What words come to mind when you hear the name, Helena Rubinstein? Pioneer? Beauty? Cosmetics? All of these words? This amazing woman moved to New York from Poland in 1915 where she opened her first cosmetics salon, Helena Rubinstein Incorporated, which made her one of the world's richest women. After her death in 1965, her company was sold to and is now owned by L'Oréal.
Rubinstein was born on Christmas Day, December 25, 1872, in the city of Kraków in Lesser Poland to shopkeepers; she is the eldest of eight children. In 1902, she emigrated from Poland to Australia with no money and knowing very little English. When she first moved there, she did not really fit in with the other women; she had a very white complexion and her style of clothing was completely different than what the other ladies were used to. Everyone soon became fond of her when she started selling her beauty cream that she brought with her in her luggage, and eventually had to start making her own due to the high demand of it. Although the cream worked like a charm, it had a pretty foul odor due to the main ingredient being sheep. so she often tried to throw in flowers like lavender or water lilies to try and make the smell more bearable.
She began working as a waitress in Melbourne, where she soon met a buyer who wanted to invest in her beauty cream. She began selling it at the pretty price of 6 Shillings, which translates to about $1.50 USD at that time or $35.71 at today's value of the dollar. She the expanded from Melbourne to Sydney, and five years after her expansion she gained enough money to open the Salon de Beauté Valaze in London and formed one of the world's first cosmetic companies. All of this was completely funded out of her own pocket due to women not being able to obtain bank loans at this period of time.
In 1915, at the outbreak of World War 1 (WW1), she moved to New York where she opened her first cosmetics salon in the US, and this one store made her the leading lady of cosmetics during this time period. In 1928 she sold her American business for $7.3 million ($173,809,523.81 today) at the start of the Great Depression, but bought it back for less than a million towards the end of the depression. She eventually gained so much wealth that she expanded to 12 more cities across the US. Helena
Rubinstein lived a very lavish, but frugal life. She knew how to sell and knew what to sell. She started from absolutely nothing and eventually became everything. She was a powerhouse in the beauty and cosmetics world and her multi million dollar company was a forced to be reckoned with if you were a competitor. She died a legend and was in almost every household in the US and other countries. Will there ever be another tour de force like her? We shall see.
Happy Hunting,
JS
