Cynthia Breen, 54, has been named the North American president of the New York-based cosmetics giant Estee Lauder Cos. She starts her new job Monday.
Breen is the daughter of Dave and Gert Breen of Benson, and a 1968 Benson High School graduate.
She will become president of a company that had sales of $1.75 billion in the last year.
While known by local friends and family as Cynthia, in her career with Estee Lauder, Breen is known as “Thia.”
"Thia is superbly experienced for this position," John Demsey, Global Brand President Estee Lauder, said. "Her vast accomplishments in sales and leadership at The Estee Lauder Companies plus her recent tenure in retailing make her ideal for this critical post. This is like a homecoming for Thia and I am thrilled to have her back."
With its products sold in over 130 countries, Estee Lauder is one of the world's leading manufacturers and marketers of skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products. Its products include such well-recognized brand names as Estee Lauder, Aramis, Clinique, Prescriptives, Origins, M-A-C, Bobbi Brown, Tommy Hilfiger, La Mer, Donna Karan, Aveda, kate spade beauty, Darphin, Michael Kors, Good Skin and Donald Trump The Fragrance.
This past week, as she waited to start her new job, Breen was in Benson visiting her family and spending time at Breen’s Pharmacy, the family business where she got her first lessons in sales, marketing and customer service.
Breen’s Pharmacy today is much the same as it has been for decades. It is more than a pharmacy where Dave Breen, and now his son Vyke Breen, fill prescriptions for customers. The drug store is packed with cosmetics, magazines, books, china, home decorations, toiletries, grooming products, candies, film, batteries and much, much more.
As strange as it may sound, Breen said in an interview Monday, it was working at the drug store when she was a young girl that prepared for her future.
“I didn’t grow up just going to school and coming home,” she said. “We went to the drug store every day after school. There was always a sense of selling things - I loved ringing the register. What I do now is so different in many ways, but that whole attitude of selling to a customer...I learned there,” she said.
Breen learned one of the most important lessons of succeeding in business from her father.
As a little girl, she remembers working at the register when the farmers would come in from the fields or the barn, muddy and smelling a little of the animals they had been working around. When she would comment on this, her father would remind her, “They are customers.’ That is a really important thing to remember. I don’t want to minimize that - customers, and selling things, and hard work.”
When Breen stopped at the drug store after school, one of her jobs was stocking the penny candies and seeing that new supplies were ordered when needed.
“There must have been 10 kinds of penny candy, and 10 kinds of 2-cent candy, and that is what Olga (Pederson) and Kirsten (Peterson) would let me do. They were in charge of the big 15 and 20-cent bars, but I got all the first two shelves,” she said.
The candy would be in boxes on the shelves. If there were two boxes of the same kind of candy, Breen loved to combine them so one would be empty “...which meant when the Henry’s Candy man came in, we had to order more. I loved that whole sense of selling and having to reorder. “
When, as the eldest of six children, Breen went off to the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, she didn’t have a specific goal in mind for a career. Going to the U in Minneapolis was, in a way, pre-ordained by the family’s dedication to Minnesota Gopher’s sports, she said.
As education progressed, Breen studied marketing and journalism, but she still had no clear idea where she was going with her life after college.
Then in her senior year, her father told her that there were five other kids at home who had to go to college yet, so upon graduation “I’d be glad to give you a $50 bill, but that is sort of the end of the line...” of what I can do, she recalls him saying. He had paid my way through college. That was when it really dawned on me that I was going to have to start working.”
Breen took the message to heart and didn’t let any time slip between graduation and her first job. She graduated on a Friday and went to work for Dayton’s in downtown Minneapolis on a Monday. “At that point, I needed to earn a living.”
While with Dayton’s, Breen started in the children’s sales area and then moved into the upscale women’s clothing that were being sold in the Oval Room. She then moved out to the then new Ridgedale Center in Minnetonka to help open the Oval Room being set up there. But not long after, the Dayton’s store manager asked if she would be interested in taking a position managing the cosmetics division.
Cosmetics weren’t entirely unfamiliar to her, Breen said, her father sold Dewberry and Bonnie Bell cosmetics at the drug store. But she was unsure of how she would like being involved with the cosmetics division.
“It seemed that everyone came in the morning and made themselves up together, went on breaks together, and it all sort of seemed cliquish. I didn’t know how much I wanted to manage that group.” But she took the position and found it to be challenging and rewarding. “Once I got into cosmetics, I realized I wouldn’t be leaving it.”
One of the things she enjoyed about the job was its independence from the way most facets of the Dayton’s operation was run. The cosmetics department was able to order its own products directly, Breen said, while the other departments have to place theirs through the main store downtown.
Breen also liked the way the cosmetics business worked.
There is much more of a coordination between the product, the brand, and who sells it, she explained.
“All of a sudden I realized that the cosmetic community supports the salaries, develops and trains the people that sell their brand, and pays them commission. I had never been involved with anything like that before.
“These brands wanted to know who was selling their product. They wanted to ensure that the customers were getting great satisfaction and product knowledge as they come in to buy their products. That was completely different from anything I had been exposed to in the department store world,” Breen said.
And it is still true today, she said. “The highest amount of training that takes place anywhere among a group of employees in a department store is still in cosmetics,” she said. “Every brand has its own unique qualities. There may be 50 different moisturizers in one department store. Why is one better than another and which one should you be using? Answering that question takes product knowledge on the part of the beauty advisor.”
After five years, Breen found herself in a highly successful position with Dayton’s with the possibility of more advances to come, however, her next move was to quit her job.
Her sister, Kari, was living in San Diego, C.A., and telling her what a beautiful place it was to live. The reading she had done about California made it sound like sort of a dreamy place where everyone should live at least once in his or her life, Breen said. It lured her away from Minnesota with no job at the other end.
Just before Breen left the state, the Estee Lauder Clinique division account executive in Minneapolis told her that she was moving to San Francisco to work with the company. She added that there could be an opening with the company in California and that she thought Breen should consider it. The person had asked for Kari’s phone number so she could give her a call if there was a job opportunity.
But Breen had saved enough so that she didn’t have to go to work right away and wasn’t in a hurry to find another job. Having gone from high school to college to work without a break, Breen said she wanted to take up to six months off. Still, she gave the Clinique account executive Kari’s number before she left.
When Breen got to San Diego, there was high unemployment in the area. She eventually interviewed for a job with Union 76 Oil and was given a position in the marketing department.
“I was actually thrilled to get out of retail,” Breen remembers. “I thought it would be great for a December to come around and not be totally involved in sales and whether or not we were going to make the December sales plan. That had been so much a part of my life before.” But it wasn’t long before Breen found herself in a wholly unexpected position with Union 76.
Not too long after she had started with the company, that her manager at Union 76 called her into his office with news that he was a little uncomfortable giving her.
‘“We always want to have the highest standards in our gas stations,” the manager said. “Sometime when people don’t uphold those standards we try to buy the station back so we can refranchise it to someone who will uphold our standards. Today, we bought a station back that we have been trying to get for a while and the rule around here is that when we buy a station back, until we can find a new buyer, the newest person in the marketing department goes and runs the station.”
Breen was the newest employee. She found herself going from the marketing division to a gas station outside San Diego.
Not long after that, Breen received a call from the Clinique account executive that had moved to San Francisco who told her of an opening in Los Angeles. Interviews for the position were going to be conducted in San Diego, she said.
So, the morning of the interview, Breen opened the gas station at 6 a.m. and managed it until it was time to get ready for the interview at the San Diego airport. She changed into a dress in the gas station bathroom and drove to the afternoon interview with Jack Wiswall of Clinique.
“After 15 or 20 minutes he said, ‘Absolutely, you’ve got the job. I want you to go to work for Clinique.’” Then he added, “Why aren’t you drinking your coffee?”
“Actually, the truth is I am with Union 76, but right now I am running a gas station,” she told Wiswall. Breen had kept her hands under the counter because she couldn’t get all the grease out from under her fingernails. To this day, Breen says, Wiswall tells people of how he rescued her from the gas pumps.
Breen took the job as an account executive with Clinique and moved to Los Angeles. From that point on, she stayed with the cosmetics industry and began a steady climb up the management and executive ladder.
In 1985, after eight years with Clinique, Breen became the national sales manager for Aramis, another division of Estee Lauder. After seven years with Aramis, she was named the first national sales manager of Origins, a new Estee Lauder division focused on cosmetics based on natural ingredients and a holistic approach to beauty and health.
Returning to Estee Lauder’s Clinique division in 2001, Breen was named senior vice president and general manager for North America and the United Kingdom.
However, two years later, after more than 25 years with Estee Lauder companies, Breen accepted the position of senior vice president, cosmetics, with Federated Merchandising Group of the Federal Department Stores. Federated operates both Macy’s and Bloomingdale’s. But late last year, Estee Lauder courted Breen back to its fold with the offer to become president of its Clinique division.
What Breen has found rewarding through her career in the cosmetics is building a profitable business. “At the end of the day, I love to see profitable growth in a business<‘ she said. But it isn’t something a person accomplishes on their own. “Those results are due to developing great teams of people. If I am not surrounded by a great team of people, it won’t be successful,” she said.
In recent years, Breen said, she has really recognized how much she can help volunteer organizations, both within the cosmetic industry, and in society at large, because of the access her positions have given her.
She currently serves on six boards and is chairman of a seventh.
Breen says she now tries to encourage the managers below her to get involved in more than just the product brand name they are working with or just the career aspects of their profession. There are so many organizations that could use their support, she said.
In the past, Breen said, she would pay her dues, go to luncheons, and do the minimum to participate. But she now tries to give more.
Breen works the Skin Cancer Foundation, the Cosmetics Executive Women group which has over 3,500 members, she volunteers to teach and speak for the Fashion Institute of Technology, she is on the board of the Fragrance Foundation, and she is the chairman of the Mother’s Day Council.
