Mary Kay sells the beauty of culture

A Texan beauty company's products are not the first thing that most people would suspect to find in Chinese women's cosmetics bags, but it is a little-known fact that Mary Kay was the top-selling beauty brand manufactured on the mainland last year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics.

The direct-selling beauty giant, which awards pink cars to its top salespeople, recently celebrated its 50th anniversary and 18 years of doing business on the mainland. It has 3,500 sales consultants in Hong Kong and more than 850,000 on the mainland.

China chief executive K.K. Chua, whose office is decorated in bold red lip prints (and a lip-shaped sofa), shares with the South China Morning Post how the traditional business model of going door-to-door can survive in the digital age, why it pays to have been the one to teach women how to take care of their skin and how the East now sets the cosmetics trends for the West.

When I first arrived in China, it was a country at a little bit of a crossroads. It has just come out of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 and now is on to the concept that to get rich is glorious. Do we enter the market by product or by opportunity or by technology or pricing? I chose market entry by culture.