March 25, 2025
Kristof Neirynck – CEO – Avon
Uber Yourself Before You Get Kodaked—Why Consumers Don’t Buy Your Brand, Kristof Neirynck – CEO Avon
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Founded in the 1800’s, Avon has been through many reboots in its storied direct selling history—but nothing like the one it is going through now. Unlike most old brands, the organization provides lessons and roadmaps that leaders can deploy across consumer and B-to-B sectors.
Avon is part of Natura & Co, a multi-billion-dollar group that combined has more than 200 million clients, 7 million dedicated Consultants and Representatives, 900 stores and franchises, and 22,000 employees around the world.
Avon’s CEO, Kristof Neirynck, joins us on this episode to unpack one of the world’s boldest reboots with untold stories that you can use now. This purposeful community-oriented brand is deploying the power of not just “or” but “and”—as in how many reboot cylinders can your company fire on at the same time.
What does AND look like? With a goal of driving growth and innovation, it is not just upgrading their traditional direct selling models—that would have been too easy with ineffective results, like other MLM brands have experienced. Instead they have transformed into an aggressive omnichannel platform. Everything from modernizing direct selling, embracing technology, and digitizing the brand to going big on omni-channel, and resetting the brand to reflect the 21st century consumer trends.
Listen in on how he encourages people to challenge the past, take smart risks, shift the culture with accountability, think smaller and make things much simpler—and why more CMOs will be taking on CEO roles in the back end of the decade.
Where The Major Reboot Started
When Kirstoff first became the CEO of Avon he noticed a couple of things that needed to be changed. One of the major things he changed was the portfolio that Avon had. Kristof notes that “I inherited a ginormous portfolio of I think it was about 30,000 skews”, Avon was selling not only their beauty products but also pots and pans to shoes and handbags. Seeing how thin Avon was spreading itself, Kristof decided to cut roughly 70% of those skews, to have a more focused business. That also made it so they could go from “580 pieces of innovation a year” (almost two a year yikes) to 150. Talk about a makeover.
Pushing The Boundaries Of Direct Selling
Kristof makes a very clear point that direct selling has its limitations, saying “The direct selling industry probably hasn’t faced quickly enough the fact that there is something called the internet and Amazon”. The convenience that the internet and e-commerce as a whole have brought is a pain point to the direct-seller business. Their adaptation to this pain point has been switched from a representative-oriented model to a consumer-focused model. They place certain products in drug stores and online, but also have updated their direct sellers to also be online, using apps like TikTok and WhatsApp for those people who still want to talk to someone about what products could be good for them. All to allow consumers to interact with the brand on their terms.
The Five-Year Plan And What Comes Next
Looking Ahead, Kristof sees Avon “as one of the most personalized beauty brands in the world.” Fueled by their fusion of the personal representative and a massive catalog of data to make those representatives even more efficient. Although he does believe that as they move forward there will be fewer and fewer representatives, those that remain are going to be better trained to give the best beauty advice available. On top of all that, there will be innovations in things like beauty tech wellness tech, and other higher-value items to help Avon get to the next level in the beauty industry.
