Mary Kay Ash built a $2 billion cosmetics empire out of a 500 square foot Dallas storefront. She was the first woman ever to chair a company on the New York Stock Exchange and the only woman included in Forbes’ Greatest Business Stories of All Time, a pantheon otherwise reserved for Rockefeller, Ford, and Carnegie. And when CBS This Morning introduced Mary Kay to America, they declared there was no more potent role for the self-made woman than Mary Kay Ash.
Her story is scrappier and stranger than the pink Cadillacs and bouffant wigs you might remember.
Born dirt poor in Hot Wells, Texas, she was running a household and nursing an invalid father by the age of 10. She was a mother at 17 and a grandmother at 34. By the time she founded Mary Kay Cosmetics in 1963 at 45, she had already outlasted three divorces and two husbands’ deaths. The later death, of husband George Hallenbeck, the man who was supposed to be her business partner, came via a heart attack while jogging, just one month before the doors to Mary Kay were set to open.
Her 20-year-old son Richard, a budding finance whiz, stepped into the breach. A legend was born.
In this episode of Elena Meets the Author, I’m speaking to Mary Lisa Gavenas about her new biography, Selling Opportunity: The Story of Mary Kay, fifteen years in the making. We get into the restrictive 1960s norms that shaped what was possible for women, how Mary Kay adapted the direct-selling and party-plan models to build something genuinely new, the thinking behind her famous non-cash incentives like the pink Cadillacs, and the culture of encouragement and competition she created around her. We also talk about the criticisms levelled at direct selling, what made Mary Kay’s approach different, and what drew Gavenas to spend so many years researching and writing this particular story.
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