Estée Lauder

The Estée Lauder Companies Inc.
Type	Public
Traded as	NYSE: EL; S&P 500 component
Industry	Cosmetics, personal care
Founded	1946, New York City
Founder	Estée Lauder and Joseph Lauder
Headquarters	New York City, United States
Area served	Approximately 150 countries and territories
Key people	William P. Lauder (chairman), Stéphane de la Faverie (president and chief executive), Akhil Shrivastava (chief financial officer)
Products	Skin care, makeup, fragrance, hair care
Revenue	Approximately US$15.6 billion (fiscal 2024)
Employees	Approximately 62,000
Website	elcompanies.com

The Estée Lauder Companies Inc. is an American multinational cosmetics corporation headquartered in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. It manufactures and markets makeup, skin care, fragrance and hair care products, and is the second largest cosmetics company in the world after L'Oréal. Its portfolio includes Estée Lauder, Clinique, MAC Cosmetics, La Mer, Jo Malone London, Tom Ford Beauty, Aveda, Bobbi Brown, Origins, Aramis, Too Faced, Dr. Jart+, Le Labo and The Ordinary, sold through department stores, specialist retailers, travel retail and digital channels.

The company was founded in 1946 by Estée Lauder and her husband Joseph, and remains under the control of their descendants through a dual-class share structure, with family members occupying the chairmanship and board seats more than three decades after the public listing in 1995. It is among the few large consumer companies in which founding family control has persisted at that scale, and the family's involvement is a defining feature of how it is run.

Its position is concentrated in prestige beauty, meaning products sold at premium prices through channels where a consultant or a specialist retail environment mediates the purchase, rather than in the mass market. That concentration was for decades the source of its profitability and has more recently been the source of its difficulties, as the prestige channel has been disrupted by direct-to-consumer brands, by social media marketing, by the collapse of Chinese travel retail and by the decline of the American department store.

History

Foundation and the department store model, 1946 to 1980

Estée Lauder, born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Queens, learned to make creams from her uncle, a chemist, and sold them from beauty salons and hotels before founding the company with her husband Joseph in 1946. They began with four products: a cleansing oil, a skin lotion, a super-rich all-purpose creme and a creme pack, produced initially in a converted restaurant kitchen.

The first department store account was Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan in 1948, secured after Lauder persuaded the buyer to take an order she had no established demand for. Her commercial method, developed in that period and adopted across the industry, rested on demonstration and on the gift with purchase: a free sample given at the counter, which created both obligation and the opportunity to try a product that a customer would not otherwise buy. The technique is now universal in beauty retailing and was regarded as a novelty when introduced.

Youth-Dew, launched in 1953, was a bath oil that doubled as a fragrance and was sold at a price at which women would buy it for themselves rather than wait for it as a gift, which transformed the company's revenue. International expansion began with an account at Harrods in London in 1960, followed by an office in Hong Kong in 1961.

Aramis, a line of fragrance and grooming products for men, launched in 1964. Clinique followed in 1968, developed with the dermatologist Norman Orentreich and positioned as allergy-tested and fragrance-free, presented in a clinical idiom of laboratory coats and diagnostic consultations that distinguished it from the glamour of the parent brand. Clinique became the first women's cosmetics company to introduce a men's line, Skin Supplies for Men, in 1976.

Estée Lauder was named one of ten Outstanding Women in Business in the United States by business and financial editors in 1967 and received a Spirit of Achievement Award from the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in 1968. The company's products became available in the Soviet Union in 1981.

Brand acquisition and public listing, 1990 to 2000

The 1990s converted a family business selling a handful of brands into a portfolio company. Origins, created in 1990, was the first wellness brand in American department stores. Licensing agreements for designer fragrances began with Tommy Hilfiger in 1993, followed by the Italian house Kiton in 1995 and Donna Karan in 1997.

Acquisitions began with an investment in the Toronto-based MAC Cosmetics in 1994, completed in 1998. MAC had been created by a makeup artist and a salon owner for professional use, was sold by staff who were themselves artists rather than beauty advisers, and had built a following through drag performers and the fashion industry rather than through advertising. Its acquisition gave the company a brand with an entirely different relationship to its customers from the one Estée Lauder had.

Bobbi Brown Cosmetics, founded by the makeup artist of the same name, was acquired in 1995, as was La Mer, together with the original formulation of Crème de la Mer, a cream developed by the aerospace physicist Max Huber after a laboratory accident and sold at prices that established the possibility of a luxury tier well above the rest of the market. Aveda, the company's first hair care and holistic beauty brand, followed in 1997, and the fragrance house Jo Malone London in 1999.

The Estée Lauder Companies listed on the New York Stock Exchange on 16 November 1995 at US$26 a share. The dual-class structure adopted at listing preserved family control, and Leonard Lauder, Estée's elder son, who had run the business since the 1970s and was the principal architect of its expansion, remained the dominant influence for decades afterwards.

Designer brands and category expansion, 2000 to 2020

The company acquired a majority interest in the hair salon business Bumble and bumble, completing the purchase in 2006, and signed an exclusive global licensing agreement with Michael Kors in 2003. Tom Ford began working with the company and signed an agreement in 2005 to develop fragrances and cosmetics under the Tom Ford Beauty name, which became one of its most valuable properties.

Smashbox Beauty Cosmetics, created at Smashbox Studios in Culver City by Dean and Davis Factor, great-grandsons of Max Factor, was acquired on 1 July 2010. In October 2011 the Aramis and Designer Fragrances division signed a multi-year worldwide licence for Tory Burch fragrances, the designer's first venture into beauty, with products launched in 2013. AERIN Beauty, a luxury lifestyle and fragrance brand created around the style of Aerin Lauder, Estée's granddaughter, launched in 2012.

In 2014 the company acquired RODIN olio lusso, a skincare brand known for a facial oil, and Le Labo, a fragrance house whose products are compounded in front of the customer, and made its first Indian investment by taking a minority stake in Forest Essentials, an Ayurvedic luxury brand. Editions de Parfums Frédéric Malle, a fragrance publisher that credits its perfumers on the label in the manner of an author, and GLAMGLOW, a Hollywood skincare brand, followed in 2015. Becca Cosmetics was acquired in 2016, and in November 2016 the company made its largest purchase to that date, acquiring Too Faced for US$1.45 billion.

Dr. Jart+, founded in Korea in 2004 and the brand that introduced BB cream to Western markets as a cosmetic category, was acquired in 2019, reflecting the influence Korean skincare had acquired over the global industry.

Recent history, 2020 to 2026

On 20 August 2020 the company announced a reduction of 1,500 to 2,000 positions worldwide, about 3 per cent of employees, principally in support functions and stores, together with the closure of 10 to 15 per cent of its freestanding stores and of a number of in-store counters, and a redirection of investment toward digital channels.

It acquired a majority of the Canadian group Deciem in 2021 and completed full ownership in June 2024. Deciem's principal brand, The Ordinary, sells single-ingredient formulations at very low prices with the active ingredient and its concentration stated on the label, an explicit rejection of the pricing and marketing conventions on which prestige beauty rests. Its acquisition by the second largest prestige company was therefore widely commented upon, and it has proved among the company's better-performing assets.

A 300,000-square-foot distribution centre opened at Galgenen in Switzerland in 2022. In November 2022 the company agreed to acquire the fashion house Tom Ford for US$2.8 billion, with Ford remaining as creative director into 2023, securing outright ownership of a brand it had built under licence.

In 2024 it announced a partnership with the jeweller Messika, and in October opened a Global Fragrance Atelier within La Maison des Parfums in Paris, presented as an artificial-intelligence-enabled innovation centre for its luxury fragrance portfolio. In September 2025 it appointed Ossama Ogla as general manager for the Middle East. In December 2025 it disclosed that it had been taking minority stakes in beauty brands across China, Mexico and India as part of a strategy directed at emerging middle-class consumers alongside the Americas.

The period from 2022 was the most difficult in the company's modern history. Its unusually high exposure to Chinese consumers, and in particular to the travel retail channel in Hainan and in Korean duty-free stores through which Chinese buyers had purchased a large proportion of their prestige beauty, collapsed as travel restrictions, a weakening Chinese economy and a crackdown on grey-market resale removed the demand simultaneously. Sales and profit fell sharply, the share price declined by more than three quarters from its 2021 peak, the dividend was cut and successive restructuring programmes were announced. Fabrizio Freda, chief executive since 2009, retired in 2024 and was succeeded by Stéphane de la Faverie, a company executive, in January 2025, with William P. Lauder moving from executive chairman to chairman.

Brands and operations

The company reports through product categories rather than brands. Skin care is the largest and most profitable, comprising Estée Lauder, Clinique, La Mer, Dr. Jart+, Origins, GLAMGLOW and The Ordinary. Makeup comprises MAC, Bobbi Brown, Too Faced, Smashbox, Clinique and Estée Lauder colour. Fragrance comprises Jo Malone London, Le Labo, Frédéric Malle, Tom Ford, Aramis, Kilian and the designer licences, and has been the fastest-growing category in the industry as consumers have shifted toward niche and artisanal scents. Hair care comprises Aveda and Bumble and bumble.

Distribution runs through department stores, specialist beauty retailers including Sephora and Ulta, freestanding stores, travel retail, the company's own websites and third-party e-commerce platforms. Travel retail, meaning duty-free sales in airports and at border destinations, grew for two decades into one of the industry's most profitable channels and became the source of the company's greatest recent difficulty, since the trade depended substantially on Chinese travellers buying for resale at home.

The decline of the American department store has been a structural problem of the same kind. Estée Lauder and Clinique were built around the beauty counter staffed by a trained consultant, an arrangement that works when customers visit department stores and does not when they do not, and the company has been obliged to rebuild distribution around specialist retailers and direct channels where the relationship with the customer is different.

Marketing

The company has used named spokesmodels, referred to within the industry as faces, since the 1960s. Estée Lauder's faces have included Karen Graham, Shaun Casey, Willow Bay, Paulina Porizkova, Elizabeth Hurley, Carolyn Murphy, Liya Kebede, the first African face of the brand, Anja Rubik, Gwyneth Paltrow and Hilary Rhoda. In 2010 the company added Liu Wen, Joan Smalls and Constance Jablonski, a deliberate broadening of the roster in response to criticism of the industry's narrow representation. Kendall Jenner was signed in 2015. Violette Serrat was appointed global beauty director in 2017.

Global ambassadors have included Ana de Armas, Amanda Gorman, Bianca Brandolini d'Adda, Carolyn Murphy, Grace Elizabeth, Imaan Hammam, Karlie Kloss, Manushi Chhillar and Yang Mi, and in 2024 the singer and actress IU became the first Korean global brand ambassador. Alvin Chereskin, founder of the agency AC and R, was the company's long-standing creative partner.

MAC's marketing has operated on different principles. Its Viva Glam line, launched in 1994 with RuPaul, donates the full selling price of each product to the MAC AIDS Fund, which has raised several hundred million dollars, and the brand's association with drag performance and with professional makeup artists preceded and substantially anticipated the commercial mainstreaming of both.

Corporate affairs

Leonard A. Lauder, who led the company from the 1970s and served as chairman until 2009 and chairman emeritus thereafter until his death in 2025, was the principal figure in its transformation from a family concern into a global corporation, and was also a major collector and philanthropist whose gift of Cubist paintings to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was among the largest in that institution's history. Ronald Lauder, his brother, served as United States ambassador to Austria and as president of the World Jewish Congress, and founded the Neue Galerie in New York.

William P. Lauder, Leonard's son, served as chief executive from 2004 to 2009 and as executive chairman thereafter. Fabrizio Freda, who came from Procter & Gamble, was president and chief executive from 2009 to 2024 and presided over both the company's strongest period of growth and its subsequent decline. Stéphane de la Faverie became president and chief executive in 2025.

The family holds Class B shares carrying ten votes each, giving it voting control substantially in excess of its economic interest, an arrangement that has been criticised by governance specialists and defended on the ground that it permits investment on a timescale longer than public markets otherwise allow. Whether it has served the company well during the recent downturn has been the subject of sustained debate among investors.

The company reported net sales of approximately US$15.6 billion in fiscal 2024, down from a peak above US$17.7 billion in fiscal 2022. It ranked 258 on the Fortune 500 in 2018 on 2017 revenue.