DeAnne Stidham is a Mormon mother of 14 with Barbie-blonde hair, studded designer stilettos, and a cozy Kris Jenner charm who, with her husband Mark, founded the billion-dollar company LuLaRoe. (You’ve probably seen their leggings, available in loud cat and pizza prints, peddled in your Facebook feed.)
According to a 2019 suit filed by theWashington state attorney general, their multilevel-marketing company is also a pyramid scheme that bilked thousands of people out of millions of dollars. According to the attorney general’s office, LuLaRoe made some of their retailers believe that if they invested between$500 and $5,000in startup costs, theycould“rescu[e] their families during financial crisis.” (The suit was settled in 2021.)
When Oscar-nominated filmmaker Cori Shepherd Stern first started hearing these stories, after falling down the LuLaRoe rabbit hole on her own social media accounts, she felt a familiar pang of heartbreak. While growing up in Panama City, Florida, her mother had also fallen prey to a multilevel-marketing company she believed could save her family’s finances. That background inspired her to produce LuLaRich, an Amazon docuseries about LuLaRoe’s rise and fall, premiering September 10.
“I grew up with a single mom who borrowed money to buy a giant makeup kit,” says Stern. “And she’s not a saleswoman. She didn’t have a background in business. She thought she was going to make thousands of dollars a month to keep giving us cereal and haircuts…and that it was going to let her stay at home with us so she did not have to pay for child care. That’s how this is often sold—‘You’re going to get to stay home with your family. You’re going to get to participate in the American dream.’”
“It was devastating to her when she didn’t sell what she thought,” says Stern. “It was a huge blow to her self-esteem. She saw women succeeding and was like, ‘Why am I failing at this? Why can’t I do this?’ It’s because the system—the whole multilevel marketing system—is flawed. I saw it firsthand.”
After the Stidhams founded LuLaRoe in 2013, they boosted their company by encouraging retailers to barrage social media with posts that rippled envy and intrigue across exponential contacts. Their early retailers boasted of outsize bonus earnings. The phenomenon felt reminiscent of the cultural co*cktail that fueled the doomed luxury music festival Fyre Festival—the topic of dueling 2019 documentaries, one of which was made by codirectors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason. So with her filmmaking partner, Oscar-winning Spotlight producer Blye Faust, Stern asked Furst and Nason if they would be interested in making a LuLaRoe doc.
Like Fyre Fraud, the four-part LuLaRich is a fantasia of seemingly deceptive social media marketing, colorful characters, and stranger-than-fiction details. “We like to go underneath the hood of the zeitgeist of American culture,” says Nason. “This story in particular had such a bubblegum feel that it was fun to highlight the corrosion of systems in general.”
The filmmakers spoke to former LuLaRoe employees and independent retailers who claim they were duped out of money and gaslighted by the company when they started asking questions. Incredulously, in spite of the lawsuits against and controversy surrounding their business, the Stidhams also agreed to sit down for a five-hour interview with the filmmakers.
“I think they were incentivized to get ahead of the story and be able to promote what they were doing,”says Furst—noting that LuLaRoe is, nominally at least, still in business after agreeing to pay $4.75 million to resolve the Washington state attorney general lawsuit. (In a statement, LuLaRoe’s founders maintained that they thought they would have eventually won the case, but “the expense would be enormous and the amount of time senior management would have had to devote to the litigation during the trial would have been a distraction from our business.”)
