How Much Money Can You Make with Pampered Chef? – A Realistic Look

Before becoming a consultant for Pampered Chef you first must ask yourself if it is really worth your time?

How much money can you actually make with Pampered Chef? I’m not talking about the few people that make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year–I’m talking about how much you can REALISTICALLY make.

The opportunity is open for anyone to join and it has a lot of benefits: It’s flexible work, you get to work from home, etc. But if the money isn’t right then the opportunity isn’t worth it.

In this article I’ll be breaking down how the business opportunity works, how you make money, how much consultants are actually making and more. I’ll be going over things that most consultants probably won’t–and by the way, I’m not a consultant.

Overview of Pampered Chef

Pampered Chef is a network marketing (MLM) company that was founded in 1980 by Doris Christopher. Their sales are completely in the hands of their independent sales force, which they call consultants, who sell products directly to the consumer (or take orders directly). This is called direct sales and means they don’t retail products in stores.

As you probably already know, they sell cookware–all sorts. You can buy anything from skillets, to slow cookers, to spatulas, to rice cookers, cocktail sets, waffle makers and everything in between. And for what it’s worth, the products seem to be very good quality. Pampered Chef certainly doesn’t skimp out when it comes to bringing consumers the best.

Consultants, which anyone can become by purchasing one of the ‘kits’ below and signing up, are able to make money in 2 basic ways: by making sales themselves and by recruiting other consultants into the business.

The cheapest kit to get started with starts out at $109 (subject to change). With this you will be provided with an array of different products as well as business materials to help jump-start your home-based Pampered Chef business.

When you join as a consultant you will also have access to some training to help you get started. This includes information on topics like:

• Booking parties
• Working with hosts
• Submitting orders
• Growing your team

There is also a lot of help you can get from 3rd party sources. For example, ChefSuccess.com is a forum where consultants share ideas and help each other out. I would definitely recommend going here if you do end up joining.

How You Make Money

In order to stay ‘active’ as a consultant you will have to sell at least $150 a month worth of products. If you don’t then you will be wasting your time because you won’t have access to the compensation plan–which is a bunch of crap, I know.

The Comp Plan

First off I want to say that finding information on the compensation plan was quite challenging. Pampered Chef seems to be really secretive about all of this, which is unusual. Usually MLM companies like to show off their compensation plan as much as possible to attract new consultants.

I guess their comp plan just isn’t that exciting (it’s really not), but this is actually a good thing in a way–as I’ll go over later.

But anyways, let’s get to it. There are 2 main ways to make money:

1. Personal sales
2. Recruitement

Personal Sales:

Personal sales consist of the sales that you personally make. Much of these will come from you taking orders at home parties (more on this later).

The amount you make depends on the amount of sales you are able to generate in a given month. The more sales you make, the higher commission rates you get. You start out at 20% commissions and go from there…

• $1-$749 sales/mo earns you 20% commission
• $750-$1249 sales/mo earns you 22% commission
• $1250-$2499 sales/mo earns you 23% commission
• $2500-$3999 sales/mo earns you 24% commission
• $4000+ sales/mo will earn you 25% commission

*On one part of their website they mentioned that consultants start off earning 20% commissions and can earn up to 27%–I’m not sure where the extra 2% comes from–as mentioned there is very limited information on this.

Recruitment:

This is where the MLM part of the business comes into play–where you make money by recruiting in other consultants.

MLM stands for ‘multi-level marketing’ and with this business model there are many different levels. In a nutshell, with a MLM business you can recruit in other members beneath you and earn commissions from their efforts. Of course they are also encouraged to recruit in other members beneath them, which you can also earn from. This can go down further and further depending on the companies compensation plan.

*Yes they have pyramid structures, just like pyramid schemes. No they are not pyramid schemes. I wrote an entire post on the difference between MLMs and pyramid schemes that you can read for clarification on this.

With the recruitment side of the comp plan there are 3 ways to earn…

• Bonuses
• Team Overrides
• Leadership Overrides

Bonuses – There are several different types of bonuses you can get as a consultant, all of which come from recruitment of other consultants into your downline.

They have a Recruiting Bonus where you earn a set amount for every new recruit you bring in. There is an Activity Bonus where you get paid a bonus if your recruited consultants are active. Then there are some Generational Bonuses and even car allowance bonuses if you reach a high enough rank.

Team Overrides – These are commissions you can make from people that you recruited in, people that they recruited in, and so on.

Leadership Overrides – These bonuses come from ‘generations’, which I mentioned above but didn’t explain. I like to think of generations as little teams that form within your downline–they are the result of consultants that have been recruited in by you or others in your downline that also go out and recruit a bunch of people–forming a generation.

I think that’s a pretty simple way of explaining it without getting too carried away.

It’s All About Moving Up The Ranks

There are a variety of different ranks that you can achieve which are based on personal sales and recruiting (sales from your team of recruits–downline).

• Consultant
• Senior Consultant
• Team Leader
• Director Promotion
• Director Mainenance
• Director Re-promotion
• Advanced Director
• Senior Director
• Executive Director
• Senior Executive Director
• National Executive Director

The higher you move up the ranks the more of the compensation plan you ‘unlock’ and get access to. For example: you don’t unlock the Leadership Overrides until you are in the rank of Director Promotion (about to be promoted) and you don’t unlock all 3 generations of the Leadership Overrides until you are an Executive Director.

How to move up the ranks: Make enough personal sales and recruit like crazy. Recruitment and building your downline is the main focus here.

Parties

Pampered Chef is all about parties. In fact–if you aren’t up for the life of attending parties and making sales in this kind of atmosphere, then this company is probably not a good choice for you.

Parties are really encouraged, as you can see by this promotion that is on their website at the time of me writing this…

But don’t worry–you don’t have to get your house ready for parties multiple times a week. That isn’t how it works.

You see, Pampered Chef encourages anyone to host parties by incentivizing them with a discount on products. The hosts are usually just customers. Where you, the consultant, come into play is with the planning and attending the party. So you don’t host the parties–you just attend them and help out–organizing, taking orders, etc.

There are different types of parties that can be thrown…

• Cooking party
• Virtual party (online)
• Fundraiser party

The virtual parties, which take place online, are ones that consultants host themselves. People are able to attend from anywhere in the world and you make the theme anything that is related to cookware. Sales can be made by directing attendees to your personal Pampered Chef website.

How Many Parties Do You Need Per Month?

I found this little chart that is supposed to help give a rough estimate of how many parties you should be a part of each month depending on what your income goals are…I definitely would take these numbers with a grain of salt, but maybe they can give you some idea of what you are looking at.

How Much Do Consultants Actually Make?

Something that is a bit worrisome is that Pampered Chef doesn’t provide any sort of income disclosure as many MLMs out there do.

Why is this? What do they have to hide? Or do they just not feel like going through all the data and putting together a report like this?

I’ve done a lot of digging around and can’t find any sort of disclosure that states how much consultants make.

Of course you hear all the stories of people that are successful–but what about those who have failed? How many people fail in this business? 80%? 90%? Even more?

Although I don’t have any statistics to go off of from Pampered Chef themselves, I do know that the large majority of people that get involved in MLM opportunities fail. This, unfortunately, is the way it will always be due to the very nature of such businesses.

Why Most People Fail

Chapter 7 of The Case Against Multi-level Marketing by the Consumer Awareness Institute is titled MLM’s Abysmal Numbers.

In this chapter a study is talked about where over 350 different MLM companies analyzed and it was found that about 99% of people who get involved actually end up losing money.

Now I knew beforehand that the failure rate was extremely high–but 99%–that is even higher than I was expecting.

However, the true failure rate probably isn’t quite that bad. I’m not sure if they took into account all of the people that joined and ‘failed’ due to simply not putting in any effort.

MLM’s Make It Hard to Earn Money

They have a pyramid structure at their core and this brings a flow of commissions from the bottom to the top. There are always going to be more people at the bottom of the pyramid than at the top–and these people will be having potential commissions sucked away from them–which end up in the pockets of those above them.

This is the reason a small percentage of people make good money while most fail.

Pampered Chef Isn’t as Bad as Most

Usually the MLMs with the more fancy and extravagant compensation plans–the ones that seem to be the most appealing–have the highest failure rates. This is because they usually give people more potential to recruit and make tons of money with large teams, but take away more from the bottom.

Pampered Chef really isn’t too bad. They are a MLM, but don’t suck money from down 10 levels like I’ve seen other MLMs do. So I would expect their average consultant income to probably be higher than most.

Conclusion – How Much Are Pampered Chef Consultants Really Making and Is It Worth It?

While I don’t know how much consultants make on average, one thing I do know for certain is that if you want to be successful in any MLM business you have to be one heck of a determined person. You have to be motivated, put in the work, go the distance, get out of your comfort zone and really just put everything you have into it.

Sure, you can do less work if you just want to earn some extra money in your spare time, but even this is more challenging that you may think.

Fact: Most people fail. Just remember that.

Personally I’m not a fan of MLMs because of their extremely high failure rates and difficulty, but Pampered Chef does seem to be more on the legit side of things when compared to others.

Before leaving my site here, since you are interested in making money from home you might also want to check out my top recommendations.

And if you have any comments or questions leave them below and I’ll get back to you soon 🙂