FASHION:
Lauren Sherman talks business with Tory Burch and fashion trends with Kate Young.
and…
Rachel Strugatz digs into the Estée Lauder executive shuffle.
ART MARKET:
Marion Maneker corrects the narrative about the art market correction.
HOLLYWOOD:
Matt Belloni and Lesley Goldberg unveil the worst and most questionable deals of the Peak TV era.
and…
Eriq Gardner parses the docs in CAA’s new legal war.
and…
Scott Mendelson reviews the town’s summer box office math.
and…
Matt chats with the talented crew behind True Detective: Night Country.
WALL STREET:
Bill Cohan reveals Elon Musk’s electric fallacy.
MEDIA:
John Ourand explores Zaz’s Venu Plan B and peeks at Bronfman’s Paramount deck.
and…
Dylan Byers offers a talmudic reading of the Deb OConnell power play at ABC News.
WASHINGTON:
John Heilemann examines the Bidenization of Donald Trump, and chronicles the return of Obamalot.
and…
Tara Palmeri reports on the Lewandowski shakeup in Mar-a-Lago.
meanwhile…
Peter Hamby gathers all the dish from Chicago and Julia Ioffe previews which Biden aides would stick around for a Harris administration.
PODCASTS:
Heilemann gathers the D.N.C. tea with the Center for American Progress’s Patrick Gaspard and Politico’s Jonathan Martin on Impolitic.
and…
Matt and CNBC’s Alex Sherman contemplate the cable-pocalypse on The Town.
and…
Tara and Chuck Todd measure the Kamalamentum on Somebody’s Gotta Win.
and…
Lauren fact-checks Emily in Paris with Kate Young on Fashion People.
and…
Peter and Ourand discuss Zaz’s Venu options on The Powers That Be.
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| Early Monday morning, shortly before I was about to load the Radio Flyer to take the kids to the beach, Rachel Strugatz dropped a note into Puck’s now-famous Slack channel that I instantaneously knew was going to change the course of the day, and maybe even the complexion of the week.
Rachel, of course, is the most connected and acerbic reporter at work today focused on the six-hundred-ish billion-dollar beauty industry—from the publicly traded behemoths, like L’Oréal, to the new era of influencer-led insurgents, like Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty. And just like Hollywood or the media or Washington, the beauty industry offers its own veritable cinematic universe that’s filled with strivers and incumbents, hucksters and hegemons. It’s exactly the sort of ecosystem that we love to unfurl here at Puck.
I’ve also always found it both fascinating and perplexing, and maybe even a little familiar. As loyal readers know well, I started my career at the beginning of the end of the magazine era—back in a time and place called Midtown in the early aughts. In those days, we were convinced that the cultural product we churned out every month was immune to changing tastes and technologies, and we were superbly confident that consumers valued our work more than the sort of garbage accumulating on nascent social media platforms. Alas, in many ways, the humbling that the industry endured—reverberations that have since defined my career—presaged similar dislocations across the economy: the music business, the television industry, and yes, even the beauty trade. These days, the legacy cosmetics giants are also watching their moats evaporate in real time as they race to keep up with the whims of younger generations: both what they want to consume and their point of purchase. Few entities embody this generational transition more than Estée Lauder Companies, the family-controlled dynasty that helped forge the industry as we know it, and has endured its own very public humbling in recent times as the stock has fallen 75 percent in the last three years.
On Monday, Rachel reported that Lauder’s C.E.O. Fabrizio Freda was announcing his retirement ahead of the company’s earnings call—a sure sign that the family and the board wanted to communicate to the markets that they were focused on a turnaround. Of course, this followed the recent departure of the company’s well-regarded C.F.O. Tracey Travis, who sits on the board of both Accenture and Meta. There was more: Rachel suggested that other executives would be departing, too.
Freda isn’t going anywhere immediately. He’ll stay on until next June, the end of the 2025 fiscal year. Naturally, however, the news has set this cinematic universe ablaze. Will the Lauders elevate one of their own, chief data officer Jane Lauder, into the perch? Amid a season of uncharacteristically high succession intrigue—at LVMH, JPMorgan Chase, Disney, and even the White House—the sitch at ELC may yet be the most compelling. I behoove you to turn your attention to Rachel’s fabulously good piece, The Estée Exodus, to fully comprehend the familial, political, and economic dynamics.
But if you only have time for one late summer weekend read, I’d turn your attention to another double-barreled piece regarding another sort of succession. Right after Rachel filed her story on Freda, my partner John Ourand emailed me a copy of Edgar Bronfman Jr.’s pitch deck to investors to acquire Paramount Global from another scion, Shari Redstone.
Yes, yes, I know that the sprawling, certifiably endless Paramount auction has been an infatuation here at Puck—some bankers have joked, half seriously, that we should collect a deal fee on the transaction from all our perspicacious reporting—but now John has unveiled the latest twist. Bronfman’s pitch deck not only crystallizes his strategy for the company, but also the management team he’d deploy into Times Square to fix the business. Bronfman’s Closing Pitch eloquently builds on the previous reportage from Matt Belloni and Bill Cohan and yet crystallizes it in a new light. After all, this is one of the great sagas of our time, and precisely what you should expect from Puck.
Have a great weekend,
Jon |
