아마 이미 다 보도되어서 아시지 않을까 싶습니다만 검색하여 본 결과 이 게시판에 관계되는 글이 올라온 것 같지는 않는듯 싶어서 몇 자 적고 부고기사를 올립니다. 제겐 늘 엘리자베스 헐리가  모델인 브랜드(최근에 모델이 바뀌었다는 얘기를 얼핏 본 기억이 나네요)로만 기억되었었는데 지난 주 창업자인 Estee Lauder가 죽었군요. 그렇게나 privacy를 지키려고 (혹은 자기가 만든 제품에 신비감을 주기 위해서) 태어난 해나 기타 개인적인 정보를 감추려고 했다는데 죽자마자 1906년 혹은 1907년 생이라고 Estee Lauder社에서 발표해 버렸으니 허탈하기까지 합니다. 미국 여성들이 쓸 수 있는 실용적 화장품을 처음 개발했다라든지 남편과 이혼했다가 다시 재결합한 얘기는 상당히 흥미롭군요. 그리고 화장품 살 때 사은품 끼워 주는 것을 처음으로 시작한 게 Estee Lauder였다라든지 Clinique나 Aramis가 모두 계열사였다는 것은 이 기사를 보고 처음 알았네요^^;; 명복을 빕니다.

  Cato...from the Windy City

Chicago Tribune
Copyright 2004, Chicago Tribune. All Rights Reserved.
  
Monday, April 26, 2004
  
Obituaries
  
Estee Lauder; America's queen of cosmetics; 1906 or 1907 - 2004
By Bettijane Levine, Tribune Newspapers: Los Angeles Times.

Estee Lauder, founder of the international beauty empire that bears her name
and undisputed queen of America's prestige cosmetics industry, has died.
Lauder, who pioneered such concepts as "gift with purchase," never made public
her birth date, but her company said Sunday she was 97, which means she was
born in 1906 or 1907.

The doyenne of makeup died Saturday at her home on the Upper East Side of
Manhattan of cardiopulmonary arrest, said her son Leonard, chairman and chief
  executive officer of Estee Lauder Cos.

A self-propelled dynamo, Lauder raised cosmetics merchandising to an art form
through incessant work, a passion for quality and creative sales techniques.
From the start of her career in the 1920s, she ignored conventional wisdom and
forged new paths, unabashedly marketing cosmetics as "jars of hope." By 1998,
she was the only woman listed among Time magazine's 20 most influential
geniuses of business of the 20th Century.

Lauder, who was protective of her birth date and other personal information,
began life as Josephine Esther Mentzer--one of six children of Jewish
immigrants from Hungary who lived above the family's hardware store in the
working-class neighborhood of Corona in the Queens borough of New York.

She entered the beauty business armed only with a flawless complexion, an
uncle's face-cream formula and unlimited ambition.

Fifty years later, when she had begun delegating authority to her sons Leonard
and Ronald, she had become one of the world's richest women, according to
Forbes magazine.

  She was one of the most respected women as well, ranking tops in numerous polls
along with Mother Teresa, Jacqueline Kennedy and Nancy Reagan. President
Richard Nixon had hoped to appoint her ambassador to Luxembourg, but she
declined.

Her company's labels--including Estee Lauder, Clinique, Origins, Prescriptives
and Aramis--became best sellers around the globe. In 2003, net sales of all
products sold in 130 countries by the Estee Lauder Cos. (which went public in
1995) was $5.12 billion.

Lauder wrote in her 1985 autobiography, "Estee: A Success Story," that she was
interested in beauty even as a child, and would comb her mother's long hair and
pat her face with creams for hours. As a teenager, Lauder was fascinated by the
work of an uncle--a chemist who lived nearby and had some basic formulas for
face creams. He taught her about ingredients, and how to formulate products in
her kitchen. Then she struck out on her own, apparently before she finished
high school.

At first, Lauder sold her creams and lotions at small beauty salons in her
neighborhood. In those days, no one else was doing such a thing, and hair
salons were in their infancy. And Lauder didn't just sell. She chatted as she
  massaged, patted, soothed and smoothed--rippling her fingers gently over the
skins of women marooned under huge metal hair dryers and desperate for
distraction of any kind.

In most cases, Lauder wrote, the women would leave with at least one purchase--
and one free sample.

From the start, Lauder shunned traditional ways of promoting her products,
partly because she had no money for ads, but also because she understood the
dynamics of hands-on demonstrations and of gifts of her wares. Lauder believed
that women would return to buy more of her products once they learned how good
they were. "Rapture is feeling pretty," she wrote. And rapture was, in essence,
what she sold.

Lauder was a perfectionist, by all accounts. As she expanded by starting
cosmetics counters at more nearby salons, she hired only women who meticulously
could follow the techniques Lauder had invented and branded as her own. When
offered the opportunity to expand with a counter at a shop in Brooklyn, more
than an hour's travel away, Lauder declined. It was too far for her to properly
oversee on a daily basis, she said.

  In 1930, she married Joseph Lauter, who was six years her senior and had
studied accounting in trade school on the Lower East Side. They changed their
name to Lauder soon after, and began working together.

Wife-husband team

Estee Lauder did the outside work, and Joe toiled behind the scenes on
production and finance.

Her attention to quality was lifelong. Not only did products have to be of the
highest caliber possible, but so did containers. In 1944, for example, when
most postwar lipsticks were packaged in plastic, Lauder presented hers in an
elegant metal case.

When Lauder stopped selling in beauty salons and began to establish her
presence in department stores, she came up with the natural successor to her
informal free-product giveaways: the "gift with purchase." Her competitors
called it "crazy" and sneered that she was "giving away her profits." But
Lauder's sales figures soared, and competitors soon started copying her. The
gift with purchase is now standard operating procedure in cosmetics and many
other industries.
  
Lauder revolutionized the American fragrance industry in the late 1940s with
her creation of Youth Dew, a sweet, sensual bath oil formulated so it could
double as a perfume. In those years, most fine perfumes were expensive French
imports, packed in jewel-like bottles, sealed with wax, ribbons and gold-mesh
wire. Middle-class women considered it extravagant and self-indulgent to buy
such items for themselves. They waited to receive perfume as gifts, and then
used the precious fluid only on special occasions.

Lauder developed an inexpensive bath oil ($8.50), with a twist-off cap and a
warm, heady scent that clung to the skin for hours. Women bought millions of
bottles, and became eager customers for the Youth Dew colognes and perfumes
subsequently marketed by Lauder. The American fragrance industry benefited from
Lauder's coup.

For more than a half-century, Estee Lauder kept most of her personal background
information secret, hinting at an aristocratic lineage and childhood idylls in
Viennese palaces. Critics sniped at her for what they considered foolish
vanity. But others said it was probably a wise marketing decision for her to
create the illusion that she was born into the elegant social set to which she
aspired.
  
In 1939, Estee and Joseph divorced, but they were remarried in 1942. Their
second son, Ronald, was born in 1944. Estee Lauder, the corporation, was formed
in 1946, at which point there were no employees and only four skin-care
products and three makeup items. (At her death, products numbered some 2,000
and employees 21,500.)

Saks was big break

The Lauders' big break came when Estee managed to wheedle a small order from
Saks Fifth Avenue, their first department store. She had determined that was
where her products belonged--a place where society's top drawer shopped.

Home cooking of products was no longer enough. The couple took over a vacant
eatery on the Upper East Side, and, Lauder later wrote, "on the restaurant's
gas burners we cooked our creams, mixed them, sterilized our pretty jars with
boiling water, poured and filled and planned and packaged. ... Every bit of
work was done by hand--four hands, Joe's and mine."

Lauder began crisscrossing the country--a kind of store-to-store saleswoman in
couture clothes--introducing herself and her products to the heads of fine
  department stores.

Legend has it that she "accidentally on purpose" dropped an entire bottle of
Youth Dew on the floor in a Paris department store. The lingering scent
captured shoppers' attention and drew them, like magnets, to her counter
without a word being said.

Between travels, she and her family created new products, packaging, and
strategies.

Aramis, launched as a men's fragrance, became the first men's treatment line in
department stores. Clinique, launched in 1968, was the first upscale line of
allergy-tested cosmetics. It lost $20 million before it caught on to become the
best seller it is today.

Lauder declined to sell her products in drugstores, even when her competitors
were making huge profits by doing so. She preferred to remain elite, she said.

Her social clout grew along with her income. The couple's name started popping
up in newspaper coverage of major charity and social events. They purchased
palatial homes in Palm Beach, Fla., the South of France, Long Island and New
  York City.

In the 1960s, the Lauder Foundation was set up to fund three playgrounds and
support other New York civic causes and charities.

Elder son Leonard, who made his post-college career with the family business,
established the company's first sales force and its first research-and-
development laboratory. He became president in 1972 and went on to be chairman
and chief executive officer. Ronald is chairman of Clinique Laboratories Inc.

Lauder's husband died in 1983, and in 1995 the company went public, with a
value estimated at $2 billion. The Lauder family retains control of the
majority of the stock.

In addition to her sons, Lauder is survived by four grandchildren, including
William Lauder who is to become chief executive of the Estee Lauder Cos. on
July 1, and six great-grandchildren.