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Dallas News Obituary
Cosmetics icon Mary Kay Ash dies
Pink empire changed the face of business for women
11/23/2001
By JOE SIMNACHER / The Dallas Morning News
Mary Kay Wagner Ash, who parlayed a hide tanner's cream and the color pink into a multimillion-dollar global cosmetics empire based in Addison, died Thursday afternoon of natural causes at her Dallas residence.
The 83-year-old grande dame of direct marketing was chairman emeritus of Mary Kay Inc., the business she founded in 1963 with $5,000 in savings.
A child of Houston's poor Sixth Ward, Mrs. Ash lifted the fortunes and esteem of legions of women who joined her cause as beauty consultants. She and her Mary Kay enthusiasm defined the company, even after a stroke effectively ended her career in February 1996.
"She was an extraordinary business leader in an age when far too many people who are running corporations are competent managers, but nothing more," said John P. Kotter, a professor specializing in leadership at Harvard Business School. "She was also an extraordinary business person and a great entrepreneur."
A private memorial has been set for Wednesday.
As a girl, Mrs. Ash dreamed of becoming a physician. But the realities of family and school steered her into a 25-year career in direct sales. She became fed up with the unequal treatment of men and women and retired at age 45. But the self-proclaimed workaholic didn't sit still for long.
She started her own company and blossomed into a glitzy icon of free enterprise.
Mrs. Ash was nearly as flamboyant as she was successful. Each summer, she marshaled her troops from around the world into Dallas for an annual extravaganza that was equal parts sales convention, stage show, and old-time revival.
Her influence touched many lives outside her company, including that of Zig Ziglar, whose name has become synonymous with motivational speaking worldwide.
Mr. Ziglar was struggling to launch his career when he addressed a group of about 50 Mary Kay employees in 1968.
"I had no idea that Mary Kay was around the corner, out of sight," he said. "When I finished my talk, she told me she liked what I was saying and the way I was saying it."
She arranged for him to give six-hour seminars to her troops across the nation.
"As a result of that, my whole philosophy developed or emerged," Mr. Ziglar said. By the end of the two-year Mary Kay tour, Mr. Ziglar had honed his presentation into "pretty much what I teach today," he said.
Mrs. Ash and Mr. Ziglar became lifelong friends and enjoyed long phone visits until her 1996 stroke.
Mr. Ziglar said Mrs. Ash "was the wholesome personification of the American dream."
"For women everywhere, she brought the impossible dream to life by making it a reality," Mr. Ziglar said. "She was a very wise lady. She was a people person. She was very sensitive to the importance of having her people recognized."
Doretha Dingler of Dallas, who worked with Mrs. Ash for more than 30 years, was among the legions whom Mary Kay mentored.
"She's a person who unleashed the talents of women," Mrs. Dingler said. "When she formed her company, women couldn't even sign their name to a bank loan. She's brought us up to where women own banks."
Mrs. Dingler began her cosmetics career after attending a Mary Kay skin care class in Greenville, Texas, in 1965. At the time, she saw her role in life as one of support for her husband, an engineer.
Mrs. Dingler became one of Mary Kay's top sales directors in the country. In her 36 years with the company, Mrs. Dingler said, she has earned more than $9 million. She is one of 151 women who have recorded more than $1 million in Mary Kay sales.
Mrs. Ash mentored her sales force in much the same way her mother had mentored her when Mary Kay was a child, Mrs. Dingler said.
"Mary Kay would just be there saying, 'You can do it, you can do it.'" she said.
Mrs. Dingler, who said she couldn't even speak in front of a group when she joined the company, has addressed thousands of women at every Mary Kay convention since 1969.
"Mary Kay probably produced the first career women in the world," Mrs. Dingler said. "We were teachers, secretaries, nurses, whatever, but career women – no way."
Mrs. Ash built her company by recognizing high sales with awards that had a woman's touch, things that women probably wouldn't buy themselves.
"When I started my sales career ... I won a prize for selling," she told The Dallas Morning News in 1980. "It was a flounder light – something you're supposed to pin on your hip boots when you fish at night. I was devastated. What a terrible thing to give any woman. You can tell it was a man who was awarding those prizes."
Pink Cadillacs
Mrs. Ash's company became indelibly identified with its top sales prize, Cadillacs painted Mary Kay Pink, as the color was known in-house by the automaker.
Mrs. Ash ordered the first pink Cadillac for her personal use in 1968 from Rodger Meier, now a retired Cadillac dealer. The next year she awarded her top five sales directors the first pink Cadillacs. (In Germany, the top Mary Kay sales award is a pink Mercedes.)
There are now about 1,600 pink Cadillacs on the road.
"It created a sensation," Mrs. Ash said.
She didn't particularly like pink but instinctively homed in on it as a sales tool. The pink Mary Kay products would look good in the predominantly white bathrooms of the early '60s, she determined.
She came to own the color. Her office was done in soft pink. And, much to the ire of her neighbors, so was the 19,000-square-foot mansion she built on Douglas Avenue in Dallas' Preston Hollow neighborhood. Sales representatives used to have their photos taken in her pink bathtub for good luck.
At a surprise birthday luncheon in her honor one year, she was the only one not wearing the trademark pink. "I guess today I'm just pinked out," she said.
Mrs. Ash started her company after a one-month retirement from a Dallas-based direct sales company. She left out of frustration with male corporate bias.
"I couldn't believe God meant a woman's brain to bring 50 cents on the dollar," she told The News in 1974. "Before I started my company in 1963, I had worked for 25 years in sales, and nothing would make me angrier than training some man only to have him become my superior."
The idea for her company came to Mrs. Ash while she was preparing lists for her planned memoirs.
"Primarily I wanted it to be a book on sales for women, so I listed all the good things I had learned from the companies I had worked for," she said in a 1980 interview. She also made a list of problems she had encountered. "I got everything down on paper, and one day I read it. I thought how great it would be if somebody did it instead of just talking about it."
Mrs. Ash based her company on a skin cream she discovered years earlier while hosting a sales party for Stanley Home Products, which pioneered the direct sales method.
She noticed the women at the party had unusually good skin. One woman was selling a beauty cream her father – a leather tanner – had formulated. Mrs. Ash bought the formula from the woman's estate in 1963.
Mrs. Ash had the skin cream reformulated to remove its strong odor. She also reformulated the party sales techniques she had observed over the years, removing barriers to career advancement.
She envisioned a company that would "give women the ultimate opportunity with no ceilings, no boss," she said. "You promote yourself in our business."
In July 1963, Mrs. Ash married George Hallenbeck, who was also in direct sales. They decided he would handle the company's business affairs, while she would focus on products and sales.
Mr. Hallenbeck died of a heart attack a month later.
"Every dime we had was either spent or committed, and we were working feverishly toward our opening day," she said. "We were sitting at the breakfast table discussing the final figures when he had a massive coronary and died instantly."
Mrs. Ash drafted Richard Rogers, her youngest son from a previous marriage, to help manage the company for $250 a month.
"How would you like to turn over your bank account and financial problems to your 20-year-old son?" she asked in 1980.
The mother-son team got the company off the ground with nine saleswomen.
"We began with one shelf of cosmetics on a Sears $9.95 shelf – and we really didn't need that because nobody was buying," she recalled.
Her business formula, however, was on target. Within months, the company had $34,000 in sales and had turned a profit. During its first 10 years, Mary Kay Cosmetics consistently achieved 20 percent to 30 percent increases in annual sales and earnings. By 1974, the operation had 21,000 beauty consultants, annual sales of $23 million, and earnings of $3.4 million.
Last year Mary Kay Inc. had revenue of $1.3 billion. Half of the company's 3,600 employees are in the Dallas area. It ranked No. 5 on The Dallas Morning News' list of the area's largest private companies for 2000. Today, there are about 800,000 independent Mary Kay beauty consultants in 37 countries. Men make up about 1 percent of the sales force.
Mrs. Ash's business succeeded by changing the lives of her troops.
"We're selling a way of life," she said in the 1990 book Texas Big Rich by Sandy Sheehy.
"So many times a woman comes into this company so inhibited, with such a bad self-image and no belief in herself. If you ask me what is the absolute common denominator among women, I would say it is the inability to have confidence in their own abilities. Men at least have sense enough to bluff their way through."
Mrs. Ash was a self-admitted workaholic who stopped only for summer vacations on the Texas coast with her children.
"Those two weeks in Galveston were the only time I didn't work," she said in her 1981 autobiography Mary Kay. "The rest of the year, my life was strictly God, family, and work, work, work."
High expectations
The queen of cosmetics was born Mary Kathlyn Wagner in Hot Wells, Texas, 25 miles northwest of Houston. As a child, she cared for her father, who was disabled by tuberculosis, while her mother worked 14-hour days managing a restaurant to support the family.
"She was gone and yet contributed so much to my positive attitude," Mrs. Ash once said of her mother. " 'You can do it' became the theme of my childhood."
Mrs. Ash learned to be a fierce, independent competitor.
"As a young child, I enjoyed the satisfaction of bringing home A's my mother expected," she said in her autobiography. She brought home the typing trophy and excelled at extemporaneous speaking and debate.
"Before I was out of junior high, I had competed in a statewide [speech] contest and had actually placed second," she said in her book. "What a thrill it was for me to feel that I was the second best speaker in the entire state of Texas."
Unable to afford college, Mrs. Ash married after graduating at the top of her class at Reagan High School in Houston. At age 17 she had a daughter. She later had two sons during the 11-year marriage to Ben Rogers.
But her husband was more interested in an amateur singing career than supporting the family with his day job at a service station. He asked for a divorce when he returned from a three-year stint in the Army.
"I was devastated," Mrs. Ash said. "I felt like I was a failure as a wife and mother."
Direct sales
During her first marriage, Mrs. Ash sold books and cookware. But as a newly divorced mother of three, she found her calling in direct sales for Stanley Home Products.
"I enjoyed selling, but nothing excited me quite as much as company contests," she said in her book. "It was just that old competitive spirit of mine."
One Stanley contest remained fresh in her mind decades later as she told her life story. The Stanley dealer who recruited the most new representatives in a single week would be crowned Miss Dallas.
"Well, I decided that was the only way I would ever be Miss Dallas, so I was determined to win," she wrote.
She fell short on her first attempt but was named Miss Dallas the following year.
Mrs. Ash became legendary in Stanley sales. She left the company in 1953, however, when she was passed over for a management position in favor of a man she had trained.
She joined World Gift Co., another direct sales company, and soon rose to sales manager. One year she was responsible for a 53 percent sales increase companywide. In 1959, she moved to Dallas to become the company's national training director.
She quit World Gift in 1963 when she realized the men she was training were making $50,000 a year while she was earning $25,000.
Open-door policy
As her dream grew into a corporation, Mrs. Ash didn't retreat into a glass office.
Yvonne Pendleton, Mary Kay Inc.'s director of corporate heritage, said Mrs. Ash was very much a hands-on manager who created an open-door policy that lives on.
"If you really had a problem and felt like she was the only one who could solve it, she wanted you to come to her," Ms. Pendleton said.
"She didn't like chains of command, although you have to have them to a certain extent."
As head of the company, Mrs. Ash once knocked on a conference-room door to a sales meeting and asked to speak to the assistant of one of her managers.
" 'I heard you were getting eyeglasses and I know a great place you can get them two for the price of one,' " Ms. Pendleton recalled Mrs. Ash saying. "She not only loved and worked with employees on a daily basis, she really was involved in all the things in their lives."
Mrs. Ash also knew her sales troops longed for glamour.
Her annual award meetings, the Mary Kay Conventions, became queen-for-a-day extravaganzas.
"Glamour," she said. "That's what it's all about. Our girls want it, they crave it, and they'll work and work to get it. They may never make their debut; they may never be a prom queen; they may never be Miss America. So on our awards night, we try to put all that together for one great, big wonderful moment."
At Stanley, only the top three producers were rewarded. Mrs. Ash devised a system where everyone who met a predetermined sales goal was honored.
Fame spreads
Mrs. Ash's own honors included winning the first National Sales Hall of Fame Award from the Sales and Marketing Executives of New York and a spot in the Texas Business Hall of Fame.
In 1978, she received the Horatio Alger Distinguished Citizens Award.
In 1996, the company created the Mary Kay Ash Charitable Foundation, which so far has awarded 21 grants totaling $2 million to fund research at leading U.S. medical institutions and universities.
Mrs. Ash made cancer research a priority of her foundation. Her third husband, Mel Ash, died of lung cancer on July 7, 1980. They had been married since 1966.
In July 2001, the foundation took up a second cause: prevention of violence against women. The Mary Kay Foundation is the underwriter of a PBS documentary, Breaking the Silence: Journeys of Hope.
Many of Mary Kay's 500,000 U.S. sales representatives give customers brochures from the American Bar Association offering abuse safety tips.
Like the proper lady that she was, Mrs. Ash never revealed her age.
"Why should I?" she liked to ask. "I believe that a woman who will tell her age will tell anything."
Mrs. Ash is survived by two sons, Richard Rogers and Ben Rogers, both of Dallas; 16 grandchildren; 28 great-grandchildren; and one great-great-grandchild. Her daughter, Marylyn Rogers Theard, died in 1991.