Avon Products

Avon is one of the world's best-known direct-selling beauty companies, founded in 1886 and built on the Avon Lady — the representative selling cosmetics, skincare and fragrance person to person. Avon Products, Inc. was a New York Stock Exchange company (symbol AVP) for decades, but it no longer exists in that form: the business split in 2016, the North American operations were sold to LG Household & Health Care in 2019, and Natura &Co acquired Avon Products' international business in January 2020. Avon Products, Inc. later filed for Chapter 11 in 2024 as part of a further restructuring of the international business.

Company Profile

The 2016 split is the key event. Weak North American performance led Avon to separate the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico into New Avon LLC, backed by Cerberus Capital, while Avon Products kept the international business. LG Household & Health Care bought New Avon outright in 2019, and Natura — the Brazilian group behind Natura, The Body Shop and Aesop — combined with the rest of Avon in 2020, creating one of the world's largest pure-play beauty groups.

Avon's model made it an apparel-industry neighbour rather than a clothing company: its representatives sold beauty, fragrance, jewellery and fashion accessories directly to customers, at a scale few retailers matched. The dated summaries in this section record the unified listed company before the split — a business with millions of representatives and sales in more than 100 countries.

The range behind the name is cosmetics, skincare, fragrance, jewellery and fashion accessories. Its customers are customers buying person-to-person from millions of independent representatives. That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Avon Products in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Avon Products with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

For current dealings, the snapshot at the top of this page is the place to start: it gives the company's present status — Acquired — international business acquired by Natura &Co in 2020; North American business owned by LG Household & Health Care since 2019 — and links to the official website, which is where current product ranges, store information and investor or corporate contacts are maintained. Anything in the dated summaries that conflicts with the snapshot should be read as the older position: summaries describe the year they are dated, and the snapshot describes the company as it stands now.

The stock record matters because Avon Products sat at a point where fashion meets the public markets: investors following the shares were really following the economics of direct selling. The dated company summaries gathered in this section were written for that audience, recording store counts, sales descriptions and company statements as they stood at the time. Read together with the current status above, they show both halves of the story — the business as it presented itself in its listed years, and what became of it afterwards.