Halloween reviews start on October 1!
Unless you have been living under a rock, I’m sure you have heard of LuLaRoe. You know, those are the “buttery soft” leggings that “fashionable” moms everywhere wear. The company skyrocketed to popularity only to fall from grace amid scandal. Well, the people that brought us the Hulu documentary, Fyre Fraud, have given us LuLaRich, a four-part docuseries on Amazon Prime, to show us all the gritty details behind the shady company.
In case you aren’t aware of the issues surrounding LuLaRoe, here is a not-so-quick synopsis. The company started with DeAnne Brady selling maxi skirts, that she sewed at home, out of the trunk of her car. When she became overloaded with sales, she recruited some of her friends to help sell the clothes. As the company grew, more consultants signed on and the company began to form a tiered (or may I say, pyramid) ranking of these consultants. The top tiers would make a commission based on the sales of their lower tiers and so on. (Obviously the bottom tier didn’t have commissions as there was no tier under them.) Those top tiers would rake in tens of thousands of dollars per month. I believe some of the top tier consultants got monthly checks for $70,000 or more. While multi-level marketing (MLMs) are not illegal, pyramid schemes are. And this, my friends, is a pyramid scheme.
The issues really started when LuLaRoe had more consultants than an area could handle. It became difficult for consultants to sell their products because there was so much competition. In addition, the quality of the clothing started to go down. Leggings, their highest selling product by far, would arrive smelling bad or have holds in them or the patterns were sewn badly, resulting in the infamous Tower of Pisa leggings or other almost-x-rated patterns.
Eventually, consultants began leaving en masse. LuLaRoe, in an attempt to keep all of their profits, refused to honor the 100% refund they promised their consultants. Bring on the lawsuits!
How does the docuseries do telling this story? Eh. If you already know the story of the company, the series will probably bore you. There are some interviews with Brady and her husband, Mark Stidham, as well as some former employees. We haven’t heard a lot from the people involved with the actual corporation. Those parts are interesting. However, there are a lot of interviews with the very vocal consultants that were in the top tiers before they left the company. I would have preferred to hear more from the people in the lower tiers that lost everything and barely made any money. I don’t have a lot of sympathy for people who raked in tens of thousands of dollars each month on the backs of other people’s work then sob when their expensive sports cars are repossessed.
Each episode is roughly 45 minutes. If you are interesting in hearing more about the terrible things DeAnne and the company did (trust me, I only scratched the surface), it is worth the watch. However, if you are already familiar with the basics of the story, you would probably do better watching the video Vice put out in 2019.
