I’ll talk more in later posts about my personal experience as a Mary Kay representative. There are many facets of the company, its representatives, and its training programs that I think will interest my readers. In a nutshell, however, I joined the company as an independent sales representative, and quickly started moving up the ladder of “management”, recruiting other independent beauty consultants.

After a couple of years in Mary Kay, I lost interest in what the company had to offer. By this time, I had opened my forensic accounting practice and was devoting most of my time to client development opportunities. I also started teaching college courses, and found that I didn’t have time for Mary Kay. The things about the cosmetics company that appealed to me in the beginning, no longer held my interest.

Several years later, however, my interest in Mary Kay was renewed as I began researching pyramid schemes and multi-level marketing companies as part of a book project. I started searching the Internet for information on these schemes, and found many sites about Amway, likely the most popular (yet most disputed) multi-level marketing company out there.

I also came upon information about Mary Kay, and my prior involvement with the company and knowledge of its sales and recruiting techniques led me to investigate further. I quickly found websites, chat rooms, and discussion boards dedicated to the discussion of Mary Kay Cosmetics. Some spoke of the postive aspects of the company, while others emphasized the negatives.

In recalling my own experience with Mary Kay, I knew that the company was really not what I believed it to be when I first heard the marketing plan. It was then that I decided to go “undercover” on these anti-Mary Kay sites and learn all that I could about Mary Kay Inc. and its sales representatives.