Joel Smilow
American businessman and philanthropist
Joel E. Smilow is an American philanthropist and former CEO of Playtex.
Early life
Joel Smilow was born in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Yale University in 1954. As a student, he was sports director at the campus radio station, WYBC. While he did not play football, he was a strong supporter of Yale's team. He received an MBA from Harvard Business School and served in the Navy.
Career
Smilow, an executive of Esmark/Beatrice, purchased its Playtex division in the late 1980s. He kept Playtex and sold Max Factor to Ron Perelman of Revlon. Smilow led Playtex through four leveraged buyouts between 1985 and 1988. during which he earned $186 million. He spun out Platex's bra business, Playtex Apparel, for Playtex to focus on tampons and baby bottles. He retired in 1992 and stepped down as chairman in 1995.
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This entry incorporates text from “Joel Smilow” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.