In December 2022 Dashing Diva launched “The Diva Life” MLM opportunity.

In January 2023 Dashing Diva announced it had decided “to no longer move forward with The Diva Life program”.

Here’s what happened.

I’m not going to pretend like I’m even remotely familiar with Dashing Diva, but apparently it has a bit of a cult customer following.

SimilarWeb tracked 2.22 million visits to Dashing Diva’s website in November 2022. In December 2022 that sunk to 1.1 million, roughly in line with October 2022.

96% of Dashing Diva’s website traffic originates from the US.

As per Dashing Diva’s website;

In 2003, Dashing Diva was born to create the ultimate salon experience with hygiene at the forefront and made it an “instagrammable” moment before Instagram was even a thing.

Over time, we wanted to bring the salon experience to you so we launched Dashingdiva.com.

Today, we make it fun and easy to get show stopping manicures at the comfort of your own home.

With patented pressure sensitive adhesives and over a thousand designs to choose from, we combine innovation and style with the latest technologies in nail.

Dashing Diva started out as KMC Exim in 1998. The company was founded by CEO John Chang in Port Washington, New York.

As I understand it, The Diva Life division was headed up by recent corporate recruit Scott Halversen.

Following intense backlash from their customers, on January 11th Dashing Diva attempted to reassure them The Diva Life wouldn’t impact regular retail operations.

The backlash however continued, prompting Dashing Diva to post a follow up corporate response on January 14th.

I don’t know what went on behind the scenes at Dashing Diva over the next few days, but things seem to have escalated internally.

The saga climaxed on January 17th, culminating with this email sent out to Dashing Diva’s entire customer base:

The blogger Halversen referenced is Tasha @ Making Managing Money. Tasha has since posted emails between herself and Halversen leading up to the January 17th public email.

Regardless of Halversen’s intentions, his email only added fuel to the fiery customer backlash.

Within 24 hours of Halversen’s public email going out, Dashing Diva announced it had terminated its MLM opportunity.

Correspondence between Dashing Diva and its customer-base suggests Halversen was fired within 24 hours of sending out the public email.

Regardless of whether The Diva Life’s compensation plan was set up as a pyramid scheme or not, I think there’s an important lesson here in how to communicate with your customers.

Loyal customers can be loud, and if you as a company do something they don’t like, you’re probably going to hear about it.

Dashing Diva did come to the right decision by their customers eventually. Perhaps however they could have done better by putting feelers out with their customers prior to announcing The Diva Life.

This won’t necessarily work with every company thinking of going MLM. But if you’ve cultivated as close a following as Dashing Diva seems to have, it’s probably a good idea.

And this goes for any employment really; If you’re a new hire to a company with an established retail customer base, read the room before you decide to go nuclear.

I spent the majority of the weekend looking at every comment on IG and each account and I would say in a general way that 40% are intentional comments from competitors who are threatened by our product and chosen path of marketing. 30% more are bots designed to follow and trend those comments.

Pretty nefarious stuff but it’s the reality of social media.

20% are social influencers who are threatened by our business model because they know their currency to convert followers into sales is not nearly as good as your ability.

The remaining 10% are either just plain ignorant or unhappy in life and they just can’t be helped.

While I can’t say for sure, I would say in a general way the above paragraphs are probably what did Halversen in – and The Diva Life in the process.