Why Stéphane de La Faverie keeps a yes button on his desk

On Stéphane de La Faverie’s desk sits a green novelty button. Press it, and it says yes. Enthusiastically. Repeatedly. A corporate office has many ways of communicating authority, from the height of the floor to the thickness of the carpet. A talking toy is a rather more economical declaration of intent.

De La Faverie became president and chief executive officer of The Estée Lauder Companies on January 1, 2025. He inherited famous names, a family’s commercial legacy and an organization that needed to change. By October 2026, the button had become an apt accessory to his attempt to give colleagues more permission to act. Alongside chief people officer Michael Bowes, he had made saying yes part of a new company vocabulary.

The charm of the prop is obvious. The difficulty lies beyond the desk. How do you persuade a business built on prestige to become quicker, more curious and more willing to try something before every committee has finished admiring it?

A career with several departure gates

His route to New York ran through different countries and different versions of the beauty business. Educated at ESC Bordeaux Business School, de La Faverie began with Lancôme’s global brand in Paris. He moved into North American travel retail, working across Lancôme, Giorgio Armani, Ralph Lauren and Biotherm. Later came responsibility for Lancôme in Australia, followed in 2006 by a marketing role at Lancôme USA overseeing skincare and fragrance.

Before joining Estée Lauder, he was general manager of Giorgio Armani Beauty USA. His working languages are French, English and Spanish. The itinerary matters because the same brand can meet very different expectations depending on where the customer encounters it. A counter in Australia, an American department store and an airport shop offer different chances to make an introduction.

Travel retail gave him early experience of that problem. The customer is passing through, often across borders, with limited time and plenty of other distractions. A brand has to explain its appeal quickly. That experience would remain relevant when the departures moved from airport gates to shopping apps.

Learning the family’s namesake

He joined The Estée Lauder Companies in January 2011. In July 2016 he became global brand president of Estée Lauder, putting him in charge of the name on the building, the bottle and the family history. In 2020 his responsibilities expanded to group president while he continued leading Estée Lauder and AERIN Beauty. By September 2022 he was executive group president.

During his leadership of the namesake brand, he worked with established products, digital marketing and new channels to reach customers across generations. China became a particularly significant market. His subsequent portfolio included Jo Malone London, Le Labo and The Ordinary, a collection requiring more than one idea of what prestige should look like.

That breadth is an interesting part of his preparation. Leading a collection of brands requires an ear for differences. Each name has its own language, price expectations and relationship with shoppers. A group executive can supply resources and direction; the brand still has to sound like itself when someone opens the box.

The bottle that needed a boarding pass

There is an unusually literal example of the namesake brand reaching a new place. In 2020, during his tenure, Estée Lauder arranged for ten bottles of Advanced Night Repair to travel to the International Space Station. The purpose was commercial photography. Astronauts would photograph and film the bottles near the Earth-facing windows of the station’s cupola.

The arrangement belonged to NASA’s effort to develop commercial activity in low Earth orbit. It offered a beauty brand a setting that even a well-funded studio would struggle to reproduce. Space supplied the view; the product supplied a decidedly terrestrial reason for being there.

The episode sits neatly beside his later insistence on meeting consumers in new places. Beauty advertising trades in attention, and attention can be expensive to obtain. An orbiting bottle is an extravagant answer to an ordinary marketing question: what might make someone stop and look? At minimum, the shoot gave the phrase product launch a pleasing second meaning.

Permission needs an operating system

His appointment to the top job was announced in October 2024, with Fabrizio Freda handing over at the start of the following year. The promotion came from inside a company confronting falling demand and a difficult sales environment. Familiarity with the business gave de La Faverie a starting point. It also meant taking responsibility for changing habits he knew well.

On February 4, 2025, he introduced Beauty Reimagined. Its priorities included reaching more consumers, speeding innovation, increasing spending that shoppers could actually see, finding efficiencies and changing how the company worked. The language could have remained comfortably at presentation level. The organizational decisions were less comfortable.

The company expanded its restructuring plan to an expected net reduction of 5,800 to 7,000 positions. That is a substantial human cost attached to the promise of a faster business. Any account of the reset has to hold both facts together: more room for action within the organization, and fewer jobs in the organization itself.

In his early earnings discussion, de La Faverie described a structure designed around regions, brands and operations, with regional clusters intended to sharpen attention. The practical ambition was to shorten the distance between noticing a problem and doing something about it. A yes button is inexpensive. Delegating a consequential decision takes more nerve.

“We are growing again.”

Stéphane de La Faverie, 2026

Luxury learns a new address

One test of that willingness was distribution. On an October 2025 earnings call, de La Faverie explained the principle behind moving into new channels: follow the consumer while preserving a brand’s appeal. He discussed Amazon, TikTok Shop, Shopee and Kakao, as well as M·A·C’s planned move into Sephora in the United States.

He treated TikTok Shop as an ecosystem for recruiting consumers and maintaining a relationship with them across channels. He also pointed to a Shopify partnership intended to improve direct connections online and in freestanding stores. The common question was where the next customer wanted to shop.

For an executive raised professionally on luxury counters, this is a revealing adjustment. Distribution choices express a brand’s view of its customer. They determine whether a curious shopper can find a product at the moment curiosity arrives. An elegant invitation loses some of its force if the host insists on sending it to an address the guest no longer uses.

A Paris workshop with a stopwatch

Fragrance offers a more physical expression of his plans. In October 2025 the company opened L’Atelier at La Maison des Parfums on Rue Volney in Paris. The five-story building brought a fragrance innovation center together with teams from perfume brands, placing creative work closer to the suppliers and expertise of the French fragrance industry.

De La Faverie linked the investment to reducing development times by 30 to 50 percent and expanding the output of new formulations. Those were ambitions for the process, rather than a claim that every future scent would become a success. Perfume retains an awkward habit of needing to smell appealing, however efficient the meeting schedule.

By April 2026, Atelier director Lucas Nanini was describing a working approach that borrowed the pace of smaller startups while accommodating the requirements of a larger company. That detail gets close to the central challenge de La Faverie faces. Scale offers laboratories, manufacturing and access to markets. It can also add waiting time. The workshop is an attempt to keep the advantages while removing some of the delays.

The first full-year reckoning

Fiscal 2026, which ended on June 30, supplied a measurable checkpoint. Reported net sales reached $15.049 billion, up 5 percent. Organic net sales grew 3 percent, while adjusted operating margin rose from 8.0 percent to 11.2 percent. The final quarter delivered 5 percent organic growth.

Those figures describe a return to growth and improved profitability. They also deserve their proper labels: organic sales and adjusted operating margin are company-defined, non-GAAP measures. Reported operating margin was 5.2 percent. The distinction matters when a turnaround is being judged on both momentum and the costs incurred to achieve it.

The commercial changes were becoming visible too. By year-end the company had expanded on Amazon and TikTok Shop, and M·A·C had entered selected US Sephora locations. These were useful signs that the strategy was reaching places where purchases happen. They gave colleagues something more concrete than a new vocabulary.

Back at the departure gate

In September 2026, de La Faverie appeared at the company’s opening event during the travel retail gathering in Cannes. It was his first Cannes show as CEO. He returned to a channel connected to his early career and argued for its continuing value in introducing people to brands they might later buy at home.

He described the company as “80 years young” and recalled Leonard Lauder’s encouragement: “Just do it.” There is affection in that connection to the family’s history, alongside an impatience with behaving as though age excuses slow movement. Eight decades provide plenty of material for an anniversary. They also provide plenty of habits to examine.

His public reflections on meeting more than sixty leaders at the company’s Bryn Mawr College program offer another view of the job. He emphasized listening, questions and learning from colleagues across brands, regions and functions. The executive who asks for quicker decisions still needs to hear what happens after people make them.

That is the more demanding version of the green button’s message. Enthusiasm can start a conversation. A working organization has to carry it through: to a store, a launch, a customer, then back again with information worth hearing. De La Faverie has given the company permission to say yes. His continuing task is to make those yeses useful.