Matilda Jane Clothing shutting down
Matilda Jane Clothing is shutting down its MLM operations.
The announcement was made via an email sent out to affiliates yesterday.
Social media posts from Matilda Jane Clothing suggest the closure came as a surprise.
BehindMLM hasn’t seen a copy of the email but WPTA21 reports;
The email said that as of 5pm Wednesday, the company would be terminating relationships with trunk keepers and winding down business.
Matilda Jane’s CEO said the company has been experiencing financial difficulties and leaders had been negotiating a sale of substantially all of its assests [sic] to preserve jobs and the business, but that sale fell through.
As the name suggests, Matilda Jane Clothing operates in the clothing MLM niche. The company was founded in Indiana back in 2005.
Oddly enough Matilda Jane Clothing’s website provides no executive or company ownership information.
On LinkedIn Donna Noce Colaco cites herself as CEO and Executive Chairman of the company.
Matilda Jane Clothing has its own LinkedIn profile, on which it’s disclosed Denise DeMarchis founded the company.
Matilda Jane Clothing’s designer and founder, Denise DeMarchis, started the girls’ clothing company in 2005.
A mother of two boys (good ones, if ever there were) and a successful decorative artist, Denise brought her unique, soulful approach to creativity and relationships to her new venture—an “unpredictable clothing company.”
DeMarchis sold Matilda Jane Clothing to CID Capital in 2012. In 2017 CID Capital sold the company to Webster Capital.
After early success at art fairs around the Midwest, Matilda Jane Clothing moved the business toward a Trunk Keeper model—a direct selling approach that keeps the spirit of art fairs alive while building personal relationships across the country.
Matilda Jane Clothing refers to its distributors as “Trunk Keepers”. As a guy who associates “trunks” with boxer brief hybrids, this is… amusing.
While BehindMLM does try to review as many MLM companies as we can, unfortunately Matilda Jane Clothing fell through the cracks. Other than it using a party plan based model, I can’t comment on Matilda Jane’s compensation plan (it isn’t provided on Matilda Jane Clothing’s website).
Matilda Jane Clothing’s LinkedIn profile cites the company as having between 51 to 200 employees.
SimilarWeb tracked a steady decline in traffic to Matilda Jane Clothing’s website over the past three months. ~98,000 visits were estimated for November, down from ~136,000 in September.
Every MLM uses the false pitch of “You’ll be your own boss!”
The truth is you’re at the whim of the company you signed up with. You have NO control over how you run your pseudo business, and they can cut you loose at any time. Severence pay? Ha! You’re a contractor, not an employee.
It happened to every single Mary Kay associate in Austraila and New Zealand overnight. It happened in early March, 2020.