The Estée Lauder Companies
Lauder Summer 2022 Intern, Marketing
The Estée Lauder Companies is the global leader in prestige beauty, being the only company focused solely on prestige makeup, skin care, fragrance and hair care with an impressive portfolio of 20+ brands sold in approximately 150 countries and territories. As a Lauder Summer 2022 Intern, I was involved in a 10-week program that offered undergraduate students in the U.S. the opportunity to think critically in real-world corporate situations. I was on the Marketing track, which led to my assigned team: Global Promotional Marketing, Clinique.
My Team
Global Promotional Marketing
The Global Promotional Marketing team at Clinique is responsible for two categories: Gift with Purchase and Holiday Programming. Gift with Purchase is the small bags of either trial, travel, or occasional full-sized products that were gifted if a purchase exceeded a certain threshold (i.e. receive a best-seller's travel-sized set with a purchase of $75 or more). Holiday Programming focused on full-sized sets that could be bought in store or online. My focus as an Intern in this category was Christmas, Mother's Day, and Lunar New Year.
My Experience
Gift with Purchase
During my internship program, I was able to assist with a handful of Gift with Purchase projects that allowed my creativity to flourish. My most notable assignments were the Spring 2024 Gift With Purchase Mix Review and the Fall 2024 Gift With Purchase Creative Brief.
Spring 2024 Gift With Purchase Mix Review
For this project, I assisted the Director of Gift With Purchase (GWP) with researching consumer insights and opinions of the GWP Program. These insights were placed in the “Gift With Purchase Online Reviews” section of the Mix, as the review had multiple reports. This was a challenge as Gift with Purchase sets are not for sale and thus don’t typically have a platform for reviews to be submitted. However, I was able to dig deep into the internet and find sufficient reviews of our products across multiple seasons.
Fall 2024 Gift With Purchase Creative Brief
For this project, I assisted the Associate of Gift With Purchase with researching potential themes and collaborations for our Fall 2024 “Internal Concepts” and “Partnership Concepts” sections of the Brief. I gathered information on popular companies with similar interests, then put together various mood boards to provide additional visual aid to the idea I wanted to convey.
My Experience
Holiday Programming
Holiday Programming is where I spent most of my time, as I was directly paired with the Associate of this team (with guidance from my Executive Director as well) to help her on many projects over the course of 10 weeks. Although the projects I worked on are confidential and therefore cannot be shown, I will share the structure of the assignments and the accomplishments I achieved for them.
Fall 2023 Set Names Grids, Fact Sheets, and Copy Requests For this assignment, I was asked to create a Grid (excel spreadsheet) with all the names for the Fall 2023 Holiday Sets, Discovery Sets, Macy’s Sets, Nordstrom Anniversary Sets, Sephora Recruitment Sets, Skin Care Value Sets, and UK Clinique for Men Sets that may or may not need a new name or subline (this document included 80+ sets). To do this, I cross-referenced the sets with the Internal Global Promotional Marketing Fact Sheets, which include all identifying information for each set like individual product IDs, packaging materials, shade ranges, set categories, variations per country, and tons more. With this information, I mirrored the identifying information into an organized Excel document including their Category, Set Name, Subline, my opinion on whether it needed to be changed, what was the set's purpose, what were the benefits, what products were in the set, and what region they were designed for. I then met with the Executive Director of the North America Marketing Team and the Assistant Manager of the North America Promotional Marketing Team to discuss their thoughts. Once this was complete, I put together individual Copy Requests for each Category to be submitted to the Creative Team for review (these documents total to 60+ requests).
Spring 2024 Gift Set Cross-Region Quantity Collection Grids and Fact Sheets With guidance from the Associate of Holiday Programming, I was tasked with collecting the quantity of gift sets that regions wanted for Spring 2024. This included Mother’s Day Sets, Discovery Sets, and Clinique for Men Sets across regions such as North America, UK, APAC, China, LATAM, and EMEA. Through an extensive email exchange, I collected all the estimated quantities for the sets (quantities were organized by Category, then by tabs for each Sub-Category, for a total of 3 separate yet equally extensive Excel documents). I then transferred the information from the Grids to the Fact Sheets and reviewed the work with my Executive Director of Global Promotional Marketing.
Fall 2023 Holiday Flash In collaboration with the Associate of Holiday Programming, we were tasked to create and send out the Fall 2023 Holiday Flash (which is a brief forecasting our plans for that particular season and our progress at the moment). Originally, we had ample time to complete and space out meeting times over the course of a few weeks to work on it together. We then suddenly received an email from our Executive Director informing us that we needed to get it up by the end of the week. The need to accelerate this was to give one of our regions visibility to the holiday program to help with forecasting for their other programs. With a sudden time crunch, we booked a conference room and cross-referenced the Grid with the Fact Sheets so that the Grid was up to date. We then created the Flash and reached out to the Global Supply Chain (GBSC) Team to acquire the replan information and timing. Although under an intense amount of pressure, we were able to successfully post the Flash in time.
Fall 2025 Lunar New Year Consumer Insights Brief One of my first projects upon joining the team was researching consumer insights for the Fall 2025 Lunar New Year. As this was 3 years from when the project was presented to me, it was very difficult to find insights or forecasts that far in advance. I took my time in combing through the research I did find and found a few insights for 2024 that could be translated to 2025. Although extremely difficult, I was able to successfully find an extensive amount of consumer insights that expanded across 2 pages of a Word document.
Final Project
Recruiting Gen Z to Holiday Programming
When beginning my final presentation, I was asked to pick a topic that interested me, which was a challenge as I wanted my project to assist my team after my time in the internship program ended. After much thought and brainstorming, I developed the topic “Recruiting Gen Z to Holiday Programming”. This seemed fitting because this was a subject that my team talked about many times regarding how Gen Z would react to the themes, set names, Holiday sets, and ideas we’d discussed. Since I am also classified as Gen Z, I thought this would also be a perfect topic to merge my perspective and opinion with Clinique’s Holiday Programming. I dove into my research hoping that it would be a guiding light for the Holiday Team in the future.
With only 2 weeks left in my program, I was able to complete my presentation with a total of 56 slides and 6 different topics with graphics I created to match the Clinique color scheme and branding. This was an extremely challenging project, but I fully immersed myself in my work and am extremely proud of what I was able to present in the time given.
