Who I am
My name is Nick Apostolidis.
I am a digital accessibility professional, a father of four, and someone who has learned to start again when things do not go as planned.
I have also been blind since birth.
I mention this neither to impress nor to ask for different treatment. It is, however, an essential part of my story, because it has shaped my studies, the way I work, how I travel, my access to information and, of course, my experience with Herbalife.
Alongside my professional life, music has always been an important part of who I am. I have been creatively involved in music, composition and expressing myself through songs. That side of my life has taught me something that applies to the rest of it too: nothing worthwhile is built in a moment. It takes repetition, discipline, a personal voice and the courage to keep going even when results are not immediate.
This is not a success story.
At least, not yet.
It is the story of a relationship with Herbalife that began more than 25 years ago, stopped, started again, and went through enthusiasm, results, mistakes, disappointment and, eventually, a long pause.
I am writing it because I believe that the stories of people who did not succeed the first time may have more to teach us than those in which everything seems to have gone right.
I do not want to prove that network marketing is easy. It is not. Nor that believing strongly in something is enough to succeed. My own experience shows exactly the opposite.
I want to talk about what I did right, what I did wrong, what I could not control and, above all, why I decided in 2026 to start again from scratch.
If this story has a purpose, it is this: to show someone who tried and did not succeed that a failure does not have to be the final page. It may be the education they needed before their next attempt.
First contact and early lessons
My first contact with Herbalife happened almost by chance, around 2000–2001. I was not the one who started. My father, Alexis, started with his twin brother, Andreas. That was how Herbalife first entered my life and my family.
I tried the products and was enthusiastic about them. At the time, though, I was going through a fairly difficult period in my own life. I was studying in the Department of Informatics at the University of Athens, but the serious accessibility barriers I faced effectively prevented me from taking exams on equal terms and progressing with my studies.
For a blind student at that time, many things that are taken for granted today simply were not available. Learning materials were not always accessible, procedures were not designed for people using assistive technology, and often the issue was not whether I knew the subject, but whether I could participate equally in the education and assessment process itself.
At some point, I decided I needed a reset. To leave that attempt behind and start my studies again in England.
Around the same time, Andreas, my father's brother, decided to risk more money to reach the Supervisor level at Herbalife. His upline did not discourage him from that decision. The result was that he ended up with a very large quantity of products in the office he shared with my father.
In a way, I benefited from the situation too. As I was preparing to leave for England and had very little money, I began using quite a few of those products and making them part of my daily routine.
And there were products I truly loved.
Vanilla Formula 1 became one of my favourites. So did Energy with guarana, which was sold as tablets in the Greek market at the time. It was one of the products I remembered particularly fondly and later looked for again.
I also loved the aloe and the classic tea. Back then, there was not the variety of flavours available today. Things were much simpler.
But my relationship with Herbalife in those years was not limited to the products.
Whenever I returned to Greece for holidays, I went with my father and uncle to many of the events and seminars organised by their upline. Without having planned it, I began gaining substantial training in network marketing.
In fact, I was not starting from scratch. Before that period, I had been personally active with Amway for about two years. From that experience, I had collected quite a lot of training material and many cassette tapes about networking, sales, communication and team development.
Over time, I realised that much of this knowledge was not specific to one company. These were principles of communication and network marketing that I could also use with Herbalife.
This created a rather unusual situation: without being a Herbalife member myself, I often found myself talking to customers and people interested in the business opportunity on behalf of both my father and my uncle.
In practice, because of my previous experience and training, I was often the most trained of the three of us when it came to networking.
They often told me:
“You should sign up.”
And I thought about it. I liked the products, already knew quite a bit about network marketing, and could communicate the idea.
But there was a significant barrier.
I was living in England and felt that I did not have the support there that I would need to get started properly. So I kept putting it off.
Looking back, I consider that delay one of my first important lessons.
Knowing what to do is not enough.
You need a way to do it consistently.
And at the time, I did not have one.
A little later, disagreements and problems arose between my uncle and their direct sponsor. That relationship had a significant impact on their work together, and eventually both my uncle and my father stopped actively participating in networking.
That was also when my own contact with the company ended.
A long period followed in which Herbalife was effectively absent from my life.
There was no conscious decision that “it was over”. Life simply took a different direction.
I went abroad, completed my studies, entered the workforce and spent years focused on entirely different priorities.
In the meantime, I changed too.
I gained quite a lot of weight, and my blood tests started showing levels that needed monitoring, including cholesterol, blood sugar and triglycerides. These were personal health issues that required medical monitoring, independently of any nutritional product.
2019 — returning and making my own decision
And that brings us to 2019.
Almost two decades had passed since I first encountered Herbalife.
I was no longer a student.
I had studied, worked, lived in England for years and developed very different priorities.
And then I met a woman.
I fell in love with her, and she would become the woman I would share my life with.
That relationship was one of the main reasons I began to reconsider the life I had built up to that point.
I decided to move back home to Greece.
I was not returning for Herbalife.
I was returning to build a life with the person I had chosen.
A little later, we decided to get married.
And in the middle of that new beginning, an old memory returned.
I wanted to lose some weight before the wedding and remembered the products I had discovered many years earlier.
Nobody approached me.
I went looking for them.
I told my wife about that earlier experience and said I wanted to find an active independent distributor again.
We searched online and on Facebook, and that was how we found Andreas Galanis.
He was the person who brought me back into contact with Herbalife and, this time, helped me become an independent distributor myself.
That was an important moment.
For the first time, the decision was truly mine.
I received my own distributor ID and decided to get actively involved.
As part of my effort to organise my diet and daily routine better, I managed to reach around 72 kilograms before my wedding.
That was my personal result. It does not mean that someone else will have the same experience or the same result.
For me, though, it meant a great deal.
I already knew several products, but now there were new flavours, new choices and new things to discover.
It felt like getting to know Herbalife all over again.
Starting the business and facing accessibility barriers
After my wedding, while we were expecting our first child, I decided to take the business side seriously as well.
And the initial results were positive.
Within my first year, I managed to reach the Supervisor level.
At the same time, I met people in my upline who genuinely supported me.
That was particularly important to me because, as a blind distributor, I faced several accessibility barriers.
The Herbalife website was not always easy to use with assistive technology.
But even something as simple as identifying which product I was holding could be a real barrier at the time.
For a sighted person, two different packages may be immediately distinguishable.
For me, if a box or bottle had no accessible identification, I could have many products in front of me and not know which was which.
Today, I can use artificial intelligence, a camera and text recognition to get information within seconds.
Back then, that simply was not there.
The same applied to training materials.
If information existed only in print or in an inaccessible digital file, I could not simply read it as another distributor could.
But when I faced those barriers, I found people willing to help.
That support went as far as recording training materials for me, so that I could access the same information.
I particularly remember Sofia Eleftheriadou and the team who helped with that effort.
It is something I remain grateful to them for.
There was also another practical issue.
Travel.
For me, going to an event on the other side of Athens was not simply a matter of getting in the car and leaving.
It required planning, time, transport, possibly assistance and considerable extra energy.
And when those events were frequent, the overall burden became significant.
I did not see it as an excuse.
It was my business, and I felt it was my responsibility to be there.
But it was a real circumstance that affected how I could work.
What did not work
Despite that good start, though, I did not manage to build what I wanted.
At the time, I could not clearly see all the reasons.
Today, I can.
I relied too heavily on my personal motivation. I believed that wanting it badly enough would keep me consistent.
It did not.
I also failed to create a truly consistent and repeatable system for reaching people.
I had energy.
I had knowledge.
I had determination.
But not always a process.
At the same time, I was much more influenced by the people around me than I wanted to admit.
My wife was particularly negative about the products and about Herbalife in general.
And however much I tried to ignore it, that constant friction affected me.
The business also could not financially support my family at the time.
I needed regular, stable employment.
And when time becomes limited, an activity without a strong system can very easily fall behind.
I did something else that I would handle differently today.
I waited to find the “right person” who would become the foundation of the team.
Today, I understand that you cannot build a business while waiting for one person to save it.
There has to be a process that can work with many different people.
The pandemic and the pause
Then the pandemic arrived.
Strange as it may sound, part of that change worked in my favour.
Zoom entered our lives, bringing online support with it.
That was valuable to me.
For the first time, a significant part of the training and communication could come to me, instead of my always having to travel to it.
For a blind person, that was more than convenience.
It substantially reduced a real barrier.
Being able to participate online showed me that the work could be done differently.
But at the same time, I lost much of my personal contact with people, needed to focus more on my main job, and faced increasing pressure at home.
Together, all of that wore me down.
And eventually, I stopped.
I did not stop because I had proved that “it cannot be done”.
I stopped because the way I was trying to do it was not sustainable for my life.
Nevertheless, I kept my membership active so that I could continue buying the products I liked.
The business side had stopped.
My personal relationship with the products had not.
I associated them with periods when I took better care of myself and followed a more organised daily routine.
2026 — a different starting point
And that brings us to the next big jump forward.
Today, I have a good job and a decent income.
Yet the reality of family life is very different from what I imagined a few years ago.
I now have four children, and our family's needs have increased enormously. There are additional support needs, and we often need people to help us practically with the children and everyday life.
All of this carries a very significant financial cost.
And that was when I began thinking again about something I thought I had left behind.
Was it time to try again?
Not because I had failed professionally elsewhere.
Quite the opposite.
I am returning from a very different position.
Today, I work professionally in digital accessibility.
My visual disability, which has created barriers at various points in my life, has also become a core part of my professional knowledge.
I have learned to identify barriers that others do not see.
To assess whether a system truly works for the person who needs to use it.
To organise projects.
To work with technology.
To design services and experiences.
To analyse a problem and look not just for a temporary solution, but for a way to prevent it from happening again.
And that is perhaps the biggest difference from my previous attempt.
Back then, I mainly tried to work harder.
Today, I want to work better.
I also have tools that were not there before.
Artificial intelligence is changing a great deal for me.
It helps me access information that used to be difficult to access.
To identify products.
To organise material.
To create content.
To prepare follow-ups.
To reduce my dependence on other people.
To work more systematically.
That does not mean my disability has disappeared.
It does not mean everything has become accessible.
But it does mean that today I can work around barriers that made me much more dependent on other people just a few years ago.
And for me, that changes the situation significantly.
It does not mean success has become easy.
It means I now have more tools to address the problems that stopped me then.
I am also older.
More mature.
I already know I cannot rely on enthusiasm alone.
I know life will not pause to let me build a business.
I know I have a family, responsibilities and a regular job.
I know the people around me may not always be supportive.
And I know that no one joining a team is going to “save” my efforts.
Starting again with what I learned
That is why I decided to make another reset.
To start from the beginning.
Not by pretending the past did not happen.
By using it.
I am not returning as someone who has already succeeded.
I am returning as someone who tried, made progress, struggled, stopped and decided it was worth trying one more time.
And perhaps that is ultimately the most important part of this story.
Not every story has to be a triumph to have value.
Sometimes the real story is that you fell, learned, changed and returned with greater awareness.
And that is exactly where I am today.
At the beginning of a new effort.
Not at the end of a success story.
At the beginning of a story I want to write differently this time.
And this time, I am not interested in proving that I never failed.
I am interested in proving that I learned.