“Multi-level Marketing” sounds like a harmless enough phrase. But thousands of would-be entrepreneurs have learned the synonym for MLM the hard way: Pyramid scheme. The new documentary The Rise and Fall of LuLaRoe takes on the notorious company that sold mostly women on the idea of (their version) of the American dream: You can work part-time from home and make gobs of money and win fabulous prizes and…
Well, you can already see where this is going, right? As someone in the film points out, whether you’re selling vitamins or supplies or, in the case of LulaRoe, “buttery soft stretch pants,” if the business involves you recruiting other people to sell under you, and they recruit others to sell under them and you, it’s a pyramid. And it almost never ends well for anyone in that pyramid except for the person at the tip top.
The documentary does an excellent job, through animation, of illustrating just how that pyramid looks and how it all comes together. Whether ambitious ,desperate, or just the personality type who buys into what people pitch to them – these recruited “ retailers” found themselves in what can only be described as a kind of cult. Drinking Kool-Aid, buying more stock than they can sell of poorly made and, frankly, butt-ugly stretch pants that they had a hard time moving at any price.
What I found particularly interesting were the psychological phenomena that are in play with something like this, and how people like the owners, DeAnne and Mark Stidham, use those techniques to make true believers out of the vulnerable. So many women lost their homes, their savings, and their relationships and ended up with garages filled with useless garments in a market so saturated that one retailer discovered that her next door neighbor was selling the same product out of her apartment just steps away.
In addition to psyche experts, we hear from journalists who were part of lengthy investigative work that helped expose the inner workings of the scam, even though the company still, somehow, is in operation.
The last movie I watched before this one was The Eyes of Tammy Faye, in which a husband and wife team (Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker) looked earnestly into the eyes of their followers and promised salvation, very much like husband and wife DeAnne and Mark Stidham.
Yes, salvation, riches, a better life – all can be yours. But it’ll cost you.
