An avid race car fan, Sir Lindsay Owen-Jones, the honorary chairman of L’Oréal and recipient of this year’s WWD Beauty Inc Visionary Award, knows a thing or two about power and speed. During his 18-year run as chief executive officer, he built L’Oréal into the world’s biggest beauty company, posting double-digit profit growth for an unprecedented 21 years. Despite his success, the term visionary is one he eschews. “I’d like to be remembered as a brave soldier,” he told WWD’s executive editor of beauty, Pete Born, during a two-hour conversation in which he reminisced about his career. “I asked an awful lot of stuff from an awful lot of people, but I have some pride in thinking that nobody ever saw me as anything other than optimistic, competitive, combative, outgoing. If I had moments of doubt, I kept them to myself. I tried to lead from the front and show my team that we could do things and that we would do things.”
Related Articles
Evelyn Lauder was another do-er. She represented all that is great about the beauty industry. Absolutely passionate about people and products, she had a smile that suffused her entire face with a benevolent kindness. Her compassion belied a steely determination, as I discovered when I profiled her in 2002. Though her title, senior corporate vice president of the Estée Lauder Cos. Inc., sounded almost ambassadorial, her contributions to the company’s success showed how hands-on she really was. It was she, for example, who thought up the name Clinique (and Aramis, too) and she who created Beautiful, Happy and Pleasures, three fragrances that remain in the top 10 today. Mrs. Lauder also embarked on her tireless fund-raising and passionate advocacy for breast cancer awareness through her creation of the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. She was one of the pioneers of the corporate social responsibility movement and when we decided to create an award of the same name earlier this year, she was the clear choice to receive the inaugural award. When she passed away in November from nongenetic ovarian cancer, we decided that the best way we could honor her memory would be to present the Lauder family with this posthumous appreciation of all that Evelyn Lauder accomplished.
Were Mrs. Lauder with us today, I believe she would have cheered the loudest for all of this year’s WWD Beauty Inc award winners. As you’ll see, they represent the best and brightest of the beauty industry, and 2011 was a very bright year, indeed. Across categories and retail channels, sales rebounded, with double-digit gains fueling increases not seen in a decade. (Mrs. Lauder would have approved. When I asked what goals she set for herself, she replied, “High. Always high. One always has to have a goal so that sales increase.”) Our editor’s choice business-to-business awards recognize the brands, products, people and retailers that powered our industry forward this year. And on behalf of everyone at WWD Beauty Inc, I’d like to wish congratulations to all of this year’s winners.