Avon Goes For A Younger Look

The fixture of door-to-door selling is turning to the internet to reach new customers

- Eric Pfanner

In 2016, with two young children and needing money for her law studies, Samantha Richard decided to become an Avon Lady. Trudging from home to home in the suburbs of London, struggling to sell lipstick and mascara, she lasted a day. “My anxiety couldn’t handle it,” says Richard, now 23. “I wasn’t ready to start knocking on strangers’ doors, so I thought there had to be a better way.”

It turned out there was. Richard began making Facebook Live videos offering beauty tips and directing customers to Avon Products Inc.’s nascent e-commerce platform. She added her own YouTube channel, which has grown to 2,900 subscribers, supplementing her appearances with Instagram posts and tweets. Now she sells Avon goods to customers from Yorkshire in England’s north to Cornwall in the far southwest—most of whom she’s never met.

The 132-year-old company needs more sales representatives like Richard to turn around a business that’s fallen on hard times. Across the U.S. and other developed economies, door-to-door vendors who once hawked everything from makeup to encyclopedias are switching to other lines of work. They’ve fallen victim to the spread of Walmart Inc. and other big-box stores, the rise of Amazon.com Inc., and the increase in two-career households—which means there’s no one home to answer the bell.