The new Avon ladies

At just before 5 o’clock on a Monday evening, 17-year-old Megan Ver Steeg, a perky blond with a sparkly pink pedicure, is perched on the edge of her living room couch anxiously awaiting her guests. The candles are lit, a maroon-and-pink striped ribbon is tied smartly around her waist in place of a belt, and her parents’ old card table has been transformed into a shimmering display of beauty products.

“I’m featuring a new product, Hollywood Pink, so I went with a Golden Globes theme,” Ver Steeg says, referencing the awards ceremony of the night before. She covered the table with black plastic and taped gold fringe around the edges. She wound a string of white lights around the samples of De-Luscious Plumping Lip Pots, Electro-Lights Lip Vitagleam, Scanda-Lash Mascara, Starliner Hook Up Eye Glimmer and five different lines of fancifully titled lip glosses. On top, she sprinkled a handful of gold star confetti.

Soon the guests begin to arrive at Ver Steeg’s family home in Artesia -- friends of hers from Valley Christian, the private school where she is in her junior year, as well as friends of her younger sisters, Emily, 15, and Olivia, 12. “Oooh! Megan, can I smell?” asks a blond girl with a fuchsia sweater and a brand-new promise ring on her finger, walking directly to the display and taking a whiff of the fruit-flavored lip glosses.

“Did you just get your eyebrows done?” Emily Ver Steeg asks a friend. “They were so bad you could tell?” the other girl squeals. Within 15 minutes the living room becomes a sea of blond hair and flip-flops. The girls gather around the table testing lip liner shades on their hands, experimenting with eye shadow combinations and asking Megan whether she thinks the light or dark blush would best complement their complexion.

This was Ver Steeg’s third “social beauty party” -- a sort of Tupperware party for the belly-baring set -- where young women get together to purchase products by Mark, a new line from Avon. Although the Avon brand is marketed squarely to middle-class women between 25 and 55, the company hopes that Mark, with its multitude of sparkly eye shadows and eyeliners and clever packaging, will be bought and sold by their daughters and nieces, women between 16 and 24. The line was launched in August and represents the first time in Avon’s 118-year history that it has actively ventured into the teen market.

“We had two clear objectives with the Mark line: to bring new customers to the world of Avon and to pass the baton to a new generation of sellers,” says Deborah Fine, president of Avon Future, the business unit responsible for launching Mark.

Mark is sold the same way Avon is, though the sales structure has been tweaked to fit more comfortably into a teenager’s lifestyle. The start-up fee is the same, $10, but the Internet plays a central role. Mark reps do all their ordering online, and a full list of products also is available on Mark’s pink and flowery girlie website.

There is a lot of competition for the allowance and after-school job money of the roughly 17 million women in the United States who are in Mark’s target age group, but Avon has high hopes. In 2004, the line’s first full year of business, Avon expects Mark to make $100 million in sales. And because of the direct sales model, Mark can be sold in places its competitors can only dream of reaching -- high school hallways, college classes and sleepover parties.

Thanks to a sizable army of loyal Avon representatives (650,000 strong in the United States) and a comprehensive marketing campaign that includes a TV spot by Wes Anderson (director of “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums”) and advertisements in Allure and Cosmopolitan, 20,000 women who had never worked for Avon signed up to sell the Mark line, and an estimated 10 million women have already flipped through copies of the catalog. Mark also has been well received in the tastemaking world of women’s magazines.

“I really, really like Mark,” says Erin Flaherty, beauty editor of Jane magazine. “Their stuff is really cute and modern and fun to use. We’ve run them in the magazine several times, so that’s my stamp of approval.”

Ver Steeg, who has been a Mark representative since late August, was among the first teenagers to sign on to the campaign. “My aunt got a [Mark] catalog from a lady in my church who sells Avon,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in hair and makeup and stuff, so when she saw it, she was like, ‘Hey, that’s totally you.’ ”

Not that she was interested in selling Avon herself. Ever. “I had a couple of things from Avon, but it feels so like Mom and Grandma makeup,” she says. “I don’t think I would have ever sold Avon. Unless I got really old all of a sudden.”

Better than baby-sitting

Mark’s first television advertisement aired on the NBC and MTV networks late last summer. As the camera pans across a series of brightly colored rooms, a series of young women talk about what Mark has done for them. “Mark helped put me through college and taught me about body shimmer,” says a white girl with blond hair in what appears to be a library. “Mark introduced me to my old best friend Sarah, who introduced me to my new best friend, Kristin,” says a Latina about to brush her teeth in a pink bathroom. “Mark improved my social life and made my nails more beautiful,” says an African American girl with a sizable Afro. “I met Mark in the girls’ bathroom,” says another young woman about to do her laundry. There isn’t a single doorbell in it.

The Avon brand has never quite been able to shake the kitschy image of the cheerful blond suburbanite in the once-ubiquitous “Ding-dong, Avon calling” television ads. (The campaign, which appeared from 1953 to the mid-1960s, was one of the longest-running in ad history.) But despite the lingering stereotype, Avon still is big business. The company is No. 280 on the Fortune 500 list, sales increased almost as much in metro L.A. last year as they did in rural Iowa, and Avon has stretched its well-groomed tentacles into all corners of the world. There are 4.4 million Avon sales representatives working in 143 countries, including South Korea, Uruguay, Malaysia and Lithuania. There are even women who risk their lives to sell Avon in the Amazon jungle.

The decision to start recruiting younger women to sell for Avon was not a desperate attempt to revitalize the company or to reposition an aging brand. Although sales fell in the early 1990s because of management problems, the company has been doing a robust business in recent years. Avon’s net sales have been steadily increasing, from $5.3 billion in 1999 to $6.8 billion in 2003, and in the United States alone the number of sales representatives increased 9.5% last year.

Oddly enough, Avon’s success is partly due to the slump in the economy. At a time when many women have lost their jobs or need extra money, direct sales is an inviting option.

Angela Escoto, 16, a Mark representative from Bellflower, tried and failed to get a job at a mall during the holiday season. “Even at Christmas nobody would hire me,” she says. “It’s so competitive out there.”

To make money to pay for presents, Escoto, who has been selling Mark since September, held her first social beauty party in early December. She says she is fortunate to have a large family with a lot of women, so most of the 10 people present were relatives. “I think it’s more comfortable selling to your family because you can tell them you need the money right now,” she says. “With friends it’s more awkward. And my family always buys a lot. I have one aunt, and her last order was $200.” The average price of an item in the Mark makeup line is about $8.50, and most of the shadows and lip glosses sell for $4 to $6, so that’s a lot of makeup.

Ver Steeg estimates she has made $1,400 selling Mark products to friends and family. The 16 girls who attended her third social beauty party bought at least two products each, and Ver Steeg’s net sales were just over $500, 40% of which ($200) she got to keep for herself. It’s more profitable than baby-sitting, but she admits she makes less money with Mark than she did waiting tables at Cortigiano, an Italian restaurant in Lakewood. “But there is so much drama that goes on at the restaurant, and selling Mark is so much easier,” she says. “People just come to you, tell you what they want, and they get it. They aren’t like, ‘This is too cold.’ ”

In between hosting parties, Ver Steeg does most of her selling at school, where she always keeps Mark catalogs and a few samples in her backpack. She uses the products herself, which she says is really her best advertisement. “People will be like, ‘Oh, I like your eye shadow,’ and I’m like, ‘Oh, it’s Mark, why don’t I show you what color it is?’ ” She places an order for the products on the Mark website almost every Thursday and usually averages about $400 in sales a month. “It keeps my car full of gas,” she says.

Contemporary image

Though Avon may seem passe to those unacquainted with the brand, those who have grown up with it don’t hold such stereotypes. Avon’s research has shown that 90% of the young women who signed up to sell Mark did so because of familiarity with the brand, and that the outdated Avon Lady in the old advertisements has been replaced by images of their very contemporary mothers, aunts and neighbors.

“My grandma would sometimes bring home Avon books and there was an Avon Lady who lived behind me, so I definitely knew about the brand,” says Arianna Merino, 19, a sophomore at Cerritos College and a Mark representative since September. “I know that some people think that the Avon Lady is like from the movies or something, just something they would make fun of, but I always liked everything I got from Avon.”

Merino first heard about Mark in August when logging onto her favorite website, www.makeupalley.com, an online community where makeup-obsessed users rate different products, ask and answer makeup questions, and swap lightly used products with one another. Avon has partnered with the website and runs ads and conducts market research through it.

Merino, who lives in Norwalk with her mother, hasn’t hosted her own social beauty party yet. She tried once, but the party kit that Mark sells -- $35 for samples, applicators, preprinted invitations and display ideas -- was so popular that it was sold out. Although she was disappointed, Merino says she has a lot of success selling at school.

“I sit in class and I see girls putting on lip gloss and I’ll say, ‘What is your favorite brand?’ and then ask them how much they spend. Then I hand them some samples or a flier or a magalog [a Mark magazine/catalog hybrid that’s heavy on the catalog] and tell them to look it over,” she says.

Merino, who has short curly hair and glasses, says selling Mark has helped her climb out of her shell. “I used to be really shy, but now I feel kind of empowered,” she says. “Sometimes I get a little nervous, but everybody has been so receptive. And it helps with the social thing because you have something to talk about.”

On average Merino makes $100 a month selling Mark, and most of the money goes back to makeup. “It’s funding my addiction,” she says.

Luvstruck

At Ver Steeg’s party, business is booming. Candice Grasmeyer, one of Ver Steeg’s oldest friends, who already owns four Mark eye shadows, two lip glosses and a concealer, puts in an order for a big set of brushes, Moose I Sheer Creamy Shadow and a Starliner in Goldcrush.

“Then I’ll get Luvstruck eye shadow and I have to stop,” she says. Twenty minutes later, she calls to Ver Steeg, who has moved on to customers across the room. “Can I get the Jet eyeliner? And I also want another eye shadow,” she says.