Ding Dong! Avon Calling

Many will recognise the singsong call that featured in Avon advertisements through the second half of the twentieth century. The catchy phrase announced the arrival of the Avon Lady on your doorstep, armed with catalogues, lipstick samples and sales pitches. As Katina Manko’s new monograph shows, it was these women who transformed Avon into the leading direct sales company in the United States through much of the twentieth century. The women of Avon are subsequently Manko’s focus, and for good reason; it is the gender and racial dynamics in Avon Products Incorporated that make it an especially significant historical case-study for scholars of business and women. This includes the firm’s entrepreneurial opportunities aimed at women workers. As Manko states early in the study, ‘[t]he direct-sales business model—in which a company sells its products to representatives, who in turn sell them directly to customers through home demonstrations—set the stage on which Avon developed a business ethos uniquely for women’ (p. 2). This ‘business ethos’ was rife with contradictions, however, including the exclusion of women from upper management positions for much of the company’s history. In this way, Avon represented an important model of female entrepreneurship in its hiring of independent contractors, but one that was also marked by paternalism, racialised policies and corporate limitations that affected the very women who secured the firm’s success

Advertising · Business · Economics · Entrepreneurship · Ethos · Management · Paternalism · Political science · American History and Culture · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Law · Political Economy and Marxism