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Founded in 1980, Herbalife International is a company that sells weight-loss and health products through infomercials and multi-level marketing methods through distributorships. Distributors make money from retailing, and a residual income from their downlines' retail sales volume.
The company was founded by Mark Hughes who died in 2000, at the age of 44. (Not the Welsh football player Mark Hughes.)
Recent History
2004 has been a year of changes. Today, the company is trying to rebrand its Herbalife line with the introduction of Shapeworks. This may hurt its revenue figures and adversely affect its 2004 IPO filing price with the SEC. Some distributors are not too thrilled about the product changes, because their customer base has to be retrained and the percentage of customer reorders dropped as a result.
New distributors should be aware that network marketing does not mean easy money. Treat it like a real business and the success rate of your business will be greater than .001%
Company History
In February of 1980, Mark Hughes began selling the original Herbalife weight loss product from the trunk of his car. By 1982, Herbalife had reached $2,000,000 in sales and opened a distributorship in Canada, its first outside of the United States. In 1986 Herbalife became a publicly traded company via NASDAQ. The weight loss business continues to boom and in 1996 Herbalife reaches $1,000,000,000 in sales. In 2000, Mark Hughes, Herbalife's founder dies at the age of 44. Herbalife continues to grow to this day (March 2005).
Health Concerns
Herbalife's original weight loss formula contained the active ingredient Ma Huang, an herb contained Ephedrine. Herbalife stopped using Ephedrine in its products after 1998 when the FDA linked one of their products (Original Green) to the cardiac arrest of a 28 year old woman.
As of 2005, it is not immediately clear what method Herbalife's weight loss products employ as an actual nutritional breakdown of the products is not made publicly available. Recent advertisements indicate that the current philosophy is one of meal replacement via diet shakes, which is to all appearances not unlike the SlimFast diet.
Herbalife provides testimonials by health professionals as part of their marketing campaign.
Public Relations Issues
There are two main public views on Herbalife. One view, commonly propagated via the internet, is that Hebalife is nothing more than multi-level marketing at its worst, or a glorified and just barely legal Ponzi scheme. Others, especially those who have worked with the company state that Herbalife provides genuine and profitable home business opportunities, much as advertised. In reality, the truth lies somewhere in between. Due to its multi-level nature (a fact which is not in dispute), it is difficult for Herbalife to directly manage all of its employees and distributors all of the time. As such, though many levels of Herbalife may offer genuine business opportunities, it is no surprise that some unethical employees abuse the Herbalife name and resources solely for the purpose of personal profit, all of which is typical and evident of any multi-level marketing corporation.
External links
- Official site
- Yahoo! - Herbalife International, Inc. Company Profile
- Herbalife category in the Open Directory Project
- Criticism
- Work at Home special report by Rob Cockerham, an investigation on "work from home" signs in Sacramento, California, all leading to Herbalife.
- The Dubious Promotion of Herbalife's Niteworks by Stephen Barrett, M.D., founder of Quackwatch and vice-president of the NCAHF.
- Information about Herbalife gathered by The Rick A. Ross Institute.
- Index to Information about Herbalife International on MLM Watch (history, lawsuits and consumer complaints).
- Herbalife / ShapeWorks
- Discussion
- Herbalife Discussion Forum discussion forum on Herbalife products and usage.