The business model might seem a less-than-perfect fit for city dwellers. “And yes, that $600 last month bought me a pair of shoes.” Zarin said that she wanted to try to promote the chocolate on the air “I have a lot of fans” but that a planned scene involving Xoçai was cut. You’re my friend, I trust you, sign me up.’ ” ![]() “She says, ‘Jill, I have to tell you about this thing I found, this chocolate, it’s unbelievable, and not only that, you can make money.’ I said, ‘You know what, Robin? Here’s my credit card. Zarin, a former Avon lady (at 14, on Long Island). “Robin is a very holistic light person,” said Ms. One of the friends she signed was Jill Zarin, one of the stars of the show “Real Housewives of New York City.” She signed up in August and said she has about 20 executives high-volume sellers working beneath her. One early convert was Robin Cofer, an ordained swami and ballet dancer who lives on the 90th floor of Trump World Tower. She now sits atop a tree of about 300 distributors, and said she makes $1,500 a month. Watt was introduced to the chocolate in July by an old friend, Debra Scott, who lived in Las Vegas, and quickly became the Johnny Appleseed of Xoçai in New York, urging friends and acquaintances from the theater world to sign up. “Because we don’t know how high is high.”Ībout a third of those who sign up follow this model another third keep ordering the chocolate to eat it and a third drop out, according to Mr. “Marketeers in general overstate the importance of a high number,” Mr. Brooks, who founded the company with his mother in 2005.īrunswick Laboratories, which assigns ORAC levels, has run independent tests confirming Xoçai’s levels, according to Jim Nichols, Brunswick’s president, who cautioned that chocolate companies tend to overplay the importance of the number, when exactly how it translates into promoting health is unknown. A 12-gram “nugget” (recommended serving: three) has 3,120, while three fluid ounces of a Xoçai drink has more than 15,000, according to Andrew N. Xoçai’s levels are said to be more concentrated. Typical dark chocolate has ORAC levels around 15,000 per 100 grams milk chocolate has more like 6,700. Xoçai is a product of MXI Corp., a Reno, Nev., company that heavily promotes the chocolate’s oxygen radical absorbance capacity, or ORAC. ![]() “You’ve got people in penthouses who are involved in this.” Watt, a close friend, persuaded him to sign up. “When you think of Amway, you think about people in a ranch house somewhere,” said Ronnie Glucksman, 47, a theater producer and Xoçai distributor who said he found network marketing “unseemly” until Ms. But where Tupperware parties and door-to-door sales are a time-honored tradition in suburban towns, Xoçai has found a foothold among the ladies who lunch and the men who love them in New York City. Then she said a few more, about a new way to make some money in a shaky economy.Įxotic name and sleek day-spa packaging notwithstanding, Xoçai (pronounced show-SIGH) is a cousin of the humble Amway products, among the newest in a seemingly endless series of network-marketing ventures. Watt said a few words about the chocolate, pitched as being so rich in antioxidants that, if eaten three times a day, it provides some nutritional benefits on the order of a pound of spinach. ![]() They chewed and nodded with approval, among them a prominent 9/11 widow, a bankruptcy lawyer, an Argentinean investor and avid polo player, a Pace University student, and a former sister-in-law of the last president. “Probiotic,” the hostess of the tasting, Patricia Watt, a theater producer, told a group seemingly culled from the front page, gossip sheets and back copies of Playbill. The little wrapped chocolates were passed around the Upper West Side living room on a silver tray, plucked one at a time by the manicured hands of the guests perched on sofas and kitchen chairs.
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