For stay-at-home moms, LuLaRoe offered the best cake-and-eat-it-too scenario: Make “full-time income for part-time work” selling the company’s colorful patterned clothing while still having time for your children and husband, Texas News Today reported. Sold as empowerment and a fun way to build community, they paid the $5,000 to $10,000 buy-in for its skirts, leggings, dresses and tops. To afford this, some borrowed from family members and credit cards, took out loans and even sold breast milk. Instead, except for those at the top, many women drowned in debt and over 100 former retailers have filed for bankruptcy. And even for those that pulled in staggering sums, marriages were shattered, the work was all-consuming, and one wondered whether she had joined a cult, according to a new docuseries. The new series investigates the allegations that LuLaRoe was a billion-dollar pyramid scheme that mostly benefited the Mormon couple, DeAnne and Mark Stidham, who founded the company and their family, pressured women to get a weight-loss surgery in Tijuana, and sold shoddy product. It charts its meteoric rise from 2013 to raking in $2.3 billion in 2017 to then facing and settling several lawsuits. ‘Since 2016, over 50 lawsuits have been filed against LuLaRoe,’ according to the docuseries.
