What is moving in direct selling

QNET announced a full leadership refresh, bringing in executives with backgrounds at Herbalife, Avon, L'Oréal and Tupperware. The new Chief Information Officer is tasked specifically with leading technology transformation and AI integration across the business, while a new training head from Modicare and Amway will rebuild distributor onboarding, product education and compliance training. This is a clear signal that a large, established direct selling company sees technology and structured education as the levers for its next growth phase, not just new products or comp plan tweaks.

For smaller and mid sized companies, the takeaway is simple. Distributor onboarding and compliance training are no longer back office chores, they are competitive advantages. Companies that can get a new distributor productive and compliant in days instead of weeks will out recruit and out retain those still relying on manual follow up and static PDFs.

This is exactly where agentic CRM and automation earn their keep, handling onboarding sequences, compliance checks and follow up messages at a scale no human team can match. If your company is thinking about what a modernization push like QNET's would look like on your own numbers, it is worth a conversation with Plondo at https://plondo.com/contact to map it out.

dōTERRA named Jonathan Johnson as President, moving him from Chief Communications Officer into a role overseeing the company's Executive Council and operational strategy. Murray Smith, the outgoing President, shifts to Executive Vice President of International, keeping his market experience focused on global growth while Johnson takes on company wide execution.

The interesting signal here is the framing. dōTERRA's CEO described the move as being about bringing clarity and discipline as the company scales, not about a specific market win or product launch. That language usually shows up when a company senses that its internal systems and coordination need to catch up to its size, not just its growth ambitions.

For any direct selling company past its early growth phase, this is a familiar moment. Once you are operating across many countries with a large distributor base, the bottleneck stops being sales and starts being coordination: how fast leadership gets accurate field data, how consistently policy gets applied across markets, and how quickly problems get surfaced before they become expensive.

A leadership change built around operational discipline is often a sign that a company is investing in better internal visibility, not just a new org chart. That is the same problem AI powered back office tools are built to solve, by giving leadership real time visibility into recruiting, sales, and compliance without waiting on manual reports. If your leadership team is wrestling with the same visibility gap, it is worth talking through your reporting setup with Plondo at https://plondo.com/contact.

Mannatech swung from a $4.3 million net loss a year ago to $1 million in net income this quarter, with net sales up to $26.7 million and gross margin climbing to 76.9 percent. The company also reported that new associate and preferred customer recruiting jumped 33.3 percent compared to the same quarter last year, even though its total field size of about 116,000 is smaller than the 125,000 it had a year ago.

That combination is worth sitting with. Recruiting is up sharply, but the overall base still shrank, which points to a retention problem rather than a top of funnel problem. Companies in this exact spot often over invest in new lead generation while under investing in what happens to a new recruit in their first ninety days. If new associates are joining faster than ever but still leaving before they build momentum, the leak is usually in onboarding, early support, and how quickly a new distributor gets a first sale or a first answer to a question.

Mannatech also cut selling and administrative expenses by nearly 17 percent, which suggests leaner operations are part of the profit turnaround. That is the right instinct, but cutting cost without protecting the new recruit experience can quietly undercut the recruiting gains a company is celebrating.

If your recruiting numbers are climbing but retention is not following, it is worth mapping your specific onboarding funnel with Plondo at https://plondo.com/contact to see where automated follow up and faster support could close that gap.

Bravenly told 1,600 attendees at its Orlando summit that it has opened Canada, is pre launching Australia and the United Kingdom, and will add Spain this fall. That is four new markets inside about twelve months for a company that only crossed $100 million in annual sales last year.

The pace here is the real story. Most direct selling companies treat international expansion as a multi year project because compliance, currency handling, language support, and field training all have to be rebuilt for each country. Bravenly is compressing that timeline, which means its operations team, compliance vendors, and support systems have to work at a speed that a lot of legacy back office setups were never built for.

Companies watching this should ask a blunt question: if we opened a new country next quarter, could our systems actually handle it, or would we be manually patching commission rules, translating support scripts, and training call center staff by hand for months. Fast expansion only works if enrollment, compliance checks, and distributor support scale without adding headcount at the same rate as the new markets.

This is exactly the kind of growth pressure that makes agentic automation worth a serious look, since AI voice agents and back office tools can pick up new market rules and language support far faster than a manual buildout. If your company is eyeing international growth this year, it is worth a conversation with Plondo at https://plondo.com/contact about what your specific expansion timeline would actually require from your systems.

Mary Kay announced that its Pink Changing Lives program has surpassed $230 million in monetary and product donations since 1996, plus another $19 million through cause marketing, reaching more than 4 million women worldwide. The company also climbed to number 8 out of 5,500 brands on a recent ranking of best brands for social impact, the only direct selling company on the list.

Numbers like this are not just a public relations win. In direct selling, a consultant's decision to join or stay is rarely just about product margin. People want to represent something they are proud to talk about, and a well documented giving program gives every consultant a story to tell that has nothing to do with a sales pitch.

The harder part is turning that story into something a consultant can actually use in a recruiting conversation or a social post, at the right moment, without the home office having to hand hold every interaction. This is where automated content delivery and CRM tools help, surfacing the right story, stat, or testimonial for a consultant to share based on who they are talking to and what that person cares about.

Brands with a strong purpose story worth putting to work in the field should talk with Plondo about turning that content into something the sales force can use every day, starting at https://plondo.com/contact.

BODi, formerly Beachbody, reported its fourth consecutive quarter of both operating income and net income. Total revenue fell to $49.6 million from $63.9 million a year earlier, yet operating income improved by $5.6 million and adjusted EBITDA rose to $6.7 million. The company also amended its credit agreement to a more flexible structure, a sign lenders like where this is headed.

This is a company shrinking its top line on purpose while protecting margin, leaning on retail placement for legacy brands like P90X and Shakeology alongside its direct to consumer nutrition and digital fitness business. For a direct selling operator, the lesson has nothing to do with diet products. It is about what happens when a company stops chasing every recruit and instead runs its existing base and customer relationships more efficiently.

Eleven straight quarters of positive adjusted EBITDA does not happen by accident. It happens when back office costs come down, customer questions get answered faster, and the sales force spends less time on paperwork and more time selling. That is exactly where automation earns its keep, cutting the manual work of order processing, commission questions, and lead follow up so a leaner team can still serve a full field.

Any company trying to protect margin while revenue is under pressure should talk with Plondo about which parts of their back office could run on autopilot, a conversation that starts at https://plondo.com/contact.

Zinzino reported July revenue of $33.2 million, up 20 percent year over year, with its Faun Pharma line growing 14 percent. Nearly every region the company operates in showed growth compared to the second quarter, including Central Europe, South and West Europe, North America, South America, Asia Pacific, and Africa. Only the Nordics, East Europe, and the Baltics lagged behind.

What stands out here is the breadth. A single hot market carrying a whole company's growth is common in direct selling and it is fragile, because one regulatory change or one competitor move can wipe it out fast. Growth spread across a dozen countries at once is a much harder thing to build and a much better sign of a business model that travels well.

Running that many markets well at the same time is an operations problem as much as a sales one. Every country has its own compliance rules, payout timing, and support expectations, and keeping all of that consistent without slowing anyone down is where a lot of fast growing companies start to strain. Automating the parts of compensation, onboarding, and distributor communication that repeat across markets is usually what lets a company keep adding countries without adding proportional headcount.

If your company is scaling into new markets and starting to feel that strain, it is worth talking through your current setup with Plondo at https://plondo.com/contact.

Natura posted $1 billion in second quarter revenue, with its Hispanic market segment growing 7.2 percent thanks to progress in Mexico and a recovery in Argentina. Within that region, the Natura brand itself grew 12.3 percent while Avon grew 4.7 percent with a 7.6 percent EBITDA margin. The overall company number is solid, but the real story is how uneven the growth is by market and how much of it came from a handful of specific countries doing well at the same time.

That pattern matters for any direct selling operator running multiple markets or brands under one roof. Corporate level numbers can hide a lot. A market in recovery and a market in decline can average out to a headline that looks fine while masking exactly where attention and resources need to go. Leaders who can see performance broken down by country, brand, and even individual leader tier are the ones who catch a turnaround or a slump early enough to act on it.

That level of visibility usually depends on how well your back office systems separate and surface data, rather than burying it in one combined report. If your team is working off delayed or blended numbers across markets, it is worth walking through what a clearer, real time view could look like with Plondo at https://plondo.com/contact.

Nu Skin reported $320.1 million in second quarter revenue, with gross margin holding near last year's level at 68.2 percent. Leadership pointed to the ongoing rollout of Prysm iO and preparation for its India launch as the reasons behind a reorganization of internal resources. Full year guidance sits between $1.28 billion and $1.35 billion, a range that reads as cautious rather than confident.

This is a familiar moment for established direct selling companies. Revenue is roughly flat, a new market and a new platform are both underway, and management is openly telling investors it is still learning how to make the pieces fit. That kind of transition puts real strain on field support, onboarding, and back office teams who have to keep serving distributors while systems and processes shift underneath them.

The companies that come out of a reorganization stronger are usually the ones that automate the repetitive parts of distributor support before the transition gets messy, not after. Order status questions, commission explanations, and onboarding steps do not need to wait on a stretched support team when AI tools can handle the routine volume and free staff for the judgment calls a new market launch demands.

If your company is heading into a similar stretch of platform changes or new market entry, it is worth mapping out where your team is most exposed and talking it through with Plondo at https://plondo.com/contact.

OpenAI opened its self serve ad platform to all advertisers in May 2026, letting brands target ChatGPT conversations related to their products the same way Google Search ads target keywords. Early data shows average cost per click in the two to five dollar range, a minimum daily budget as low as twenty five dollars, and targeting currently limited to seven countries including the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Ads only show to logged out users and people on the free or lower paid tiers, not to people paying for the top subscription level.

For direct selling and network marketing companies, this matters because prospecting conversations are moving into chat interfaces before they ever reach a search engine or social feed. Someone asking an AI assistant to compare supplement brands or recommend a side income opportunity is a real buying signal, and until now there was no way to be present in that moment. A twenty five dollar daily budget also means testing this channel does not require a large media budget, which makes it realistic for individual field leaders or smaller companies to experiment with.

The bigger question is what happens after someone clicks. A lead that comes from an AI chat conversation still needs a fast, relevant follow up to convert, whether it lands with a corporate team or an individual distributor. If your company is weighing whether this channel fits your lead flow, Plondo can talk through the setup and routing through https://plondo.com/contact.