Natalie Deacon on: Creating a better world for women

Her path to working in purpose 

Sometimes I think I’ve purposely gravitated towards this my whole life. I was brought up with by a single mum, and with lots of really inspiring and strong role models in my life: my mum, grandmother, auntie, and I reflect now that I’d always been very interested in women’s issues in particular. When I left university, I looked around and decided that PR would be a good place to start. I went into a very unsexy end of public relations, business-to-business IT PR, which was very male-dominated. But that company had been founded by the most amazing, inspiring woman who had set up her own PR company and had become part of the bigger city gate group. I think I gravitated towards this company where there are a lot of great women. Since joining I have also had my own personal journey where I’ve moved from PR and comms more to brand activism, managing social impact programmes and now managing our sustainability agenda. 

Avon’s heritage and Purpose  

Avon started in 1886, founded on creating opportunities for women to become micro-entrepreneurs. Our first Avon rep, Mrs Albee, started selling Avon 20 years before women had the right to vote in the US, and only 20% of women worked in paid employment. So, it was an amazing pioneering business model where women sold beauty on their social networks to gain financial independence. We are also very conscious of our core purpose and business model, helping to create a better world for women, which is a better world for everybody. Women have this amazing ripple effect on their families and their communities. So, a better world for women is truly a better world for everyone. We’re focused on creating opportunities for women to earn and learn, lowering barriers and challenges to economic participation for women.  

Supporting women through the Avon Foundation 

There are issues that we actively choose to engage in, certainly speaking out about most issues laddering up to gender equality, and choice and freedom for women. We also do a lot of work to support two specific issues, breast cancer and gender-based violence. We started our Avon breast cancer promise in 1992, to make sure women know the signs, the risks and how to take action, and we activated that in over 50 countries. Our gender-based violence work has been growing steadily over the last few decades. In total, we’ve raised and donated over a billion dollars to both of those causes.  

One of the programmes I am most proud of is our work tackling gender-based violence. This is an issue that I’ve been working on for 15 years. It’s often really difficult to get attention as it’s a really unpleasant issue. It impacts one in three women worldwide, at least one in four women in the UK but it is surrounded by a wall of silence. There was a moment when COVID hit in 2020. Our phones were ringing from our domestic violence and refuge partners telling us they were seeing huge spikes in domestic violence because people were trapped at home with abusers. We were seeing fourfold increases in calls to the helplines that we support. We were able to mobilise really quickly, and we were able to find a million dollars’ worth of funding for our NGO partners to respond quickly at that moment.