• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, April 15, 2015

Avon, which told analysts on Monday that it was postponing a May 13 investors meeting until autumn to give new EVP CFO James Scully time to acclimate himself to the business and “prepare for a more robust discussion,” is investigating options including selling off its North American operations — a move that some analysts have urged for some time, according to an impactful analysis of the state of the company by Joann S. Lublin and Ellen Byron in the Wall Street Journal.

“Avon doesn’t have a deal on the table to sell itself or to hive off its North American operations, and one isn’t imminent,” sources “familiar with” the situation tell Lublin and Byron. “But they said the company is open to all options as it tries to plot its best path forward.” 

That willingness to keep an open mind apparently caused a 14% leap in its market price following the WSJ’s report, however. “The pop in Avon comes as the stock has tumbled 45% over the past 12 months,” points out Akin Oyedele in Business Insider, which reprints a Yahoo! Finance chart documenting a surge resembling rocket fumes. 

“Trading in the stock was briefly halted Tuesday because of volatility,” reports CNBC’s Jacob Pramu, and spiked when trading resumed around 12:50 p.m. Avon had no comment on the WSJ report, he writes.

The hed on Ben Levisohn’s coverage of the surge for Barron’s wonders if Avon might be “Putting Lipstick on a Pig.” Levisohn quotes the observation of Bernstein’s Ali Dibadj in a conference call last week that the company has “some deep-seated problems, ranging from poor management, bad products, and lackluster quality control” before suggesting that the answer might indeed be selling off some pieces or an LBO.

“We believe Avon is coming to terms with the reality that cost cuts are not the answer and it needs to recapitalize and find funding for a massive $500M-$1B reinvestment needed to fix the business,” RBC Capital Markets analysts wrote in a note on Tuesday reported by Reuters’ Shailaja Sharma.

The mighty has indeed fallen. Avon was founded in 1886 by David H. McConnell as the California Perfume Company — “Highly Concentrated Odors Extracted From Flowers” read the clunky tagline — and renamed Avon in 1939, according to a company timeline. It’s heyday was in the 1960s and early 1970s, after which the “knock, knock of the Avon representative at the door was not answered … as more women moved from home to the workplace,” according to Retailing Triumphs and Blunders. Before then, write Ronald D. Michman and Alan J. Greco,  its “profit margins were the envy of the industry” with reps earning 40% commissions (but no base salary).

“Once the largest direct-selling company in the world … in 2014, Avon’s North America revenue fell 18% to $1.2 billion, crumbling to barely half of what it took in 2007,” reportsFortune’s Phil Wahba. “And more worryingly for a company that depends entirely on sales reps, the number of Avon Ladies selling its products fell 18% at home. Globally, the size of its sales force fell for the fifth straight year.”

Some wonder why the brand is not available over the counter.

“Going the retail route is not that simple,” Fortune’s Wahba points out, “given that the company has no systems in place to sell to stores. It’s hard to see anything encouraging in Avon’s North American sales, particularly as the business is clearly unprofitable, losing $132 million in the last two years.”

But Avon CEO Sheri McCoy “told analysts in February that the North American unit was on track to be profitable this year and described the United Staes as ‘Important’ for the company,” Matthew Heller writes for CFO.

McCoy, a scientist by training whose many positions in a long career at Johnson & Johnson included running marketing for skin-care brands such as Neutrogena, Aveeno and Lubriderm, accepted the CEO slot at Avon in April 2012 after “months of wooing,” as we reported at the time.

Scully, who had been at J. Crew nine years, most recently as COO spearheading its international expansion efforts, was named Avon’s CFO in January and started at the company only last month. Presumably, he knew what he was getting into, even if the answers appear to be immediately apparent only to outsiders.

“Unless Avon somehow persuades a buyer to pony up some serious money for some or all of the company, the new CFO could face more than robust discussion,” at its rescheduled Investor Day this fall, writes Paul Ausick for 247Wall St.com.