FOR years Alice Mthini worked as a domestic servant. Becoming an “Avon lady” in 2009 changed everything. Discovering a talent for selling, she persuaded other ladies to part with 10,000 rand ($1,190) for Avon’s make up and fashion accessories in her first month. She now earns enough to send her children to a private school. She has bought herself a laptop and a car (although she still has to learn how to drive it). “Avon is my life,” she says.
Although bad management and poor investments caused Avon's share price to fall, in South Africa it is doing well.
“You go to a doctor’s room and everyone has a brochure,” says Eunice Maseko, another of Avon’s many ladies in South Africa. “You start to think, where am I going to sell?” she laughs.
The trick for direct-sales companies such as Avon is not getting people to buy your products, but getting people to sell them. That may be easier in a country where more than a quarter of women are unemployed and formal jobs are scarce, even for educated job seekers.
Avon does not demand any formal qualifications; only a warm smile and a start-up fee of 75 rand. The firm has been operating in South Africa since 1996. In 2011 its sales in South Africa increased 29%, whereas its global sales grew 1%.
Researchers at Oxford University recently published a three-year study of Avon ladies in South Africa. They found that their incomes were above average for black women in their communities, and close to that of an average black South African man.
In rural areas, where many roads have no names and houses no numbers, Avon delivers merchandise to post offices so that reps can pick them up. Where there is no bank nearby, Avon organizes payment through the post office or a big retailer. Avon's rating system takes account of small indices of permanence and responsibility, such as a mobile phone number or a formal address.
Linda Scott, one of the Oxford project’s leaders, says that reps spoke of Avon in semi-religious terms, using words like “salvation”. In South Africa, it seems, lipstick changes lives.
adapted from The Economist
