There are two things I keep seeing in this conversation that are making me lose my mind.
First, people asking customers to protect consultants financially.
Second, people telling Ryze that what another company did has nothing to do with us.
Both are completely backwards.
Let’s start with the customer.
I’ve seen people saying customers shouldn’t request refunds or dispute charges because the consultant could lose the commission she earned on that sale.
Let me be very clear.
I’m not telling anyone to request a refund.
I’m not telling anyone to request a chargeback.
I’ve never purchased from this company, and I have absolutely no business telling another adult what they should do with their purchase or their money.
But this idea that the customer should sacrifice their money so the consultant doesn’t have to sacrifice hers?
What the heck are we doing?
I have tremendous empathy for the consultants.
Many of them sold those products believing the information corporate gave them.
They didn’t create the problem.
But neither did the customer.
So why are we asking either one of them to pay for it?
If you’re worried that taking care of the customer will financially hurt the consultant, don’t ask the customer to sacrifice herself.
Ask corporate not to take the money from the consultant.
There.
That’s it.
Protect both.
The customer shouldn’t have to pay for information she relied on being wrong.
The consultant shouldn’t have to pay for information corporate gave her being wrong.
If the problem originated at corporate, why the hell do the financial consequences keep getting pushed down?
And while we’re talking about harm, stop telling Ryze we haven’t been harmed.
Because we have.
Since the day we opened our doors, Ryze has had to compete not only against other products, but against what consumers were told those products were.
And there is a massive difference.
Here’s a real example.
Vermeil.
Ryze sold vermeil.
Another company in this industry sold jewelry labeled vermeil too.
Their own shopping platform still identifies a Sterling Club Vermeil collection.
Our vermeil was expensive.
It was substantially more expensive than theirs.
And guess what happened?
It was hard for us to sell.
Why wouldn’t it be?
If you’re the customer and you’re being told:
This is vermeil.
And this is also vermeil.
But one costs significantly less than the other.
Why wouldn’t you think the less expensive one is the better deal?
That’s normal consumer behavior.
Except now, according to the company’s own explanation shared by one of its owners, the vermeil plating was approximately 0.5 microns.
The FTC’s Jewelry Guides say vermeil should have a minimum gold thickness equivalent to 2.5 microns.
That’s one-fifth of the thickness associated with the term vermeil.
And that isn’t somebody else’s test result we’re arguing about.
That’s their own explanation.
Now do you understand why that matters to me?
We weren’t competing against their product.
We were competing against their description of their product.
We bore the cost of producing what we were selling.
We priced our product accordingly.
And then we had to stand next to another product consumers had been told was the same thing and explain why ours cost more.
How many sales did Ryze lose because of that?
How many customers looked at our pricing and thought we were overpriced?
How many Influencers struggled to sell it because the obvious comparison was sitting right next to us for less money?
I don’t know.
But please stop telling me the harm doesn’t exist simply because I can’t hand you one receipt with the total printed at the bottom.
Competitive harm does not have to look like one invoice.
It can look like lost sales.
It can look like customers choosing a lower-priced product because they were told it was equivalent to yours.
It can look like your field having to defend your pricing against a comparison that was never actually apples to apples.
It can look like damage to your reputation.
It can look like consumer trust being distorted by inaccurate product claims in the marketplace.
And those things matter.
In fact, federal false-advertising laws exist for a reason.
Because when companies make misleading claims about what they’re selling, the harm doesn’t always stop with the consumer.
Sometimes it reaches the competitor too.
And that’s exactly the part I’m no longer willing to pretend doesn’t matter.
