Can You Make Money With Pure Romance
Pure Romance was founded in 1993 and based in Ohio. They tell us that Pure Romance products are based on ‘the latest sexual health education, the best in must-have beauty products, and the hottest bedroom accessories’
Since inception, Pure Romance has grown into a global company with over 30,000 consultants participating in their network marketing system. Here The Finance Guy, we believe you can’t make money with MLM, but we’ll go ahead with this full review of Pure Romance.
Pure Romance say that they have enabled their consultants to ‘take charge of their sexual health, and just maybe, take a leap and start a life-changing career’. They also say that their self employment opportunity will help them ‘achieve their dreams’.
What Is The Pure Romance Opportunity
We looked at the official Pure Romance Opportunity page. As expected, they tell us how you will be working with the ‘best products’ and earn the ‘best income’.
All you have to do is arrange a few home parties, and the money will flow in. You can set you own hours and control your own income.
If you don’t want to arrange parties, no problem, you’ll also get your own referral link to the Pure Romance Website, so you can sell orgasms to anyone with an internet connection.
If you have no experience Pure Romance say they will support you ‘every step of the way’. While this is all well and good, it does leave us wanting more information
How Do You Make Money With Pure Romance
To find out how you earn income from this opportunity, we looked at a copy of the Pure Romance Compensation Plan. This document explains all the ways you can earn commission as well as what you need to do to qualify for it.
The first thing we notice, is that to qualify for any payments from Pure Romance, you need to become an ‘active consultant’. To do this you need to purchase $200 worth of products in your first 60 days.
To remain active you need to spend at least $200 every 2 months on Pure Romance products. If any products are returned, they will be deducted from your total. If you don’t spend your $200, you’ll be deemed inactive and will lose any benefits you’ve accrued. To us, this raises the Pay to Play red flag
If you spend enough on Pure Romance products to remain active, then like all MLMs, there are many commissions you can earn. We’ll go through them below:
Retail Commission
The name says it all, you can make money by selling sex products to your friends and family. All you have to do is find someone to host a party and then you can earn a profit on any Pure Romance stuff purchased.
The amount you can earn from each sale is based on the difference between the retail price, and your buyers discount. The amount of discount you can get depends on your rank in the Pure Romance MLM
The retail margin available at each rank, is shown in the table below:
So as a new active consultant, you can make 40% off every sale you make to a full paying customer. Pure Romance suggests that if you arrange one sex product party a week, and sell $600 worth of product, you can make $240.
If you manage to climb 2 ranks and become a ‘Senior Consultant’. You can earn 50%, so the same party, selling the same sex toys, would now earn you $300. If you keep climbing all the way to the top of the triangular scheme, you can earn up to 60%. So that would be a commission of $360 from the same $600 party.
From this table, we can see that the key to climbing the Pure Romance ranks, is to recruit. If you personally sponsor 3 active consultants, you can become a ‘Senior Consultant’. If you sponsor 30, yourself, and they sponsor 30 in turn sponsor another 30 (your downline), and 8 of your sponsors become ‘senior’, you’ll have reached the top of the not a pyramid.
Let’s not forget, that all these people in your downline have to be active, so each consultant needs to spend $200 every 2 months on Pure Romance
What we can really see here, is the Promotion Through Recruitment Red Flag. The only way to climb the ranks, is to convince others to join the Pure Romance opportunity and become active consultants.
Side Note - Orders made through your website pay less. There is a flat rate of 30% for for purchases under $40, and 40% for $40 and over.
Paying less commission for orders made on the world’s largest marketplace (the web) doesn’t make sense to us. Then again it could be intentional because Pure Romance sells directly through their own website, where they pay no commission at all.
Free Product Bonus
This is basically a 5% rebate on every $1,000 you spend with Pure Romance per month. So if you spend $1,000, you get $50 in free products.. If you spend $10,000, you get the maximum $500.
While it’s nice to get products, we’d prefer cash. If they gave you an extra $500, you could spend it on achieving your monthly sexual desires, or you could add it toward your other financial goals.
Override Bonus
This is another typical MLM commission. It is the commission you make when people in your downline buy from Pure Romance. It is a complex system, where you can earn from your referrals, as well as their referrals and so on for several ‘generations’.
The override commission you can earn depends on your rank with Pure Romance. The Overrides paid at each rank in the scheme are shown below:
As we can see here, if you climb to the top, you can earn a total of 13% in overrides from 4 levels in your downline. This is commission you can earn from all the people you have recruited as well as those they recruit, and so on (for 4 levels).
In this table, Pure Romance reminds us that you need to recruit to ascent the ancient Egyptian burial structure.
While it’s fun to think about all those bonuses you might earn if you reach the top, we’d like to point out that all these bonuses are included in the price Consultants pay to Pure Romance.
Your upline will encourage you to keep spending because they are earning commission from you. This raises the Most Of The Rewards Go To Your Upline Red Flag.
It’s generally a good idea to try and do your job the best you can, but in MLMs, the more you sell, the more the people above you earn.
Consultant Trips
If you meet whatever the criteria of the time is, you might qualify for a trip to Mexico or wherever they are going.
Living in Australia, I’d love a luxury trip to Mexico to see the sights, enjoy the food, and embrace the culture. The only problem is, that MLM trips aren’t vacations, they are conferences.
If you ‘qualify’ for a trip, what they usually mean is that you pay for your own flights and accommodation. The only thing they pay for, is access to their confernce.
I don’t know about you, but if I paid my own way to Mexico, there’s no way I’d want to spend the whole time sitting in a room with no windows hearing about Pure Romance. This isn’t a vacation, it’s a Pure Romance hype conference.
Directors Bonus
There’s a lot of words in their compensation plan, but we’ll cut it down to this. If you make it to a directors rank, you can earn even more bonuses from even more levels in your downline.
Once again, this all sounds great, but it raises the More Than 5 Levels In The Downline Red Flag.
While it’s nice to know that there are so many ways to profit from other people’s sensual pleasures, we still need more information.
How Much Are Pure Romance Consultants Earning
Credit where it is due, they have provided an online copy of the 2019 Pure Romance Income Disclosure Statement. Most MLMs make this difficult to find, so until they remove it, we must give a nod to Pure Romance
ignoring all the sales words on the page, the most important information is in the table shown below:
Like most MLMs, Pure Romance can’t tell us about customer sales because they don’t measure them. So their Income Disclosure looks at all other commissions.
Like all pyramids, 83.45% of Pure Romance Consultants earned nothing from the bottom of the scheme. Moving up the ranks things don’t get much better.
Only the top 0.13% are earning more than they could in a regular job. Applying some high school math, we find that only 1 in 769 Pure Romance Consultants earns a full time income.
Why Is It Hard To Make Money With Pure Romance
We applied Dr Jon Tayolors 5 Step MLM evaluation to this opportunity. We found that Pure Romance raises all the Red Flags. According to the research 99.3% of people who join the Pure Romance Opportunity will lose money.
The problem is not with the company, it’s with the business model. MLM is designed to help companies sell products to you. If you join Pure Romance, you are a customer, not a business partner.
Is Pure Romance An Illegal Pyramid Scam
Even though MLMs closely resemble pyramids, they are not illegal. The technicalities date back to a 1979 Amway ruling. To the best of our understanding, Amway managed to word their documentation in a way that bypassed the pyramid scheme laws. This opened the doors for other MLMs to do the same.
While the paperwork may make them legal, that doesn’t mean that Nuskin and other MLMs are ethical. If you join any MLM, you have to realize that the only way to make money is if people below you are losing money
We looked at the 2018 FTC Business Guidance for MLMs. This explains when MLM participants are acting in a way that is misleading or unlawful. Examples of breaches include pressuring downlines to purchase products, and making unsubstantiated claims about earnings potential. Based on what we’ve seen, it appears some Pure Romance Consultants are in Breach of the FTC guidance.
As always, we’d love to hear what you think in the comments section below, especially if you an share your experiences with Pure Romance
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