“I was a woman with a mission, and single-minded in the pursuit of my dream,” said Estée Lauder in the 1985 TV documentary, Estée Lauder: The Sweet Smell of Success. She built the third largest cosmetics company in America, and was the only woman to earn a spot on the Time Magazine list of the 20 Most Influential Business Geniuses of the 20th Century in 1998.

Lauder was born in Queens, New York in 1906. During her high school years she agreed to help her uncle, Dr. John Schotz, with his business. Schotz’s company, New Way Laboratories, manufactured and sold beauty products. Lauder named one of her uncle’s blends Super Rich All-Purpose Cream, and began selling it at beauty shops, beach clubs and resorts.

In 1946, Lauder and her husband Joseph founded their own cosmetics company on a shoestring. They produced lotions and creams using the kitchen of a former restaurant as their manufacturing facility. But Lauder insisted on selling at only the top luxury stores. She waited outside the offices of Saks Fifth Avenue, day after day, until Saks agreed to place an order. The products from that first order sold out in two days due to their effectiveness and word of mouth. No advertising agency would work with Lauder because of her company’s small size. So, she spent her entire $50,000 advertising budget creating promotional samples. This was a novel idea at the time, but free cosmetic sample giveaways has become a standard industry practice.

Lauder introduced her first fragrance in 1953, Youth-Dew, a bath oil that doubled as perfume. By 1984, 150 million bottles of Youth-Dew were being sold annually, and Estée Lauder was valued at over $5 billion. The next year the Estée Lauder company went public and expanded around the globe.

To this day Estée Lauder’s children and grandchildren continue to run the empire she founded, and that is her legacy. She said, “I wanted to see my name in lights, but I was willing to settle for my name on a jar.”