Turkey's appeal for global direct-selling retailers such as Oriflame has recently been growing, yet a year-long currency depreciation threatens to reverse this trend as well as cut profits, the Swedish cosmetics maker's Turkey director has told Today's Zaman.

Oriflame Turkey Manager Johan Larsson said on Wednesday in İstanbul that the company has been enjoying double-digit growth in the Turkish markets since 2008, capitalizing on a fast-growing young entrepreneur population. After entering Turkey in 1992, Oriflame signed up nearly 500,000 individuals as independent sales representatives, 200,000 of whom are currently active. As much as 90 percent of these people, including door-to-door representatives, are female in Turkey, Larsson says, adding that three Turkish women made it onto the list of Oriflame's top 15 most successful independent sales representatives worldwide last year.

The company aspires to surpass US rival Avon as the market leader in Turkey, as well as make the country its third-largest sales market among 65 countries Oriflame operates in. The company is best known for its skin lotions, creams and moisturizers and also targets Turkish male buyers with different promotions.

These still remain ambitious goals for which it is too early to share an exact timeframe. Larsson says the lira's decline against the foreign currency, especially the euro, remains a challenge for them to drive market growth.

“We buy the products in euros and market them in Turkish lira here, and a further decline below the 2.3 level versus the euro would make things harder for us,” he added.

Among other factors that have the potential to adversely affect direct-selling businesses like Oriflame in Turkey are online fraud schemes. Thousands of Turkish online entrepreneurs were caught in pyramid schemes in the past, sustaining big losses in investment. This eats into the legal companies' market share and undermines their growth, Larsson agrees, though noting that it is no longer a major problem in Turkey.

Pyramid schemes generally use money from new recruits to pay older members, and people can also become network marketers by recruiting others, thereby receiving a share of sales made by the newly recruited. Once the scheme grows too big to manage, the firm fails to pay earlier investors and the system collapses.

Turkey is among Oriflame's top five strategic target markets along with India, Indonesia, Mexico and China; all of which are emerging markets where pyramid schemes have recently been commonplace activities.