Nu Skin now in business for 25 years

PROVO — Blake Roney was in his mid-20s when he first applied a revolutionary face cream to the volunteers lying on his sister's basement floor.

Self-conscious about his own appearance, he worried he looked too young to be taken seriously as a leader of a new, multilevel marketing skin-care company that claimed to have a cream that could smooth away your wrinkles in half an hour.

But now, celebrating 25 years of riding the ups and downs of building an international, billion-dollar business, a head of white hair makes Nu Skin's chairman of the board finally look the part. And the company, headquartered in a 10-story Provo office building, has certainly outgrown Nedra Roney's basement.

Nu Skin has more than 755,000 independent distributors around the world and 6,500 employees — 1,200 of whom work in Provo. That makes Nu Skin the fourth-largest company headquartered in Utah, according to the Utah Business magazine, and one of the biggest multilevel marketing companies in the world.

In 2008, Nu Skin surpassed $6 billion in total revenue, with a record $1.25 billion in sales. The success of Nu Skin, which is not without its critics, has given birth to a host of other multilevel marketing companies along the Wasatch Front — including Tahitian Noni International and XanGo — which have become key drivers of the state's economy. The company recently celebrated its 25th anniversary with a giant birthday cake and gifts to the community.

"They're one of the first multilevel companies to be successful internationally," said Lew Cramer, CEO of Utah's World Trade Center, an organization that helps Utah companies expand globally. "They did a marvelous job rolling out their products around the world, and as a result, they were followed enthusiastically and aggressively by others. They were a fantastic pacesetter. And many people who were involved in Nu Skin have gone on to other companies. Many MLMs have been more accepted in the United States because Nu Skin made such progress as a company."

In the good old days (back in 1984) Nu Skin's founding leaders would grab anyone they could find — the lady at the supermarket, the girl in the parking lot, a guy at a gas station — and bring them to late-night product demonstration meetings.

Blake and Nedra Roney were there, along with Nedra's old schoolmate from BYU, Sandie Tillotson — now Nu Skin's senior vice president — and Blake's buddy, Steve Lund, vice chairman of the board of directors, who was then just starting out as a lawyer.