California Perfume Company
The 1886 origin of Avon.
The California Perfume Company was founded in New York in 1886 by David H. McConnell, a travelling book salesman who noticed his customers cared more about the perfume samples he handed out than about the books themselves. He began mixing scents — Little Dot Perfume was the first — and recruited women, beginning with Mrs. P. F. Albee in New Hampshire, to sell them door-to-door, building one of the earliest direct-selling networks in American business. The company set up its laboratory in Suffern, New York, expanded into cosmetics, and in 1939 renamed itself Avon Products in tribute to Stratford-upon-Avon. The original California Perfume Company name has since been revived chiefly as a heritage label and collectors' line. Today it is of interest mainly to historians of American perfumery and to those who collect early Avon and CPC ephemera.
DNA over time
Each column is an era. Each colored band shows that family’s share of accord weight across every perfume the house released in that window. Bigger band = the house leaned harder on that family.
