The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty

When I got back to New York, I would write a personal letter to each person on the van trip—not a canned letter but a personal one that mentioned some of the things we saw and talked about. To understand my motivations, let me say that I firmly believe that people don’t work only for money. They work for recognition. I often say to friends who may

However, I never, ever forgot that once you’ve lost market share, you can’t get it back again so easily. And I was always going to protect our market share, no matter how much it cost. As a private company, we had a huge advantage over our publicly held rivals: we could spend years nursing along a new brand or spending to gather market share becaus

I’m a big believer in what I call “lateral creativity”—getting ideas from everywhere.

Back in my college days, I launched competing film clubs to reach a wider audience. I created Clinique specifically to compete with Estée Lauder. Competing against myself is an idea that never grows old. Who was going to compete with M·A·C? The answer, unquestionably, was Bobbi Brown Cosmetics.

Creating our own competition both brings about something and prevents something.

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. Our great strength as a company has derived from the fact that from the beginning, we had a woman giving women the prod

That ranking taught me the greatest lesson of my life: No matter how smart you think you are, there’s always someone who’s smarter. No matter how good you are, there’s always someone better. I vowed that when I got out of the Navy and went into business, I would search out and hire exactly those people. So if they were the head of sales, they would

A multi-brand model for Estée Lauder had always been in my mind. I thought, “I know just what I’d do if I were competing with Estée Lauder. Why let a competitor do it? I’ll do it!”

Up until then, every cosmetic ad was designed to sell a product. I decided that rather than selling only a product, our ads would sell the brand. The brand would be timeless and would translate across languages and countries. All our advertising would be oriented toward the brand. Focusing on the brand would hone our identity and be our North Star: