Estée Lauder built a beauty empire from a Queens hardware childhood
Estée Lauder (1908–2004), born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens, to Hungarian Jewish immigrants, co-founded the cosmetics company that still bears her name. She grew up working in the family hardware store. In 1998 she was the only woman on Time's list of the century's 20 most influential business geniuses.
Her parents wanted to call her Eszti after her mother's favourite Hungarian aunt but stuck with Josephine; the family nickname Estee stuck anyway. Later she added an accent to make it look French and pronounced it as her father had in his Hungarian accent. She liked to claim a Viennese mother and a grand Flushing childhood with stables, a chauffeur and an Italian nurse, a story Lee Israel's 1985 biography debunked. Her New York Times obituary put it plainly: she was a New Yorker, not an aristocrat. As a girl she dreamed of acting, and she worked alongside most of her eight siblings in her father's shop.
The turning point was her uncle, John Schotz, a chemist whose New Way Laboratories made creams, lotions, rouge and scents. He taught her facial massage and how to wash her face, and after leaving Newtown High School she threw herself into his business, naming one blend Super Rich All-Purpose Cream and selling his products to beauty shops, beach clubs and resorts. When Florence Morris, owner of the House of Ash Blondes salon, admired her skin, Lauder came back with four creams to demonstrate, and Morris invited her to sell in her new salon.
She married Joseph Lauter on 15 January 1930; the name later became Lauder. They divorced in 1939 and remarried in 1942, and she later called him the sweetest husband in the world. In 1946 they founded Estée Lauder Cosmetic Co. on Madison Avenue. Her 1953 fragrance Youth-Dew, a bath oil that also worked as perfume, had women pouring it by the bottle; it sold 50,000 bottles in its first year and 150 million by 1984. She put her success down to never going a working day without selling, and pushing hard for anything she believed in.
In 1978 she became the first woman awarded France's Legion of Honour at the rank of chevalier, and she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. Her son Leonard later ran the company, and Ronald served as US ambassador to Austria. She died in Manhattan in April 2004, aged 95.
Source: Estée Lauder (businesswoman)
