Estee Lauder

The Sweet Smell of Success

The Estee Lauder brand is familiar to almost everyone, everywhere. How did that happen? The credit goes to Estee Lauder, who built a cosmetics empire, a person who had a passion for and desire to help women feel glamorous. Even those who aren’t experts in the field of cosmetics and fragrances recognize this most prominent and respected name. Estee Lauder, born Josephine Ester Mentzer, was one the most successful women entrepreneurs in America and she was the only one woman on Time Magazine’s 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the time. She built her cosmetics empire by having every woman’s dream in her heart, which was providing woman with resources to look and feel beautiful. Estee Lauder was born on July 01, 1908 in Corona, Queens, New York. She was indeed European, where her parents, Max Mentzer and Rose (Schotz) Mentzer, were Jewish immigrants from Hungary and Czechoslovakia. She was the youngest in the family with eight other siblings. They were far from high society, her father’s owned a hardware store and there was where they spent most of their time.

While was working in his father’s hardware store, it did give her a better understanding and bigger picture of entrepreneurship and what challenges she might meets to be a successful retailer. In her autobiography, as a teenager, Estee had a dream; she dreamed to be a skin specialist and making women beautiful. She loved to study all the products that launched in the market, and worked on faces and hair by having their family members as her models. In her life of cosmetic field, the first and the most important mentor was her uncle, John, who was a passionate chemist. Estee learned many important details and gained experiences through her uncle by helping him in his work. She experimented and tested the creams made by her uncle on the faces of her family members and classmates. She even promoted her uncle products to salons and resorts throughout the...