Selling the Bro Dream: Are Frat Boys Peddling Vemma Suckers?
Alex Morton can still remember the day when he decided that academics weren’t for him. He was a freshman at Arizona State University, sitting in biology class, when it clicked. “My professor starts talking about biomes,” he says. “I’m like, ‘My major is communications, and this guy wants me to memorize all the animals in the rainforest? I gotta go.'”
Morton is recalling this catalyzing moment while in the front passenger seat of a white Mercedes sedan speeding down an Arizona highway. To his left sits his unofficial bodyguard and driver, Joe Smith, whom everyone knows by the nickname “Sloppy.” Behind him sits Claudia Chiarelli, Morton’s girlfriend, a 20-year-old aspiring dental hygienist from a Chicago suburb, currently in the midst of an existential crisis caused by Instagram. “OK, seriously, picking a filter is a struggle,” she says.
She is uploading pictures from the previous night, a boozy affair that ended at 6 a.m., after Morton had signed for a $600 bar tab and Sloppy had slept on the stairs of his own house. “I’m so done with clubs,” says Morton, wearing sunglasses on a cloudy late-spring day.
Sometimes referred to online as “King Douche,” Morton is a few months shy of his 25th birthday, has expertly manicured eyebrows and is handsome in the same way that people on TV are handsome: smaller than you expect in real life and with a head just slightly larger than normal. Despite the fact that he walked out of biology class that day, Morton (who did eventually graduate) has claimed to be a millionaire, and the spoils of his recent success are evident wherever you look. The watch on his wrist is a diamond-studded Rolex; his belt and shoes are Louis Vuitton. To discover what’s afforded him these indulgences, one only needs to look at the body panel on the luxury car he’s riding in, which is outfitted with a decal that says VEMMA.
Morton is the public face of one of the fastest-growing multilevel-marketing companies in the country. His title is “Royal Ambassador,” and only nine other people in the company make more than him. “This is like hearing about Facebook when Mark Zuckerberg was still in his dorm room at Harvard,” Morton says.
To Morton and founder BK Boreyko, Vemma isn’t just the quickest route to financial freedom, it’s also a savior for a lost generation of millennials in the aftermath of the Great Recession. Though it is merely the latest hot commodity in the most controversial corner of American business, to them it’s not just an alternative to corporate America but the answer to it – a certainty that produces as a side effect an almost religious zeal; salesmanship as performance art, played out on any number of social-media platforms. A decade ago, Boreyko, an entrepreneur and son of an Amway salesman, started Vemma after his previous company, the diet supplement supplier New Vision International, ran afoul of the Federal Trade Commission because it claimed a regimen of its pills, collectively known as “God’s Recipe,” could cure children of attention-deficit disorder. From the ashes of New Vision rose Vemma, which sells energy drinks and weight-loss shakes, and which was just another company before Morton and scores of other millennials came along.
Vemma is the latest mutation of an American invention. Multilevel marketing began in the middle of the past century with one company, a predecessor of Amway. The idea was simple: Instead of just selling a product, you could recruit people to sell it, too. Then, when they made a sale, you both shared in the profit. Recruiting soon became a lot more profitable than merely selling, a shift in incentives that produced a first in American consumerism: Suddenly the pitch was more important than the product. In some cases it wasn’t necessary to even have a product. For some 50 years, lawmakers, consumer advocates and lobbying groups have argued over whether this unique setup constitutes a legitimate business or something more sinister, like an illegal pyramid scheme.
Today, there are an estimated 600 to 800 multilevel-marketing (MLM) companies in America alone, with roughly 15 million distributors, $150 billion in annual revenue and the political clout that comes with all that cash. The DeVos family, co-founders of Amway, are influential backers of conservative causes; former Secretary of State Madeleine Albright’s consultancy has made a reported $10 million working for Herbalife; and various politicians with deep ties to Utah, from Jon Huntsman to Mitt Romney, have lobbied publicly for multilevel-marketing companies, in keeping with the acronym’s most common bastardization: Mormons Losing Money. What sets Vemma apart, however, is that it has found success where others have failed by attracting younger people like Morton. And his pitch offers a clue as to how it has succeeded.
Sloppy pulls the Benz into a run-down neighborhood in the shadow of a Tucson-area Air Force base. “This is a, how should we say, more diverse crowd than the one we normally talk to,” Sloppy says. The street is packed with cars, and the front yard of the modest ranch house where today’s “home event” is taking place is crowded with a mix of mostly young black and Latino men eating barbecue off plastic plates.
The home event is the backbone of Morton’s business. Technically, he lives in Las Vegas with his parents, who he says made a fortune selling life insurance, but really he spends most of his time on the road. Last month he was gone for 27 days on a trip that saw him visit half a dozen European countries. When he made his inaugural trip to Colombia, to initiate Vemma’s push into South America, a ticket agent in Bogotá recognized him from his sales videos. “A high school teacher and a college professor can’t teach you how to make money,” says Morton to his audience in his signature rapid-fire patter. “You can’t teach what you don’t know.” Morton’s pitch is built around the idea that college, and the debt that comes with it, isn’t worth the risk. It’s landed him some 13,000 recruits, many of them around his age, whose every sale earns him a cut. “What’s another synonym for ‘employee’?” he asks the crowd. A young woman in the audience gives the answer – “slave” – at the exact moment that Morton says it. Then she lets out a self-congratulatory “whoo!” as if she were the only one at the concert to recognize the first few bars of the band’s deepest cut. “We’re living in the worst economy since the Great Depression,” says Morton, wrapping it up. “We need to find a new model. This is that new model.”