How LuLaRoe clothing brand snared women in cultish Ponzi scheme
IN 2015, Roberta Blevins was a busy hairstylist, traveling between San Diego and Los Angeles for work — and struggling to find balance between her career and co-parenting a 4-year-old and 9-year-old. Then she heard about LuLaRoe from a Facebook mom’s group. The California clothing company — known for its brightly patterned leggings and dresses — offered sales consultants a way to “earn full-time income for parttime work” from the comfort of their own homes.
For Blevins, it sounded like a dream come true.
“I could sell leggings,” Blevins, now 40, remembers thinking. “It’s so easy. Everyone wears them.
“What I know now is that it was a scam,” she told The Post.
From 2014 to 2019, LuLaRoe leggings were pervasive on social media — slavishly peddled by women seeking the holy grail: setting their own hours and working from home, with the promise of big money. It was a classic multilevel marketing setup — or, as the Washington state Attorney General’s Office claimed in a 2019 suit against the company, a “pyramid scheme.”
It’s now the subject of “LuLaRich,” a four-part docuseries streaming on Amazon Prime that offers a look inside the brand’s explosive growth and how it led to fraud accusations, lawsuits and, ultimately, consultants losing money, cars, homes and even their marriages.
Directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason also made “Fyre Fraud,” about the notorious 2017 musical festival, and say the subjects have a lot in common.
Both stories are filled with “delusions of grandeur — and this type of incessant entrepreneurship that is promoted from influencers to [strangers] on Facebook,” Nason told The Post.
By September 2017, just a little over a year after she signed on, Blevins — who hosts the podcast “Life After MLM” (as in multilevel marketing schemes) — had seen the light. LuLaRoe was a pyramid scheme selling empty girl-boss dreams. She quit.
“There were red flags from the beginning,” Blevins said.
LULAROE sprang from humble beginnings. Around 2012, DeAnne Stidham — who previously organized clothing parties for retailers — started selling homemade maxi-skirts from the trunk of her car.
Within five months, the vivacious Californian had moved 20,000 pieces, she says in the docuseries. In 2013, DeAnne met a woman in Utah who said she could unload a bunch of the skirts to her friends.
DeAnne called her husband, Mark. “[I] said, ‘What can I do to make it valuable to her?’ ” she says in the docuseries. His advice: “You sell them to her . . . and she gets to make double the money [selling them to her friends].
“It was instant cash and instant opportunity,” she added.
That woman became the first sales consultant for LuLaRoe, which is named for the Stidhams’ granddaughters Lucy, Lola and Monroe.
While old-school multilevel marketing brands like Tupsary, perware or Amway were all about women — often stay-at-home moms — hosting parties to push product and recruit other women as salespeople under them, recent counterparts such as the skin-care line Rodan + Fields rely on social media. Even the actress Ione Skye got into multilevel marketing a few years ago, selling DoTERRA essential oils and promoting them on Instagram and YouTube.
Consultants took to Facebook to advertise LuLaRoe leggings parties and flaunt the financial freedom, big homes and fancy cars their new gig provided.
The message spread like wildfire. By 2016, LulaRoe had raked in more than $70 million.
It worked like this: Once a woman’s — or, sometimes, a husband-and-wife team’s — application was accepted, they paid the start-up costs (as much as $15,000) and started hustling the clothes. Typically, they marked the leggings up to $25, after having bought pairs for $10.50 wholesale.
When Blevins joined in February 2016, buying in for an initial fee of $9,000, there was a leggings shortage — so she had to shell out more money to buy them off other consultants.
At the time, eager consultant wannabes were waiting anywhere from 90 to 100 days for approval because the company didn’t have enough manpower to keep up with demand.
LaShae Kimbrough was part of the onboarding team. She’d collect new consultants’ money — which desperate women raised by any means necesincluding taking out loans, openzero-interest ing credit cards and even selling their breast milk.
Kimbrough 43, told The Post that her team was bringing in at least $1 million a day.
Consultants were compensated for recruiting new salespeople to their teams. They received a cut of onboarding costs paid by their protégés, who then brought in people under them.
In the docuseries, married couple Tiffany and Paul Ivanovsky said that, at one point, they had 1,100 people on their team and raked in anywhere from $22,000 to $42,000 a month in bonuses over the course of a year.
[DeAnne] was able to come up with a recipe that had people groveling at her feet. Former LuLaRoe seller LaShae Kimbrough on founder DeAnne Stidham