For years, it seemed, they were stalking us. Brightly colored leggings in busy, garish patterns infested social media feeds. Photos of them. Links to them. Invites to parties showcasing them. Videos of women going live on Facebook to model and then implore you to buy them.
It felt like each day brought two or three more people you knew peddling these kaleidoscopic LuLaRoe clothes—a girl you went to high school with, a cousin, a co-worker’s wife—the women all boasting about their reincarnation as Girl Boss entrepreneurs. They were making their own money and in charge of their own business as LuLaRoe retailers, contributing to their family’s finances while having the freedom to juggle mom duties. And, what’s more, you could be a Boss Babe selling leggings with owls and pizzas on them, too. Just ask how!
Beyond the proliferation of mosaic athleisure wear, LuLaRoe was a phenomenon. By 2016, it was a billion-dollar company with over 60,000 “consultants,” women who spent between $5,000 and $10,000 to buy in and start selling—plus a weeks-long waiting list of others in the wings desperate to join.
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There were multimillion dollar conventions staged around the country, where Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson performed in between seminars coded in pop-feminism gibberish about “empowerment.” There were reports of women who, after recruiting thousands of retailers on their downline, received bonus checks well into six figures, spoiling themselves with trips on private jets and lavish shopping sprees.
And of course every word of that description of LuLaRoe is a massive, billowing red flag that reads, “pyramid scheme,” which the company has been accused of being amidst an outrageous downfall involving lawsuits, the exodus of thousands of retailers, comparisons to a “cult,” and a recent multimillion-dollar settlement.
“I had noticed that even the label had a pyramid on it,” director Julia Willoughby Nason tells The Daily Beast, laughing. “Being of a certain gender, that was certainly in my social-media sniff test.”
Nason and Jenner Furst, who previously made 2019’s Fyre Fraud for Hulu, co-directed LuLaRich, a new docuseries about the rise and fall of LuLaRoe, and all the grotesque practices in between. The series premiered Friday on Amazon and has already sent binge-watchers onto social media with collective gasps over the unbelievable revelations about the scandal.
Implausibly, in what amounts to a docuseries miracle for the filmmakers and viewers alike, LuLaRich founders DeAnne and Mark Stidham sat down for a six-hour interview early in production.
“I think it was pretty simple physics. We were a body in motion,” Furst says. “We were going to make a film, and you can either have a voice in it and tell your story or others will tell your story. I don’t know if it’s pure human instinct to want to defend and tell your own story, or if it’s part of our lesser self, our narcissistic or egoic self, that wants to be in control and still believes that there’s a chance—still believes that they can hold on to that thing, whatever they have.”
One might argue that “thing” is delusion.
The Stidhams are unbelievable characters. DeAnne, who apparently has “the higher hair, the closer to God” stitched onto her soul, was a divorced single mom of seven when she met Mark. After 23 years together, the couple, who identify as Mormons and often preached the church’s word at LuLaRoe conferences, have 14 children together. Two of their adopted children have since married each other.
The first thing you see on screen in LuLaRich is the two of them fussing over a Guatemalan rug the shot will be framed around, micromanaging how the tassels are fluffed before allowing the interview to begin. They project salt-of-the-Earth wholesomeness and maniacal hubris in equal, unsettling measure.
The company was born out of DeAnne’s hustle of selling clothes she bought at swap meets at dress parties. That evolved into her selling maxi skirts that she designed. After convincing a woman in Utah to buy inventory of the skirts wholesale and then sell them herself at a mark-up, LuLaRoe was born. It’s at this point you learn that both DeAnne and Mark have experience with Amway, one of the most notorious multi-level marketing schemes.
The Stidhams are fascinating manifestations of plausible deniability, explaining away everything from the predatory buy-in plan, the lack of profit for the vast majority of retailers, the refund money that was never paid out, the decline in product quality, and even their son, who had a corporate position, being caught on video imploring retailers to talk about the company in a way that made it seem less like a pyramid scheme.
But before LuLaRoe’s army of women revolted against the leggings that arrived wet, torn, and smelling like “dead farts”—filing lawsuits after the company reneged on its promise for refunds—it was a raging success. A perfect storm of social media, a population of moms and housewives more educated than any generation before and desperate to prove their worth, and girl-boss lingo cleverly designed to catch their attention made for a flawless recruiting tool. “It was super sinister,” Nason says.
Those women’s stories provide the backbone of LuLaRich.
There’s the women who followed the company’s guide to putting debt on credit cards to buy in, and the others who sold breast milk to fund the seed money. One went from blowing six-figure bonus checks at Louis Vuitton to divorcing her husband, selling her house, and filing for bankruptcy when the company’s bonus structure changed.
Another was forced to sue when a $20,000 refund of inventory was not honored because she didn’t return the product quickly enough; she had just had a miscarriage and was suffering postpartum depression and therefore missed an unstipulated deadline.
A former LuLaRoe in-house employee named Derryl Trujillo lamented that, once he learned that Kelly Clarkson had been paid to sing at a convention when women were being denied the money they were owed, he could never bring himself to listen to any of the American Idol winner’s songs again. Not even her duet with Jason Aldean, which was his favorite.
LuLaRich is a dramatic story about the promise of the American dream and the crassness of corporate greed. It’s also about what happens when a company’s success becomes a runaway train that no one is equipped to handle—especially when you’re talking about the unwieldy and precarious legality of multi-level marketing.
“It was like flying a plane while still building the plane, and you didn’t know how pieces of the plane work,” the Stidhams’ nephew, Sam Schultz, who was events director, said about the catastrophic growth. “And you’ve never flown a plane. You’re not even a pilot. It was a corporate tornado for sure. You don’t know what that tornado is like unless you’re in the middle of it looking through the eye of the tornado.”
LuLaRich reports that, in 2016, the top 0.01 percent of LuLaRoe made $150,000 in bonuses, while 70 percent of retailers made nothing. In 2019, Washington state filed a civil lawsuit against LuLaRoe for operating as an illegal pyramid scheme, which was settled for $4.75 million in February.
For more on that, what the hell the Stidhams were thinking, and how all this happened in the first place, we chatted with Nason and Furst about LuLaRich.
I think a lot of people who are aware of the LuLaRoe scandal are going into watching LuLaRich with schadenfreude in mind. What do you make of people’s desire to watch a juicy takedown of these people?
Furst: I think schadenfreude is common for all of us. But with a lot of these dumpster fires, I think what makes them the most thought-provoking is when we start to see our own belongings in the blaze. I think that there's something about these stories—Fyre Fraud, LuLaRich—that they have a piece of us in them, too. No one is “innocent,” quote unquote. No one is untouched from this type of stuff because it’s so systemic that it affects all of us.
What was your awareness of LuLaRoe before working on this?
Nason: I had noticed that even the label had a pyramid on it. Being of a certain gender, that was certainly in my social-media sniff test. That's pretty much as far as it went in terms of knowing straight-on about this. They all blend together, these MLMs, to a certain degree, especially when it’s like this athleisure-obsession generation of this “sweatpant supermom.” I didn't really know the depth and the teeth to it until we really started to take this project on. Underneath the hood is a fanciful world of smoke and mirrors, and essentially Oz behind the curtain.
I love that phrase, “sweatpants supermom.” Why do you think it was this company, LuLaRoe, and these patterned leggings that so many women became obsessed with?
Furst: We went into this knowing multi-level marketing wasn’t new. It’s been around for decades. But I think what makes this so sticky and what makes this story worth reexamining is the dichotomy between a very obvious sort of stay-at-home mom, patriarchal kind of construct, and then the pitch that you’re going to get women’s empowerment. You’re going to be a Girl Boss and a Boss Babe. Then the products themselves are geared towards women and children. But in the end, it was this handcuffed, oppressive model where you had to work all night in your own personal sweatshop to break even, if you were even close to the middle of the pyramid. And if you were at the bottom, there was no chance in hell you were going to make money.
Nason: I think to speak to the women’s empowerment/gaslighting aspect of the salesmanship, the reason why these people couldn’t make money in the end was because there was no market reach. Everybody starts to sell to each other. So essentially it was like, here’s an empowerment dish, and then you guys all eat each other. It’s super sinister. At the same time, it’s that sinister connection that was sold too, which is there can be a community around eating each other. There can be a community around rising to the top, essentially masquerading greed as like a family value.
The docuseries talks a lot about how the company preyed upon women who were more educated than they had ever been before, that it was a different demographic and different type of woman than had been victimized by past MLMs. How did that play into things?
Nason: I think the difference in education of women now that fall prey to MLMs is that the companies are very savvy with using the catchphrases and lingos of an educated person or a woman. They hook you in to say, “Yeah, that’s my language. Those are my values. I want to have it all. It's not fair that my husband comes and parenting, to him, is a hobby. I'm an educated woman and I want to make money and I’m fierce.” It’s these cheap slogans of pop feminism.
Furst: The “don’t be a victim” seminars and all these different things extended the psychological warfare that was necessary to overcome that these were people that were people more educated than before. But that’s the extension of the same story with Fyre Fraud. It’s the millennial experience.
They’re both very millennial stories.
Furst: We’re more educated than any generation before, yet we have less opportunity than our parents. In Fyre Fraud, there were a bunch of shiny objects and celebrity influencers on yachts, and here it was dress parties and a chance to make great money and support your family. This is the millennial experience that women and men around the country are experiencing. They’re experiencing the lack of opportunity, the need for some kind of prosperity. The dream and the promise of that is as seductive as ever, because the pain and the real dearth of opportunity is increasing day by day.
I’m fascinated that the Stidhams agreed to this. What was your approach to that big interview, and what do you think their goal was?
Furst: I think it was pretty simple physics. We were a body in motion. We were going to make a film, and you know you can either have a voice in it and tell your story or others will tell your story. I don’t know if it’s pure human instinct to want to defend and tell your own story, or if it’s part of our lesser self, our narcissistic or egoic self, that wants to be in control and still believes that there’s a chance—still believes that they can hold on to that thing, whatever they have.
So they thought they could control the narrative?
Furst: And the reality is they’re still in business, so that was another thing going for the project. LuLaRoe is fully operational at this point. You can go and buy their product. You can go to their website. You can call them. I don’t know if anyone’s there to answer the phone, but they’re still in business and so that creates a question: If you’re still in business and you believe you’re in business for all the right reasons, then why wouldn’t you sit down? Why wouldn’t you tell us about your company? I think they saw it the same way.
There’s a note near the end of the film that they canceled a request for a second interview. Do you think that was in response to any sort of unease or displeasure with how that first six hours had gone?
Furst: I think their hopes for what could happen if they took control of the narrative was that they could take control of us. And we were after the truth. We let them know that from day one. The arrangement that we discussed with them was, we’re going to give you a chance to set the stage and tell us all about your company. Here’s a bunch of questions we have. Just talk. Tell us who you are, where you’re from. That was the spirit of the first interview with a series of actually pretty tough questions sandwiched in there that related to the open case in Washington. But the plan was always that we’re going to come back after we've spoken to everybody else. And we’re going to ask you all the tough questions and give you a chance to respond. That was the interview they turned down.
How much of this whole story do you think was a business being a runaway train that got away from these people who didn’t know how to manage it? And how much did you end up feeling actually was intentional?
Nason: I think that there’s a level of privilege to have plausible deniability as business owners. I think that it was a combination of the runaway train, that their business just grew insanely so quickly that they didn’t have the infrastructure to keep up with it. A lot of mistakes happened and they just kept cleaning it up ad infinitum. I just think that there’s a level of white privilege to say, “I didn’t know better.” I’ll say that.
Furst: There’s no question that if Mark and DeAnne were African American that something criminally would have been done against them and they would be potentially sitting in a federal prison right now. But even still, I think that’s part of the American dream, too, to tap-dance your way out of a lawsuit and learn how to settle things. To have a great lawyer and know how to talk to the press when things catch on fire. I think that they’re very savvy. They’re claiming that they did wrong things. They didn’t intend to be wrong, and that anything they’ve done wrong, they’re willing to clean up. If you look at a $4.75 million speeding ticket for a billion-dollar company, I don't know yet if quote unquote “justice” has been served.
I’m getting told to wrap up, but I have one last question: Do I have to stop listening to Katy Perry and Kelly Clarkson now?
Furst: I think the ball is in your court, Kevin. We need Kelly Clarkson to invite Derryl Trujillo onto her show and solve this. This is of maximum importance. It’s global news. It’s breaking. I think that Darrell boycotting Kelly Clarkson, you know, like what has happened to the world? I mean he needs to listen to that Jason Aldean duet.
Nason: We’re going to do a GoFundMe and a Change.org about it.
