1. Not to get on my lil Atheist Soapbox so early on the Lord’s Day or anything, but damn. Y’all really do ruin a lot of stuff by randomly throwing religion into things where it simply does not belong whatsoever. There’s no reason to quote the Book of Mormon to women who just wanna sell ugly leggings.
2. The girl who designs the ugly leggings is such a stoner and I’m obsessed with her. I’m one-thousand percent sure she hates 98% of the LuLaRoe customer base, so she’s great in my book.
3. Last night when we watched it, my main takeaway was that Money Corrupts. This perfectly wholesome maxi-dress company for stay-at-home moms ballooned into a cult-like pyramid scheme where the owners took zero responsibility for problems within the organization all because of greed. I was actually very impressed with the startup story of how DeAnne created LuLaRoe and I honestly believe she and her husband only had the best of intentions. I don’t think they set out to defraud anybody or steal money from anyone at all, and then the company got away from them and they couldn’t admit their failures or own up to the things they were doing badly.
4. This morning after I’ve slept on it, I’m walking that back, because money can’t corrupt you out of nowhere. All the seeds where already there in the Stidham’s belief system: patriarchy, bootstraps, and unacknowledged white supremacy. If DeAnne and Mark ran LuLaRoe the way she ran it when she had 3 sellers, we wouldn’t be sitting here talking about how disgusting they are. But they also wouldn’t be sitting on a billion dollar business.
5. The pot-selling nephew is a joke. The whole family is a joke but he’s such an obnoxious piece of human.
6. MLMs are pyramid schemes. It is what it is. I grew up in the Rural South. I am so *so!* familiar with pyramid schemes. I can’t tell you how many “meetings” I went to with my grandma, held in some small conference room of a Howard Johnson or Holiday Inn, where the scammer of the month rolled through with a new product to “sell” based on a structure that was essentially just a money tree. You put $10 in this week and get $100 back in three weeks! Some are worse than others and LuLaRoe is definitely toward the crappier end of things, but I wanna make a lil sidenote about MLMs — not everybody goes into it wanting to be a seller. A lot of them are structured just like LuLaRoe, where you make more money by bringing in people under you than you make from selling the clothes, but whereas LuLaRoe worked on this massive startup cost of thousands of dollars with a truckload of clothes you would never personally use, some MLMs have more reasonable startup costs and a small buy-in of product that some “sellers” use just for themselves. If you’re in a pyramid scheme selling fancy coffee beans and you try to sell me some, maybe I like the product and I buy a couple of bags for $20 a piece. Then you say, “you know, you could make some money and be a seller too. I buy these from the company for $10 a piece, so I make $10 profit on each one. It’s only $100 to sign up.” Well to me that sounds like I can become a “seller” and get these beans for half off, and now I have ten bags of coffee. If I sell it, fine, but it’s really just for my household. So many MLMs have a huge “seller” base that never intends to actually sell anything. LuLaRoe isn’t one of them, but I kinda wish that point had been made in the documentary because it shows LuLaRoe is even more unscrupulous by comparison.
7. I don’t think we’d be watching this documentary after 50 lawsuits if they hadn’t let the product quality slip while also refusing to acknowledge the product quality slipped. If you send me stuff that smells, stuff that’s wet, stuff with holes in it, etc. and then cop a smarmy little attitude when I can’t sell it or complain about the merchandise, I’m gonna assume (rightfully) that you’re a pisspot little human and I no longer care about your company. You’re a crook and I want you to go down for taking advantage of me and everyone else. LuLaRoe expanded too quickly to keep up with quality control. If they had just admitted that and taken the loss (which they could absolutely afford to do!) they would still be as big as they were three years ago
8. I wore a pair of the low-quality leggings and they ripped after 30 minutes of walking. My Jimmy Jam & Terry Lewis were just out of control on 8th Avenue for everybody to see. I had to run into a shop and buy some shorts.
9. To reiterate! LuLaRoe is a cult of patriarchy and white supremacy, but they would still be a wildly successful MLM if they had handled the quality control issues with any amount of grace and empathy. It’s hard for me to feel bad for women who got in over their heads with a company that is so clearly exclusionary from all of the promotional materials and advertisements they make. You joined a White Jesus Cult. I don’t really care about the consequences of that terrible decision.
10. Y’all were buying ugly clothes off FACEBOOK! I just have to laugh.
11. LuLaRich doesn’t have the same kind of forward motion that Fyre Fraud did (the same team did both documentaries). I wasn’t quite as engaged over the course of the 4-episode series as I was with Fyre Fraud, but it was still interesting to watch it come together and fall apart. It’s not an absolute Must-See, but still enjoyable, especially if you like to see people talk about cults they were in. As far as the genre of Escaping a Cult goes, this is a lot easier to watch than the ones about NXIVM and Scientology, because the stakes are more along the lines of ruining your credit as opposed to ruining your entire life.
12. How long has this lady had braces? That’s not a read, because she is so cute and fun, but I’m genuinely curious.
Score: 6.5 / 10
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