Avon Resents Its Customers

Avon Calling!

Avon Products

The History

Avon Products, Inc. may be the world’s most famous MLM (multi-level marketing). It is an international company that sells personal care products like perfume, antiperspirant, body lotion, and many other products. Historically, it has relied on door-to-door sales with “Avon Ladies” who would bring catalogs and tester bottles and mini cosmetics with them so they could color swatch and help you find “the perfect shade”.

“It is the fourteenth-largest beauty company and, with 6.4 million representatives, is the second largest multi-level marketing company in the world (after Amway).”1 Representatives are what they call their sellers. The idea behind all MLM companies is that you don’t make money selling products to people. You make money by having a downline. The more people you recruit to the company the more money you make because you get a small percentage of their sales. The problem with MLM companies frequently is saturation. When you begin recruiting more people to the company, they’re also attempting to sell products and also attempting to recruit a downline. This creates a sort of bottleneck effect where, sometimes, whole offices or workplaces become full of Avon representatives and no one is selling to anyone else. The company, however, continues to make big bucks because each representative is required to maintain a “sales kit”. That is to say, for every season you’re required to invest a few hundred dollars to obtain the newest products Avon wants you to push to potential customers. You’re supposed to use the products and if someone asks “what is that wonderful perfume you’re wearing” you are generating an opportunity to sell to that person.

MLMs have faced a great deal of backlash in the past for their unethical practices. Namely, their often hypocritical statements of wanting to support women, provide mothers and caretakers and traditional homemakers a flexible job with “steady income” that allows them to balance family and career. They promise that if you work hard and follow their bootstraps narrative that you, too, could earn that pink range rover or luxury vacation to Bali. But the reality is nearly no one ever achieves this goal.

The American Federal Trade Commission has broken down on their website in a chart what losses look like for different types of businesses. Let me break it down for you here.

Figure 1 FTC Chart for losses across various income options

As you can see from their chart, you have considerably better odds of making a profit while gambling away your life savings at Ceasar’s Palace in roulette (a game of chance) than joining an MLM. I want you to keep this information in mind as I tell you the rest of this wild ride I recently experienced.

Avon Resents You

Do you like Avon products? Many of us grew up with parents who were avid Avon fans. Sweet Honesty was one of their first and has been one of their most enduring fragrances. It now comes in multiple forms in addition to a body spray and perfume fragrance. It can be found in body lotion, antiperspirant, and even body washes. It has a delightful powdery scent that is classic, vintage, and yet still relevant. Trust me, I’m one of the first people to wish that Avon wasn’t so dang good at making fragrances.

When I was in high school I started wearing Imari, the classic Imari. My mom bought a lot of Avon products from a coworker who was always selling. She would put in gigantic orders because it was often cheaper to do so and then she would share with me, also a lover of fragrances and cosmetics. Imari was my first fragrance love. It smelled amazing on me. And throughout the next 25 years I fell in love with many of their other fragrances: Amour, Today, Femme, Imari Seduction, Haiku, Haiku Kyoto Flower, Haiku Reflection. Bath & Body Works could never compare in the depth, complexity, and longevity of scent. (I dislike Avon as an MLM but kudos to the lab and designers who develop the fragrances.)

As an adult woman I almost exclusively wear Avon fragrances. There are few others that smell as good and last as long for the money spent. I have designer fragrances and they are great, too, but Avon keeps up. And for a fraction of the price. I started my higher paying career in 2014. I began putting in larger orders, like my mother used to, so I could also share with her. I first used a coworker at my first job who had just begun selling Avon and was finding it very difficult to make sales, especially in enough quantity to make buying the kit worth it. (To make a profit you have to somehow make more than $400 in sales because the kit costs several hundred dollars depending on which one you order. And, of course, they encourage you to order a larger range of products to reach as many customers as possible. And, of course, the market had been saturated by then and she had convinced herself it was just to buy for herself and maybe sell off the things she didn’t like. Except no one was biting.)

I bought a lot. And in about 5–6 years, I put in another order. That was close to 2020. The pandemic had not yet started and I got another big order of, mostly, fragrances and split some with my mom. I know the ones she likes and the general fragrance profiles to look at for her to feel confident being adventurous in untested, untried fragrances.

This year, I was met with a very different customer experience. I had put in an order of several fragrances. Every time I go to order from Avon I am disappointed at many of my favorite fragrances that have been discontinued and are no longer available. As a result, I have a tendency to buy multiples of each one. And many antiperspirants. They work, but they are small. But also, they are affordable.

And it was wild. I mean absolutely wild. I put my first order in and it was largely new fragrances that I had never tried before. But I noticed the fragrance page was looking really sparse. And I understand that Avon has been facing declining business. In 2020, they filed for bankruptcy after a fatal blow when they were exposed for putting talc in their products, and it was linked to cancer. But it was only the final blow after years of decline. “…It appears Avon failed to maximise this opportunity. Instead of innovating, the company clung to outdated practices and seemed to resist the changes needed to stay relevant in a rapidly evolving market. This has left Avon vulnerable to the very disruptions it could have led.” 3 Avon clung to old strategies instead of joining the computer age. My personal suspicion is that Avon does not see you, the end customer, as being their money-making strategy. Their predatory business model seeks to take money from the representatives that they lie to.

So, when I put in my second order to order duplicates of all my old favorites before they get gone and Avon goes under as a company that is most assuredly going to suffer in the 2025 economic collapse, I should not have been surprised to receive an aggressive phone call. Her name was Josette and she was from Avon’s sales department. She left a message and I called her back, fairly sure this was a scam. But it was not. She did not ask me for information. She asked, “Did you intend to order this much product?” I said that I did. She responded in a very hostile tone, “Are you selling them on Amazon? Because that is against our policies and we do not allow it.” I was confused because I have never heard of a business attempting to control products once they had been sold to customers. I can only imagine if Walmart called me up to berate me for letting my apples spoil or for selling the brownie mix I used to make brownies at a bake sale. But, alas, I was not selling them on Amazon. I was simply collecting and I explained to her as much. I told her that I collect and I buy for me and my mom. She insisted again that it is against their sales policy and that this was too much product. I should note that nowhere on their website under sales policy does it state a maximum amount of products you are allowed to buy or a maximum dollar amount you are allowed to spend on the website.4 But also, if this was something they were concerned about, why not have your website cap the amount you can have in your cart? Why allow me to put in these orders and receive payment for them in full?

Josette informed me that if I were to ever do this again they would cancel my order and I would not receive the products. I had been threatened. For shopping at Avon and spending large sums of money. And accused of being a reseller as though that is criminal. (I have no idea if it is or isn’t because I do not resell. I have a wall full of fragrances that I have curated and many are no longer made, including Chanel products.) I was gob smacked. Never in my life have I heard of a customer being threatened for spending money. She said she would fulfill the first order. The second order remains unfulfilled (but they have most certainly removed the money from my bank account as of right now).

I contacted their customer service email and sent them an explanation. The same one I have given here and stating that I had to admit that it almost felt like a scam. The email I received in return was just as outlandish and bizarre. It is as follows.

*Dear ****,

Thank you for contacting Avon! I’m happy to address your concerns today.

To begin, thank you for your interest in our products! We are sorry for the inconvenience that you have had with the quantities of the items for your orders. Thank you for checking the information.

We appreciate that you took the time to share your comments with us. Please know that every interaction is recorded, and we will review it for you.

Next, we are sorry for the confusion in ordering your products, we would need to have a reason to order a large quantity of an item to avoid canceling your orders. To avoid having issues with the quantity of the items that you would like to order, we suggest to become an Avon Ambassador.

Please follow the steps below to become an Avon Ambassador for free from your customer account:

1. Please click on “Become An Ambassador” At the top of your screen.
2. Throughout the page click on the “Sign Up Now” Option, it will take you to the enrollment page.

You can also click on the following link to start the process to become an Avon Ambassador: https://www.avon.com/becomearep

In closing, if you have any other questions, you can reply to this message, or you may give us a call at this phone number 1–800–500-AVON (2866), and a Customer Service Specialist will be glad to assist you. Remember, we are available Monday through Friday from 8:00 a.m. to 8:00 p.m. EST.

Thank you for being a valued Avon customer! We hope this information was helpful.

Sincerely,

Carlos P. AVON Care Center*

I’m still shocked every time I read this. Their response was to suggest that I become a victim of an MLM. Again, why am I surprised at all about this? I suppose I believed the brand to have more customer service integrity than that. Why is this a hidden policy? Why assume that large quantities are automatically to the level of needing hostile and being treated like a criminal? Especially if they looked up my history and realized it was about every 5 years. If this was, in fact, an Amazon business it would be a terrible one.

My email in response was firm in stating that I had no interest in being an Avon ambassador (no longer a representative). I once again explained that I simply collect and buy for yet another collector, my mother, who is not technologically savvy enough to handle online ordering herself. Again, the vibe I’m getting is that Avon does not want to sell to YOU. They want you to become a downline in the company and lose your money at a steady rate that benefits the company. It should be noted that after bankruptcy the company has exchanged hands a couple times and each time it has not been much of an improvement. The quality of fragrances has declined (as I have some of my much older Imari in the fully red coated bottle vs the smaller, cheaper clear glass bottles and they are not the same). I asked them if they were going to fulfill my second order or not and that after that I will not be buying from Avon again so it will not be a problem that we have to address any more.

Avon Customer Service had yet more to say to me. They are convinced that I sell online and seem that they will not be told otherwise. In their eyes I am a liar and a fake. Part of their response, the most relevant, is below.

First, we offer an apology for the trouble. Shoppers with bulk orders (large quantities of the same item) may have their order denied/canceled to prevent wholesale and exporting of Avon products abroad. This policy is in place due to the growing number of unauthorized methods of promotion and sale of Avon products on the Internet. It hurts our brand and the earnings opportunity for our Ambassadors.

And, yes, I do understand that. Though, it certainly makes me concerned that their response to that is to not actually go after the sellers they find online, or using any technique at all to track sellers who are unauthorized. I have concerns about the tactic of attempting to threaten, intimidate, and coerce online customers into becoming “ambassadors” for the company. If this is truly not allowed, why is it not listed on the webpage? (At least, not where it was easily located.) If you did not want customers putting in large orders, you have the ability to put code on your website that allows you to cap the quantity of items or the total cart limit. I know this because I also run a business selling personal care products that I hand make, and my website, which is much more rudimentary and I have much less resources, allows me to do these actions with the click of a button. If they truly wanted people to go through ambassadors instead of ordering online, then make that a part of the website. Why not integrate local ambassadors and give online customers the option to select which “local storefront” they can buy from? I’m not a web designer, though I have a very modest background in it. I feel surely their company has money and people power to make better choices and design options than what I could come up with in the few minutes I’m writing this. Why not make a code you have to have to order in bulk? Why not have verified customers? There are a ton of ways to handle this that is not threats and intimidation and force. But they are choosing low-hanging fruit.

The ultimate result here is that I have every intention of following through with my promise that I will not order from Avon again and so this will not be a worry for them or myself again. And that includes ambassadors. (The Avon subreddit is full of people who paid ambassadors for their products who never received them so they are not always as reliable as direct sales from the Avon website, too. And that is always something to keep in mind.)

Avon doesn’t like their customers and it is painfully apparent in how they have handled this issue.

Sources

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avon_Products

2. Figure 1: https://www.ftc.gov/sites/default/files/documents/public_comments/trade-regulation-rule-disclosure-requirements-and-prohibitions-concerning-business-opportunities-ftc.r511993-00004%C2%A0/00004-57286.pdf

3. https://www.forbes.com/sites/katehardcastle/2024/08/14/ding-dong-avons-calling-the-rise-and-fall-of-the-original-side-hustle/

4. https://www.avon.com/information/shopping-information.html