Back in the days when cornflakes were strange and “In-Er-Seal” cracker boxes triggered anxiety, when new-and-improved companies such as Kellogg and National Biscuit were forging the way into the 20th Century, an obscure, doughy-faced book-peddler named David McConnell decided to ditch publishing and embrace odors.
Overnight in 1892, McConnell’s New York-based Union Publishing Co. became the California Perfume Co.–a name that bore the aura, he said, of coastal blossoms–and another marketing epic began.
Ding dong . . . Avon calling . . .
“My ambition was to manufacture a line of goods that would be consumed, used up and sold through canvassing agents, direct from the factory to the consumer,” McConnell later wrote.
Renamed Avon Products in 1939–an echo of the peaceful purity of Stratford-on-Avon, said the imaginative McConnell–the company is now the oldest continuously operating direct-sales cosmetics concern in the United States. Two months ago, Avon officially transferred its extensive archives of products, literature, advertising, packaging, records and photographs to the Hagley Museum and Library in Wilmington, one of the country’s largest repositories for business archives. To mark the occasion, a small exhibit–aptly dubbed “Avon Calling! –” is now on view at the library.
“Avon is an important company in defining the culture of consumption,” said Michael Nash, chief curator at the library. “Their products shaped values and attitudes toward consumption. And as far as I know, Avon is probably the first company that relied on women sales agents. Women going door-to-door in direct sales is very unusual.”
Extract of Violet. Heliotrope. White Rose. Lilac. Sweet Pea. California Cold Cream. Elite Powder, for the removal of perspiration and offensive odors of the body, feet and clothing. Lavender Salts. California Witch Hazel Cream.
Women sold them all–and samples are now on display at Hagley, along with early catalogs luxuriously printed in color.
Avon found the bulk of its customers in rural and small-town America, among women seeking a bit of city luxury and sophistication.
“Avon’s marketing and distribution was going against most logic at that time in terms of how to get their product out,” said Katina L. Manko, an archival assistant at Hagley who is doing her doctoral dissertation on Avon. “Their system is, on the face of it, incredibly inefficient. You have one person in one town knocking on the doors she feels like knocking on. They have no way to hit a broad audience.”
Kathy Peiss, a professor of history at the University of Massachusetts and author of a forthcoming study of American beauty culture, said Avon’s tactics amounted to “an alternative way of getting products to the consumers.”
“It relies on a one-to-one relationship, which we think of as the sales relationship before the rise of the mass market,” said Peiss. “Avon was a really important source of employment for women, as well as promoting products to women. So it shows women as both producers and consumers.”
As the Hagley exhibit makes clear, Avon spent at least as much time and energy recruiting, inspiring, rewarding and exhorting its army of female sales agents as it did on wooing customers. Turnover of sales reps was rapid, but the total numbers climbed from 6,000 in 1900 to 10,000 in 1906 and 25,000 in 1925. (There are 450,000 Avon reps in the U.S. today; worldwide, the number is 2.3 million in 130 countries.)
“Avon was as much in the business of selling business as they were in the business of selling perfume,” said Manko. “In the early 1900s when all this starts, it’s remarkable to me that McConnell, the founder, is talking very directly about providing economic opportunities for women who do not have other options for bringing money into the household. I think the company saw it as being a very flexible opportunity for women who wanted to work full time. They could earn enough money almost to live off of. If they were on their own and they worked full time, 50 hours a week, they could make enough money to provide for themselves. If you just wanted extras, it could provide that, too. It was an incredibly flexible formula that met a lot of needs.”
Cosmetics and skin creams, closely allied in the 19th Century to patent medicines, are a perfect product for door-to-door peddling, says historian Susan Strasser, who has written extensively about women, consumerism and the marketplace.
“Products that need to be demonstrated do well door-to-door,” Strasser said. “Vacuum cleaners–people couldn’t imagine the benefits of them until someone came in and sucked stuff up and showed them what could be done. With Avon, you want to put stuff on, experience it. You can’t sell cosmetics by mail successfully. You want to put things on, feel them, touch them, smell them. It’s still true. It’s true in department stores where these products are demonstrated. And there is a feeling that these are products a woman can understand.”
Localized selling worked well for the company, even during the Depression, but by the middle of the 1930s, Avon executives–all of whom were male–decided they needed to establish the brand more firmly in the national consumer psyche. In 1936, the first coast-to-coast ad campaign began with a two-page spread in Good Housekeeping magazine.
“Do your Christmas shopping, the Avon way,” the ad reads, featuring two serious, lipsticked women hovering over a jar of cold cream as if a genie were about to appear. “Let your Avon representative help you.”
Here, the symbiotic relationship between sales rep and consumer is fixed, never to change. In 1945, an ad featuring a female pilot proclaims:
“Even under the most trying conditions, women of great pioneering spirit guard their beauty as one of their most cherished possessions. To you, loveliness can be a friend at the door: Your Avon Representative. Welcome Her. Be Hostess to Loveliness.”
In 1953, Avon finally hit television, creating the most famous door-bell chimes of the era. From 1955 to 1962, model Connie Johannes portrayed the Avon Lady in all print and TV advertising, firmly etching the image: cherry-red lips, stylish gray suit, pearl earrings, bowl hat, white gloves, smile fixed like marble.
In countless ads, the Avon Lady appears at the door of the suburban home–so convenient, so smart, so efficiently cheerful. And always, the hostess is at home, alone, ready to welcome in loveliness and take time out for beauty.
“Mrs. Ewans’ church and PTA activities keep her very busy,” a 1957 ad confides, “so she appreciates the convenience of shopping at home the Avon way.”
“The culture of beauty is created,” said Manko, the Hagley archivist. “You’re inviting it in.”
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“Avon Calling” is on view at the Hagley Library, Buck Road East, Wilmington, Del., until Sept. 30. The library is open from 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday to Friday, 302-658-2400.
