This Day in Business History (“Avon” Founder Born)

July 18, 1858—You probably haven’t heard of David Hall McConnell, but you’ve surely heard of his company: Avon Products Inc., one of the great brand names in American enterprise and an employer of choice for thousands of women over the years.

The story of Avon is quintessentially American in that it was (and is) polyglot: The brainchild of the son of a Famine-era Irish emigrant (County Cavan), with a product line probably heavily influenced by French perfume manufacturers then peddling their wares in the States, and with a name taken from the English hometown of William Shakespeare, which reminded McConnell of the American town where his company was based.

As a salesman in charge of the southern territory for the Union Publishing Co. of Chicago, the twentysomething McConnell chafed in a business that was “not congenial” to him. Although they didn’t have a name for the concept then, he made the same dismaying discovery that the book publishing industry keeps having to learn over and over: unless you’re a bestselling “brand” author who give readers more or less the same experience from book to book, such as Danielle Steel, Mary Higgins Clark and Tom Clancy, publishing is a total crapshoots that resists efforts to market books as if they were bars of soap.

It surely irked McConnell that female customers were more likely to buy the products he used as inducements—perfumes—than the major objects of his quests, books. Then he had a brainstorm: while books were really one-offs, perfumes were consumed, so they had to be bought continually. So McConnell sensibly decided to leave the first industry for the second, and in 1886 founded the California Perfume Co. (The name was suggested by a then-business partner, who associated the state with a wild profusion of flowers.)

Know the old line, “Behind every successful man stands a woman”? Well, in McConnell’s case, he started out with two important women and ended up with a veritable army of them. In fact, I think it’s inconceivable that he would have succeeded without them.

The first woman was McConnell’s wife Lucy, who helped him operate a combination of office, laboratory and shipping room in downtown New York, at 126 Chambers Street. This would have tested the patience of anyone, for they operated from a room only 20 x 25 ft. (McConnell’s instincts as a farmboy had been to do things on the cheap so as not to fall in debit.) Her participation was critical, since the business did not have its first $500 day until 1897, more than a decade after California Perfume’s establishment.

The second woman was Mrs. Persus Foster Eames (P.F.E.) Albee of Winchester, N.Y., a 50-year-old woman who had been one of McConnell’s best employees at Union Publishing. It was Mrs. Albee who came up with the company’s business model of “depot agents” selling products door to door in their own neighborhood.

It’s hard to understand what a radical break that concept was from then-current practice. Direct selling in those days depended on commercial travelers arriving by rail in small towns throughout rural America. Coming from nowhere with little but a wave and a smile, these males created a great deal of understandable suspicion.

Now, a woman, working in her own neighborhood with people who knew her—that was someone who could be trusted. At the same time, women—whose only financial options at the time were housework, sewing, teaching, nursing, or working in sweatshops—found an entirely new avenue where they could make money and develop business acumen. Twenty years after its founding, 10,000 representatives and district managers were selling 117 different articles in 600 styles.

By 1897, attracted by country living, McConnell built a wooden lab in Suffern, N.Y., three floors high and 3000 sq. ft.—quite a bit roomier than his initial New York address. By 1971, the Suffern facility was 10 times its original size.

In 1928, after his inspirational vacation to Stratford-on-Avon, McConnell offered his first products under the Avon name – a toothbrush, a talcum, and a vanity set. Amazingly, the company doubled during the next decade—yes, the heart of the Great Depression. By the time of McConnell’s death in 1937, thanks to a nationwide print campaign and the sponsorship of a radio show called Friends (now, not that one, silly!), the company had doubled in sales. So prominent had the Avon name become that two years later, California Perfume became Avon Products Co.

Today, Avon is by far the world’s largest direct seller with 5.4 million Avon Representatives in
over 100 countries. For the full year 2007, according to the company’s latest annual report, it posted revenues of $9.9 billion. It’s a long way from its start as a dream of escape by a harried, annoyed book salesman who learned that it paid to listen to women.