Hi there! Welcome! If this is your first time at bottlesoup, thanks for joining us. In this article, we’re going to discuss selling Scentsy. Please note that these articles are the opinion of the author and should not be taken in place of professional legal or professional financial advice.
What is Scentsy?
Scentsy is a direct sales company that markets “wickless candles” or wax warmers, in addition to other home fragrance products. Like many other direct sales companies, one of the primary ways the company earns money is buy recruiting consultants to join Scentsy.
Who sells Scentsy?
A quick search of #Scentsy on Twitter will give you an idea. Here are a couple tweets:
What’s the worse that could happen? You join for $64 & decide to quit & go back to your life with more than $200+ in stuff? 🤷🏻♀️#Scentsy #lifechanging #ownit
— Steph (@hiddenjewel) February 26, 2019
Shhhhh…It’s #QuietDay #JustWhatTheDoctorOrdered #WhoIsGoingToLetMyKidsInOnIt #WAHMLife #Mompreneurship #MomHustle #HustleHard #MomBiz #ILoveMyJob #Scentsy #WaxBoss #BossLady #NoWickBrandy pic.twitter.com/eruUpDVVSg
— Brandy Kleinfelter (@NoWickBrandy) February 25, 2019
So who’s selling Scentsy? Mostly women with children. This is typical of many direct sales companies, which are known to recruit stay at home moms.
What’s so bad about giving SAHMs an opportunity to earn an income, you ask? Well, nothing is bad about that. In fact, that sounds awesome. But when we dig deeper into the actual feasibility of the opportunity, that’s where things get sad.
How much money can you make selling Scentsy?
We’ll break this up into two parts: how much money you can make in theory vs. how much money Scentsy consultants are actually making.
How much money can you theoretically make selling Scentsy
With any direct sales company, a lot of the marketing pitches the idea that your income opportunities are infinite. It’s a nice idea, but it’s not really accurate. Walmart is a huge company and a household name, but even Walmart doesn’t have infinite opportunities.
Getting started with Scentsy
In order to make any money with Scentsy, you must first sign up as a Consultant.
While you can get started for “just $49” according to the homepage banner, most Scentsy Consultants spring for the $99 Starter Kit. (Because it has “everything you need”)
Once you join, you’ll earn 20% commission on the first 1,000 in Personal Retail Volume (PRV).
It’s important to note that PRV = sales price. A product can sell for $10 but have a PRV of just $5. So that’s something to lookout for.
But anyway. You’ll earn 20% on the first 1,000 PRV, then 25% after that. For the sake of simplicity, we could assume that’s all you have to do: get a Starter Kit and start selling. But if you’re considering this as a legitimate, long-term business opportunity, then you need to understand that there are other costs involved.
Additional costs for Scentsy Consultants
Your minimum sales volume. While they won’t charge you for this directly, you’re required to sell 200 PRV per month to remain active. If you don’t, you can’t earn commission. Many consultants wind up buying a bunch of their own product in order to remain “commission eligible.” While the official stance on this by all direct sales companies is that you shouldn’t do it, don’t be fooled. It’s strongly encouraged and the peer environment pressures you into believing that you’re just moments away from getting a bunch of huge orders. And if you’re not commission eligible, you’ll miss out. The problem? Even if you are commission eligible, 20% of 200 PRV is $40. If you spent $200 or more to get to 200 PRV, then you haven’t earned. You’re $160 in the hole.
Marketing materials. You have to purchase these through Scentsy. You’re not allowed to make your own order sheets or DIY your marketing efforts.
How much Scentsy product do you need to sell in order to earn the equivalent of minimum wage?
We know that you probably have goals beyond minimum wage. But we use minimum wage as a baseline to show how much effort goes into to earning. So, the current federal minimum wage is $7.25/hour. That’s about $271.87/week assuming you work 37.5 hours (40 hour work week with 30 minute unpaid lunch taken out). Before taxes, that’s $14,137.50 per year.
The average price of a Scentsy product is about $8. That’s what their “best selling” spray goes for. On each $8 product you sell, you’ll earn $1.60 in commission.
Using our free Direct Sales Calculator, we plugged in the commission of 20% and the $8 product.
So, you’ll need to sell 799 Scentsy products in the first month to earn the equivalent of minimum wage and earn back your $99 Starter Kit investment.
“But wait,” you say. “After 1,000 PRV, you earn 25%.” Sure, that’s true. We don’t know what the PRV is on the $8 Scentsy sprays. But for fun, let’s say you wind up earning 25% on everything.
You’ll still need to sell 639 Scentsy products to earn the equivalent of minimum wage and recoup your initial investment.
How much money do Scentsy consultants make
If you look at the most recent Income Disclosure Statement from Scentsy, you’ll get a pretty clear picture of how much profit Consultants are taking home.
You’ll see that the majority of consultants have been with Scentsy for nearly three years (32.4 months) and only make an average of $676 in commission per year. That’s just $56.30 a month. And after you deduct the cost of buying samples for new customers to try and keeping your Personal Website (PWS) up, you may have much less.
TL;DR: What’s the bottom line?
As with all of our direct sales/MLM analysis articles, we cannot tell you what to do. The choice is yours. But we urge you to look at the opportunity with a critical eye. Consider your selling abilities, the commission rate, the product, the Income Disclosure Statement – basically, consider all the facts. And use our free Direct Sales Calculator to help make your decision.
You can do anything
Women need to be empowered to succeed. And while direct sales companies are very good at putting forward an empowering message, the opportunities usually fall short of what we’d define as successful. You don’t need a direct sales company to start your own business. You can start building your brand on your own, right now. You can start your own blog, or make your own Etsy shop. Heck, make a Facebook page and start selling your creations or services there. Bottom line? You’re incredible. And you have things to offer the world. Peddling someone else’s product won’t get you the financial freedom you crave. Invest in yourself, either through education or paving your own way. You deserve it. We’re rooting for you.
Data Junkie says
Thank you for this Bottlesoup! And thank you for championing women and shedding light on these questionable opportunities. I just couldn’t resist adding just a touch of additional information to your awesome analysis to help show more of the stark reality that comes with this business model.
We know from experience that friends and family (warm contacts) will only account for a handful of sympathy purchases early on…and probably only once or twice. That leaves the consultant to resort to cold calling (selling to strangers) for the bulk of their sales. Let’s see how this plays out:
Assuming 2% of cold contacts result in a sale, to get to 639 purchases:
– 31,950 strangers need to be contacted in that first month
– That’s 1065 cold contacts on average per day (assuming a 30 day month)
– At full time, that’s about 40 cold calls per per hour, or one cold call every minute and a half
– This all assumes you have a way to “contact” 31,950 people to begin with!
Imagine if all 100,000 Sentsy consultants sought to make minimum wage, that’s 3.1 billion cold contacts collectively in their first month alone!
Social media is not likely to help, as FB and IG are already filled with other Scentsy consultants selling the exact same products. Since success requires selling to strangers, how will individual Scentsy consultants differentiate themselves from the more than 100,000 other scentsy consultants?
Selling over-priced, commodity merchandise to strangers is nearly impossible. Selling to F+F puts a very real strain on personal relationships when one party attempts to turn it into a business relationship. Besides, those few early F+F sales can’t even provide enough revenue to cover the ongoing costs of a Scentsy consultant, much less provide minimum wage.
Given all of this, your last paragraph says it all. Best to look for other ways of making money from home…ways that are more likely to lead to success, but don’t impact one of your most important life assets: your personal relationships.
Thank you for humoring me, Bottlesoup, and keep up the great work!
Bottlesoup says
Thank you, Data Junkie! I love the additional insight you provided. Contacting 31,950 people really puts it in perspective. That’s 87 people per day, every day. 3.64 people per hour every single hour, 24/7/365. It’s a shame that people who have bought into direct sales/MLMs think they’ve failed because when you dig into the math, it’s just not feasible.