Vantel Pearls closing down, founder Joan Cabral retiring
Vantel Pearls has informed affiliates it is closing down.
The company maintains it is “thriving”, but that founder Joan Hartel Cabral (below right) wants to retire.
As per the announcement sent out to Vantel Pearl affiliates earlier this week;
Vantel Pearls has had an amazing 30+ year history.
Our Consultants and staff have accomplished so much, and we are proud of what we have done to empower women to make a difference in their family.
Our founder, Joan Hartel Cabral, is now ready for the next chapter, a much-deserved retirement and time with her family.
We are grateful that we can make this decision while the company continues to thrive so that we can end this journey on our own terms.
We are all sad to say goodbye but so happy for the legacy Vantel Pearls leaves behind.
Two thoughts come to mind:
- Being able to spend more time with family is one of the core MLM marketing pitches directed at women. Shutting down an MLM company to spend time with family seems a bit… odd.
If Vantel Pearls is “thriving”, why not keep the company running by promoting from inside? Surely that’d give Cabral (right) a chance to reduce her workload?
I was expecting Vantel Pearls’ website traffic to show a decline but surprisingly it’s seen an uptick over the past 90 days.
That’s not a direct correlation with sales but does suggest Vantel Pearls wasn’t doing too bad as a business.
Whether COVID-19 had an impact on Vantel Pearls’ business is unclear. As I understand it Vantel Pearls was very much a party plan orientated company.
Vantel Pearls was founded in 1990 so they’ve certainly had a long run.
BehindMLM reviewed Vantel Pearls in September 2016.
Once you got over the canned oyster marketing angle, we found Vantel Pearls to be a solid enough jewelry orientated MLM offering.
As of yet there’s no official announcement regarding the closure on Vantel Pearls’ website.
Vantel Pearls’ official Facebook page is still marketing the MLM opportunity and company products.
Comments left on some of the posts suggest Vantel Pearls will be winding down over the next six weeks.
A May, 2017 article in BuzzFeed quotes a January, 2017 video from Vantel Pearls:
That explains their COVID ride-through: they had already transitioned to an online-party model.
The article goes on to uncover some pretty shady business practices, mainly inflating the valuation of the pearls themselves.
Vantel were putting cheap freshwater farm pearls into saltwater oysters and providing a meaningless appraisal chart they claimed was blessed by an official-sounding, yet non-existent, “National Pearl Association of the United States.”
And see if this consultant’s experience doesn’t sound familiar:
Typical MLM dodginess: Don’t address the problem, just ignore it and blame the questioner for being “negative.”
Article can be found here: NOLINK://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/leticiamiranda/pearl-parties-are-taking-over-facebook-live-but-buyer-beware
I don’t think any of us should be lamenting the demise of Vantel Pearls. They may have had a reasonable compensation plan that emphasized retail sales, but they were still an endless-chain recruitment scheme that sold outrageously overpriced products.
Switching out the pearls doesn’t surprise me. I assumed these weren’t worth much.
The early Facebook Live transition is interesting. I would have thought, like that bath bomb reveal company reviewed a month or so back, that the “live surprise” element was a major marketing drawcard.
Watching someone else open your oyster on Facebook doesn’t sound near as appealing (assuming you find the original premise appealing).
I don’t know if anything ever came of the lawsuit, but I kinda wonder if there is some sort of settlement and closing is related to it.
classaction.org/vantel-pearls-lawsuits
@Recovering:
Well, that made for an interesting read. It sounds like the company was in no way “thriving” and Cabral couldn’t find any takers. Otherwise she would have sold it rather than walk away from it.
Thanks for the link.
There was no lawsuit (AFAIK). That’s just your typical lawyer marketing regarding a potential class-action lawsuit.
People and their assumptions amuse me. I have been admin for a woman who works for vantel for 4 years now.
I was offered to go on the team but I am not good at trying to sell things.
The woman that owns this company, her husband is severely ill. Thats why the doors are closing. he needs full time care and that’s what her priority is now.
yall stop. she doesn’t want to sell because she doesn’t trust what someone else would do with it.
You know what they say about assumptions.
So why not just say that instead of being intentionally opaque? It’s nothing to be ashamed about.
If you make a decision that seems strange on the surface and don’t provide an adequate explanation, people are going to speculate.
Will miss my pearl girl eskalina beck best 5 years ever.