John Demsey
49, President Estee Lauder
By Kate Betts
Fall 2005 Style & Design
Growing up in Shaker Heights, Ohio, John Demsey, who was recently
appointed president of Estée Lauder, always knew he would end up in a
glamorous business. "I was fascinated by iconic women like Elizabeth
Arden and Estée Lauder," he says. His grandmother's first cousin founded
Jovan, a brand of sexy musk oils from the 1970s, and his parents knew
Revlon founder Charles Revson, so Demsey had a lot of exposure to
glamour early on. Family connections got him his first job after
Stanford University, working in the Macy's executive-training program.
But his boss there told him he would be better off in banking. It was
while working in the Sergio Valente Jeans department of Macy's in Port
Chester, N.Y., that Demsey had an epiphany. "I was standing in the
Bronx, having my own nervous breakdown, and a woman came up to me and
said, 'You're not Macy's, you're Bloomingdale's.'" So he quit and got a
job selling fragrances at Bloomingdale's. After working his way up the
ladder at Saks Fifth Avenue, Benetton and Borghese, Demsey landed at
Lauder as head of sales in Los Angeles. But it wasn't until 1998, when
Leonard Lauder tapped him to oversee the then fledgling Toronto-based
makeup line MAC, that Demsey really got his big break. "I had been in
the cosmetics business for 12 years, but I didn't even know that a
foundation was a base because I dealt with merchandising, numbers and
promotions," he says. "All of a sudden I had to learn a new way to
think."
From the get-go, his idea at MAC was to develop an international
business by relying on word of mouth and the notion of credibility
instead of splashy national advertising campaigns. All his promotional
budgets were used to supply the company's products to makeup artists and
fashion designers during show weeks. Demsey also hired staff members who
could forge relationships with music- and movie-industry talent—from
RuPaul to Britney Spears to Diana Ross—who would act as official
spokespeople for the brand. Result: MAC became the "professional" makeup
line, the stuff insiders and opinion leaders used. "I thought, Isn't
that a great thing, for a company to be a patron of people who are in
the arts or are talented in fashion?" says Demsey. "And that was the way
the company was built."
Seven years later, MAC is a $500 million company selling in 54
countries. In addition to growing the business, Demsey built the MAC
AIDS fund from a grass-roots charity that raised $4.5 million seven
years ago to a serious not-for-profit with its own board of directors
that has raised more than $15 million so far this year. His mandate at
Estée Lauder is "to do the right thing." There is no laundry list per
se, but judging by the talent Demsey has brought on board—from Tom Ford
doing his own branded line of fragrance and color cosmetics to Gwyneth
Paltrow representing fragrances—it looks as if he will generate the
same kind of buzz he created at MAC.
"Having worked in an unstructured, nontraditional world and entering
back into a traditional role, I look at everything completely
differently," he says. "I think sometimes people think I'm out of my
mind. But there's an intuitive nature to everything. It's not an exact
science. This business is about people and about what makes people
relate to things and connect to things."
|
Premium Content