Thousands of Women Say LuLaRoe’s Legging Empire Is a Scam

My wife unfortunately got involved with LulaRoe. She was a stay-at-home mom for a little while and wanted to help out the family by bringing in some extra income while still keeping the flexibility of being able to stay at home with our child. She loved their clothing and had a few friends who were also starting up selling so she felt some sense of community with them. They also sold her hard on the idea that the market was just starting up and she could get in on the "ground floor" and make a good amount of money if things went well. She'd spent pretty much her entire work life in food service and cafes and she always wanted to run her own business and have that level of independence so that she could "break away" from the service industry.

The reality was she ended up losing a lot of money, working 60-70 hours some week just to keep up with customer requests (most of which was returns and asking if she had a specific print in a specific size), and eventually burnt out with how difficult it was and how much back-and-forth the company was giving her (they had a policy where you could return product, then they totally changed the policy, then they changed it back, then changed it again). They also required that she kept up with inventory purchasing quotas, and if she didn't buy enough inventory within a certain amount of time she was cut off from selling at all and she wouldn't have access to their resources or sales systems.

She's not unintelligent and did realize the risks involved. She was just wanting to help out our family and build something for herself, and that's where I think a lot of these companies come in to feed on that desire for independence and flexibility. It was a difficult lesson for her to learn and really demoralizing.

She now runs her own cafe and is doing quite well at it, so I don't think it was her lack of business acumen that kept her from being successful.

I think HN stores text encoded as UTF-8, so all you need to do is input an emoji via your keyboard/copy-paste.

Defining LuLaRoe as a "legging empire" is simply wrong. They are a weak-minded-person manipulation empire. Their competitors aren't clothing retailers, they're other MLMs, all targeting the same weak-minded people. That's what they sell. The prey on the weak-minded--those who would have their own dreams sold to them--and then wrap it up in fancy English to make the FTC happy.

"--and then wrap it up in fancy English to make the FTC happy."

The wool is being pulled over 0 peoples (in power) eyes. Everyone (again, everyone with power) knows what is going on, including the FTC.

MLMs target those particularly vulnerable to their pitch. They leverage their information asymmetry (almost everyone will lose money in a MLM to the benefit of those above) and as you say, hide what the reality of what the "business" really is with lifestyle fantasy and rhetoric marketing.

I consider myself maybe a little smart in a few very specific areas - that has not stopped me from being outsmarted or taken advantage of at times I and think this is true for most people at some point. Labeling victims as weak minded is a simple way of dismissing the wrongdoing done by MLM actors with far more resources and power than their victims.

What they do should be illegal, and the simple reason it's not is MLMs donate lots of money to lawmakers.