"The Prosperity Gospel That Never Pans Out"
Author Emily Lynn Paulson on how multilevel marketing companies use faux feminism to profit off of women's bossbabe dreams.
Most of us have some familiarity with multilevel marketing companies—or MLMs. Maybe your mom bought Avon or Tupperware. Maybe you’ve been invited to a Pampered Chef party. Or maybe you, like me, just like watching documentaries about the rise and fall of brands like LulaRoe and Herbalife.
These companies offer people, mostly women, the promise that they’ll be able to earn good money by selling the company’s products to their extended social networks. Run your own business! Be a bossbabe! Stick it to corporate America!
But the reality is very few MLM distributors earn a sustainable income from their work, and many lose money.
Emily Lynn Paulson was one of the rare MLM distributors who did make money—and she made a lot of it. In her new book, she tells a fascinating story of how MLMs hook women into these predatory systems and explains why it’s so difficult to get out of them.
Hey Hun: Sisterhood, Supremacy, and the Other Lies Behind Multilevel Marketing is a memoir and an expose that reads like a potboiling novel. I tore through this book. Even if you’re someone who, like me, has not had a lot of personal exposure to MLMs, this book has so much to say about contemporary womanhood, power, and the dreams society dangles in front of us.
But mostly I love this book because Emily writes with such humor and brutal honesty. She is strongly indicting the multilevel marketing industry, but she is also indicting herself—both her naivete in the beginning and her complicity later in her career. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at a fascinating and quite bizarre world, and I had a great conversation with Emily.
Here are excerpts from our conversation, which have been edited for both length and clarity. In the full conversation, which paid subscribers can listen to here, we also discuss a wider range of topics: how women are encouraged to commoditize vulnerability, what Emily’s current work as a sobriety coach can teach us about making larger systemic changes, and the connection between MLMs and white supremacy. Emily also counsels me on my conflicted feelings about accepting payment for this Substack from friends and family members. It was fun!
SE: You worked for a multilevel marketing company that you call Rejuvinat, which sells beauty products. How did you get involved in this company?
ELP: I was a stay-at-home mom with five little kids. I was using wine as a coping mechanism. I just felt really lost. I felt really alone. I didn’t know how I could get back into the workforce, because childcare for five kids would have been ridiculous. An acquaintance from high school reached out and said she was meeting people in my town, Seattle, where I was living at the time, and wondered if I’d like to get together. She could have been selling anything; we could have been getting together for any reason. I was just looking for an escape.
So I’m meeting with this person, who I know, like and trust. And she’s in this company. And it looked great. And the products looked like they could be good. And I just thought, what could be the harm in it? Maybe this is what I’m looking for.
SE: How do multilevel marketing companies work, or how it was explained to you in the beginning that they work versus how they actually work?
ELP: The way I initially understood it was you share things with your friends, and your friends buy those things. But really it is recruiting human beings to recruit other human beings under the guise of empowerment and having your own business—which it’s not, you’re a 1099 contractor. So essentially, the money is made by recruiting other people to sell the same thing, and for them to recruit other people to sell the same thing. It’s a pyramid scheme with products.
SE: What is love-bombing, and what was your experience of that?
ELP: Right off the bat, I was congratulated. People who I didn’t know were reaching out to me and welcoming me to the company. I was getting gifts for doing nothing but joining. So I thought, Look at this supportive group of women! I hadn’t been congratulated for anything for years. I hadn’t gotten a paycheck for years. And other than, like, a coloring page for Mother’s Day, I didn’t get accolades. It felt so good.
It’s done on purpose. In all multilevel marketing companies, the first promotion, the first rank, the first paycheck, the first little nugget of something is very easy to get. So you think, Oh my gosh, this is easy. You get this love bomb. You start gaining this tribe of women, and it feels really good. So then you will continue to try to replicate that. And as soon as your upline [the people higher the pyramid who profit from the sales of everyone directly below them] feels you pulling away or questioning if it’s working, you’ll get tagged on Facebook with all of this appreciative language saying you’re a wonderful person and they love being on the team with you. It’s this constant roller coaster that keeps you drawn in.
SE: I was interested in all of the prizes and gifts. It’s great to get a Kate Spade bag, but I think some people would say, wouldn’t it be better just to have the money to buy my own Kate Spade bag? What’s the emotional game they’re playing here?
ELP: Well, most people would say, I wouldn’t buy that for myself. I would never have bought myself a Gucci bag. But when it comes in the mail, I take a picture of it. I tag it on social media, and everyone else looks at that and says, Oh my gosh, look, she gets this. I didn’t get anything from my job. Whereas if someone sent me money, I wouldn’t take a picture of it and post that on social media. So that is also done by design.
SE: You were one of the rare MLM sellers who made significant income—at one point you were making about $40,000 a month. When you were rising up in the company, how did you see that? Because there were other women who were not doing nearly as well—some were even losing money. How did you explain that to yourself?
ELP: At first I was told, OK, here’s what you do. Here’s the system of operation—you reach out to these people, you do these activities, blah, blah, blah, and you’ll succeed. Well, I did those things. I reached out to my friends. I reached out to family. I posted on social media. I did all that stuff. And it worked for me. So my assumption, without fact-checking it at all, was that if other people were not succeeding, they must not be doing those things. That’s what I told myself until a few years in, when I was willing to look at what people were doing and think, Gosh, they are doing what I’m telling them to do, and they still aren’t succeeding.
SE: When did it first start dawning on you that maybe something was awry, and it was not just that you were doing all the right things and other people weren’t?
ELP: It was really me getting sober. I was escaping with alcohol and the MLM was another escape. When I did get sober, I started doing the 12 steps and started making my amends. I was having to look at, Oh, gosh, I told this person to sign up and put it on a credit card when I knew they didn’t have the money. Because that’s what I was coached to do. I thought that’s what you do because that’s what successful people do.
So that was the beginning of seeing the red flags. At the same time, it brought on another barrage of love-bombing. Oh, my gosh, congratulations, you’ve got sober, you’re so amazing. Being in that supportive environment when I was at a very low place—day one, month one of sobriety is really rough—got me even more drawn into the community. I stopped doing the cold messaging and using the bullying language to pressure my downline to perform. But by that point, I was already so high up that I wasn’t making money off my own work. It was all the work of everyone beneath me.
SE: Would you explain how it was that you were making so much money, but the people below you were making very little or even losing money? You all had to purchase your own inventory, unlike salespeople in a traditional company. But how is it that you were making so much more than even your top earners, who you say would have been better off working at Starbucks?
ELP: There were several things going for me. The company itself was not that old and not very well known in the area I was living in. So I had a pretty untapped market. And I had a husband who had a job. So I had income. And I had a network of women who were also similarly well-heeled. They had one- or two-income households. They had money to spend. Then, as soon as I recruited my first line of people, that basically tapped the entire market because it takes very little to completely saturate a market when you’re selling something like skincare. That’s why there isn’t a Sephora on every corner; it wouldn’t survive.
So it became saturated very, very quickly. The more people who joined, the less successful they were. They were basically just buying their own products. And going back to the gifts, the love-bombing that was done to me was then something that I did to my team. So while they were selling and maybe not making that much money, they were still posting the Kate Spade bags. The outward appearance of success is what drives these things.
SE: One key reason why so many women lose money—and why even your earnings weren’t as high as they’d seem at first glance—was that sellers have to pay for everything. In an ordinary company, you’re not paying your airfare to go to a big meeting, and you’re not paying for the meeting. With this, there was so much outlay of cash. Even at one of your first meetings, when you were speaking, someone asked you for $10. And you said, Well, I’m speaking, and they said, Yeah, but the company isn’t paying for this. Jenny is paying for this. How are women able to work this out in their heads?
ELP: You’re told it’s this meritocracy—if you do it, you will succeed. Just do what it takes. And if you do say, Gosh, I can’t afford the convention. I can’t afford to go to that business meeting. I can’t afford to buy this new launch. Well, I guess you don’t want to succeed—you’ve got to spend money to make money, leaders show up. If you don’t go to the convention, you’ll always be able to say to yourself, Gosh, I wonder if that would have been the thing that made me successful? It’s hope that keeps people roped in. Because if your hope is strong enough, if your belief is strong enough, logic will go by the wayside every time.
SE: I have very little personal exposure to MLMs. I went to a jewelry party in high school once, and I think I have one Facebook contact who has ever posted about MLMs. And yet, I was completely hooked into your book. I really connected with the way you said you weren’t selling products, you were selling the dream. I’m curious about what you thought about the connections between what you experienced in the MLM world and in the culture at large.
ELP: We already live in this culture where it’s hustle culture. It’s fake it till you make it, work as hard as you possibly can, and don’t stop until you get there. So we’re already primed for this. And we already live in a culture where we’re buying stuff all of the time. And we’re already primed for I want to be empowered as a woman, I want to be a boss, I want to be the CEO. Then you’re given this package: You can be your own boss! You can have financial freedom! You can stick it to the man!
It’s all the worst parts of capitalism. They’re sold as, you’re a small business, you’re your own CEO. But you’re not because every MLM is a multimillion- or billion-dollar corporation run by white men. It’s that prosperity gospel that never pans out. It’s that fake American Dream that is not available to everybody. And then you’re blamed when it doesn’t work out.
SE: How did the company respond to you when you were diagnosed with cancer and, later, when you got sober?
ELP: You’re primed in an MLM to exploit any tragedy. Every story in an MLM is, Oh, I was broke, and now I have money, or I had acne and now I’ve got good skin. It’s all of these before-and-after stories. It’s a lot of rags-to-riches stories where the company was the difference.
The first time I was diagnosed with cancer, my upline suggested maybe you could make something good out of this. And I thought, I want to make lemonade out of lemons. I’ll do a fundraiser. Any money I make from this event, I will give to charity. Super nice of me! However, all of those commissions were still flowing up to the company. When I got sober, I thought I knew better. And then I did it again. I used my sobriety story because it made me feel good about myself. It was really hard to see that I was doing the same thing, exploiting my own story to keep other people in the company.
SE: You talk about the many ways Rejuvinat was similar to a cult, such as the way they distance people from friends and family. How were you trained to respond to anyone skeptical of the company?
ELP: Say your mom says, Oh, no, I don’t want to buy those products, or I don’t like MLMs. The response will be, Your mom must not be supportive of you. And then you’re in this supportive community with all these people saying Yeah, we love you. You drive your actual friends and family even farther away. And you assume that they just don’t understand, that they’re ignorant, that they’re uneducated, they’re not willing to learn. When the reality was, I was the one who was not willing to listen.
SE: You started distancing yourself from the company, and then beginning in 2020 your disillusionment took a whole new level. What were you seeing?
ELP: There were a couple of things. I was getting into this field of recovery advocacy, and I had written a book about my recovery story. And as much as the company had pimped out my sobriety story, all of a sudden they didn’t like that now I was doing this other thing. I thought, Wow, you really liked my story before. Now you don’t because you’re not profiting off of it.
And then COVID happened. And the blatant misinformation around the products themselves—not just in my company, but other companies, too—saying "this product will cure COVID” or “You lost your job; join this opportunity.” The predatory nature of it took on another level. And there was a lot of groupthink. People were choosing not to vaccinate because their upline wasn’t.
And the hate flags were flying so high. And the company wasn’t doing anything about it. That was just frightening to me. People would be terminated for posting something negative about the company, but post some expletive about the president and you were fine. You could post yourself on January 6 in front of the Capitol, and you were fine. You could say, don’t vaccinate your kids. You could post a plandemic video, and you were fine. It didn’t make sense.
SE: Whereas you were reprimanded for mentioning sex in a podcast.
ELP: With the name of the company. You get a slap on the wrist for anything that made the company look bad.
SE: I live in a deep-blue city in a deep-blue state in a deep-blue family. I don’t have a lot of access to this world of people who believe in the plandemic, though I know there is certainly a contingent of the left who are anti-vax. Can you offer insights from your MLM experience about, like, what is happening? Writer Naomi Klein said recently that we used to disagree with each other, but now we disagree about what reality is. Do you have any guidance?
ELP: I don’t know if I have guidance, but I understand what you’re saying. Prior to 2016, I was blissfully ignorant of who people were even voting for. I had voted Republican and Democrat. We could do a whole deep dive into why this happened and why the divide got so much bigger. But in the MLM world, there are a lot of MLMs that run in religious communities, which tend to be more politically conservative. So if someone is in a very evangelical church, and they join this MLM, and they get all of their church friends in—that’s already a closed environment. Then if they have certain beliefs, those beliefs just fester, and they go down these rabbit holes together.
But I think it’s society-wide. Social media and misinformation have a lot to do with it. It goes back to that groupthink of being in a closed environment where you all believe the same thing. Why wouldn’t you get the information from the person you’re trusting with your financial future? You joined this person because you believe in them, and you believe in the company. Why would they lead you astray?
SE: It’s like that Upton Sinclair quote, it’s very hard to make someone see a different point of view if their livelihood depends on their not seeing it.
ELP: People have asked me if I think the people at the top understand what they’re doing. And my answer is, they can’t. They can’t be willing to look at it because it will challenge everything they believe in. It’s just easier to not look at it.
In the full conversation, Emily and I talk more about her MLM and sobriety journeys, the connection between MLMs and white supremacy, and what makes people vulnerable to joining a cult. Paid subscribers can listen HERE.
GUEST BIO: Emily Lynn Paulson is the author of Highlight Real: Finding Honesty & Recovery Beyond the Filtered Life, a speaker, and the founder of Sober Mom Squad. She has given two powerful TEDx talks, both challenging the status quo of parenting, alcohol use, and feminism as we know it. Paulson has also been featured in major publications such as the Today Show, New York Times, Washington Post, The Seattle Times, Chicago Tribune, Next Question with Katie Couric, and the Tamron Hall Show.
What is your experience with multilevel marking companies? Do you see elements of this world in other facets of our society?
I loved this am definitely going to read this book! I am fascinated by MLM culture. I have lots of acquaintances who have participated in these and was always so confused by what I saw on Facebook. But reading the bit about love bombing, now it makes much more sense. Thanks for sharing this.
What strikes me is that MLMs break just about every rule of running a business successfully and ethically, yet they still are around. Were it not for their artful dodge of ostensibly selling cosmetics, vitamins, etc. they’d be outlawed as pyramid schemes.