Lilla Rose Review
Company Name: Lilla Rose
Costs: $49.95
Rating: 65/100
What Is It?
An MLM that offers an extensive range of hair accessories, including many that are unusual or unique.
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Short Review
Lilla Rose has the standard limitations of an MLM, including the reliance on team building and direct sales. Nevertheless, this company is one of the better MLMs out there, offering fairly unusual products at a decent price, and a simpler model than most.
Product Breakdown
There is a range of different direct selling companies that focus on the field of fashion and beauty, including those that sell jewelry, accessories and even clothing. But, Lilla Rose does take a different approach than most. In this case, the company’s focus is firmly on hair products and accessories.
Within this general category, they have a range of different types of products, including hair clips, hairbands, bobby pins and sticks.
I can see the appeal of the products that are on offer here. In most cases, direct sales companies tend to promote products that are easy to find elsewhere. This means that distributors face considerable competition from physical companies, in addition to competition from other MLMs and even from other distributors.
That’s not the case when it comes to hair accessories. Instead, there are relatively few companies that specialize in this area and many of the products are fairly similar to one another. In contrast, the products from Lilla Rose tend to be a little more unusual and even unique.
At the same time, it’s easy to imagine people buying many items from the company over time. After all, as is the case with jewelry, people often end up choosing accessories to match mood and outfits.
That pattern is most common when the products from a company are affordable and this does appear to be the case with Lilla Rose. In particular, most of the products on their site were under $20 and some were under $10. Plus, even the more expensive categories were reasonable. For example, most of their hair bands come in at around $24.
This might be more expensive than other brands and options. However, the price range is pretty good for this type of company and the products are cheap enough to encourage people to make multiple purchases.
The other important thing to consider is quality. It’s pretty much impossible to work out the quality through the company’s website and unfortunately, reviews for the products aren’t much help either.
This is because, in most cases, people tend to review the potential of Lilla Rose as a way of making money, rather than the company’s products. Additionally, many of the bloggers that do review the products are also distributors. So, it’s hard to tell how much of their information is real and how much is biased.
Nevertheless, I did notice that reviewers were mostly interested in the overall styles that the products offer, rather than the quality of the product. Overall, the reviews that I found did suggest that the product range works very well. However, take that information with a little caution, because many of the reviews contained phrases like this:
Still, there are thousands of types of jewelry and hair accessories being sold in stores and online every day, so there’s no reason to believe that these are any worse than any other company’s products. As far as products go, I approve!
Opportunity Breakdown
In terms of products, Lilla Rose is one of the better options for an MLM that I’ve seen. I like the way that the products are reasonably priced and are also pretty unusual. Both of those areas are pretty big advantages if you’re trying to make money. But, the products are still only one aspect of the business. The actual opportunity that the company offers is just as relevant.
So, let’s take a look at that.
The first thing to note about the opportunity is that it’s party-based. This is a really common approach among MLMs targeted at women. The underlying concept is like the image below suggests, where distributors use gatherings as a way to show off the products and make sales. Ideally, this means that distributors are supposed to make sales mostly at the parties.
Those parties are a bit of a double-edged sword. On the one hand, people get to interact with one another, which creates peer pressure and they also get to handle the physical products. This can increase the likelihood that people will actually make a purchase.
But, on the other hand, this model also makes things much more complicated. One key aspect of the party approach is that the distributor hosts it at somebody else’s house. That person is called the hostess. Basically, that hostess gets various freebies and discounts based on the total amount of party sales.
In theory, this should work in the distributor’s favor, as it allows them to market the products to different sets of people, based on the friends of the hostess.
However, I have seen this done in the past and it often doesn’t work as well as you might think. Typically, the parties tend to attract similar groups of people, so you’re often marketing to the same people over and over again. That’s a real issue because people get less interested in the products over time and less likely to buy. How many times can you sell some hair ties to the same group of girls?
In many cases, distributors find that the first few parties that they hold are fun and easy to make sales at. However, as time goes on, getting people to turn up and actually buy something gets progressively harder.
Now, you can also make sales online through a website, which is always a nice touch. However, this is just a duplicate website, so you would have to manually drum up traffic for it, like getting friends and family to buy off there from Facebook. If you haven’t sold stuff online before, that might not seem like a big deal, but as an online marketer, I can tell you that it’s important your website is unique (especially the written content).
Interestingly, the site for Lilla Rose focuses on the rewards that people get for being a party hostess but offers relatively little information about being a distributor. This always bugs me about network marketing companies – they rarely give you the whole picture of what’s happening, and you have to talk to someone inside the company, so your inquiry immediately turns into a sales pitch.
The Compensation Plan
Lilla Rose may not make its compensation plan evident on the site but thankfully there is still information online about it. Now, as MLMs go, this company actually has a fairly simple plan. Awesome!
The first part of the plan is income from profit, which looks like this:
This means that your percentage per sale goes up as your monthly sales increase. One nice thing is that you can actually hit the top percentage just from your own monthly volume, without building a team. That’s unusual for an MLM. With that in mind, you could theoretically make a decent profit from the company, although that does depend on the sales that you make.
Nevertheless, the real emphasis isn’t on your own sales but on building a team by recruitment. While it is possible to make money without doing this, most of the potential bonuses come from having a team. The basic structure looks like this:
Across the top of the image are the five ranks within the company. Each rank has its own set of requirements, including how much you are supposed to sell, how much your team needs to sell and how this is distributed among your team. Below those requirements is the percentage bonus you get from the ranks below you. So, as you get higher in ranks, your potential for income increases.
That model is the same across pretty much every MLM out there and it’s even where the term MLM comes from (it stands for multi level marketing).
Personally, I don’t like the model. It creates a lot of complexity and honestly, recruitment is never as simple as it sounds. Even simply selling to friends and family is a tough gig and many people find themselves alienating others in the process. Recruiting is more complex still, especially as most people you know aren’t going to have the time or money to invest in this type of business.
Nevertheless, I will note that the model for Lilla Rose is simpler than most. I’ve seen many MLMs where there are ten or more different ranks, along with more complex requirements for progressing through the ranks. Plus, Lilla Rose does offer more potential for making money through sales alone.
Other Comments
Companies like Lilla Rose make direct sales sound like an easy and fun way to make money and even be social. But, it’s important to understand that this isn’t the case. Regardless of the industry or the type of product, direct sales is no walk in the palk. This is even more difficult with an MLM, because you don’t have formal training in sales, plus you are trying to convince people to buy something they might not have even considered before.
Even if you do successfully manage to make sales early on, keeping that momentum is another challenge. In many cases, people will start to lose interest once they have purchased a few products from you. To keep the business going, you really need to be effective at finding new customers and also growing your team.
It certainly is possible to achieve all of this and within any MLM there are some people that do. However, it’s important to understand the challenges before you get involved, because many people simply do not have the social connections or skill to make money in this way.
MLM VS Affiliate Marketing
Lilla Rose is one of the better MLMs out there, both in terms of the products and the compensation plan. In fact, this is one of the few companies that I would recommend if you insisted on getting involved with an MLM. Nevertheless, at the end of the day, it is still an MLM and that is always going to limit your potential to make money.
One of my biggest issues with MLMs is that they are needlessly complex and rely on selling to friends. There is so much that you have to worry about, especially because your income is tied to your rank and that can change one month to the next.
In contrast, if you use an approach like affiliate marketing, you don’t have to worry about a complex model at all. No selling to friends or family, no parties, no team building, and you don’t have to buy product yourself.
If you are interested in products like Lilla Rose has, you could potentially promote jewelry affiliate programs or designer clothing affiliate programs. You could even get more specific and do something that links to designer handbag products, or anything else to do with fashion.
Can You Generate Reliable Income With Lilla Rose?
The Lilla Rose Review
Products
Business Opportunity
Final
Though I don't agree with the MLM business model as a legitimate way to make significant income, I see no major issues with Lilla Rose as a company. It's not something I would personally get involved with, but I can see how some people might enjoy it.
MLM Critic & Author: Nathaniell
What's up ladies and dudes! Great to finally meet you, and I hope you enjoyed this post. I have to be honest though. I'm not a big fan of MLM. Tried it. Hated it.
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joanna swank
As a Lilla Rose stylist I have to say I am happy to not have a live chat. I can call the office and get a live person anytime. I have even talked to the CEO when I called once. It’s a big family.
April Barnett
Thank you for your review of Lilla Rose, Inc., however I have several issues with your analysis, particularly in your chart of what Wealthy Affiliate has vs. what Lilla Rose has. This chart is misleading for a number of reasons: the first four red “X’s” you have on your chart all all incorrect. As a Lilla Rose stylist, I can atest that Lilla Rose DOES have step by step training (they are RICH in training opportunities actually). Though not a web based “live chat” via an instant messenger platform, it is extremely easy to contact the company for assistance via phone, facebook, uplines, and email. The owners do not have their personal contact information online, nor should we expect them to, however I’ve never seen a more approachable CEO than John Dorsey. He regularly makes personal calls to stylists, attends all regional trainings, leads training webinars wherein you can “live chat” questions and he answers them on the spot. He is also in the office most work days and, though I personally haven’t tried, I would be surprised if someone asked to speak with him and were totally unsuccessful. Appropriately so, he has a receptionist that fields all incoming business calls, as do all reputable companies.
There are other points that I could contend with in your post here, however I am somewhat limited in this comment box.
I do agree that MLM is NOT an easy path to financial independence. It is a job, like any other method of earning an income, and one must put in effort to receive any payout. But this is as equally true for any other job as it is for networking marketing.
I thank you for your mostly favorable review and the information you give, however your article would be more accurate if some of the facts were checked.
Nathaniell
Thanks for your comment. I’ll be happy to change some things.
1. Can you link to the training so I can see the quality?
2. I will not change the “live chat” rating because WHO you can chat to and when entirely depends on who you join through. If you don’t have a supportive upline, then you’re left in the dust. As far as I know there’s no specific, guarateed live chat resource that can advise you on a daily on how to grow your business.
3. I’ll change this ASAP!
4. What was the 4th point?
Kimberlee
Nathaniel, unfortunately I am not able to give you a link to the training that is provided by Lilla Rose to their stylist. HQ does provide at least one, usually two webinars weekly that stylists can take part in and there is a live Q&A session at the end and sometimes during each training. There are also regional trainings that stylists can attend, these are typically a Friday evening and Saturday training. John Dorsey has brought in Melanie Moore from Cinchshare, Shannon Ferraby (a Lilla Rose Jr. Executive who has always answered my questions and personal messages on Facebook even though I am 5 layers down in her line and she adds all stylists to her FB group to get training and information if they want to be there). Belinda Ellsworth has also started doing some of our training sessions and if you look her up, you will see she also has a long list of experiences to share. After going to several regional training sessions and online training, I feel like we are provided with some fantastic support and have met so many people who were more than happy to answer questions and concerns without hesitation, so I have never felt like I didn’t have the support I wanted/needed. HQ typically answers their phones when called and if it does go to voice mail, they reply in less than 24 hours (unless it is the weekend and they are closed) MLM is not for everyone and it is hard. What isn’t included or easily explained (like you said, most MLM comp plans are hard) is the bonus program or the prizes and incentives offered to the stylists just for working.
The quality of LR products is great and they stand behind that with a 1 year defect promise, if the product breaks within a year, they will replace it or fix it. I know that John has replaced or fixed some that are over 5-6 years old. The flexi is made with piano wire, so it is durable, the only problem I have ever had was a stone coming out and a glass bead breaking, they exchanged it for a new one. I hope this helps clear up the training opportunities offered.
Mario
Hey Nathaniell! I’ve been involved with a MLM company but the product was gold, I did not sell anything at all instead I just lost money, never went back to that kind of business model again. In these kinds of products like accessories I don’t see why not buying in bulk from a wholesaler if you are going to be selling to your friends anyways, in the other hand affiliate marketing seems more lucrative with less effort, thanks for the review and great recommendation, have a good one.