Doing the same thing for 50 years can get stale.

But for Grant County resident Annie Smith, 80, the 50 years she’s spent selling Avon products has brought a lot of change. What remains consistent is Smith’s love of the products and her customers.

One thing becomes abundantly clear walking through Smith’s Canyon City residence: She’s been doing this for a while. A collection of beauty products whose quantity and variety would make a department store manager envious takes up an entire room in Smith’s home.

New York businessman David Hall McConnell founded the company in 1886, hiring a cadre of women to sell perfume, and later a full line of cosmetics, door-to-door. By 1978, the company had more than a million sales representatives across the globe, mostly women recruited by their friends to sell products to their own circle of friends and neighbors.

Smith’s 50-year journey selling Avon started prior to the birth of her son while she was living in Florida and experiencing health struggles.

“I could not walk, I could not do anything — I had to lie down,” she said.

Smith said she did nothing for the first seven months of her pregnancy until her doctor informed her that she had to be more active. A chance meeting with an Avon recruiter shortly after receiving that news led to Smith’s long relationship with Avon.

“She talked me into selling Avon,” Smith said. “My mother was mortified.”

The money made from those Avon sales in Florida helped Smith return to Oregon following the birth of her son, and she stopped working for the company. But about nine months after her return to Oregon, another chance encounter with a woman selling Avon put Smith back on the path she’d briefly left.

“She said, ‘Why don’t you sell Avon?’ So I asked my husband and he said, ‘Sure, if that’s what you want to do, go ahead.’ So that’s how I became an Avon lady,” she said.

Smith, with her now 9-month-old son in tow, once again began selling Avon products.

“Oh, everybody loved the baby. He was such a good baby. He never cried — he smiled. He was a blond, blue-eyed baby,” she said.

“If I didn’t have the baby because he was sleeping in the car (customers would say) ‘Go get that baby, go get that baby,” she added.

A typical day for Smith back then started at 6 a.m. and ended at 5 p.m. with door-to-door sales throughout the entire day. That part of the business — having to make your own connections and grow your own clientele — is something that hasn’t changed much in the past half-century, according to Smith.

A lot of other things have changed, however, since the time Smith began selling Avon with her infant son by her side.

“Now we don’t have any managers, we don’t have any support,” she said.

“You’re your own business. Most of the time you order stuff and you don’t get it.”

Avon has also diversified its offerings. Known for beauty products in the past, Smith said you can now purchase a much wider array of goods.

“A little bit of everything,” she said.

“You have face cream, you have shampoos, you have deodorant, you have dish soap, you have laundry soap, you have toilet cleaners, you have bras, you have shoes, you have shirts. This is not just Avon — Avon is such a variety of stuff.”