Brooke Sutherland, Columnist

Avon Falling

Updating its business model will take time and money, and it's running low on both.

May 5, 2017 at 5:27 PM UTC

Brooke Sutherland is Bloomberg News' Boston bureau chief and writes the Industrial Strength Newsletter. She was previously a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering deals and industrial companies and an M&A reporter for Bloomberg News.

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Avon Products Inc.'s activist investor has played its trump card, but the deck is stacked against it.

Barington Capital Group led a group of fed-up investors late Thursday in calling on the door-to-door cosmetics seller to immediately start looking for CEO Sherilyn McCoy's replacement after the company posted another quarterly loss and its shares continued their downward spiral. This has been a long time coming. Barington raised questions about McCoy's leadership in 2015, but settled for a board seat and appeared willing to give her a shot at turning things around following the sale of the bulk of Avon's North American business to private equity firm Cerberus Capital Management last year.