Mary Kay's Beauty Business

Mary Kay: $5,000 to start

Mary Kay several marital setbacks of the grind, coupled with the ambition to dare to start a business in the 50s to create a world-famous cosmetics company - Mary Kay Inc. From the initial small stores, has expanded its business to 37 countries, sales organizations up to 750,000, sales in 2000 reached $ 13 billion in large companies, which is the result of her 45-year-old start-up.

Divorced woman who started with $5,000

Born May 12, 1918, in Houston, Texas, Mary Kay began caring for her father, who was bedridden with tuberculosis, when she was 6 years old, while her mother worked 14 hours a day in a restaurant.

At 17, Mary Kay, a high school graduate, married Rogers, a local man. Initially, she sold children's psychology books.

In 1938, at the age of 20, she moved her family to Dallas and, with three children, finished her college education. To keep up with all the family's expenses, she took a job selling household goods.

After 11 years, she managed to win a seat on the company's board of directors and expanded the company's sales territory to 43 states. 1963, the company hired an assistant for her, but paid her twice as much per year just because the assistant was a man. Mary Kay could not tolerate this contempt for women, and in a fit of anger, she was dismissed and went home. She was 45 years old at the time.

September 13, 1963, with the help of her son Richard, Mary Kay poured out her savings -- $5,000 -- to establish Mary Kay Cosmetics. The road to success was always thorny, and just a month before Mary Kay's company was to open, her second husband died suddenly of an acute illness.

A dream come true -- if you're willing to work hard

Mary Kay revolutionized traditional door-to-door direct sales by calling her salespeople "beauty consultants" and selling products in small group presentations, with no more than five or six people attending each event. No more than five or six people attended each event. Mary Kay also adopted a pay-as-you-go policy that was not common at the time, which eliminated the need for a lot of start-up capital, and, more importantly, allowed them to pay as little as 50 percent of the retail price for a full set of products.

In the first year of its existence, the company's sales revenue reached $200,000 with the efforts of a dozen or so "beauty consultants" (salespeople), rising rapidly to $800,000 in the second year, and with a sales force of 3,000 women, Mary Kay was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1976, which was the first time the company had been listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1976, Mary Kay was officially listed on the New York Stock Exchange, the first time a woman-owned stock was listed.

Mary Kay has more than 850,000 independent beauty consultants (mostly women), is present in 37 countries on five continents, generates more than $2.4 billion in retail sales annually, and has been ranked the No. 1 seller of facial skincare and color cosmetics in the United States eight times in the past nine years. Fortune magazine has ranked Mary Kay among the nation's 100 Best Companies to Work For three times, and is one of the 10 best choices for women. Mary Kay is also the only woman among the 20 business giants in the Forbes Greatest Business People book to have grown the company from a small direct sales company to the nation's largest direct sales skincare company with an annual turnover of $2.5 billion and a presence in 37 countries and territories around the world.