La Prairie’s CEO Is Walking Ad for Hands-On Style

Georgette Mosbacher fills the role of beauty queen just fine.

Dubbed “Big Red” by Women’s Wear Daily, which records her every move in New York and Washington social circles (usually on the arm of her husband, Secretary of Commerce Robert Mosbacher), the statuesque redhead and CEO of La Prairie cosmetics is living proof that a cosmetics company can benefit from hands-on leadership.

When Mosbacher works a sales counter, she’s a star. She’s Madonna without a singing voice, Oprah without a microphone. Customers can’t get enough of her, in her pastel business suits and big diamond brooches. They buy, buy, buy, and even when they don’t, Mosbacher thanks them for looking.

“I’ve been using La Prairie for 10 years,” one customer at the Neiman Marcus counter confided.

“And it shows,” Mosbacher enthused.

She still writes notes to many of the women she meets at the La Prairie cosmetics counters she visits. It’s a practice she began after buying the company two years ago. Mosbacher said that since she acquired the company, sales have risen more than 30%.

“We’re living in a world of faceless corporations. Every day there are more and more. It’s nice to know there’s somebody living and breathing that says, ‘I’m here and I care,’ ” she explained one morning after breakfast No. 3. (The first was alone in her hotel room; the second was with her salesclerks, and the third was with members of Colleagues, a Los Angeles social group.)

But personal attention has a price. Mosbacher was home only 100 days last year, and non-working weekends are a rarity. She collects awards from women’s groups, and honorary degrees. She speaks on self-esteem.

“It has not so much to do with specifics as with saying, ‘I can be what I want to be.’ We all dream, and there aren’t a lot of role models for women at the top of the management rung, with a high profile, who have come from humble beginnings,” Mosbacher said.

“I worked myself through college. I didn’t even know there were different jobs for men and women until I became an adult. My father died when I was 7 and my mother and grandmother both worked.”

When people say that being married to the Secretary of Commerce doesn’t hurt, Mosbacher says that her profile may have risen, but her privacy is routinely invaded. Last month, for example, her written request for a meeting with the head of the Food and Drug Administration to discuss policies affecting imports--La Prairie products come from Switzerland--was leaked to the Washington Post. She has defended the move, saying that she acted as an executive, not as the wife of a Cabinet member.

“I don’t get it,” she said of the media coverage.

These days, Mosbacher is on the road with a new fragrance, One Perfect Rose, which is sold in a Boehm porcelain bottle for $1,500 per ounce, or in a crystal bottle for $350 per ounce. Masses of pink roses that match those on the porcelain blanket the counter, reminding Mosbacher that she hasn’t been home in two weeks.

“I can’t wait to see my rose garden,” she said.