COSMETICS: Luckmcm Branches Out

Like the hero of a soap opera, Lever Brothers’ Charles Luckman this week embarked on a new adventure. Lever went into the cosmetic business: it bought Manhattan’s Harriet Hubbard Ayer, Inc. For one of the biggest U.S. cosmetic companies, with gross sales of $6 million to $8 million a year, the price was low—only $5,500,000 for the stock and working capital of Ayer.

Chuck Luckman got a bargain because the cosmetics business has looked none too pretty lately. (Sales have dropped so much that many a company has had to take back merchandise from retailers.) And after 30 years of hard work, Ayer’s president and owner, Mrs. Lillian Sefton Thomas Dodge, sixtyish, had had enough.

Face Tester. Mrs. Dodge had never expected to go into business in the first place. When she married, she settled down with the intention of raising a large family. She had only one child before her first husband, Vincent B. Thomas, suddenly died in 1918, and she had to take over his business, the Ayer company.

He had named it after Mrs. Harriet Hubbard Ayer, a Manhattan socialite who pioneered the sales of cosmetics in the U.S. and shocked women by telling them to scrub their faces. The Ayer company was not prospering when Lillian Dodge took over as president. Not knowing where to start, she started everywhere at once. She passed on labels, sampled powders, tested perfumes, tested cold creams on her own plump cheeks before putting them on the market.

As the business grew, she acquired a 90-acre estate on Long Island. But social demands were never allowed to conflict with business. Soon after she married her second husband, an architect named Robert L. Dodge, he went to work for the company.

Face Lifter. Extremely shy, Mrs. Dodge had no liking for publicity. One of the few times her name appeared in print was in 1926, when she spent $50,000 backing a French flyer and famed War I ace, Captain René Fonck, in a transatlantic flight that never came off. Another was in 1930, when she paid a record-high fine of $213,286 for failing to declare the full value of trunksful of clothes and jewelry that she brought home from France. She was still largely unknown when in 1938 a U.S. Treasury report showed her to be the only businesswoman in the U.S. earning $100,000 a year.

As she left the presidency (she will remain an advisor), her place was taken this week by Ralph P. Lewis, until recently vice president and sales manager for Elizabeth Arden. For the careworn cosmetics business, Chuck Luckman promised a face lifting. Said he: “We’re going to get in there and sell like hell.”