Why are all my friends becoming Body Shop consultants?

[Coffeebiscuitsrepeat]

Since I hit 30, I've noticed at least 6 of my wider friendship group do this. Is it actually profitable? Is it MLM? I'm just curious mostly, as it looks like quite a lot of effort to drum up sales!

Several friends have started doing Scentsy.
I'm sure the original one has recruited them all but with the same circle of friends I'm not sure how successful they'll be!

I don't even like the Body Shop!

I've signed up as a Neal's Yard consultant. Only to get a hefty discount on the products that I use anyway, and to pass that discount on directly to friends and family who already use their stuff. Absolutely no hard selling via SM or earning commission, and definitely no "team". Urgh.

@Zaffa Body Shop @ Home categorically is MLM. You can build downlines and it’s very tricky to make anything more than pun money be product sales alone. I know plenty of people burned by BS’s MLM arm.

On my estate FB page, we mostly argue about cats etc

I've blocked 6 bots. Thermomix. Scentsy. Avon. Darceys. Younique. Bodyshop.

My feed is much nicer than my husbands

Someone I went to school with is part of a travel agent MLM. She posts more about recruiting people than she does the holidays. She has zero experience and her posts are clearly just copy and pasted information. The selling point they use to get you to sign up is that you can make commission off your own holidays.

I did some research on the company and you have to pay a few hundred in sign up and ‘training’ fees, which most people will never make back.

I think it's a real shame that these companies are able to carry on operating and preying on what are often vulnerable or financially struggling people - mums who are worried about money or can't commit to a regular job, disabled people who wouldn't manage in a workplace, with all these false promises.

They tell people they'll make the money back on their starter kits really quickly but of course they won't - if you pay £100 for the kit, selling 5 x £20 won't make it back - you only get a small commission, not the product price. It'd take you ages to break even and then they start again with more sets and minimum order thresholds to make people spend more of their own money.

It's naive to think you're going to get more than a few sympathy purchases from friends and family - lots of these mlm products are awful quality and over priced, I use a couple of body shop things but I buy them online when they're heavily discounted.

I really wish these schemes could be stopped, I know of a couple of friends who've made a massive loss and wasted a lot of their own money trying to make it take off (and pissed off the friends and family they're trying to sell to)

@leftovercoffeecake yep, Inteletravel is a scam. It generates cash by recruiting people who are buying the “opportunity to be a travel agent”, who pay to join, pay a monthly fee, pay for training etc etc. The last three sign ups I met had all been told there is about to be a travel boom which isn’t what legitimate travel industry people are saying, this is what @DobbyLovesSocks has heard too and rightly commented that it’s just a script. The three IT travel agents I met had never been abroad and two had never owned a passport - IT/PlanNet Marketing don’t care!

I have one fiend who does Avon and a Canadian one who did one until recently.Neither of them spam my feed. If you do have a friend who does one please encourage them to keep some sort of books ,even if it's only money in vs money out.

What is mlm?

@Jul1911 MLM is short for multilevel marketing. It’s a pyramid scheme where people ‘invest’ by giving a fee to the scheme in exchange for a product starter kit. They are then encouraged to buy more product regularly and their upline is paid on what they continue to buy from the company. Much of the purchasing is within the scheme and the money trickles upwards. Over 99% of sign ups lose money. mlmtruth.org/mlm-or-not/

Loads of school mums are body shop reps, I get tons of invites and accept and unfollow as I don't like to offend but what did piss be off was one of them invited all school mums for a drink in a local pub one night prior to lockdown, a catch up which I thought oh how lovely yes I'll go.

She then proceeded to open her bag on the table and start getting out a load of products and asking us all to sample them....all very awkward and I could see a few raised eyebrows.

Then I felt fucking gullible for falling for the invite.

I live in a small area and I now have 6 friends all trying to sell tropic to everyone. The one is doing very well because she recruited people

@Tanfastic That is outrageous!!

@Tanfastic I would have been raging if that had been me. How sad that she has to resort to desparate measures like lying to people just to try and sell. Did anyone say anything to her about it?

A friend does body shop as a second income, she’s made quite a bit doing it and just does it as a hobby really. She’s not a pushy seller though!

I have various on mine. The BS one shared a post (I guess her upline) that said "I just need five more people to get a promotion" I thought "well at least you're honest about it."

Someone else is using her page to promote Younique for a friend.

I am in a free group and there is often a thread to promote your business, every single one is a MLM.

The thing at the moment is pay £x as part of a raffle, seems to be the way of every MLM, plus a load of randoms doing it for whatever reason.

It's all Tropic round here. I don't mind as I quite like the stuff and the ethos, though it is expensive. One woman seems to do really well as she has given up her job to do it. I think she is actually quite skilled. She has genuine enthusiasm for the products and her marketing definitely seems next level to others on FB. I hope she does well as she puts in a lot of effort.
For me if the products are good then I'm happy to put an order in and get them delivered to my door.
I wouldn't mind a bit of Body Shop of Neals Yard.

I had one too, someone pretending to be a friend, invites places and talked about all the fun things we could do, then roped me into a forever living 'night out' in which I had to watch an excruciating talk about how great it all was, then she proceeded to give me a 'life coach' session which was horrific and cemented in my mind what a dick she was, she was basically trying to make my life seem shit so I would join and recruit my friends! It was at a low point in my life career wise and personally so I feel like she was hoping I'd cave. I politely declined and all the social things she'd suggested never materialised, surprisingly 😒

It's naive to think you're going to get more than a few sympathy purchases from friends and family - lots of these mlm products are awful quality and over priced

Absolutely. I’m 48 and I can remember, in the early nineties, people I knew talking about getting involved in ‘an amazing marketing opportunity that will allow me to retire at 40’. Bloody Amway, of course.

I subsequently shared a house, on two separate occasions, with people who had got involved in Amway. All keen to tell me that the Amway products were REALLY REALLY good and much better than anything you could buy in the shops, which is why it was worth paying five times as much for an Amway bathroom cleaner instead of Flash spray.

In the second case I was the lodger of a bloke who appeared to have dedicated his life to Amway. Not only did he regularly lecture me about how GREAT the Amway Artistry make up was and how I should start using it and selling it (as if! Also, how would he know?), when he invited poor saps around to try to recruit them as downlines he used to ask me to pretend to be his girlfriend rather than his lodger. So that he could pretend to be so successful that he didn’t need my £300 per month, see.

@Bebbanburger if your friend really has some talent then what a shame to be lining the pockets of Alan Sugar and Susie Ma.

If she’s doing well, and I mean by that consistently earning every
month as much as the U.K. national wage then she is likely to be recruiting. It’s very rare (though not unheard of) for some people to do well but it is usually at the expense of someone else they’ve brought in. It’s very hard to do consistently well just by selling the products though in the early days it can feel like it has potential because the sign up has yet to exhaust their social network. Once she’s trying to cold sell then the fact that the products are very expensive becomes an issue.After all, there’s a lot of competition from brands that are easily available and more effectively marketed. I’ve never heard of anyone having MLM brand loyalty unless they are part of the scheme. What the person I know told me about Tropic was that the 6 “supportive” friends who bought £800 of product in month one Of trading either returned to the original brands they liked or just didn’t need a sixty quid face cream as often as she needed to sell it.

At my children’s school there were 3 Tropic huns; Tropic doesn’t care as it’s already made its money from 3 customers, it not Tropic’s problem if they’re all trying to sell to the same customers!

But if you simply remain the end customer it isn’t your problem either. All the problems belong to the people who think they’re signing up to make a viable living beyond pin money.

Not sure how full on MLM Body Shop is? I can imagine it's hard to make any money as they have shops and the website, plus no one likes to constantly spammed on FB etc. A lot of people are cutting back on purchases so it would be even harder at the moment.

This funny Australian video about (not) selling Arbonne made my day:

I liked the twist at the end.

There's a lot of MLM information on this website (linked by a PP), including Usbourne books which seems like a scam too:

www.talentedladiesclub.com/articles/how-much-money-can-you-really-make-working-for-mlm-arbonne/

Alexthelittlecat as I said before (post early on) my friend was a rep for only 4 weeks before she started recruiting to her team...so pretty full on!

Someone I know from school is a Bodyshop at home bot. She is constantly posting about her her "business" helps her pay for her dd's dance lessons and how women should support other women by buying her shit.

What she doesn't mention is that she also runs a lucrative physiotherapy practice, and her husband is a sodding hospital consultant. That's what paying for the dancing lessons.

Also just a wee legal point - the sort of raffle which MLM bots love is illegal. The "buy a number and you could win X, Y and Z". You can only run a raffle selling tickets in advance or away from an event if you have a Gaming Licence and if it's for a charitable cause. (I think). You definitely need the licence.

The fact you're losing money hand over fist in a MLM is not a charitable cause.