Alberto-Culver Co.’s Bernice E. Lavin was a superwoman before the term became popular.
Starting in the mid-1950s, she and her salesman husband, Leonard, built the Melrose Park-based beauty products concern into a public company with a well-known brand and $3.5 billion in sales before a spinoff last year of the company’s Sally Beauty sales business.
While he grew the company using the then-new medium of television advertising, she tended internal operations, from finance to security to human relations.
At the same time, she raised three children and carved out a prominent role in local philanthropy.
In 1973 Fortune magazine named her one of the 10 highest-ranking women in U.S. business.
She was “a generation or so ahead of her time,” Leonard Lavin, 88, wrote in his 2003 memoir, “Winners Make It Happen.”
Bernice Lavin, 81, died Monday, Oct. 29, in her North Shore home after a long illness.
Born Bernice Weiser in Chicago, she met her husband at a dance in summer 1947 and they married in October of that year. Their meeting was “like you were meant to know each other your entire lives,” Leonard Lavin recalled in his memoir.
She joined him in his sales company, which represented national consumer products.
In 1955 they purchased a West Coast beauty supply company, discontinued most of its line to focus on a single product — Alberto VO5 Conditioning Hairdressing — and moved its operation to Chicago.
The company generated $100,000 in sales the first year. By 1960 sales had reached $15 million, and Leonard Lavin credited the rapid growth to their use of 30-second television commercials, which he pioneered.
“They’d take a week’s worth of receivables and figure how many spots they could buy,” said Dan Stone, Alberto-Culver’s vice president of corporate communications.
Mrs. Lavin was vice president, treasurer, a director and corporate secretary until she retired in 2003.
Her interest in community and philanthropic causes began before the Lavins’ business success.
“Even when the company was small, she had the same urge to contribute. But they didn’t have the money to do it,” Stone said. “What she could do is organize the meetings, address the envelopes. It was really more sweat equity than dollar contributions” initially.
Her husband’s memoir suggests her interest in health care and rehabilitative services stems from her childhood. He relates how, after she collapsed and tumbled down a flight of stairs at age 9 or 10, she was diagnosed with septic arthritis. The Shriners organization financed her treatment in Boston.
“I think her various ordeals left her with a resolve and purpose she might not otherwise have had,” her husband wrote.
Dr. Henry Betts, past president and chief executive of the Rehabilitation Institute of Chicago, recalls her support of the institute before it had established a leading reputation.
“There was no evidence it was a board to join that would make you a social success,” he said, yet she and her husband contributed money and time as directors.
“She was very direct, very smart, very perceptive,” he said. “She was very good company.”
Among the facilities that bear her name is the child care center for Northwestern Memorial Hospital doctors and staff.
In recognition of her community work, Alberto-Culver established the Bernice E. Lavin Jumpstart Fund, which awards grants to Chicago-area programs serving the areas most important to her: health care, education and issues that affect women in the workplace.
She is survived by her husband and two children, Carol Bernick and Karen Lavin; and four grandchildren.
A memorial service will begin at 10:30 a.m. Thursday in the Alice S. Millar Chapel at Northwestern University, 1870 Sheridan Rd., Evanston.
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