LuLaRoe, a pyramid scheme that prides itself on empowering women, is the latest shady business venture to receive the investigative documentary treatment. A trailer for Julia Willoughby Nason and Jenner Furst’s “LuLaRich” has arrived.
The four-part docuseries features interviews with former LuLaRoe workers, business experts, and company founders DeAnne Stidham and Mark Stidham. As Variety puts it, “the explosive growth of the clothing company, which began as a multi-level marketing scam in which people (mostly women) sold leggings to one another, while also signing up new retailers to be beneath them in the pyramid, has played out, as so many evil things do, mostly on Facebook.”
“I had achieved the dream. I was selling magic leggings,” one interviewee says. Yet, as the spot details, buying into the enterprise was expensive and, once people were able to get in, they weren’t selling anything.
LuLaRoe apparently drew people in — and distracted from any wrongdoing — by leaning into “cheap language of feminism” such as “girlboss” and “bossbabe.” “We want to see women succeed,” DeAnne Stidham maintains. “That’s where the business started,” Mark adds.
That may have been the company’s mission statement, but its actual practice is very different. “We were empowered and then the husband was supposed to take over,” an interviewee recalls. So much for sticking it to the patriarchy.
Nason and Furst previously directed the feature doc “Fyre Fraud” and docuseries “The Pharmacist” and “Rest in Power: The Trayvon Martin Story.”
“LuLaRich” premieres September 10 on Amazon Prime Video.