![]() ![]() And for a few years, it was - generating $2.3 billion at its height in 2017 - until it was rocked with very public turmoil. Five of her adult children and their spouses pitched in, and eventually joined their mother, working for the company in a quest to make LuLaRoe a success. ![]() Through pure grit and determination, LuLaRoe says on its website, DeAnne “launched LuLaRoe with a vision to help others succeed.” She named the company after her three oldest granddaughters and named items of LuLaRoe clothing after different members of her large, extended Mormon family. It was founded in 2013 by DeAnne Stidham, a California woman described by the company as a “ struggling mother” who had the idea for the company after sewing a skirt for her daughter. LuLaRoe was largely so successful because the dream of working from home, setting your own hours, and supporting your family by running your own business is so deeply baked into the company’s DNA. She ended up selling her last 500 pieces for a dollar an item, just to get rid of them. When she wanted to quit, she still had around 3,000 pieces of LuLaRoe clothing in her home, stuffed into every spare nook and completely cannibalizing her dining room. After approximately two years and countless hours of working for LuLaRoe, she said she never made a profit after the first year (and that year, she said traveling to LuLaRoe events and other expenses ate away at any profit she had made). She had to cash out her 401(k) to pay it off. More than 80,000 women believed they could do it too, and in just four short years, this army of women turned LuLaRoe from an informal side hustle by twin Mormon grandmothers into a company worth an estimated $2 billion.īut by the time Willis, a 36-year-old mother of two from Kenosha, Wisconsin, finally quit the multilevel marketing company, or MLM, in 2018, she said she had around $50,000 in credit card debt from her business. Willis was living the dream of a lot of millennial women, many of whom are in the never-ending grind of working, raising their families, and trying to pay their student debt simultaneously. After just eight months, she was able to quit her job as a NICU nurse to do LuLaRoe full time. In her prime, she estimates she had $80,000 in inventory and was doing approximately $12,000 to $18,000 in sales a month. She said she paid $10,000 to join the company in April 2016 with the hopes of hustling enough on nights and weekends to pay off around $120,000 in student loans from nursing school. In many ways, Willis was the ideal LuLaRoe consultant. “I sat in my room and cried probably four out of the seven nights just because it felt like everybody hated me, it was so cliquey, it was so cultlike, is the best way I can describe it,” she told me over the phone late last year. In reality, Willis now says, she was completely miserable the entire trip, which she had been invited on after being one of the top sellers for LuLaRoe in 2016. “And this, my friends, is the LuLaRoe life,” reads the caption. A third simply shows her perfectly manicured toes resting on a window, the expanse of blue sea in front of her. In another photo, she wears a kimono and sunglasses, standing in the middle of the ocean with her arms outstretched, as if she can’t quite believe she’s really there. She and her husband sport matching straw fedoras and clutch drinks, while standing in front of a crystal-blue ocean, a massive cruise ship in the background. In a photo she posted on Instagram of her 2017 cruise to the Caribbean, Katie Willis smiles at the camera, her hair perfectly braided and her teeth blindingly white. ![]()
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