If you’ve been around the planner world (or shit, the online world) you probably know about LuLaRoe. Amazon Prime released a documentary called LuLaRich chronicling the rise and fall of the MLM - I’ve got so many thoughts!
Colorful words may be used. don't be alarmed.
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TRANSCRIPTION
Hey everybody. Welcome back to the uncurated life podcast. My name is Cindy Guentert-Baldo. If this is your first time here. Welcome if this is not your first time here. Hell yeah. I'm glad that you're back. Blah-blah-blah let's get into today's episode really quick, but before I do, I want to give you a quick announcement.
How many times can I say quick? And this episode who knows, right? The announcement is that this coming up Thursday, October 21st, 2021, my Etsy shop will be reopening. I will have all of the series, one fuckery flowers, my art prints of realistic flowers with naughty words, hidden in them. All of the series one, the flowers that were in the shop before we'll be back with all prints and postcards available as well as a couple of small, new, like stocking stuffer type items, a few bookmarks and vinyl sticker packs.
You can find the link to it in the show notes. And soon in the next few weeks, I will be updating it with limited edition calendars with series two and series one fuckery flowers on them. And then in later November, there will be the launch of series two, which is. Set up 12 new fuckery flowers with prints and postcards, as well as some bundles of things that will include both series.
So if that is something you have been waiting for, or you haven't checked it out yet, my Etsy shop will be linked in the show notes and you can go ahead and favorite it, do all the things and look for it on October 21st. Now let's get into the episode. We're going to talk about Lula rich today. Why is this relevant to the planner world?
Yes, it's fucking relevant to the planner world. If you don't know why it's relevant to the planner world trust, I will tell you about that. So what is Lula rich? Let's start right. Lulu rich is a documentary on Amazon prime. It just came out well, it came out in September and I binge watched all four episodes of it.
It's about the rise and fall of the multi-level marketing company. They interview current and ex. Retailers or consultants. They're the people that are actually part of the multi-level marketing company. They interview former employees of the home office, the corporate side of it, and most interesting.
They interview mark and DeAnn Stedham who are the founders of the company, as well as some of their family members who were put into high level positions within the company. One of the things that I thought was interesting is that the documentary was made by the same people who made the documentary about the fire festival.
So they have had some experience making documentaries about dumpster fires. So what is LuLaRoe in case you don't know? And if you don't know, I. Remarkably jealous of you. LuLaRoe's a multi-level marketing company. If you don't know what multi-level marketing is, and I'm really jealous of you, it is direct sales is another name for it.
Some people call them pyramid schemes. Although in the U S in the laws, there are very specific rules that govern pyramid scheme. Versus multi-level marketing companies, pyramid schemes are illegal. Multi-level marketing companies are not honestly, I don't really see that much of a difference between the two.
And if you really want an interesting, entire deep dive on multi-level marketing companies, I will recommend the first season of the dream, a podcast. They did a limited series on multi-level marketing. That's outstanding. But in general, multi-level marketing is a business model where there is a company that produces something, whether it's it's essential oils like young living or what's the other one.
I don't remember. There's some other fun. Essential oils. I don't give a fuck or like makeup. Some of the most famous makeup ones are like Mary Kay and Avon. Then there's Amway, which is one of the most famous Tupperwares, also multi-level marketing company, but there's all sorts of them. And during the age of social media, they've exploded because of how social media works.
And Lula Roe really leaned into that. We'll talk about that in a second, but in the idea of a multi-level marketing, is that. There's a company that makes some sort of a product rather than sell that product to stores or sell it themselves like wholesale it, they sell it to consultants, quote, independent consultants who are not employed by the company.
They send a contract with the company, but they're not employed by the company. The consultants buy the products at wholesale and then sell them to customers at re. No in and of itself, that doesn't sound like such a problem, right? Except that a lot, or the majority of multi-level marketing companies, the money is not made in the sales of the product.
The money is made in recruiting more consultants underneath you to then by-product from the company and sell to customers. The problem here is a, if the real money is made through recruiting, rather than selling the product. Then the people at the top make the most money and then, but they have to depend on more and more levels of people beneath them.
Hence the term pyramid scheme. The other problem that you run into is that while they say there's like so many people that you can recruit and blah, blah, blah, if you're recruiting your customer base sooner or later, you don't have anybody to sell to now social media, once again has blown this all up because you can reach out to more than just your, your sphere of influence in like your community or whatever.
But like it, it can, a company can really hit like a level of saturation and that's when shit can start to go a little wonky. Now, if you really want to really delve into like the side of people who have been burned by this, besides watching Lula rich, Google, anti MLM, trust me, you'll find all sorts of.
But we're talking about LuLaRoe. So LuLaRoe is a MLM that sells clothing. It started with maxi skirts expanded in to quote, buttery, soft leggings, and then a whole bunch of other things. The. Clothing was mainly geared towards women. And one of the things, one of the like selling points of it was that they had all of these like wild prints for the fabrics that these clothes were made out of.
And that any given print was only going to be. Into like 3000 pieces and then it would be gone. And so retailers will be getting in there. The consultants will get in their orders of prints. And if you got one of the prints that was like a very popular one, then people would want to shop with you. It also supposedly was going to encourage collaboration with other retailers because people would be looking for certain things.
And if you didn't have it, but you had other friends who were consultants, they might have it. So you could serve your customers that way, which is an interesting way to go about it. Okay. Now, one of the things that was, is pretty painful about Lula Rowe is that retailers, which is what they call their consultants.
Um, don't get to choose the prints. They can pick the styles and they can pick the sizes, the prints, however, we're not their choice. They would not know what they were getting until they open their box, which could be very cool except, and Lula rich really. Demonstrates, this really shows a lot of the evidence of this.
Not all of these prints are nice. I've heard people refer to some of them as Doritos leggings. There is a lot of them where the way the leggings were made, it would look super like a badge or a penis because of just the unfortunate way the pieces were stick together. And as time went on, the prince got more and more janky and more and more not desirable.
And so these consultants would wind up with a lot of inventory that they couldn't sell because it was ugly. And then on top of that, the only way to get better inventory would be to order more and more and more. And you can see where this could become a problem. Now there's two things that really are important to understand about LuLaRoe's specifically one because it's clothing and because it's like meant to be an inventory, heavy business, the initial package.
Is like at least $5,000, you have to spend a huge chunk of money upfront and then continually order more and more you with some multilevel marketing companies, you could get a catalog and sell from the catalog and then order as the money comes in, that would be the least risky way to go about things.
But in LuLaRoe, because you don't know what you're getting until you get it, you literally have to buy a bunch of shit in order to sell a bunch of shit. So there's that the second thing to know about LuLaRoe is that it, it really started in the mid 2010s, I believe, right? As Facebook lives and Periscope and things like that were becoming really big.
So. A lot of consultants started to do Facebook lives. They get their box of stuff. They go live on Facebook in their group or on their page where they had a bunch of potential customers. And then they would just show items and people would comment sold and that's how they would sell them. And this just really blew up and a bunch of other multi-level marketing companies hell or use social media now, too.
But it got very big on Facebook very quickly. And this is where the connection to the planter community begins. So. Around 2016 and I could be wrong. It could have been 2015, but I, my best memory is around like late 2015, early 2016, Lula Rowe sorta started to take over the planter community. It started with a few retailers in the planner world, and then they began to recruit from the planner community.
Now I understand why this is. I'm going to generalize a little bit here, but a lot of people in the planter, community or women, especially back then, a lot of people in the planner community are introverted. I'm generalizing. And there's a lot of them that are moms. A lot of them that they, I w I would, I would say that in, especially in like the circles of planner committee that I've run in, like the PGW kind of area.
There were a lot of people that were kind of ripe for the picking when it came to Louisville road, because one of the things that they did well at the beginning was sell clothing that was comfortable and Dorito his side was not like entirely unflattering. But it was comfortable. I got some, I got the maxi skirts because they were the longest maxi skirts with a nice wide band around the belly.
I'm six foot two. It's hard to find maxi skirts that are actually maxi on me, but the Lula ones I got were, they also had a. Irma. That was like a tunic length top that was long enough to cover my plumber's butt crack, which again is very difficult for me to find because of how tall I am. It's just, it's hard for me to find.
And so there were certain items from LuLaRoe that were just there. We're well-suited for me and I was comfortable in them and I appreciated that. And I wasn't the only one now I also had to get into a little bit of that hunting kind of mindset, because I didn't want any wacky prints. I wanted solids.
And so solids were like a big unicorn, especially black leggings. Oh my God. So hard to find. But so the people who came, who were planned or people who got into Lula Rowe had a really great audience for them kind of already there. So those people, they sold their products to planner. People, built groups from planner people and built their teams from planner.
People. The teams are pretty big and there was a lot of them. And LuLaRoe was everywhere. There were all sorts of people like asking about different groups and blah, blah, blah, but it came kind of to a really frothy head at go wild 2017. And now. So the go wild team, the people that put the, the org, the welfare planners, people that put on the actual conference decided that year, that for the plan Gemma party, they were going to rent the little bar, like, like corridor that's at the, uh, the Gaylord hotel in Nashville that the conference was being held at.
There were these three bars, there was a karaoke bar. There was a kind of a club style bar. And then there was a smaller situation. And what they decided to do was rent all three of those out and like close it off to just the people that were coming to play in JAMA. So Erin Condron sponsored the clubs, style bar, Krissyanne designs sponsored the karaoke bar, but that was the third bar.
And remember, this was the second year of go wild and it was only 700 people coming. So the number of like companies that had. Been willing to put large amounts of money into the conference. We're still very, it was a, still a very short list because it was so new. And so they decided to allow a Lula Roe pop-up to sponsor the third.
Now, um, a lot of this is anecdotal evidence. I don't know all of the details behind any of this. This is just like I said, from my observations, from being in the community and being at the event. But. Uh, one of the groups of consultants in the planner community decided that they would as a team. So they were all on a team together.
They were all in one downline. They decided to pool together and sponsor the bar so that they could bring their shit and put all their clothes out and let consultants shop. And it seemed like, you know, a smart financial move for them because so many people in the planner community were buying shit anyway.
So they were going to have them kind of as a, as a captive audience. Right. There were two controversies that came from this one was that at this point, and even to this day go wild does not have a shopping component to it. Every once in a while, there will be like a place you can buy things or like one.
Opportunity to buy things. But one of the reasons they don't have like a vendor hall or haven't had a vendor hall in the past is because they wanted the shop owners who are part of the community to actually get to come and meet their customers and enjoy the conference, not spend their whole time vending.
I think that's a great idea personally, although I do know some people who get sad that there's not a lot of shit to buy, but personally you get so much shit from the conference. So much swag anyway. That's like, where would I put it? Like I barely have enough room anymore. Regardless. So there was that there was a lot of sore feelings that these people were going to be allowed to sell when selling was not allowed.
Otherwise, the other source of hard feelings was that there were other Lula consultants who wanted to bring their sh who were not in that team who wanted to bring their shit and sell it like out of their hotel rooms. But there was like a band put on that because this team. Had sponsored the bar, they got to, um, have like exclusive rights, again, make sense because they're putting the money into the sponsorship so they can demand that, that happens a lot with sponsorships, you can, and other kinds of contracts, like I've had contracts with people before where I have signed exclusivity with them for a certain thing as part of the contract.
Like it makes sense. But one of the things I saw people bitching about. And it's understandable was that there wasn't an opportunity for them to step up. It was suggested, and then it just happened and other people felt left out of it. I get that when I say bitchy and I don't mean that in a negative way, I actually mean that in a, like it's like they were, they were upset about it.
And I get that. I do understand that I could see both sides of this particular situation. Looking back on it. I'm like kind of grossed out by the whole thing, Maine. Mainly because of my feelings about MLMs. And I have a lot of feelings about MLMs and I'll expand on that in a bit, but like, I think that.
Part of the reason I wasn't. So skeeved out by Emma, the Lula Roe specific MLM at the time was because I had found a couple of items of clothing that worked for me, but I was already getting really kind of grossed out about how it felt like the planner world was becoming like fertile recruiting territory because at the heart of it, multilevel marketing is predatory and that's something that Lulu right shows.
Anyway. So that was the. The situation, I will update you on some of those planner connections as I finished talking about the documentary, but I wanted to give a bunch of context, 17 minutes of context, of both what LuLaRoe is and how it connects to the planter world. So now let's talk about the documentary.
I'm not going to spoil it. You should watch it. I promise you. If you have Amazon prime, you should watch it. It's four hour for, I don't think it's four hours. I don't think they're all an hour long, but it's four parts. Give yourself the time to watch them all in a row, because you may not want to step away from it.
The first takeaway I have what a fucking hot mess, and I'm not even talking about. There's there's two kinds of big, hot messes. There's the hot mess of the clothing. One of the reasons that Lulu burrow began to sink as a, as a company was that the clothing went downhill. The patterns you learn in the documentary, that the people who had to design the pattern.
Unhealthy as somebody who does graphic design and can make repeating patterns like very unhealthy unreasonable quotas, like impossible quotas to make. So that's where like a bunch of plagiarizing came in and a bunch of other garbage and Dorito prints, right. There was also stuff being kept outside. So it was moldy and like wet.
And so consultants were getting nasty shit and the company wasn't helping them with it. So there's that the quality was going down. But then on top of that, and maybe kind of in tandem with that. The way the company was run was a hot fucking mess up Mickey mouse horseshit, right. They hired their chip mark.
And Dan had between them like, hell fucking children, like 14 children or something. There, there, there are latter day saints or Mormons. They between them and a whole bunch of children, including a pair of children who are married to each other fucking glossed right over that. But like, They put their children into like all of the executive offices, despite none of them having any experience at that.
So it doesn't surprise me that a company that grew that quickly, like they show how fast the revenue and the consultants grew. It's like ridiculously fast growth with incompetent people running the company. It was bound to explode at some point, and it just happened to explode. And she sent out shrapnel of stinky leggings and penis crunch.
So there's that right? The second big takeaway was how they portrayed mark and Deanne Stidham, which I actually thought was very. Very clever of them. They interviewed the two of them, the founders of the company in their fancy office. She's wearing like designer heels, looking all like made up and very Tammy Faye Bakker.
And they're sitting there and they're like swab and like answering their questions, all calm and cool and collected. And then they juxtapose the filmmakers juxtapose. With segments from their deposition, from one of the multitude of lawsuits that are against them, which I'll get into in a minute and how the answers they give the interviewers and the answers in the depositions.
Don't always track with each other. It's very, very telling it very much, kind of informs your opinion of them as you're watching the show. The other thing that I found was really, really just both gross and also amusing was them fronting like they're feminists talking about how they're trying to like empower women.
This is a women empowerment company to run your own business and blah, blah, blah. Except it comes out during the documentary that they want to hammer home like traditional gender roles. Like once you get going, you need to make sure your husband is respected. Bring him into the business. Cool with your business, you should find a new husband, but like he still needs to call the shots.
And then they started to talk about like how they wanted it, like have feminine a feminist company, female empowering company. And before DeAnn could answer her husband talked right over her. Like it was a beautiful, I think it's in the trailer. It's a beautiful example of how ridiculous this shit is. Now I felt really like another thing that I took away from the whole documentary was how conflicted I felt about all of the ex consultants that they interviewed, especially the ones who built massive teams.
They had some coaches, which is like the second highest level on the pyramid. And, um, at least two mentors. So that's the highest level that you could reach. And they were talking about their regrets and the way they felt about certain things. And I felt very sympathetic towards them, especially as somebody who like filed for bankruptcy because of an MLM, like I felt sympathetic to them.
But at the same time, I really felt also that except for one there's one exception to it. And you'll know when you watch the documentary, who the exception is based on. The way that she talks about things, but none of them seem to really, they felt awful about their situation, but none of them really seemed to cope or like talk about the fact that they were predators.
Like, if this is what happened to you, what happened to all of the people below you? All of the people, like one of them had thousands of people on her team. Is there remorse. Do you feel bad about it? If you really want a nuanced take like a really good take about this? I would suggest you watch the video on the financial diet channel, where she talks about that.
A link in the show notes. She also has a. Good. She's great conversation about how the only way to change the culture in which multilevel marketing continues to proliferate is that we can't just get mad at the people who run the companies. We also need to get mad at the people who use the companies to make money, like the people who recruit a whole bunch of people.
And where's the line drawn. Like if you recruit one, I think I recruited three people over the course of my time at a multi-level marketing. And does that make me predatory? Compared to somebody who, who recruited like 2,500 people. I don't know. You know, I have no idea. So, so there's that right? Check that video out.
And there was one particular couple who I was really grossed out by, and that was the, I think they're called the . They weren't, they never quit. They were fired from Lula Rowe and they didn't seem to show any. Like I don't, I think they'd still be in it today if they hadn't been fired. And they were like there for sympathy and it's like, I don't feel sympathy for you.
It's hard to feel sympathy for you got fired from something that really sucked. And now you're speaking out against it, but you would still be like playing into the suckiness if you hadn't been fired question mark. I don't know why just look and say, you got to watch the documentary. I'm curious to know.
And then there was an entirely other situation that really is not a multilevel marketing thing, but just a toxic fucking wellness. Diet, I'm really into the podcast maintenance phase. If you haven't listened to that 10 out of 10 recommend. And like, I have been working really hard to try and like deprogram myself from diet culture.
And I'll talk a lot more about that in some upcoming episodes. But the thing that like kind of came out of the blue and I sorta knew about it from other anti MLM stuff I saw, but like the way it was described just really, really got me was the weight loss surgery. Shit.
If you haven't seen it yet, I'm not going to spoil you too much, except to let you know if the talk of like weight loss surgery, and having to maintain a certain physique to be accepted is triggering to you. That is something to watch out for when you're watching this documentary, because it absolutely comes up.
Let's just say that the owners, the owners of LuLaRoe had a fucking life. Group chat to get people to go to Tijuana and get weight loss surgery, and you were pressured to do it so that you can look a certain way, reinforcing certain roles about how somebody should look. It's fucking gnarly dudes, and I'm not going to go too deep into it right now just to say, Hey, watch out for that.
If it's in, it's hard for you and be damn right. But I will say that one of the biggest aha moments that came to me at the end of the documentary. And this brings it back to the planner world. The biggest aha moment to me came at the end from Robert Fitzpatrick. He is an expert on MLMs and he is somebody that they interviewed for the documentary.
And he he's the one who shows up throughout it to explain things about how MLMs in general work. He's actually does a very good job about that as well. So that'll help you if you're still confused when you watch the documentary. I'm also going to read his book soon, and I will be sure to discuss that here.
He said that once an MLM gets big enough, it's damn near impossible to make money when you get recruited into it, because you need to get in early enough. To be one of the people that are higher up in the pyramid, the later you get into it, the more likely it is that you're going to have a hard time finding other people who haven't either heard of it and been burned by it or heard of it and been recruited themselves.
So when an MLM starts to struggle or loses popularity or start sending their consultants, slimy leggings, the people who are higher up in the pyramid, the ones who already have big teams, big. We'll bounce and go to a newer, more up and coming MLM to start the cycle all over again, to get it on the ground floor so that they can build their team from people that they brought with them.
And then shoot up to the top of the pyramid. Now, when he said that my jaw was on the floor, not because this was new knowledge to me, this is not something that I didn't already like, no, but it was the first time that I had really. Wrapped my mind around the fact that a lot of the people who recruited heavily from the planner community when Lula rose started to cruise down hill bounced to another MLM.
And now a lot of them are higher up on the pyramid. There it's a nail Polish company by the way, but I'm not going to, and like I'm not condemning every single person who's in an MLS. I could, but I'm not going to mainly because a blanket condemnation is something that I struggle with, especially with my, like, you, you values that I so have trouble living up to sometimes, but I will say that, like that particular comment it's like you held a mirror up to the planner community and it was an, you could see that exact story play.
And it's still playing out today. It just makes you go. Hmm. Now there's a bunch of other things that this documentary gets into gets into race and how MLMs, especially ones like Lula Roe are. Really geared towards a certain demographic of white women. Who's a good target. Like who's easily recruitable, who are the people that are easily preyed on.
There's a reason that there are a lot of military spouses that get recruited into MLMs because they are looking for like community and you can find one in an MLM until. I don't want to do it anymore, then that community has gone and I can do more, but I'm not an anti MLM podcast, but I could totally do some more episodes on them in general.
And my experience is on them. But I will tell you generally speaking, I have not talked a lot about them in my, on my YouTube channel or here on the podcast, because. I had a, I had a shitty experience that really messed my family up really fucked my life up. And I take responsibility for the choices I made.
I'm the one who decided to do it. I'm the one who spent the money. I'm the one who caused my family to file for bankruptcy because of it. I'm the one who recruited a handful, a couple of people into it. I did those things and the consequences for those things were brought because of my actions. As I look back on it, I was a perfect person to be preyed on.
I was a brand new mom. I was out on disability because of tendonitis. My everything was really hard. We were like scraping by. I was a perfect candidate for it and I can see how I was pulled into it, but I don't like to talk too much about my really strong feelings about MLMs. Because I know from personal experience how touchy and like fraught that conversation is, especially for people who are still in.
And it just makes me extremely uncomfortable to talk about it. It's one of those, like it's like throwing them all to top cocktail and I just, there's all sorts of times, I'm fine to throw the cocktail. And this is one in particular that just is very difficult for me. So I haven't decided exactly how deep I want to get into anti-Muslim.
And it would mainly be on this podcast now on the YouTube channel, just because it's not really related, but like, it may be changing soon. I may be willing to do more depending on how this comes out, but this, this documentary kind of like was a reminder to me of a lot of my feelings and it brought up a lot of other feelings as well.
So I wanted to mention that because it can be a really difficult thing for me to even wrap my mind. Yeah. But, like I said, the documentary brings up all sorts of things about race, about. Income inequality about the role of religion, especially Mormonism in the forming of a lot of MLMs. There's a reason a lot of them have come out of Utah.
Like there's a reason for it. The toxic positivity that like infused. MLM culture, the toxic wellness culture, which is going to be definitely something that's coming up on this podcast in the next couple of months, because it's high on my list of things to talk about. Like there's a lot of things that this documentary touches on, but doesn't really dive deep.
It could have been a lot longer. I would love to see a documentary of this quality made about the MLM industry as a whole. But the problem you run into with that is that the MLM industry has the government in its pocket. There's a reason that it hasn't been regulated and it's not a Democrat thing, and it's not a Republican thing.
It's a government thing. And they're like, you should go listen to the dream for a lot more information about that. But yeah, I just wanted to give you some of my thoughts on it and provide some context because I have seen a lot of people in the planter community talking about wanting to watch this. And a lot of people who were around for that who were like, hell yeah, planner, community LuLaRoe, blah, blah, blah.
And a lot of people wondering what the fuck? Why, why is the planner community? Why are so many people in the planner community? So excited to watch this documentary? I wanted to provide some of that context because I think it really does inform how MLMs can be very, they can be very predatory on groups of people, especially with.
And how the planner community was impacted by that. Anyway, now that I talked all about that, if you have watched it, I would love to hear your thoughts. You can let me know, tag me at Lama letters on Instagram, in your stories. I'd love to find out your thoughts. And, uh, also keep an eye out for my Etsy shop reopening this Thursday, the 21st, which is not a multi-level marketing company.
I make these prints and then I sell them to you. And I will not recruit you to sell them to someone else because they're fuckery flowers, not fuckery business practices. Also, if you haven't signed up for my newsletter yet the October freebie has started to go out. I'm so sorry if you were not able to get it earlier, but you should get it by now.
If you start to sign up for it, there will be a new one in November. All of this stuff is linked in the show notes as always. This is sponsored by my patrons. They are fucking rad. They. Support me in everything I do. And hopefully I have not pissed too many of them off with any of my recent episodes. I guess we'll find out won't we on the Patrion page, you can check it out at www.patreon.com/cindyguentertbaldo to find out more as always take care of yourselves.
I'll see you next Monday. And until next time, my friends peace out.
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