Bal Harbour

C O U R T E S Y O F JA N E H E R T Z M A R K H U D I S here is a photograph Jane Hertzmark Hudis keeps close by. In it, she is standing beside Evelyn Lauder at the Lauders' Palm Beach home, both dressed in white for an Estée Lauder gathering. The picture is from another era, but Hudis needs little prompting to summon the woman beside her. "Beautiful. Accomplished. Incredibly smart," she begins, before arriving at the description that seems to matter most. "She was a true woman's woman." Hudis would know. This fall marks 40 years since she joined The Estée Lauder Companies, an almost unimaginable tenure in an industry built around reinvention. When she arrived at 26, the company was private and had just four brands. She was a junior marketing manager at Prescriptives, sitting beside another young employee who had joined six months apart from her: current Estée Lauder Chair William P. Lauder, the son of Evelyn and Leonard Lauder and grandson of company founder Estée Lauder. This fall, the two will celebrate their 40th anniversaries at the company together. What followed was a career that essentially grew up alongside the company itself. Hudis spent 13 years at Prescriptives, moved into the field at Leonard Lauder's urging, led different brands and businesses, and in 2009 took charge of Estée Lauder, the company's flagship brand. In 2016, she became a group president; today, as Executive Vice President and Chief Brand Officer, she helps shape the strategy and creative direction of nearly the entire portfolio. For all the scale of that role, Hudis remains, at heart, a brand person. She talks enthusiastically about brand DNA and equity, about making sure each brand "does the right thing, for the right reason," her well-known mantra at the company. And despite the seniority of her title, she still gets into the details. "I've got a sixth sense for this stuff," she says. Yet there is something telling in the fact that Hudis recounts her career through people rather than positions. When she talks about the past four decades, it is Leonard and Evelyn, William and the extended Lauder family who populate the story. "I've been blessed to work closely with the Lauder family," she says. Even after the company went public and grew exponentially, something intimate remained. "We still feel like a family company." Evelyn occupied a special place in that family for Hudis. They first worked together on fragrance, long before the Breast Cancer Research Foundation became the global force it is today. Hudis remembers Evelyn as endlessly curious and deeply caring, a woman who could talk about anything and who possessed the rare ability to turn concern for others into action. In the early 1990s, Hudis watched that instinct crystallize into a mission. She remembers Evelyn walking into a room and telling a group of colleagues that she was creating the Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Evelyn returned again and again to two words: Save lives. Research, she believed, was the way to do it. For Hudis, however, Evelyn's legacy lives as much in the small gestures as in the institution she built. She remembers watching her take phone call after phone call from people confronting cancer. Evelyn would listen, offer guidance, find a doctor, make a connection. The calls came during the day and continued into the night. "She was always willing to help," Hudis says. Without quite intending to, Hudis has inherited that habit. People now call her, and she, too, finds the doctor, makes the introduction, tries to help. "I do that all the time," she says. "And I help them fast." It may be the most revealing way Evelyn's influence has endured: not as an abstract notion of philanthropy, but as a reflex. That same sense of responsibility is what Hudis sees in BCRF today. She speaks with particular admiration for its researchers and for Evelyn's insistence on collaboration among them. "She dreamt of a world that would be free of breast cancer," Hudis says. The breakthroughs since then are tangible, but so is the understanding that there remains much more to do. Asked what Evelyn would think of it all now, Hudis doesn't hesitate. She would be proud of the Foundation, certainly, and of the company's continued commitment. But she believes Evelyn would be especially proud of William, who wears his pink ribbon every day. "She always wanted to save lives," Hudis says. "And she has saved lives. And she continues to do so through us." Forty years into a career that began almost by chance, Hudis has accumulated the titles and accomplishments one might expect. Yet what seems to matter most to her now are the relationships that came with them, and the lessons absorbed simply by being in the company of remarkable people. One of Evelyn's most enduring lessons may also be the simplest. As Hudis puts it, "Nothing great happens alone." T After four decades at The Estée Lauder Companies, Jane Hertzmark Hudis reflects on the relationships that shaped her remarkable career. BY DEBORAH FRANK the company she keeps Jane Hertzmark Hudis and William P. Lauder at this year's BCRF Hot Pink Party; (right) the photo Hudis holds dear of herself with Evelyn Lauder at a company event in Palm Beach. the advocate 130 130 BALHAR B O U RSH O P S .CO M

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