Just looked into this and apparently it is indeed an MLM. When I was a kid my grandma sold AIM (American Image Marketing) goods. Mostly heath food and vitamin products. I'm pretty sure I drank enough of this stuff as a kid to fill a swimming pool:
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Haven't died yet though. It's some sort of seaweed powder you mix with whatever. For a while they changed the name to "BarleyLIFE" for some reason but now it looks like they changed it back. Looking into it, it's almost $50 a jar.
Oh man, I remember AIM, I am so damn sorry you had to go through that. Our normally normal neighbors somehow got sucked into both Amway
and Juice Plus at some point. All I can vouch for is that if you have a bottle of Shaklee concentrate, a pressure hose and a poor bastard friend who works in a local hotel you too can have a freight elevator full of fun (just run before security gets there). The Juice Plus I think we used to throw at people out the car window.
As others have stated here, Avon isn't a MLM. It began in the 1880's as the "California Perfume Company" as a way for women to make a little extra household cash (traditionally, farm wives maintained the 'dairy' money -- profits from eggs, cheese and butter sales were considered the 'ladies' income' and as families began to move into urban areas there was that gap of income.) So with one employee, off she went to sell perfume door to door and within a year there were 75 or so of these "perfume ladies" -- a few years later, when make up was 'acceptable' for "nice ladies" to wear they expanded to cosmetics and became Avon. (and yeah, I really did know all that because I wrote an article on them once) Avon ladies
will encourage you to start your own sales, but not really because they don't want you horning in on "their" territory. A friend of mine was actually an "Avon Gentleman" and did really well, he later became a make-up artist.
And, yep, I'm the one who ended up with LLR Universal Monster leggings
and the creepy ass xmas ones -- I swear the dude looks like Frylock in a Santa hat leering out of the bushes covering your ass. We show them to guests and laugh like hell. She forgot to mention the greatest moment of LLR history however; LLR is FAMOUS for lifting patterns and designs wholesale from other sources, namely Spoonflower. Their greatest fuck up in history was when they stole one, and released the dresses and leggings with the true designer's WATERMARK embedded into the FABRIC! (Lawsuit still pending). One of the LLR sales reps was making huge bank at one point, she now is living in an unfinished garage that she was having converted into her "LuLaRoe Home Boutique". (she had to rent out the actual house to try and recoup some of her LLR mega-debt) We live fairly adjacent to LLR Ground Zero so we get a lot of local gossip on them from time to time. Their reps
were receiving wet, damp, molding product ... why? ... because most of it was sitting on palettes in the parking lot during the winter of 2016-17, one of the worst rainy winters California has had in 20 years. They have been indicted under a RICO violation because (surprise!) their stockers, stitchers and warehouse managers
weren't "lazy illegals lucky to be in the U.S." Nope, they were native Californians who were hard-working members of the Garment Workers Union, Teamsters, you name it and when they were told "oh sorry, there's just no money to pay you" they called in their Union Reps. ... And thus began the Battle of the Leggings Bastards. Disney quietly canceled their licensing agreement (due to shitty fabric, construction and fuck paying some other company) and now makes their own leggings.
TL;DR - Amway shenanigans, Avon's A-okay, and we've got enough dirt on LuLaRoe to fill the Grand Canyon.
