This failure happened with Arbonne International, a multi-level marketing company (MLM) for which I was a consultant for about five months in 2014 (it’s also called network marketing). Usually in life, your typical product like make-up or clothing goes from the manufacturing plant to a warehouse to the distributer (usually a store) to the customer, increasing in price at each step. With MLMs the product goes from the manufacturer to individual sellers of the product (often called consultants or similar) who sell it to customers. This more direct pathway supposedly makes the product cheaper for customers because you’ve cut out the supermarket or department store where they really mark up the price.
But according to Jane Marie of The Dream podcast season one, MLMs are just one step up from pyramid schemes, which involve the exchange of money within a closed system. Pyramid schemes — which were big in the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s — required participants to constantly bring new people into the pyramid. That was because the new people gave money to the current participants, which the new people got back when they brought in even newer people. The only way a pyramid scheme could keep paying off was if the participants kept recruiting new people. And in a pyramid scheme, there was no product. It was just a bunch of money going around that mostly benefitted the people who joined earliest. Pyramid schemes were outlawed in the 1980s.
Arguably, Arbonne isn’t a pyramid scheme because there’s an actual product bought by people who aren’t Arbonne consultants. They also have an extensive training process that sets you up to use their marketing materials when you pitch to people who buy the products.
From the beginning it was difficult for me to be an Arbonne consultant because their sales training stressed calling people on the phone to make the initial contact and set up appointments. It seemed to me that it took a specific kind of personality that would be willing to forego email and texts in favor of talking to strangers live. I thought Arbonne needed to update its outreach technique, but no, the woman who recruited me insisted the phone was best. I’ll call her “M.”
I also had to sink $1,000 into makeup just to start my Arbonne career. M was so brightly optimistic about my future, I didn’t realize it was going to be several months before I made that thousand back, and even longer to earn actual net profit (if ever). I was encouraged to advance up the ranks as soon as possible by hitting monthly sales goals. But those goals were challenging and since I didn’t know dozens and dozens of people to pitch to, I ended up buying a good amount of my own product.
Remember: one of the characteristics of a pyramid scheme is that it’s a closed system. When consultants buy more of their own product than they’re selling to outside customers, that gets scarily close to being a closed system. But the real sign — which I didn’t see as a warning but should have — was that M stressed that the real money wasn’t made from selling products but by getting others to join the organization as your downline (essentially recruits).
I was very disappointed to realize that being an Arbonne consultant wasn’t about the simple selling of products. I wanted to do that. The real goal was constantly throwing a net to get others to join underneath me. When this sank in for me in 2014 I didn’t know what to do, but I was already on the train, so I stayed.
For me, the need to recruit was bad enough, but Arbonne also had a very specific culture that I didn’t fit into. Arbonne was (and still is) very white. In 2014 the make-up had few options for dark-skinned people and their promotional materials had almost 100% white faces. But worse than that were their meetings and training sessions. Not only were they full of young, white women who didn’t feel like my peers, but they were all aggressively optimistic.
Training sessions were dominated by grinning, bubbly young white women (who relentlessly called themselves ladies). They chirped about how much we were all going to succeed and used the words fantastic and amazing almost obsessively. (Jane Marie’s podcast includes the history of MLMs and they originated from positive-thinking religions like Unity. Such religions maintain that as you think so it shall be and if things don’t go as you want them to, it’s because you didn’t envision correctly). These training sessions left me wondering if I’d fit into this organization.
The Arbonne annual conference I attended was even worse. It didn’t train us much in selling and closing techniques, but it did make me feel like this whole Arbonne thing was much bigger and uglier than I had realized. There was an assumed intimacy because we had made this commitment to Arbonne. There was also an expectation that I would be as out-of-my-skin excited to be there as the hard core consultants were. I was not.
M gathered her downline to have us meet each other, share our “whys” (the reason we were doing Arbonne) and to give us gifts. It was full of emotion, appreciation, morale-boosting and (some kind of) friendship, but it didn’t help me learn how to make money. I was underwhelmed by the level of professional support the conference gave and overwhelmed by how emotional and smiley it was.
The plenary sessions were awful. That was when every person at the conference filled a stadium-sized room and expressed their enthusiasm for Arbonne and the love we felt for one another. It had an F of a lot of colored lights, loud music and screaming. Positive, positive, positive! It was more like a pop music concert than a professional sales conference and it convinced me that I would never fit into Arbonne culture and I didn’t want to try any more.
One more thing I had no patience with: the make-up line was constantly promoted with the phrase “fine lines and wrinkles.” But that’s a very white concern. Women of color don’t focus much on fines and wrinkles because we often don’t have them. The women in my family more often get puffy cheeks and baggy eyes as we age. I talked to M about this and she took the note. She’d never heard that before.
M had also never heard of having lips that are too big for the little skinny lipsticks Arbonne sold in 2014. We women with full, wide mouths had to run those skinny little things back and forth to get full coverage.
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| Big lips, little stick |
During those months, I and two new consultants who were African-American would meet and try to boost each other’s morale. We wanted to believe that with Arbonne we would make good money, but we often ended up talking about how hard it was to sell and complaining about the weirdly alienating culture. The three of us left Arbonne in less than a year of joining.
(BTW: In 2014 Arbonne knew it needed to add people of color to its catalogue images, was adding a dedicated diversity person to its international staff and wanted to attract more Arbonne consultants of color. But at the day-to-day level of interacting with your downline, there was no attempt to make sure I or my consultant-of-color peers were happy with our new job.)
Arbonne was an expensive failure for me. Between purchasing tester makeup and promotional materials, buying products for my personal use so I’d know what I was talking about, hosting parties for selling makeup, and paying for that damn conference (flight, room, meals and the conference fee which was hundreds of dollars), I was out about $4,000. Ouch! Fortunately, I had the money, but it meant my savings account was considerably diminished at the end of that adventure.
I’ll probably always regret trying to be an Arbonne consultant, but at least it got me…um…no, I can’t think of one damn way it benefitted me. The one thing I did right was get out after five months. Some women stay in MLMs for years, sinking into tens of thousands of dollars of debt. For too long they believe the message that financial comfort is right around the corner if they just believe in themselves.
But if my experience didn’t help me, maybe it can benefit others if I say: don’t join multi-level marketing companies! If you ever think, “Maybe this MLM is a good idea,” don’t do it. Do not try to earn money by joining Arbonne or Young Living or Mary Kay or Melaleuca or LimeLife or Herbalife or Amway or LuLaRoe or Primerica or Shaklee or any of them. You can purchase the best of those products (and some are excellent) from consultants without having to join anything. MLMs? Just don’t. Listen to this instead.
(And here’s my next story of personal failure.)
EXCELLENT point, Andria. I just changed the title.
An important warning. So important, I wish the title reflected it. I thought it would be just a personal analysis but the blog is more than that, an MLM warning is important to everyone.