Mary Kay (Ukraine) marks its 25th anniversary in Ukraine this year. We were planning a wonderful party to celebrate our founder, the incredible Mary Kay Ash, and to recognize her accomplishments, and her fight for opportunities to enrich women's lives.
But the war came. We must fight again, and not just to keep women's opportunities alive. We are fighting for the right to live, work, and create a living on the land that is our native, as well as for our sense of national identity.
The greatest valuable resource for the Mary Kay Company has always been and will always be its people. Because of this, our main responsibility was to support the Company's staff members and Independent Beauty Consultants (IBCs) of the Ukrainian subsidiary. We decided to create financial support program, and chats for communication both within the Company and with IBCs. We are so happy that we were able to financially support women entrepreneurs who worked as our IBCs during these difficult times, despite not having made a single hryvnia in sales at the time. Constant mutual support 24/7 and the ability to communicate kept each of us in good shape, adding positivity and faith that, together, we are a powerful force and victory will surely come. And such emotional support was extremely necessary.
Our warehouse and the IBCs' service center in Stoyanka village were right in the whirlwind of military operations. Every day we watched as the buildings next to our warehouse were destroyed under continuous shelling. But a miracle happened! After the de-occupation of the Kyiv region, we were able to get to the place and discover that amid the fire the Mary Kay warehouse was only partially damaged! This not only gave us optimism, but filled each of us with incredible energy, courage, and readiness to restore business. In close cooperation with colleagues from the European region and the corporate office in Dallas (USA), we began an intensive process of business recovery, adjustment of supplies, and opening of the order system.
In the shortest possible time, we managed to move the products to a new warehouse and started accepting orders. It is worth mentioning that we had no doubt that women in Ukraine needed Mary Kay products at any time. Since already in March, we started receiving questions from IBCs about the possibility of ordering products. They shared in their messages how they hold beauty meetings in bomb shelters. Internally displaced women who had to leave their homes only with a small suitcase were so happy that they could buy lipstick, fragrance, or skin care products. Later in May, we started accepting the first orders for a limited number of products, and since October, we have completely restored the possibility of individual orders for the entire brand portfolio.
Today, when the first fear of war has passed and each of us has pulled ourselves together and is doing everything to bring the victory closer, we continue to support the women of Ukraine. In addition to creating new programs for business development, strengthening sales opportunities, and launching new products, we continue to keep in close contact with IBCs through chats, webinars, and weekly meetings. We also do not forget about development, involving external experts, because training as an investment allows us to plan and dream, strengthening the belief that victory is approaching and a happy future lies ahead.
For nine months, the Mary Kay brand continued to provide earning opportunities to hundreds of women throughout Ukraine. In our opinion, the support of entrepreneurial activity is extremely important in these times, and we are happy that our company conducts its activities, developing women's entrepreneurship in Ukraine. In addition, we help those Ukrainians who suffered from the war through charitable organizations, including the Red Cross Society of Ukraine. Together with the charitable organization "Tabletochki" we launched several charitable initiatives to help children from the affected regions to fight cancer. In October, another initiative was launched under the "Pink Changes Lives" charity program aimed to support women who have faced breast cancer.
The activity of every business in Ukraine, large and small, is a contribution to the victory, development, and reloading of a new successful, and prosperous Ukraine. That is why we must work and develop. For each of us. For the sake of the future. For the sake of Ukraine!
