Victoria Beckham and Estée Lauder Announce Makeup Partnership
Victoria Beckham (Photo: Solve Sundsbo)
Estée Lauder and fashion designer Victoria Beckham are partnering on a limited-edition makeup collection. Dubbed Victoria Beckham Estée Lauder, the cosmetics line will launch globally this September at select retailers, including Victoria Beckham stores and online at esteelauder.ca and victoriabeckham.com. Although the specifics on what’s in the upcoming range remain hush-hush, we expect the products to sync with Beckham’s long-running love of smoky eyes and nude lips.
Current market trends have many beauty brands eager to piggyback on the social-media success of plugged-in millennials—Lauder included (see: the Kendall Jenner–fronted Estée Edit collection, launched at Sephora this spring). However, when announcing this appointment, the New York–based beauty giant chose to emphasize the professional parallels between Beckham, 41, and its namesake founder, rather than just rhyming off the designer’s significant following on Instagram (9.9 million), Twitter (9.8 million) and Facebook (2.6 million).
“Victoria is an entrepreneur in the true spirit of our founder, Estée Lauder, with a real understanding of what women want, and a commitment to making women look and feel their most beautiful,” said Jane Hertzmark Hudis, group president of The Estée Lauder Companies, in an official release.
Lauder, who founded her beauty empire in 1946 at age 38, is widely respected as a pioneering businesswoman. Her hands-on, family-centric approach to building her company has been applauded beyond the beauty industry, with Lauder being the only woman named to Time magazine’s 1998 list of the 20 most influential business geniuses of the 20th century.
Likewise, Beckham has built her own family-focused business from the ground up, leveraging her celebrity to bolster her luxury fashion house. Founded in 2008, her label is now carried at 400 stores in 50 countries, including Holt Renfrew in Canada, where her dresses retail in the four figures. With her industry accolades—she was named Designer Brand of the Year at the 2011 British Fashion Awards—the former Spice Girl has done what many pop stars have tried (and failed) to do: earned legitimate success in the notoriously guarded fashion world. Conquering the beauty biz is only the next logical step.
