May business obituaries: Innovators who made a splash

Italian designer Laura Biagiotti, right, who was also known as the ‘Queen of Cashmere’, died of a heart attack on May 26 at age 73. Pierre Verdy / AFP

A tycoon who earned his fortune from soap, an Olympic champion who became a big player in swimming gear and the studio boss who oversaw Star Wars. All feature in our monthly round-up of notable obituaries from the worlds of business and economics.

Lloyd Cotsen

Lloyd Cotsen, who made a fortune as chairman of the Neutrogena soap and cosmetics company but also suffered a horrible tragedy, died on May 8. He was 88.

Cotsen joined his father-in-law’s cosmetics firm and by 1967 he was president. He marketed Neutrogena by getting luxury ­hotels to buy it and dermatologists to recommend it.

Sales of the clear amber soap soared as Cotsen helped to build the company into a worldwide brand.

The company was sold to Johnson & Johnson in 1994 for US$924 million, of which Cotsen received about $350 million.

Cotsen used some of the money to expand his lifelong penchant for collecting. He amassed collections of folk art, illustrated children’s books, Japanese bamboo baskets, antique Chinese mirrors and other items.

Cotsen also donated more than 3,000 objects, including textiles, to the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The objects “appeal to my curio­sity, to the thrill of discovery of the extraordinary in the ordi­nary, to my sense of humour, to my love of pattern, colour and texture, to my search for the beauty in form and simplicity, and to my perceiving beauty in and behind the object,” Cotsen wrote, according to a museum website.

Cotsen’s life was shattered by the 1979 killing of his first wife, 14-year-old son and another youth. They were tied up and shot by a masked intruder in their Beverly Hills home while Cotsen was out of town. The suspect, a business rival who had feuded with Cotsen over rights to the Neutrogena trademark, later killed himself at his home in Belgium on the day that Beverly Hills detectives were scheduled to question him.

Brad Grey

Brad Grey, who was the chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures for 12 years, died on May 14. He was 59 and had been battling cancer.

Before exiting Paramount in February, Grey oversaw the Star Trek, Transformers and Mission: Impossible franchises, as well as prestige properties such as There Will Be Blood and multiple films from Martin Scorsese including The Wolf of Wall Street.

Grey also produced Scorsese's The Departed, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2007.

Grey founded the management and production company Brillstein-Grey Entertainment with the late Bernie Brillstein, co-founded the production company Plan B Entertainment with Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston, and produced multiple Emmy Award-winning television shows, including The Sopranos and The Larry Sanders Show.

He was at the helm of Paramount for the release of the top-grossing film in the studio's history, Transformers: Dark of the Moon, led the acquisition of DreamWorks and shepherded the distribution agreement with Marvel, releasing Iron Man, Iron Man 2, Thor and Captain America before The Walt Disney Company acquired Marvel Studios in 2009.

Recently, however, the studio had struggled with underwhelming box office receipts for films including Zoolander 2 and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows, and counted losses of nearly $450m last year, leading to his exit in February.

Grey started out in the entertainment business as an assistant to Harvey Weinstein, who was then a concert promoter. His first client was the comedian Bob Saget, and his partnership with comics, including the late Garry Shandling, helped to make his name in the business.

Judith Stein

The economics historian Judith Stein, whose works included an analysis of the decline of the US steel industry, died on May 8. She was 77 and had taught at City College of New York for half a century.

Running Steel, Running America, published in 1998, said the industry's troubles were as much the result of bad government policy as they were of globalisation.

More recently she wrote Pivotal Decade: How the United States Traded Factories for Finance in the Seventies. She said that the Fed's emphasis on fighting inflation in the 1970s came at the expense of job creation and wrecked the manufacturing sector.

“The Fed’s approach to fighting inflation in the late 1970s – restraining the growth of the money supply to produce high interest rates – was the worst strategy for the long-term well being of the US economy,” she said.

In her works she asserted that successive US governments, by putting financiers ahead of factory workers, brought about the decline of liberalism.

However she also argued that America’s economic rebound in the 1990s was due to “neoliberalism”, which featured market-based solutions, less regulation and freer trade.

Stein was the daughter of a stockbroker father and a schoolteacher mother who taught history at a high school in Brooklyn.

Laura Biagiotti

Laura Biagiotti, an Italian fashion designer who conquered global markets with her soft, loose women’s clothes and luxurious knits that won her the nickname “Queen of Cashmere,” died of a heart attack on May 26 at age 73.

Biagiotti began designing women’s clothes in the 1960s and by the 1980s was making her mark. In 1988, she became the first Italian designer to put on a fashion show in China, presenting dresses and blouses in silk and cashmere, and in 1995 was the first to have a show inside the Kremlin walls in Moscow.

She expanded into men’s clothing as well, and created a plus-size women’s line, Laura Piu, and a line for children.

Her company produced sunglasses and other accessories and perfumes, including the popular Roma fragrance, named after Biagiotti’s home city.

Born on August 4, 1943, Bia­giotti studied to become an archaeologist but abandoned those plans to help her mother run a dressmaking business.

In those early years, she travelled frequently to the United States to learn business and technology.

After collaborating with such famous fashion houses as those of Emilio Federico Schuberth and Roberto Capucci, she presented her own collection in Florence in 1972.

“Being a fashion designer is like taking vows. It becomes your religion for life,” she told The Associated Press in 1987.

She was always deeply proud of her native Italy, and for years wore a cashmere shawl woven in the red, white and green colours of the nation’s flag.

“I’m convinced that the true gold mine in our country is the `Made in Italy’ label,” she said in 2011.

Biagiotti lived in a medieval castle on a hilltop outside Rome that she had restored, and which was the headquarters for her business.

Patti Upton

Patti Upton, who founded the multimillion-dollar home fragrance company Aromatique thanks to a popular homemade mix of pine cones, oils and spices she concocted to help a friend’s shop “smell like Christmas,” died on May 23 at age 79.

Her company had humble beginnings: leaves, berries, spices and a broomstick.

It started after Upton agreed in 1982 to help make a friend’s ­local shop smell festive. She mixed together leaves, acorns, pine cones, berries and gum balls, combined with oils and spices.

Customers soon began asking to buy the scent looming through her friend’s store in Heber Springs, so she started mixing bigger batches – in garbage bags using a broomstick.

“Our friends thought absolutely I had lost my mind,” Upton told The Associated Press in 2000, as the company’s sales were expected to top $110 million.

“They said tell them you’re making clothes. Don’t tell them you’re making the smell of Christmas.”

The work blossomed into an international business manufacturing fragrances, candles and other decorative products. According to the company, “The Smell of Christmas” remains the Aromatique’s flagship fragrance.

Stanley Weston

The creator of the GI Joe figurine, sales of which have reached the billions of dollars, died May 1 at age 84.

Stanley Weston was partly inspired by the Barbie doll, which required a host of accessories – which, from the manufacturer’s point of view, meant a host of high-markup follow-up purchases by customers.

Barbie was made by Mattel. According to The Washington Post, the GI Joe idea came with an assist from the Mattel co-founder Elliot Handler, who told Weston: "Stan, you've got to sell 'em the razor. Then you can sell them a lot of blades."

Weston, a veteran of the US Army, pitched his idea to Mattel’s rival, Hasbro. Like Barbie, GI Joe could wear a variety of uniforms – scuba diver, soldier, sailor.

Hasbro (then known as Hassenfeld Bros) immediately saw the potential for a money-spinner. They paid Weston $100,000 for his idea and marketed GI Joe not as a doll but as an action figure.

As a child, Weston combined his love of comic books with his nose for a profit.

“When I was [a] kid, I used to sell my comics out of a milk crate,” he once said. “The other kids could buy them for 3 cents, or they could rent them for a penny. Kids would sit in front of my apartment in Brooklyn and read them.”

Adolph Kiefer

Adolph Kiefer won a gold medal in the backstroke at the 1936 Olympics in Berlin and went on to start a company that produced several innovations in swimming equipment.

He died on May 5 at age 98.

Kiefer’s self-named company, begun in 1947 with his wife Joyce, invented several performance and safety products, such as the first nylon swimsuit, which was used by the US Olympic team, and a patent for the first design of the non-turbulent racing lane line.

Kiefer’s company was widely recognised as an industry leader, producing lane lines, starting blocks, lifeguard equipment and apparel. Kiefer served as CEO from the company’s founding until he retired in 2011.

Kiefer, whose parents came from Germany and whose dad was a candy maker, became an Olympic champion as a teenager in an Olympic-record time that stood for 20 years. He was the first man to break 1 minute in the 100 backstroke, doing so as a high school swimmer in Illinois. He later competed for the University of Texas.

In 1944 he enlisted in the Navy when it was losing thousands of lives to drownings. Kiefer was appointed to establish a safety curriculum and train officers how to survive in the water.

His “victory backstroke” – a simplified version of the stroke that begin with the arms stretched out in a V – was credited with helping save thousands of lives in the ­final years of the Second World War and was later adopted by the American Red Cross.

“He considers it to be his greatest achievement, hands down,” Robin Kiefer, a grandson, told The Associated Press.

Why was he so big on the backstroke?

Because as a child he disliked getting water up his nose, so he swam on his back.

* Agencies and The National

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