WS Chronicle

By Todd Luck

The Chronicle

Jodria Bufford has received the ultimate Mary Kay reward, a pink Cadillac, for her success selling the beauty brand’s popular cosmetics.

Buford said that she’s the first African-American woman in years to get a Mary Kay pink Cadillac locally.

Bufford, an Independent Senior Sales Director for Mary Kay, received the pink Cadillac SRX on Thursday, Oct. 8 at Flow Cadillac. Mary Kay sales its cosmetics through its 3 million Independent Beauty Consultants worldwide and offers incentives such as career cars when they reach certain levels of success, with the pink Cadillac being the top incentive. Bufford has built a successful sales unit, that’s had as many as 130 women in it at one time.

Mary Kay career cars are for both personal and professional use. They’re replaced with a new car every two years based on the level of success the salesperson is at. Buford said she plans to keep her pink Cadillac. She said it’s a prestigious symbol of the hard work of her sales unit.

“It really is a trophy on wheels,” she said.

Bufford said that before she started with Mary Kay in 2010, she would’ve never dreamed she’d be selling cosmetics for a living.

“If anyone had ever told me someday you will leave your job and you will sell lip gloss, I would have told them they were out of their mind,” she said.

Buford was a mortgage banker and Realtor when she joined Mary Kay to help out a fellow Realtor who was selling the brand’s cosmetics as a side job. She quickly discovered how much money she could make and earned her first Mary Kay career car in her first year. By 2012, she was earning as much selling cosmetics as she did working for Self-Help Credit Union, so she decided to do Mary Kay full time.

Having worked in law enforcement and banking, Bufford said she felt she was an unlikely beauty consultant.

“I wasn’t a girly girl. I had a law enforcement background, so I didn’t wear makeup until I started selling Mary Kay and I said ‘How am I going to do that?’” she said. “But what I found was there are more women like me than there are ‘glamazons,’ and somebody that doesn’t intimidate them, they can sit in their kitchen or at their dining room table and discuss what look they want to achieve or what areas they would like to improve.”

Bufford said it’s the personal connection with clients that keep them coming back to their beauty consultants, who get to know them and their beauty needs. It’s the type of relationship that’s hard to find in a store isle. That’s the key to Mary Kay’s success, she said.

“The product is wonderful, but it’s the relationship tied with the product that makes it different,” she said.

Currently there are 6,032 Mary Kay career cars on the road nationwide and about 1,318 of them are Mary Kay pink Cadillacs.