In the 1880s, David McConnell sold books door to door in upstate New York. It was hard work with a low hit rate, and he needed something to get past the front door. So he started offering a small vial of perfume, which he made himself, as a thank-you to any woman who agreed to hear the pitch. It was a sales tactic. The perfume was the bait, the books were the business.

Except the customers kept asking about the perfume. They’d let him finish the pitch, decline the books politely, and then want to know if they could buy the little bottle. McConnell paid attention to that for longer than most people would have, and in 1886 he quit selling books entirely and founded the California Perfume Company, with a line of scents made in a small space in Manhattan and sold the same way he’d sold books: in person, at the door.

His second insight was bigger than the first. The people best positioned to sell perfume to women at home were other women, who were largely shut out of paid work at the time and who already had the relationships. His first representative was a woman in New Hampshire named Persis Albee, who recruited and trained others, and the direct-sales model that came out of that grew into a company with millions of representatives worldwide. It was renamed Avon in 1939, and it’s been selling the same way ever since.

Look at what actually changed. McConnell didn’t invent a new product; he was already making the perfume. He didn’t invent a new sales channel; he was already going door to door. He just noticed that the thing he was giving away was the thing people wanted to pay for, and had the nerve to reorganize the whole business around the accessory.