‘LuLaRich’ Takes Comedic Look At Collapse Of Leggings Empire

Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason have become pioneers in a new genre within the true-crime category, something they call “true comedy.”

The directors/executive producers earned an Emmy nomination for their 2019 documentary Fyre Fraud, about the luxe music festival that turned hilariously bad. Their latest docuseries, LuLaRich, from Amazon Prime Video, takes a comedic look at the rise and fall of LuLaRoe, a clothing company known for leggings that featured pizza slice prints, grinning pineapples, bespectacled canines and other fanciful designs.

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LuLaRoe was founded by DeAnne and Mark Stidham, a couple steeped in the ways of multi-level marketing – businesses set up like Amway and Avon that sell direct to consumers.

“They started in their garage and they had to keep expanding and expanding until they had all their inventory out in a parking lot, which led to it being infested by mold and some of the aromas described in the film,” Furst explained as he, Nason and fellow executive producers Blye Faust and Cori Shepherd Stern appeared at Deadline’s Contenders Television: Documentary + Unscripted event. “I think it’s a perfect metaphor for ‘bigger is better.’ ”

The Stidhams recruited mostly women to sell the apparel out of their homes, dubbing these agents “fashion consultants.” In true multi-level marketing manner, the consultants were urged to sign up other recruits. Each new recruit paid startup fees to LuLaRoe and had to buy thousands of dollars in inventory, which, oftentimes, they couldn’t unload.

“Multi-level marketing is a legal form of a pyramid scheme, essentially,” Nason said. Added Furst, “They were peddling a dream to families around America that wasn’t a reality.”

Stern said the company purported to be all about supporting women.

“It was cloaked in a sort of cheap feminism,” she said. “These women were set up for failure rather than set up for success. … My mom was part of a multilevel marketing company when I was a kid and I saw the toll that it took on her. And that was one of the reasons I personally wanted to do this doc.”

The Stidhams agreed to sit down with the filmmakers to present their side of the story, though they backed out of a planned second interview.

Faust, who won an Oscar for producing 2015’s Spotlight, said of the Stidhams: “They are very good salespeople, and that’s what allowed them to grow and become so huge. … They had a good idea [originally] and they unfortunately ended up really kind of abusing that idea … and grew much too fast and really exploited the women who were selling for them by saturating the marketplace in a way that was just untenable. And the business then just imploded from there.”

Check out the panel video above.