Origami Owl was founded in 2010 out of Chandler Arizona. Rather than using traditional sales to sell their line of Jewellery products, they use MLM. They now have thousands of ‘Independent Designers’, selling their ‘customizable jewelry’ throughout the Americas.

Here at The Finance Guy, we think you can’t make money with MLM. Having said that we’ll give them a chance to prove us wrong in this full review of Origami Owl. In particular we want to look at the business opportunity. We’ll find out if this is a real money making option, or just another MLM.

What Is The Origami Owl Opportunity

We looked at the official join Origami Owl page. It told us that if you want to become an Origami Owl designer, then you have to be ‘ready to start dreaming big’. You can make money from helping others tell stories through this customizable jewelry. No matter what your financial goals are ‘Origami Owl may be the begining of making these dreams happen’.

If you want to get onto the path to your financial dreams, all you have to do is pick the Origami Owl starter kit that best suits you. While there are a million reasons to join, the one you should focus on is ‘right now’. If you sign up this month, you will get some free jewellery. We’re not sure which month you’re reading this in, but it’s quite likely that the promotion is still running.

While it’s clear that they seem very excited, they haven’t actually told us anything about what you’d be doing with Origami Owl

What Does Origami Owl Do

We had a look at part of the Origami Owl catalogue, it appears to like build a bear for jewellery. You pick your locket, your chain, and some charms and essentially design your own end product. They also have watches and other accessories, which can appear to work with the charms too.

How Do You Make Money With Origami Owl

To work this out we looked at a copy of the Origami Owl Career Plan. This simplified one page version of a compensation is the best we could find. It does however give us a good idea of all the ways you can earn with Origami Owl, and what you need to do to qualify for commissions. We’ll go through them below

Retail Profit
As the name suggests, this is the amount you can earn from making retail sales. If you find customers to buy from you at the full retail price, you can earn a profit. The amount you make will vary from 20% - 50%.

Origami Owl say that the main determinant of how much you earn is the amount of product you order as Personal Volume (PV). It makes as buying in bulk usually leads to better wholesale pricing.

While it is nice to offer discounts, it could also lead to some designers overspending on inventory that they might struggle to sell later.

Sponsor Bonus
You can earn commission ranging from 6% to 10% on sales made by Origami designers you personally sponsor. To qualify for this you need to reach the rank of ‘senior designer’. or higher with Origami Owl. Reaching this rank is simple enough, all you need to do is sponsor at least 1 designer, and spend at least 100 PV on products.

The amount you can earn from your sponsor bonus depends on your rank with Origami Owl. The more people you sponsor, and the more you personally spend, the more you can earn.

Mentor Bonus
This is commission you get for purchases made by designers sponsored by people in your downlilne. In other words if you sponsor someone, and they sponsor someone else, then you earn commission from both designers. Origami Owl pays the Mentor Bonus on up to 4 levels in your downline.

To qualify for the mentor bonus, you need to reach the rank of ‘Executive Designer’, or higher with Origami Owl. To do this you need to personally sponsor at least 2 designers, and you need to spend 250 worth of PV on Origami Owl product.

The mentor bonus ranges from 3% to 7%, the amount you can earn, and the number of levels you earn it on, depends on your rank in Origami Owl.

Advancement Bonus
If you reach the rank of ‘Team Leader’, you will qualify for you first advancement bonus of $50. This is a one time payment for achieving this rank. If you continue to climb the Origami Owl MLM, you will get advancement bonuses at each rank after this. The amount increases with the ranks. If you ever make it to the very top rank of ‘Executive Field Vice President’, the bonus will be $10,000

Generation Bonus
If you reach the rank of ‘Director’, or higher with Origami Owl, you might qualify for a generation bonus. While it’s not well explained, we think this is a commission you can if designers in your downline reach the rank of director.

You can earn anywhere from 0.5% to 1% on up to 2 generations of directors. This commission is calculated on the volume of their entire business, not just the orders made by the director. That means you get an extra commission on all the orders made by all the designers sponsored by your directors in their downlines.

While all these commissions and bonuses sound well and good, it’s important to remember that they are included in the price. If you are a new Origami Owl designer, then 38% of the price you pay to Origami Owl, goes to your upline as commission.

Are Origami Owl Designers Making Money

To find out if designers are making money, we looked at the 2018 Origami Owl Income Disclosure. This document is meant to show all the commissions earned by Origami Owl designers during 2017.

The first page tells us how Origami Owl is a ‘life-changing opportunity’. Allegedly if you join Origami Owl, you can ‘start living your dreams’.

On the 2nd page, we see a brief table which details all the commissions paid to Origami Owl designers in 2017. We have included a copy of this below:

Origami Owl income disclosure statement — Origami Owl designer earnings for 2017

If we do a little math, we can see that 66.41% of all designers earned at least some commission during the year. This also tells us that 33.59% of Origami Owl designers earned nothing in 2017.

If we look in the average earnings column, we see that the only group who averaged more than $18,000 were the ones who reached the rank of ‘Director’, or higher. At this level the average earnings were just over $100,000 which is a good annual income. However only 0.07% of designers reach this level. This means that 99.93% of Origami Owl designers earned less than minimum wage in 2017.

Looks like this ‘life-changing opportunity’ can only works for 1 in 1428 designers. The other 1427 would be better of with a regular job!

Why Is It Difficult To Make Money With Origami Owl

Origami Owl is not alone, it’s difficult to make money with any MLM company. The problem is with the business model. It’s designed to sell products for the company, not to create new business partners. If you join Origami Owl, you are their customer, not a business partner.

While Origami Owl might give you a ready to run opportunity with a website and products, they do the same for thousands of other designers. If you join Origami Owl, your ‘business’, will be identical to all the other Origami Owl designers. You will be in competition with them for customers and for recruits.

At the end of the day, the Origami Owl opportunity is quite similar to a commission based sales job. The only way you can really turn a profit, is if you are good at sales. Whether it’s selling products to customers or the opportunity to new recruits, you need to be good at selling.

Unlike most sales jobs, there are no territories or market controls. Owl will let anyone join, so it doesn’t matter how many people are selling it in your area, they’ll happily add more. This makes it more difficult for anyone to make a profit because of market dilution. Imagine if McDonald’s opened 4 stores on the same block. None of them would turn a profit!

Is Origami Owl An Illegal Pyramid Scheme

Even though MLMs closely resemble pyramid schemes, they are not illegal. The reason dates back to the 1979 case of Amway vs the FTC. After 4 years in court Amway was found to be offering a business opportunity, rather than a pyramid scam. The technicalities came down to wording in their paperwork. One example requires consultants to make retail sales.

The Amway ruling effectively opened the doors for all other MLMs to operate within the law. However we should remember that being legal doesn’t make it ethical. If you knew that only 0.07% of designers earn over minimum wage, would you feel comfortable recruiting friends. If you want to build a downline with Origami Owl, this is exactly what you’ll need to do.

Even though they have managed to operate within the legal system, there are people who believe that MLMs should be classified as illegal product based pyramid schemes. Of note is Dr Jon Taylor, who identified 5 characteristics of product-based pyramid schemes, which are listed below:

An Endless Chain Of Recruitment
Promotion Through Recruitment
Pay To Play
More Than 5 Levels Of Commission
Most Of The Rewards Go To Your Upline

Based on Dr. Taylors definition, we believe that Origami Owl could be a product based pyramid scheme.

Should You Join Origami Owl

The only reason to join any sales job, is if you truly believe in the products. No matter how good you are at sales, selling a product you don’t personally believe in would be incredibly difficult.

Before you join this ‘business opportunity’, maybe take the time to buy a few products at retail price. If you think you can comfortably sell these products at full price, then maybe you can make money with Origami Owl. If you think it’s going to be as easy as just sharing the opportunity with a few friends, then you’re in for a surprise.

As always, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below, especially if you an share your experiences with Origami Owl

Are you wondering if you can make money in an MLM? Check our our list of mlm reviews before you join. If you find one that’s not on the list, let us know and we’ll do our best to write a review