I posted this over in r/lulano and a few people suggested I share it here. I know there is a lot of curiosity out there about how an otherwise reasonable human being could get sucked into a MLM and what it's like so I wrote about my experience with Lula Roe. Here it is and it's long:

How I got in: I went to a Lula roe party with a friend. I fell in love with the leggings because they are comfortable and the perfect tee actually worked on my body type. The price didn't really bother me at the time because I had inherited six figures when my dad died and that warped my views on the value of money. Flash forward six months. I have put a down payment on a house, put my brother through drug rehab, replaced my husband's old car, traveled and the money is starting to run out. There is, however, enough there to buy into Lula roe and,having seen how well it was selling that the time it seemed like a good investment. My husband agreed. For awhile it was great. I lost(was fired due to personal illness, I didn't quit to sell llr) my day job but Lula Roe kept some money coming in.

Why I left: The first issue was how ugly some of this stuff was. When you are looking as a customer at a party you are really only looking at your size so it's easy to over look a few ugly pieces as a fluke. You don't even consider that for every ugly piece in your size there's an ugly piece in up to 6 other sizes. It doesn't hit you until you fork over $6000 grand to get inventory and you see how truly awful some styles are. Then the artists start coming forward claiming copyright infringement. One artist showed where Lula roe forgot to remove her water mark so her name was printed all over some pieces. I was disgusted with how Lula roe handled it. They tried to claim it was a coincidence that their hipster lion looked so much like this other artist's piece. When you put them side by side there was no way it was an accident. They just denied blatant theft until the watermark issue came forward and there was no way to lie their way out. Once they stopped stealing art and relying on their own designs the ugly pieces became more and more frequent and the decent pieces became rare. Quality went down hill, too. People started reporting leggings shredding on the first wear.

As consultants began going out of business and selling dirt cheap, under wholesale, I went from being able to sell 50-60 pieces in a weekend to being lucky to sell 3. I began to discount to try to get some money in but no one wanted to pay $18 for leggings that they could get for $10 or less from consultants desparate to get any money in. People would claim items and then contact me demanding to get a lower price because other consultants where selling under wholesale. If I agreed I lost money on the transaction. if I refused, I lost the sale. lose-lose.

With the mass Exodus of consultants came the founders really showing their true colors. They refused to acknowledge their own mistakes in running the business and instead insulted people who were leaving. They were called names and made fun of by Mark and Deanne. They told us that those consultants were just lazy miserable cows who didn't want to put the effort in to succeed.

Next came Disney. I'm a huge Disney fan so I was ecstatic when they announced the partnership. Surely Disney will make sure they produce quality styles,. right? Wrong. Hideous AF and only Micky and Minnie at first. We were told it would be many Disney characters and then I get a box of horrid Mickey and Minnie prints that no one wants, even massively discounted. (I recently sold my horrid Disney stuff to a very nice lady at $5 a pop losing about $10 a piece but I was thrilled to get anything)

For me the absolute final straw was convention 2017. I paid $800 for two tickets for my mother and I to attend. My faith in the brand was dwindling and I hoped to have them restore it. Yes, I know, naive. But I was desparate to succeed.

Day 1: Mom isn't feeling well so she stays at the hotel to rest up for the beach party. I went to the convention center to pick up our swag bags and bus tickets. The convention center was a mad house. Their organization of things was a joke. Swag bag lines for anything bigger than a large were rivaling the line for space mountain at Disney. But our tickets for convention events were in those bags so we needed them. I waited about two hours. When I got to the front it became clear what the hold up was. Despite the fact that we registered our shirt sizes when we signed up, they had failed to make the appropriate number of larger swag bags. (Clearly they don't realize that comfy, baggy clothes appeal to us bigger gals) they would run out, go look for more, then come upstairs with nine more despite having hundreds of us in line. Chatting with a woman in line I found out that the line for the pre paid bus tickets was about four hours long. My mother and I had a lunch reservation inside Disney an hour later from when I got my bags, I decided to abandon the bus tickets as I figured the line to get on the bus would also be awful. (Future requests to have my tickets refunded we're never acknowledged) As I clutched my swag close and turned to the sea of angry consultants I started to have a panic attack. My hope of rekindling my passion was falling apart and I needed to get away from the crowds. I found my way out side and took off running in a blind panic. I passed literally hundreds of Huns and not one thought to stop and ask if the fellow Hun, running in a terrified panic, needed help. I am a bigger girl so seeing me running in flip flops should have triggered a, "maybe something is wrong...?" But it didn't. Some sisterhood.

I ran until I stopped seeing Huns. When I finally stopped I was in a residential area. I called an Uber to the street corner I was standing on and went to get mom to make our lunch.

That night was the beach party. Talk about a shit storm. Since I had abandoned the bus tickets we took an Uber. We were told dinner would be provided at the party. They had several local restaurants there but the lines were even worse than the swag lines. Mom and I waited over an hour in line before word trickled back that all the booths we're out of food. I was shocked. They knew how many tickets they had sold so they should have known how much food they needed to order to feed everyone and yet they managed to feed less than half. My mom can be pretty awful when she's hungry so we decided to leave. We make our way out and back to the Uber drop off zone and I attempt to summon a ride. There's no signal. At this point I wondered if llr planned that just to spite us. Mom and I started walking, holding our phones up above our heads, trying to get a signal. I finally was able to get a faint signal and summon a car. We had met another mother/daughter duo who were also trying to get a ride and offered them a ride with us since the car had seat belts for four of us. We ended up riding back and having dinner as a group at down town Disney.

Day 2: I awoke still angry about the night before but decided to give convention a shot. Mom and I headed to the convention center and we're herded into a training session. It was awful. People were just sharing their success stories, telling us if we just tried harder we could succeed, too. Then they brought out a lesbian couple who sell together. The couple starts talking about how hard it was to come out since the founders are Morman but how supportive the command had been. To me, it felt like the equivalent of a racist parading around a black person they know going, "Look at me. I have black friends." To me, you don't brag about being accepting. You just accept them as they are because that's what decent people do. After this session I had had enough of their bullshit and had started planning my exit strategy in my note book while they finished.

Day 3: I went to Disneyland. I had no interest in further training. We decided to go to the closing party because they had a big name performer coming, though they didn't tell us who ahead of time. Didn't want to miss out on a concert we had basically paid $400 for. We got there early having learned from the beach trip. Got our "free" dinner and found seats. Headliner ended up being Katie Perry. I'm not really a fan but some of her music is decent so I can deal. Except when she started singing you couldn't understand her. It was just muffled and awful so we left. I learned later that the first song that was unrecognizable was "I kissed a girl" which was hilarious for an event run by mormans.

Post convention: When I got home I put in my resignation and announced I was going out now business in my groups. I sold what I could at wholesale, sold some for less to people who had bought a lot from me in the past. I returned what I could to Lula roe and just this week sold the last of the unreturnable (capsule collections, stuff I bought from other consultants etc) for a huge discount to a woman that likes to give it out as stocking stuffers at Christmas. I now have a normal 9-5 job. I know a lot of former consultants who went on to other mlms but I learned my lesson and will never do mlm again. I got about $4000 back from returning inventory. I was left with credit card debt because I had kept buying inventory hoping to boost things. We took out a home equity loan to cover those debts and are rebuilding our savings. I told my husband if I ever come to him with something like this again to shoot me and he agreed. Life is good out side lula roe.