Clinique: Fireside Chat with Leonard LauderA Fireside Chat with Leonard Lauder

Client

CliniqueThe Leading Clinique series

In conversation

Leonard A. LauderWith Michelle Freyre, Clinique's Brand President

Crew on set

NoneRecorded on Zoom, 16 August 2021

Pictures

The Estée Lauder Companies archivesAds, letters, stores and products

Runtime

12 minutesIn chapters, subtitled throughout

Aired

28 September 2021To Clinique's leaders worldwide

How do you film the founder of Clinique when nobody can be in the room? In the summer of 2021 we made a fireside chat with Leonard A. Lauder, and no camera of ours was ever in the room.

Leading Clinique is Clinique‘s program for its new leaders: directors and above, from every function and every region, brought into the brand’s history and the way it thinks. It had paused for the pandemic. For its return, Leonard A. Lauder, Chairman Emeritus of The Estée Lauder Companies and the man who started Clinique in 1968, agreed to a fireside chat with Michelle Freyre, Clinique’s Brand President. Clinique asked us to turn that conversation into a film worth gathering a global team for.

The brief, and the catch

The catch was the pandemic. By the summer of 2021, COVID-19 had kept people apart for a year and a half. Vaccines had arrived, but the Delta variant was surging that August, and at 88, Mr. Lauder was among those most at risk. Nobody was sending a film crew into the Lauder home. We offered every option we could think of: a single vaccinated, masked camera operator, a second camera synced to the call, a quick scout for a better background. Clinique chose to keep it simple, and rightly so. Mr. Lauder took the call in front of his bookshelves, Michelle set up at home with a ring light, and the two spoke on 16 August over Zoom. We weren’t on the call.

What arrived was a Zoom recording: two webcams, one shared audio track and a wonderful conversation. Everything that would make it a film had to be built afterward.

A fireside chat recorded on Zoom usually looks like one. We set ourselves a rule from day one: the film would be visually rich, and the Zoom would appear only where it earned its place, never as the main event. Mr. Lauder’s face carries the biggest lines and the warmest moments. Everything else is told in pictures.

Our rule: storytelling comes first

Before a single picture went in, we cut the conversation on its own: no music, no archive, placeholders where the titles would go. The point was to lock the story before anything was layered on top of it. We tightened every answer, took out the pauses and repeats, and put the stories in the order that tells Clinique’s life, from the idea to the icon.

Then we broke it into nine chapters, each one named for a line from Mr. Lauder: To Catch a Thief, The Beginning, Fragrance Free, The Cornerstone of Clinique, “We Need Copy”, My Secret Love, What Price Great Skin, A Family Affair and, to close, Great Skin Can Be Created. The cards give a twelve-minute conversation the rhythm of a documentary, and give the audience a place to breathe between stories.

The archive does the filming

If we couldn’t film Mr. Lauder, the archive could film everything Mr. Lauder talked about. We turned the conversation into a request list for The Estée Lauder Companies archives, talking point by talking point: the ads from the conversation, the products, the letters, the store photography, the launch at Saks Fifth Avenue, the consultants in their white coats. We can add subtle movement to a photograph, but nothing beats archival film, so we pushed for every reel the archive could find.

Then we ran it all through a vintage film gate, so the 1960s and a 2021 webcam feel like parts of the same film. The street outside Saks, the counters, the Clinique delivery van and the three-step system ads all play as if someone shot them yesterday on old stock.

It takes a thief to catch a thief

Mr. Lauder tells Clinique’s founding as a run of stories, and the film gives each one room. At the University of Pennsylvania, Mr. Lauder founded a film society. When it grew more popular than its auditorium, the answer was a second society to compete with the first. Years later, with Estée Lauder doing phenomenally well, the same thinking applied: who better to compete with Estée Lauder than Estée Lauder? It takes a thief to catch a thief.

Mr. Lauder hired Carol Phillips, then beauty editor at Vogue, to build it. Mrs. Estée Lauder, Mr. Lauder’s mother, wanted to call it Estée Lauder’s Clinique. Mr. Lauder wanted a name of its own, and won. Mrs. Estée Lauder set the rules that became the cornerstone: allergy tested, fragrance free. The formulas came from the dermatologist Dr. Norman Orentreich, and a computer typed each customer’s skin.

At sales meetings there was a song about exfoliation. Mr. Lauder asked for it to be in the film, and the archive found the recording. When Clinique launched at Saks Fifth Avenue, the store’s sales staff didn’t know how to sell a regimen at modest prices, so Evelyn Lauder, Mr. Lauder’s wife and a former schoolteacher, trained the staff and became Clinique’s first training director.

Then the ads. Everyone said Clinique needed copy. Mr. Lauder said it didn’t, because a picture travels to every country without translation, and the wordless still lifes ran everywhere from magazine back covers to bus shelters in France. There’s a confessed soft spot for High Impact Mascara, and a secret love for Take The Day Off, “But don’t tell anyone.” And there’s the story of how Carol Phillips held prices year after year under the line What price great skin?, and how Clinique became the place where the Lauder family learned the business.

Made for a room that spans the world

The audience was Clinique’s leaders in every region, so the film is subtitled in English from the first line to the last. It premiered to the global team on 28 September 2021, six weeks after the call.

ServicesEditing·Brand Storytelling·Motion Graphics·Branded Content