AVON

CEO Andrea Jung wants to sell more than makeup--and not just door-to-door.

It's 8:30 on a Sunday evening in summer. Outside the Thomas & Mack Center

in Las Vegas, where temperatures have hovered around 110F all weekend,

the desert heat is still oppressive. Inside is another matter. The air-conditioning

has made for a chilly stage as Andrea Jung waits in the wings to address

the biggest crowd she has ever faced. And Jung herself couldn't be more

cool and composed. In her red floor-length ball gown with spaghetti straps

and white shoes with sharp-pointed toes, Jung, at 41, looks more like a

movie star than the CEO of a $5.3 billion company. As she strides onto

the stage, she is met by an explosion of applause from some 13,000 mostly

forty- and fifty-something Avon women reps who have traveled to Las Vegas

from all across the U.S. to see Avon's new product lines, listen to Engelbert

Humperdinck, applaud Suzanne Somers' keynote speech, and do aerobics with

Richard Simmons to songs like Breaking Up is Hard to Do. The contrast is

striking: the svelte, fashionable, Ivy League-educated, New York fast-tracker

preaching to the mostly Middle American moms and grandmas whose fashion

tastes lean toward slacks for dressy occasions and sweat suits and sneakers

Still, with a mike in her hand and giant TV screens in the background

. . .
ver. That's good money for very little work. And it's also good business for Avon. Today, most reps still fill out 40-page paper order forms in No. 2 pencil and send them in by mail or fax. The cost of processing that order is 90 cents. On the Web, it's 30 cents. Says Chief Operating Officer Susan Kropf: ``Anything we can get off of paper has a significant cost advantage to us.'' Unfortunately for Jung, Avon is getting a late start. Back in 1997, the company put up an early but basic Web site that offered only a small fraction of its products for sale. Management consciously downplayed the Net's role to avoid a backlash from reps. But as the importance of the Web became more obvious, it was clear that tack wouldn't work for long. But what would? The internal struggle over Net strategy dragged out over three long years and cost Avon its early online lead. Now, small upstarts like Eve.com are running away with the lion's share of the nearly $1 billion online beauty-products business. While executives dawdled, reps, meanwhile, reacted with outrage last year when the company took the mild step of printing its Web address on catalogs. Many simply covered it with their own stickers and forced the company to quick
. . .

Some common words found in the essay are:
Jung Avon, Susan Babinsky, START Jung, Disney Co, Andrea Jung, James Preston, Winchester NH, Brenda Barnes, Kline Co, Avon Jung, avon reps, sales reps, las vegas, avon rep, web site, neiman marcus, avon catalog, avon ladies, andrea jung, latin america, story avon calling, magnin neiman marcus, independent sales reps, giorgio beverly hills, chief operating officer,
Approximate Word count = 3523
Approximate Pages = 14 (250 words per page)

More Essays on AVON