This past Wednesday, philanthropist and cosmetics tycoon Leonard Lauder donated a cubist art collection worth $1 billion to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
That may seem extravagant, but Lauder can afford it — Forbes estimates he's worth $8.1 billion, due mainly to the cosmetics empire founded by his mother, the late Estée Lauder.
Her shrewd sales tactics and corporate strategy have kept the Lauders on top for over seven decades. Estée Lauder pioneered giving out product samples to women, encouraged them to try her scents at the department store counters, and undercut her competitors with cheaper prices and better marketing.
Today, the Estée Lauder empire now owns 29 other big-name brands and reported sales of just over $9.7 billion to investors last year.
And how the Lauders spend all that money is almost as interesting as the rags-to-riches story of how the daughter of two Hungarian Jewish immigrants left behind a beauty dynasty.
Estée Lauder was the daughter of Hungarian Jewish immigrants.
According to the book Brand New: How Entrepreneurs Earned Consumers' Trust from Wedgwood to Dell, Estée Lauder was born Josephine Esther Mentzer in 1908 in Queens.
Her father was Max Mentzer, a Hungarian Jewish man who immigrated to the United States in the 1890s.
Her mother Rose also left Hungary in 1898, but came to join her first husband with their five children. The historical record is fuzzy, but within seven years of arriving she had left her first husband and married Max Mentzer instead.
She got her start by selling cosmetics in a beauty salon.
Estée's uncle John Schotz was a chemist with his own cosmetics company, New Way Laboratories. She would sell his products for him.
The story goes Lauder was getting her hair done and was approached by the salon's owner about her "perfect skin."Lauder says in her autobiography that she came back to the store and gave the salon owner a makeover with her uncle's products.
The owner was so impressed that she let Estée sell the creams and cosmetics out of the salon.
Her first "factory" was actually based out of an Upper West Side restaurant.
By the time Estée married Joseph Lauder in 1930, her business in Manhattan beauty salons was on the rise.
So she stopped selling her uncle's products in 1935 and started her own company — Estée Lauder, after her middle name.
The couple ran the business together out of a small office on 39 East 60th Street in Manhattan, and made all of the creams and cosmetics on gas burners in a former restaurant on 1 West 64th Street, according to Brand New.
They even attached the labels themselves.
See the rest of the story at Business Insider