Well, this is it: The last company review in my five-part series on product-focused, home-based business opportunities. Have I saved the best for last with Melaleuca? I’ll let you be the judge of that. The first four companies I looked at—Younique, Scentsy, LuLaRoe, and ddoTERRA—all rely on distributors who purchase and resell their products. That’s the hallmark of multi-level marketing. Melaleuca, however, has no distributors. It’s just an online store. I was kind of surprised when I found that out. It turns out that the only way customers can purchase Melaleuca products is directly from the company.

A good meditative state can be hard to accomplish. You need peace and quiet—which is sometimes impossible to achieve with three young kids. You need an atmosphere that is Zen-friendly, and to me, that means aromatherapy.

Okay. Let’s get the bad news out of the way right up front. LuLaRoe has come under fire during the last year over some of its business practices. First, there have been some complaints about the quality of its products. Second, distributors were in an uproar over not being able to return their inventory for a refund. Phew. Now that that’s out of the way, let’s talk about the good news.

A girlfriend of mine is in the market for a new home, so a few months ago I spent a Saturday house shopping with her. At one of the homes on her interest list, we walked in the front door and all I could focus on is how wonderful it smelled—like the most delicious streusel cake in the world. Turns out, that smell was coming from a Scentsy candle. I say candle, but it’s really just a square of scented wax that releases its fragrance as it melts. Scentsy is another multi-level marketing company founded in Utah (there seem to be a lot of those; perhaps that’s a topic for another post) in 2003, but it is now headquartered in Meridian, Idaho. The company is a little different than most MLMs as it employs a direct-selling model, and a party-plan marketing model.

Over the past few months, I’ve been contacted by a lot of people investigating home-based businesses. The common question I’ve been asked is, “Alyce, of all the home-based businesses out there, which one do you recommend the most?” That’s a good question, and a really tough one to answer. Why? Because it seems like there are as many home-based businesses as there are stars in the sky. But the question is an intriguing one, so I jumped right in and began looking at some of the newer, more popular businesses out there. It didn’t take me long to separate the wheat from the chaff based on one important criteria: The best home-based business, whether they rely on network marketing, party planning or some other business model, are all product-focused.