The Men and Women of Avon

During World War II, the size of the Avon representative salesforce shrank as women took jobs in the war industry. The stalwart representatives who remained with the company established the highest sales records in its history. When the war ended, the size of the sales force increased again but its efficiency lagged. Avon established new sales offices in cities and suburbs, carefully drawing territories that excluded African American and minority neighborhoods. The female agents who had traveled to recruit were tapped to manage the new city sales offices, creating a new middle-management rung on the corporate career ladder physically independent from the men at headquarters. They soon occupied a meaningful and influential position in the company, ensuring its success in the postwar era.

Women of Enterprise

During the 1980s and 1990s, Avon had successfully built its reputation as “a company of women and for women.” Avon, along with the Small Business Administration, created a Women of Enterprise awards program that highlighted the success of women business owners outside of direct sales. Through this program, Avon engaged in a popular conversation about women’s ability to “have it all.” Recognized for its women-friendly management policies, organizations such as Catalyst held Avon up as an example of a company where women had shattered the glass ceiling, even though Avon continued to name men to lead the corporation, prompting the defection of several high-ranking women in its global organization. When Andrea Jung became CEO in 1999, Avon had reached its zenith as a direct sales company, but it could not succeed against the fundamental challenges presented by internet marketing.

Agents and Agency

The CPC traveling agent was a woman who traveled for several months a year, stopping in small towns on her route to recruit women to sell in their neighborhoods. The traveling agent kept in daily contact with the company in New York, evaluating individual sales reports and earnings, handing out catalogs and sample cases to new recruits, and training women for making sales calls, submitting and receiving orders, and distributing products to customers. A demographic profile of these agents shows that most women were either single or widowed and between the ages of twenty and seventy. An analysis of their work gleaned from company literature, private writing, and the national census shows that most of these women welcomed the independence and opportunity for substantial income beyond what ordinary work offered. This group of women would become the first generation of women managers in the company, overseeing the transition from district to city sales offices in the late 1930s.

The California Perfume Company

David McConnell built the California Perfume Company to sell perfumes, toiletries, extracts, and household products through a system of direct house-to-house sales. To overcome the seedy reputation of itinerant peddlers, common at the turn of the twentieth century, McConnell relied on women. Door-to-door sales representatives sold the products to their family, friends, and neighbors in their hometowns. Traveling Agents were women who travelled the countryside recruiting and training new women to sell. The company managed all of its agents remotely, relying on newsletters, prize offerings, and regular sales reports to motivate representatives to sell. While a relatively small company, the CPC was the only one of its kind to exclusively hire women.

“Now You Are in Business for Yourself”

The California Perfume Company (CPC) was the only direct sales organization to hire women exclusively as its sales representatives. The size of the force increased from about 10,000 in 1910 to more than 30,000 by 1929. A demographic profile built from an analysis of company newsletters and census data shows that the vast majority of CPC representatives worked in small rural towns of fewer than 1,000 people. Most were married and were forty years of age or older. Selling door-to-door allowed women to bridge the gap between home and work. CPC promised women an independent business opportunity, and their testimonials showed that most regarded the work as business, not labor. Their sales records, however, suggest that only a minority of women would rely on CPC as their main source of income.

“Ding Dong! Avon Calling!”

From the 1950s to the 1970s, Avon increased its representative force from 26,000 to more than 6 million women selling products around the world, and it became a leader in both the direct sales and cosmetics industries. Avon developed its iconic advertising campaign, “Ding Dong! Avon Calling!” which promoted both the distinctive door-to-door sales service to customers as well as a recruiting message to attract women to the business opportunity. Avon became established in new white suburban neighborhoods, then expanded into the African American market in the 1960s. In the 1960s, Avon worked to uphold affirmative action and equal opportunity laws, increasing the number of minority employees in its sales staff as well as its corporate offices and manufacturing facilities. Avon named two women to the board of directors in the 1970s, turning its attention to creating a supportive workplace for women. Public relations campaigns sought to rebrand the direct selling opportunity as a business on par with new career paths opening to women during second wave feminism.

“The Dawn of a New Era”

Throughout the 1930s, the California Perfume Company expanded in both numbers of representatives and sales. It introduced the Avon brand of cosmetics and toiletries in 1929 and created new sales strategies, such as two-for-one campaigns, and efficiency measures, such as reducing the sales cycle from four weeks to three. David McConnell’s son and a new management team led by John Ewald, who remained as CEO well into the 1960s, created the company’s first national advertising campaign and a plan to develop city markets. They also spearheaded the efforts by the National Association of Direct Sales Companies to write independent contractor legislation to protect them against new minimum wage and unemployment regulations. The company officially changed its name to Avon in 1939, cementing its place as a leader in direct selling committed to developing women’s entrepreneurial opportunities.

Epilogue

This history of Avon and Avon Ladies is one story amid a much longer history of women and business in the twentieth century. Coming of age in the 1980s, I grew up in a family in which my mother, a mid-level manager at a telephone company, encountered the glass ceiling in a slow-motion reality show. One by one, men she had trained became her boss, while her ideas and reports were appropriated by others and then used to justify their promotions and pay raises. The experience showed me how a business’s assumptions about appropriate gender roles could shape its management philosophy, daily communication, and corporate values. When I learned that Avon had made gender central to its business model, my curiosity was piqued. Its deep-seated language about women and business ownership revealed a company that thought about how women and men might create a corporation that assumed and relied on women’s agency as integral to success. Throughout the twentieth century, Avon’s championing of women’s economic potential was its hallmark contribution to business history....

Introduction

Avon Products employs women as both corporate employees and as sales representatives. Employees receive a salary and work at the office while the representatives are independent contractors who work from home and are paid by commission on their personal sales. Avon Ladies visited the private homes of their customers, cultivating a personalized service integral to the corporate culture. Avon, as a direct sales company, has always sold two products. The first was its line of cosmetics, perfumes, and toiletries as displayed in its catalogs. The second, to which Avon also devoted substantial time and resources, was selling the business opportunity and recruiting women to become Avon Ladies. Avon organized its representatives in city or regional sales offices run by salaried managers, and unlike modern multi-level marketing companies, it did not require representatives to recruit. As a leader in the direct selling industry, Avon occupied an influential position in the twentieth-century conversation about women in business and the value of women’s entrepreneurship.