When Multilevel Marketing Met Gen Z
So you’ve been scrolling through Facebook for a while—dull, dull, dull—when you hear the sound of tropical bird chatter. You glimpse a 20-something woman floating in a natural pool of water with her eyes closed, and then she starts to talk to you about her passion for “manifesting money” and how every little thing she’s ever wanted is now hers. What’s this? She’s looking out the window of an airplane, through the clouds at a mossy mountaintop; she’s scooping up sand and blowing it at the camera as if the grains were dandelion seeds; she’s biking in a white dress on a secluded path, no handlebars. She has more time and wealth than she knows what to do with—and so now she will pause to bathe an elephant. Wait a minute, you say to yourself. Could this be my life too?
Maybe, because this video is “your invitation to experience lasting abundance” and “financial freedom” and the opportunity to travel the world, ethically, while eschewing plastic water bottles. Amelia Whelan, founder of the Breakaway Movement, shared it to Facebook on her company’s launch day, in the summer of 2019, when she was 25 years old. “I’ve dedicated the last 12 months of my life to this project, so I know you’ll love it,” she wrote at the time. “I invite you to join me and breakaway …”
Doing so would cost just $33.33 a month, in exchange for access to a private Facebook group, invitations to weekly group calls, an assigned mentor, and dozens of hours of video-course materials about how to create a social-media brand, how to form an LLC, how to maintain a “money mindset,” and, sort of, how to sell $5,000 K8 water-ionizing machines to your friends and followers on commission for a Japanese tech company called Enagic. (Enagic says it does not have a formal relationship with the Breakaway Movement or Whelan, beyond her being an independent distributor for the company.)
Whelan, the self-made (and self-declared) millionaire at the center of the movement, grew up in a small town in New York and moved to Hawaii for college. When she first started selling water-ionizing machines for Enagic, she joined a sales community on Facebook but didn’t vibe with it. The group had a “very predominant male presence,” she’d later say, and its members’ approach to spending money—“they were flashing checks and they were buying Yeezys”—did not appeal to her..
