Home jewelry MLMs? The 90’s called and want their lame trend back.
Forever 21 quality jewelry at Tiffany’s prices.
Harassing friends to come to your “parties” time and time again just so you can try to sell them on your “business”.
Making less than $1,000…per year.
So what makes Sabika any different and what has kept the company around so long? Am I still involved?
This video explains everything:
Make sense? Either way, here’s the full review on Sabika.
Overview
Sabika’s got a pretty cute founders story to tell. It was founded by mother-daughter duo Karin Mayr, an Austrian-American immigrant, and her daughter Alexandra Mayr-Gracik back in 2001 in Robinson, Pennsylvania.
The mother, Karin Mayr, has decades of experience in the fashion industry working with some pretty impressive names – Donna Karan, Armani, and Banana Republic, to name a few. [1]
The company wasn’t quite your typical “started out of a basement” story – it actually started out of the Mayr family’s dining room.
Overview
In keeping with their wholesome start, the company has been raising money for local charities ever since they started making their first six figures. In 2012, they raised almost $300,000 for Komen for the Cure and the National Breast Cancer Foundation with their home parties. [2]
They even refuse to use models in their catalogs and instead use customers and distributors. Doesn’t get more down-to-earth than that. According to their Founder, “We like to use everyday people, customers or individuals we meet along the way. We want to make the woman who wears our jewelry feel a little prettier, feel a little more confident.”
I’m all for humility, especially in MLM, a showy, over-the-top industry that tends to be anything but down-to-earth, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re successful.
Sabika has been hitting 60% annual growth in sales on a fairly regular basis, which is great. They’re expected to hit $20 million in sales. [3]
They’ve got over 1,700 consultants in 42 states, and a handful of them are hitting 6-figures. These numbers aren’t bad, but they’re not overly impressive either when you consider they’ve been in business for 15 years. [4]
Products
True to their roots, Karin and Alexandra design Sabika’s jewelry in Austria, in a small quintessential European town. Rather than basing their designs off jewelry trends, they actually find inspiration in the world of high fashion. Alexandra creates collages of the season’s runway shows to get them started. [5]
While they develop new collections each season with pieces that go together flawlessly, their goal is to make sure that new jewelry always looks good with their retired collections as well. There’s a distinct style that is Sabika’s signature.
They even collaborated with Swarovski to create their own signature Sabika Cut for their gemstones. If you buy an item featuring The Sabika Cut, you’re buying something that is truly unique to this company. [6]
Having a unique design is a great way to stand out, but it also means that you’re not going to have the wide appeal that more generic jewelry companies have. Not everyone is going to love the signature Sabika style.
Either way, their jewelry is actually fairly nice for MLM. But it’s also fairly pricey. Gift sets are upwards of $259, rings and earrings are $49 and up, and necklaces are around $159 to $298.
Not sure that costume jewelry is every worth spending that much. Maybe if you really, really like their designs. Still, I can’t see it being an easy sell.
Opportunity
While it’s fairly cheap and easy to join, you have to sell $500 in the first three months to qualify for any commission. While that’s not a huge number, making sales in MLM is way harder than it looks, especially when it comes to a product like overpriced jewelry.
Even if you do qualify, the commission rate on personal sales is only 20%. That’s well below average.
There are extra bonuses involved. For example, if you sell over $3,000 for 3 months in a row, you get a $500 bonus and an extra $150 per month.
You do get some pretty good bonuses in the form of free and discounted product. They estimate that $3,500 in monthly sales will get you $764 worth of product value. That being said, if you’re not making a good paycheck, product discounts and even the occasional free necklace are pretty useless.
Their website doesn’t go into detail regarding team commissions, other than to state that it exists. That usually means that it’s unimpressive.
The worst part of the opportunity with Sabika though isn’t the compensation plan itself, but the fact that the business is built around selling through in-home parties. This structure very rarely works nowadays, and it’s only going to continue to become less popular in the future.
I mean, would you give up your Saturday to drive all the way to your friend’s house just to sit and listen to her sales pitch for some overpriced jewelry?
As a distributor, do you want to beg your friends to do that for you time and time again?
Recap
Unless you’re willing to spam your friends and family regularly and incessantly invite people you know to your parties, you’re probably not going to make any money. And if you are willing to do those things, you’re probably not going to have many friends left.
Sabika may have a great founders story and a solid philosophy behind their company and jewelry design. Their product is really not bad, albeit overpriced.
But the bottom line is that, unless you’re 1/1,000 (or more), you’re just not going to make money with them.
—
Now I’m not a Sabika hater by any means. But MLMs have a terrible history of getting hot and falling off just a few years later.
Not saying it’s impossible to make money with them, but your time could be better spent.
If you like automated ways to build passive income, there are better ways.
(and you can trash those old MLM habits, too)
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