My Confession as a Former MLMer

Frazzled mom trying to work

I used to be neck-deep in network marketing. First Mary Kay, then ItWorks (spoiler alert: it doesn’t), and then Plexus. I thought Plexus would be my forever-home business. I went all in.

I did the cold messages, the copy/paste scripts, the endless trainings. I spent thousands of dollars on “independent” coaching programs (which, funny enough, ended up being helpful later in life - just not for MLM). I spent hundreds every month on products and used them faithfully. To be fair, some of them helped, especially as I was healing from postpartum depression. But the flashy “quick weight loss” stories that always hooked me? They never panned out for me.

And after years of trying, I never made it past the first rank or two. I never saw a consistent paycheck.

But here’s the deeper loss: I lost sight of people.

The unspoken (and sometimes very spoken) message in MLM culture is this: every single person you meet needs your product. No exceptions. Every conversation becomes a pitch. Every relationship becomes a potential sale. And when you start living like that, it dehumanizes people. It reduces friends to business opportunities and souls to dollar signs.

I burned bridges without meaning to - not because I wanted to hurt people, but because I believed the lie that people couldn’t live without what I had, and that my job was to push and follow up until they gave in.

But Jesus never did that. He didn’t manipulate. He didn’t gaslight. He didn’t push until people broke down. He saw people. He loved people. He spoke truth with compassion and freedom.

And that’s the kind of person I want to be known as.

Yes, I make and sell candles now. But I don’t want people to cringe and duck away when I walk into the room. I don’t want to be remembered as the person who always had an angle. I want people to feel seen. I want them to feel loved. I want them to know they matter - whether they ever buy a single candle from me or not.

Because at the end of the day, people matter more than profit. Always.

Disclaimer: This is solely my experience. I am in no way throwing shade at anyone still working in MLM. I simply feel the need to shed light on a mentality that I believe is rampant in the MLM world - one that I personally had to unlearn.