Estée Lauder’s struggles continue into 2025…

Welcome back to The Devil Wears Data newsletter, where I cover the business of the things you wear 🙂 If you don’t have time to read this email in detail right now, you can skim the yellow highlighted sentences to finish it in seconds!

In December, I made a video about Estée Lauder and why the company struggled to sell you stuff in 2024. When I say Estée Lauder, I’m talking about the massive conglomerate that owns companies like MAC Cosmetics, La Mer, and Tom Ford, and employs around 62,000 people worldwide.

Those struggles that I discuss in the video are continuing into 2025.

This morning, the company’s executives said in a call that they’re planning to cut around 7,000 jobs as their sales continue to decline. This plan comes from the new CEO, Stéphane de La Faverie. He emphasized that Estée Lauder is investing heavily into winning over younger customers (so if you’re Gen Z or younger, this means you) by developing trending products at a price point that you’re willing to pay for.

On the call this morning, the executive team also acknowledged that the company as a whole has missed a lot of opportunities to align with people’s evolving taste in beauty (like affordable but quality makeup, as we see with the rise in preference for dupes).

The near future looks bleak for the company, as they said net sales at the company are expected to fall 12% through the first three months of 2025, which is almost double what analysts who spend their time researching the company projected (they said 6.8%, fyi).

Something I discuss in my video, that the CEO mentioned today, is the ongoing struggle to get folks in China to buy its products, due to a struggling economy and an increasing preference for local China-based beauty companies.

The company’s stock price is down 6.10% this year so far, and the CEO pointed to uncertainty around US President Donald Trump’s tariff rules as a cause for concern going forward (many economists say that increase in tariffs mean that the consumer aka you end up paying more for stuff, which goes against the kind of strategy that Estée Lauder is aiming to employ right now).

Estée Lauder gets its ingredients from various countries, including Australia and Indonesia, and has facilities in the United Kingdom, Canada, Switzerland and China (to name a few). Tariffs mean that extra taxes when goods cross borders could end up being not just a burden for the company, but a burden on you if you buy their stuff.

Other news: Bieber’s Rhode Skin is reportedly headed to Sephora

In 2024, I uploaded a video about Hailey Bieber’s Rhode Skin. At the time, the company had just wrapped up a summer of pop-up events in New York City, Toronto and other cities around the world.

I included a lot of interesting data in there, about online sentiment and the company’s virality. Something else that was central to the video is: will the company enter a retailer like Sephora or Ulta or a department store? The experts I spoke to said Sephora would be the likely choice.

Last week, Puck News reported that Rhode Skin is reportedly entering Sephora later this year, after a really successful 2024. Hailey Bieber's Rhode Skin brought in around $90 million in revenue from its website in the last two months of 2024, according to YipitData.

Why did it choose Sephora over Ulta? And what does this mean for the company going forward? Watch the full episode if you haven’t already to find out!

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My next episode is going up soon on both YouTube and Spotify.

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Love,

The DWD