Norwex: Do the Claims Wash?

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Country of Origin: Norway

Year Founded: 1994

Founded by: Bjørn Nicolaisen

Year MLM established in New Zealand: April 1st, 2015

Generally sells: Microfiber cloths, towels, and other cleaning products (including laundry detergent, essential oils and hand soap)

The Pitch: Get a discount on the cleaning products that you were going to buy anyways, while reducing your exposure to “harmful chemicals”.

“Cult” products: Microfiber cloths, which they claim contain silver nanoparticles that enhance their cloths' ability to remove 99% of bacteria. This same antibacterial agent then self-purifies the cloth and inhibits odours from bacteria, mould, and mildew. Within 24 hours, the cloth is supposedly good to use again.

Methods of selling: Norwex uses the Party Model, whereby the consultant recruits a friend or customer to host “parties”, in-person or online, for the consultant to present at. The host receives a small gift in return for hosting the party, but can earn additional rewards based on the number of sales and additional parties they book before, during, or after the initial party. A consultant can double- or triple-dip on the bonuses by hosting a party themselves, thereby earning commission, all applicable host rewards, and booking other parties.

Name for workforce: Consultants, then the ranks are as follows: Team Coordinator, Sales Leader, Executive Sales Leader, Senior Executive Sales Leader, Vice President Sales Leader, Executive Vice President Sales Leader, Senior Vice President Sale Leader

What is the main sales jargon: Subtotal A Sales are retail sales excluding GST, Host Discount for hosting parties, and sales materials. Personal Sales are sales that the consultant personally makes via parties, personal usage, and the Norwex consultant website. Customer Sales are all sales made except orders made by a customer who hosts a party.

Is there a buy-in?: Kind of. You can either buy a Basic Starter Kit for $79.95 NZD + $11.45 shipping and handling or, if you buy the Party Starter Kit, you only pay the shipping and handling costs first and then have 90 days to make $2500 (or 30 days to make $1000) in Subtotal A Sales. The starter kit is valued at over $460 NZD.

Is ongoing purchasing/selling required to maintain active status: Yes, a minimum of $250 in cumulative personal Subtotal A Sales is required for three months. If this is not met for six consecutive months, the account is considered dormant and the consultant is charged a reactivation fee of $20.91 NZD if they reach that threshold again. If there are $0 in Subtotal A sales in 12 consecutive months, the consultant is removed from the organisation.

Is there commission?: 32% on your personal Subtotal A Sales. However, to “prevent” inventory loading, the terms and conditions of Norwex's NZ consultant contract has two caveats. First, if a consultant purchases over $500 of norwex products, the consultant must retain receipts showing at least 70% were resold to three (3) different customers within 30 days of product order date. Second, consultants may not purchase Norwex products as inventory in advance of receiving orders from the customers. Consultants also benefit from a 32% discount on products; while it is possible that the discount is applied in place of the commission (as they would cancel each other out) this is not discussed in the company's documentation and it is something that is easy to bypass.

Income Disclosure Statement?: No, and its lack of one despite 25 years in operation is alarming. Admittedly, income disclosure statements are not mandatory and are industry-driven, insofar that it is the MLMs that have determined which information is provided and how. Norwex is clear on the application form that there is no guarantee of profit or income, but it should not be assumed that the lack of disclosure is evidence that their consultants are regularly earning competitive incomes.

Instead, Norwex estimates that each party will earn approximately $500 to $650 in sales, from which the consultant will earn approximately $160/party. At one party a week, monthly income will be $640 but at 5 parties a week, monthly income would be $3,200. Norwex further estimates that each party will take 3 hours inclusive of pre-party prep (including any coaching of the host, if needed) 30 to 45 minutes of product demonstration, and an hour of taking orders and selling-up the opportunity. If that is strictly true, then the hourly income of the average party is about $53.

Price Guide: Here. The catalogue, blessedly, is straight-forward with its prices, and lacks the over-complicated personal volume, group volume, bonus volume, etc. that is seen in other MLMs.

Compensation Plan?: Here. Now, things become complicated again. As a bottom-rung consultant, you can earn a $200 bonus for each recruit who makes $2,500 in 90 days.

The next rank is Team Coordinator. To achieve this rank, a consultant needs to have a minimum of 3 active consultants in their downline, and have earned the minimum $250 in Subtotal A Sales. The additional benefit of this rank is that the Team Coordinator earns a 3% bonus on the Subtotal A Sales of personal new consultants (consultants within their first 90 days of signing up) but nothing from consultants who have been around longer. Maintaining this rank requires consistently earning $250 in personal Subtotal A Sales while your downline does the same to remain active.

The third rank is Sales Leader. To qualify, a consultant will need to earn the $250 qualifying personal sales threshold, have a minimum of 5 active, personal consultants in their immediate downline, and have a minimum of 10 active consultants in their entire downline (this number also includes the 5 in the immediate downline). The bonuses earned from the downline are complicated, as the Sales Leader earns a 5% bonus on group sales; however, if the Sales Leader has a Team Coordinator in their downline, then the Sales Leader will only earn a 2% bonus from them. The compensation plan appears to imply that it is possible for your downline to hold the same rank as you; If you have a Sales Leader in your downline then you only earn 1% commission on their downline sales, and this group is known as a breakaway. Rank maintenance requires $300 in personal sales to receive commission on downline sales.

If the original Sales Leader continues to rank up, the ability to rely on the breakaway group (and any breakaway groups from the original breakaway group) for bonuses and promotions varies on the particular rank. The higher the rank, the deeper into the downline they can claim. This Norwex video explains how that rabbit hole works; it can go as far as three levels deep of breakaway groups.

As always, ranks are not forever, and inability to meet your rank requirements can result in a downgrade. However, this is not an automatic change and it seems possible that you can retain your title for several months before being repositioned back down the ladder. This is a somewhat deceptive practice which gives the impression that the leader is pulling in the profit required to maintain that rank.

Has a reputation for: Half-cooked “experiments” that “prove” how effective the cloths are.

Should you be worried?: The MLM model is always a bad choice, and you will make more money working at Steven's or any other NZ kitchenware outlet. The products work but are overpriced for what they are, and there are much cheaper, equally effective products out there.

Just, maybe, don't eat any food off of the counters.

The brief on Norwex

What's notable about Norwex is that there is so little to write about it compared to other MLMs. They aren't breaking new ground when it comes to their compensation plan or party plan model (Mary Kay and various Sex Toy MLMs have Norwex beat there), and their consultants are outright boring compared to Arbonne and Monat distributors. Norwex flies under the radar even by the standards of the anti-MLM community and, so far, are only the subject of at least one measly lawsuit. However, that does not mean that all is good under the hood.

Are Norwex products really that great for the environment?

It is hard to get cloth wrong, but Norwex leans heavily into the greenwash for its range of products. The certifications they use, on deeper investigation, take a broader definition towards organic and natural ingredients than their customers might anticipate (because, you know, petroleum is natural…). These certifications have long been suspect and recently came under fire in India.

Microfibre towels, regardless of whether they are made from recycled materials, are a major issue for the environment. The PET material that it is made from becomes a microplastic during the weaving and production process. This means that the care and maintenance of these products is complicated, as washing will gradually abrade the fibres and the plastic can melt and ruin the quality of the cloth when thrown into a dryer, shedding further microplastics. These then enter our water supply and create havoc in marine ecosystems.

Are Norwex products…good?

This is a hard question to answer, due to the large amount of astroturfing. So, it is best to focus on two claims when it comes to the cloths: That it is effective in cleaning, and that the silver embedded in the cloth helps it to self-purify in 24 hours.

A favourite demonstration of Norwex distributors is the raw chicken test. A raw chicken is placed on a table-top, Norwex products are used to clean it, and then a residue test is conducted with a rapid protein residue test swab. The swabs come back clean and the proof is definitive, right?

Blogger Annie Pryor, Ph.D. has tested multiple claims made by norwex and similar products. Motivated by her child suffering from a terrible stomach virus, she conducts experiments at home (not in a lab) and has some affiliate links, but they're sadly the best we got. Nevertheless, her findings thus far show that Norwex and a much cheaper competitor, Ecloth, are better at picking up protein and cleaning bacteria but do not guarantee a completely clean surface. The protein tests, according to Pryor, only detect when there are a high volume of germs; they do not prove that all germs are removed. Agar plates are much more sensitive and cheaper when conducting these experiments.

Pryor also explores which cloth removes germs the best, what is the best way to sterilise a cloth, which cloth kills germs, and which cloth transfers the most germs to surfaces. In brief, while Norwex was better than cotton cloths, handi wipes, and Scotch Brite microfibre, it performed similarly to its competitor, Ecloth, with significantly less bacteria growth after 24 hours. However, if left out to air dry with no cleanser applied, it would still be very germy, thereby undermining Norwex's claims that the cloths are self-purifying and environmentally-friendly due to requiring less washing.

A 2019 study by Jackie Buttafucco and Daniel Herman looked at the effectiveness of Norwex cloths with Bacillus subtilis and Escherichia coli compared to a regular microfibre towel. They found that both cloths were effective at binding 99% of bacteria, but were equally ineffective at self-purifying overnight.

Product Math

The flagship Enviro Cloth is a 35cm x 35cm cloth with a recommended retail price of $32.50. To meet the $250 sales threshold to remain active, a consultant would need to sell 8 cloths a month ($260). If they sell said cloths to actual customers, then they could earn $83.20 in commission.

Presuming you recruited three consultants this month to become Team Coordinator, and they did the exact same thing for the 3 months they still qualified as a new consultant, then you could earn $83.20 from your sales and $23.40 in group bonuses for a total of $106.60 for the next three months.

If you moved up to Sales Leader and had 5 personal recruits and each of them had a personal recruit of 1 AND sold 8 of cloths to meet minimum sales, your profit would be $104 (commission on selling 10 cloths to maintain rank) + $130 (commission on 80 cloths or $2,600 of sales) = $234 per month to sell 90 cloths. The commission drops if you have a Team Coordinator in your ranks, and you can only earn 2% on their downline sales.

The bottom line?

There is no silver bullet or science-based evidence to support all of Norwex's claims, but some do bear out. The MLM opportunity is not economically viable, with both affordable and environmentally-friendly product alternatives easily accessible to most. In light of the wall of pro-Norwex propaganda from distributors, the lack of an income disclosure statement to cut through the bright and modern promotional materials is a testament to how the government fails to view MLMs as a serious harm to New Zealand citizens.