Shari’s $20,000 Inventory
Written by Parsons Green
Mary Kay will be launching a new shopping experience. Currently, consultants had the option to have a Personal Website. Consultants with orders could choose to fulfill them through the CDS system (where the company sends the product to the customer) or by using their personal inventory. The new experience will be called My Shop. It will only allow orders to be fulfilled by CDS. Consultants won’t be able to fulfill online orders using their inventory.
Sales director Shari Schlapman is very very concerned. She has $20,000 inventory on her shelf. Her customers won’t want to reach out to her directly for orders. 85% of her orders are online. They will want to use a website. What will happen to her stockpile when this changes?
Peg Stokes and Lizi Quin are equally outraged. And Shari is VERY ANGRY.
Karen Saphos is confident the company will listen to consultants and change this. If they don’t, she will turn off her website and only accept orders from customers who contact her directly.
Shari doesn’t think her customers will be comfortable with giving her a credit card directly. They like the security a website offers. Amy Davis McCann says that My Shop will now start using Stripe instead of Pro Pay. With Stripe, Shari can still process an order out of her inventory. She can then send a link to the customer who can pay securely online. Shari then insists that the company is taking away her ability as a business owner to work her business the way she wants.
Kristi Mimbela has decided she will not offer free shipping to customers who use My Shop. Customers will need to contact her directly for orders.
Amanda Wright drops in to mention that this topic was discussed on the recent Top Director’s Trip. The company’s response was that a lot of the website orders were never fulfilled by a consultant. They also saw a long delay in order processing. She feels that consultants need to focus on recruiting woman who want to run a business, as opposed to just taking orders. (See them saying the quiet part out loud: Do not focus on selling a product, focus on recruiting.) She has very few customers who use the website. Naomi State suggests that the company automatically ship orders in 3-4 days if the consultant doesn’t process it.
Martha Klein thinks that the FTC may have something to do with this change. Amanda Wright concurs. Mary Kay needs to be able to show orders are going to customers, and not to stockpile inventory that is never sold.
Ava Oja is worried about both her and her consultant’s inventory. How do you promote the star levels if everything goes through the website?
Julie Phalen also will not offer free shipping for website orders. She is planning on calling every customer to let them know.
Paula Cole feels that this will be a good thing. It will bring new customers to you. Your current customers will continue to order from you directly. It will be a good recruiting tool for consultants who just want an online business.
Patricia Picard thinks this is big. She believes that the majority of Mary Kay consultants don’t hold inventory. They aren’t working the business. Online orders have the tendency to take weeks to fulfill because the consultant isn’t paying attention. The company needs to change this.
Jessica Dudley is going to focus on face to face appointments. She wants to add as many people as she can to her team.
This change is supposed to happen later this year. I’m sure Mary Kay will implement this in December during the busy shopping season. I sure do hope Shari is able to clear out that inventory as quickly as possible. As a business owner, why did she stockpile so much?
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The winds of change are blowing through MKC. Oh to be a fly on the wall of the executive conference room for these transformational strategy discussions!
So sad to see how many cannot see “the Emperor has no clothes”.
Mary Kay will make more profit on direct orders rather than stockpiling.
National Court of Sales increased too.
Car qualification has increased.
All of this will lead to more sales directors no longer choosing to “save” their units, which leads to diminishing the sales force.
With a diminished sales force and an increase in the company bypassing the sales force, this gives the company the “proof” that an affiliate business model makes more sense.
It is the natural progression of doing business these days.
And yet, so many still believe the company has their back…”Get in boxcar #3″.
“Mary Kay will make more profit on direct orders rather than stockpiling.”
Once they eliminate that outrageous commission/bonus overhead, they can drop the retail price 75% to boost sales volume big time…while still pulling the same margin on each item.
Welcome to modern online retailing, folks!
Door to door selling started to die in the 1970s. Amazon put the final nail in the coffin. This is why most MLM purchases are made by the sales force and/or pity purchases by F+F. There is simply no real retail market left for the high-overhead prices and emotional tomfoolery associated with this grossly outdated sales model!
So many consultants say they love the company!!! Like WTF? You’re an independent contractor ma’am.
Sales director Shari Schlapman is very very concerned. She has $20,000 inventory on her shelf. Her customers won’t want to reach out to her directly for orders. 85% of her orders are online. They will want to use a website. What will happen to her stockpile when this changes?
According to our latest PTC, she must have been very weak-willed to have ordered that amount without being able to sell it.
Wow. Just wow. There’s a whole lot to unpack here, but I’m going to focus on Speshul Sheri and her $20K inventory. And I’m going to give her the benefit of the doubt that she’s actually telling the truth…
Most consultants report their inventories in wholesale dollars, not retail. So that $20,000 inventory has a suggested retail price of $40,000! The most expensive item in the MK catalog is the Timewise Repair Ultimate VoluFirm set at $343. That’s 117 Ultimate Repair sets! ONE HUNDRED SEVENTEEN!!!
Now, obviously, she doesn’t have only the most expensive skin care set in her inventory. Which only makes it worse, when you consider that a bulk of that is going to be eyeshadows in all the colors. Eyeshadows retail for $8 each. Dear Sheri could have a whopping 5,000 eyeshadows in her inventory for $40,000!
How long has she been stockpiling all of this mess? If you were her customer, would you be happy to receive product five or more years old? Stored by someone who isn’t held to any professional standard? Has Sheri had mice or mold in her home in that time? An air-conditioning outage that melted half her lipsticks? How much of her inventory is expired or discontinued? Old limited edition products that aren’t even in the catalog anymore?
Or would you prefer to have your order shipped out of a controlled warehouse that’s (ostensibly) regularly inspected by the appropriate officials for such things?
Sheri is not proving her point that MK is making a mistake with this move. Quite the opposite, in fact.
I wonder if Sheri has spent even more than she realizes (or admits) on her inventory.
Well Ms. Shari chose not to go to Seminar this year cause she didn’t want to spend the money ! things that make you go hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
Paula Cole throwing out that there may be no need for people to worry about inventory anymore! So let’s recruit with zero inventories, and everybody turn your car in!
Amanda Wright is bugging me over here because she’s grown her business basically on sales. The past couple of years she’s wanted to earn Trip and million, and alllllll of a sudden now she points the finger saying everyone needs to be recruiting and not worried so much about sales. Girlfriend we all listened to your trainings on sales. But when you recruit because you’re learning to be a business owner, we’re just gonna tell them not to buy inventory anymore?
Do they hear themselves?
This one from Patricia Picard cracked me up: ““I have been saying this for years—There are not enough WORKING consultants (that includes directors because we are always consultants too) to manage the number of people in the [sic] North America that want to buy MK products.”
work harder Patricia! Snatch them up!
Refusing free shipping to customers who shop online isn’t much of a flex. I’m sure plenty will pay for shipping just to avoid dealing with a consultant at all.
I was at a big vendor show yesterday (New York Sheep and Wool, mostly real small businesses and many women owned BTW) and every vendor took cards, using all kinds of apps and gadgets. No problems with either security or people refusing to use them.
Leads me to think that the customers who don’t want to give Shari their CC info… just don’t want to shop with her.
Take a hint.
A sheepfest! Sounds like way more fun than an MLM rah-rah session.
My guess is that MK will offer free shipping to people who place a $$ amount order.
The whole website thing doesn’t make sense if Mary Kay wants to sustain their current business model of new consultants front loading inventory. Maybe FTC got wind that Mary Kay sales are mostly to consultants. It’s forcing corporate to make changes.
SO….you CREATE the problem for those you recruit ??
“I don’t have to figure out how to sell on a website/complete an order. I”ll recruit and let my downline figure it out and deal with it”
Wow. Just wow.
As our departed Abigail Van Buren would say “Wake up and smell the coffee”.
“ The most expensive item in the MK catalog is the Timewise Repair Ultimate VoluFirm set at $343.”
Women willing/able to spend $343 for a skincare set don’t buy Mary Kay.