Are MLMs Ruining Your Local Craft Fairs?

This has been a problem for years, but people are fed up.

Woman selling Mary Kay at a craft fair, screencap

One thing that a lot of people like to do around the holidays, when shopping for presents, is to check out local craft fairs in hopes of supporting a local artisan in their own community instead of a large, soulless corporation. Even if not for present-buying, craft fairs are a great way to spend an afternoon any time of year (and where I’ve bought at least half of my jewelry).

Unfortunately, in recent years, craft fairs — especially in smaller cities and towns — have been nefariously infiltrated by multi-level marketing “huns*” looking to sell buttery-soft leggings or makeup products they definitely didn’t make themselves. (“Huns” are people involved in multi-level marketing schemes, so named for the dreaded “Hey Hun!” messages they have been known to send to their former high school classmates on Facebook.)

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This has caused no small amount of consternation in both the crafting and the anti-MLM communities over the years, for a variety of entirely valid reasons — starting with the fact that they don’t belong there.

One woman racked up over a million views on TikTok last week with a video of a “craft fair” at which people were selling MLM products from Epicure, Mary Kay, and Scentsy.

@canadiankelswent to the “craft market” 🙄 #pyramidscheme #mlm #multilevelmarketing #antimlm #antimlmmovement #crafter #craftersoftiktok

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She’s not the first to do it — there are a lot of other videos that do the same thing, this one just happened to hit the mark for people.

“Let me just buy my crocheted pot holders from the little old ladies without being bombarded with red light therapy and spray on makeup!” said one commenter.

“I used to make jewellery and at my first craft show, I was one of about ten actually handmade booths. Everything else was MLMs. I stopped doing shows,” said another.

These people are taking up booths that could go to people who are actually making their own products (which, again, is what people are there to see and buy), and, as the second commenter insinuated, kind of discouraging those people from wanting to participate. That sucks.

There were a lot of comments like that, and honestly not that many were from the ever-present MLM defenders who apparently spend their lives searching out anti-MLM content and trauma-dumping all over them about how they were living in their car or in a bad marriage until they were saved by selling chintzy jewelry for Paparazzi. This is a common phenomenon, and it’s not because these companies are actually helping people but because trauma-dumping is a very common MLM sales technique. Remember — most of these schemes target women and they’re also trying to recruit desperate people to sell for them.

Another part of the issue is that while we are living in a post-Lula Rich world, not everyone is aware of every company that is an MLM, even if they would rather not give their money to businesses well-known to cause people to go bankrupt. They’re not all Mary Kay or Cutco. Some of them sell jewelry, essential oils, educational toys, candles and other things one could conceivably make and sell oneself. MLMs pretending they are local small businesses instead of predatory pyramid schemes is deeply unethical.

Indeed, a lot of MLMs have recently been trying to lure in new customers without revealing that they are MLMs, through ways other than the traditional “parties” and Facebook groups. For instance, a viral makeup hack trend called “the demi method” went “viral” on TikTok as a “no makeup makeup look” … and it turned out that the people pushing it were actually selling products from an MLM called Seint. The method itself, by the way, is nothing revolutionary — it’s just basic color correction and using that instead of foundation or concealer.

Just recently another TikTok trend called “Morning Duo,” in which young women talk about how they lost weight and gained beautiful skin by drinking aloe vera juice and a cup of coffee every morning turned out to be another MLM called It Works (we are going to assume It Does Not).

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It’s all kind of the same thing, isn’t it? It’s taking people’s trust and manipulating it some kind of way to sell them things — whether they are people who want to support local artists and businesses, people who are excited to hear from an old friend or be invited to a party, or the way certain “hacks” go viral on social media. It’s cruel, especially when you know that people so often lose everything in these schemes. They have actually taken to calling them “network marketing” or “social marketing” because that, specifically, is what they are leveraging.

There are enough things in this world to make us feel jaded. Can’t the craft shows at least be pure?