[imagesource: Amazon Prime Video]

The rich are getting richer and the poor getting poorer.

So when stories about the carnage and chaos at the top get spotlit from those at the bottom, we tune in.

Amazon Prime has released a new four-part docuseries, LuLaRich, that unpacks the deterioration of a women’s online apparel company/pyramid scheme called LuLaRoe.

We’ve got the trailer towards the end.

Filmmakers Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby Nason made Fyre Fraud so they know their fair share about quick-buck schemes going wrong.

Like other founders that have fallen – Adam Neumann (WeWork), Elizabeth Holmes (Theranos), and Billy McFarland (Fyre Festival) – DeAnne and Mark Stidham (pictured above) rose to the top by selling a dream and profiting off the backs of millions, instead of running a proper, easily scalable business.

Per Variety, at the company’s height in 2018, they were bringing in $1,8 billion in sales annually from over 80 000 consultants.

There was, potentially, great money to be made for others within the organisation, but this documentary unfussily lays out that it tended to come through the process of drawing in referrals, rather than through the retail operation.

For the Stidhams, this looks like evangelising and spreading the good word; for those beneath them, it’s a grind.

Former LuLaRoe retailer Roberta Blevins is featured in LuLaRich calling the garments “dead fart leggings” to describe the smell of rotten clothes that were being sent for retailers to sell.

When the true-con docuseries came out on September 10, consultants, still loyal to the brand, flooded Amazon with one-star ratings:

Using a Facebook group for retailers of LuLaRoe clothing, one LuLaRoe retailer posted, “If anyone wants to give it a one-star review to bring down the ratings …” and then pasted a link to the reviews area for “LuLaRich.”

According to screenshots, this retailer had succeeded in doing just that, and trashed “LuLaRich” for being badly made, while also slamming the whistleblowing consultants who participated in the documentary.

Trailer time:

Ignore those one-star reviews because LuLaRich is worth a watch.

[source:variety]