The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty

The Navy also taught me about strategy. The aircraft carrier was always accompanied by several destroyers, which served as a screen for the larger ship. I would use that analogy in business: The small brands would protect the main brand. Clinique was the first screen for the Estée Lauder aircraft carrier, followed by Origins and Prescriptives. Late

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

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

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.

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

I often thought back to the sock fiasco over the years and had two words when people got into a tangle: fix it. If you don’t know how to fix it, find someone who does. I didn’t burden them with my views on how they should fix the problem. I gave them complete autonomy. I considered those two words—fix it—to be key to my ability to be a leader.

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.

The launch of Clinique was a classic case of leveraging market segmentation. Looking back, this was probably the most important lesson I learned in my entire career: if you understood market segmentation, you understood everything. If you believe in market segmentation, you know that one marketing campaign cannot cover the globe. There have to be m