My response to this post:
Is Avon Just Another Pyramid Scheme?
EelKat - Yes, Avon Has Become an MLM, but I Don’t Mind.
Avon has changed a lot over the years. When my grandmother sold it (from 1920′s to 1970s) each rep was assigned an entire town, or more depending on the saturation of reps in the area. In the 1920′s my grandmother was the ONLY Avon rep in the State of Maine so her territory was the entire state! That got smaller over the years as more Avon reps cropped up.
Than later, it used to be you signed up and was given a map of 100 houses and you had to sell, sell, sell, like crazy at just those 100 people! That’s the way Avon was in the 1970′s – 1980s. That was because there were SO MANY reps that they had to start limiting how many costumers each rep was allowed to have!
They discontinued Representative Territories in 1987. Why? Because out right wars broke out. There were reps that had some of their houses on other reps territories (2 reps assigned the same houses) and that caused some nasty violence – marbles through car windshields, cow manure dumped on your front seat, there was one local rep, who took over 200 of my mom’s brochures (stole them off door knobs!) and took them to the post office saying that my mom had left them in mail boxes! There was so much violence and fighting among reps that Avon had to get rid of the territories just to keep the ladies from killing each other. Think the Lobster Wars between the men of Maine are bad? They are nothing compared to the Avon Lady Wars that go on in Maine!
So, the poster that mentioned how pissy and rude some Avon Ladies get, was right on. Lots of them a nice. Most of them are great, but once in a while a really b**chy one shows up and than WATCH OUT!
I noticed that there are several that troll the Avon forums, and boy are they control freaks! When the online forums first opened, I posted pretty regular, but than the hissy-fit-divas showed up and took over the place and I just never went back. Besides, staying on the forums takes away from my time selling right?
At that same time (late 1980′s) they started pushing Avon as a part time side job instead of a full time career, and started telling reps to get out there, get “regular day jobs” and than start selling Avon to their co-workers.
In around 1997 they set up the online feature and discontinued the door-to-door sales all together. Things went really bad than. Because Avon started threatening us reps if we REFUSED to give up selling door-to-door! They were telling EVERY rep that was not in the President’s Club or higher to basically, get lost! It made a lot of Ladies really mad and tempers flared every time you meet a former Avon rep! Avon did the whole “we’re online now – buy from us direct, no need for sales reps to come into your home any more!” thing and lots and lots of reps lost customers in droves.
The problem was quite simple: there are WAY TOO MANY reps out there! There are 3 living on my street alone and our town of 8,000 people has 21 of them (that I know of)!
Thankfully the whole “don’t buy from your Avon Lady, buy online instead” pitch did not last long, only about 8 months or so. So the reps who stuck it out and still did door to door, ended up being called eRepresentatives after that, because Avon gave each of us our own “mini-website”. Door-to-door sales were reinstated, but today it’s highly unusual to find a representative that still does it that way, most do the at-work thing or the online thing now.
Hostess Parties were introduced shortly after that and reps were encouraged to get permission from the bosses of their day jobs to host “at work” Avon Parties. I’m one of the few that opted to continue door to door sales.
My grandmother started selling Avon in the 1920′s and back than, yes, Reps had 100 house districts. In the 1970′s my mom took over after my grandmother stopped selling. Yep, 100 house districts were still going. My mom had over 700 customers, none of them in her district and was one of the reps that started the protest to disband the territories.
But yeah, what you say is correct. Avon has started pushing yet another new scheme, and that one is: recruit, recruit, recruit! They tell us that 75 out of every 150 reps DO NOT have a single customer, and that they only join Avon to buy the products for themselves at a discount, and therefor it is in our best interest to recruit as many new reps as possible! I get 2 or 3 emails a week telling me similar messages. Why? Because in 14 years, I’ve yet to recruit a single rep! LOL! They keep telling me how I would make more money if I started recruiting. Every once in a while they ship “recruitment packages” with my orders (basically it’s a pack of 100 flyers to hand out to my costumers to tell them how great it would be for them to sell Avon instead of buying it from me!)
My DM emails me every champaign to remind me I should join the Leadership program.
There was also a change about 3 or 4 years ago in the start up package. Which sucks really. It USED to include a tote bag full of stuff, 100 brochures, delivery bags, $300 worth of demo products, samples, etc, not any more! You still get the tote bag and 10 free brochures and a little notebook to keep track of customers in. That costs $20, but thats all you get today! It no longer includes the free demo products, ring sizer, lipstick demo cases, samples, delivery bags, etc, that came with it back when I joined 14 years ago! And really, I don’t think that’s fair on the new reps, because Avon Products are NOT CHEAP! Some face creams are over $100 each now! And the Reps only get a 15% discount, unless they can sell over $500 per order, in which case they make a 30% discount, and though Avon brags of a 50% discount, I only know of TWO reps in my district who sell enough (several thousand per month) to reach that level discount! And the discount changes with each order so if you sell $5,000 today but only $75 next week, you go right back to 10% and have to work your way up all over again.
And while they do not actually come out and tell you to stock up on inventory, they do quarterly send out a “case lot” flyer, where you can by 144 bottles of Skin So Soft or Anew or whatever the “hot thing to have on hand this quarter” is. And if you buy a certain amount of cases you start getting cases free. One of the last campaigns it was the Skin So soft Bug Guard “stock up for summer” “buy 4 cases and we well send you the fifth free!” Uhm. Yeah. I don’t know ANY local reps who could ever sell 300 tubes of bug guard not even around here were there are campground every mile! At the back of the flyers there are always “success stories” which interview a rep who talks about how “stocking up before the summer sales” helped her send her kids to college or paid for her daughter’s wedding or whatever.
So yeah, they don’t actually push stocking up, but they do sneak a lot of little hints at you to make you feel guilty if you don’t stock up.
Another new thing that was added in the last five years EVERY ORDER has a $7.50 processing fee now. That means Even if you DO NOT sell one single item this champaign, you STILL have to pay Avon $7.50 in order to remain a rep! That means you are paying not only $20 to join Avon, but you continue to pay $22 EACH and EVERY month in order to continue selling Avon, wither you sent in an order or not! That really hurt a lot of reps, because it was not uncommon for rep to only send in one order a month instead of the every other week Avon recommends (they DO NOT require you to sell every 2 weeks, they only RECOMMEND that you do, but if you go over 6 weeks without sending an order in, they cancel your account). A lot of reps locally here are only selling so they can use the products themselves and sell to family members, and when they had to start paying $7.50 a week to remain a rep, it caused a lot of reps to just quit Avon all together.
But yeah, you are right, it’s really, really hard to sell Avon today, not like it used to be at all, and ten times harder to make money while selling Avon. I wish the company would be more upfront beforehand with people about what really goes into selling Avon. A lot of people join, than quit with in 6 months, and they often leave either depressed because they think they must have done something wrong because they couldn’t make enough sales to earn an income or they leave angry with Avon for not being honest upfront about the extremely high overhead costs (cost of brochures is $2 per brochure unless you buy them in bulk cases! delivery bags and samples can take up most of your earnings fast, and demo products are only 15% off regular price!) It’s sad because selling Avon was pretty easy only 20 or 30 years ago and today, it’s a far cry from what it used to be. Today, you really got to love the product and have a lot of persistence to make a living at it.
I’ve been a rep for 14 years, I have over 100 customers, each of them only places one order once every 3 or 4 months! In the end, I am lucky if I have enough left over from purchasing supplies to earn more than $20 per campaign! Sure you can make a lot of money, heck Avon’s #5 rep in the world lives down the street from me, she’s making of 500k a year and Avon is all she does, but for her, it’s all about recruiting and she has over a thousand recruits under her. Recruiting and the whole MLMing part of Avon is her style and it works for her. It’s not my style though. I like the old fashioned door-to-door sales, sure, the pay sucks and thanks to having an award winning recruiter on my street it’s hard to find any one in the neighborhood who DOES NOT sell Avon now, but I like the product and I like what I do, so for me, it’s not about the money.
I DO NOT sell Avon as a way to earn a living, because really, I would need closer to 2,000 or 3,000 customers in order to do that. My grandmother made a full-time living on it, but she had close to 4,000 customers. My mom made a part time living at it, but she had 700 customers.
Me? Why do I sell Avon? I am allergic to most every skin care product on the market, Avon is the ONLY company I am not allergic to. So in the end, I’m a rep, more so that I can get products for myself at a discount, and the way Avon is set up, it allows me the option to do that. If I sell a few orders on the side, great! If not, it’s no big deal. I have a different job that I do for an income. I wish I could make a full time income from Avon, but the sad truth of the matter is that less than 5% for their 5.4 million reps earn anything close to being enough to live on, Avon used to be a full time career, but today it’s more of a hobby that keeps you smelling nice and looking good, while you work elsewhere.
But hey, you know what? Avon is constantly tell us it OUR BUSINESS and we can do AS MUCH or AS LITTLE as we want. And so, I just ignore all the hype. I don’t waste my time recruiting. I don’t waste my money stocking up. Sure, a lot of new reps come into Avon thinking they HAVE to do EVERYTHING and BUY everything, and they just burn out fast and get themselves in huge amounts of debt to Avon. I know what it’s like. I did the same thing when I first started out! But than I realized: Hey! This is MY business! I can run it MY way. If I don’t want to recruit: I don’t have too! If I don’t want to stock inventory: I don’t have to!
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