The AVON LADY Comes Of Age

From the NY Times via Dane

Luz Stella Bongiovi has a job that many people would envy. After 12 years in the same business, she supervises more than 100 employees and logs about 50 hours a week, coming into work at 10 a.m. and often working at home. She has been sent on junkets to Hawaii, Las Vegas and Puerto Rico. Her earnings total nearly $170,000 a year.

Her job title: Avon lady.

The folks at Avon, however, would call her a sales representative, the updated term for the 468,000 people in the company’s work force generating more than 95 percent of sales revenue. But to the public, “Avon lady�? has stuck, ever since the company’s sales representatives began ringing doorbells in 1886.

Ms. Bongiovi is an example of how to succeed the old-fashioned way: she started small, worked hard and took advantage of her natural business sense to build a living slowly by selling Avon to her extended network of family, friends and acquaintances. But now, Avon is trying to force itself to step into the future — and bring the sales reps with it, turning its distinctly mid-20th-century sales model into a 21st-century version.