The Most Impossible Rise of a Company Ever: Avon

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1886, a door-to-door book salesman named David McConnell noticed that the free perfume samples he gave away were outselling the books. He stopped selling books. He founded the California Perfume Company in a rented room on Chambers Street in Manhattan, hired a fifty-year-old woman from New Hampshire named Mrs. P.F.E. Albee to sell door to door, and accidentally invented the most powerful direct sales force in American business history. The company became Avon Products. It survived the Depression. It conquered the suburbs. “Ding Dong, Avon Calling” became one of the most famous advertising lines of the twentieth century. At its peak in the early 1970s, Avon was a Wall Street darling — a Nifty Fifty stock trading at staggering multiples. By 2004, its market cap hit $21.8 billion. Then everything fell apart. Women entered the workforce and stopped answering the door. Avon bought Tiffany’s and a hospital supply company and lost hundreds of millions. It turned down a $10 billion buyout from Coty. It paid $135 million in fines over a bribery scandal in China. It was split in half, sold to a Brazilian conglomerate, sold again to a Korean corporation — and then, on the last day of 2025, its entire international operation was sold for one British pound. This is the full story of the most improbable rise and collapse in American business. Sources: Avon Products, Inc. — Annual Reports and SEC 10-K Filings (1993–2020), U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission EDGAR Database “Avon Products, Inc.” — International Directory of Company Histories, Vols. 9, 19, 46 (St. James Press / Encyclopedia.com) “Avon Settles Bribery Charges, Pays $135M” — CNN Money, December 18, 2014 “California Appeals Court Upholds $51 Million Ruling Against Avon in Mesothelioma Case” — Androvett Legal Media, February 2026 “Natura Completes Sale of Avon International to Regent LP” — Premium Beauty News, January 2026 “LG H&H Sells The Avon Company for $6M, Exits at a Loss” — The Korea Herald, August 25, 2026