The truth is that the market for Mary Kay is saturated, and I’m going to explain why and how we can tell. Market saturation occurs when a product is fully distributed within a market, meaning that almost all those who want to buy a product have bought it.

Mary Kay obviously competes with tons of brands around the world, ones available at cosmetic counters, drugstores, beauty stores, and the like. Mary Kay representatives have been known to claim that the company has 8% to 10% of the “market share” in the U.S., which would mean that 8% to 10% of all skin care and cosmetic sales are of Mary Kay products. That’s total fiction, so we should throw out that number and completely ignore it.

So Mary Kay is competing for business…. Whose business do they want and how many buyers are available? From the U.S. Census Bureau:

• There are about 303 million people in the U.S.
• About 51% are women = 155 million
• About 20% of these women are under age 15 = subtract 31 million
• About 5% of the women are age 80 or over = subtract 8 million
• We now have 116 million women who MIGHT consider buying Mary Kay.

From those 116 million women, you also have to subtract out those who have no interest in purchasing skin care and cosmetics, as well as those living below the poverty level who are unlikely to buy Mary Kay. I don’t know how many are not users of cosmetics, but I do know that there are about 36 million people at poverty level in the U.S. If half are women, that’s 18 million to subtract off our potential customer base.

I think it’s fair to say that we could also cross off the bulk of women who are former Mary Kay consultants. I think most of them use MK until they have gotten rid of all their inventory, but the likelihood of them continuing to buy products from the pink cult afterward is low. Mary Kay has told us that they burn through 40,000 consultants a month. If you just take the consultants from the last 5 years, you’ve got 2.4 million that have to be subtracted off the potential customer base.

There are about 700,000 beauty consultants in the United States. You’ve got to subtract them out of the pool of women who are potential customers, because we’re just looking at women who could be 3rd party customers for a Mary Kay consultant.

We’re now sitting with 94.9 million American women who might use Mary Kay, if given the chance. That’s about 136 customers per consultant who are available to buy Mary Kay products. But many of them will buy other brands, of course. Even if you are lucky, you’ll capture about 10% of those, or 13 customers per consultant. I know the numbers for Mary Kay are even lower than that… but let’s be generous.

What can you do with 13 customers? And what happens once you try to recruit them because you want to move up? Can you make a living on 13 customers? Could you even make a living if you got all 136 of your potential customers? (Sadly, even with 136 retail customers you couldn’t make a full time living.)

If you knew these figures before you signed up with Mary Kay, would you still have signed up? Probably not. This is a different age than when Mary Kay started, and customers have many more options availalbe. Not only are there tons of product lines to try, we are mopre mobile and have additional avenues to purchase products (like the internet).

So is the market for Mary Kay saturated? I say yes. There simply aren’t enough customers wanting to buy Mary Kay to give you an opportunity to build a viable retail business. Oh… I know…. some of those 700,000 consultants don’t really want to sell anything so their potential customers are available to you blah blah. Right. But just ask the women who were in Mary Kay for 10 or 20 years. How many customers were they able to build and keep? And were they able to make a living from a retail business? No.