n Christina Mitsi’s friend offered her a job that paid up to £40,000 a month for as little as eight hours a week, she thought she’d hit the jackpot.
Christina, 37, jumped at the chance and joined health and skincare brand Forever Living as a sales rep.
Within months, she was waxing lyrical about her new role on Facebook.
She had the opportunity to be among the first to try out new beauty products, most of which were made from aloe vera and boasted huge health benefits.
She had access to attractive discounts. She was running her own business selling on behalf of Forever Living and travelling to glamorous events each month, including one party on a yacht on the river Thames through London.
So when Christina, who is from the Lake District, noticed that a growing number of old friends had ‘unfriended’ her on Facebook, she put it down to jealousy.
Reality check: Christina Mitsi quit her Forever Living job after 11 months of stress which took a huge toll on her family life
And when family friends who were close to her father started to make snide comments to him about her work, she brushed them off.
It was only when her husband sat her down 11 months into the job that Christina confronted reality.
She’d become so focused on selling Forever Living’s beauty products – and caught up in all her colleagues’ positive messages spurring her on – that she hadn’t noticed how little money she’d been making. Or how much she had irritated her friends who were sick of being sold to.
In fact, Christina had been spending hundreds of pounds on business trips and buying products just to meet the minimum targets required to keep her company running. She was pouring more money into the business than she was earning.
In the 11 months she worked for Forever Living, Christina estimates she earned around £1,100 but spent around £400 on beauty products and over £1,000 attending company meetings and events, so overall she’d made a loss of more than £300.
She says her earnings changed drastically from month to month depending on how much stock she managed to sell to friends and family.
Some months she made £200 to £300, while others she made as little as £18. Looking back, she says: ‘How was I, an intelligent university-educated woman, sucked into that?’
Christina is among a growing number of women who have been lured into working for so-called Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) companies and have since quit.
Now they are warning other women it is not worth the effort and involved making sacrifices that cost them friendships and ruined family life.
Forever Living is an MLM company, which is a type of business that encourages independent sales reps to sell company products and recruit others to join. MLMs provide the products for recruits to sell.
They buy from the company at a discount and then sell at list price, pocketing the difference.
Reps such as Christina take a commission from sales earned by people they recruit and can then move to higher levels of the network, where rewards are greater. More sales and larger networks help reps qualify for bigger discounts.
A number of MLMs, including Forever Living, have been criticised by women who say they advertise an unattainable dream.
Other major names include Arbonne, Avon, Herbalife, InteleTravel and Tropic Skincare. Some companies pressure new recruits to spend hundreds of pounds on products to sign up. Very few reps are able to turn a decent profit.
Recruits such as Christina warn not only of the financial toll these jobs can take but also the social isolation many feel, as they are often told to distance themselves from friends and family who speak negatively about the company.
Earlier this summer, Charlie Harris told Money Mail how she’d toiled for 60-hour weeks to earn just £1,470.25 over 15 months (sometimes finishing with £25 a month) from InteleTravel and PlanNet Marketing.
Charlie had joined travel agency InteleTravel but her main income wasn’t from selling holidays, it came from recruiting other agents to sell holidays with InteleTravel.
That was through a second operation called PlanNet Marketing, a multi-level marketing (MLM) company, in which sales reps earn by recruiting others into the business.
Charlie said it destroyed her friendships. She fell out with her best pal, who said she felt used.
In Christina’s case, she says she was in desperate need of a new career when her friend and colleague at the time suggested she join Forever Living.
She found that Forever Living was founded in 1978 in Arizona and sells aloe vera based drinks, supplements and cosmetics, while recruiting new members.
It operates in over 160 countries and relies on independent distributors. It claims online to be ‘a multi-billion-dollar company’.
Christina says: ‘I was in such a vulnerable place at the time and I trusted my friend.’ In 2015, she was working in the Palace Theatre in Manchester on a zero hour contract. It was a job she hoped would be temporary.
Age 26, she had quit a role as a chef in a Greek restaurant where she had worked 70-hour weeks for four years.
So she jumped at the offer of high-paying work where she would be able to choose her hours.
Her friend invited her to an introductory meeting in Ashton under Lyne, east of Manchester, to learn more about the company.
Christina says she was mesmerised by the women on the stage, who gloated about their £40,000 a month incomes. She adds: ‘It sounded great. I thought I could absolutely smash it.’
Christina signed up, agreed to work at least eight hours a week and bought a £200 kit containing all the key products to sell, confident it was an investment in her future. She decided to take on the work alongside her theatre job.
She was immediately told to message all 300 plus contacts in her phone telling them about this amazing opportunity to buy Forever Living products. ‘Man or woman, young or old, everyone got a message from me,’ she says.
She claims she was also encouraged to hold product demonstration meetings with family and friends. The products ranged from lip balms to gels, shampoos and conditioners. They cost at least £18 per 100ml bottle.
Christina recalls being shocked to hear her dad’s friends asking him what ‘nonsense’ she was sending them in her messages.
And, she says, she was told by managers that strategy meetings with colleagues both in-person and online were vital to attend.
Christina says: ‘I was getting the bus to the next town along, going to these meetings and then coming back late at night and working at the theatre around 30 hours a week too.’
On top of the meetings, they were pushed to attend ‘success days’ in London once every three months that cost £50 a ticket.
Scant rewards: Most reps who join Forever Living do not earn a significant amount of money from the business, its online income disclosure statement shows
The women had to pay for their own accommodation, train tickets, food and drink, resulting in a bill of around £300 – more than Christina was making a month.
One event was on a yacht on the Thames. They drank champagne. There were thousands of people at the in-person events, all from the UK, she says. ‘Most people I met were genuinely lovely.’
Christina managed to recruit four people and continued to meet them at these events.
But she was struggling to make sales. Despite posting online three times a day and spending 30 hours a week messaging people about her aloe vera products.
She says: ‘I started to get the hate messages; “I didn’t expect this of you Christina, I thought you’d be the last person to do this.” We were told “they’re just haters. That’s just negativity, you block those people out, don’t let them bring you down.” So, we did.’
Most reps who join Forever Living do not earn a significant amount of money from the business, its online income disclosure statement shows.
Just 10.2 per cent of joiners earned a ‘volume-based bonus’. A volume-based bonus is a financial reward paid to an employee, sales rep or business partner.
Among those who received a bonus, the majority (69 per cent) earned an average of £82.20 a month in bonus incentives. The top one per cent earned an average of £23,131 a month.
Christina said her husband eventually asked if the venture was actually making money and if she was enjoying it, prompting the couple to conclude the business ‘wasn’t working’.
‘I couldn’t do it any more. It wasn’t worth my time,’ she adds.
Christina says her colleagues refused to speak to her after she quit. She now promotes brands on social media app TikTok receiving commission through her account @christinatmitsi.
Vix Leyton, consumer expert at Think Money, says: ‘MLMs are technically legitimate but have earned a difficult reputation because, for many people, the chances of making a consistent living from them are very low.
‘The appeal is completely understandable, especially for people looking for work that fits around family life or caring responsibilities. Being selected is also quite powerful – and flattering – so it is easy to be lured into an initial conversation.’
Consumer expert Martyn James adds: ‘While many MLMs are legitimate in the sense that they exist and have actual products to sell, they can have cult-like conferences where you are “nudged” in to signing up to sell the goods.
‘So be prepared. Work out precisely what you need to sell to turn a profit and check how to get out of the contract if it’s not for you.’
Forever Living was contacted for comment.