Cover Story : AVON: THE NEW CALLING
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
projecting her image, Jung has no problem firing up the crowd. ``Avon is
first and foremost about you,'' she proclaims. ``I stand here before you
and promise you that that will never change.'' She vows that Avon Products
Inc. can be as big in the women's beauty business as Walt Disney Co. is
in entertainment. She confides her proudest moment: Jung, the daughter
of Chinese immigrants, traveled to China last year for the first time in
her life to meet and speak to women in a Chinese factory. ``We will change
the...