Avon
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40 free Avon trivia questions with answers — trivia quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Avon is one of the oldest beauty companies in the United States, and its story starts on the doorstep. In 1886 a travelling salesman noticed that his customers cared more about his free scent samples than about what he was actually selling, and he built a business on that hunch. Its representatives, mostly women earning their own money long before that was common, carried the brand into millions of homes. This quiz covers the whole story: the founder and the first representative, where the name came from, the best-known product lines, the famous faces who have fronted the brand, the companies it bought and the ones that tried to buy it, and how it spread from New York to markets around the world. It opens with questions most people can have a go at and builds to details that will test long-serving representatives. That makes it a good fit for team meetings, sales parties and anyone curious about the company behind the brochure. Every answer comes with a short explanation.
30 of 40 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Avon founder David H. McConnell selling door-to-door before he switched to perfume in 1886?
Books
Books were his trade, and the free perfume samples he handed out to get a hearing proved more popular than the volumes. He mixed the first scents himself in a small New York office.
Q 02Avon Products takes its name from the river that runs through which playwright's home town?
William Shakespeare
William Shakespeare was born in Stratford-upon-Avon, and the founder thought the countryside around his New York laboratory looked like it. The name went on a few products before the whole company took it.
Q 03Which famous doll, sold in special Avon editions in the 1990s, became the company's best-selling gift product?
Barbie
Barbie reached Avon customers through a joint venture with Mattel, and the dolls did so well that a range of play cosmetics for girls followed.
Q 04Which Tim Burton film begins when a door-to-door Avon saleswoman calls at a Gothic hilltop mansion?
Edward Scissorhands
Edward Scissorhands sends saleswoman Peg Boggs up to the mansion, where she finds Johnny Depp's title character and offers to take him home to her pastel suburb.
Q 05Which luxury jeweller did Avon buy in 1979 for about $104 million, only to sell it five years later?
Tiffany & Co.
Tiffany & Co. was meant to lift the image of the door-to-door brand, but its profits slid after cheaper lines put off its regulars, and Avon sold it to an investor group.
Q 06Avon's international running circuit of the late 1970s helped win which event a place at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics?
Women's marathon
Women's marathon racing needed entrants from 25 countries before the Olympics would take it, so Avon's circuit recruited runners worldwide. Its 1983 race was run in Los Angeles itself.
Q 07Which Oscar-winning actress became Avon's first Global Ambassador in 2007 and honorary chair of its foundation?
Reese Witherspoon
Reese Witherspoon signed a multi-year agreement that was her first move into endorsements, and she fronted the company's charity work for women as well as its adverts.
Q 08Which disease is the target of the fundraising crusade Avon launched in 1992 and of its sponsored walks?
Breast cancer
Breast cancer became the company's signature cause when its British arm began selling a fundraising pin. The first sponsored walk followed six years later.
Q 09Which Avon body-care brand, launched in 1961, later added a DEET-free insect repellent called Bug Guard?
Skin So Soft
Skin So Soft became one of the company's best-known names, and its Bug Guard spin-off was made without DEET, the chemical in most rival repellents.
Q 10Under what name did Avon trade for decades before 1939, despite being based in New York?
California Perfume Company
California Perfume Company was the suggestion of an associate of the founder, who lived in that state and wrote to him in praise of it. The Avon name replaced it in 1939.
Q 11Which former Neiman Marcus executive became the first woman to run Avon as chief executive, in 1999?
Andrea Jung
Andrea Jung cut a third of the product line, repackaged the rest and doubled research spending. She stayed in the job for more than a decade.
Q 12Which group, then owner of The Body Shop and Aesop, completed its takeover of Avon Products in January 2020?
Natura & Co
Natura & Co paid more than $2 billion and took a 76% stake in the combined business, which ranked as the fourth-largest beauty group in the world.
Q 13Which country overtook the United States in 2010 to become the largest single market for Avon products?
Brazil
Brazil had become the biggest prize in a business that was leaving home: by 2013, about 88% of Avon's revenue came from outside the United States.
Q 21Who became the first sales representative for Avon's founder in 1886 and went on to recruit thousands more?
Mrs. P.F.E. Albee
Mrs. P.F.E. Albee of Winchester, New Hampshire, built a base of 100 salespeople within six months and had trained nearly 5,000 representatives within 12 years.
Q 22The Little Dot Perfume Set, the first product sold by Avon's founder, offered five scents all taken from what?
Flowers
Flowers supplied every one: white rose, violet, lily of the valley, heliotrope and hyacinth. He brewed them in a pantry-sized space in New York City.
Q 23Which sideline did Avon add in 1971 and grow so fast that it led the world in making it within five years?
Costume jewelry
Q 14Which country's 1998 ban on direct selling forced Avon to switch to shops called Beauty Boutiques?
China
China lifted the ban in 2001, and five years later Avon received a licence to sell directly there again.
Q 15Lawsuits over which ingredient led Avon Products to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in August 2024?
Talc
Talc claims pushed the 138-year-old company into court protection, less than five years after it had been bought for more than $2 billion.
Q 16For what price did Avon's parent company agree in 2025 to sell Avon International to the investor Regent?
A single pound
A single pound was the nominal price, in a deal that left the Latin American and Russian operations behind with the seller.
Q 17Which rival direct seller teamed up with financier Irwin Jacobs in 1989 in a failed bid for Avon?
Amway
Amway was seen off partly by Avon's own sales force, who wrote to would-be buyers in huge numbers saying they would refuse to work for them.
Q 18Which Canadian city gave Avon's forerunner its first office outside the United States, opened in 1914?
Montreal
Montreal got a sales office first and a manufacturing plant a year later, four decades before the company moved into Latin America and Europe.
Q 19Which perfume company offered $24.75 a share for Avon in 2012 in a takeover approach that came to nothing?
Coty
Coty was offering nearly 20 percent above the share price, but Avon's board said the approach was opportunistic and not in its shareholders' interest.
Q 20Which American track-and-field star appeared in Avon's 1996 Olympic-year advertising as an unlikely Avon lady?
Jackie Joyner-Kersee
Jackie Joyner-Kersee was named in a multi-million dollar campaign that Avon tied to its corporate sponsorship of the Atlanta Games that summer.
Costume jewelry was so profitable that the cosmetics seller became the biggest manufacturer of it anywhere by the mid-1970s, just as its core business hit a slump.
Q 24Avon's ill-fated 1980s diversification, which left $1.1 billion of debt, took the beauty company into which industry?
Health care
Health care looked like a winner when Foster Medical became Avon's fastest-growing division, until Medicare cost controls devastated it. Every holding was sold by 1990.
Q 25Which prestige fragrance brand did Avon buy for $165 million in 1987 and sell to Procter & Gamble seven years later?
Giorgio Beverly Hills
Giorgio Beverly Hills began as the first luxury boutique on Rodeo Drive, and its signature scent was launched in 1981 with a $260,000 party.
Q 26Which fashion designer teamed up with Avon in the 1990s to sell moderately priced casual wear through its catalogues?
Diane von Furstenberg
Diane von Furstenberg signed a joint venture that took Avon into sportswear, timed to the company's sponsorship of the 1996 Summer Olympics.
Q 27Sheri McCoy became chief executive of Avon in 2012 after 30 years at which pharmaceutical and consumer-goods giant?
Johnson & Johnson
Johnson & Johnson had hired her as a chemical engineer in 1982, and she holds five patents. She had risen to vice chairman before leaving for the beauty business.
Q 28Avon's North American business was sold in 2019 to the household-goods arm of LG, a company from which country?
South Korea
South Korea's LG agreed to pay $125 million in cash for the business, which had been split from the rest of Avon three years earlier.
Q 29To which city did Avon Products move its global headquarters from New York as part of a 2016 restructuring?
London
London became home after Avon split off its North American business into a separate company that kept using the Avon name there.
Q 30What name does Avon give to each of its short selling cycles, which began as three-week pushes in 1932?
Campaigns
Campaigns were later cut from three weeks to two in the United States to lift sales, while the longer cycle stayed in use overseas.