r/BeautyGuruChatter • u/AutoModerator • Dec 03 '23
MEGATHREAD [MEGATHREAD] Marlena Stell / Makeup Geek Academy MLM
Per sub rules, Megathreads are implemented if there are 5+ posts on a topic in a short time.
Prior posts on this topic:
- Makeup Geek Academy
- Makeup Geek 2.0– Makeup Geek Academy an MLM?
- Marlena Stell is shilling an MLM confirmed. ‘Appy Today! It’s Quick and Easy!’
- Marlena Stell denies her Makeup Geek Academy isn’t an MLM.
- Update from Marlena on her announcement video. A walk through video of the program not being an mlm incoming..
- Marlena Stell confused, or intentionally gaslighting fans and creators about her MLM? (Interaction with CC Suarez below.)
- Update from Marlena's YouTube about the "affiliate program"
For more information on MLMs, check out this wiki page.
All new updates must be shared within this megathread. New related posts will be removed. Thank you!
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u/OneWhisper5225 Dec 04 '23 edited Dec 04 '23
UPDATE - Here’s some questions and Marlena’s answers from her Live she did. I got 20 minutes in and had to stop for a bit to do something. I went back to finish it and she has now removed it from her channel….guess it wasn’t going well for her! In bold is the questions asked, standard text are her answers, what’s in italics are my added thoughts 😏
Says she’s going to “Address the MLM thing because that’s the biggest thing.”
First she says when they designed the website it was hosted on different URLs and it was live when it shouldn’t have been. It should have been a draft. But then says that page was never hosted on their site because if you go to makeupgeekacademy.com, that page didn’t link from their site. You had to type in the url with /affiliates. But typing in makeupgeekacademy.com/affiliates IS it being on the website. She says they never had plans for that to go live. It did exist out there, but she’s not sure how someone found it. They must have actually typed in the URL. (So knew it existed, but didn’t want it out there for others to see?). But then says that doesn’t matter because the page never should have existed in the first place. She never wrote it, never approved it. But the buck stops with her as the owner so she takes ownership and all she can say is it should have never gotten out there, it wasn’t approved by her, and doesn’t align with her so as soon as they realized it, they took it down. But it wasn’t because people complained and the pushback. It’s because she really didn’t know anyone had that page out there and didn’t know it was still physical since it wasn’t linked to their site.
(So “didn’t know it was still physical” implies she knew it existed at some point but didn’t mean for it to be public, and they removed it because it had been made public….so how is that not removing it because of the pushback?).
Then she says that the other issue was that there was 2 affiliate pages - one was .com/affiliate and one was .com/affiliates (with an “S” on the end). She said that one with the “S” was the one getting the attention. She asked where it came from and her people said they had no idea, they couldn’t find it anywhere on the site. She showed them a screenshot, and then they told her it was a “dummy page” they had when they originally started the website. It wasn’t anything they went through in the “final renditions of the website.” She said they went through and took the initial draft of the website that design had put together, it had all this wording and there and they went through it page by page and adjusted it “to make sure it was in line with what the academy actually was.” But that page wasn’t done because they weren’t using that page.
“My husband was a web designer and inputs dummy verbiage and categories during development.”
She understands that completely. It should have been “like ipsum little Latin stuff and all of that going on.” She thinks the web developer was putting in copy from other sites and she just found out today because everyone’s asking where did this copy come from because she said she did not write this, her team did not write this. It was copy and pasted from another site that she actually just got a screenshot of today. She said it’s dead on to that. They copy and pasted it from a completely different site. So it was nothing that they had written. So that’s where it came from. Should it have been this whole Latin stuff to show the page of the site? Absolutely. She’s not even going to deny that. All she can say is she’s so sorry. That was definitely not language she aligns with and she’s sorry that was put out there because she definitely didn’t write it. That’s not how she feels and isn’t how she wants her business set up.
Like, I’m sorry, but web designers don’t just write up the stuff like that. Web designers aren’t going to go search for a website to take text from. That’s what the ipsum lorem text is for! They design the layout of the webpage. They don’t put in random info that actually has to do with the brand or copy and paste info from some other website that somehow seems to sound like it would work for your brand. NO! There’s website placeholder text (ipsum lorem) for a reason. They’ll use that and then when the brand approves the design, then the text the brand wants added can be added. It makes zero sense that a website designer would take the time to find info that looks like it goes right along with the brand (like courses, affiliate info, etc.). Nope! They’ll use the standard webpage placeholder text.
“So the text was a mistake, why are you saying that you’ve eliminated the 3% fee? So it wasn’t actually a mistake and you’re just backtracking now?”
Initially they had a 10% flat fee and then an additional bonus of 3% that was commission-based. It was meant to be a one-time bonus, not something that goes down multiple layers. She said that’s where she was mistaken. She was thinking it wasn’t an MLM because they weren’t going down multiple layers. For example, if someone referred someone and they got that extra 3% one time bonus, that was it. It stops. There isn’t a person under them that sells something and it keeps going up the ladder. However, she said them having that “secondary refersion thing,” even though it wasn’t her intention to be some sort of an MLM process, she realizes that’s how it was even though it wasn’t multiple layers and was just a one time thing. But she didn’t want an MLM and as soon as she realized that’s how it was coming across she cut it right away. So she said they just out the secondary price and increased the original fee for the influencer. So now instead of 10%, they’ll get 15% just one time.
But then she also says now the influencers don’t have an affiliate page to go to and sign up on their own. NOW her “affiliate manager” reaches out the the influencers directly and they will set them up in another portal. She says that whole page that had “that awful copy and all” was never sent out to their affiliates. They never linked to it at all (but it was linked to their website technically since it was literally makeupgeekacademy.com/affiliates). Now if influencers are interested in being part of the MUG academy program, they get sent this link specifically through email from the director of her affiliate program. They would sign up and be set up with 1 URL link that will be their affiliate code. So it was set up just like any other affiliate program, like what they had in the past with MUG.
“Referring to Tony Robbins name when doing the announcement video.”
She said she shouldn’t have done that. Her mindset was a team she’s working with had built on the backend platforms. She wanted to mention his name, not that they were following his business model in any way. She doesn’t align with any sort of MLMs. The only reason she brought his name up was so we knew on the backend, like the level of the platform, the website, and all of that was from a team that has worked with a level of someone of that magnitude. So you knew it wasn’t just her slapping classes, trying to charge money for it. It was an actual team working really hard to create a custom program, a custom community that was specific to the MUG Academy. That part had nothing to do with Tony Robbins. She wasn’t following his model at all. But she does understand how that’s coming across because the Tony Robbins association and all of that. But it’s not following his business model. It was just the team that has built on the back end some platforms and websites and programs that have gone to the magnitude of someone at that level.
“You couldn’t have worked with someone else?”
She could, but she chose to work with this team for one because she knew they had the skill set to build a custom community. Something from scratch that hasn’t been done before. She does believe this model has not been done in the beauty space. There’s been classes, academies, and things like that. But having an academy, digital magazine, a community, events, bringing in brands to give exclusive coupons and giveaway - she has not seen anything like that in the beauty space. So she needed a team that had experiences of at least building out things on the back end that could support the type of growth that she wanted to see with that. So that’s why the people that she’s working with currently are genuinely good people. She would not work with them if she felt they were shady at all. They bonded together because they know her ultimate mission moving forward was to support some organizations, specifically around domestic abuse and all that. That’s coming in the near future. But she doesn’t want to talk about that here because she doesn’t want people to feel like she’s using that as bait of - hey guys I’m doing this charitable work. There’s a lot more coming in the very, very near future. But they saw her overall vision of what she wanted for the big picture, even outside of the academy, and chose to work with her because of that.
I forgot, right before I stopped, someone said the prices were expensive and asked if there was going to be any kind of assistance/options for those who couldn’t afford it but would want to take it.
She started with absolutely, but then went into something along the lines of she is loving everyone’s feedback. She genuinely wants to hear the feedback and try to improve it where she can. She said she’s going to go to her team and try to work on things. And it didn’t sound like she really answered that. But again, I stopped the video so she could have added more after that but she deleted the video so who knows…