11. The Amway Dream
Amway is a multi-level marketing company: the structure is triangular, but don't call it a pyramid scheme. The Federal Trade Commission already tried and failed. Now, hundreds of MLMs like Amway are embedded in America's towns and cities, and in the highest offices in government. So how did this happen?
Produced by Anna Mazarakis and Clare Rawlinson, with Dan Bobkoff, Amy Pedulla, and Sarah Wyman, with reporting from The Dream's Jane Marie and Dann Gallucci.
Transcript
Note: This transcript may contain errors.
DAN BOBKOFF: Jane Marie grew up in a small town near Flint, Michigan called Owosso. And back then, in the 70s and 80s, General Motors was the obvious place to work. But not for everyone.
JANE MARIE: My great grandma was an Avon lady. I grew up going to Tupperware parties with my mom and then my aunts and my grandmother and my uncle. And for me it's like an everyday part of my life.
DB: The thing about Michigan is that it is like a mecca for multi-level marketing companies like Avon, Tupperware, and Mary Kay. It's an MLM Heartland.
JM: Kind of everyone from back home has some connection, if not working as a distributor for one of these companies, you know going to parties.
DB: Jane was surrounded by MLMs, but skeptical of them. Except for one moment, when she had a brief flirtation with an MLM.
JM: I'd forgotten this, blocked it from my memory. But I remember right when I was 20 I hosted one at my house once.
DANN GALLUCCI: I didn't even know that.
DB: That's Jane's partner, Dan.
JM: I told you. (laughs) It was a lingerie one.
DB: Oh.
JM: And they brought in like a rolling wardrobe rack and then there were like prizes. And if you - if you modeled it in front of everyone, it was all ladies, but if you'd come out of the bathroom and like show the night gown or whatever you would get like extra prizes. So I got a lot of extra prizes because I have no humility, no shame.
DB: What were the prizes?
JM: Just like an extra pair of panties or you know a candle or it was gross, like don't get me wrong it was totally gross. But it was fun. I had a good time.
DB: How old were you?
JM: Twenty. Yeah yeah.
DB: And did you like have a conception of MLMs and all these reputations and all that back then?
JM: Me? Yes. I've never joined one myself.
DB: But she still couldn't fully avoid them.
When Jane moved to Los Angeles, she'd see Facebook posts from friends back home trying to recruit new distributors to this or that MLM and she'd wonder: how is this Ok? How is this not a pyramid scheme?
For the last year, she and Dann have been answering those questions.
And, to understand how this $200 billion industry exists, you have to start with one name…
CLIP: Amway may be the answer.
From Business Insider and Stitcher, this is Household Name: brands you know, stories you don't. I'm Dan Bobkoff.
On this show, we look at how famous companies affect our lives and culture - sometimes on a national scale, sometimes just on a very personal level. And you might be surprised at how much Amway has shaped American life in the last half century.
Amway is the godfather of all multilevel marketing.
Amway is the oldest.
Amway is the biggest.
The most powerful MLM of them all.
About forty years ago Amway convinced a judge that it's not some illegal pyramid scheme.
That one moment emboldened an entire industry, leading to an explosion of MLMs.
Maybe your friends have tried to get you to buy some yoga pants or skin creams. Maybe they've tried to get you to sell them too.
So today, we're teaming up with Jane and Dann to find out how any of this is legal? Why do people sign up? And who's actually making the money here?
Stay with us.
ACT I
BERNIE SANDERS: Thank you Mr. Chairman and Mrs. DeVos...and thanks for being with us and dropping into the office a few days ago...
DB: It's early 2017. Senators are grilling Betsy DeVos on her way to becoming education secretary. She's a controversial pick. She didn't have much experience in education, but she's donated a lot of money to charter schools. Betsy DeVos is rich and Senator Bernie Sanders has a question about that.
BS: Would you be so kind as to tell us how much money your family has contributed to the Republican party over the past 30 years?
BETSY DEVOS: Senator thank you first of all for the question, I was pleased to meet you in your office last week. I wish I could give you that number, I don't know.
BS: I have heard the number is 200 million. Is that the ballpark?
BD: Collectively? My entire family? Yes that's possible
DB: It's possible because of Betsy's father in law, Rich DeVos, and the company he co-founded in 1959: Amway.
RICH DEVOS: I was 23 - All I know is this business - I spent my life at it - went pretty good but wasn't always easy.
DB: You could say Amway sells products. But really what Amway sells is something more quintessentially American — the idea that anyone can be an entrepreneur and make a fortune.
If you don't know what multilevel marketing is, here's the short version. First it recruits regular people to sell its products. Those people then recruit more salespeople, and they earn commission from all the salespeople beneath them. They're called the "downline."
The early recruits come out the best because they earn commissions on what their recruits sell, and commissions on their recruit's recruits, and their recruits' recruits' recruits… all the way down the line.
The higher you are on the chain, the better it is for you.
If all this sounds like a pyramid scheme, well…. you're not far off. It is in the shape of a triangle, but legally, there is a line between a pyramid scheme and multi-level marketing.
Which brings us back to Jane Marie and Dann Gallucci. They both live in Los Angeles now. For the past year, they've been making a podcast that confronts head-on the world of multilevel marketing in America.
Jane was a reporter for This American Life, and Dann was a rock musician - until they became partners at their own production studio.
DB: What kind of partners are you? Professional romantic?
JM: Yeah. So we're both. As partners partners like sitting around Netflixing and chilling we were like 'We should have a recording studio. We should make the thing that we want, we should make the place where we want to work.'
DB: Nice.
JM: So we did.
DB: And last week, they launched a new show called The Dream. Here's a bit of their trailer.
TRAILER: Pyramid schemes are agains the law, ok? But this is not one of them.
In this area I was encountering women that didn't have bank accounts, that had their credit cards shut off.
People that failed were told, 'You failed because you didn't work hard enough.'
They know that what they're setting up is taking advantage of people.
No authority in the country right now will openly acknowledge this for what it is.
JM: you know all of those annoying Facebook ads you see. 'We have an incredible business opportunity for you. How would you like to earn a living working ten hours a week and only selling candles,' like that kind of thing.
DB: I don't get those ads.
JM: You don't get those ads?
DB: No but I get ads for Ziprecruiter telling me that they're sponsoring podcasts. So I think I've been very very typecast.
JM: You don't have enough cousins in rural Michigan. Female female cousins in rural Michigan who who really like make-up and that's all. That's my whole feed on Facebook. So we have this thread going throughout the series of my personal experience and my family and my hometown and how these companies flourish there and then you know our big question was why? Why are they flourishing? Why when we see the numbers and we know that people aren't making money, how is this a thing? And Dann discovered that the reason was Amway. So he's going to tell the story of all of that. Of the history of MLMs, of the history of Amway, and what happened to Amway and the industry of multilevel marketing after Amway beat the FTC.
DB: Okay so before I talked to Jane and Dann, I was only vaguely aware of Amway. I knew it sold a lot of things but I couldn't tell you what they were. So let's get a little Amway 101.
DG: Amway was started in 1959 by two people who - Rich de Vos and Jay van Andell. They had themselves started out as sales people for a company called Nutrilite which is arguably the first multi-level marketing company.
They had tried and failed at several different businesses and then became Nutrilite distributors and performed well because they got in really early. But one of the problems with Nutrilite was that they sold dietary supplements and at that time the FDA was cracking down on dietary supplements in a major way, and felt like Nutrilite's science was not really backing up their claims.
So Van Andel and De Vos decided that they shouldn't be in the supplement game and decided to sell a soap called Friske and that was their first product.
DB: So this is the birth of Amway. Soap!
But it's a lot more than that now. Today, Amway sells more than 450 products - beauty products, skincare, electronics, kitchen products … and along the way, Rich Devos and Jay van Andel got over their fear of selling dietary supplements. Amway actually bought Nutrilite in the '70s..
NUTRILITE AD: Nutrilite pioneered nutrient supplements in 1934...
DB: Now it's the company's biggest seller.
DB: What made you so obsessed with Amway?
DG: The reason I became obsessed with them was specifically because as I would talk to various people who were experts on MLMs. And what people kept saying to me was there was a case that happened in 1979 and it was the FTC v. Amway where the government had been successfully prosecuting MLMs for the prior decade.
It seemed as though the government had decided that multilevel marketing was a fraudulent business model - for about ten years they were taking down several of the biggest companies and very high profile cases.
DB: Perhaps the most high profile takedown of an alleged pyramid scheme by Federal Trade Commission's was its case against a company called Holiday Magic in 1974. This was an MLM that sold scented cosmetics, and some kind of personal empowerment.
HOLIDAY MAGIC: Today, I am earning more money each week than 96% of the American people earn a year. Soon, my earnings per day will be likewise. This money will continue as long as I desire it to...Wealth comes from giving something of value to other persons who are willing to pay for this value...
DB: The FTC charged Holiday Magic with deceptive trade practices. It became a success story for the opponents of MLMs. In this moment it seemed the FTC was about to take down the whole industry.
DG: And then it changed with that Amway case, they used the same evidence and the same tactics going into this Amway case but they lost. And because of that loss, a lot of people feel like the industry was emboldened that they would be able to operate more freely.
DB: Amway insists it's not a pyramid scheme...it says it's possible to make more money than people above you on the chain. Amway even made a YouTube video explaining why it's not one.
YOUTUBE AMWAY CLIP: Unfortunately, people, companies and even countries get stuck with labels that aren't true. Those labels can ruin reputations. Amway has one of those untrue labels: pyramid scheme. So lets better understand that label, so we can remove it...
DB: The video goes on to explain the ways Amway avoids meeting the legal definition of a pyramid scheme. And it essentially lists the same reasons the judge gave in 1979 when he ruled Amway wasn't one.
Here are the main reasons.
To sell for Amway, you become what it calls an Independent Business Owner, or IBO. It costs almost nothing to become an IBO. Like $100 or less. And then consumers actually want the Amway products those IBOs are selling to their friends and family. Maybe many of them really do like the shampoo and knife sets. Amway always emphasizes this point. They did so again when we contacted them for comment, , writing that quote "Amway has long been recognized as a legitimate direct selling business, primarily because Amway business owners sell quality products to consumers and no one earns income unless products are sold." And if those products don't sell, Amway allows the IBOs to return the leftovers for a refund.
But then you read the company's business reference guide - which is this 56-page PDF that explains how IBOs actually make money - and it's not very enticing.
First of all, it said in 2016, less than half of Amway's Independent Business owners were active. Active means they did something Amway-related: like selling something or at least trying to sell a product. Or maybe they met with someone they're trying to recruit. And then for those who are active, Amway says the average income for its IBOs is less than $2500. Per year. That's like $200 a month. And that doesn't include a lot of expenses to run the business. Amway even admits, often those expenses a higher than what people earn...and there isn't an estimate of how much money people are losing, if they're not active every month of the year...which Amways says "of course some people choose not to be."
All that's in the fine print.
We asked Amway about this and the company wrote saying: "Amway is a low-cost, low-risk option for people to supplement their income. While most conduct their Amway businesses part-time, which is common in our industry, some grow their business beyond that."
The ways each MLM works is a little different. But if this is the picture we get just from looking at Amway, how do any of these schemes manage to attract people?
DG: Well the promises are that you can make - it's entirely up to you. But if you work hard enough, commit yourself to this, if you do everything that they tell you to do, and that's a long list, then you have the chance to make millions. One of my favorite quotes is a guy named Robert Fitzpatrick who is one of the experts that we talked to, was at an Amway meeting and someone spoke up and said 'you know well I'm a schoolteacher. I mean how is it - like how is this going to affect me?' Or whatever. And someone said 'well that's a loser job, being a schoolteacher. You don't want that, not for you or for your family. You know you want this. You want to be rich, you want to prove to everyone in your community, everyone in your family that you can do this, that you can provide for them, not only what you need but all of your dreams what you want.' I mean everything about the way these companies operates involves heightened emotion. And one of the reasons for that as well is that the last thing that they want anyone to do ever is to look at the actual numbers.
JM: And be rational.
DG: That's not what the conversation should be ever. Because if you were to look at those numbers, first of all, it takes so long and people will get bored and walk away. But ultimately you would find that it's next to impossible to be successful—
DB: Is that true for Amway too? Are they all about emotion?
DG: Absolutely. Opportunity meetings. Yes.
ARCHIVAL: We didn't know when we would become financially successful but we knew it was coming soon because we have a system no different than you.
When we spout off to our friend we are putting stakes in the ground, and here's out company - they look at us - and if they don't see us making headway, we care creating doubt in them.
DG: They all follow the same line which is you know you're reaching out emotionally to people.
JM: You're a winner, if you want to be a winner like me, sign up, don't second guess it. Just trust me.
DG: People who are negative in regards to MLMs and people who tell you that MLMs are bad, that they're fraudulent, that does something wrong.
JM: They're jealous.
DG: They're jealous, they're losers.
AMWAY: I don't believe in the economic situation out there affecting me -I believe I affect the economic situation I live in. How big is your dream tonight? Don't tell me about the night after night after night...it's saturated, it'll never happen, it won't work…you're gonna listen to the losers or winners?
DB: What does the Amway name mean?
JM: The American way. Yeah.
DB: And what you think they mean by that?
JM: The dream.
DB: So it's the same as your show.
DG: It's all couched in the American dream.
DB: A dream, even for the vast numbers who are losing money trying to sell enough through an MLM.
Over the years, Amway distributors have run for office and held positions in Congress. They've often been elected with the financial support of the DeVos family and the larger Amway network.
And, MLM-friendly politicians come from both parties. Bill Clinton was a big supporter during his time in the White House.
BILL CLINTON: I am delighted to have this opportunity to talk to sales people who help the economy grow...
DB: Then there's Clinton's secretary of state Madeleine Albright, representing Herbalife.
Republican Housing and Urban Development secretary Ben Carson endorsed a company called Mannatech.
Republican congresswoman Marsha Blackburn is an MLM booster, too.
And of course we have Secretary of Education, Betsy Devos. After she survived her grilling from Bernie Sanders, Donald Trump gave her a warm welcome.
DONALD TRUMP: I'm going to do my job and Betsy will do her job at the education level and just to, I want to very formally congratulate you for going through this very tough trial, and a very unfair trial, and you won.
DB: And he's no stranger to MLMs either -- just google "ACN endorsement" and you'll see.
DONALD TRUMP ACN: The two things I've mastered over the years is understanding the importance of timing in business, and the ability to recognize great opportunities and great people. So I'm here to tell you about a company that provides these two essential components for success...
JM: That's also part of why we're looking into this right now because it feels so at the moment.
DB: After the break, Jane's complicated relationship with MLMs, and her journey back to her home state, Amway's home state, Michigan.
ACT II
DB: We're back. And Jane is taking us to where she grew up.
JM: I grew up in a rural area outside of Flint, Michigan. It was a bedroom community for the auto industry in Flint.
DB: Where most of the men worked for GM.
JM: My dad did not and it was really obvious when it came time to buy a car because I didn't have the dad discount when all of my friends did (laughs) but - and my grandparents had a trucking company that shipped parts for a company called fabricating engineers which made parts for GM so they were like tangentially related but my great uncle worked on the line, like everybody's friends, family you know mostly men, is what the future held. So you know MLMs coming into a community like that. I think it's three quarters of the sales force in the MLM industry is female. And a lot of the products are geared towards women and in my community, it was something that you heard about and kind of thought about your whole life. I mean I did. I knew what an Avon lady was. I knew what Mary Kay was. I knew what Tupperware was.
DB: Was it like everyone in town was doing this?
JM: Yeah I mean to some extent. I mean you know my mom never signed up for an MLM but we hosted Tupperware parties because that's part of the way these companies work right. They get into your house by saying well 'host a party and we'll give you a hostess gift' which is like a 10 piece Tupperware set. So my mom was very frugal and did that sort of thing and then never signed up. She was like that that kind of jerk.
DB: That's a savvy way to do it.
JM: One of my junior high classmates is like really high up in one of these companies and just total coincidence, one of the people that we talked to who lost money and didn't do well is her pastor.
DB: The woman Jane is talking about is Katie Hyde. In The Dream, she tells Jane how she spiralled into debt working for Mary Kay.
KATIE HYDE: You're spending the money to maintain your director status or you're spending money to maintain your red jacket status or the car that you so desperately want to earn. Because if I'm supposed to have a 4000 dollar quota and I'm at two thousand dollars and I'm really tired. And no one's going to order that I might as well just put 2000 dollars on my credit card right because I can sell it. And I'm a good seller. And it doesn't matter and I'll wake up feeling better tomorrow. And that's what I'm going to do. Right? And that feel good for 48 hours and then you realize shoot there's 28 days left in this month. And I need to get another 4000. For this month. And, it's the same scenario over and over and over again.
You hate being there but you're not sure how to leave and you feel guilty if you do. You've invested so much of your life and your identity. And I think when it comes to Mary Kay or anything like that people look at you and think O'K. You're going to become a millionaire selling Sensi. OK.' That people do have that. Natural inclination to look at you that way and you think I'm going to prove them wrong. And then I didn't. But I have so much invested. I'm not really sure I can drop out of this is just your conflicted.
DB: All right so Katie is a pastor from your hometown, and she ends up getting close to $10,000 in debt. How did she get so deep in debt?
JM: Psychology. The companies played to her psychology which we talked to a micro economist about this and a couple of historians but basically there are things that we do as human beings that are not awesome and they don't help us much in life but we're compelled to do them and MLMs exploit these things about human nature. So one of them that he was talking about is putting more money, more orders on your own credit card in order to maintain your status, there's something called honoring sunk costs which we all do and this will be very familiar to anyone listening.
It's like once you've spent a lot of money on something you don't want to just throw it away if it's not working or abandon it. You think 'well I've got a thousand dollars into that.' Like oh you know it's the question of do I fix up my car or do I trade it in at a loss? Do I go on this vacation where I have a non-refundable ticket even though something came up that's more important or do I just eat the price of the plane ticket? And we face those sorts of decisions every single day and we often make the wrong choice because we have a tendency to say once we put money into something it has value - it has value regardless of whether that value is doing us any good or whether we're enjoying it.
MLMs know - the companies know that that's part of human behavior and human nature and bank on that. Bank on the fact that if you put a thousand dollars in, say you're even doing OK, but you want to make 1500 dollars in a month, well you've already put this much in, what you should do is spend a couple grand coming to a conference with us and then we'll train you how to get up to fifteen hundred dollars. So then you spend the money going to the conference and you come back and you're further in the hole and it takes - it takes some sort of event or some realization to go Wait. What? Like I - how did this happen to me?
DB: What is driving people in Owosso or anywhere who are thinking of joining and then end up joining them and then get into this?
JM: They want extra money. They want the things that are being promised. They want to stay at home with their kids and have a flexible schedule. I want that. I mean I want that. You know I want what they're promising. I want to make my rent and then some working an hour or two nights and weekends here and there and selling stuff to my best girlfriends and my cousins. All of that sounds great. Because that's what - that's what they say you can do.
DB: Do you think you might have have gotten into MLMs if you stayed in Michigan?
JM: Totally yeah. What else would I do? I'm a hustler, I know how to talk to people, I know how to go up to strangers. Right. And spark a conversation. I like getting dressed fancy for work. You know there's things like about me that would maybe translate to one of these careers.
DB: When you think about people like Katie, do you think differently about that at all?
JM: I guess I have more sympathy if there was anyone that I was feeling bad for at a distance. You know if there were people that I meet - not even from my community but like you know thinking about who would join one of these companies. It really made it even more human. I mean I already had that experience of it being very humanized by my family members but you know getting out there and talking to as many people as I did, I think it probably made me less judgmental.
DB: After the break - we're bringing you an exclusive listen to some of Jane and Dann's reporting for The Dream, where Dann begins his journey investigating Amway and the ways the MLM industry is regulated - or not...
ACT III
DB: We're back.
I've been following The Dream for the past couple of weeks, and it's really interesting.
So we're going to share with you part of Dann Gallucci's journey reporting for this podcast.
Already at this stage, Dann has spent hours with two experts in the field - Robert FitzPatrick and Bruce Craig, retracing the MLM industry from the early 20th century up until today.
But he discovers the person he really needs to speak to is someone else. Someone who knew the 1979 Federal Trade Commission case against Amway better than anyone. I'll let Dan and Jane take it from here.
DG: I want to find this Amway case. If it's such a big deal, I want to find any records of it and see who was involved with it. And when I found it, there were about five lawyers attached to the case, and the lead lawyer was a guy named Joe Brownman - and that was a name I hadn't seen yet. So I went to Robert and Bruce and I say, 'What do you guys know about Joe Brownman?'
And they were like, 'First things first, Joe doesn't talk to anyone, so don't even try it.' I mean I know that Bruce talked to him every once in awhile, but as a colleague or a friend. Not in like an interview situation. Robert had tried...
ROBERT FITZPATRICK: As I said in my email, I think I may be one of the few people that actually sought him out. I'd never heard his name, in all the years I've been working on this. People spoke extensively about the case, the judge, the failure, the consequences, and so on, but almost nobody ever mentioned a person at the FTC. One reason, of course, is that he vanished.
JM: So he vanished? No.
DG: No. He didn't vanish.
JM: Oh.
DG: He lived five blocks from the FTC. (laughs)
JM: Right.
DG: Hello.
JOE BROWNMAN: Dann?
DG: Yes.
JB: Hey, it's Joe.
DG: So, he wasn't hard to find at all. But thing is, he did kind of disappear from the world of MLMs - because after he prosecuted the Amway case, and he put years and years into it, he was so devastated by the result - he stopped, he basically stopped doing that kind of work... I would find that out later.
JM: Yeah.
DG: But first I just needed to contact him. So he agreed to get on the phone with me; he didn't agree to an interview, but just to get on the phone and talk. I get on the phone with him and he just starts talking, and talking, and it's amazing. This is a pre-interview, and it lasted over an hour. I wanted to get this guy on tape so bad, and so he agreed to it.
JB: Yeah, yeah. Start with a question or two and I'll go into whatever you want to know, and -
DG: Great.
JB: ... you know, if you need more information just, you know, just far asstarting off, you want to know where I was born, or do you want to know where I went to school, or whatever you want -
DG: Yeah, where were you born?
JG: Well no, come on.
DB: No I do, where were you born?
JG: I was born in Williamsburg Maternity Hospital in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. I don't think that hospital even exists any longer, and Williamsburg today is not what Williamsburg was like when I was living there 70 years ago.
DG: Not only did he agree to talk to me, which was surprising -
JM: He wouldn't stop.
DG: ... he wouldn't stop. You know, when we schedule an interview, we almost always schedule it for an hour.
JM: Yeah.
DG: And I would schedule it for an hour. I started doing an hour and a half, and then they started getting into the two hour range -
JM: Getting longer than that.
DG: Yeah. He's telling me all of this information that's really important -
JM: And he hasn't talked to anyone.
DG: He hasn't talked to anyone in 30 years, he's never sat down and just gone over the details of, not only the Amway case, but what I've learned is many more cases he was involved in.
JM: Right, right. So you're getting, like, gold, and you ...
DG: Getting gold, and I'm struggling. He would interrupt me with new cases that I need to follow...
JB: ...there are still things to be said about Ger Ro Mar, and I can do it now in two or three minutes maybe, just to tell you why I think Ger Ro Mar is important.
DG: Okay.
DG: So Joe's right, this Ger Ro Mar case does turn out to be important to the history of the FTC and MLMs! But I have a problem - I would always schedule these for Thursday nights, and on Thursday night, my daughter goes to ballet, and I had to pick her up.
DG: I do and I appreciate it—
JB: Part of the problem might've been that the Ger Ro Mar case was brought by the San Francisco office...
DG: And so I would say to him, 'Joe, I have to get off the phone.'
DG: Joe, I hate to say it, I gotta go pick up my daughter from ballet, so ...
JB: I'm finished.
DG: Okay. So ...
JB: No, I'm fine. I don't know whether what I'm saying to you is understandable. It makes sense to me, but I don't know if you're able to follow everything I'm saying. Can you tell me?
DG: I ... yes. And it's understand -
JB: I know what you're doing, I know what you're doing. I know. But to be perfectly honest with you, I'm more ... I'm more concerned about saying the wrong thing.
DG: So I'm running around the studio trying to shut lights off and stuff while I'm still talking to him, and so it would be like, you know, like it matters. Like that five seconds matters. But I'd be like, turning the lights off and trying to ...
anything I could shut down, I would.
JM: We need to make a robot Dann that just makes affirmative noises that you could set in your chair when you have to go get her.
DG: Right. Well, it was funny because I would open the door from the studio to the other part of the studio and I'd be yelling, like, 'Uh-huh.' And he just didn't even ... it didn't even matter.
JM: While you're like, packing up?
DB: Yeah, exactly. He gave me so much information. That only he could. Because he was the one that was there in the courtroom trying to prosecute these early MLMs. As I dug deeper into the companies he was taking to court, and more importantly the owners of the companies he was taking to court, I found myself on a pretty wild ride.
DB: ...Dann Gallucci from The Dream, Stitcher's new podcast all about the weird world of multilevel marketing.
Dann continues this journey over the coming weeks, and meanwhile, you'll hear Jane Marie find out what it's like being at the top of the pyramid in her hometown, and at the bottom.
You'll also get to follow their producer's attempts to make it in a cosmetics-based MLM. Good luck to her! Subscribe on your favorite podcast app, it's out right now.
CREDITS
DB: This episode was produced by Clare Rawlinson, and Anna Mazarakis with Sarah Wyman, Amy Pedulla and me.
This week's episode was edited by Peter Clowney and mixed by Casey Holford. Our executive producers are Chris Bannon, Jenny Radelet, Laura Mayer, and me.
Quick heads up before you go - Household Name is taking a break next week. We're diving into a whole bunch of new episodes though, and we'll be back in your feeds on October 17.
Here's a taste of what's to come in season 2...
TEASER CLIPS
See you back on October 17, and till then don't forget you can always get in touch via phone or email. We want to hear how brands have affected YOUR lives! Or maybe you have a burning question about a big brand? Get in touch with us on 7313-BRANDS or by emailing householdname@businessinsider.com
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