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Estée Lauder

1908–2004 · 96 years Tier II

The Corona hardware store girl who invented a Viennese childhood

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Josephine Esther Mentzer was the second child of Rose Schotz, from Satoraljaujhely in Hungary, and Max Mentzer, a shopkeeper from Pressburg. Rose had crossed in 1898 with five children already, to join a first husband, and married Mentzer in 1905. The family kept a hardware store in Corona, Queens, and most of the nine children worked in it. Her mother's brother, John Schotz, was a chemist selling creams, lotions, rouge and fragrance as New Way Laboratories, and she liked his business better than her father's. He showed her how to compound a cream, and how to wash a face and massage it. She left Newtown High School, named one of his blends Super Rich All-Purpose Cream, and started selling it to friends.

She sold into beauty parlors, beach clubs and resorts, and the sale was always the same physical act, demonstrating the product on the customer herself. In 1946 she and Joseph Lauder incorporated at 501 Madison Avenue with four products. Saks Fifth Avenue placed the first department store order in 1948. Youth-Dew arrived in 1953 as a bath oil that also worked as perfume, which meant women bought it by the bottle rather than by the drop, and it moved 50,000 bottles the first year and 150 million by 1984. Aramis followed in 1964 for men, Clinique in 1968 with a dermatologist attached. The company listed on the New York Stock Exchange on November 16, 1995, at 26 dollars a share.

The origin story was not hers. Her favorite version had a Viennese mother raising her in fashionable Flushing in a house with stables, a chauffeured car and an Italian nurse, and she let a descent from European aristocracy stand for decades. Lee Israel took it apart in a 1985 biography, Estee Lauder: Beyond the Magic. Lauder published her own memoir the same year. Her New York Times obituary said flatly that she was a New Yorker and not an aristocrat at all, while allowing that mythmaking is a great deal of the magic of the beauty business. The accent on the first e was added to make the name look French. The pronunciation was her father's Hungarian one. She sold the story exactly the way she sold the cream.

She died of cardiopulmonary arrest at her Manhattan home on April 24, 2004. The Times put her age at 97 in the headline. The New York City birth record indexed for July 1, 1908, makes her 95, and the gap is the last working artifact of the habit. Joseph had died in 1983. Leonard ran the company and then chaired it and died on June 14, 2025, at 92. Ronald went into diplomacy, politics and art collecting. The grandchildren sit on the board. Time put her on its 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the century, the only woman on it, and she took the Presidential Medal of Freedom the year she died.

Lifespan

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Estée Lauder's life against the full span of the corpus.

Notable works

  • Estée Lauder Cosmetic Co. company
    Founded with Joseph Lauder, selling four products     1946
  • Youth-Dew other
    A bath oil that doubled as perfume and changed how women bought fragrance     1953
  • Aramis company
    The men's line     1964
  • Clinique company
    Allergy-tested and dermatologist-guided     1968
  • Estée: A Success Story book
    Her memoir, out the same year as the biography that disproved its opening chapters     1985
  • New York Stock Exchange listing other
    November 16, 1995, at 26 dollars a share     1995

Life in brief

with age at each point
  • July 1, 1908 aged 0 Born over the family hardware store in Corona, Queens The year is disputed. Her Times obituary made her two years older.
  • January 15, 1930 aged 21 Marries Joseph Lauter, whose surname later became Lauder
  • 1939 aged ~31 The marriage ends in divorce and she moves to Florida They remarried in 1942.
  • 1946 aged ~38 Founds Estée Lauder Cosmetic Co. at 501 Madison Avenue
  • 1948 aged ~40 Saks Fifth Avenue places the first department store order
  • 1953 aged ~45 Youth-Dew goes on sale
  • January 16, 1978 aged 69 France makes her a chevalier of the Legion of Honour She was the first woman to receive it in that class from the consul general in New York.
  • 1985 aged ~77 Lee Israel's biography disproves the aristocratic descent Lauder published her own memoir the same year.
  • April 24, 2004 aged 95 Dies at her home in Manhattan

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Entrepreneurship