Multi-level Marketing Madness – A follow up
I’m excited to write a follow up to a post I wrote in 2022 about a Multi-level marketing company named Elomir.
As a quick recap, Elomir was selling a tongue strip product (like a Listerine strip) that they claimed had incredible results. Testimonials for the product included claims such as improved mood, seeing colours more vibrantly, the urge to vacuum, no longer needing a walker, appetite suppression, reduced road rage, and more.
It was very clear that Elomir was just another sham of a company, trying to take advantage of people by hocking exorbitantly priced vitamins and making absurd claims about their impacts. I showed in my post that for a time at least, Elomir appeared to be operating as an illegal pyramid scheme per the SEC’s definition.
As part of Elomir’s launch, there were various meetings meant to hype up potential brand partners to the amazing opportunity they have by selling this product and more importantly, recruiting people to sell it for you. On one zoom video, a brand partner named Jessica strongly suggests that everyone on the call (20+ people) will have 5,000 people under them. She emphasized how blessed everyone on the call was to be getting in so early, and you could see the excitement in everyones eyes at their good fortune.
That is the short synopsis, but If you’d like to read more, here is the full post.
Recently, I decided to look up Elomir and see how they were doing. I went to their website and clicked on their income disclosure link (a legal requirement of MLM’s). To my disappointment, the link still went to their original disclosure statement, which simply said they are a new company, without enough information to be able to provide an income disclosure.
That’s not going to fly.
I logged into one of the alias emails I used for conversing with Elomir in my original post, and sent them the following message:
Hello there, I am still considering joining Elomir, however it would give me comfort if I could see an Income disclosure statement, which is a legal requirement for MLM companies according to Texas law – Business Opportunities and Agreements – Chapter 51. I am aware of the disclosure link on your site, however it is insufficient and does not disclose any relevant information. Your link states that Elomir does not have enough statistical data since it recently launched, but Elomir launched in 2022, so you have over a year of data to disclose. I would appreciate it if you would send me the data you have on how much your brand partners are earning with Elomir at your earliest convenience, and if you would update the income disclosure link on your website.Thank you
To my surprise, Elomir responded with:
Hello, Thank you for reaching out to us. Please refer to the link on the Elomir website for the information you are requesting. Thank you,
Elomir Compliance
I went to their website, and sure enough, they had updated their income disclosure link to be a new PDF with actual data about income. They didn’t give any admission of wrong in their email, or admit that they hadn’t updated it until I asked, even though they were legally obligated to post that information.
Anyways. I am pleased to be able to share the Income Disclosure Statement for Elomir: Link to income disclosure statement.
Income Disclosure Analysis
Starting with Jessica’s statement that there would be many thousands of people part of Elomir. The income disclosure statement (IDS) says that 9.09% of brand partners (37 people) qualified as “Icon 1” in 2023. 37 divided by 9.09% tells us that Elomir had 407 brand partners in total in 2023. That is quite a bit lower than 5000+ people for each of the 20+ people on the zoom meeting I referenced. Ouch.
Lets move on to what these 407 people earned. The very first paragraph of the IDS details the average compensation earned by brand partners in 2023. Are you ready for the big reveal. Drumroll please……
….$84!!!!!!
Eighty four dollars. That is gross annual income. 84. Eighty. Four. In a year. One years gross earnings before expenses, was $84 on average.
We shouldn’t be surprised. As shown in my original post, we know this is the typical story for pretty much all MLM’s. It gets worse though. $84 is gross annual income. The first paragraph of the IDS also states that a brand partner is someone who has paid the $49 annual brand partner fee. Presumably, a brand partner purchased at least one box of product as well. So let’s look at how much profit the average brand partner earned in 2023, assuming they bought just one box of product (I think one box is a conservative estimate, and they most likely bought more. In fact, in the zoom videos I watched, partners were encouraged to buy bundled packages of products because they came with higher discounts, and would set them up better as a brand partner).
So the average person who joined Elomir lost at least $10 in 2023, not counting the time they wasted (which is the most valuable component) on joining zoom calls and annoying their friends and family by trying to sell this crap.
It gets even worse though.
Let’s look a bit deeper at the IDS. They have broken out earnings into each of the tiers in their system. The IDS details earnings in written form, so I have entered it into a table below for easier reading. The table shows the stats exactly as is from the IDS. Then I added one more table below that, which removes the “high earning” person from each tier, as they will be skewing the average earnings number they quote up. So the second table normalizes the average earnings in each tier by removing the “high” earning outlier.
It’s important to note that the numbers you are seeing are averages, and even with removing the one high earner, they are going to be skewed up. We only know the low number, and the high number, not how many people hit each. But, given the average for all of Elomir is only $84, and the “average earnings” quoted in the IDS in most tiers is higher than $84 it means that most people skewed towards the “low” number quoted, and the averages are inflated due to high earning outliers.
You might have noticed that one person earned $78K in 2023. So the average earnings of $84 in 2023, includes one person out of 407 who earned $78K. 407 multiplied by $84, is only $34K, so you can imagine how much one person earning $78K would skew up the $84 average income number for everyone else. I’d bet that stripping out the top five earners, which account for $152K of earnings, would make the other 402 peoples average income be in the single digits at most, but likely very close to $0. Here is a list of the anomaly earners, ie – the people in the “high” bucket. There are a couple “high” earners below $351, but its only $16, or $0, so I excluded them.
So five people in Elomir made 5-digit annual incomes. We don’t know how much time they invested in that (and if they could have earned more spending that time on a job for example). I suspect everyone except for the $78K person could have worked a minimum wage job and earned more profit with the same amount of time invested. The sad reality is, these few people (really one person) who earned a decent income in a year (before expenses) did it at the expense of everyone else, who lost money.
I spent some time on Facebook sending messages to people who were heavily involved in Elomir in the past, trying to check in on how things were going/went from their perspective. Here is what I sent:
Hello X, I am sorry to reach out cold like this. I’ve been looking into Elomir and whether it is a good opportunity for me to join as a brand partner. I’ve tried to do my research and have spent time on Facebook looking up Elomir and testimonials, I saw your name come up several times with very positive feedback about taking the strip, and I wanted to ask you about your experience with them? Do you still use and recommend Elomir? Has it been a viable side hustle for you as a brand partner? Any advice or feedback you would have for me? Thank you for your time.
I only received one response which was:
I’ve moved on. Thanks. A brand new Facebook account zero activity. That’s just weird. Considering it’s been since 2022 or before that I have has anything to do with Elomir
Fair point lady. Fair point. I did make a new Facebook account to reach out to these people, as I didn’t want people to see my other fake profile that I use to find tennis matches in my area. I don’t have a real Facebook account. The fact that this lady was out already in 2022 though probably hints that she wasn’t very successful (as does the IDS). I tried to lock down the Facebook account so they couldn’t figure out from my page that it was brand new, but clearly they still figured it out.
I replied with the below, and was subsequently blocked.
I understand. I joined Facebook so I could research Elomir. I didnt have an account prior to that. A lot of the activity around Elomir seems to be from 2022. Appreciate your time, no need to continue responding. If you are willing, I’d love to learn why you moved on?
I sent a similar message to several other people, but received no responses.
In terms of activity from this company, it’s pretty much dead in the water.
The Elomir Facebook page has become just a motivational page at this point. The latest posts are mentor mondays, pillars of wellness, habits to break, the goddess of good luck, and just a bunch of random stuff like this picture below.
Again, this isn’t surprising. Elomir has nothing of value to sell. Consumers don’t want the strips. The only strip sales they made were to brand partners who were giving the strips away as samples to recruit partners under them. Elomir is in the recruiting business, and now they have to try and keep their recruits engaged as peddlers of health and wellness, so they hopefully continue to try and sell strips. It won’t work though, since you don’t make any money from it.
From what I am seeing from the tiny amount of chatter regarding Elomir that still exists which is really just coming from the founders, it seems like they are a bit defensive. Perhaps things didn’t go quite as well as they thought? Here is a post the CEO made a few days ago:
Opening Elomir opened some things I needed to face. They always say every new level requires a new devil to conquer…. Boy oh boy it came out angry.I feel like I’m completely starting over on who am I?
Being a top producer was great but being an owner…
dealing with things I never imagined dealing with when I was just a distributor.I just want to take a moment to apologize to all the owners in MLM that I now understand the pressure of ownership. Now to the owners that did unethical practices, I am not sorry but I’m grateful you showed me what not to do.
If you’re like me and growing through a transition right now, I want you to know you will figure it out. There is always hope. If you’re lucky to have someone that is cheering and supporting your process, you’re blessed. If you don’t please reach out to me any time! If there is one thing I know I did well in my career, I am great at helping others see the light in darkness.
“dealing with things I never imagined…” Yea, I bet you never had to deal with some guy named Ares Karaggianes emailing you and telling you that you are required to post an income disclosure statement on your website.
The angry devil line, the never imagine dealing with these sorts of things, and the line about being in a transition right now sort of imply Elomir was maybe, perhaps, possibly, a cluster fluff.
I scrolled down a bit through Van’s profile out of a morbid sense of curiosity. A few posts down she wrote:
People want all the accolades and success but don’t want to lay the foundation. We have an account that started with $200k is currently sitting at $1.3 million dollars in it from investments we’ve done in the last 2 1/2 years. (Did I get your attention with that number?) This is just 1 of many other things we have. People are going to comment “info” because 1.3 million makes everyone’s eyes go
and of course 1.3 million is a dream for everyone. The problem is most will never do the things necessary. They all want the shortcut.
It’s not specifically related to Elomir, but just wanted to make the observation that usually people who have to share their bank account details with the world have some deep insecurities to work through.
With just a little bit more information, I could backwards solve the Elomir compensation plan into what the business did in revenues / payouts to get a rough estimate of profit that the owners made in 2023. But with confidence I can say that 407 people lost money on average in 2023, and all that lost money, and all the annual brand partners fees, and products purchased went to Elomir. So her line about “laying a foundation” to her wealth, could perhaps be more specifically stated as laying a foundation of people I scammed.
Elomir and its owners can rationalize away their unethical practices with cutesy mission statements like “leave people better”, but the reality is they peddled people a useless supplement, promised and overhyped the financial opportunity to its “brand partners” (customers is the better word), employed predatory tactics to recruit people, and now they are in “transition”, on to the next scheme. With MLM’s, they always have to sell a product or else they’d be in blatant violation of the definition of a pyramid scheme, but the product is always secondary. It’s a people business, and the goal is to convince them they are a part of something that is changing the world, and opening up possibilities for financial freedom, work-life flexibility, being your own boss, working from the beach, and whatever else they use to convince people to join. Don’t take the bait!
Between my first post and this one, I have sunk close to 100 hours of time into this. I don’t get anything out of it, and barely anyone will read this in the first place. However, on top of finding it wildly entertaining to watch companies like Elomir fail, I find it extremely irritating and offensive that these companies keep popping up and scamming people out of time and money, so I get a fairly robust dopamine hit from archiving their shenanigans and ultimate failure to build sustainable businesses. It bothers me to no end that those few people at the top of the pyramids, and the owners of Elomir will simply jump to the next thing and help a few hundred other people earn $84/year before expenses, but what can you do? I’ve got a day job, so we’ll have to stop at this.
But Elomir, if you are reading this, I stop at nothing, and I will sic the SEC on you the moment you slip up. I am always watching. I’m the defender, ever vigilant, ever ready, like a cobra, I strike when you least expect it.
…he’s the hero we deserve, but not the one it needs right now. So, we’ll hunt him, because he can take it. Because he’s not our hero. He’s a silent guardian. A watchful protector. A Dark Knight.
