Beauty on your doorstep

In today’s competitive marketing world, promotional labels such as “New!”, “Improved!” and “Repackaged!” are thrown around ad nauseum. Store shelves, corporate advertising campaigns and digital billboards are littered with products and concepts dressed with beguiling buzzwords. In most cases, the showy sizzle will fizzle as the item fails to live up to its promotional hype.

Not so with Mary Lisa Gavenas’ Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay. Billed as “the definitive history of a peculiarly American industry,” the author’s second non-fiction book exceeds the public relations “definitive” descriptor.

Selling Opportunity is an authoritative, indisputable, complete yet very readable history of the direct-sales industry in the U.S. — and the entrepreneurs, such as cosmetics queen Mary Kay Ash of Mary Kay Cosmetics, who flourished and flopped within its multi-level marketing sales structure.

Gavenas, a Boston-based journalist and entrepreneurship historian, encountered Mary Kay 25 years ago while researching her first book, 2002’s Color Stories: Behind the Scenes of America’s Billion-Dollar Beauty Industry. Ash, she writes, “had lived a life intertwined with history that had largely been ignored… I wanted to let her life be defined by its intersection with the lives around her. Mary Kay had a story begging to be written.”

Gavenas spent more than 15 years transcribing hundreds of interviews to bring the riveting story of America’s direct selling industry — and the sociological times that drove it — to light. How lucky for history buffs.

Texas-born Mary Kathlyn Wagner (later known as Mary Kay Ash, after being divorced three times and widowed twice) was born in 1918. The youngest of four children, her youth was spent juggling school, housework and taking care of her ailing father, while her mother worked 15-hour days at a greasy spoon restaurant. By age 16, Mary Kay had married a 19-year-old guitarist with no skills and fewer prospects; by age 18, she was a mother of two, and a grandmother by age 34.

But not even the ever-optimistic Mary Kay could have predicted that at the time of her death in 2001 at age 83, she’d leave a fortune of US$98 million, or that Mary Kay Cosmetics, her namesake company, had more than US$1.2 billion in sales that year and a sales force of more than 800,000 people in three dozen countries. Today, Mary Kay Cosmetics is one of the world’s largest privately held direct sellers of skin care-beauty products.

Gavenas skilfully unmasks life as door-to-door seller in the early 1930s. The economic impact of the Great Depression meant times were tough, money was scarce and good-paying jobs were even scarcer. Folks took any opportunity to bring more moolah into a household, and direct selling allowed women to earn money while still caretaking their kids and cleaning house. If that meant flogging goods from Bibles, cleaning supplies, perfumes and encyclopedias to pots, pans, tools, soaps and underwear, so be it.

Direct-to-buyer sales had a long tradition in America with companies including Real Silk, JR Watkins, California Perfume Company (later Avon) and Fuller Brush already well established. While the image of direct sellers had improved somewhat when Ash started selling Cloverine Salve in the early ’30s, its workforce hadn’t changed much. Of its quarter-million “authorized agents,” 60 per cent of Cloverine sellers were kids aged eight to 14.

Direct sales fuelled Ash’s very competitive spirit, and selling different types of products taught her lessons that became “best practice” cornerstones to the cosmetics company she would start in 1963 at age 45. Get a good product that can be sold using the “house party model” of companies like Stanley and Tupperware, she believed. Hire representatives and praise them constantly. Make sure buyers leave with their purchase — no waiting. Add a “You can do it!” mantra and the sales would take care of themselves, she predicted.

And they did. Beauty by Mary Kay (later renamed Mary Kay Cosmetics) turned a profit in its first year; almost US$1 million of product was sold by the end of its second year. Ash became the first woman to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange when she took Mary Kay Cosmetics public in 1968 (it returned to private family ownership in 1985). Accolades and awards followed.

But Ash took corporate hoopla to another level when she created Mary Kay’s annual Seminar gathering in 1964. What began as a weekend salesforce conference morphed into a four-day revival, says Gavenas, adding that last year’s Seminar had 20,000 consultants in attendance. Consultants, who pay their own way to be there, are recognized for achieving sales and recruitment milestones. Diamond jewelry, swanky vacations and pink cars are spoils for the highest achievers.

Gavenas has skilfully unmasked the human and business sides of the direct sales world with Selling Opportunities.

While a screenplay would yield a great TV series, CBS-TV did attempt a Mary Kay biopic in the fall of 2002, a year after Ash’s death.The Winnipeg-shot Hell on Heels: The Battle of Mary Kay starred Shirley MacLaine as the pink-loving, bouffant quaffed skin-care queen; she earned a Golden Globe nod for her performance, and still says that the role of Mary Kay was one of her favourites.

GC Cabana-Coldwell is a Winnipeg-based freelance writer who tried direct selling in the early ‘80s. It was a short-lived experiment. While she never mastered how to close a sale, she did have better skin.