Ropen Blevins first heard the leggings in the fall of 2015, in a post by a colleague from a maternal-themed Facebook group. They had a strong, soft, buttery, interesting pattern: functional clothing to chase young children, adapted to body changes after birth, and pretty enough to be socially acceptable away from home. The woman who advertised the leggings said she bought them in bulk from a company called LuLaRoe and sold them for twice the price.
Blevins was intrigued. She struggled with the alienation of young motherhood and sought to supplement her family’s income, and LuLaRoe offered a seductive and reassuring promise: sign up to be a retailer and you could run a successful virtual boutique away from home while keep your children present.
LuLaRoe seemed to offer “this integrated community, where he knew he could have an instant friendship,” he told the Guardian. As Blevins recalls in LuLaRich, a four-part Amazon docuseria of the besieged multilevel marketing company, LuLaRoe’s women added her to Facebook groups, texted her, invited her to parties that they doubled as fashion sales and cheered her on. In March 2016, Blevins paid $ 9,000 to become a LuLaRoe consultant and receive an initial package of clothes to sell.
At first, things went well: she was excited about clothes and made money selling LuLaRoe on Facebook from her home on the outskirts of San Diego, California. But Blevins quickly felt the strain of the company’s precipitous growth, due to its emphasis on hiring new “consultants,” people from the “downline,” whose initial costs traveled to the queue as ” bonus checks “. By the end of 2016, what had started in 2012 as a business selling maxi skirts out of the trunk of a car by two Mormon grandmothers had surpassed $ 1.3 billion in sales with more than 60,000 consultants and s ‘had faced lawsuits alleging that LuLaRoe founders Mark and DeAnne Stidham tricked retailers and ran a pyramid scheme.
Over the course of four episodes, LuLaRich, directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason (creators of Hulu’s Fyre, about the spectacular collapse of the scamming music festival), analyzes the growth of the warp speed of a company that is it seized on the sense of purpose of millennial and overwhelming women. , repackaged the fallacy of “having it all,” and settled thousands of unfulfilled debts and promises, while the company’s top professionals made millions. The company appealed, Furst said, to “millennials in middle America who don’t have the same opportunities as their parents, who face many different struggles, who are susceptible on the one hand to the nuclear patriarchal family structure, but also the playing field for being a girl’s boss and for empowerment and for being a feminist who sells these leggings ”.
Blevins, like several of LuLaRoe’s former consultants featured in the series, was initially convinced by the promise of running his own business. The company earned the benefits of not only being a LuLaRoe retailer, but a member of a movement, a “boss girl,” “part-time full-time job,” contributing to the household income without going to an office. Or, as Mark tells Nason and Furst in the first episode, “Take your creativity, your passion, your enthusiasm for life, and here you have a place that is pure meritocracy.”
“They saw me, I’m like I’m bubbly, energetic, she knows how to use social media, it’s an advantage to move forward,” Blevins said of the process of preparing for the “love bombing” that convinced her to join. and LuLaRoe. “At the time, I was just a walking dollar sign.”
Slowly, inconsistencies began to build up. Blevins visited the “home office” in Corona, California, or attended corporate events, which increasingly had the feel of pop religious festivals (corporate events included performances by Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry) and Mark began reciting. passages from the book of Mormon. “I thought we were selling leggings?” Blevins remembered the thought. “It just seemed weird.” Blevins received an order for merchandise that smelled of mold; the quality slipped and some poorly designed straight leggings, with prints that resembled the anatomy of the crotch. Now, with several consultants online, Blevins passed questions through the chain, “and they would give me an answer that made sense,” he said.
“You get inside the organization [for answers]. Don’t reach out of the organization for information or to get answers to your questions. It’s very cultured. “
Through interviews with current consultants, employees and consultants and even with Mark and DeAnne themselves, LuLaRich takes a bird’s eye view of what Blevins couldn’t see at the time: the company, allegedly designed to make money not with clothes but with the unsustainable hiring of new members, it was collapsing under its own weight. Mark and DeAnne, who married in 1998, registered the LuLaRoe trademark in 2013 and endowed it with members of their large extended family. In 14 months, from 2015 to 2016, the company went from $ 70 million in sales to over a billion. The benefits for those who joined the company early and whose low lines grew into thousands of people, were staggering: some in the series claim to have received bonus checks of between $ 20,000 and $ 70,000 a month. .
Meanwhile, most of LuLaRoe’s consultants were struggling to get to both ends, encouraged to take on debts and full of merchandise they couldn’t sell. With an excess in the market of LuLaRoe consultants, most of which fell under the weight. “A lot of people lost their marriages, their lives were in ruins, people were selling breast milk for start-up expenses. LaShae Kimbrough Benson, who started as an administrative assistant at the company’s headquarters in 2015, told The Guardian. “People took out loans, all kinds of things [Mark and DeAnne] I knew it. “
The differentiated margins were for the design of multilevel marketing companies (essentially legal pyramid schemes under the guise of selling a product rather than belonging to members), according to series experts like Robert FitzPatrick, author of Ponzinomics: The Untold Story of multilevel marketing. Legal MLMs must have a repurchase policy and prohibit the purchase of new inventory until retailers have sold 70% and have at least 10 new customers. As Benson and other former employees recall, LuLaRoe bordered this line. “We always had a quota to reach,” said Benson, who eventually worked for the “onboarding” team for new members.
The Stidhams claim that LuLaRoe, which still operates (although start-up costs have dropped by 90% and the structure of the commission altered), was never a scam, but a meritocratic scale that reflects the effort and personal character. The couple participated in an initial interview with the filmmakers to detail the company’s home history and entrepreneurial values while maintaining a traditional family structure; rejected a second interview to specifically address the claims made against the company in 50 lawsuits filed since 2016, as well as some of the most outrageous elements of corporate culture: that they pressured consultants to engage in weight loss surgery in Tijuana and they would receive setbacks from the doctor, for example.
Instead, the company offered a statement presented at the end of the series: “We continue to focus on our mission to improve lives and strengthen families through the principles of entrepreneurship, while continuing to educate small business owners. on the opportunities that lie in personal responsibility and individual choice. “
“It’s this double-edged sword of personal responsibility,” Furst said of the statement. “This is what MLM feeds on in the first place: if it’s a failure, it is Yours guilt “.
Blevins felt the stigma when he began to lose faith in the company during 2017. The last time was to join a Facebook support group for former LuLaRoe consultants and “have all the little ones things I had never complained about, any questions I had, they all answered, ”she said. He read the messages and cried.
“There’s a grieving process you experience when you leave an MLM,” said Blevins, who left LuLaRoe in September 2017 and now defends MLMs through his own podcast. “There was a lot of excommunication, a lot of harassment, a lot of people telling me I was crazy or saying ‘You’re going to ruin your life by leaving.'”
Internal pressure to shut up and avoid “negativity” was something that haunted many women who participated in the series, according to co-director Julia Willoughby Nason. “There was just a lot of pressure and bullying behind the scenes, and the rebound that these women had already experienced, and I think they were very scared of the repercussions if they had a platform like a multi-party document. series, “he said.
In February, LuLaRoe agreed to pay $ 4.75 million to Washington state to resolve a 2019 consumer protection lawsuit alleging the company had operated a pyramid scheme that made “unfair and misleading misrepresentations about profitability. “from being a retailer. Through his collection of first-person testimony, LuLaRich offers an “invitation, tacitly, to attorneys general across the country to do what Washington did and protect its consumers,” Furst said. Meanwhile, the company still promises a “community of lasting love and coexistence” on a website that proposes “creating freedom through fashion” through a single button: “Join LuLaRoe.”