Younique cosmetics gives direct sales a twist: No parties to host

Admin   |   08 August, 2015   |   568   |   3980

Utah-based cosmetics company has put a new spin on its direct-sales business, allowing sellers to work through social-media platforms instead of the typical in-home parties and paying their commission immediately.

Younique is growing fast on the strength of its premier product — Moodstruck 3D Fiber Lashes mascara, $29. The company says it's selling 16,000 units a day.

It also says almost 260,000 women, plus some men, have signed on as salespeople since the company’s 2012 founding. Nearly 6,000 of them are in Chicago this week for the company’s third annual convention. The three-day event at McCormick Place concludes Saturday.

Brother-sister team Derek Maxfield and Melanie Huscroft steered their business away from the home gatherings familiar to buyers of everything from Tupperware to Thirty-One products. Hosting home parties, they note, cost sellers time and money and typically draw small groups.

Instead, Maxfield created a system allowing for virtual parties, with multi-day selling periods during which independent sales reps and party hostesses reach out via Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter and Google+ and link to deals. Orders are fulfilled as soon as they are placed online. And the hostess is instantly credited with rewards to be used when she places her next order.

Direct sales has its high-profile failures — Lia Sophia, the Wood Dale-based jewelry company now out of business and embroiled in a lawsuit, being one of the more recent. But its popularity is growing. The trade group Direct Selling Association reports that more than 18 million Americans, 75 percent of them women, generated $34.5 billion in such sales in 2014.

At Younique, sellers can recruit hostesses to invite guests to online parties and earn rewards toward product purchases. Sales reps earn 20 percent to 30 percent of sales.

After a customer places an order, the hostess earns a reward of instant purchasing credit from the sale. The salesperson gets paid within three hours.

“In the beginning, we were criticized by people saying ‘Why would you pay them before you could pay yourself?’” Huscroft said, pointing out that credit card companies can take days to pay merchants. “Oftentimes they need to buy diapers or put food on the table. We want to empower them and said ‘If you need money today, go sell something today.’”

Salespeople pay $99 for a kit to get started, and the online sales model means that they needn’t buy and hold inventory. 

Women are “running their entire business online and from the smartphone,” Huscroft said. “Many don’t even have a computer.”

Cheryl V. Jackson is a freelance writer.