After Emma and I watched “LuLaRich,” the new Amazon Prime series about the mostly imploded multilevel marketing company LuLaRoe and its oddball founders, DeAnne and Mark Stidham, all we wanted to do was talk about it. Ali Barthwell, the Emmy-nominated “Last Week Tonight” writer and Vulture recapper, felt the same way.
So we did a podcast for our beloved angel subscribers about it! We talked about everything pyramid-shaped (Christianity, racism, capitalism — oh, oops, the foundational principles of our whole society, wonder why things aren’t going so great), the whiteness of LuLaRoe and “LuLaRich,” recklessly bad fabric prints, and more. Please enjoy!
As a non-MLM joiner, LuLaRoe was always emblematic to me of something other than great leggings or an opportunity to get a down payment for a three-bedroom house. It represented the death of Facebook. When I joined Facebook on the cusp of my freshman year in college, social media seemed like a realm of sheer recreation. My peers and I were teenagers with our lives ahead of us; we were all curating our lists of favorite movies and posting albums of party photos and deciding whether to return “pokes” from guys we barely knew. But as I got into my twenties, graduated, moved to NYC and got a job editing dozens of blog posts a day, Facebook changed. It was, like my email and literal inboxes, full of junk mail.
I was still friends on the platform with lots of old high school classmates who still lived in Indiana, and now lots of them were trying to sell me protein shakes. Or something called “nail wraps.” One frequently posted about It Works!, but never in a way that clarified to me what the actual product was; the pitch was that she felt very empowered and happy to be selling whatever that product was. Most of these women were young moms, and they were caught up in multilevel marketing schemes that promised flexible work, high income, and personal fulfillment.
Somehow I don’t recall encountering LuLaRoe, but by 2021, I knew about the leggings, the mold on them, the angry sellers, the lawsuits. LuLaRoe offered a clear target to documentarians seeking to recreate the Fyre Festival docu-farce bonanza (the directors of “LuLaRich” were also behind “Fyre Fraud”): Its rise was meteoric, and so was its fall, amid widespread rumors about wet, stinky and tissue-thin clothes going out to vendors and lawsuits alleging it was a pyramid scheme. The core product, absurdly patterned leggings, were often praised as silky soft, thick, and comfortable, before the quality took an inexplicable nosedive. (If you want an explanation for this quality collapse, don’t hold your breath, as one is not forthcoming in “LuLaRich.”)
The popularity of multilevel marketing companies among a certain demographic — lower- to middle-class millennial women, especially white women — has piqued media interest in the last few years, and fairly so. It’s a space where so many toxic elements of American society make themselves almost comically plain: the obsession with entrepreneurship and unchecked financial growth, the messianic fervor of white evangelical Christianity, the white ideal of the stay-at-home mother who finds complete fulfillment in unpaid care work, the girlboss/empowerment strain of corporate feminism, and the inevitable exploitation and scarcity that leave so many scrounging for a way to survive a society built as a rapacious hierarchy with few winners and many losers.
And “LuLaRich” does not fail to note the comedy of how on the nose LuLaRoe’s story can be. That a company that profits from women going into debt in hopes of contributing financially while still raising their kids full time might have some deeply rooted misogyny at its foundation is to be expected, but that cofounder DeAnne Stidham advised her top sellers to give their husbands blowjobs daily to keep them happy? That I did not see coming. The fatphobia, too, seems expected — it’s everywhere, and a fashion company geared towards blonde Mormon moms would seem particularly prone — but that Stidham pressured her sellers to get weight loss surgery in Tijuana??? Every detail is cartoonish.
The show is so full of truly unhinged touches (two of the Stidham children married EACH OTHER; one former corporate employee very solemnly proclaims that he can’t listen to Kelly Clarkson anymore because she performed at a LuLaRoe conference) that Emma, Ali and I couldn’t even cover them all in our conversation. But what’s even wilder is how many massive, systemic issues are either gestured at or not addressed at all. Maybe a better show, as Meg Conley and Anne Helen Petersen discuss in their vital conversation about “LuLaRich,” would have focused less on the goofy bits and more on the question of what was going on in the factories where these increasingly slapdash garments were being constructed (a guess: probably terrible pay and terrible working conditions).
But what “LuLaRich” depicts, despite all its omissions, is a parody of where the American ethos of capitalism leads. Everything valuable is pillaged for profit, profit that mostly goes to the people who led the pillaging. Places like Facebook that were presented to users as playgrounds were never actually intended to be simply that, but were ransacked for profit still more thoroughly than Mark Zuckerberg could probably have dreamed. MLMs mine their sellers’ actual social networks, chewing up friendships and sucking out whatever money there is to be had. (Several women who appear in “LuLaRich” have gotten divorced and lost friends because of the pressures of the business.) The problem with a pyramid scheme is the same as the problem with the capitalist drive for growth: Eventually, you run out of people to sell to. Eventually, you run out of resources to extract.
It makes sense that the Stidhams chose to appear in “LuLaRich,” amid all the controversy and lawsuits, perfectly groomed and genial and unashamed. What did they do wrong, in the eyes of America? They built a pyramid with themselves at the top, and that’s exactly what we’re all told to do. -Claire
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