The Counter at Saks: Estée Lauder’s First Department Store

A cosmetics company founded in New York in 1946 had, in its founder’s telling, four skin creams to sell. Within a year or so its products were on a counter at Saks Fifth Avenue, and it had found the route on which, as her son Leonard later observed, its success was built: the high-end department store.^[1]

Exactly when that happened depends on the account. So does a good deal else about Estée Lauder’s early career.

Estée Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in Corona, Queens, to Jewish immigrants from Hungary. Her own account credits her mother’s brother, John Schotz, a “skin specialist”, with sparking her interest in cosmetics; the historian James Bennett finds that Schotz was a chemist, who ran New Way Laboratories on West 43rd Street making everything from poultry remedies to cosmetics, and that she appears to have learned the manufacturing side there.^[2]

Lee Israel’s biography has her travelling between New York and Florida from the mid-1920s to the end of the war, selling wherever she could. In her autobiography she mentions concessions in two hairdressing salons, with a range of four skin-care products: Cleansing Oil, Creme Pack, Super Rich All-Purpose Creme and Skin Lotion.^[2] She married Joseph Lauter in 1930, divorced him in 1939 and was reconciled with him in 1943; after that he ran the manufacturing while she went on the road to sell.^[2] The company was officially launched in 1946.^[2][3]

By the company’s own account, a year after the launch Saks Fifth Avenue placed its first major order, for $800 worth of products.^[4] Bennett dates the Saks counter to 1947 and reproduces the first invoice: $810, after a 50 per cent discount. By then the creams had been repackaged in containers made by the T. C. Wheaton Company of Millville, New Jersey, painted in a shade later known as Estée Lauder Blue.^[5]

Other accounts put the counter a year later. PBS’s They Made America has her persuading Saks executives to carry her cosmetics in 1948, then risking six months’ rent on office space and joining her husband and elder son in mixing formulas and sterilising and filling jars to meet the demand.^[6]

The orders show a wider range than the legend. Published orders to Albert A. Katz of Philadelphia in 1946 and to Saks in 1947 list face powder, lipstick and eye shadow, and a cream and a dry rouge, beside the skin creams.^[8]

Lauder later said that her lipstick, eye shadow and cream rouge each came in a single shade — Duchess Red for the lips, Turquoise for the eyes — and if so the range did not stay small for long. By 1951 the Duchess lipsticks also came in Coral and Melon, and the Creme Base Face Powder, which may have begun in one shade, Honey Glow, came in seven.^[8]

The department store suited her for reasons beyond prestige. Before credit cards, stores such as Saks gave select customers charge accounts, so they could buy on impulse when they were short of cash, and the addresses on those accounts made mailing lists.^[9] Lauder persuaded the stores to send their customers a card that could be exchanged for a free gift at her counter. They resisted at first, until they saw that the gift brought in women who went on to buy elsewhere in the store.^[9]

The company’s own history says that she offered customers a free sample when they bought a product, helping to establish the gift with purchase as a standard practice of the industry, and that she attended the opening of nearly every new store, staying a week to teach its beauty advisors.^[10] By 1951 the line was sold at Saks, Bonwit Teller, Neiman Marcus, I. Magnin and other stores across the country.^[9]

The year of the first Saks counter is 1947 in Bennett’s account and by the company’s own arithmetic, and 1948 in PBS’s and in other popular ones; this account follows the invoice.^[11][12][13] Whether the company’s $800 and Bennett’s $810 describe the same order is not stated.

Her own account of her early life is an unreliable guide. Bennett describes her autobiography, published in 1985 after she heard of Lee Israel’s unauthorised biography, as mixing facts and half-truths with fiction, and how much of the early formulation was hers, her uncle’s or later chemists’ is not settled.^[11]