Amazon's LuLaRich hits paydirt delving into the fall of women's clothing retailer LuLaRoe

Indiewire

"Lately, it feels like documentaries are in a rush to capitalize on the next big scandal, whether it’s the mullet-cut world of Joe Exotic or the privileged attendees of the Fyre festival," says Kristen Lopez. "The desire to create a guilty exposé of an unknown world can lead to stories where the scandal isn’t as obvious as the surrounding peculiarities. In other cases, like Amazon Prime Video’s LulaRich, a docuseries hits paydirt. Directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason — who, incidentally, directed Hulu’s Fyre Fraud documentary in 2019 — craft a thrilling, nightmarish story that combines elements of fashion, feminism, and fraud all in one beautiful package." Lopez adds: "There’s a splashy brightness to all four episodes of LulaRich that gets at the heart of why so many (predominately) women wanted to join the company. Furst and Nason look at the companies origins and its enigmatic founders, DeAnne and Mark Stidham. The Stidhams are a picture-perfect couple and that emphasis on aesthetics runs deep from the first time they’re interviewed, when DeAnne worried about the composition of the rug while the two (very much unscripted) hold hands. Like most companies, DeAnne’s story of being a mother trying to make some money while raising 14 children is compelling and was at the heart of LulaRoe’s ethos: They were offering a chance for mothers to become entrepreneurs....We’ve seen documentaries on pyramid schemes before, but with LulaRich the intent isn’t just to focus on the fraud, but how the company specifically targeted women. Several interview subjects mention the appeal of being able to make money while spending time with their children. Couple that with the rise of social media and the emphasis on FOMO, and it’s not surprising that LulaRoe was able to explode as Facebook Live and Instagram just started to take off. These women were early influencers of their day, selling leggings and making millions."

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• LuLaRich benefits from its chronological presentation: "LuLaRich, the new Amazon Prime series about the rise and partial collapse of the clothing company LuLaRoe, will be right up your alley if your alley is: docuseries about cults, docuseries about scams, true-crime docuseries, podcasts about any of those things, or sighing with resignation while scrolling past Facebook posts for LuLaRoe (or Herbalife, or Mary and Martha, or Mary Kay, or any of the other dozens of pyramid schemes of the past few decades)," says Kathryn VanArendonk. "LuLaRich benefits from running roughly chronologically. There are teasers at the beginning to let you know how bad things will be, and occasional jumps backward for additional context, but for the most part, the series’ four installments, which drop simultaneously tomorrow, generally chart the company from inception through its sharp rise in popularity, and then past the point when the cracks begin to show. This straightforward design is a welcome relief from the trend of so many shows (especially fiction, but docuseries as well) that leap through time willy-nilly. It also lets LuLaRich showcase the oddity of LuLaRoe’s founders from the beginning."
• There’s little overt philosophizing about what it all means in LuLaRich, which works to the project’s benefit: "It serves up both a sense of what multilevel marketing does to those who participate in it and a dose of human weirdness in the form of two founders in the process of falling, or rising again," says Caroline Framke, adding: "What makes LuLaRich most interesting is its position relative to the history of LuLaRoe. Theranos collapsed, and (Elizabeth) Holmes is on trial; Fyre Festival’s impresario Billy McFarland is in prison; WeWork still exists, but its own reckless founder stepped down as chief executive in 2019. While the Stidhams have paid a settlement, LuLaRoe remains very much a going concern. The most punishing costs have been borne by the associates, whose stories we hear — time spent away from family on a doomed project, divorce, even bankruptcy. These stories, so marginal to the Stidhams’ ambitions, won’t stop the business from rolling on. But they’re central to a documentary that comes into focus as a clear-eyed accounting of an economy that seems to have an unsentimental tendency to encourage endless hustle, the perfect setting for a powerful narrative."
• It isn't shocking that LuLaRich comes from the Hulu Fyre Festival documentary directors: "So many of the elements of LuLaRich feel like extensions of previous cyberscam/cybercult documentaries, which by now have a fairly codified rise-and-fall structure accompanied by common scenes of limited embellishment — TED Talk-like leadership speeches, obscenely expensive concerts with overpaid musical acts, etc.," says Daniel Fienberg. "LuLaRich doesn’t break new ground at all, but it treats its vulnerable subjects with some empathy and effectively layers some of the wild (but really not so wild) twists that the story takes. And is Amazon actually in any position to be lecturing any other primarily online retailer on questionable business practices and employee treatment? Yes! Amazon is apparently in that position."
• LuLaRich has done the impossible: make leggings uncomfortable—on screen, at least: "The fascinating documentary series juxtaposes snapshots of flashy pants and other colorful clothing with the dark story of the increasingly malicious actions of DeAnne and Mark Stidham, co-founders of the clothing company LuLaRoe," says Saloni Gajjar. "Their products are popular for unapologetically vivid patterns, but the most sought-after item are leggings with colorful prints and an initially “buttery soft fabric.” The clothes might be bright and snug, but LuLaRoe’s success story is marred with lawsuits, heartbreak, and jaw-dropping levels of emotional manipulation. LuLaRich charts the company’s upsetting practices that caused upheaval in the lives of its middle-class retailers. In trying to match its subject, the docuseries is sometimes more showy than needed, but it is effective in capturing the Stidhams’ horrifying leadership, and the financial ruin it caused for their employees."
• LulaRich doesn't totally succeed in explaining why LulaRoe was such a disaster, mostly because LulaRoe's screw-ups are too vast to chronicle: "It's a train wreck," says Alexis Nedd, "and what LulaRich offers is dozens of perspectives on what it was like to ride the train before it crashed. And, perhaps, a reminder not to board similar trains when they attempt to stop in at your station."
• LuLaRich directors Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason were working on the documentary for a few months when co-founders DeAnne and Mark Stidham agreed to sit on camera: “We were very straight with them,” Furst told Variety. “We said, ‘We’re making this film and we think that it could be one way with you and it could be one way without you. But either way, we want to give you the opportunity to tell your own story.’” So amid the pandemic in August 2020, Furst and Nason went to LuLaRoe headquarters in Corona, CA for a six-hour sit-down with DeAnne and Mark Stidham.