By ELIZABETH AGUILERA
The Orange County Register

Hispanic and black Avon representatives peddled $1 million worth of lipsticks and lotions in a Los Angeles district, helping to send their manager, Alejandra Cerna, to Paris on Avon's dime.

Santa Ana resident Cerna, 31, earned the trip by ranking in the top 10 percent of Avon Products Inc. managers nationwide last year. She also ranked 81 out of the 300 managers inducted into the cosmetics company's Circle of Excellence for performance, recruiting and sales.

Cerna oversees more than 400 sales reps in a three Zip Code area in Los Angeles. In her district, 45 percent of the representatives are purely Spanish-speaking and more than half are Hispanic. The rest of the group is mostly black.

Having women of color sell Avon is a boon for the company, said Marie Rodriguez, vice president of ethnic marketing. They tend to sell to other Hispanics and blacks, creating a minority buying pool for Avon.

"Our Hispanic and African-American representatives are more productive, they sell more, and their average order is higher," she said. "When we have an ethnic representative in an ethnic market, the sales are at least 10 percent higher."

In Orange County, 40 percent of the 6,650 Avon representatives are Hispanic, said Stephanie Dupre, Avon spokeswoman

Avon's new president, Andrea Jung, who joined the company in 1999, is focused on globalization and expansion beyond the 137 countries where Avon is already a force. Jung, one of two women at the helm of Fortune 500 companies, also plans to increase Avon's e-commerce business.

Avon's recent plan to sell beComing,a cosmetics counter brand, through Sears and J.C. Penney stores was partly derailed when Sears, Roebuck and Co. backed out of the deal. J.C. Penney still plans to launch the line for Avon come fall.

For Avon, keys to success with this demographic were the debut of a Spanish-language brochure in 1998, and expansion of colors and options. Flat Hispanic sales exploded after that, said Rodriguez. She would not release sales numbers for that division.

In addition to colors, Avon realized that minority women are very important to the bottom line, Cerna said. Face-to-face contact between Hispanic women helps increase sales.

"Hispanic representatives have grown so quickly because there is no requirement to sell Avon except an ambition to do so," said Avon's Dupre. "So where people might encounter obstacles upon immigrating to the United States in the traditional workplace, at Avon it is more relationship-based."

Cerna's mother, Engracia, a native of Guanajuato, Mexico, started with Avon almost two decades ago. In the era before Spanish-language brochures, young Cerna, at age nine, filled out purchase orders for her mom. Avon earnings sent Cerna and her sister to private schools.

Cerna was working as a Sav-On store manager when Avon came calling three years ago. Now, as a part-time graduate student at Chapman University, she recruits sellers, trains new reps and supports established sellers. Sometimes she even trains representatives' sons or daughters who are illiterate but want to sell Avon.

"Just because they don't have citizenship doesn't mean they can't succeed," she said. "The fact that I had been around Avon forever and know what the sellers go through helps me do my job and helps Avon."