My MLM Was Racist

I left an MLM because of the culture as much as the bad business model

I’m a failure as a multi-level marketer. This failure happened with Arbonne International, a multi-level marketing company (MLM, but it’s also called network marketing) for which I was a “consultant” for about five months in 2014. You might already have heard how exploitative MLMs are and how they rely on recruiting new sellers more than on selling product. Here’s the Chicana experience I had.

Your typical body care product goes from the manufacturing plant to a warehouse to a distributer to the customer, increasing in price at each step. Arbonne cut out most of those parts of the chain and has their consultants sell directly to consumers. And that would be fine if most of the money came from consumers in exchange for products.

But according to Jane Marie in season one of The Dream podcast, MLMs are just one step up from pyramid schemes. Pyramid schemes — which were big in the U.S. in the 1970s and 80s — required participants to constantly bring new people into the pyramid. The new people gave money to the current participants, and the new people only got money when they brought in even newer people. In a pyramid scheme, there is no product. It’s 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 classic pyramid scheme because there’s an actual product bought by some people who aren’t Arbonne consultants. But there’s a definite emphasis on recruiting new consultants and the woman who trained me made no secret of that. I’ll call her “M.” When I learned that the real Arbonne money didn’t come from selling but from constantly throwing a net to get others to join underneath me, my heart sank. Unfortunately I was already $1,000 in the hole from buying the skin care products M said I needed to get started.

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 net profit. I’m a very social person and I have a lot of friends, but even I didn’t have dozens of people to pitch to who would pay $18 for shampoo. So I ended up buying a good amount of my own product.