Mum rakes in millions as Avon lady
Wednesday 14 July 2010
With gloomy tales of credit-crunch woe still a newspaper staple, it’s easy to feel that we’ll be tightening our belts forever.
But don’t give up hope just yet. For a few ladies, raking in a bit of extra cash has turned into a business worth millions.
Meet Rebekah Testar: the Avon lady whose sideline in lippy and perfume snowballed into a business worth a whopping £150,000 a year.
The 39-year-old mum-of-three from Burbage, Leicestershire, became an Avon lady eight years ago, and now has 1,750 staff working for her.
The team was responsible for bringing in more than £2million last year.
The cosmetics cash-cow came about for Rebekah when she was a housewife, and her husband was forced to give up his job as a financial consultant due to ill health.
To earn a bit of extra cash for Christmas and distract herself from her husband’s illness, she began selling Avon products door-to-door and hand-delivering 200 brochures every other day.
Fast forward a year and Rebekah had made £10,000. Four years since she began, she had worked her way up to senior executive level.
She told The Daily Mail: “I now earn more money in a week than I earned in a month when I worked full-time for a building society.”
Her enthusiasm seems to be infections, with her husband now working full-time for Avon, and her daughters Jessica, 10, and Charlotte, 12, hoping to follow in her footsteps.
The extra cash even seems to have improved the couple’s married life: “My husband and I take at least four holidays a year,” Rebekah said.
“We take six weeks off during the summer and award ourselves regular pay rises.”
Rebekah proudly shows off her Avon-devotion with a personalised number-plate for her Mercedes, which reads ‘4 Von.’
We’d be shouting our success to the world too if we were raking in millions from selling bargain slap!
The women in the picture are not Avon representatives.
By Emily Gosling
Any moneymaking schemes for us Closer readers?