LuLaRich (2021) User Reviews

Serries is good - people are loathsome.

[al-939-110267 · 8/10 · 10 September 2021]

8 stars for the expose itself. However the people are upsetting and it would easy to rate the movie based on the people.

DeAnne, Mark and many of their children are despicable. These people represent attitudes and narcissism of the most depraved people in our society. What a group of disgraceful people. Thank you, Amazon, for exposing this group. Watch it and see how what would seem to good people down the food chain turn into the form of unacceptable behavior. Mankind in a very poor light.

The "Tiger King" of Fashion and Pyramid Schemes!

[Felicia_Voris · 8/10 · 10 September 2021]

Disclaimer: The clothes offered by said company are not my style, and even if they offered clothes I liked, the company doesn't make anything in my size.

Last year's "Tiger King" sent my brain for a spin. I wasn't expecting "LuLaRich" to blow my mind...but it did!

The documentary starts off with the affable owners DeAnne and Mark Stidham sitting down for a convo about themselves, their family, and the meteoric rise of their business. I'm thinking- wow, how cool DeAnne is as she uses the tried and true "party plan" to sell her skirts!

As the story progresses, I figure the truth is somewhere between the perma smile DeAnne exhibits and the frustration of former consultants. Some of the former consultants were earning monthly bonus checks in excess of $40k. How bad could the culture at LuLaRoe be?

And then BAM! Tales of company pressure to recruit people as consultants, poor clothing quality, and rigorous social media expectations come to light. Okay, this is de rigueur stuff for any "home sales party" type of business.

What I didn't expect was:

1. Sell your breast milk to raise funds for what was a $5k start up fee 2. Spend 5 minutes on your knees daily and your husband won't care how much money you spend 3. DeAnne and/or her sister scheduling trips to Tijuana so consultants can have weight loss surgery- to help present the LuLaRoe image of successful, skinny consultants 4. A business with a mantra of empowering women to achieve financial success, yet incorporating patriarchal tropes into business training (I am just a helpless woman at the mercy of you big, strong men.) 5. Mark quoting the Book of Mormon during consultant trainings and comparing himself to Joseph Smith 6. A cult-like meeting where LuLaRoe rented a stadium and paid Katie Perry $5 million to perform 7. A homogeneous group of over 80k consultants (at the companies height) that were self-described as very white, very blonde DeAnne look a likes. Yes, there is some diversity with the company, however, the aesthetic of the company tends to hit the mark with the "basic" white woman 8. Scenes from a recorded deposition (if you don't pay the correct amount of sales tax or set your business up like an illegal pyramid scheme, expect to be hauled into court) where DeAnne comes off as a fake, greedy reptile.

I'll stop- you'll have to watch the four-part documentary on Amazon to find out the rest of the story.

After seeing this documentary, I wouldn't buy their clothes. How do you spend your money with company whose business model "works" because it keeps 80% of its consultants poor? And, before I get too self-righteous, I'm sure a documentary that exposed who makes my clothes would leave me gobsmacked as well. I'll channel my best DeAnne when I glibly say- "I love fashion" and ignore what's behind the scenes of of making my clothes.

There was so much more they could have added

[spivaphotography · 8/10 · 13 September 2021]

My only complaint was that there were other issues that plagued Lularoe like the Hun on Hun pettiness, Lularoe Bless Website, Make Good was barely mentioned, the debit card.....great storytelling, great interviews. Wish there were more episodes coming.

Love it!!! what an eye opener

[bowmakingmommy · 10/10 · 10 September 2021]

Wow this is completely eye opening. In a time when so many are looking for jobs that allow you to work from home this documentary really show you why finding a company that is reputable is so important. Helping stay at home moms know what to look out for, I am so happy to have found this show. Way to go on shining a light on MLMs and how they really work.

The greed in this film makes my skin crawl

[docnrse · 9/10 · 10 September 2021]

Well-made documentary explaining how pyramid schemes work, how greedy people set their sights on their "marks" (victims), and how laws in the US need to be stronger.

The film makers use a lot of interviews with key players, and historic clips from the depositions of deanne brady and mark stidham, the founding fraudsters of Lularoe (purported to be a company that sells clothes made out of stretch cloth with brightly colored designs on it). Their own damning words are used against them over and over, and their only response is to imply that if someone lost everything because they bought into the Lularoe pyramid scheme, then that's because those victims are stupid or didn't work hard enough or are whiners. The deposition videos are great watching!

Stidham manages to pull up tears when necessary and makes sure we all know he didn't plan the emotion. Brady, however, seemed unable to muster any expression other than disdain for everyone and every question, sipping her beverage to hide her discomfort, and glaring at the camera with a smile that doesn't really seem to be a smile. She's cold-blooded, and the film makers did a great job of capturing this.

Many people are interviewed and sometimes I couldn't help but wonder if they were allowing themselves to be interviewed because they thought it would help their own social media standings. Several of them seemed to know they had done wrong things, but were not willing to admit enough in front of the camera that they would have to suffer any penalty for their own misdeeds.

Mormonism is brought up. The company brings people in by claiming to be all about "family first" and they put this in all their literature. Apparently they just mean their family, as their nepotism was also highlighted. Stidham is shown likening himself to the guy who came up with Mormonism, saying that nobody believed that guy either.

The film moves along at a good pace and brings a lot of viewpoints. The one area that seemed lacking was when highlighting the victims on the bottom of the pyramid. Maybe they weren't as picturesque or perhaps they were too busy working to take time to be interviewed. These people get crushed by the greedy dishonesty of schemers like deanne brady and mark stidham, and the other levels of pyramid above them. Maybe, had they been able to work their way up the pyramid, they would have become just as greedy. However, I felt the film makers could have gone further to find those people and drive home how utterly life-destroying pyramid schemes truly are.

In the end, we have a quirky former employee expressing his wish to see the super rich founders fall from their mountain of gold. But as we are shown, they continue to operate, continue to defraud thousands of people, continue to hold themselves up to the world as paragons of virtue, as they race around in their 3 million dollar Koenigseggs.

WTF: How did anyone ever buy those ugly, ugly clothes?

[atmegh · 13 September 2021]

While it's great to expose these scammers, this documentary does not delve below the surface. Jumping around from clip to clip with a few lines from people with experience makes this "series" completely superficial. It goes nowhere after the first episode. It's more like a music video. We don't get anyone's actual story or experience.

You basically see everything in the trailers.

Would have liked to see more of those depositions.

I hope it will at least open some eyes and save some women from this stupid cult of a pyramid schemes.

Plus, Deanne apparently gained all that weight back! These people are endangering their lives by going to Mexico for surgery.

Also, we clearly need to teach better math skills!

Interesting if overly long

[rhibreads · 7/10 · 24 November 2021]

The series was entertaining. That said, it was not actually a "good" documentary because of several flaws.

One, Amazon was definitely stretching it out way more than necessary. With more tidy editing you could easily get this down to 2-3 episodes and still retain the important information. The documentary repeatedly throws in the same "stock" footage, same shots of Lularoe's website or marketing material, same shots again and again and again and again and again and again of Lularoe events. It really isn't necessary and by the end of the series it really has probably added a good couple hours of filler.

Two, Amazon picked the wrong people to appear for the narrative it was trying to tell. The trailer marketed this as a documentary about the rise and fall of Lularoe and the devastating financial damage it caused mostly stay-at-home moms. This would be fine if they had stuck solely with women like Stella Lemberg, Roberta Blevins and Courtney Harwood who were likeable, honest and did seem to have suffered considerably. The problem is that they didn't. Instead you had women like Ashleigh Lautaha who didn't seem to know whether she was coming or going with Lularoe and refused to say anything remotely negative about them and just seemed uncomfortable being filmed, which begs the question why she agreed to be in the documentary or why Amazon kept her there once filming began and it became clear she didn't fit the narrative. Jill Drehmer stated outright that she still happily sells Lularoe at the end of the series which pretty quickly eliminates any sympathy for her. And perhaps Lauren Covey Carson had a husband who made money somewhere else but when she films her entire appearance in a massive, celebrity-worthy, $60,000 kitchen it's a little hard to take her cries of woe about her bad product or financial losses that seriously. She certainly doesn't seem to have been hard done by and still lives in a massive, gorgeous house that was almost certainly bought with her megachecks from Lularoe. LaShae Kimbrough just disappeared completely and abruptly with no resolution to her Lularoe story.

If the narrative had been more tightly crafted and better edited they might have worked as counterbalance *to* stories like Courtney, Roberta and Stella's but that's clearly NOT what they were there for as they were pushed to tell the EXACT same "woe is me" "my $70,000 of bad product" "it hurt us so much" as the other women and it comes across as completely disingenuous.

By the end this series will leave you with about the same feeling as the Fyre Festival documentaries. People who made/had way more money than sense who might tell an entertaining story but will also leave you rolling your eyes a bit and not necessarily feeling all that sorry for the majority of them and their "harrowing" "tragic" "stressful" experiences, whether that was attending a bad festival for one single day (Fyre) or selling enough leggings to build their dream home and buy multiple fancy cars and designer handbags...until they couldn't anymore. Woe indeed.

A warning for those 'looking for more'

[shannon_hammel · 10/10 · 11 September 2021]

I can totally relate to Roberta. She shares her story but it's so many people's stories. This is also a warning to other victims that have yet to be sucked in.

Prime example of highly questionable business practices

[paul-allaer · 7/10 · 21 July 2022]

As Episode 1 of "LuLaRich" (2021 release; 4 episodes of about 45 min each) opens, DeAnne and Mark, the owners of a clothing company called LuLaRoe, are about to be interviewed by the film makers, to give their side of the LuLaRoe story. We then go back in time to "1995" when Deanne, then a single mom with 7 kids, and Mark meet on a plane, hit it off and soon thereafter get married. DeAnne has an idea for what we now call a multi-level marketing company...

Couple of comments: this docu-series is produced and directed by frequent collaborators Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst ("Fyre Fraud", "Rest In Power: The Treyvon martin Stiry"). Here they look back at the spectacular rise and equally spectacular fall of a clothing company called LuLaRoe. Let me admit that I had never heard of this company before seeing this series, and hence I was completely in the dark about its background and what exactly happened to it. But when I started watching Episode 1, within 5 minutes I thought to myself: "sounds like a Ponzi scheme". Which is of course exactly what it was, albeit with a 'different' twist: targeting white suburban stay-at-home moms who want to make some money. To put this in perspective: at one point there were about 100,000 "consultants" (i.e. Independent resellers), each of whom paid around $5K-$10K in upfront inventory. Do the math, and that amounts to $500 million to $1 billion in upfront money. That is how you go from $60 million in revenues to $1 billion in revenues in just one year. The question of course is: how did 100,000 individuals believe that they could make money from this? The fascinating part when watching a true story like this one, is to watch how people react when they finally realize what is really going on. The other part is of course that greed, plain and simple, is an essential piece of the American story.

"LuLaRich" premiered in September, 2021 and it is now streaming on Amazon Prime. I missed it entirely when this came out, but it recently came to my attention (I forgot exactly how). These 4 episodes are very easy to binge. If you like a good documentary or are curious what drives people to do things that are simply not possible from an economical perspective, I'd readily suggest you check this out, and draw your own conclusion.

Interesting and Damning

[andreahaugen-13476 · 10/10 · 10 September 2021]

It's disturbing to watch the ease with which the owners of they "company" lie. It's also so sad to see the talking points given out to the urgent crop of #bossbabes. The poor reviews for this docuseries on multiple platforms all use the same language. Language I'm sure is straight from the home office. MLMs are toxic and predatory and this series does a good job of pointing out some of the reasons why.

Gobsmacked

[lu_lou_belle · 7/10 · 3 December 2021]

I never heard of Lula Rose until it started popping up in podcast feeds as cultlike.... Good explanation of how MLm systems work, especially by feeding on emotional desires of people to connect, belong and desire to improve or get ahead.

What's hard to accept, is that college educated women would ever buy into this crap! The ugly, garish prints...even the head designer was mystified by the instructions to create more and more crazynpatterns. The simple matter of MLM's is only the people at the top of the game make money, once growth potential hits the limit of the exponential expansion of customers. The special events, the sales perks-of course there's a cruise. There's a cruise for highlevel sellers in every one of these schemes that I've encountered through friends trying to live the dream. The owners figured out how to create scarcity from as Morty Seinfeld would say : cheap fabric and dim lighting, by only producing small numbers of each pattern and then driving desire using social media networking and forced enthusiasm.

This is a compelling documentary but it still feels like watching a slow motion train wreck and a sad statement of life in debt ridden aspirational America.

Eye opening

[wahmof-38568 · 9/10 · 10 September 2021]

I can't say there were a lot of spoilers in this movie if you have ever bought clothes from this company or know any of their reps. But I was shocked at some of the behind the scenes - especially about being told to have their husband retire to work with them is atrocious. Canceling their return policy without warning. If you are in direct sales or network marketing, you might find some of this hits close to home.

Easy entertainment

[mandaanne2009 · 7/10 · 18 September 2021]

Good for a lazy Sunday afternoon.

The guy who boycotted Kelly Clarkson was the most entertaining.

Could Have Been a Lot More Interesting

[PresidentForLife · 3/10 · 27 November 2021]

The makers of this over-long doc take the easy way out by interviewing a a handful of players who essentially say the same things over and over. Little effort is made to explore the allure of the get-rich-quick fantasy against the backgrounds of the (almost exclusively) women who are drawn to this sort of scheme. No disrespect to the product, which many people seem to enjoy, but the societal drain of mass producing "business entrepreneurs" who function solely to contribute to consumer society should have been part of the picture too. This is the fast fashion which winds up in trash heaps in Indonesia where the jungle used to be. Could have been well told in two hours, not four.

LuLaRoe is a cult

[jkburnett-49231 · 10/10 · 10 September 2021]

LuLaRoe is a cult. LuLaRoe is a pyramid scheme. I'm glad someone is exposing them. And I feel bad for all of the Huns that still they they own their own business.

Excellent!

[dearingdearings · 10/10 · 10 September 2021]

Mark & Deanne need to pay for what they've done to so many women! If you're still in GET OUT!

Brilliant!

[BarbaraLaMarr · 11 September 2021]

A truly brilliant documentary filled with great interviews and cold, hard facts. After watching, one can only hope that the remaining victims also watch and leave the cult that is LuLaRoe.

Did LuLaRoe pay for all 10/10 reviews?

[kamfg · 7/10 · 13 September 2021]

I enjoyed this doc. I don't think it's groundbreaking 10/10 worthy but it was fun to watch. No way every reviewer gives this a solid ten stars. I give LaShae a 10/10 tho bc she had my laughing, I even rewound and rewatched her explaining why she didn't want to go on the cruise in episode two.

We need MORE!

[bbray-74391 · 10/10 · 10 September 2021]

Please consider doing more episodes, or even branching out to some of the other predatory MLM's out there! Believe me you would have enough content for sure.

I also wish there was more information shared about the anti-MLM movement and how it's not about tearing people down. It's actually about trying to warn people before they get in too deep and offering a place to go after you finally get out with people who understand your frustration no matter which predatory company you have left.

Meh. Way too long

[mcc315 · 6/10 · 13 September 2021]

It is hard to feel bad for the people that became involved in Lularoe. Seems like a lot of them featured here made a lot of money for many years. The bottom section of the pyramid were the ones that really got screwed. Deanne and Mark are definite swindlers who justify every misdeed. Ugh. And the guy who said he'd never listen to Kelly Clarkson again ? Idiot. They hired her she was not involved in the company. If anything he was involved in keeping the members happy and deceived. Think about that when you are drinking your vodka and cranberry drink. Interesting documentary but way too long.

I want to know more.

[katiekty-20048 · 10/10 · 10 September 2021]

The documentary does a good job of explaining why all MLMs (direct sales, social selling, etc.) are cults that lure in smart people that you think would know better! It's easy to see how people were fooled.

But I want to know more about the people at the bottom of the pyramid! Those 90% that fail...I want hear their stories too.

I hope this family pays for their crimes and go out of business so they can no longer manipulate people and negatively impact lives.

Greedy people taking advantage of greedy and foolish people--not at all unique to LuLaRoe

[IMDRoch · 6/10 · 20 September 2021]

The people who made this documentary are so obviously trying to club you over the head with their idea that LuLaRo is so very bad that I think most intelligent people would have to question their motivation and bias and to what extent they are trustworthy.

Throughout the series they feature an interview with the couple behind LuLaRo. Deanne and Mark seem to think this is a normal interview, but obviously it was secured through deception. I'm sure they had no idea they were doing an interview for a docuseries intending to rake them over the coals. I'm sure they had no idea that their interview would be woven with clips of their former employees talking about them in scandalized tones. There's a limit to how much I can find it entertaining to watch greedy and deceptive people deceive greedy and deceptive people who capitalized on the stupidity of others, but I seem to be in the minority here.

There's a lot of the style of this "docuseries" which is just incredibly obnoxious. I don't need to see your interviewees settling into theirs seats or getting their makeup done. It feels cringey and manipulative. I don't need to see uncomfortably lingering shots of the email guy staring into the camera for ten seconds with beady eyes after describing his fantasy of sipping an alcoholic beverage while he watches the founders of LuLaRoe crying as everything is taken from them. I suspect that all the people critical of LuLaRoe in this series have legitimate beef, but honestly with only a few exceptions the "victims" who the directors want to force us to sympathize with come across as greedy, foolish, bitter, and vindictive. Interweaving their contributions with the clips from the deceptively obtained interview just makes it all feel greasy and uncomfortable.

I also cannot deal with the way they'd display little tidbits of fairly innocuous material from the LuLaRoe motivational materials/media accompanied by sinister music to make sure viewers agree it's very "bad." Oh no, they said they supported families--get out the pitchforks! Oh, no--they encouraged having a lot of energy--string them up! Oh, no, Deanne told a newly divorced lady to take her kids to church--how dare she?! There's just a whole truckload of people (primarily the directors) clutching their pearls about stuff that a lot of perfectly normal people say/believe/teach.

I did not come out of this liking DeAnne or Mark, but probably the people I felt were the most clearly untrustworthy/disingenuous were the docu directors themselves. But 6 stars because as obnoxious as it was, I was moderately entertained.

Watched it start to finish and then all over again!

[stepharoth · 10/10 · 10 September 2021]

I wish all the ex consultants were 99.9% of the documentary....because every time DeLieALotand her husband come on, I just cringe and don't want to listen to them or the lies that so easily come out of their mouths...LuLaRoe LuLaRuined lives. They need to go out of business asap. Watch this documentary! Once you start it, you won't stop until the end. It's FANTASTIC! Shout out to Roberta for her participation: you rock!

Eye Opening

[verdandee · 7/10 · 1 December 2021]

Wow... you want to see white collar human predators in action, this is the documentary for you. I'm not sure how these live with their actions, but I sure would like to see them prosecuted for the abuse and fraud they inflicted on others. At the start, I think they truly believed in giving people a chance to better their lives and be their own boss. In the end, they were just a pyramid scheme that damaged lives and bankrupted those same people. They use the carrot of money to get their followers to become morally, ethically, and financially bankrupt. A chilling cautionary tale for anyone contemplating joining a MLM.

Promises much but fades quickly

[jlroodt · 4/10 · 10 October 2021]

This docu-series starts very strong and provides a nice balanced background to how Lularoe started. Unfortunately they reveal all the most important pieces of information in the form of a clip montage, which turns out to be all there is to see really.

Also, this is clearly a radical feminist piece of propaganda which unfortunately isn't balanced enough from that point of view to really dig deeper into the reason so many women actually joined Lularoe to start with. Conveniently it is all blamed on the "outdated" worldviews of the founders of Lularoe, according to the filmmakers.

I would have wanted more in-depth analysis of those that stayed and still participate in selling Lularoe products. Surely there must be more compelling reasons for this to balance the narrative with those that left.