This time last year, Alison Bryant was plagued by money worries. For five years, she’d been unable to work thanks to arthritis and her career as a carer had come to a grinding halt.
So when a rep from the aloe vera-based beauty brand Forever Living suggested she take up a lucrative role selling products from home, it seemed like a lifeline.
‘She said I could eventually earn £2,000 a month and in five years I could have the seaside cottage that had been my dream for as long as I could remember,’ says Alison, 57.
This August, Alison left Forever Living after having forked out £5,310.50 on the company’s products and the paraphernalia she needed to sell them – and earned just £154.48. ‘It made me feel sick, working out the amount I spent,’ she tells me. ‘I made a mistake. I was gullible, swept away.’
Forever Living is a multi-level marketing (MLM) company, whose sales reps – or Forever Business Owners (FBOs) as they’re known – earn money recruiting others to join the company, as well as from selling products.
The idea of working from home in a booming wellness industry, supported by a ‘family’ of like-minded women, can certainly sound enticing, especially when viewed alongside pictures reps are encouraged to post on social media of their happy successful lives.
The reality, alas, is rather different.
This August, Alison left Forever Living after having forked out £5,310.50 on the company’s products and the paraphernalia she needed to sell them – and earned just £154.48
Most MLM reps – usually women needing flexible work – earn very little indeed and some lose money. They often have to buy stock upfront or stockpile products to meet sales targets. Forever Living – an American company that launched in the UK in 1992 and has an estimated ten million reps worldwide – has consistently denied that it’s a pyramid scheme and points at the physical products it sells as evidence that it does not focus solely on recruiting members.
But critics say the line is blurred.
According to its website’s most recent Income Disclosure Statement in 2022, while most people choose to buy the products at a discount rather than join the MLM, 89.8 per cent of reps received no ‘meaningful’ income, and of the 10.2 per cent who did, 58.6 per cent earned less than £375 a year.
The founder, Rex Maughan, amassed an estimated net worth of over $500million (£373million) before he died in 2001, leaving his son, Gregg, as chief executive.
This April, after accusing the company of misleading people as to how much money they could make, America’s Federal Trade Commission prohibited it from making unsubstantiated earnings claims. In May, Forever Living stopped operating as an MLM in the US. American reps can still sell products, but not profit from recruitment.
In the UK, however, bold claims about income are still being made. Training material I’ve seen from this summer claims new starters can earn £75 to £300 a month (when in fact this could put them in the top 1 per cent of Forever Living earners) and earnings of up to £5,000 a month are ‘possible’ within 16 weeks, it says.
For the ‘very ambitious’, one of the UK’s top sellers suggests in a video recorded this March, a salary of £100,000 is possible.
In response to this, a spokesman for the company says: ‘The £75 figure relates to an example of potential retail profit from product sales.
‘Our Income Disclosure Statement reports bonus and incentive payments made by Forever Living and therefore measures a different form of income. The figures are therefore not directly comparable.’
But for Alison, such distinctions are irrelevant. An inherently private grandmother from Warrington, Cheshire, she cuts an unlikely whistleblower, but within minutes of talking to her it’s clear just how furious she is.
‘It’s just so misleading and can potentially ruin you,’ she says. ‘But I want people to know. You can’t make real money selling products. You can only make money by recruiting a team. I believe it absolutely is a pyramid scheme.’
Alison’s interest in Forever Living was piqued when she met Sarah – as we’ll call the woman who recruited her – selling Forever Living products at a market last spring. Its range of deodorants, soaps, supplements and gel drinks often contain aloe vera, which is said to have anti-inflammatory properties that may help lower cholesterol and blood sugar levels and aid digestion.
‘The natural ingredients appealed,’ says Alison, who believes the £27.09 aloe vera drinking gel helped her joint problems caused by arthritis and the nervous system condition fibromyalgia. ‘I didn’t like synthetic ingredients in health and beauty products.’
Sarah, meanwhile, was a mum in her 50s, who had been with Forever Living for 13 years and worked her way up to manager, the fourth level up. (There are five rungs on the rep ladder, and then another six rungs of leadership reps above that, each earning a progressively higher percentage of sales profits from those they recruit.)
‘I hated being on benefits,’ says Alison. ‘I thought this was something I could do from home.’
She had never heard of MLMs. Sarah told her she’d need to build a team for ‘lasting growth’, but that ‘the idea is you sell goods, first and foremost’.
At £6.83 for a soap and £28.79 for a cleanser, few friends could afford repeat purchases from Alison
To join, she paid £172 for a ‘Start Your Journey Pack’ of two sets of ten products, ‘one to use as a trial, one to sell to friends and family’. She was told to write a list of everyone she knew she could sell products to and join a WhatsApp group with 17 other reps in Sarah’s ‘downline’ (what they call the other women she’d recruited). ‘We had Motivation Mondays where we had to tell each other how much money we’d made,’ says Alison – which was nothing, for the rest of the year, as both she and Sarah were ill.
Nonetheless, Sarah persuaded Alison to come to Forever Living’s bi-annual ‘Success Day’ at a theatre, in which senior reps rev up a room of women who’ve paid £25 for the privilege. ‘They chant. They whoop, “One team! One goal!”’ says Alison, who was chivvied on-stage herself and presented with a sash, to her bemusement, ‘because all I’d really done at this point was buy a box’.
‘Looking back, it was almost cult-like, but at the time I was inspired. They all said they’d quit their day jobs and had life-changing incomes. One said she was earning £30,000 a month.’
Reps are told to set up private Facebook groups and then invite friends to join and sell products, using their happy lives to promote the brand on social media. Alison amassed 20 friends in her private Facebook group but struggled with the concept. ‘I’m quite private. Sarah used to tell me off for not doing it.’
Instead, she focused on selling in person, starting with a sales evening for friends at a hair salon in February. ‘I was enthusiastic and people bought from me,’ say Alison. A second sales evening weeks later was similarly successful and that month she sold more than £1,000 of products.
Forever Living uses an internal virtual currency of CCs (case credits) and to stay ‘active’ and receive sales bonuses, reps have to sell four CCs (around £630 of products) each month.
Alison had made over seven CCs. Granted, that only earned her £70 – 5 per cent of her sales – and a significant proportion included products she’d bought for herself for people to test. ‘But I could see how it would work as a business,’ she says. ‘I just needed to grow.’
But at £6.83 for a soap and £28.79 for a cleanser, few friends could afford repeat purchases.
She tried to drum up custom by contacting local businesses and residents ‘but not one person contacted me out of hundreds of flyers dropped’. In March she earned two CCs. Short of the required four, all her commission went straight to Sarah.
‘She said I needed to build my network, but I’d already approached all my friends and didn’t want to alienate them by asking again.’
In April, she hosted her first of ten market stalls selling Forever Living products. Each time it cost around £35 to hire the stall, and hundreds more in merchandise and equipment. ‘You need a 6ft table, a gazebo, chairs, a tablecloth with the Forever Living logo on it,’ she says. ‘You need flyers, brochures and enough products to put out on your table, open, so people can sample them.’
Even that wasn’t enough to guarantee a table, with so many reps fighting for one coveted spot. ‘The market was saturated. Some days nobody bought anything. Some I just about made back the stall money. Every single penny I earned, I put straight back into products.’
Alison was told by Sarah to hold prize draws at her market stalls so she could use the contact details women gave when they entered ‘to cultivate a relationship’. She says: ‘If they don’t respond, three or four days later you send them a WhatsApp, and then a voice message. You’re supposed to go back to them three times to persuade them to join the business.’
Many of Forever Living’s wellness products contain aloe vera, which is said to have anti-inflammatory properties that help lower cholesterol and blood sugar levels and aid digestion
Alison refused. ‘If someone’s given their information for the sole purpose of entering a prize draw, that doesn’t give you the green light to keep the information in your phone and keep contacting them.’
Perhaps unsurprisingly, given her misgivings, she didn’t recruit a single person, which would have earned her the equivalent of two CCs and helped push her up the sales ladder.
To buy the products, Alison took money out of the pension she’d been drawing since she was 55. ‘I’ve never been good with money,’ she admits. ‘You’re not encouraged to look at the finances. Anything you spend is seen as an investment. You’re told you need to buy the products to try them – or how can you sell them?’
When she did voice concerns to Sarah, ‘she said I wasn’t giving it a chance’. ‘If I hadn’t bought anything for a while, she’d text, “I’ve noticed you haven’t put in an order yet.” She needed me to place an order to make her CCs.’
On social media, Sarah posted pictures of herself with her new fancy car, raving about the freedom her role allowed. With Alison, she was more candid.
‘She couldn’t afford to get the radiator on her car fixed and as we got to know each other said she still worked as a carer – another red flag, when you’re trying to sell a luxury lifestyle.’
Every week, reps were encouraged to watch a Transformation Tuesday training video from a senior rep, sent via YouTube link. On Thursdays another training session was released. ‘They were always about recruiting,’ says Alison. ‘I didn’t see one session where they were talking about the products.’
In fact, nobody seemed interested in the products at all. In one training session a senior rep says she used to memorise the ingredients to tell potential customers but gave up because ‘nobody cares’.
‘That was a trigger for me,’ says Alison. ‘I thought “I care.”’
In July, Forever Living told reps it was launching a new moisturiser free from parabens – preservatives in many beauty products that can potentially interfere with the body’s hormone system. ‘I thought our products already were paraben-free,’ says Alison. ‘When I tried to talk about it to Sarah she laughed and said, “you and your parabens”.’
Something inside Alison snapped. ‘When you’re standing under the health and wellness banner and you don’t know what you’re selling, that’s disgraceful.’ Instinct told her to check the company’s finances. She Googled ‘is Forever Living financially stable?’ And suddenly, the penny dropped.
For the first time, she learned Forever Living was an MLM – and what an MLM was. She found Forever Living’s Income Disclosure Statement, and the FTC complaint that alleged Forever Living in the US ‘deceived prospective workers with false and unsubstantiated earnings claims’ using social media posts and videos, images of luxury cars and giant cheques to tout potential earnings.
‘I hadn’t realised the scale of the deception,’ she says. Alison sat on the information for a month, worried about upsetting Sarah.
‘I kept thinking, she needs to know 90 per cent of people don’t earn a living. If you’re recruiting people into a business, you need to have some idea of what you’re getting them into.’ In September, she texted Sarah her findings.
‘I thought she’d be as shocked as I was. I was concerned about her.’
In one training session a senior rep says she used to memorise the ingredients to tell potential customers but gave up because ‘nobody cares’
But within three minutes, she says Sarah removed her from the Forever Living WhatsApp group. When Alison asked why, Sarah accused her of sending ‘false claims’ and texted: ‘I will not allow you to share the same information in there that you sent to myself.’
Astonished, Alison emailed Sarah evidence of every allegation. Sarah didn’t reply, but that evening a picture was posted of her on Facebook attending a recruitment drive promoting Forever Living as an ‘income replacing business’.
‘That made my blood boil,’ says Alison, who texted Sarah, asking: “Have you no shame?”’ Sarah, in turn, posted ‘I absolutely hate bullies’ on social media. When she was asked by her followers who she was referring to, she posted a picture of Alison and wrote: ‘vile’.
Alison assumes Sarah reported her to head office because the same day she received an email from Forever Living’s compliance team asking that ‘abusive comments’ towards other reps were avoided. Any concerns she had about the company, they wrote, could be raised ‘directly’ to the company.
‘They were trying to silence me,’ says Alison. ’But I thought, no, I haven’t bullied anyone. I’m going to defend myself.’ Not least because when she combed through her bank statements to add up everything she’d spent on Forever Living, from products to fuel to travel and merchandise, she found out the £1,000 she feared she’d squandered was actually over £5,000. All but £200 of her pension is now gone.
Her anger isn’t directed at Sarah, whose mind she believes is ‘controlled’ by a company she compares to a cult. ‘She’s not capable of critical thinking. She’s a victim as well.’
But she urges other women promised a better life by Forever Living reps to steer clear. ‘It is an illusion. It has to stop.’
When we put Alison’s allegations to Forever Living, it said: ‘Forever Living has been operating in the UK for almost four decades and takes compliance, product quality and ethical business practices seriously. As a member of the Direct Selling Association, we are committed to maintaining high standards and complying with applicable legal and regulatory requirements. We maintain policies and procedures designed to support compliance by our Forever Business Owners, including in relation to product and income claims, data protection and distributor conduct.
‘Our products are manufactured in accordance with applicable safety and regulatory requirements, and we remain committed to maintaining high standards across our products and business opportunity.’