Estée Lauder and the Free Sample

The company that bears her name dates its beginning to 1946, when Estée Lauder and her husband Joseph officially launched it. A year later, by the company's own account, Saks Fifth Avenue placed a first major order worth eight hundred dollars.^[1]

Most of what is commonly repeated about her comes from that account, or from her own telling of her life. Both are primary sources about how she wished to be remembered, and at least one biographer did not remember her the same way.^[2]

The company's history has her selling by touch before she sold by advertising, demonstrating her preparations on women sitting under the dryers in beauty salons, and later attending the opening of nearly every new store that stocked her products, staying a week to teach the women who would sell them.^[3]

The method is one this site traces through the counters of the 1920s, advice given in person as the means of the sale.^[4] Her contribution, on this account, was to make it a system that could be repeated in store after store.

The practice most often credited to her is the gift with purchase. The company's own wording is precise: she offered customers a free sample when they bought a product, and the company credits that with establishing gift with purchase as an industry practice.^[5]

The distinction between a sample and a gift matters, and so does the source. A company's account of its founder is evidence of what the company wants believed, not an independent history of a sales technique, and its claim to have established an industry practice has not, in the sources cited here, been tested against what other houses were doing at the time.^[5]

In 1985 Lee Israel published an unauthorised biography, Estée Lauder: Beyond the Magic.^[6] As Publishers Weekly summarised its charges, Lauder had failed to admit her age and hedged about her background, and, more seriously, had not compensated the chemist uncle who invented the cream on which her company was built.^[7]

This entry does not adjudicate between the versions. It records that they exist, and that the most often repeated facts about her origins come from the side with the strongest interest in them.

Her date of birth, for one; the dispute over her age is part of the record.^[8] How much of the early formulation was hers, her uncle's or later chemists' is another. Estée Lauder died in 2004, and the company she founded became one of the largest in the industry, which is the one fact about her that neither version disputes.^[9]