For Nancy Mahon, galvanizing the Estée Lauder Cos.’ workforce is a two-way dialogue.
“Leadership has been engaged, our board of directors is very engaged,” said the freshly appointed chief sustainability officer. “Jane Lauder was critical in developing the ELC Cares fund for our employees. Tracey [T. Travis, executive vice president and chief financial officer] is the one who’s found the money to do all of this great work. Sara Moss, our vice chairman, has built a women’s program. It really is a team effort.”
Related Articles
Mahon joined Lauder after heading up God’s Love We Deliver, prior to which she was involved in AIDS activism. She came to the company to heads up MAC Cosmetics’ Viva Glam Fund (then called the AIDS Fund), which she grew to raise $60 million annually. Currently, that program has raised more than $500 million since its founding.
Since then, she’s broadened her purview to include diversity, equity and inclusion, as well as climate justice. “We were the first beauty company to declare an electric vehicle goal, and we were the first beauty company to have a windmill farm out in Oklahoma. The beauty industry generally, Lauder in particular, has a lot of guts,” she said. “But in my area, what’s amazing is that we’re not competing. We’re trying to help each other out.”
Her assessment of the industry overall is optimistic. “The beauty industry, maybe more than others, has been at the forefront of diversity, equity and inclusion because we have to talk about beauty. What does beauty feel like? The actual community of beauty is quite embracing. We have a lot of work to do,” she said. “There’s a lot of sorrow and strife in the world over what a family looks like, or what a man or woman looks like. I’m just excited to be on the journey.”
Mahon also views her work through an intersectional lens. “People who have high HIV rates with no health care, who don’t have access to breast cancer treatment and diagnosis, are the same people with bad climate outcomes,” she said. “So, we’ve established the ELC Charitable Foundations, and then we have branded funds — an Origins fund, a MAC fund, all of the brands are hyper-focusing on their sweet sauce.”
Figuring out which causes for the brands to focus on is part of Mahon’s mandate — and forte. “They all have different identities. Le Labo has been at the forefront of refillable bottles, and if you look at the commercial model, that brings people into the store,” she said. “Aveda was just declared vegan, Le Labo is our first B Corp. It’s an incredible practice lab when you have different brands.”
Across brands, she also works on outlining best practices. For example, “We’re trying to get out of virgin plastic, rolling up our sleeves and working with the store design people. We just launched a green store program, because we found no one had one. It’s incredibly creative.”
Among her priorities is connecting Lauder’s vast workforce with company efforts. “Candidly, we’ve been a little understated in how we’ve communicated. We’ve purposely tried to be humble,” Mahon said, pointing to Aveda’s campus, where employee walking paths weave in and out of solar panels. “It’s not just a matter of that we have panels there — it’s how does it matter to the employees,” she said. “We are in a seismic shift, whether about gender identity or climate, the understanding of our employees and our consumers are huge.”