The Company I Keep: My Life in Beauty

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

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

It led to my long-term decision of always keeping some distance between myself and the people who work for me. That didn’t mean “no socializing,” because socializing is both pleasant and necessary to build team morale and cohesiveness. But I was always very careful about drinking, and I didn’t play golf or tennis with them. I didn’t want them to se

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

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

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

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

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

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