Month: January 2018

Today is January 22, 2018. I write that so I can look back at this and remember when it was written. I don’t plan on ever publishing this post, but I need to write–and right now, this is where I will.

It’s been almost 2 years since I started my “journey” in LuLaRoe.  It was exciting at first. I was never planning on being successful in it, but it just kind of “took off.” My “launch” party in April 2016 (what they like to call your initial pop up party once you receive your inventory)– I sold over 210 pieces, around $8000.00, which at the time my sponsor said was the record. (I think she was just trying to make me feel spectacular–which she did!) Overwhelmed was an understatement. I was planning on having to ship like, 20 items. So having to all of a sudden ship 210? I think I cried for two days straight because I wanted everything to be perfect. People started coming to me to join “the movement”. I never really wanted a team, but once people started coming to me, and I saw the bonus check, I thought–hey, maybe this is something I could do. I hit trainer status in 4 months. I cruise qualified every month the first year I started, which was something I never thought was possible. I was going through some medical stuff with mental illness, and although a part of me was screaming not to do it, I quit my nursing job. I think I knew deep down that I was making a mistake, but there wasn’t any way I could physically work as a nurse that point. I was drained. LuLaRoe kept me busy. Occupied. I would forget about my depression, anxiety, past traumas because I literally just threw myself into work. Working sometimes up to 16 hours a day. Seven days a week. My husband and I argued a lot the first 7 months of my journey. Him asking me when it was going to get better, when it was going to get easier. I tried to answer him, and I tried to slow down, but I couldn’t. It became an obsession. I HAD to hit that $12K monthly goal at a minimum and each month I pushed harder so I could make a little bit more, be a little bit better than my previous month. Anyone who knows me knows I am a perfectionist at my core, and the way I ran my business it showed. Everything I did had to be perfect, from my sales to my albums to the way I shipped my packages. Looking back I realize now that it wasn’t “saving me from my depression or past traumas”. It was, in fact, feeding into them. It was much easier to “be numb” while selling LLR than it was to be numb while being an RN. The latter just wasn’t possible. In order to be safe, I had to be present when I was a nurse. LLR made me sink further into my PTSD. I didn’t have to think, I just went through motions, robotically. Day after day, night after night, week after week. I found it as a reason to stay home and stay away from my friends because I always had work to do. It was my “out”. I thought it was helping me but looking back it was so detrimental to the state I was in. And it just increased the company’s ability to feed on my insecurities and downfalls.

In October of 2016 I was invited to California to attend “Leadership.” I was excited. I was excelling at what I was doing and I didn’t really understand why or how, but I was. I was never really a “sales” person so I wasn’t sure how I was doing so well but I just went with it. I was scared shitless to go to Leadership. I knew no-one, but I decided to go anyways which is totally unlike me. I remember getting off the plane in Cali with my stomach in my throat, literally having a panic attack by the baggage claim. I was in tears, about 2 seconds away from running back upstairs and booking the next flight home. There’s no way I can do this alone, I thought. But I did. I met someone, we took a shuttle to the hotel together, and then went our separate ways. I checked into the hotel, by myself, finally realizing the depth of what I was doing. I was being independent. I had constantly depended on others for a long time, and here I was, doing something by myself. Without my husband, without a friend, without a significant other. Just me. I’m extremely introverted. Extremely closed off. I’m shy, and I don’t like to talk to people unless I have some drinks. But I did this. AND I survived. AND I had a blast. I was definitely all in that first night. I met my sponsor and her fiancé, who were SO much fun. I also got to meet my upline coach who you would never think that she was a “coach” in all of this (because unlike most uplines, she didn’t act like she was better than anyone else). I also met a girl…a sweet, blonde haired girl who was going through A LOT of stuff I could relate to myself from my past. To be honest, at first I was annoyed because she got me to cry and I told myself I wouldn’t cry…but by the end of the night we were friends. Little did I know that she would end up being one of my best friends…

Leadership was… I don’t really know. Extravagant? I felt like I was a “cool kid” but not really a cool kid because I was only a trainer. Funny thing. Everyone was obsessed with my mentor. They wanted to be by her and take pictures with her. I may have taken one, just so I said I could, but I distinctively remember one part. Her husband had just come back from being gone for awhile (I think military but I’m not saying that for sure because I don’t remember) . What I DO remember is feeling horrified for him. He left and his wife and life were normal. He’s come back to his wife being the center of a billion dollar business. Consultants were like paparazzi around her. Always wanting to talk to her or take pictures with her. He was just kind of, off in the corner. I went up and introduced myself to him, told him my name was Katie. He goes, “Hi, I’m {sic} her husband. “No”, I say. You’re {name}. You’re {name}. You may be her husband, but you have a name and it’s nice to meet you, {name}.” I found it disturbing. Disgusting. But in the same sense it was fascinating. Could I be like her? Could people look up to me like they look up to her?

The parties were extravagant. Over the top. I felt like a celebrity, but just a tiny celebrity compared to the “big wigs”. Looking back I kind of laugh. Celebrity? Wtf 😂 But it was that feeling, that sense of almost belonging that made me want to continue and keep growing and keep building. Keep pushing to be the best. I had a couple of drinks before each night’s event. It was the only way I could be somewhat normal and let’s be real, the parties were a lot more fun with drinks in hand. I had a blast with my sponsor and her fiancé.

When I went to leadership, though, I was honestly kind of ready to quit LuLaRoe. I was mentally and physically EXHAUSTED. I thought I was making good money, but at what cost? LLR was my life. I worked close to 60 hours a week. I worked weekends. I was constantly in my “LuLaRoom” taking photos, shipping, etc etc etc. My kids were always upset with me, my husband was always upset with me, and I didn’t know how to “shut it off”. I couldn’t shut it off. Perfection was all I ever knew so when I started doing so well right off the bat, I just had the drive and mindset that I had to keep being perfect. I didn’t know how to take a break. I stopped seeing my friends. I stopped talking to everyone. I took the pain that I was going through mentally and threw it into my work instead. To numb myself. Because when I worked, I didn’t think about anything else. So yea…I went into Leadership saying that if something didn’t change, I had to quit. Unlike a lot of the girls there, who had gotten a mindset of “my husband better get used to this because I would choose LLR over him”, I was the opposite. I flat out told my sponsor if my husband ever told me I had to quit LLR, I would in a heart beat. I wanted to find a way to make it work, but I wasn’t about to sacrifice my marriage for it. Long story short, I found a way to make it work easier. Sales decreased a little. I was no longer having 150 item pop ups every week. Instead, they were more spread out so it gave me less of an overwhelming feel.

Slowly though, I started to get the feel of inventory adding up in my room. I’d be adding a rack here. Adding another there. Have to carry this style. Need more of this one. Didn’t meet my goal this month. Leaders would ask me how much I bought. You need to buy more in order to sell more. Well that’s good… But when you buy 50 pieces and can only sell 20 of them, that’s 30 pieces in every single box I was stuck with. The bills kept adding up. I’d spend my bonus checks on shoes and other materialistic items that made me fit in with the culture of LuLaRoe. I morphed into what they were even tho I had convinced myself I was my own person. I truly was not. I was under the spell.

Looking back, I wonder if I missed signs. And I did. I don’t know if I was drunk on the Kool-Aid or if I was just oblivious to it all. Maybe a combination. But I now realize the red flags. Mentors and Coaches (not my direct Coach or Sponsor, they were always pretty upfront with me) telling us to “order order order”. The more you buy, the more you sell. I take FULL responsibility financially for what I got myself into. Nobody made me purchase inventory. I was great at putting together outfits and putting on a front to sell these clothes, but NO ONE prepared me how to manage the financial side of a business of that magnitude. (And yes, looking back it wasn’t really a large magnitude but coming from someone who has no experience with taxes and all that other jazz…it was a big deal) Here’s the thing though…when you see someone question why their sales aren’t higher and you get told to tell them (my downline) to order more inventory, looking back I should have seen the red flags then. So many red flags. Mentors giving away iPads and other big gifts for a random person that ordered a certain amount in a month on their team. (Back when bonuses were based off of amount ordered and not sales). Mentors giving us a table that said if you ordered this much a month you could sell this much a month. The mentors telling us how much they were making a month in bonuses. This could be you, they said. They stood up on a stage at leadership and told us that there were now 2 consultants that LLR had been made millionaires off of by bonus checks alone. I want to do that, I thought. Coach by convention was my goal. I mean, I was already close…I didn’t think I’d have a problem reaching it.

And then, things turned. Maybe I started to realize how much money LLR owed me in backorders. Missing items. Stuff I thought they would just send me because they “had my back”, but I never got the items and certainly never saw the money. Nonpayments not going through. Having to fight and argue and spend countless hours trying to prove that you didn’t get a payment or didn’t receive an order. I started to speak up in our Leadership group when I felt things weren’t right, and I was often shunned or politely told to “shut up”. (Okay, they never told me to shut up, but they always just told me I was wrong and that I need to trust lularoe and that lularoe “has our backs”.) Any time I would speak up I would be criticized by the majority of women on our larger team. The few that agreed with me wouldn’t agree with me out loud in the group (probably in fear of being ostracized like I was) but would private message me saying things like “thank you so much for speaking the truth and trying to get answers”. The more I spoke, the less I was liked. It became isolating.

And then February came in 2017. I was excited for the cruise. I was PROUD of the cruise. I worked my ass off for it and I was super happy to be one of the select few that got to go on it. Boy, was I ever wrong.

The cruise. I felt judged. I got trashed talked (behind my back of course) for not going to the “trainings” because my husband (who is not involved in my LLR business) and I wanted to treat the cruise like a vacation and not like my work trip. I remember going to Cozumel and sitting with my sponsor at a bar when my mentor walked up to us. She talked to my sponsor and her fiancé for a good 10 minutes with my husband and I sitting RIGHT there, and she didn’t say a word to me. Not a word. Not a hi, not a hello, not a nice to meet you, not a how are you. Nothing. She acted as if I didn’t even exist. She walked away and I was downright pissed. And I let my sponsor hear it. My sponsor’s response? Apparently I was supposed to get “talked to” by my coach. For speaking my opinion on our leadership page. Apparently they didn’t appreciate the way I often spoke up about legitimate concerns I was having with the company (IE, the hole-y leggings issue, non payments, backorders, etc). Because I wasn’t all “rainbows and unicorns”, my mentor didn’t think highly of me. I told my sponsor I wasn’t going to change who I was for ANYONE else. My sponsor said, “Well if I were you, I would definitely want to be on {the mentor’s} good side, not on her bad side”. Which to her point, was true since there are a lot of things a mentor can do for you. They are essentially your lifeline whenever you have a problem with orders, payments, etc. They also have been known to build up your team (which I obviously never reaped the benefits of lol) so I understand now where she was coming from. At the time, though, I was livid. Needless to say the rest of the cruise was ridiculous. I spent half the time in tears in my room. Hating the fact that people judged my husband and I because we chose to treat the cruise like a vacation. Judged me for having a beer. Judged me because I wasn’t obsessively in love with LLR. Judged me because I had an opinion about whether or not some things were being handled correctly. Judged me because I had my own style and chose not to wear LLR 24/7 while I was on the boat. I was miserable. Absolutely miserable.

By this time, I was still selling a ton. I was still on my way to CQ for 2018, so I just kept chugging along. I started talking with one of my directs a lot and we became close friends, along with that blonde haired gal I had met at Leadership way back in November. I figured out a routine. I didn’t work as much, but I still wasn’t happy. I was drowning. Drowning in debt. Drowning in unhappiness. Drowning in clothes.  By this time, LLR had started the 100 percent buyback. Send back your inventory and they’ll refund you 100 percent. I can’t even explain how many times I thought about it. How many times I told my two best friends that I wanted to do it. Just make it through the summer, I thought. I wanted the summer off of work, and I knew if I quit LLR I’d have to go back to nursing. So I thought, I’ll enjoy my summer off and then I’ll quit. And then August came…then September…and I still thought about it daily, but I was reassured by my mentors that the buyback was NOT going to go away. And then bam. It did. One day, out of left field. It was gone. And so here I sat. Stuck. Under the new rules, anyone who had ever made a bonus check from LLR can basically send back nothing. The way LLR does their crazy ass illegal math, if you are a sponsor or above, you’re never sending back anything to LLR and getting money for it. So here I am. $55000 (yes, that is the right number) in inventory later and I am FORCED to stay in this business. Yes, that’s how I feel. Forced. I can’t leave because I have too much inventory. I can’t leave because I need my bonus check to survive while I try to figure out how to offload all of this inventory I have. I can’t leave because I need to reorder little amounts here and there to stay “fresh” in my customers eyes so I can still pair old with new to move inventory. And I’m miserable. Every day of my life, I’m miserable. My upline keeps telling me to stop bitching. If you’re so unhappy why don’t you just leave they say. I WANT TO, I scream. But I can’t. I can’t leave. I need to stay in compliance so I can continue to sell off the thousands of dollars of clothing that is sitting in my room. I need to stay in compliance so I can keep getting the bonus check to pay my bills and keep my head above water. I need to keep ordering new inventory so my group doesn’t die out. God. It was just an endless cycle. A completely endless cycle.

I try to talk myself into going live for my group and I hate it. I hate wearing LLR, I hate pretending to be happy that I am selling it. I hate that I’m associated with this God awful company and the leaders in it. I feel like I am in a cult. Wanting to leave but them making it impossible. Them screwing us over time and time and time again, only to come back and apologize or say this or say that and make it seem like it’s someone else’s fault. It’s never theirs. It’s always someone else. It feels like a cult. It feels like an abusive relationship. It’s all of the above.

NOIR just happened. I got some. Using the hack of logging into 20 different accounts to get first in line. Am I ashamed? No. I did what I had to do to keep my business running. Am I ashamed now, looking back on it? I mean, I’m ashamed of everything I did. I’m ashamed of selling, I’m ashamed of telling downline it was a good investment (because at the time I still believed it was), I’m ashamed of who I had become.

I’m twenty pounds heavier #becauseofllr. Because I stopped caring about what I looked like because I never left the house, and if I did, I wore leggings or sweatpants or one of their other oversized styles that made me not care about my body. I ate crap all the time because I never had time to eat a healthy meal. I was too busy selling or taking photos to work out or to care what I looked like. So then I became more depressed. Not only did I hate what I was doing, hate what I was selling, but I hated what I looked like, hated my body, and hated who I was becoming. I was so angry all of the time. Angry at LLR, but I couldn’t show it. And the hate ran so deep that I would just snap at anyone, all of the time. My husband, my kids. Other consultants that tried to pretend like LLR was perfect. I think back to what I was like before LLR and the scariest part is I don’t remember. It’s like I don’t have an identity anymore. My identity is LLR. And I hate it. It’s disgusting. I try to remember I do it to make others feel good, but how can I keep doing that when I see how evil the company is deep down. I feel like a fraud. Selling these clothes to people when I disagree with everything that the company has become but I don’t have a choice. Because here I am, stuck with thousands of dollars in inventory that I have to “fake it till I sell it all” and bring me out of this miserable Hellhole I have come to live in.

LuLaRoe was THE worst decision of my life. It was there when I needed a break from nursing. I will give it that. It allowed me to make money at a time in my life when I needed an option where I could work from home. But see there’s the thing. I thought I was making money. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t at all. In fact I was doing the opposite. Slowly drowning in debt.

I believe Lularoe has completely destroyed me. It’s destroyed my confidence. It’s destroyed my friendships. It has destroyed me as a person–because I no longer like the person I have become. I no longer like the person that my larger team (not my sponsor and coach) have “groomed” me to be. I’m not her. Why did I ever become her?

2/22/2020: Because a lot of people are asking what I’m doing now…

Update… I’ve changed a lot. I’ve learned a lot (the main one being to never be involved in any MLM or DS again lol). I’m in a much better place than when I wrote this blog two years ago. The shame doesn’t ever go away but I’m trying to be vulnerable enough to post it to help others know that they aren’t alone in their feelings. (And to perhaps save someone from joining this “movement”) I honestly didn’t think I’d ever publish this for people to read but maybe now is the time. These are my opinions on my time with the company. Everything I’ve mentioned is the truth on how I felt through my journey. When I wrote this the feelings were raw. Writing was my outlet because I couldn’t admit to anyone what I was going through because my biggest fear was being a failure. I wanted to keep going to try to turn it around and when I finally realized that “turning it around” was never going to happen, it was hard to grasp. The hardest part for me through all of this wasn’t even the financial stuff. It was the gaslighting, the cycle of abuse, the feeling of being in a cult and not being able to escape. It was the shame of selling the company’s clothes to other people. The shame of creating a team under me of which I felt and still feel responsible for getting them into such a disgraceful situation. The guilt. The isolation. THAT was all the hardest part for me.

As far as where I am now…I’m back to NICU nursing and realize that is where I’m truly meant to be…with the babies and their families. It is being an RN that makes me truly feel like I am making a difference in the world and that makes me happy. 🙂

I will say again that the financial part of this whole fiasco is completely on me. I don’t “blame” the company at all for the mess I got myself into. That’s on me. When I got back from the cruise in 2017 my husband and I finally made a plan on paying off the debt. I started dumping my bonus checks into the credit card payments so I was SLOWLY paying them off, but as much as I would sell and as much as I was slowly (very slowly) decreasing the debt, I could just never really get ahead…especially when the bonus pay changed and my checks decreased by about 3/4. In the end I ended up draining my 401K to pay off the credit card debt I had accumulated from being a consultant because I just wanted it all to be done. The majority of it was inventory. The rest of it was me purchasing materialistic items to help me “fit in” with the culture of the company. Some of it was traveling to and from events. A trip to Cali for Leadership, Conventions, etc would cost about 4K all said and done. The “free” cruise I earned? I ended up spending about 3K on flights, lodging before, drinks, and excursions. Again, all on me. Luckily my husband is smarter than I am financially so the hit we took from the mess I got myself into wasn’t detrimental in the long run. Mentally, however, the hit I took from being a consultant has been a lot harder to overcome.