Anonymous wrote: I found it very tiger king-esque in that there were so many random turns - Kelly Clarkson, Mario Lopez, Extreme Couponing, Star Trek, weight loss surgery in Tijuana. Also the step siblings who married each other,wtf

+1. I already knew the basic story of LuLaRoe and listened to the Dream podcast about it, but watching the documentary really brought it to life and added so many of the crazy details. Don't forget Katy Perry, the pot farm, and selling breast milk. Also, hearing from DeAnne and Mark themselves was priceless.

I found it very tiger king-esque in that there were so many random turns - Kelly Clarkson, Mario Lopez, Extreme Couponing, Star Trek, weight loss surgery in Tijuana. Also the step siblings who married each other,wtf

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Why aren't the college and universities where these women paid tuition and took out student loans also considered MLM? That's the ultimate marketing scam and pyramid scheme. LLR was successful because these college educated SAHM moms didn't have careers but had a lot of college debt. I hear stories like this all the time, where a college grad in debt will go further in debt to pay off the student loan debt.

I didn't hear any of the women talking about being in debt from student loans. I assume a lot of them went to BYU or state schools. It seemed like their husbands were supporting their families and this was for "extras."

Women who actually need money get real jobs.

So I can only give the example of the one woman I knew who did this, though from watching the documentary I think there may have been others in this position (I'm thinking of one who talked about how she worked in "corporate America," but found it difficult to balance once she had kids).

Anyway- the woman I know is college educated and was a paralegal at a law firm I used to work at. For reference, our paralegals usually made between 80k-100k. Her husband was a plumber. This was when I worked in NYC; they lived in a pretty far out suburb and she had a super long commute and young kids. I think in the beginning she brought in decent money and quit her paralegal job. I don't think she was fully replacing her salary, but they no longer had to pay for child care. Anyway, obviously the whole thing imploded; they sold their house and moved to a lower cost of living area, and she has since found a work from home job as a paralegal. I don't know if she lost money or how much. But it sounded to me from the documentary that they really appealed to this type of woman- educated and professional, but not high up enough to earn a ton of money or have much control over their schedule.

Its like those damn LOL dolls kids love, Are the ugly? Yep. Would you CHOOSE some of hte ones you get? NO way in hell.
BUT it is a SURPRISE to see what you got!!
LLR created a frenzy for 'rare' prints and women went bat sh!t crazy over them because there were only a few like it.

One thing the random prints DID help with was competition. Multpile sales reps in one area would all have different inventory. If they all had black leggings there is no way they all could make it. But because Sally's stock is different than Karen's stock they aren't eating into each others customers as easily which allows LLR to keep saturating the area with retailers

Anonymous wrote:Why don’t they make solid colored leggings and more black ones since they have broad appeal? Is this so that they can sell large bulk amounts to reps who will keep buying until they have things that are actually sellable?

That’s my thought. The consultants were the customers. They got addicted to buying and unboxing their orders too in a way. Ordering 40 things to get only a few that are actually sellable.

The wholesale prices that LLR actually paid for their clothes was so low. Leggings cost LLR like $1-$2 from the factory. Then they turned around and sold them to the consultants - can’t remember what my ex-consultant friend told me the “wholesale” price was on leggings but maybe around $10? - so at that point LLR was already making a s*** ton of money on them, and THEN the consultants had to try to sell these weird print leggings to customers for $25 a pair.

Why don’t they make solid colored leggings and more black ones since they have broad appeal? Is this so that they can sell large bulk amounts to reps who will keep buying until they have things that are actually sellable?

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand why this is illegal. I mean of course it’s a scam but I don’t see where they lied to anyone except the refund policy for which they were rightfully sued. I feel bad for the women who signed up but I also don’t feel like they were victims of a crime. Especially the woman who ended up bankrupt - sounds like she profited but just spent it all?

I’m super liberal fwiw and I recoil at the ahole couple running it talking about “personal responsibility” but I also don’t feel like this should be illegal. As long as they’re transparent about the pyramid, which it sounds like they were, I don’t see how there can be a law against it. Seems on par with churches, gambling, and weight loss plans to me.

Remember the graph that was created by WA state that showed how much the women earned from bonuses from people beneath them and how much was earned from actually selling clothes (negative number)? The whole premise was you can have your family and still work and yet when people paid (even being told to go into debt to buy into this) for the products for them to sell, they were told if they weren't doing well, it was THEIR fault, if the products were inferior, it is YOUR fault for complaining when others aren't, give your kids cereal and hire someone to help raise them because selling is what you need to do all the time, when your business grows, give it to your husband, etc. None of these things are said at the beginning...at the beginning all that is said is you can make x-dollars, have cars, homes, purses, designer stuff, etc...just by selling LLR and still being a full time mom. None of that was true.

That’s just marketing. In theory, if you sold 10,000 leggings or whatever you could buy a car. I didn’t get the impression that they lied about the uplines.

No, that’s not what happened. They may have bought cars, but I’m the end they lost everything from their “profits.” The market was over saturated, their return policy was awful and you had to buy products upfront and they refused to fix shoddy products.

Read here: https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.buzzfeednews.com/amphtml/stephaniemcneal/lularoe-millennial-women-entrepreneurship-lawsuits

Quoting:
2016: “In her prime, she estimates she had $80,000 in inventory and was doing approximately $12,000 to $18,000 in sales a month.”

2018: “ But by the time Willis, a 36-year-old mother of two from Kenosha, Wisconsin, finally quit the multilevel marketing company, or MLM, in 2018, she said she had around $50,000 in credit card debt from her business. She had to cash out her 401(k) to pay it off. After approximately two years and countless hours of working for LuLaRoe, she said she never made a profit after the first year (and that year, she said traveling to LuLaRoe events and other expenses ate away at any profit she had made). When she wanted to quit, she still had around 3,000 pieces of LuLaRoe clothing in her home, stuffed into every spare nook and completely cannibalizing her dining room. She ended up selling her last 500 pieces for a dollar an item, just to get rid of them.”

They lied about their sales because that’s what made it appear it wasn’t an mlm. Didn’t you hear them say over and over - robotically- this was sales for a wanted product? No, it was an mlm. I think you missed the entire point of the documentary.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand why this is illegal. I mean of course it’s a scam but I don’t see where they lied to anyone except the refund policy for which they were rightfully sued. I feel bad for the women who signed up but I also don’t feel like they were victims of a crime. Especially the woman who ended up bankrupt - sounds like she profited but just spent it all?

I’m super liberal fwiw and I recoil at the ahole couple running it talking about “personal responsibility” but I also don’t feel like this should be illegal. As long as they’re transparent about the pyramid, which it sounds like they were, I don’t see how there can be a law against it. Seems on par with churches, gambling, and weight loss plans to me.

In the final episode one lady explained why it was illegal - there are certain rules that have to be followed to be an MLM and not a pyramid scheme. LLR wasn’t following them. Things like set return policies and the amount of inventory you had to sell as a retailer before being able to buy more. The LLR team just got greedy and were exceedingly sloppy.

I would've liked more information on when and how the $5k buy-in to become a salesperson started. It sounded like it was not this way initially.

Anonymous wrote:Why aren't the college and universities where these women paid tuition and took out student loans also considered MLM? That's the ultimate marketing scam and pyramid scheme. LLR was successful because these college educated SAHM moms didn't have careers but had a lot of college debt. I hear stories like this all the time, where a college grad in debt will go further in debt to pay off the student loan debt.

I didn't hear any of the women talking about being in debt from student loans. I assume a lot of them went to BYU or state schools. It seemed like their husbands were supporting their families and this was for "extras."

Women who actually need money get real jobs.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand why this is illegal. I mean of course it’s a scam but I don’t see where they lied to anyone except the refund policy for which they were rightfully sued. I feel bad for the women who signed up but I also don’t feel like they were victims of a crime. Especially the woman who ended up bankrupt - sounds like she profited but just spent it all?

I’m super liberal fwiw and I recoil at the ahole couple running it talking about “personal responsibility” but I also don’t feel like this should be illegal. As long as they’re transparent about the pyramid, which it sounds like they were, I don’t see how there can be a law against it. Seems on par with churches, gambling, and weight loss plans to me.

Remember the graph that was created by WA state that showed how much the women earned from bonuses from people beneath them and how much was earned from actually selling clothes (negative number)? The whole premise was you can have your family and still work and yet when people paid (even being told to go into debt to buy into this) for the products for them to sell, they were told if they weren't doing well, it was THEIR fault, if the products were inferior, it is YOUR fault for complaining when others aren't, give your kids cereal and hire someone to help raise them because selling is what you need to do all the time, when your business grows, give it to your husband, etc. None of these things are said at the beginning...at the beginning all that is said is you can make x-dollars, have cars, homes, purses, designer stuff, etc...just by selling LLR and still being a full time mom. None of that was true.

That’s just marketing. In theory, if you sold 10,000 leggings or whatever you could buy a car. I didn’t get the impression that they lied about the uplines.

Anonymous wrote:Why aren't the college and universities where these women paid tuition and took out student loans also considered MLM? That's the ultimate marketing scam and pyramid scheme. LLR was successful because these college educated SAHM moms didn't have careers but had a lot of college debt. I hear stories like this all the time, where a college grad in debt will go further in debt to pay off the student loan debt.

A lot of degrees might be “scams” in some sense but it wouldn’t be a pyramid scheme unless you got paid for recruiting new students.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I'm so excited to watch this. I watched the trailer and my husband was like "how do you know this company?"

Every woman knew LLR. And knew someone at least indirectly who sold LLR. And I remember watching the bottom fall out and feeling awful but also like "yep, this is how this things end".

There's no safe mlm.

Do you live in the District? I feel like it was more of a suburban phenomenon. I only heard of it when they had a convention downtown and suddenly the streets were full of ugly yoga pants. And then my Midwestern cousin started selling it. Was it actually a thing in DC otherwise?

It definitely was in Alexandria at least.

Yup. It was definitely all over Old Town, Del Ray, and Carlyle at least.

Anonymous wrote:I don’t understand why this is illegal. I mean of course it’s a scam but I don’t see where they lied to anyone except the refund policy for which they were rightfully sued. I feel bad for the women who signed up but I also don’t feel like they were victims of a crime. Especially the woman who ended up bankrupt - sounds like she profited but just spent it all?

I’m super liberal fwiw and I recoil at the ahole couple running it talking about “personal responsibility” but I also don’t feel like this should be illegal. As long as they’re transparent about the pyramid, which it sounds like they were, I don’t see how there can be a law against it. Seems on par with churches, gambling, and weight loss plans to me.

Remember the graph that was created by WA state that showed how much the women earned from bonuses from people beneath them and how much was earned from actually selling clothes (negative number)? The whole premise was you can have your family and still work and yet when people paid (even being told to go into debt to buy into this) for the products for them to sell, they were told if they weren't doing well, it was THEIR fault, if the products were inferior, it is YOUR fault for complaining when others aren't, give your kids cereal and hire someone to help raise them because selling is what you need to do all the time, when your business grows, give it to your husband, etc. None of these things are said at the beginning...at the beginning all that is said is you can make x-dollars, have cars, homes, purses, designer stuff, etc...just by selling LLR and still being a full time mom. None of that was true.

Anonymous wrote:I used to buy Lularoe back in 2016. It was made for women who were overweight and had problems loving their body. I bought a few leggings and a shirt. In a normal store I was a size 12 and a Medium/Large top. In LLR I was a One size fits all legging and I could get away with a small or XS top. They were comfy for post partum while I shlepped my baby around town and made me feel skinny.

The quality was alllll over. The closest person to me was still 20 minutes away. I jumped on a pair of cute owl leggings from her, and a few weeks after paying for them, I went to pick them up. Bring them home and the waist is WAY too tight. Much smaller than my other leggings. So now I have to shlep them back to her. Other clothes got holes, or were inconsistent materials. They also faded really fast in the wash.

So TLDR they were clothes designed for overweight people to look/feel skinnier.

FYI I live in Alexandria.

Your second paragraph doesn't match your bolded sentence above. I think your TLDR should say some of their items seemed to be designed so you felt better about the sizing (clothes that fit like a large were a small or xs with LLR) but then their quality control was terrible and sizing and material quality were all over the place.