'Avon Rose' calling

On the 14th of February, 1942, Rose Christmann started selling Avon.

She set out pulling her toddler son in a wagon as she went door to door in Baker, Mont., population 2,000.

“I knew everybody in town,” she said.

Christmann had no sales experience, but she had resolve. She carried some samples, such as deodorant, in a basket, and a brochure of Avon products.

One of her first calls was an acquaintance.

“Rose, I don’t really need anything,” the woman said after the introductions.

Christmann nodded and said she would return in a month to see if things had changed.

As she walked down the walkway, she heard the door open.

“Come back. I do need something,” the woman said.

She was after makeup. It cost less than a dollar.

That was Christmann’s first sale.

“It was very reasonable,” she said.

That was nearly 79 years ago.

The Coeur d’Alene woman known as “Avon Rose” is still selling Avon. Through marriage, children, businesses, moves, sting operations and efforts to close her shop, Avon Rose has stood the test of time.

And Rose Christmann, we might add, is 100 years old and is as strong and feisty as ever, with no plans to retire.

“Retirement is just a word that they picked up just for lazy people,” she says with a laugh.

Today, the base of operations for Rose’s Avon Shoppe is at 920 Best Ave. A shop attached to her home is dedicated to an array of products. Makeup, shampoo, gels, skin care, perfume, eye liner, watches, jewelry and dolls are displayed on crowded shelves, walls and glass cases.

She knows them all.

“Moisture therapy is another one that’s very popular,” she said. “That’s really good. It’s a product that does what it says. Avon is guaranteed 100 percent. That is one thing I like about it, what really sold me when I started out selling Avon, it’s 100 percent product. The customer, if she can’t use it, has a bad reaction, they can bring it back, get their money back or buy something else.”

It’s not just that its guaranteed that made her Avon Rose.

“The beauty of it for people to smell nice, to look nice,” she says.

On a Friday afternoon, Christmann and her granddaughter, Carolyn Selander, are ready for customers to stop by or call in. They are busy organizing and record-keeping and stocking. Rose shows off filing boxes with thousands of index cards tracking orders, sales and customers.

Selander is impressed by her grandmother’s drive and attention to detail.

“I think it’s incredible. She keeps me going,” she said.

Nothing is done on a website because Rose’s Avon Shoppe doesn’t have one. Carolyn sometimes makes deliveries.

“They can just come in and pick it up,” Rose said. “It’s just like going to the grocery store.”

She’s been good for Avon, and Avon has been good to her, Christmann says. It’s provided her with a way to earn a living, well after her husband Ernest passed in 1987.

Her instinct when she was young, which proved to be spot on, was to get into something she knew she could do on her own later in life, when her children were grown. She valued independence.

She earned enough to buy the Best Avebye lot where her home and shop stand today, for $2,300 cash.

“I’m a cash gal,” she said, with smile.

The location was a good one.

“Best is just like grand central station, anymore, my Lord. It just seems lie the cars are going day and night,” she said.

But the shop, some 25 years ago, caused a stir.

“The only way you can operate something like this is if it’s connected to your home,” she said.

The city tried to close her business after she started selling Avon in 1991 from that shop that’s part of her Best Avenue home. She was the target of a sting operation in 1992 and accused of illegally selling Avon products. City officials argued her side of the street wasn’t zoned for commercial activities.

That she’s still there today with a sign out front that states Avon, tells you who won that battle.

She has a fighting spirit.

“The only thing I have to do is obey my Lord and die,” Christmann said.

Born in Plevna, Mont., she speaks with pride of her heritage and growing up around a mix of nationalities where acres of land went for $1.

“We’re German people, Russian people,” she said. “There were Italians and Poles.”

She endured the deaths of her three children, Ernie Christmann Jr. , Edward and Susan, within the past few years. Her love for them remains strong.

She looks with at a portrait of herself on the wall of her shop and pauses.

“That’s me. My second oldest boy took that picture, and enlarged it and made the frame,” she said.

Christmann is as passionate today as she was in 1942 about Avon. She loves what she does and still works six days a week, closed only on Sundays.

“I just can’t sit long enough. I have always worked in my lifetime,” she said.

Starting from when she grew up on a small farm in Montana, the second of 13 children.

Rose looked after the pigs and the chickens and the cattle, joined by her horse “Buster” and dog, “Shep”

“I was my dad’s boy. He didn’t have any older boys,” she said.

She left home at 18.

“My mother and I never got along. She always found a fault,” Christmann said.

She would meet and marry Ernest Sr., a serviceman who served 13 years in the Army. They would have three children and move to Coeur d’Alene in 1970.

Ernest was a talented man who worked as a contractor.

“He was a Jack of all trade,” she said.

Early in their marriage, Christmann wanted to have a way to earn her own money and saw an advertisement for door-to-door Avon sales.

She called and read the Avon brochure sent her way.

“It sounded real good. One hundred percent guaranteed," she said.

Her territory included the northern and eastern sections of Baker.

“Hells bells, I could cover 120 towns for all they cared,” she said, chuckling.

Lipstick was 9 cents a tube. Makeup cost in the range of 89 cents.

“Hell’s bells, I’m 100 years of age. I can remember all those prices that we had then and what we’ve got now,” she said.

Some figured she would fail.

“My folks didn’t believe in it,” she recalled. “When I started out with Avon they all thought I was going to flop. Well, I just showed them that I wasn’t.”

“It always seemed I did very well at something I set my mind to,” she continued.

Products have gone and gone. Prices have changed, as have commissions. But Rose Christmann remained.

Her motivation?

She doesn’t hesitate in answering.

“Money. I had three children and my husband was a service man,” she said.

Selling Avon has had its ups and down, but Christmas stayed the course through the good, the bad and the punches in the nose. Not hers.

Early in her career, she rented a space in Baker and was operating a laundry businesses as well as selling Avon.

A woman came in and said she wanted a job, but Christmann didn’t need anyone.

“She kind of got smart and sassy and I told her, 'Use the door,'” Christmann said.

She women left, but soon, the owner of the building arrived.

“You should have hired her,” she told Christmann.

Rose made it clear she disagreed.

“She got smart. She was standing at the door," Rose said. "She was calling me something. I just knocked her in the nose.”

That settled it.

She ditched the laundry business not long after that and focused on Avon.

Wherever she went, she carried her Avon hand bag, samples, and her brochure of products. She wasn’t bashful, but she wasn’t pushy, either.

Customers, she said, approached her. She was simply, “the Avon lady.”


“This is the way I told my customers all these years. ‘I’m not pushing you, I’m asking you if you would like to try Avon,” Christmann said. “If you don’t, that’s your prerogative. I’m not going to push you into buying. I said no way. I’m not made that say. If you like it and you want to try it, it’s guaranteed 100 percent. That’s what made people buy it. It’s your money you’re spending, not mine.”

“That been my motto all these years and I have had no problems,” she said.

But that’s not why she’s sold thousands of products worth thousands of dollars to thousands of people over nearly eight decades.

Her success, she says, is due to “Love of the people. I have a lot of good friends.”

“You do make good friends. You just meet all kinds of people,” Christmann said. “What I do is kind of help the people, too, in so many ways.

“I’m bragging a little bit, but I got along with people fairly well,” she continued. “I maybe had one or two that was jealous of me. They just wanted to tell me what to do, what not to do, which I don’t approve of.”

Nope. She's never taken to people telling her what to do.

Take the man who recently came into her shop and insisted she wear a mask.

Rose refused.

“I do as I very well please in my home, she told him. "You’re not telling me what to do and what not to do.”

Unless you want to place an order for Avon.