The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty

We were pumping money into Clinique across the board, not realizing that in certain markets we might as well be pouring it into the sea. We hadn’t learned that you cannot launch a new idea and expect that new idea to take hold immediately. It’s a long, long haul. Clinique

Clinique was launched just as inflation in the United States began to soar. In 1968, inflation rates hovered around 4.5 percent; over the next six years, they nearly tripled to over 12 percent.9 Common business strategy dictated that we raise our prices. I came to Carol to discuss pricing increases. Carol said no: she refused to raise Clinique’s pr

They eventually began offering free gifts themselves. But, my mother pointed out, “What they were giving away were their mistakes—the colors that didn’t sell, the ineffective creams that died on the counter, last year’s failures. They tried to unload their lemons on customers. Bad business, I say. How can you expect a customer to return for more if

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!”

And in any case, when you see your parents are working so hard, that’s what you do, too.

If there wasn’t a new product being launched, we would often create extensions of existing products to launch, such as new shades of existing lipsticks or a lighter version of one of our fragrances. I call this “scalloping,” a technique I borrowed from the mass marketers when they continually reinvented their laundry detergents by adding a new twis

No one knew that I ran both clubs. I had a lot of fun keeping the secret. I had even more fun watching both clubs succeed. And I learned a valuable lesson: you can compete with yourself and win. It was a lesson that, a decade later, would spawn Clinique and would eventually inform the thinking behind The Estée Lauder Companies’ portfolio of brands.

I used that experience to create a formula for when I visited Estée Lauder factories or counters. I’d always say to the manager or whoever was showing me around, “I’d like to meet some of your people. Tell me something good about each one.” Then when I met them, I’d say, “Your manager here tells me you’re especially good at such-and-such.” They’d f

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