Estée Lauder built a beauty empire by persisting through rejection and learning to sell directly to customers. She got her first big break at Saks Fifth Avenue by refusing to take no for an answer, then grew her company by genuinely loving the work and treating sales like a craft.
Chapters
Hi, I'm Evan Carmichael and welcome to another edition of Modeling the Masters. Today we're going to look at how a girl grew up with no money, lived with her 8 siblings in a small apartment, and she would go on to be the only woman named to Time Magazine's Most Influential Business People of the Century. This is the story of Estée Lauder and the top 3 lessons that you can learn from her success.
Estée Lauder was born in Queens, New York, the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants. Most of her childhood was spent helping her parents make ends meet by by working at the family's hardware store. As she grew up, she met Joseph Lauder, a textile salesman whom she married and moved to Manhattan with. After the birth of her first child, Lauder didn't want to give up her professional career and experimented with different ingredients to create a skincare cream for women. She began out of her kitchen and after a year of hard work got her big break. Saks Fifth Avenue agreed to carry her product and it sold out within 2 days of it being put on the shelves. After 50+ years at the top of her game, Estée Lauder became the only woman on Time magazine's list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the century. In 2009, the Estée Lauder companies had over $7 billion in revenue, almost 30,000 employees, and it all began at a crowded kitchen table.
By starting from her kitchen table and by never giving up, Estee Lauder was able to become the most influential business genius of the 20th century. To help you overcome your obstacles and grow your business, here are 3 action items that you can learn from Estee Lauder.
Action Item #1: Don't stop at the first no. Being an entrepreneur means you're going to get a lot of rejection. Whether it's friends and family telling you that your idea will never be successful, or prospects and customers telling you they don't want to buy from you, you'll get a lot of nos. Successful entrepreneurs pick themselves back up after rejection and keep improving their products and messaging until they get to a yes. Lauder was known for her unwavering persistence. When she was trying to expand her European market, she arranged a meeting with the manager of Galeries Lafayette, Europe's largest department store. When the manager said no, she accidentally spilled her perfume samples on the floor, and the store customers started asking how they could buy some of the fragrance. The manager had to give her a contract. According to Lauder, "I've never worked a day in my life without selling. If I believe in something, I sell it and I sell it hard. If you have a goal, if you want to be successful, if you really want to do it and become another Estée Lauder, you've got to work hard, you've got to stick to it, and you've got to believe in what you're doing." Action Item #2: Love What You Do. Any successful entrepreneur will tell you that one of the keys to their success is that they love what they do. When you really love your business, you not only enjoy it more, but you put the kind of time and energy in that's needed for a company to take off. You sweat the details and constantly improve your offering, not just because it'll make you money, but because you love doing it. Lauder loved her product so much that she paid attention to every little detail. When she got her first deal with Saks Fifth Avenue, she stood at the entrance door for an entire week and watched the women come in. 9 times out of 10, the first place their eyes would wander would be to the right. Not to the left, not straight ahead. So she asked for her product to be placed on the right. According to Lauder, "I love my product. I love to touch the creams, smell them, look at them, carry them with me. A person has to love her harvest." if she's to expect others to love it. Action Item #3: Sell, sell, sell. Not all entrepreneurs are natural salespeople, but you have to learn how to sell if you want to build a business of any significant size. More entrepreneurs fail because they can't sell rather than them not having a good product or service. When Lotta was first getting started, she didn't have money to spend on advertising and promotions, So she invested her time into product demos. She began at salons, hotels, subway stations, and even people on the street, offering them a free makeover and the chance to buy her products. She eventually moved to sell to the big department stores, but it all began on a $0 budget and her grinding out sale after sale. According to Lauder, "If you put the product into the customer's hands, it will speak for itself if it's something of quality." If you don't sell, it's not the product that's wrong, it's you.
So remember, don't stop at the first no, love what you do, and sell, sell, sell. To finish this video, I wanted to share one of my favorite true stories about Estée Lauder and some of her top quotes.
Once Lauder built up enough money to start a marketing campaign, she went to various advertising agencies who all turned her down because her company was too small. With only $50,000 to spend, she used her entire budget on samples that she would send out as direct mail campaigns and free gifts with purchases. It proved to be a successful move, and she changed the way beauty products were marketed.
Thank you for joining me for another edition of Modeling the Masters. If you enjoyed, please give the video a thumbs up. I'd also love to hear your thoughts if you want to leave a comment below, and stay tuned for the next episode. Mm-hmm.
