NextBillion - An Initiative of the William Davidson Institute at the University of Michigan

Saturday, April 30, 2016

In the 1990s Chuck Slaughter built the online clothing retailer, TravelSmith, from a startup to a company with sales in excess of $100 million a year. Then he signed up to be an Avon lady.

“[Avon] is the original social network business. In some ways it’s better than Twitter and Facebook because Avon figured out how to monetize the social network,” Slaughter says over coffee at a café in Oxford, England.

Slaughter became an Avon lady to do research for his current project, Living Goods. “We’ll learn from anybody. I studied Avon from the inside.”

And now he’s taking that Avon/Amway/Tupperware business model and using it to deliver basic health care and a few commercial products to impoverished parts of Africa. And he seems to be on the right track. He was in Oxford to accept a $1.25 million prize as one of the winners of the 2016 Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship.