Scams are everywhere. They are on a person’s Instagram feed and in text messages from unknown numbers. It’s possible there is a scam that is already actively infiltrating your kitchen drawers in the form of knives, cutlery possibly containing a “Cutco” label on its handles.
These alleged home intruders can be known as Cutco Knives, which are independently sold through Vector Marketing. According to Vector Marketing, they use a multi-level marketing strategy (MLM), prioritizing the recruitment of high school and college students, some of which have walked the halls at UAHS.
Mira Milligan, a former UAHS student and current brand ambassador for Vector Marketing, works on the other side of Cutco sales strategies.
“I just post stuff on my [social media] stories to try and get students to fill out a form and have an interest in working for [Vector Marketing], ” Milligan said. “If you post [on social media] you get $10, to get more people engaged.”
When brand ambassadors are getting paid to recruit new Cutco employees, they often reach out to local audiences, such as high schoolers, through social media.
“Everyone always finds [a job at Vector Marketing] out through social media, because [the company] is very good at just spreading the word and getting people to post,” Milligan said.
But Vector Marketing does not rely on income from recruiters’ posts, instead they gain income through recruited high school sales representatives.
The position of brand ambassador is comparable to a “pyramid scheme”, which Oxford Languages defines as “an illegal, unsustainable fraudulent business model where participants pay to join and earn money primarily by recruiting new members.” However, Vector Marketing does not entirely fit the definition because the majority of profit comes from selling Cutco knives.
Similarly, UAHS Seniors, Croy Aalyson and Keshav Goyal, were told about Cutco as they were seeking a job during their junior year.
“A previous senior [at UA] told me about the opportunity [to work for Vector Marketing] and I filled out the form that I got from them… next thing I knew I was getting a call and doing an interview,” Aalyson said.
When Goyal and Aalyson applied for the job they’d only seen previous advertisements on Instagram about the position. It was not until their interviews that the students learned about the details of that position.
“We would go door to door, or cold call people and try to sell those knives,” Goyal said. “They also told us about the pay and the training.”
They got the job soon after meeting over Zoom for the interview and were assigned to unpaid training.
“It was long, it was seven hours, it was supposed to be two days but we didn’t go to the second day,” Aalyson said. “We received a sample kit of knives, because of their quality, that was the excuse that they’re so expensive they’re worth the unpaid training.”
During the first day of training Goyal and Aalyson were informed on the requirements for selling Cutco knives. However, within those seven hours, the students changed their minds about the job.
“We had lots of concerns after the first day… We just thought it was kind of sketchy and slimy, the whole concept of it,” Goyal said.
Vector Marketing uses several sales tactics that seem to depend on high school students such as Goyal and Aalyson to sell knives efficiently.
“They hire high school students, primarily, to kind of guilt trip people into buying the knives, ” Goyal said. “They really emphasize that first set… that the first people you should sell to should be your family, friends and parents.”
According to Cutco their knives range from $200 to $1800, often being purchased as sets. Students like Goyal and Aalyson are assigned by Vector Marketing to reach out to people they know and persuade them to buy these knives.
“The whole point of getting high school students to do it is so that [family and friends] will feel bad and they’ll pay $400 for the set of knives just to help [us] get a profit,” Goyal said.
The sales representative position, potentially interfering with personal relationships, causes skepticism for the whole organization as high school students are put in a difficult position.
“You come out of nowhere asking [someone you know] to buy a super expensive set of knives, it’s just not good for your relationship which is why we didn’t want to do that,” Aalyson said.
Despite the observed shadiness of the sales representative position and Cutco’s reliance on students for brand recognition, Vector Marketing, or Cutco, is seemingly legal. Though the company may continue to have a system questionable to even their own employees, nothing they are doing, at least not right now, can be criticized as illegal or a scam contrary to popular suspicions.
