A Winning Formula for Selling to Women Around the World Avon has come a long way since handing out its first perfume sample back in 1886. The company, long famous for ringing customer doorbells, is now the world's largest direct sales organization—with almost five million representatives in more than 140 countries. AVON: Building the World's Premier Company for Women is the first book ever to show how this cosmetics juggernaut achieved such incredible success, while revealing secrets any business can use to effectively market products of all kinds—especially to women. Through this entertaining journey, you'll not only learn the colorful Avon story, but also see how every company, big or small, can benefit from its unique approach to sales and product development. "By providing women with an unlimited opportunity for career success, Avon harnessed the power of a committed sales force to win customers and grow the business. The company's success story is testimony to the importance of focusing on your core business while recognizing the changes taking place with your customers and the environment." —Mary Sammons, President and CEO, Rite Aid Corporation "The book is an excellent primer on how to successfully make alternative forms of distribution work." —Allen Burke, Director of Merchandising, QVC, Inc. "The author's incisive revelations . . . capture the extraordinary personalities and entrepreneurial strategies of one of America's most spellbinding success stories." —Annette Green, President Emeritus, The Fragrance Foundation

The Avon Lady acquired iconic status in twentieth century American culture. This first history of Avon tells the story of a direct sales company that was both a giant in its industry and a kitchen-table entrepreneurial venture. With their distinctive greeting at the homes across the country--Ding Dong! Avon Calling!--sales ladies brought door-to-door sales of makeup, perfume, and other products to American women beginning in 1886. Working for the company enabled women to earn money on the side and even become financially independent in a respectable profession while selling Avon's wares to friends, family, and neighborhood networks. Ding Dong! Avon Calling! is the story of women and entrepreneurship, and of an innovative corporation largely managed by men that empowered women to exploit networks of other women and their community for profit. Founded in the late nineteenth century, Avon grew into a massive international direct sales company in which millions of "ambassadors of beauty" sat in their customers' living rooms with a sample case, catalogue, and a conversational sales pitch. Avon was unique in American business history for its reliance on women as representatives, promising them not just sales positions, but a chance to have a business of their own. Being an Avon Lady avoided the stigma that was often attached to middle-class women's work outside the home and enabled women to maintain the delicate balance of work and family. Drawing for the first time on company records she helped acquire for archives, Katina Manko illuminates Avon's inner workings, uncovers the lives of its representatives, and shows how women slowly rose into the company's middle and upper management. Avon called itself "The Company for Women" and championed its high flyers, but its higher echelons remained dominated by men well into the 1990s. Avon is more than perfumes and toiletries, but a brand built on women knocking on doors and chatting up neighbors. It thrived for more than a century through the deceptively simple technique of women directly selling beauty to women at home.

Two women. Five centuries apart. One life-changing secret about to be unearthed...

Once known as Northington, a northern parish of Farmington, Avon was incorporated in 1830 after the construction of the Farmington Canal. Located at the juncture of the Albany Turnpike, the Farmington Canal, and later the Farmington Canal Railroad, Avon became a transportation and commercial center of considerable importance through the 19th century. Avon Historical Society board member Peter J. Wright, with an introduction from town historian Nora O. Howard, illustrates Avons past and present in vintage and contemporary images.

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A selection of four stories of romance, passion, and the supernatural includes tales of a vampire and a governess, an altruistic witch, and a ghostly protector

"Superb. Vetter's incisive introduction offers one of the first approaches to theorizing women's late modernist literary production as advancing specifically hybrid works located at the juncture of personal, national, and nationalist concerns."--Cynthia Hogue, coeditor of The Sword Went Out to Sea "This edition, with its finely written introduction and meticulous annotation, opens up new understandings of H.D., the major modernist writer, as she meditates, postwar, on the inner life of Shakespeare, the icon of English literature, and on the women missing from his plays. A beautiful and thoughtful book."--Jane Augustine, editor of The Gift and The Mystery H.D. called By Avon River "the first book that really made me happy." In this annotated edition, Lara Vetter argues that the volume represented a turning point in H.D.'s career, a major shift from lyric poetry to the experimental forms of writing that would dominate her later works. Near the end of World War II, after having remained in London throughout the Blitz, H.D. made a pilgrimage to Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare's birthplace. This experience resulted in a hybrid volume of poetry about The Tempest and prose about Shakespeare and his contemporaries. Featuring a tour-de-force introduction and extensive explanatory notes, this is the first edition of the work to appear since its original publication in 1949. Increasingly after the war, H.D. sought new forms of writing to express her persistent interests in the politics of gender and in issues of nationhood and home. By Avon River was one of her only postwar works to cross over to mainstream audiences, and, as such, is a welcome addition to our understanding of this significant modernist writer.