Kathia Maillefert didn’t expect to become rich. But the single mum hoped that selling skincare products to friends at ‘pamper parties’ would provide a bit of extra money on top of her personal assistant salary.

At least, that was the idea. In three years, Kathia, 47, reckons she made ‘around £1,000’. Which wouldn’t be so bad – had she not forked out ‘about that, if not more’ buying products. ‘Whatever I made, I ended up putting into products,’ she says. ‘I was very disheartened.’

The company Kathia worked for? Tropic Skincare, whose founder Susie Ma recently bought Lord Sugar out of the business. He had invested £200,000 in it after Susie appeared on The Apprentice in 2011. Today Susie, 37 – who’s back on screen as a guest Dragon on the BBC One programme Dragons' Den – is in complete control of a company boasting a turnover of more than £100million a year.

‘The growth we’ve had blows my mind,’ she tells me. Her own net worth was estimated at £73million last year – and she’s only just getting started. ‘I want to take Tropic global. I’ve got huge ambitions.’

The chances are you’ve seen Tropic’s £22 Smoothing Cleanser or £44 Rainforest Dew Hydration Serum on your social media feed. Chances are, too, that you have a strong opinion about Tropic, whether you’re an ardent fan of its vegan, plant-based products or fed-up with people forever trying to flog them to you.

Critics claim that Tropic’s success is down to its multi-level marketing (MLM) business model. Not only do sales reps earn commission from selling products, they also recruit other reps and make money from their sales.

When it comes to MLMs, it is claimed that most reps – usually women needing flexible work – earn little or even lose money, and that the emphasis is on recruitment. Reps can feel forced to buy stock upfront or stockpile products to meet impossible sales targets – to become customers themselves, essentially.

And Tropic is by no means the only company whose sales techniques have come under scrutiny.

This year market research company Gitnux found 50 per cent of new MLM recruits leave within 90 days and 77 per cent within a year. An anti-MLM page on social media platform Reddit, which describes MLM schemes as ‘a drain on our society’ and says participants ‘either build the pyramid taller or get squashed by it’, has more than 850,000 members.

None of which reflects well on Tropic, which donates ten per cent of its profits to charity and trumpets its work supporting disadvantaged women and children.

But Susie, who started selling body scrubs at London’s Greenwich Market aged 15, is adamant her business is different. In fact, she insists Tropic, which has a whopping 22,862 UK reps (known as ‘ambassadors’) and spends just over 50 per cent of its turnover on ambassadors’ commissions and bonuses, isn’t really an MLM at all.

‘I don’t feel Tropic prioritises the MLM structure,’ she says. ‘We are focused on direct selling, where product is at the heart of everything we do.’ Ambassadors are neither allowed to hold stock nor pushed to recruit, she claims.

‘When people accuse us of being an MLM and saying all this criticism, it’s not relevant to us, because we don’t have any of those practices.’

Kathia, however, says recruitment was ‘constantly pushed’ by those above her. ‘It was always, “It’s a great opportunity. Sign up your friends. Sign up your family. It will help them make some extra money. It will help push your sales. You’ll be earning commission”,’ she recalls.

One thing Tropic certainly does have is a dizzying array of incentives to reward high sellers. Exotic holidays are given as prizes and flowers are sent on birthdays. There are themed awards ceremonies (last year ambassadors dressed in green in homage to the musical Wicked at its lavish ‘Glammies’), black-tie product launches and the £1million, three-day Tropic Fest, which Susie describes as ‘a huge sleepover with 5,000 other like-minded women’.

Kathia, from Andover, Hampshire, neither sold enough to be invited to events, nor was ever fully won over by the premise of swathes of women whooping it up in hotels around the country – though she sometimes watched them via video link.

‘It can come across as quite cultish,’ she says. ‘I just wanted to see the products. I didn’t want to see people singing and dancing.’

She seems to be in the minority. While researching Tropic I am inundated with messages from evangelical ambassadors. One wakes ‘every single day super happy’ and says that, thanks to Tropic, she is ‘finally ready to step into [her] own power’. Another says she feels ‘blessed every day that Tropic crossed [her] path’; a third that being an ambassador gives her ‘unlimited possibilities' and her 'girl world’.

Most seem to idolise Susie, who speaks to me over Microsoft Teams from the south London home she shares with her cinematographer partner Matthias and their 18-month-old daughter. ‘Hopefully I’m a source of inspiration,’ says Susie.

She made her final payment to Lord Sugar for his 50 per cent share of Tropic this January – an undisclosed sum. She describes his investment as ‘definitely the best he’s ever made'.

They had ‘very different ambitions for the business’, she reveals – disagreeing with the amount of money she lavished on Tropic’s famous ‘experiences’ for a start. ‘But I actually always got my way, because I kept on going until he said yes,’ she adds.

Susie is so complimentary about my hair, so chatty about her daughter, so disarmingly friendly in the face of my scepticism, I don’t doubt her powers of persuasion.

But for all the praise and presents, how likely are her ambassadors, who earn between 25 and 35 per cent commission on sales, to actually make a decent living? On the basis of figures the company provided, the answer is, for the vast majority, not very.

A quarter of Tropic’s ambassadors at the bottom of its eight-tiered sales model aren’t even trying, it says, having signed up to the company just to buy products for themselves at a 25 per cent discount. Of the 31 per cent – 7,005 ambassadors – who sell to friends and family, average earnings are £477.36 a year.

Some ambassadors do pretty well. Executive Leaders – six rungs up – earn an average of £34,164 a year, working around 20 hours a week. But only 112 ambassadors reached this level last year. The Diamond Executives at the top earn an astonishing average of £164,112. But they are vanishingly rare. Last year there were only 25, or 0.11 per cent of Tropic’s sales force.

Earnings include bonuses of two to seven per cent, which are paid by Tropic to ambassadors who have recruited teams under them.

However, stresses Susie, who leads 261 staff at Tropic’s Croydon head office, it is more profitable to sell than recruit. ‘You don’t get any money for recruiting people unless that person does over a certain level of sales. We have loads of ambassadors who don’t want to bring anyone into the business.’

There are no sales requirements and ‘no financial risk’, she adds. She was already paying friends commission to sell her products when she decided to commit to a direct selling model after Lord Sugar invested.

‘We thought, “Why not do something different rather than giving our margins to a third party retailer like John Lewis – why not give that margin to everyday women?“’

Not that Kathia, who signed up in late 2020 after buying a cleanser from a Tropic ambassador friend, saw much of it.

First of all she bought the required starter kit – now £198 – containing products to demonstrate for potential customers at pamper parties held at ambassadors’ homes.

Then she was given a website on which her customers could place orders and joined the same sales team as the friend who recruited her. They communicated via a WhatsApp group of 20-odd ambassadors, mostly midlife women, she recalls, where those senior to her gave advice on selling.

She was told Tropic merchandise would help, and in addition to buying a 5ft banner to hang at pamper parties, she bought Tropic magazines to post through letterboxes.

‘To look more professional I bought business cards. I bought compliment slips,’ says Kathia. ‘I’d give pens as freebies. I’d give tote bags to people if they spent a certain amount.’

She provided a charcuterie board and drinks for 15 friends at her first pamper party, along with prizes for games she laid on. ‘You’re caught up in a whirlwind of it all being very new.’

After three months Kathia had made £2,000 worth of sales, earning herself £500 in commission. As a thank you she was given Tropic vouchers worth £50 on top of her commission – though, in fact, Kathia spent more than that on other products ‘to showcase more’ at her pamper parties.

‘I was spending a lot of money,’ she recalls, reasoning that she liked the products, so would use any left over.

It wasn’t a bad start. But it would not last.

Sales quickly stalled, since her friends were not in a position to keep buying ‘quite expensive’ products every month. She felt uncomfortable badgering them. ‘I’m not a big salesperson and you need to put yourself out there.’

At the time, Tropic was celebrating acquiring 18,000 ambassadors, all selling the same products.

‘I remember thinking “It’s such a saturated market,”’ says Kathia. She recalls asking management whether the company was recruiting too many ambassadors. The question was ‘never addressed’, she says.

Susie tells me Avon, a bigger direct sales company than hers, ‘has been around for about 150 years, and I don’t know a single Avon rep. They’re certainly not reaching saturation point’. People retire, she points out, ‘so I don’t think there could be that possibility of oversaturation’.

Kathia was reluctant to recruit – not, she stresses, that she was individually targeted by her team. ‘It was a blanket, outright, “Recruit, recruit.”’

Susie admits teams of ambassadors are ‘difficult to police, but our ambassadors are told that recruitment is not the number one driver of their business’.

Kathia was constantly presented with competitions as an incentive to sell. Some, ‘like trips to Madagascar’, were laid on by head office. ‘They say anyone can win, but the likelihood of someone like me who has no recruited team below me earning extra money… it’s very doubtful I would ever have got that prize,' she believes. Smaller prizes were also offered. ‘One was “Do £100 worth of sales and win a tablecloth”. Sometimes you’d think "It’s not really worth it".’

And what of the products themselves, made daily at the company’s Surrey factory?

‘We call it a beauty kitchen because I want this notion of freshness to come through,’ says Susie. ‘I see skincare products like food for your skin. You want to eat fresh food that’s been made as recently as possible – the same goes for your skin. Think about all the foods in your pantry; everything has a shelf life.’

Her products are all naturally derived and organic, she says, ‘so when you have a product of that level of purity it’s going to degrade much faster than a synthetic product’.

Beauty journalist and consultant Claire Coleman says it’s true that vitamins A and C lose potency in beauty products over time, but ‘with most ingredients that’s not the case – you’re not likely to get a tail-off in performance’. With Tropic, she feels, ‘there’s a lot of “nature washing” going on – an implication that “we don’t use this”, which suggests brands which do are worse than Tropic. It’s not marketing I particularly like'.

While there are undoubtedly many women who swear by Tropic products – one tells me that since the menopause she can only use Tropic moisturiser because ‘everything else causes breakouts’ – make-up artist and beauty writer Joyce Connor describes them as ‘average quality but pricey for the ingredients’.

‘There are much better products on the market for the same money or less. I have tested hundreds of skincare products superior to these for the money I’ve paid. I have also seen sellers commenting about the clean beauty aspect of it and scaremongering that people are going to suffer if they use other skincare.’

Her main gripe, however, is that ‘the MLM structure makes sellers pushy’.

‘I have experienced people connecting with me on LinkedIn and immediately trying to hard-sell the business to me.’

In 2022 Kathia moved from London to Andover, and asked to move teams so she could be supported by a local Hampshire group. She was told she needed to leave the company, wait six months and then rejoin and buy another starter kit. She stayed, but concluded Tropic was not ‘interested’ in its ambassadors. ‘That’s how I felt. That left a not very nice taste in my mouth.’

Susie says that moving groups is discouraged unless ‘something awful has happened, like a huge fallout between teams’ because it’s not fair on the leaders who have mentored new ambassadors only to lose their commission.

Besides, she says, the starter kit contains ‘£600 worth of products’.

‘A lot of people deliberately leave to be able to get another starter kit, and sell the products at full price.’

Born in Shanghai, Susie spent her early childhood living in a shed at the back of her grandmother’s ground-floor flat. ‘We didn’t have heating,’ she says. She moved to the UK with her mother as a teenager after her parents split up. 

Her grandmother, a medicinal chemist and toxicologist, made all of her own skincare at home so, aged 15, Susie started selling body scrub at Greenwich Market based on her grandma's homemade recipe to help her mum out financially. The same recipe is still used to this day – it became Tropic’s best-selling Body Smooth Refreshing Polish. Susie earned enough to pay a month's worth of bills on just the first day, so continued to spend weekends at London's markets.

‘I started this business to get financial freedom, to feel safe with my mum and not have to rely on my dad. My mum worked at a market stall; she ran her own business and found it incredibly tough. That was all I wanted, to earn enough money working on a market stall selling my grandma’s body scrub. It feels absolutely surreal we are the size we are.’

All she wants, she says, is to offer ambassadors the support her mother was lacking. Certainly, her rags to riches tale is inspiring. ‘Personally, I went into it knowing I’d never be a millionaire,’ says Kathia. ‘But you could imagine some people would think this is going to be a big payday.’

By the time Kathia left Tropic in September 2024, her sales had plummeted to £15 a month ‘at most’, and the woman who had recruited her had left. ‘I wasn’t pushing myself to make money. I thought "It’s more hassle than it’s worth". Had I known how much I would have spent on it, I think I would have just stayed a customer,' she says.

For other women, being a Tropic ambassador seems to provide validation and a sense of belonging, often at a juncture in their life – motherhood, midlife – when they need it most. The fact many won’t earn much is almost a moot point.