The Larkin Clubs of Ten: Consumer Buying Clubs and Mail-Order Commerce, 1890–1940

The direct selling industry has a long history, with roots snaking back to the nineteenth-century "Yankee peddlers" who roamed the countryside selling tools, teas, and liniments door-to-door. Its reputation has suffered from the prevalence of misleading and illegal schemes such as pyramids, which generate income by paying money or other compensation solely for the act of recruiting, charge high entrance fees, and sell products of questionable value.¹ Nonetheless, some advocates note that direct sales work, which often involves family and flexible working hours, has provided an excellent alternative to the traditional bureaucratic employment relationship that has historically been less receptive to women.² The Larkin Company's "Clubs of Ten" provide business historians with an early example of a direct selling organization. The Larkin Clubs succeeded impressively in the early twentieth century only to decline during the Depression. That trajectory supplies a fascinating case study for understanding the strengths and weaknesses of direct selling organizations in the history of American marketing.³

Larkin Company was a large mail-order house and a manufacturer of soaps, household products, and foods. One contemporary retailing expert described it as "a concern of unique character."⁴ It utilized typical modes of distribution to sell soap during its first ten years. After 1885, it sold its products mainly through the mail and after 1890 to women in buying clubs mostly in rural areas and small towns. Historians have generally overlooked Larkin Company's innovations in marketing and distribution—its use of valuable premiums, its "Factory-to-Family" direct selling strategy, and its club selling system—focusing instead on its relationship with Frank Lloyd Wright, who designed the company's office building in 1904 and a number of homes for its executives.⁵ This article demonstrates how Larkin's "Clubs of Ten" were an important precursor to both the gender recomposition of the direct selling workforce, largely attributed to the California Perfume Company (now known as Avon), and to the home party plan, made famous by Tupperware, that flowered inside the parlors and on the lush suburban lawns in the decades after World War II.

Though Larkin did not originate the club system (that distinction most likely goes to the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company during the mid-1860s), Larkin clubs were vital to the company's success.⁶ Clubs were comprised mainly of married women who used their social networks to solicit bulk orders of Larkin products. At a time when most direct sellers were men paid to sell door-to-door, Larkin Secretaries—club organizers—and members were overwhelmingly women who did not earn commissions or wages, only premiums and product discounts. Secretaries also hosted club members and others at their homes for social gatherings and often involved other family members in selling and distribution. The Clubs of Ten catapulted the company from a small-scale local soap manufacturer to one of the largest consumer-driven mail-order houses in the country by the close of the nineteenth century. Larkin thrived in this rural, preradio milieu in which vast numbers of married women did not work for wages but did aspire to middle-class status.⁷

By the mid-1920s, a confluence of economic, social, cultural, and internal management factors initiated a slow decline at Larkin that accelerated during the Depression. By 1941, with its mail-order operations severely contracted and its retailing units sold, the original Larkin Company was dismantled. Hence, this paper analyzes the conditions underwhich direct selling thrives—and sometimes falters. Direct selling is one of a handful of options available to manufacturers and retailers in getting goods and services to consumers. As seen through the Clubs of Ten experience, its utility and effectiveness seem time-bound; direct selling was unable to respond to changes in technology, mobility, and consumer preferences that transformed consumer buying after 1920.

Competing Distribution Systems and the Rise of Direct Selling Organizations in the United States

During the colonial and antebellum eras, itinerant peddlers played a vital role in distribution. Traipsing the countryside, they brought manufactured goods, services...