Not a Book: LulaRich

Oh we’re back in the weird American stuff corner of my world this week. I’m on a big documentary kick at the moment by the way and it’s taking some effort on my part to spread out the posts about all of them!

LuLaRich is about the rapid rise and the somewhat fall of Lularoe, a multilevel marketing firm based out of Utah. In case you’ve never heard of them, they rose to fame for their “buttery soft” leggings and the collapse came when they had some…quality issues. If you haven’t already, there are a lot of articles about it – Stephanie McNeal (then of Buzzfeed) wrote this one and it won’t spoil your enjoyment of the documentary if you read it first.

And I know that might sound strange, but that’s because the big selling point about this doc (or at least it was for me) is that it has interviews with the founders DeeAnn Brady and her husband Mark Stidham so you can see what they have to say about it all. And it’s also got plenty of people who were involved in selling Lularoe too. It’s really quite something.

MLMs are such a peculiarly American thing too – I mean I remember my mum going to Tupperware and weekenders parties and buying stuff from Avon when I was little, but its by no means the same thing as in the states – I’ve seen people talking about having to run a gauntlet of MLM vendors at church, there are several reality TV stars who seem to make their main income from selling MLM products online (like Meri Brown from Sister Wives who is a Lularoe seller – and one of the top tier) so stuff like this fascinates and horrifies me in equal measure. I watched all four parts of this in one sitting with my sister the other week and it sort of blew my mind.

Anyway, if you’ve got any more good documentary series suggestions for me, please put them in the comments. I don’t want gore or sexual violence, I want more stuff like this or like the Man Who Stole Cricket about Alan Stanford. Thanking you!