Beauty has lost its master builder.

Leonard A. Lauder, arguably the most influential and respected architect of the prestige beauty business, died Sunday at age 92.

 Lauder spent his career molding the Estee Lauder Companies, Inc., into the global leader of prestige beauty. The company that his parents – the ever quotable Estee (“When sex goes out of business, so will we”) and her husband Joseph, founded in 1946 – their son shaped into a $15.61 billion giant in sales for the 2024 fiscal year.

What drove this empire building was an unquenchable desire to create a gold standard for the industry. In June 1995, five months before the company went public, the then-president and chief executive officer unveiled his vision to become “the preeminent supplier of upmarket cosmetics in the world.”

“Throughout his life, my father worked tirelessly to build and transform the beauty industry, pioneering many of the innovations, trends, and best practices that are foundational to the industry today,” William P. Lauder, son and chair of the board of directors, said in a statement Sunday. “He was the most charitable man I have ever known, believing that art and education belonged to everyone, and championing the fight against diseases such as Alzheimer’s and breast cancer.

“Above all, my father was a man who practiced kindness with everyone he met. His impact was enormous,” William Lauder added. “He believed that employees were the heart and soul of our company, and they adored him and moments spent with him. His warmth and thoughtfulness made an imprint on our company, the industry, and, of course, our family. Together with my family, The Estée Lauder Companies, and the countless people he touched, we celebrate his extraordinary life.”

Leonard Lauder once remarked, “Money doesn’t drive me. What drives me is to see that this great company continues its inexorable march to becoming the greatest company in the world. Not the largest, but the greatest.”

He was in the forefront of leaders defining and establishing the doctrine of the modern global prestige  beauty business, particularly in department and major specialty stores. He was among the first to recognize the transcendent reach of globalization in the beauty business, coining its language and recognizing fundamental doctrines. His vision was driven by the role of innovation, the power of new product introductions, the purity of distribution strategy and the sanctity of brand equity. He viewed brands as living, breathing beings.

Those beliefs may have become thought of as old school as younger competitors came on the scene talking about triple-tier distribution, celebrity marketing, the power of influencers and their digital native brands. But Lauder’s tenacity of vision and Zen-like surety of purpose never faltered and his passion never ceased to fuel the vitality of the business.

Later in life, when asked how he kept his batteries charged, Lauder traced his deep reserves of energy to his practice of teaching his brand equity course to his young executives. He identified himself as Lauder’s CTO, or “chief teaching officer,” perhaps the title that made him the most proud.

“The thing that gives me the greatest pleasure and recharge is teaching,” he said once, noting that he had redone the agenda “to make it something far deeper than I have ever done.

“The other thing is that a lot of the people who were low-level merchants a long time ago when I was more deeply involved with individual buyers and merchandise managers are now store principals, and what gives me pleasure is meeting with them and understanding them and talking to them.” He added with a grin, “I give them my advice, whether they like it or not.”

At least one person who heeded Lauder’s advice was Ralph Lauren. “Leonard’s life and mine have intersected  for so many years and during that time I have called on him many times for advice,” the designer said in 2018. “He was always there for me. He is a man of honor, a man of integrity, a man of great energy and passion and what I’ve really learned and respected was his love and support of his family,” Lauren continued. “They always came first.”

Lauder tended to view the people who worked with him and for him as much more than employees. When asked in 2018 what was his proudest achievement, he replied that it was “the people we have brought up and who are running the company today…These are people who really started at a much lower level and they grew and grew and grew. These people are my proudest accomplishment. The wealth of a company is its people and we are a very wealthy company.”

Throughout his career, long before Lauder started teaching his classes, he was known for his mentoring skills. On more than a few occasions, a rising industry star might be asked with whom they would like to work for next. The answer was often, “Leonard.”

When asked about his reputation, Lauder, who prided himself on his ability to read people, replied, “Every time I’m meeting someone, I ask myself, ‘Can they grow into a great leader?”

But the tricky part comes when giving someone a second and third chance, usually at the behest of their manager, when Lauder knew instinctively from the beginning that they wouldn’t work out. “I always regret that I didn’t push harder,” Lauder recalled in 2018. “I wanted to let the managers say, ‘let’s do it.’ But if you wait three or four years and the person still hasn’t produced, you’ve lost three or four years.

“I gave a speech some time ago to a group of people at Macy’s in California, and I spoke to them about this and ended with the phrase—‘Just remember this, dumb is forever,’” he recalled.

But he never lost his voracious curiosity.  It was not unusual for Lauder to be lunching with someone in a restaurant like Michael’s in Midtown Manhattan and turn his questioning to his favorite subject —what promising startups are ripe for the plucking. His eyes would twinkle, he might borrow an order pad from a passing waiter to write on, then whip out a pen and furiously start jotting down names of companies.

Even at age 92, he was still in the game, thinking about how to get the group – which has been struggling over the last few years – back onto the growth track.

The word passion crops up often when associates reminisce about Lauder, particularly when his son, William Lauder reflects about his days with his father. “My father demonstrated that a hugely successful business can be built on this simple concept: A passion for product, a passion for the consumer, a passion for the retailer, a passion for the brand, a passion for quality, a passion for people, and a passion for leadership. His passion for every aspect of building a lasting, world-leading cosmetics company has made our company great. His passion for teaching everybody around him has made us all better as a result.”

But that great passion was not limited to the beauty game. His other great love was collecting art, most famously the works of the Cubist painters. In 2013, Lauder sealed his artistic legacy by donating his world renowned Cubist collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, then consisting of 81 works by Pablo Picasso (34), Georges Braque (17), Juan Gris (15) and Fernand Leger (15). The choice of the Met as the recipient of the donation came as a bit of a surprise since Lauder had long been associated with the Whitney Museum of American Art. But that museum was devoted to American art and Lauder had been quite generous there with money and painting.

Lauder had considered many other museums, but he picked the Met partly because of the encyclopedic nature of its holdings—and its shortcomings. The Met had a sparse collection of 20^th century art, a shortage he hoped to help remedy with the opening in the museum of the Leonard A. Lauder Research Center of Modern Art that might inspire other collectors to step forward.

“I wanted to transform the Met,” he said, adding that his generosity was motivated by “my love of art and my love of New York.” Above all “I wanted to make it a gift to New York,” said Lauder who was born in the city and grew up on the Upper West Side.

This story is in development.