Estée Lauder

The Lauder family still owns more than 80% of Estée Lauder Companies

When Estée Lauder went public in 1995, the company implemented a dual-class stock structure to retain family ownership of the company. Alongside owning a majority of the stock, almost everyone in the family also works within the company, leading to the family's reputation as a cosmetic dynasty.

Estée Lauder's family ran a hardware store in Corona, Queens

Estée Lauder grew up organizing the storefront window of her father's hardware store, which her family lived above. Lauder was reportedly a natural salesperson, and her experience working with her father is frequently cited as her earliest business training.

As part of her sales strategy, Estée Lauder personally demonstrated her early products at hair salons

Estée Lauder differentiated itself from other luxury cosmetics brands (including those helmed by the fiercely competitive Helena Rubinstein and Elizabeth Arden) partly through its product demonstrations. Lauder believed that actually touching her customers' faces to show them both how the product worked and how to use it was an essential part of her sales pitch.

Estée Lauder divorced and later remarried Joseph Lauder, her husband and business partner

After first marrying in 1933, Estée Lauder divorced Joseph Lauder, primarily because he wasn't as driven and ambitious as Estée. They ultimately remarried in 1942 and were rarely seen apart. While Estée was a visionary leader for the company, Joseph handled much of the behind-the-scenes work.

With the advent of charge cards, Estée Lauder fought to get her products in department stores to benefit from impulse purchases

Because Estée Lauder focused on personal relationships and demonstrations as one of her primary sales strategies, getting her product in front of enough people was an early struggle. Similarly, many customers wanted to buy her products, but didn't always have the cash on hand. One of her biggest accomplishments was earning a retail spot at Saks on 5th Ave in Manhattan, which paved the way for her brand to become a household name and gave customers more flexibility to make purchases on the spot.

'Telephone, telegraph, tell a woman:' Listen to Estée Lauder's legendary vision for word-of-mouth marketing

Without a large advertising budget, Lauder focused her marketing strategy on making high-quality products that women would love enough to tell their friends about. Those friends would later inevitably buy Estée Lauder products.

Estée Lauder once broke a bottle of the hit perfume 'Youth Dew' to convince French department stores to carry the product

Youth Dew, originally launched in 1953 as a bath oil, was wildly successful in the American market and one of the early products that cemented Estée Lauder as a luxury cosmetics brand. When the Galeries Lafayette in Paris hesitated to sell the perfume, Lauder "accidentally" broke a bottle of Youth Dew, causing the smell to spread throughout the department store. Shoppers began asking for the scent, and the department store agreed to sell it.

Read Time Magazine's profile of Estée Lauder—the only woman named to a list of the most influential business leaders of the 20th century

Time Magazine's 1998 profile of Estée Lauder credited much of Lauder's global success to her incredible work ethic and her dedication to creating the highest-quality products, even if those products weren't trendy.

Estée Lauder used wealthy people's bathrooms to curate the color of the jars her products were sold in

While Lauder herself was just starting her cosmetics empire, she knew wealthy people who could afford high-quality products would always be her target market. In order to make her products as appealing to this market as possible, Lauder held up different colors of glass bottles in people's bathrooms to see what would look best with their decorations before landing on a turquoise bottle with a gold cap.

Explore the brands owned by Estée Lauder Companies

While Estée Lauder remains the flagship brand and namesake of the cosmetic conglomerate, the company owns more than 20 premier brands. Some of the brands—like Clinique and Origin—were created in-house, but others—like Tom Ford and Jo Malone—are a result of the company's acquisition strategy, which often targets companies with high-end retail products.