As I predicted in this November 14 post, Bradford Richardson has gone to work for Shaklee. He left Usana Health Sciences (NASDAQ:USNA) to become Shaklee’s new president of international operations. I have a theory that once the Cheating in China information was revealed by Barry Minkow, that Usana needed someone to take the fall for the alleged illegal activities.

What better way to do that than blame the person in charge of the Asia Pacific operations. Usana was kind enough to keep Brad around long enough so he could collect his $3.1 million on the stock options he had.

I realize that Usana hasn’t gotten into any official trouble here or in China for breaking the laws over there. And frankly, I think Usana is just as surprised as I am that no one has brought the hammer down. But I think that they wanted to hedge their bets and move Richardson out as soon as they could. That way when questions were raised, they could immediately point to this “corrective action.”

4 Comments

  1. terminatedramp 07/08/2008 at 8:32 pm - Reply

    Tracy,

    How did you know or guess he was going to go work for Shaklee?

    Also, the illegal recruiting of Chinese Nationals is not uncommon with USANA. Back several years ago USANA had to terminate 1400 USANA Distributors who traveled from China to Hong Kong to join. Interesting enough, what FDI uncovered was that the same process was still happening and this time with the help of USANA employees. If this Illegal Recruiting story ran on a nationwide network program like Bill Oreilly, then USANA would have been shut down by now.

    Fact is, there is absolutely no media attention with USANA and the rest of the MLM industry. There has to be something seriously wrong when a multibillion dollar industry has to operate in pretty much secrecy. USANA has to go private so they can get out of the public image and remain a secret. One of their biggest selling points is the fact nobody has ever heard of them. If everyone knew about the company USANA, then there would be no one left to recruit, and the pyramid collapses.

    BTW, several USANA distributors I argue with refuse to believe BodyCote Laboratory’s USANA lead contamination figures. They believe Barry Minkow is contaminating the samples before the labs test it. I also believe 99% of USANA distributors are unaware of the contamination results and are completely left in the dark by the company. Do you have any ideas on how all USANA distributors could be notified about the lead contamination levels?

    Sorry I went this far off topic.

  2. Tracy Coenen 07/08/2008 at 9:26 pm - Reply

    I can’t give any details. All I can say is that I had an insider tip that he was going there.

    Sometimes I can’t get my mind around the fact that MLMs operate without much scrutiny. I don’t know why the media isn’t more involved in this issue. The entire industry is corrupt, and I can’t think of any other industry that relies on wholesale deception to stay in business.

    Does anyone find it odd that Herbalife claimed they had lab tests that came back clean for lead, yet they never showed anyone those tests? I guess the conspiracy theorists have to believe that Barry contaminated the pills before the tests. I don’t believe that’s the case.

  3. guy 07/10/2008 at 6:05 pm - Reply

    In order to have more media attention on usana, can’t you just contact bill oreilly or some other media source about all these pyramid schemes? Dateline consumer alert had a whole article and episode on Quixtar. Can’t the same be done with usana?

  4. JJ 04/12/2009 at 9:51 pm - Reply

    Why does this even concern you all?

    i care because i do the business, but clearly you guys don’t (and if you do/did, obviously you’re not succeeding judging by the lack of faith in the company).

    all i know is that the products are fantastic, from my own and others experience. I have seen many Succeed and many “fail”. that goes with anything in life. its so interesting reading these comments. all it tells me is that the world has become so negative and scared so everyone is so suspicious and skeptical.

    do yourselves a favor and work on something productive.

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