Multi-level Marketing: It Can Work, But Buyer-Beware
“When my son was born, I wanted to start a home business, but nothing fit,” says Sharon Holmlund of Thurmont, Maryland. Then she read a magazine article about Shoebox to Showcase, a home-based business in which consultants teach customers to preserve their family photos using photo-safe albums and accessories. She started running her Shoebox to Showcase business part-time in April 1990. This year she hopes to earn $15,000; in five year she expects to be making $50,000 a year, while still working part-time.
Shoebox to Showcase, a program started in 1988 by Creative Memories, a marketer of archival-quality photo albums, is a low-cost way to start your own home business. (Creative Memories is a division of Webway, Inc., which has produced photo albums since the 1930s.) It’s particularly attractive to parents at home with young children because the program allows you to market and manage a business at your own pace. According to Creative Memories vice-president Susan Iida-Pederson, 98 percent of Shoebox to Showcase consultants are women, of whom 85 percent work part-time.
“The market is anyone who has been put in charge of organizing family photo albums but doesn’t know what to do,” says …