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Ding Dong! Avon Calling!

Author: Katina Manko

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-06-04

Total Pages: 336

ISBN-13: 0190499842

The Avon Lady acquired iconic status in twentieth century American culture. This first history of Avon tells the story of a direct sales company that was both a giant in its industry and a kitchen-table entrepreneurial venture. With their distinctive greeting at the homes across the country--Ding Dong! Avon Calling!--sales ladies brought door-to-door sales of makeup, perfume, and other products to American women beginning in 1886. Working for the company enabled women to earn money on the side and even become financially independent in a respectable profession while selling Avon's wares to friends, family, and neighborhood networks. Ding Dong! Avon Calling! is the story of women and entrepreneurship, and of an innovative corporation largely managed by men that empowered women to exploit networks of other women and their community for profit. Founded in the late nineteenth century, Avon grew into a massive international direct sales company in which millions of "ambassadors of beauty" sat in their customers' living rooms with a sample case, catalogue, and a conversational sales pitch. Avon was unique in American business history for its reliance on women as representatives, promising them not just sales positions, but a chance to have a business of their own. Being an Avon Lady avoided the stigma that was often attached to middle-class women's work outside the home and enabled women to maintain the delicate balance of work and family. Drawing for the first time on company records she helped acquire for archives, Katina Manko illuminates Avon's inner workings, uncovers the lives of its representatives, and shows how women slowly rose into the company's middle and upper management. Avon called itself "The Company for Women" and championed its high flyers, but its higher echelons remained dominated by men well into the 1990s. Avon is more than perfumes and toiletries, but a brand built on women knocking on doors and chatting up neighbors. It thrived for more than a century through the deceptively simple technique of women directly selling beauty to women at home.

Ding Dong! Avon Calling!

Author: Katina Manko

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0190499826

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This first history of Avon traces the direct sales company's growth from its earliest days into an international corporation that operates in more than 60 countries and has had more than 4 million female representatives.

Terribly Strange and Wonderfully Real

Author: Laurie Levy

Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform

Published: 2016-05-09

Total Pages: 244

ISBN-13: 9781530103201

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In 1967, she sang along with Paul McCartney, wondering what life would be like when she turned sixty-four. Now, at age seventy, Laurie Levy doesn't listen to that song anymore. After all, she's far from the old fogey described in the Beatles' lyrics. Following a lifetime of experience, she remains an educator, innovator, and advocate for a variety of causes. But after seventy years of experience on this earth, she knows one thing for sure: The journey is terribly strange-and often far too real. In Levy's debut collection of essays, you'll find a diverse and captivating selection of insights and personal experiences on everything from being a part of the baby boom generation to fighting for developmentally appropriate educational practices to advocating for children with special needs to coping with the loss of loved ones. Heartfelt and often humorous, these glimpses at a lifetime of experience incorporate issues we can all relate to-the process of growing older, learning to forgive, screwing up, and surviving all the same. Terribly Strange and Wonderfully Real is a portrait of the educator and advocate as a woman, with a decidedly human touch that will appeal to readers regardless of gender or generation.

Avon

Author: Laura Klepacki

Publisher: John Wiley & Sons

Published: 2010-12-07

Total Pages: 297

ISBN-13: 1118040384

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A Winning Formula for Selling to Women Around the World Avon has come a long way since handing out its first perfume sample back in 1886. The company, long famous for ringing customer doorbells, is now the world's largest direct sales organization—with almost five million representatives in more than 140 countries. AVON: Building the World's Premier Company for Women is the first book ever to show how this cosmetics juggernaut achieved such incredible success, while revealing secrets any business can use to effectively market products of all kinds—especially to women. Through this entertaining journey, you'll not only learn the colorful Avon story, but also see how every company, big or small, can benefit from its unique approach to sales and product development. "By providing women with an unlimited opportunity for career success, Avon harnessed the power of a committed sales force to win customers and grow the business. The company's success story is testimony to the importance of focusing on your core business while recognizing the changes taking place with your customers and the environment." —Mary Sammons, President and CEO, Rite Aid Corporation "The book is an excellent primer on how to successfully make alternative forms of distribution work." —Allen Burke, Director of Merchandising, QVC, Inc. "The author's incisive revelations . . . capture the extraordinary personalities and entrepreneurial strategies of one of America's most spellbinding success stories." —Annette Green, President Emeritus, The Fragrance Foundation

American Independent Inventors in an Era of Corporate R&D

Author: Eric S. Hintz

Publisher: MIT Press

Published: 2021-08-17

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 0262542587

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How America's individual inventors persisted alongside corporate R&D labs as an important source of inventions. During the nineteenth century, heroic individual inventors such as Thomas Edison and Alexander Graham Bell created entirely new industries while achieving widespread fame. However, by 1927, a New York Times editorial suggested that teams of corporate scientists at General Electric, AT&T, and DuPont had replaced the solitary "garret inventor" as the wellspring of invention. But these inventors never disappeared. In this book, Eric Hintz argues that lesser-known inventors such as Chester Carlson (Xerox photocopier), Samuel Ruben (Duracell batteries), and Earl Tupper (Tupperware) continued to develop important technologies throughout the twentieth century. Moreover, Hintz explains how independent inventors gradually fell from public view as corporate brands increasingly became associated with high-tech innovation. Focusing on the years from 1890 to 1950, Hintz documents how American independent inventors competed (and sometimes partnered) with their corporate rivals, adopted a variety of flexible commercialization strategies, established a series of short-lived professional groups, lobbied for fairer patent laws, and mobilized for two world wars. After 1950, the experiences of independent inventors generally mirrored the patterns of their predecessors, and they continued to be overshadowed during corporate R&D's postwar golden age. The independents enjoyed a resurgence, however, at the turn of the twenty-first century, as Apple's Steve Jobs and Shark Tank's Lori Greiner heralded a new generation of heroic inventor-entrepreneurs. By recovering the stories of a group once considered extinct, Hintz shows that independent inventors have long been—and remain—an important source of new technologies.

Mahjong

Author: Annelise Heinz

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2021-04-05

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 0190081813

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How has a game brought together Americans and defined separate ethnic communities? This book tells the first history of mahjong and its meaning in American culture. Click-click-click. The sound of mahjong tiles connects American expatriates in Shanghai, Jazz Age white Americans, urban Chinese Americans in the 1930s, incarcerated Japanese Americans in wartime, Jewish American suburban mothers, and Air Force officers' wives in the postwar era. Mahjong: A Chinese Game and the Making of Modern American Culture illustrates how the spaces between tiles and the moments between games have fostered distinct social cultures in the United States. This mass-produced game crossed the Pacific, creating waves of popularity over the twentieth century. Annelise Heinz narrates the history of this game to show how it has created a variety of meanings, among them American modernity, Chinese American heritage, and Jewish American women's culture. As it traveled from China to the United States and caught on with Hollywood starlets, high society, middle-class housewives, and immigrants alike, mahjong became a quintessentially American game. Heinz also reveals the ways in which women leveraged a game to gain access to respectable leisure. The result was the forging of friendships that lasted decades and the creation of organizations that raised funds for the war effort and philanthropy. No other game has signified both belonging and standing apart in American culture. Drawing on photographs, advertising, popular media, and dozens of oral histories, Heinz's rich and colorful account offers the first history of the wildly popular game of mahjong.

The Wasp Eater

Author: William Lychack

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

Published: 2005-11

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9780618618903

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Set in an old New England mill town in 1979, "The Wasp Eater" is the story of a nine-year-old boy's dream of reuniting his estranged parents, and is a haunting tale of characters caught in the crossfire of their desires and fears.

The Value of Risk

Author: Peter Borscheid

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2013-12

Total Pages: 497

ISBN-13: 0199689806

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This book explains how today's insurance industry developed and highlights the role of the reinsurance industry in spreading risks globally. The book examines the development of insurance markets and of the reinsurance industry in particular, and the history of Swiss Re, one of the leading reinsurance companies in the world.

Crap

Author: Wendy A. Woloson

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-10-05

Total Pages: 405

ISBN-13: 022666449X

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Crap. We all have it. Filling drawers. Overflowing bins and baskets. Proudly displayed or stuffed in boxes in basements and garages. Big and small. Metal, fabric, and a whole lot of plastic. So much crap. Abundant cheap stuff is about as American as it gets. And it turns out these seemingly unimportant consumer goods offer unique insights into ourselves—our values and our desires. In Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America, Wendy A. Woloson takes seriously the history of objects that are often cynically-made and easy to dismiss: things not made to last; things we don't really need; things we often don't even really want. Woloson does not mock these ordinary, everyday possessions but seeks to understand them as a way to understand aspects of ourselves, socially, culturally, and economically: Why do we—as individuals and as a culture—possess these things? Where do they come from? Why do we want them? And what is the true cost of owning them? Woloson tells the history of crap from the late eighteenth century up through today, exploring its many categories: gadgets, knickknacks, novelty goods, mass-produced collectibles, giftware, variety store merchandise. As Woloson shows, not all crap is crappy in the same way—bric-a-brac is crappy in a different way from, say, advertising giveaways, which are differently crappy from commemorative plates. Taking on the full brilliant and depressing array of crappy material goods, the book explores the overlooked corners of the American market and mindset, revealing the complexity of our relationship with commodity culture over time. By studying crap rather than finely made material objects, Woloson shows us a new way to truly understand ourselves, our national character, and our collective psyche. For all its problems, and despite its disposability, our crap is us.

The Inner Level

Author: Richard Wilkinson

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2020-01-21

Total Pages: 354

ISBN-13: 0525561242

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A groundbreaking investigation of how inequality infects our minds and gets under our skin Why are people more relaxed and at ease with each other in some countries than others? Why do we worry so much about what others think of us and often feel social life is a stressful performance? Why is mental illness three times as common in the USA as in Germany? Why is the American dream more of a reality in Denmark than the USA? What makes child well-being so much worse in some countries than others? As The Inner Level demonstrates, the answer to all these is inequality. In The Spirit Level Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett put inequality at the center of public debate by showing conclusively that less equal societies fare worse than more equal ones across everything from education to life expectancy. The Inner Level now explains how inequality affects us individually, altering how we think, feel and behave. It sets out the overwhelming evidence that material inequities have powerful psychological effects: when the gap between rich and poor increases, so does the tendency to define and value ourselves and others in terms of superiority and inferiority. A deep well of data and analysis is drawn upon to empirically show, for example, that low social status leads to elevated levels of stress hormones, and how rates of anxiety, depression and addictions are intimately related to the inequality which makes that status paramount. Wilkinson and Pickett describe how these responses to hierarchies evolved, and why the impacts of inequality on us are so severe. In doing so, they challenge the conception that humans are inescapably competitive and self-interested. They undermine, too, the idea that inequality is the product of "natural" differences in individual ability. This book draws together many of the most urgent problems facing societies today, but it is not just an index of our ills. It demonstrates that societies based on fundamental equalities, sharing and reciprocity generate much higher levels of well-being, and lays out the path towards them.