Visi Review: Scandanavian berries and Vikings
Marketing wellness, energy and weightloss products, Visi launched in April 2012 and are based out of Utah in the US.
Visi’s parent company is ‘Cloudberry Nutritionals’ with both headed up by CEO and President Kent Lewis, who the company claims ‘is a veteran of the direct selling industry with over twenty years of experience as a corporate executive, consultant, and distributor‘.
Lewis (visual approximation below right) was previously “International Vice-President” of Zija (2011) and before that was an “international consultant” at something called iLearningGlobal (2009), a company that doesn’t appear to exist anymore.
In their company bio, Visi claim to be inspired by Scandanavia’s Vikings of old:
During the period of dramatic Viking expansion, the Norsemen of Scandinavia travelled in long ships to unknown territories. These rigorous, overseas expeditions demanded strong, bold, intrepid, fearless, and adventurous conquerors.
Always in search of new opportunity, the leader of these daring quests was differentiated from the others with a title of great honor – Vísi.
Following the tradition of leadership and excellence of the Vikings, Vísi offers you a unique path of personal triumph.
And if I’m reading that right, Visi are pretty much inferring they’re the modern-day leader of the Vikings.
…well, that’s all very well if you want to hit the high-seas and plunder but how does Visi shape up as an MLM company?
Read on for a full review of the Visi home-based business opportunity.
The Visi Product Line
Visi have three flagships products, covering wellness, energy and weightloss.
Visi Wellness
Visi Wellness is an all-natural multi-vitamin powder with ‘Arctic Cloudberry, Lingonberry, and other active berry antioxidants‘ which Visi claims ‘give(s) you the benefits of natural Scandinavian beauty and health‘.
Visi Wellness is sold in a 30 day supply case and retails for $99.99 USD.
Visi Energy
Visi Energy is an all-natural energy drink that, like Visi Wellness, is also based on a ‘proprietary Scandinavian Berry Blend‘. In addition to the berries, Visi Energy also contains Adenosine Triphosphate, which Visi claims ‘delivers the exact molecule the human body needs to create energy‘.
Visi Energy is sold in a 30 day supply case and retails for $99.99 USD.
Visi Weight Loss
Also based on Scandanavian berries, Visi Weight Loss is ‘an all-natural formula that promotes optimal weight control‘ containing ‘Arctic Cloudberry, Lingonberry and Garcinia Cambogia (HCA), a well-known botanical that suppresses appetite, inhibits fat production‘.
Visi Weight Loss is sold as a bottle of 30 capsules and retails for $64.99 USD.
The Visi Compensation Plan
Visi’s compensation plan offers its distributors retail cosmmissions, a weekly binary based residual commission, membership rank and car bonuses.
Retail Commissions
Visi offer retail commissions on the sale of all products to customers. Retail commissions are defined as the difference between the wholesale price paid for products and the price they are sold for.
Preferred Customer Commissions
Customers who elect to receive a monthly autoship order generate an additional 20% commission on top the retail commissions on every order.
First Order Bonus
The Visi First Order Bonus is paid out on the first product order placed by a new retail or preferred customer or recruited affiliate.
Visi do not specify in their compensation plan material how much the First Order Bonus is.
Team Commissions
Visi pay out team commission using a binary compensation structure. A binary compensation structure places you at the top and two recruited members directly beneath you. In turn, these two positions have two positions under them and so on and so forth:
In order to begin earning team commissions, a Visi distributor must have at least two members underneath them (forming two teams) with both teams generating at least 250 commissionable volume (CV). A personal volume (PV) of at least 75 must also be maintained by the distributor.
The team that generates the most CV in a pay week is a distributor’s designated “strong team” and the other is designated their “lesser team”.
Commissions are paid out on the CV generated by the lesser team as well as a matching bonus on the strong team’s CV, with excess CV from the strong team carrying over from week to week.
How much of a percentage a distributor earns on the CV of their lesser team is tied into their Visi membership rank:
- Qualified Distributor (2 recruited distributors to start both your unilevel teams) – 5% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 5% on your strong team, earnings capped at $250 a week
- Leader (binary teams generating 500 business volume (BV) a week) – 5% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 5% on your strong team, earnings capped at $600 a week
- Team Leader (binary teams generating 1000 BV a week with a minimum 500 BV from the lesser leg) – 5% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 5% on your strong team, earnings capped at $750 a week
- Arctic Star (binary teams generating 2000 BV a week with a minimum 1000 BV from the lesser leg) – 5% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 5% on your strong team, earnings capped at $1000 a week
- Arctic 2 Star (binary teams generating 5000 BV a week with a minimum 2500 BV from the lesser leg) – 5% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 5% on your strong team, earnings capped at $1500 a week
- Arctic 3 Star (binary teams generating 10,000 BV a week with a minimum 5000 BV from the lesser leg) – 7.5% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 7.5% on your strong team, earnings capped at $2500 a week
- Arctic 4 Star (lesser binary team generating 5000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 15,000 CV a week (with no more than 80% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 7.5% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 7.5% on your strong team, earnings capped at $3500 a week
- Arctic Premier (lesser binary team generating 7500 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 25,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 80% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $5000 a week
- Arctic Ruby (lesser binary team generating 15,000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 50,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 80% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $7500 a week
- Arctic Emerald (lesser binary team generating 20,000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 100,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 80% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $10,000 a week
- Arctic Diamond (lesser binary team generating 25,000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 250,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 70% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $12,500 a week
- Arctic Blue Diamond (lesser binary team generating 30,000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 500,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 70% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $15,000 a week
- Arctic Black Diamond (lesser binary team generating 35,000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 750,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 70% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $17,500 a week
- Arctic Crown Diamond (lesser binary team generating 40,000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 1,000,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 60% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $20,000 a week
- Royal Arctic Diamond ((lesser binary team generating 50,000 BV a week and your personally enrolled distributors generating 2,000,000 a fortnight for 4 weeks (with no more than 60% coming from any one distributor lineage tree)) – 10% on your lesser team’s generated CV and a matching 10% on your strong team, earnings capped at $25,000 a week
Rank Advancement Bonus
The Visi Rank Advancement Bonus is a one time bonus paid out upon a distributor obtaining certain Visi membership ranks:
- Arctic Premier – $2500
- Arctic Ruby – $5000
- Arctic Emerald – $10,000
- Arctic Diamond – $25,000
- Arctic Blue Diamond – $50,000 (paid out over 12 months)
- Arctic Black Diamond – $100,000 (paid out over 12 months)
- Arctic Crown Diamond – $250,000 (paid out over 12 months)
- Royal Arctic Diamond – $1,000,000 (paid out over 12 months)
Car Bonus
Open to Arctic 4 Star members or higher, Visi’s Car Bonus pays out $600 a month towards a Visi-branded “luxury car”.
If a distributor doesn’t wish to purchase a luxury car, they can instead elect for a $300 monthly cash bonus.
Joining Visi
Membership to Visi is $35 annually.
Due to the PV autoship requirement to earn set at 75, a product purchase must be factored into monthly membership costs. This equates to the purchase of either Visi Wellness or Visi Energy at $84.99 wholesale.
Conclusion
Despite having readily retailable products I get the impression that Visi isn’t really geared towards the sale of products to retail customers.
I say this because purchasing product from the company is a measly $15 difference (retail commission) for Visi Wellness and Energy and $10 for Visi Weight Loss.
Given that these are monthly consumables… that seems pretty low.
On the other hand Visi sell a bunch of bundle packs to distributors and that seems to be how the business is marketed. At least internally to new distributors if this advertising material is anything to go by:
The above marketing material strongly encourages new distributors to sign up, purchase a $1099 “Velocity Pack”, sign up 4 new distributors with the same pack within a month and then encourage them to do the same.
Whether intentional or not, this appears to be how Visi is being marketed by distributors and that’s a bit of a worry.
Looking at the compensation plan, from the mid to upper membership ranks the binary volume required would be near impossible to achieve (distributor numbers wise) with a simple signup/autoship plan so I’m not entirely sure why some distributors are marketing it this way.
It seems pretty short-sighted as obviously you’re going to need a lot of repeat monthly customers purchasing the product if you’re going to get anywhere in the compensation plan beyond just signing up distributors on autoship.
My only other gripe with the Visi compensation plan was the sheer amount of membership ranks on offer (15 in total, 16 if you count the non-binary earning “distributor” rank). For a MLM company that launched in 2012 this is far too much and is bound to confuse new distributors and most likely even some of those who are actually in the company.
Messy compensation plans with way too many incremental membership ranks are a thing of the past and Visi would do well to perhaps revise and simplify the number of ranks they have at some point.
I understand the mathematics of having to cap members along the way earnings wise to make the business viable but surely there’s a better way to do it. Some of the membership ranks only differ in that you can now earn a few hundred more with the new rank. Surely if a member was building a team with customers they’d achieve that anyway, so I don’t see what the need is for so many ranks.
Other than that, Visi has a product and ultimately your success will depend on how effectively you can market that to people. Being sold as monthly supplies I can’t imagine too many customers are going to purchase anymore than one product in a given month, so that might be something to think about market wise. Especially seeing as currently Visi seem to only be shipping to the US, Canada and Australia.
All in all I think Visi is a bit of a mixed bag as far as MLM business opportunities go. There’s definitely consumable products that can be marketed at a retail level but overall the compensation plan doesn’t seem to encourage you strongly enough to go in this direction.
“hit the high seas and plunder” … Oz, your writing style is becoming quite entertaining!
I just couldn’t let the Viking reference slip :).
Vikings and MLM, lol! I kept getting images of team leaders sailing around in Viking ships manned by their downlines trying to sell stuff to people.
I’m willing that those who get involved with Visi will find out that their experience is a lot like the movie “Valkyrie” and nothing like “Thor.”
As a native Norwegian, “viking” and “norseman”, I can express my knowledge:
The cloudberry only grows in limited areas of Norway. In the western part of Norway where I live, it does not grow at all. The vikings lived by the coast, but the cloudberry does not grow close to the coast. It mostly grows in the northern parts of Norway where the viking activity was low.
Most of the Vikings came from the western part of Norway. In addition, the vikings had no way to conserve the berries, meaning that if they ate it at all, it was for a very limited season.
It is not true that “the Scandinavian people have depended on the Arctic Cloudberry (also known as Scandinavian Gold) for centuries to promote health and natural beauty”. The natural occurence of the cloudberry is too poor to play an important role in the nutrition of Norwegians. It’s a stupid lie. Period.
The lingonberry grows in all parts of Norway. However, I have searched for information about which food the vikings ate, but cloudberries and lingonberries are not mentioned in any source.
It’s hard to believe that people can fall for such crap.
Even if it were true (and, as you point out, it’s not) what difference did it make ??
And I don’t think it worked very well on their beauty, either. Stories from the Viking-age doesn’t exactly give an impression of that. 🙂
And in addition, we have some interesting statistics from the Norwegian military, from a time period where Norwegian men had to serve 1 year military service after finished education (some still have to):
* the average height of male recruits joining their 1-year military service increased by X centimeters from 1930 to 1980.
Calculating backwards in time to the Viking-age, the estimated height of an average viking will be around 32 centimeters. I can imagine how that sounded down there in the grass when hoards of vikings went berserk. 🙂
Ingredient in the weightloss is highly toxic:
http://www.ricetea.com
I don’t know about anything else except that I have lost a ton of weight. I am not sure why you care about the compensation plan, unless of course, you are a scorned distributor LOL!
…oh dear.
Correlation does not prove causation.
Even if the product is legitimate, the way it’s sold/promoted may still be illegal.
Anyone know where VISI product ingredients – ie: the berries, are grown & the products produced?
@Donna
Probably best to send an email to the company for that info. It’s not something most people would know offhand.
Cloudberries are grown abundantly in northern Canada.
They are very cheap and quite common