After stumbling across a blog post about how big brand kitchen products and appliances are mostly just hollow shells with little to no integrity, I found that same blogger/journalist has a robust list of brands that haven’t gone the way of capital sell-outs that goes way beyond kitchen utensils.
It’s worth taking a look at the list as well as the articles. The articles are conversational, but with lots of links to the source material.
Maybe it was different 25 years ago, but from my experience with them 15 years ago, they were just a standard MLM pyramid scheme, where commissions were based on total sales of anyone you recruited + your own base 5% commission. So it meant it made more sense to recruit people than to sell the knives yourself. You also had to buy your own demo sets.