’s as simple as that.”
“Leonard Lauder literally created the prestige cosmetics business,” remarked Jane Hertzmark Hudis, executive vice president and chief brand officer at Lauder, when asked what she learned from him.
“His lessons are as meaningful today as when I started,” she said in a 2010 interview. “Brand equity is everything and without it, nothing else matters. Protect it, cherish it — never ever let it slip away. Leonard believe(d) strongly in the power of intuition, the power of creativity and the power of a woman,” she said.
That view was held by many, not the least by John Demsey, Lauder’s former executive group president. “Leonard was unquestionably one of the greatest architects in prestige beauty and has established the entire business paradigm that we live in today. Aspiration, desire, creativity, product innovation, point of sale, style and effective advertising and communication were the cornerstones of Leonard’s repertoire.”