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ASH, MARY KAY 1915?-

COSMETICS ENTERPRENEUR

Early Career

The founder of Mary Kay Cosmetics, Mary Kay Ash began her business career out of necessity. Divorced during World War II and raising three small children on her own, she soon moved from a secretarial position into sales with Stanley Home Products. In this new job she demonstrated Stanley's wares in people's homes. Although she enjoyed the work, she was not very successful. With the hope of improving her sales technique she attended the company's annual convention. At the meeting's awards ceremony, she saw the year's top saleswoman crowned queen of sales. Motivated by this coronation, Ash was the top seller the following year, but she was disappointed to discover her prize was an underwater flashlight. She remained among Stanley's best salespeople until she left in 1953 to take a better job at World Gift Company. She moved up rapidly in the home-accessory company to become an area manager and later the national training director. By 1963 she was making twenty-five thousand dollars per year and was happily remarried. But sexism within the company and an efficiency expert who told management that Ash had too much power led to her being transferred to a less important position. Unhappy with the new job, she retired.

Establishing the "Dream Company."

Retirement did not suit her, and she decided to write a book exclusively for women on the art of selling. As she prepared the manuscript, Ash outlined her ideal company. Such a firm would feature an outstanding product line, treat males and females equally, base promotion solely on merit, and reward outstanding work with valuable prizes. These ideas seemed sensible to her, and once she hit upon a product to market, she ventured out on her own. The product was a skin cream Ash had been buying from a cosmetologist she met at a Stanley Home Product party in the 1950s. When the cosmetologist died, she purchased the skin cream formula. With a cosmetics firm making her cream, she prepared to open a retail outlet, but then her husband died. Forced to rethink her situation, she turned to her twenty-year-old son to manage the financial side of the company while she oversaw its marketing. Founded in 1963 as Beauty by Mary Kay, the company's name was soon changed to Mary Kay Cosmetics.

The System

Built on the ideas she garnered from Stanley and World Gift, Mary Kay's line of cosmetics was sold by saleswomen called "beauty consultants" at house parties featuring a beauty program and makeup lessons. Unlike other sales operations, Mary Kay paid its sales force well—sometimes up to a 50 percent commission—and no sales territory was established. The latter innovation worked well, because as many of her consultants' (who often only worked nine-hour weeks and earned only two thousand dollars per year in the 1980s) husbands were transferred, they could sell their beauty products wherever they were located. To motivate her largely part-time sales force, she held huge and extravagant annual conventions where many prizes—ranging from jewelry and furs to pink Cadillacs and trips to tropical locales—were bestowed on many consultants for meeting a variety of selling levels.

Success

The new company enjoyed immediate success; sales rose from $198,000 in 1964 to $800,000 the following year. In 1967 the company went public, and sales topped $10 million in 1968. Although in many respects Mary Kay was not a pioneer—door-to-door sales had been used by Avon and Fuller Brush, and house parties had been exploited by Stanley and Tupperware—the company provided opportunities to a largely un-tapped labor force, women seeking a part-time or second income, and knew how to entice them to sell. In a decade that would, in its latter years, witness a rebirth of the women's movement, Mary Kay had already created a company run by and established exclusively for women.