4/29/2023 0 Comments Lularoe night owl memeWith a glut on the market of LuLaRoe consultants, most buckled under the weight. Meanwhile, the majority of LuLaRoe consultants struggled to make ends meet – encouraged to take on debt and saddled with merchandise they couldn’t sell. The profits for those who joined early in the company, and whose down lines flowered into the thousands, were astounding: some in the series claim to have received bonus checks of anywhere from $20,000 to $70,000 a month. In 14 months from 2015 to 2016, the company grew from $70m in sales to over a billion. Mark and DeAnne, who married in 1998, trademarked LuLaRoe in 2013, and staffed it with members of their large extended family. Through interviews with former and current consultants, employees, and even Mark and DeAnne themselves, LuLaRich takes a bird’s eye view to what Blevins couldn’t see at the time: the company, allegedly designed to make money not on clothing but through the unsustainable recruitment of new members, was collapsing under its own weight. You don’t reach outside the organization for information or to have your questions answered. Photograph: Courtesy of Amazon Prime Video Now with several consultants down-line of her, Blevins passed questions up the chain, “and they would give me an answer that made sense”, she said. “It just seemed strange.” Blevins received an order of merchandise that reeked of mold quality was slipping, and some leggings straight-up poorly designed, with prints that resembled anatomy at the crotch. “I thought we were selling leggings?” Blevins recalled thinking. Blevins would visit “home office” in Corona, California, or attend company events, which increasingly took on the feel of pop religious festivals (corporate events included performances by Kelly Clarkson and Katy Perry), and Mark would start reciting passages from the Book of Mormon. Slowly, inconsistencies began to pile up. “At that point, I was just another walking dollar sign.” “They saw me, they’re like she’s bubbly, she’s energetic, she knows how to use social media, she’s an asset to moving this forward,” Blevins said of the “love-bombing” grooming process that convinced her to join LuLaRoe. Or, as Mark puts it to Nason and Furst in the first episode: “Take your creativity, your passion, your excitement for life, and here’s a place that’s a pure meritocracy.” The company hammered home the perks of being not just a LuLaRoe retailer, but a member of a movement – a “boss babe”, “part-time work for full-time pay”, contributing to household income without going to an office. The company appealed, said Furst, to the “middle America millennials who don’t have the same opportunities that their parents had, who are facing a lot of different struggles, who are susceptible on one hand to the patriarchal nuclear family structure but then also the pitch to be a girlboss and to be empowered and to be a feminist who is selling these leggings”.īlevins, like several of the former LuLaRoe consultants who appear in the series, was at first convinced by the promise of running her own business. Over four episodes, LuLaRich, directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason (makers of Hulu’s Fyre, on the spectacular meltdown of the scammy music festival), surveys the warp-speed growth of a company that preyed on millennial, overwhelmingly white women’s sense of purposelessness, repackaged the fallacy of “having it all”, and saddled thousands in debt and broken promises while the company’s top brass raked in millions. By the end of 2016, what had started in 2012 as a homespun business selling maxi skirts out of the trunk of a car by two Mormon grandmothers had reached over $1.3bn in sales with more than 60,000 consultants – and faced lawsuits alleging that LuLaRoe founders Mark and DeAnne Stidham misled retailers and ran a pyramid scheme. But Blevins quickly felt the strain of the company’s precipitous growth, owing to its emphasis on recruiting new “consultants” – people on the “downline” whose startup costs traveled up the ranks as “bonus checks”. By March 2016, Blevins paid $9,000 to become a LuLaRoe consultant and receive a starter package of clothing to sell.Īt first, things went well – she was enthusiastic about the clothing, and made money selling LuLaRoe on Facebook out of her home in suburban San Diego, California. As Blevins recalls in LuLaRich, a four-part Amazon docuseries on the beleaguered multi-level marketing company, LuLaRoe women added her to Facebook groups, texted her, invited her to parties that doubled as fashion sales, and showered her with encouragement. LuLaRoe seemed to offer “this built-in community, where I knew I could have an instant friendship”, she told the Guardian.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |