Latest news with #TheCompanyIKeep:MyLifeinBeauty
Boston Globe
3 hours ago
- Business
- Boston Globe
Leonard A. Lauder, philanthropist and cosmetics heir, dies at 92
In 2013, he pledged the most significant gift in the history of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a trove of nearly 80 cubist paintings, drawings, and sculptures by Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, and Juan Gris. Scholars put the value of the gift at $1 billion and said its quality rivaled or surpassed that of the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, Russia, and the Pompidou Center in Paris. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up After the gift was announced, he added another dozen major cubist works, The New York Times reported in a profile of Mr. Lauder last year. Advertisement Estée Lauder founded the company that bears her name in 1946 and would become the flamboyant public face of her empire, pitching its lipsticks, bath oils, face powders, and antiwrinkle creams with almost messianic zeal. Leonard Lauder, her eldest son, was the marketing expert and corporate strategist working in her shadow. Advertisement In a business reliant on imagery and mythmaking, his mother, the daughter of a Queens merchant, had created a genteel Hungarian aristocratic past for herself and a name to go with it. Josephine Esther Lauter, the wife of a luncheonette owner, thus became the glamorous Estée Lauder. Leonard Lauder joined his family's enterprise in 1958 after a formative hitch in the Navy and, colleagues said, was instrumental in devising its profitable strategies: developing multiple brands that effectively competed with one another; concentrating sales in high-end department stores as competitors focused on discount chains and drugstores; and driving expansion to untapped markets in Europe, Asia, and the Americas. 'My dream,' he wrote in his memoir, 'The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty,' published in 2020, 'was to make Estée Lauder the General Motors of the beauty business, with multiple brands, multiple product lines and multinational distribution.' Estée Lauder's sales, which hovered around $800,000 a year when Mr. Lauder joined the company, soared to more than $16 billion for fiscal 2021, despite the disruptions caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, as he continued as senior member of the board. The company markets products under some 30 brand names in 150 countries around the world. Shares were publicly sold starting in 1995, but by January 2025 about 85 percent of the voting stock was still owned by members of the Lauder family, along with about 38 percent of the total common stock. Mr. Lauder became the company's president in 1972, was CEO from 1982 to 1999, and was named chair in 1995 and chair emeritus in 2009, when he retired. Along the way, he launched brands including Clinique, Aramis, Lab Series, and Origins. He also amassed a personal fortune of about $10.1 billion, according to Forbes, making him one of the 100 richest Americans. Advertisement He began a lifelong pursuit of art at the age of 6, when he spent his nickel allowance on a postcard of the Empire State Building. 'I can see that postcard today,' he told The New Yorker in 2012, adding that it turned him into a collector for life. He eventually acquired 125,000 postcards -- not the kind tourists buy, but artistic cards with lithographs and vintage photos depicting celebrities from the worlds of sports and fashion as well as images of war and historical events. 'I'm interested in popular culture and that's where postcards come in,' he told the Times in the 2024 profile. 'I love that they're the predecessor for so many things: email, Instagram, social media.' In 2002, Mr. Lauder gave the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston a collection of some 20,000 Japanese postcards to complement the museum's collection of Japanese woodblock prints, considered the most important outside of Japan. Eight years later, Mr. Lauder gave the MFA more than 100,000 postcards from the 1870s through just after World War II. When considering whether to bid on a work of art, he told the Times last year, he heard his mother's voice saying, 'You only regret what you do not buy.' Mr. Lauder for years quietly assembled a world-class collection with a focus on cubism, the movement that revolutionized modern art early in the 20th century. He bought many pieces from the collections of writer Gertrude Stein, Swiss banker Raoul La Roche, and British art historian Douglas Cooper. His collection, given without restrictions, filled an artistic gap for the Met and placed Mr. Lauder in a class with cornerstone contributors such as the Rockefellers and Annenbergs. Advertisement A trustee and later president and chair of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, he gave millions in money and art to the museum, including nearly 50 works by Jasper Johns. In 2008 he gave $131 million, the largest gift in the Whitney's history. That gift transformed the Whitney 'from a provincial New York institution to a world-class museum known for its extraordinary holdings of American art,' Carol Vogel wrote in the recent Times profile of Mr. Lauder. When the Whitney moved from its Madison Avenue location to its current home in the meatpacking district, it named its new building after him. Mr. Lauder, in New York in 1996. He would say of his relationship with his mother: 'It was so love-hate. I was her competitor, her senior partner, her manager." CHESTER HIGGINS JR./NYT Leonard Alan Lauter was born March 19, 1933, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, the older of two sons of Joseph and Josephine Esther (Mentzer) Lauter. (The family name was changed not long after his birth.) His younger brother, Ronald, would serve as ambassador to Austria and run unsuccessfully for mayor of New York. In the Depression years, his father owned a small chain of luncheonettes and a silk business. During World War II, he and a partner sold military-style post-exchange supplies. His mother also worked, helping to sell an uncle's homemade face creams and fragrances in the 1930s. His parents, who were divorced in 1939 but remarried in 1942, founded their company after the war and for years struggled to make it profitable. After graduating from the Bronx High School of Science in 1950, Leonard Lauder attended the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and received a bachelor's degree in 1954. He joined the Navy, served on two warships and became a lieutenant junior grade. Advertisement After his discharge, he joined his mother's company. Although publicly deferential to her, he shared decision-making with her. She retired in 1995 and died in 2004 at 97. 'It was so love-hate,' he said of their relationship. 'I was her competitor, her senior partner, her manager. . . . I was able to identify what she did that was really good and build on her early success.' Mr. Lauder married Evelyn Hausner in 1959, and they had two children: William, who is chair of the board of Estée Lauder Cos., and Gary, managing director of Lauder Partners, a Silicon Valley venture capital firm. Mr. Lauder, in 2024. JINGYU LIN/NYT Mr. Lauder's first wife died in 2011. In 2015, he married photographer Judith Glickman. She survives him, as do his sons, his brother, five grandchildren, two great-grandsons, and many stepchildren and stepgrandchildren. In addition to his home in New York, he had homes in Palm Beach, Fla., and Portland, Maine. He was a co-founder and chair of the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation and, with his first wife, a founder of the Evelyn H. Lauder Breast Center at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York. For all his contributions to various causes, Mr. Lauder regarded himself as a frugal man with an eye on the bottom line. 'I use slivers of soap, I reuse paper clips, I use the backside of memos,' he told the Times in 2004. 'You can take the child out of the Depression, but you can't take the Depression out of the child.' Advertisement This article originally appeared in
Elle
19 hours ago
- Business
- Elle
Leonard Lauder Created the Beauty Industry as You Know It
The day before Father's Day, Leonard Lauder, the father of the beauty industry, passed away. Leonard, 92, was the eldest son of Estée Lauder, the woman who started the now multi-billion-dollar eponymous business from their family kitchen. Leonard went on to serve as the chairman and CEO of The Estée Lauder Companies for several decades. As Linda Wells, editor of Air Mail Look and founder of Allure, wrote on Instagram, the timing of his passing was 'fitting:' 'He was a father figure to so many of us in the biz, me included.' In his memoir, The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty, he wrote, 'I remember sitting in the kitchen, watching my mother cook up facial creams on the stove.' In carrying on his mother's legacy, Leonard became an early champion of women and took The Estée Lauder Companies to extraordinary heights. Standing at over 6 feet tall, 'Leonard was such a beautiful giant—literally and figuratively,' Gwen Flamberg, beauty director at Grazia, tells ELLE. When asked about his essential rules for business, Leonard said rule No. 1 was being accountable, but called this rule No. 2: 'Never make an important decision without a woman at the table. Growing up with a mother like Estée Lauder, how could I not respect and seek out smart, tough women? Strong women have made some of the best decisions for this company.' Jamie Rosen, a contributing editor to Town & Country and founder of the Substack Office of the Surface, recalls Leonard speaking at her undergraduate business school class at Emory and wowing the students: 'He was by far the most charismatic guest we had, but he also had a lot of concrete advice, much of it running counter to what I had assumed about running a successful business. It was less about being cutthroat and more about being clever. He emphasized surrounding yourself with people who are smarter than you, and [that included women].' Leonard was an innovator, creating many 'firsts' for the beauty industry. The slanted shape of today's lipsticks was a spur-of-the-moment invention that he made after noticing that women would purse their lips during application. With a stroke of quick DIY brilliance, he took out a Gillette razor and slashed a lipstick at an angle. (Inventions even occurred to him while sleeping—he said that the idea for tinted lip gloss came to him in a dream). Leonard also coined the phrase 'the lipstick index,' an economic term referring to the recession-proof nature of cosmetics that he observed from the 2001 crisis, and created the company's first research and development laboratory. His first wife, Evelyn, made the pink ribbon for breast cancer ubiquitous (she created it along with Alexandra Penney, an editor at SELF) and founded the Breast Cancer Research Fund. The Estée Lauder Companies made it a global mission to raise awareness for the disease, starting with distributing breast cancer research cards at counters across the nation. BCRF is now the largest private funder of breast cancer research, and deaths from the disease have declined by 44 percent since the charity was founded in 1993. 'When Evelyn and I sat at their kitchen table discussing a possible foundation to connect breast cancer laboratory and clinical research, Leonard overheard and said, 'I'm in!'' remembers BCRF founding scientific director Dr. Larry Norton. Leonard became an honorary chairman. 'A really beautiful memory I have is of the memorial service for Evelyn that the family hosted at the Koch Theater. The way he spoke of her! He recalled the story of how they met and he said, 'That was my girl... my Evelyn,'' Flamberg says. When he joined the company at 25 in 1958, it had only one brand and below $1 million dollars in sales. Known as a collector, a personality trait he developed as a young boy who first collected postcards and posters, Leonard also collected companies. Now, The Estée Lauder Companies encompasses more than 20-plus brands sold in more than 150 markets. He developed brands in-house, such as Clinique, and also bought and grew companies like Jo Malone London and Bobbi Brown. Leonard bought Brown's eponymous company in 1995, and their long relationship started with a phone call and a tour of his art. She tells ELLE: 'He told me we were beating him at the stores and that he'd like to buy us. I told him we were not for sale. Then, he invited me to dinner at his beautiful apartment on Central Park. He was so real and normal. He instantly made me feel comfortable.' Brown later showed him the boat she named after him called TYLL, which stands for 'Thank you, Leonard Lauder,' and he placed a photo of the catamaran on the mirror in his bedroom. Leonard gave Brown business advice, including the old adage 'to ask for forgiveness and not permission.' She explains: 'He himself was a bit of a rule-breaker, and with that twinkle in his eye, he always encouraged me to follow my gut and do what I knew was best. He was the ultimate eye-roller and head-shaker when I called him to discuss roadblocks, and I know he had to walk a fine line and deal with both the creative and business sides. He was the most open, insightful, creative, and brilliant thinker, that cared as deeply about the formula and marketing as he did about sales. He was always as excited to hear about my innovations as he was about the bottom line. He never wanted to homogenize my brand and make it like everyone else's. He believed in the uniqueness and simplicity of who we were.' Leonard also became so successful at distribution that he recently told Air Mail that a trick he used to fall asleep was to think of brick-and-mortar stores. 'Instead of counting sheep, I mentally check off all the specialty department stores we used to sell to, starting in Portland, Maine, with Porteous, Mitchell & Braun, and working my way down the East Coast, past R. H. Stern and Filene's in Boston, Gladding's in Providence, G. Fox in Hartford, and so on. I'm usually asleep before I get to New York.' Leonard enjoyed collecting art as well, always with the intention of sharing his pieces with others. 'I collect to conserve and share what I'm assembling for present and future generations,' he told ArtNews. He also often hosted events at his house for the beauty industry. 'My most favorite memory of Leonard is when we were invited to his and Evelyn's home to see the famous Gustav Klimt painting 'The Lady in Gold,'' Flamberg remembers. He donated 78 works of art to the Metropolitan Museum, now called the Leonard A. Lauder Cubist Collection, and became the Whitney Museum's single largest benefactor. The Whitney downtown has named a building after him. 'And by the time I'm dead, which I hope will be a long time from now, all my art will have been distributed to museums or my prints will have been distributed, posters posted, everything. They belong with the people not in my house, but in the house of the people which are museums,' he said in a 2020 talk at Brandeis University. 'I think he felt that he had a duty that came with his success—a duty to protect and to share—and his philanthropy was unmatched,' says Sarah Brown, former beauty director at Vogue and founder of Sarah Brown Advisory. 'The mark he and his family has had upon New York's cultural institutions and his support of the advancement of breast cancer research, especially, has undoubtedly changed, and saved, lives.' Leonard was also known for his people-first mentality, and delighted telling people in more recent years that he was the company's Chief Teaching Officer. 'He believed that a company's wealth is its people and focused on mentoring and fostering growth within the company's diverse talent pool,' The Estée Lauder Companies said in a press release after his passing. He loved hand-written thank you notes, often composed on his signature robin's-egg blue stationery. Bobbi Brown still has all hers. 'I have saved every note I got on his blue stationery, and I also have a few postcards. Some were delivered in the mail, but most of them came hand-delivered in those manila folders that the couriers brought around. He was also the one who encouraged me to write post cards to hundreds of customers as I traveled the globe, meeting new people and coming up with new ideas.' Writer Jamie Rosen remembers, 'He has been referred [to] as the 'master builder of beauty' and he certainly was, but I believe his legacy is about people. The people he believed in early in their careers (Bobbi Brown, for one!) and the way he made others feel—a part of something bigger than themselves.' Brown agrees. 'Every time I saw him, I felt listened to and supported. We would often end the conversation with, 'I love you.' I know many people were touched by Leonard in the same ways and so many of us loved and admired him. But there was always enough of Leonard around for all of us.'
Yahoo
a day ago
- Business
- Yahoo
Leonard Lauder, Former Estée Lauder CEO, Dies at 92: ‘True Visionary, Fearless Leader'
Leonard Lauder died on June 14, 2025; he was 92 The former Estée Lauder CEO was Estée's eldest son "Mr. Lauder was a true visionary, fearless leader, and cherished friend to so many," read a statement from the companyLeonard Lauder, the former Estée Lauder CEO, has died. He was 92. Leonard, who was also famed art collector and philanthropist, died 'surrounded by family' on Saturday, June 14, the Estée Lauder Companies Inc. announced in a statement on Sunday, June 15. "Mr. Lauder was a true visionary, fearless leader, and cherished friend to so many," the statement read. "He was the beacon of our company and the north star of an entire industry. The world is a better place because Leonard Lauder was in it." Leonard was the eldest son of Estée and Joseph Lauder, who together formally started the Estée Lauder business in 1946. Leonard joined the business in 1958 and served for years as CEO. His first wife, the late Evelyn Lauder, co-created the pink breast cancer ribbon. He was born in New York City in 1933. His mother was born Josephine Esther Mentzer, and his father was born Joseph Lauter. Estée got into the makeup business thanks to her uncle, who sold beauty products. Estée and Joseph changed their names to enhance the mythology of the Estée Lauder brand. 'My mother wasn't like other mothers,' Leonard wrote in his 2020 memoir The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty, which was excerpted by CBS. 'When I was growing up in the 1930s, I remember sitting in the kitchen, watching my mother cook up facial creams on the stove.' As he and his younger brother Ronald ate lunch and did their homework, women would come to the apartment to receive facials and buy products. Leonard graduated from Bronx Science High School and then completed undergraduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School. He then served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy beginning in 1956. After he was discharged, he joined Estée Lauder. According to the company's website, Leonard wasn't sure he wanted to join the company and considered re-enlisting in the Navy for a full-time career. But he ultimately made the jump, and from 1972 to 1995 he served as president. In 1982, he became CEO, a role he served in until 1999. In 1995, he became Chairman, and in 2009 he transitioned into Chairman Emeritus. Leonard was also called the company's Chief Teaching Officer. Under Leonard's leadership, Estée Lauder transformed into the global company it is today. He created its first research and development lab, and beginning in the '90s, they started to acquire other companies, including MAC, Bobbi Brown and Aveda. According to Forbes, in December 2024, Leonard was worth $10.8 billion, making him the 234th richest person in the world. Leonard married Evelyn Hausner in 1959, and they had two sons, William and Gary Lauder. Evelyn was a teacher when she and Leonard wed, but became a Senior Corporate Vice President at Estée Lauder and founded the Clinique line. She also helmed the company's largest social issue — breast cancer awareness — helping to create the now-ubiquitous pink ribbon. Leonard and Evelyn together worked with New York's Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital and helped launched the hospital's Evelyn H Lauder Breast Center. Leonard and his brother Ronald co-founded the Alzheimer's Drug Discovery Foundation in 1998, which has awarded over $209 million to fund trials in 19 countries, according to Forbes. Leonard was also passionate about visual art and was a major collector. He wrote in his memoir, excerpted in ArtNews, that his love of collecting began with postcards, and he ultimately amassed a vintage postcard collection of more than 125,000 items. Then he began collecting posters before jumping to fine art. He wrote, 'I had become interested in modern art back when I was in elementary school. I was crazy about films and two or three times a week, I'd take the subway by myself — kids had an extraordinary amount of freedom in those days — to watch classic movies at the Museum of Modern Art. If I arrived early or had time after the film ended, I would wander through the galleries. I didn't discover Cubism then, but I experienced the great satisfaction of savoring a picture again and again and making it 'mine.' ' He donated some of his collection to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the Newberry Library, and has served as both president and chairman at the Whitney Museum of American Art. In April 2013, he promised his collection of 81 pieces of Cubist art to New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. The New York Times called it 'a sterling act of philanthropy.' Evelyn died in 2011. Leonard married Judy Ellis Glickman in 2015. Like Leonard, Glickman had also lost a spouse after more than 50 years of marriage. Leonard told The New York Times in 2015, 'We were lucky in that our next chapters' endings and beginnings coincided.' Reflecting on his life and whether he had any regrets, he told Brunswick Group in 2020, 'I can't think of anything that I really regret. Now, could I have done a few things a little bit better? Of course. You can always keep trying to do better. But do I regret anything? Not a bit. Onward!' Leonard is survived by his brother, wife and sons William and Gary, who both celebrated his legacy with statements of their own following his death. "He was the most charitable man I have ever known, believing that art and education belonged to everyone, and championing the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer's and breast cancer," William wrote in part. "Above all, my father was a man who practiced kindness with everyone he met. His impact was enormous." "He was not only well-respected and admired, but he was also adored by his employees and colleagues. This affection stands out for me," wrote Gary, in part. "While we mourn his passing, we also celebrate his extraordinary life, his lasting contributions, and the values he instilled in all of us: integrity, curiosity, and the importance of giving back. He will be missed more than words can express." Read the original article on People
