Arbonne Income Disclosure Statement
After writing a full review of the Arbonne Business opportunity, we decided it was time to have a closer look at the results. We want to know how much Arbonne consultants are earning.
We found a copy of the annual Arbonne Income Disclosure. As expected they do their best to sugar coat the information as much as possible. They tell us that Arbonne is all about ‘healthy living enthusiasts’ where ‘anyone can flourish’.
We then get a mini presesentation of the Arbonne opportunity. They remind us that you can work from your phone, and earn many forms of commission.
Then they present their earnings in the table shown below:
Quite possibly the most important piece of information is in the top line. Arbonne is only showing us the earnings for consultants who earned commission. This makes the information a little misleading because they have not included all the Arbonne consultants for the year
While this may seem like an innocent oversight, it could be that they are intentionally trying to make the information look better. In previous years Arbonne has included all the consultants in their disclosure statement. Unfortunately they have now removed those from the internet, but we did find a copy of a previous Arbonne Income Disclosure.
We also looked at a UK Arbonne Income Disclosure, which confirmed that only 12% of Arbonne Consultants earn commisison.
If we look at the information in the earnings table, it is quite similar to those of previous years. The big difference, is that in previous versions, they told us that only 12% of consultants earned any commission in the given year. In other words 88% of Arbonne Consultants never earn any commission at all.
Looking at the annual earnings table, we see that 66% of Arbonne consultants are at the entry level ‘independent consultant’ rank. Even though earning a commission probably puts them in the top 12% of all Arbonne consultants, they only earned an average of $830 for the year. That’s less than $16 per week.
While Arbonne has avoided giving us the full earnings disclosure, they did include the following line ‘A typical Arbonne participant in the United States earned between $120–$502 in 2019 in earnings and commissions.’ This is a very vague range, but it does tell us that if you join, you should expect to earn between and $2 and $10 a week in commission from Arbonne.
So even though the average earnings for the bottom 66% of their table of everyone who earned was $830, the ‘typical’ earnings for all consultants was much lower. This supports our assumption that most Arbonne Consultants earn nothing.
If we play along and only look at those who earned, things still don’t look all that good. Only those who reach the top 2 ranks with Arbonne earning a full time income. So if we pretend that only the 12% who earned commission are ‘working the opportunity’, we still see that 97% of the top Arbonne Consultants would be better off with a regular job.
If we were to include all consultants in the Arbonne opportunity, we’d find that only 0.36% of them earn a full time income. Applying some math, we find that only 1 in 278 Arbonne Consultants earns enough to replace a regular job.
There is some important information missing from the income disclosure. For example they are only showing commission. Remember that commission is not profit, as it does not include expenses. If we were to look at the full financials, we’d find that most Arbonne Consultants are losing money.
Another factor not included, is churn. This is a common term used in the sales industry. It refers to people quitting. MLMs have a huge churn rate. In any given year, it’s common for more than half of them to drop out. If we were to include the consultants who quit in 2019, the Arbonne consultant earnings would look even worse.
If you are thinking about joining Arbonne, or any MLM, we strongly suggest that you look at all other options before taking any action.
For posts like this check out our list of MLM Income Disclosure Statements. If you notice one that you think should be added to the list, let us know and we’ll do our best.