How the Estée Lauder Cos. Keeps the Spirit of Innovation Alive

Double Wear. Black Honey. Advanced Night Repair. Fix+.

It’s no small feat the sheer volume of household-name products the Estée Lauder Cos.’ has created in the beauty industry, many of them discernable by name alone — no brand identifier needed.

It’s also no coincidence. Creating breakthrough and differentiated products has always been at the heart of the business, and as the company reasserts its position in one of the most competitive markets in history, that’s true more so now than ever.

“When you think about innovation, it starts and ends with the consumer in mind,” said René Lammers, executive vice president and chief research and innovation officer at the Estée Lauder Cos. “It’s an easy statement, but you would be surprised how easy it is to lose track of the consumer.”

Indeed, keeping close to the customer has been a core company principle since Estée Lauder herself began cooking up products in her Manhattan kitchen in the 1940s, beginning with the first iteration of the namesake brand’s still-iconic Youth Dew Bath Oil.

Times have changed, of course — today, Lauder has research and manufacturing facilities in the U.S., Europe and Asia — and the vigor the company takes to keeping its research, innovation and execution engines alive and well has only increased.

“To me, the legacy of innovation at Estée Lauder is the incredible respect for quality at the highest level,” said Roberto Canevari, executive vice president and chief value chain officer at the Estée Lauder Cos. “Quality is not a priority, it is a value. Priorities change over time; values don’t. And quality and safety are [our] values.”

Those values have informed key operational evolutions at Estée Lauder of late. The company’s Research and Innovation network spans five sites in Long Island, New York; Shanghai; Toronto; Paris and Blaine, Minnesota, while its manufacturing network is made up of nine global sites — two of which are also in Long Island and Blaine — with others in Switzerland, England, Belgium and other locales.

In 2025, the company opened a global fragrance atelier in Paris, called La Maison des Paroberfums, which aims to accelerate innovation across its portfolio of fragrance brands including Jo Malone London, Le Labo, Kilian Paris and more.

It is at these sites where the magic — everything from formulation to clinical research to consumer testing to warehousing and beyond — happens. As with other aspects of the company, Lauder is continually forging new ways of working to increase speed-to-market and give it a competitive edge over rivals.

“We try to do as much parallel work as is humanly possible,” said Lammers. “Traditionally, in the industry and beyond, innovation was seen as a sequential thing: you had an insight, then an ingredient discovery, then you would create a formulation; then its package, and then scale. The world is drastically changing.

“Parallel working means we’re going faster in identifying ingredients,” he continued, “in having the right lead times; in [conducting] line trials at the factories…we’re accelerating these activities by doing them in parallel.”

To accomplish this kind of parallel working, the Research and Innovation and supply chain teams at Estée Lauder are working more closely together than ever.

For instance, in August the Estée Lauder brand introduced Re-Nutriv Ultimate Diamond Age Reversal Skin Longevity Face Oil Essence, which Lammers said took just 15 months to launch thanks to the company’s connected ways of working, which, if the company were to still have been operating sequentially, would have taken 50 percent longer to bring to market, he said.

Lauder is innovating not just with new products, but iterating existing hero products as well. In January, Estée Lauder introduced a reformulation of its bestselling Double Wear Stay-in-Place Foundation for the first time since its launch in 1997. The goal was to increase the wear to 36 hours, update it with product technology such as an oil-controlling AlgaNiacin complex leveraged from its skin care labs, and offer a more natural matte finish.

“We are seeing the skinification of makeup, and from a science perspective, we know everything about skin — that has been our bread and butter for decades,” said Lammers. “We are trying to platform that technology from skin care into other categories.”

The strategy is working: Data from Circana shows that the Double Wear reformulation was the top makeup launch in the U.S. during the first half of 2026. In addition to sales, one of the biggest successes of the launch has been the extent to which Estée Lauder has regionalized its manufacturing.

“Regionalization is a strategy we’ve been implementing for a period of time. When the tariff war and everything happened, regionalization was the right answer to a number of those things,” said Canevari. “With Double Wear, we are essentially 98 percent regionalized…which means we make where we sell, and we source where we make. So not only are we regionalizing production, but also, we are regionalizing sourcing.”

From an innovation point of view, other feats have included MAC’s latest Skin Tint Stick, priced at $38 and coming in 20 shades, which adds a timely new format to the brand’s hero Studio Fix foundation franchise, as well as The Ordinary’s Volufiline 92% + Pal-Isoleucine 1% serum, which launched in November 2025 just before conversations surrounding Croda-owned Volufiline began taking off thanks to the ingredient’s reported skin-plumping properties.

The timing was fortuitous. Data from Spate shows that the launch quickly made The Ordinary a top-three brand by mentions across online content about volufiline, with the other top brands being K-beauty players Medicube and Skin1004.

“We have a culture of continuous improvement,” said Lammers. “We know competition is out there; we know that indies move with speed, and our intent is to move faster than indies.”

Sometimes, the company wields similar ingredients and frontiers differently across brands to make an impact.

“If we’re talking about something like longevity, we can harness the [relevant] ingredient in different ways for Estée Lauder and for La Mer and Clinique,” said Lammers. “We are deploying the technology in multiple ways across brands, and that’s a conversation we’re constantly having with our brand presidents.

As for what it takes to create a breakthrough?

“It’s a bit of a push and pull,” Lammers said. “We work very closely with our insights organization, our marketing organization, and predict the future to some degree — sometimes you’ve got to place a few bets.”

That’s precisely what Jo Malone London did when it launched an inaugural dog grooming shampoo in partnership with U.K.-based pet care brand, WildWash, bringing Jo Malone into pet care for the first time.

“It was an idea we had many years ago, because Brits love their pets,” said Céline Roux-Alezais, vice president of global fragrance development at Jo Malone, adding that the idea was set in motion thanks to actor and brand spokesperson Tom Hardy often bringing his French bulldog, Blue, to campaign shoots. “Blue became part of the crew, and [we thought], we should have a dog product.”

The first product in the line is a dog shampoo in the brand’s Orange & Cedarwood scent, priced at 18 pounds. “It was a quick but fun and intense development,” said Roux-Alezais, adding that the foray expands the Jo Malone lifestyle “from your care, to your dog, to your bedroom and bathroom, to your personal scent.”

More broadly, Jo Malone is using a combination of natural and synthetic ingredients to differentiate itself in an increasingly crowded fragrance market.

“When you create exclusive ingredients for your brand, you also protect your brand,” said the executive, adding, for example, that for Jo Malone’s English Oak and Hazelnut Cologne, the brand teamed with Givaudan to create a natural roasted oak component in addition to the other, more traditional woody notes commonly used in fragrance. “It’s important to create fragrances that are not going to be copied easily, and that’s a blend of storytelling and ingredients…it is a permanent quest,” she said.

Last year, the Estée Lauder Cos. introduced its own, internal innovation awards aiming to celebrate the company’s accomplishments “not only through the lens of business impact, but also through the lens of teamwork,” Lammers said.

In terms of how the company is implementing AI to streamline operations, Roux-Alezais said Jo Malone is so far experimenting with how to use the technology to improve the silage of a scent, while Canevari’s value chain team has employed myriad assistants to boost its own processes.

“We see AI as a copilot — it assists and augments our capabilities, and it might automate as well,” he said, adding that, for instance, the company has a generative AI agent nicknamed ELLA (for Estée Lauder Line Assistant) that, “is basically an assistant for every worker in the factory. They go to ELLA and they ask whatever they need in terms of requirements to set up a line, to change a setup, to react to something that is happening in the show floor. But this assistant has the knowledge of every similar situation that has happened in the past [at our sites], and it’s at employees’ fingertips.”

At the innovation level, Lammers said, “wherever we can create value, we are applying AI,” adding that the technology is particularly useful in sifting through large databases to help assess the best way forward for a given innovation, from “the formulation cost, sensory profile, ingredient levels, number of ingredients,” and more.

As much as tech enables advancement, human collaboration and ingenuity is just as much of a key ingredient.

“We can talk about a number of technological improvements and digital solutions — those are super relevant — but the differentiator, or as I like to call it, the multiplier, is the people,” said Canevari.

Added Lammers: “Innovation is a people business. That’s what we fundamentally believe; we’re a human business.

“We have a wonderful, legacy founder-led business with the best beauty brands on planet Earth, and what we are trying to do now as a company is take that and future-proof the business through Beauty Reimagined, and celebrate that we are 80 years young rather than 80 years old.

“There’s a new vibe, a new energy,” said Lammers. “There’s a respect for the history of the brand and the company. But there is also this notion that we are onto something, and we’re going to be the best prestige beauty business in this industry for decades to come.”

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