Martha Camarillo
By Karl Taro GreenfeldJR Ridinger, 61, has the master salesman's knack of seeming intensely interested in you. He leans forward, tense with anticipation, as he asks about where you live, what you do, whether you are married, have children. He remarks at how wonderful your life seems, at how exciting it all must be. Ridinger is a multimillionaire who lives in a 35,000-square-foot mansion on Biscayne Bay with a 150-foot yacht moored at the dock. He has a beautiful wife and celebrity friends, a $25 million Manhattan condo. He is the president, chief executive officer, and 93 percent owner of Market America, the e-commerce dynamo that made $393 million last year, according to company figures. And he is happy for you! That salesman's gift, that ability to make you believe in yourself, is why he has all this.
Market America is the latest and most sophisticated incarnation of multilevel marketing (MLM), that controversial business model that exploits the get-rich-quick dreams of every red-blooded American. The basic idea is that every member of Market America pays a fee for the right to sell an exclusive product—vitamins, makeup, potent herbal tonics, kitchenware—and then recruits other distributors who also buy the product and pay a commission upward. Each distributor finds new distributors, and so on, so that money flows upward in a pyramid shape, from many to fewer to, eventually, just one person—Ridinger—at the top. Plenty of large and successful businesses have been built around this model, Amway, Avon Products (AVP), and Tupperware Brands (TUP) among them, but Market America is the first to integrate the Internet, e-commerce, and social media into the scheme, in the process elevating not only the products being sold but the act of the sale itself.
In this world, sales is far more than a career choice: It's an act of self-expression, a pathway to happiness, and the fulfillment of one's wildest imaginings. And few Americans better embody that ideal than JR Ridinger.
On a hot Miami morning, JR and his wife Loren, 43, are sitting on suede sofas in a sumptuously furnished den. Around them on highboys and end tables are golden-framed photos of JR, Loren, and their daughter, Amber Ridinger, with various famous people—"Eva" (Eva Longoria), "Kim" (Kim Kardashian), "Jennifer" (Jennifer Lopez), etc. The room is festooned with high-end bric-a-brac: dragon-handled urns, brocaded curtains, pillows with lion's mane fringes, silver trays as vast as air hockey tables, crystal-bead chandeliers. In one arched hallway connecting ballroom to dining room, there are 18 images of Cupid, a motif Loren calls "Roman." In JR's office, there are several shelves of embossed Norwegian encyclopedias and sagas. When asked if he reads Norwegian, JR laughs and says, "I wish. Loren buys those books by the yard." JR prefers listening to cassettes of his own motivational speeches, sometimes when he's doing yoga. "I make myself laugh," he says. Ridinger's dyed comb-over of black hair, his angled slabs of cheeks, his short, sharp nose, narrow mouth, and dimpled chin create an almost-cherubic appearance that is at once pleasing and—this is key—nonthreatening. You feel instantly, completely, at ease.
"JR's great gift is, well, a lot of guys can sell stuff, but JR sells belief," says his brother-in-law, Marc Ashley, Market America's chief operating officer. "JR sells the idea that you too can be a great salesman. He sells that belief in yourself. Only the very top fraction of salesmen can do that."
The Market America website sells more than 3,000 proprietary products, an array of health tonics, nutritional supplements, cosmetics, weight-loss programs, and household cleaners, all of them "unique, exclusive, and developed by and for Market America," Ridinger says. Actually, those products, the most popular and profitable of which are the Isotonix line of nutritional supplements that sell for about $70 per 10-ounce bottle, are almost interchangeable with what you could find in your local CVS or Duane Reade for half the price. But that hardly matters. The business is driven, instead, by distributors finding customers, introducing them to Market America products, and then explaining to them that by selling this product, they can become as wealthy as, well, JR Ridinger.
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