Body Shop: A Scam?

The goal of the Body Shop At Home, like other Multi-Level Marketing businesses, is to increase the sale of Body Shop products. However, instead of opening new Body Shop stores or starting an ad campaign, Multi-Level Marketing (MLM) depends on independent sales representatives to sell the Body Shop’s products. This direct mode of marketing is less expensive than hiring advertising agencies, but relies heavily on word-of-mouth marketing and relationship referrals—making results heavily dependent on the skills and connections possessed by the sales representatives. While MLM is a completely legal business strategy, companies who take the MLM route often mislead potential recruits by exaggerating profit margins and downplaying risks.

Over the course of the pandemic, hundreds of thousands of people have been furloughed, and many others have lost their jobs.

The disaster that is The Body Shop At Home starts with a select few introduced to an amazing business opportunity. And like all things, business opportunities comes with a price tag. People were then encouraged to recruit other people for a buy in to recoup their initial investment. Each new member of the scheme is encouraged to recruit somebody new and the money continues to be funneled up the system. But any mathematician can see the colossal problem with this model. To make money in The Body Shop’s MLM, there needs to be an endless supply of recruits, but that’s impossible. If the founder recruited five members, and these five members each recruited five more members that would be 25. After 15 tiers, it would have exceeded the entire population of the planet. Multi-Level Marketing such as The Body Shop At Home are mathematically designed to collapse, and when those on the bottom of the pyramid starts realizing that everyone is not making money and drop out of the scheme, the tiers above lose their ability to make money and suddenly each tier begins collapsing once they lose their only source of income.

This was reality to Jane Healey, 23, a florist from London, who lost her stake of £300 within 2 weeks of her initial start-up in The Body Shop At Home. “When you join up you go to meetings three times a week and everyone is handing over this cash,' she explained, 'It turns your head seeing all that money and they make sure all the new recruits do see it being counted at the end of the night. Then they would ring you up all the time to see if you had new recruits yet. It felt like the Mafia. I wouldn't advise anyone to do it.”