Long before the internet, before department stores dotted every town, and before most American women held jobs outside the home, a door-to-door book salesman named David McConnell discovered something unexpected. During the 1800s, when he offered small bottles of perfume as gifts to housewives in exchange for their attention, the customers showed far more interest in the fragrance than in his books. Recognizing the opportunity, McConnell abandoned books entirely and built a company around selling perfume directly to women in their homes. He recruited other housewives to do the selling, reasoning that they could relate to the customers in a way male salesmen could not.

Initially called the California Perfume Company, the enterprise expanded beyond perfume into face powders, lipsticks, and related products. By the early 1900s, nearly one hundred thousand women were going door to door selling its goods. The company adopted the name Avon in 1939, taken from the beauty line that had become its most popular product, which itself drew its name from Stratford-upon-Avon, the English town associated with William Shakespeare. These sales representatives, known universally as Avon ladies, became a defining feature of the brand for decades.

The timing of the company’s growth was fortunate. Following World War II, a surge in families meant more housewives, both to sell and to buy Avon products. The famous Avon calling commercials, among the earliest and most recognizable television taglines, ran for over a decade and pushed the brand further into the American consciousness. By the 1970s, Avon had reached one billion dollars in sales, and Forbes ranked it the most consistently profitable company in the United States.

At its peak, it was widely seen as a symbol of female empowerment, offering women a meaningful way to earn income decades before they gained broad access to the workforce or even the right to vote. Then the foundation began to shift. The same cultural changes that had once worked in Avon’s favor turned against it. As women entered the workforce in growing numbers, the pool of available Avon ladies shrank, and the captive audience of housewives answering the door during the day disappeared.

By the 1980s, the company faced mounting doubts about its future in a world where women no longer needed to rely on door-to-door sales to earn a living. Feeling the pressure, Avon began searching for new directions, and the results were costly. In 1979, the company spent over one hundred million dollars to acquire Tiffany and Company, the jewelry brand, but struggled against competitors and sold it within five years. It then bought a chemical company for seven hundred fifty million dollars and sold it at a loss shortly afterward.

Similar acquisitions followed, including a healthcare company, nursing home companies, and a toy company, nearly all purchased and then sold within a few years. By the 1990s, these failed ventures had left Avon with more than a billion dollars in debt. Competition arrived from every side. In its earliest days, Avon had succeeded partly because women in remote areas had no practical way to reach stores offering perfumes and cosmetics.

Representatives sometimes traveled by horseback simply to reach customers. That world vanished. Drugstores such as Walgreens and CVS became common places to buy cosmetics, discount retailers like Walmart and Target offered lower prices, and specialty stores including Ulta and Sephora gave shoppers countless new options. With more choices available, Avon struggled to give consumers a reason to choose its products over everyone else’s.

Technology also passed the company by. For years, Avon had been the most convenient way to buy cosmetics from home, with a representative arriving at the door carrying an array of products. The internet changed that completely. Online shopping became the new standard for buying cosmetics without leaving the house, yet Avon largely missed the opportunity, continuing to rely heavily on its sales representatives rather than building a strong online presence.

Social media advertising, so influential among younger consumers, was another area where the brand fell behind, leaving Avon unable to attract a new generation of customers. In another technological misstep, the company spent four years and hundreds of millions of dollars developing a software system intended to manage orders and track commissions, but after a negative reaction from representatives during a test run in Canada in 2013, it abandoned the project entirely. As its home market weakened, Avon moved its focus abroad. International expansion had begun as early as 1914 with entry into Canada, and continued into South America in the 1950s, followed by Europe and Japan in the 1960s.

In 2006, Avon became the first company granted a direct selling license in China after the government lifted a ban on the practice. By the early 2010s, North American sales were declining year after year, and the region accounted for less than fifteen percent of the company’s total revenue. The struggles took a severe toll on investor confidence. One hundred dollars invested in Avon in 2010 was worth only sixteen dollars by 2015.

In response, the company split itself in two. The North American business became New Avon, while the rest of the world operated under the original Avon Products, which retained a small stake in its American counterpart. In 2024, Avon Products, the international arm, filed for bankruptcy. The company pointed to external pressures such as the pandemic and the war between Russia and Ukraine, but the most immediate factor was a wave of litigation involving talc.

Talc, which is mined alongside asbestos, a known carcinogen, can become contaminated, and Avon had used it in face powders and other products. As of the bankruptcy filing, the company was facing over 380 talc-related lawsuits, costs that overwhelmed a business already weakened by decades of decline. The final, simplest explanation is that Avon had become outdated. The name, the methods, and the entire concept belonged to another era.

Even in the 1980s, as the company celebrated its hundredth anniversary, it was already struggling to stay relevant. Today, many younger consumers have never heard of the brand, and those who have rarely think of it as trendy. Nearly everything that once made Avon unique, the doorstep visit, the personal relationship with a local representative, the convenience of buying without traveling, has been superseded. The company could have adapted, investing more heavily in technology, changing its sales tactics, or pursuing more promising markets.

Instead, the world changed around it, and a company built on the realities of a century ago could not find its way in the new one.