Word: lauders
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...fever pitch early this spring. Rumor was that the celebrity designer--who over the course of a decade helped transform the Gucci Group from a $200 million purveyor of leather goods to a $3 billion luxury conglomerate--was being wooed to be creative director of cosmetics giant Estée Lauder. Would Ford be hired to revive its flagging eponymous brand (which has lately developed a somewhat dowdy aura, putting a damper on sales)? The New York Post claimed that Leonard Lauder, the former chief executive and father of current CEO William, opposed the deal; that Aerin Lauder, Leonard's niece...
...speculation was put to rest in mid-April when Estée Lauder revealed that Ford--along with Domenico de Sole, Gucci's former CEO and Ford's partner in building and then fleeing the company--is indeed signing on but not as a hire. In one of two deals that will launch a privately owned Tom Ford luxury brand, the Texas-born designer--who long maintained that he would never put his name on a label--will design a limited line of beauty products due out this holiday season under a Tom Ford for Estée Lauder label and follow...
That's apparently sufficient for now. Despite the troubles of its flagship label, and growing competition from giant mass marketers like Procter & Gamble and Avon, Lauder's revenues have been climbing at an 8% clip annually. "If the deal works, great," says Linda Bolton Weiser, an analyst at Oppenheimer & Co. "If it doesn't, they aren't betting the ranch." Hip makeup brands like M.A.C. and Bobbi Brown and a stable of high-margin skin creams and hair-care products should keep the company growing in the short term. Ford says he'll be mining Lauder's archives for ideas...
Though many of Lauder's 23 brands are celebrity and designer lines, no outsider has shared real estate with the Lauder name in the label's 59-year history. Still, William Lauder denies that the family is divided about the Ford alliance. Indeed, he says, Leonard Lauder himself set the wheels of the deal in motion after De Sole approached him last summer in Aspen, Colo., where the two own homes. But the quidnuncs were half right. John Demsey, who ran the M.A.C. business before becoming global president of the Lauder brand in January, admits that he and Aerin Lauder...
When it comes to colorful cosmetics, the eyes have it this spring with makeup artists introducing a soft, powdery palette of colors like lilac, lemon and fuchsia. Estée Lauder's Extravagant Bright collection features limited-edition eye-shadow duos designed to look like a kaleidoscope ($30 each...