After stumbling across a blog post about how big brand kitchen products and appliances are mostly just hollow shells with little to no integrity, I found that same blogger/journalist has a robust list of brands that haven’t gone the way of capital sell-outs that goes way beyond kitchen utensils.
It’s worth taking a look at the list as well as the articles. The articles are conversational, but with lots of links to the source material.
Maybe it was different 25 years ago, but from my experience with them 15 years ago, they were just a standard MLM pyramid scheme, where commissions were based on total sales of anyone you recruited + your own base 5% commission. So it meant it made more sense to recruit people than to sell the knives yourself. You also had to buy your own demo sets.
There was the part where you would get a kickback in sales from anyone you recruited to sale, but as often discovered, most people don’t sale for very long before quitting. You could try going that recruiting route, but I was up to about 50% commission when I left there and I had no interest in trying to get other people to join. It was a pretty standard pyramid scheme, but you could still make money without participating in that.
There wasn’t any other way to increase commissions much when I was there. The cap for solo sales was 15%.
On the other hand, selling home security systems door to door, which I also did, did have a performance based pay, which was 10% initial and would go up to 50% plus bonuses to top sellers. And it only went up via sales, not recruitment.
Maybe Cutco found the MLM tactic to be more profitable since you had to buy your own demo sets.
15%? Seriously? Oh, that would be terrible. I wonder if it’s at discretion of the area manager and he was just pocketing a bunch of extra money. The office I worked out of had a commission bump like every $5k in sales (first bump or two was even quicker). I think it was around a total of $70k in sales to hit your 55% commission cap.
I also had to buy the demo set to get started. I think it was like $125