Is Kyäni a Scam? [Many Complaints of It Being a Pyramid Scheme]

Maybe you’ve seen the business opportunity for Kyani and now you’re wondering if it’s legit? Maybe you’re wondering if Kyani is a scam or a pyramid scheme?

I’m going to take you through this company and show you what it’s all about and then you can decide for yourself if the opportunity is worth it.

To be upfront, I’m not involved with Kyani in any way. I’m just doing research on different MLM opportunities because I have been involved in MLMs before and I know how hard they are to succeed in.

I want to go through different MLMs to see if any of them are good opportunities, or if they will all leave you broke and frustrated.

Let’s dive into Kyani and see what it’s all about!

Contents hide

1 What is Kyäni?

2 How Much Does it Cost to Join Kyäni?

3 Kyäni Compensation Plan

4 Kyäni Income Disclosure

5 Kyäni Complaints

6 Is Kyäni a Scam or a Pyramid Scheme?

6.1 Pros

6.2 Cons

7 Conclusion

What is Kyäni?

Kyani is a multil-level marketing (MLM) company founded in 2006 by Kirk Hansen, Jim Hansen and Carl Taylor. (As I’m writing this, there is unfortunate news that brothers Kirk and Jim were killed in a plane crash. You can read that story here.)

According to the website, “Kyäni’s products combine the best of nature’s adaptations with the latest modern technology to ensure a healthy you inside and out.” In fact, Kyani means “strong medicine” in a language spoken by the Tinglit people of Western Canada and Southeast Alaska.

Kyani’s products include:

Protein Nutritionals (Protein supplements to help with the aging process.)
Triangle of Health (Includes Kyani Sunrise, Kyani Sunset, and Kyani Nitro)
Fleuresse (Skincare products)
Potato Pak (A charitable pack that provides essential nutrition to those who need it but can’t get it.)

Let’s take a look at some of the product prices:

Kyani Sunrise (30 pouches) – $48.95
Kyani Nitro FX (15ml – 8 pack) – $89.95
Fleuresse Night Cream (30ml) – $71.95
Protein Pack (includes Kyani HL5 30 1 ounce pouches and Kyani Fit20 10 33.75g packets) – $124.95

I think it’s always good to look at the prices for MLM products, as they are usually overpriced in order to pay out the compensation plan.

How Much Does it Cost to Join Kyäni?

There isn’t anything on the website about how much it costs to join Kyani. Their join page just says what all MLMs say – run your own business, spend more time with your family, positively influence the lives of others… This is the usual B.S. that we hear.

Upon further research, it seems as if there are a few starter packs that you can choose from when you join:

Starter Pack – $40
Product Pack – $299
Builder Pack – $569
Builder Pack + ILA Ticket – $669
Premium Business Builder Pack – $999

According to Kyani’s income disclosure, you can also opt to join the company for a small “Business License” fee:

“There are no required purchases to become a Kyäni Independent Business Partner, other than a one-time Kyäni Business License ($89.00). You buy only the products you need for yourself and your family. There is no need to buy inventory, because Kyäni fulfills the orders made by the Customers and Business Partners in your organization.”

Here’s a look into a distributor’s $599 pack, which I’m assuming is equivalent to the $569 pack. There was likely price changes somewhere along the way.

https://youtu.be/ubkSY54St2s

In order to qualify for commissions, you’ll also need to have 25 PV (personal volume) per month. This is just to qualify for single-level commissions. In order to qualify for all commissions, you will need to have 100 PV per month. This can be orders that you place personally or sales that you make.

This is where a lot of distributors get into trouble. Because they want to make sure to keep qualified, they often end up placing these orders themselves, and this is where it’s easy to lose more money than you make.

(Been there, done that with the MLM I was in!)

Kyäni Compensation Plan

Here’s a video that talks about the Kyani compensation plan:

https://youtu.be/KlWKYABKPdY

According to the video, Kyani is different from other network marketing opportunities because you “only” need to build three legs under you in order to qualify for all commissions and bonuses. They make it sound so easy!

Because compensation plans are extremely confusing, I’m going to leave it to the experts to explain. BehindMLM is my go-to site because they are great at breaking these down and actually understanding what they mean.

You can also read the official compensation plan here from the Kyani website.

Here’s just one image from the compensation plan that goes over something called “PayGate”:

I feel like you need to be a rocket scientist to understand these things. Do they make compensation plans confusing on purpose? That’s my conspiracy theory. You ask fewer questions that way.

Kyäni Income Disclosure

Kyani does have an Income Disclosure, and you view it here if you’d like. The income disclosure only includes “Active” partners. If you’re Active, it means that you’ve received a commission check within the year that the income disclosure is looking at. (This income disclosure is for 2018.)

According to this income disclosure, half of Active Business Partners (distributors) received a bonus check of $10 or more. Here’s their breakdown of the Active Business Partners:

To me, this says the same thing that all income disclosure statements say – almost no one is making any significant money.

Once you reach a rank of Jade, you then become a Business Builder, and here’s what those stats look like:

You can see that you need to get to at least Ruby to start having the chance to earn a decent income. And you might think that 5.5% of people getting there is not too shabby. It looks better than most MLMs!

But remember, this is just a small percentage of distributors in the company. This ONLY takes into consideration the people who made it to the rank of Jade, which, if I’m reading the income disclosure correctly, is about 9.8% of distributors. So 5% of less than 10% will earn a somewhat decent income.

Also, keep in mind that these numbers don’t reflect business expenses and how many products they’ve purchased themselves.

Kyäni Complaints

Kyani is accredited with the Better Business Bureau and gets an A+ from them. You can see that their reviews are pretty good:

The positive reviewers said things like:

There is so much potential in this business
Incredible company and products
Kyani has changed my life
I will never stop using Kyani!

Here’s a positive reviewer that I’m posting here because these are the types of things that I believe can get Kyani into trouble. Making claims such as this can go against the FDA’s rules on nutritional products.

I understand that this person is just sharing their personal and positive experience with the product, but I also know that nutrition companies get into trouble when their distributors make claims that haven’t been proven. (I’m not sure that this person is a distributor, I’m just using this as an example. More about this a little later…)

Some Kyani complaints include:

I was sent products I didn’t order and I have to pay to ship them back
The products are not worth the high cost
Someone signed me up and now Kyani says I owe them $2,000
I spent $1,148.60 on products and 6 of the bottles were just about expired
I was enrolled in automatic renewals and had a hard time getting customer service on the phone to cancel
This is one of the most unethical companies I’ve ever dealt with

Honestly, this one is just sad and unfortunately, this happens a lot with MLMs:

Related Articles:

Is Kyäni a Scam or a Pyramid Scheme?

Is Kyani a scam? Is it a pyramid scheme? Technically, Kyani is not a scam. And so far, it’s not considered a pyramid scheme in the U.S., although it does have some qualities of a pyramid scheme, which we’ll get into in a minute. In fact, they got in trouble in Sweden for being a chain letter game (aka pyramid scheme).

Pros

Inexpensive startup costs
People seem pretty happy overall with the products

Cons

There’s no evidence the products actually work
The products are overpriced, making it hard to sell to retail customers
The way to make a lot of money through this is by recruiting
When you make more money recruiting than by retail sales, it starts to look like a pyramid scheme
Almost everyone loses money in an MLM (source)
TINA,org filed a complaint to the FTC for Kyani’s deceptive marketing practices (more about that next)

TINA.org has quite a few articles about Kyani on its site, but let’s take a look at this one first about their deceptive marketing practices. There are 11 instances where TINA.org found issues with their marketing.

One of these include finding over 100 unsubstantiated health claims and over 100 inappropriate income claims:

There’s also a class-action lawsuit claiming that Kyani is indeed an illegal pyramid scheme. Looks like it’s still pending.

What makes a company a pyramid scheme? Let’s take a look at a few points from this article on the FTC’s website.

They promise consumers or investors large profits based primarily on recruiting others to join their program, not based on profits from any real investment or real sale of goods to the public.
Some schemes may purport to sell a product, but they often simply use the product to hide their pyramid structure.
There are two tell-tale signs that a product is simply being used to disguise a pyramid scheme: inventory loading and a lack of retail sales.
Many pyramid schemes will claim that their product is selling like hot cakes. However, on closer examination, the sales occur only between people inside the pyramid structure or to new recruits joining the structure, not to consumers out in the general public.

Point #4 is really what happens with most MLMs. They are closed-market systems and the “retail” sales that are happening among the distributors. There really aren’t true retail sales. Not in a significant amount anyway.

TINA.org posts a picture of consumer complaints to the FTC regarding Kyani. You can see that the majority of people are complaining that they are a pyramid scheme:

You can read some of the very interesting comments by some of the people complaining on TINA.org’s site here. This is a 20-page document of people who have reported Kyani to the FTC.

Conclusion

Is Kyani a scam? Technically they aren’t considered a scam here in the U.S. yet because they are still up and running. However, they have a class-action lawsuit against them (at the time of this writing) for being an illegal pyramid scheme. And, there’s a 20-page document of complaints from consumers to the FTC saying that they are a pyramid scheme.

While they’re still up and running right now, you might want to be careful because this company could easily end up like AdvoCare. Of course, what you do is completely up to you, but I would personally not recommend you sign up for this business opportunity. In fact, I don’t recommend MLMs at all because almost everyone loses money in them.

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