From The Confessional: Comfy Leggings Or Not, MLMs Are A Big LuLa-NO

Okay, here’s MY confession: I own LuLaRoe leggings. One pair. So does my daughter. Someone sent them to us for free—years ago—in exchange for a social media promo. And TBH, I have thoughts. First of all, I did not like one single pattern she offered me, so I chose the least hideous option and they go with literally nothing I own. HOWEVER. These are hands-down the most comfortable leggings I have ever put on my body. They feel like fucking butter. Are they shape-shifting and butt-lifting and all the magical things $100 Lululemons or Spanx are? Nope. Do I care? Nope. Because comfortable is my love language. Even if they are some weird-ass green color with orange triangles on them. (Like WHAT IS THIS PATTERN?)

And my animal-loving daughter? She hit the jackpot because the consultant sent her leggings with foxes on them. Foxes!! They were, again, a bizarre color (burnt orange, maybe?) and matched nothing, but she wore those suckers forever. They are a size 5 and she STILL wears them as capri leggings, years later. (She’s in 5th grade.)

My point is, I get it, LuLaRoe peeps. I really do. At the height of the legging / MLM / “Be your own boss!” craze when we all wanted to make some cash and we all wanted to never have to wear real pants ever again, the LuLaRoe concept duped a lot of us. Their leggings were comfortable AF and not too pricey. So we bought. And we bought and we bought and we bought. And a lot of us started to sell, too.

And that’s when shit went really bad.

This toxic MLM company preyed on women with one primal need—comfort. We are sitting on the floor with our toddlers. We are running 84 errands a day, wrangling babies in and out of car seats. We are changing diapers, heating up bottles, wiping spit up off the cat, and folding tiny socks for hours on end. For the love, just give us some damn comfy pants. We don’t even care if the patterns look like hotel carpet because we’re covered in peanut butter and jelly anyway. (And LuLaRoe said, “We gotchu.”)

So yeah, many of us got sucked in when LuLaRoe hit the stage. Looking back, we don’t know what hit us, but we do know our drawers started filling up fast.

And while our closets and drawers filled up, our bank accounts drained. And our partners didn’t know what TF was going on, other than seeing a constant rotation of obnoxiously bright leggings covered in geometric shapes, or fireworks, or jack-o-lanterns, or giant cat faces on our legs, and on our crotches, and on our asses.

Maybe you never got sucked in—maybe you saw this train wreck MLM bullshit for what it was (and how unattractive the product they were peddling also was) from day 1 and steered clear. But I’ll bet you had a friend, or a cousin, or a neighbor, or a relative who went all in, didn’t you? And you cringed in embarrassment and had to dodge their invites to “host a party!” (Ugh, hard pass, Kathy.)

I mean honestly, why were the patterns so hideous? What about “let’s make everyone look like they’re wearing a rug you’d find at the dentist’s office!” sounded appealing? But it worked, so I guess they knew what they were doing.

If you never joined in this craze, you may have felt like an outsider at one point, when everyone on your street was hosting a LuLaRoe party. “Girls night! Drink some wine and do some shopping!” and you were like “WTF NO WHY. I’d rather stab my eyes out with toothpicks.” Well, most of us have seen the light, now, even if we didn’t back then. We see just how fucked up the MLM model—especially this one—really was. And we see now how those Winnie the Pooh leggings, as it turns out, were not actually the “great buy” we thought they were.

We know all that now.

The truth is, though, the LuLaRoe cult was real, and MLMs continue to prey on women to this day. Look out for your friends. Support them if they’re actually on a good, sound investment path and are doing something they’re passionate about and that brings them joy. But if they are lighting money on fire to “be their own boss!” when “being their own boss” requires purchasing thousands of dollars worth of cheaply made “merch” they now have to harass their friends and family to buy, you gotta step in and be the friend that calls bullshit on that. Save your friends before it’s too late.

And even more importantly, save yourself.