The documentary series LuLaRich from Amazon opens with an interview of DeAnne and Mark Stidham, cofounders of the multilevel marketing company LuLaRoe. They seat themselves and make small talk, unaware that the camera is already rolling — a shortcut the filmmakers have taken to signal to viewers that this documentary won’t merely channel the Stidhams’ point of view. DeAnne and Mark, dressed to convey prosperity, are grateful for the opportunity to tell their “side of the story,” but we already know they won’t be given the benefit of the doubt.

In the first fifteen minutes of the series’ first episode, the filmmakers take several other shortcuts to communicate their unsympathetic view of the couple. We learn immediately that they’re Mormon and have seventeen children between the two of them, some of whom are adopted. We learn that DeAnne’s mother once showered her children with cash from their home’s second-floor landing in order to make a point about the fruits of hard work. We watch uncomfortably as Mark is moved to tears while recounting a story about his father saying he’d never want to work for someone else. DeAnne and Mark are unlikable and unrelatable, and the film wants us to know it before we even begin to hear about how they took advantage of thousands of people to build a multibillion-dollar leggings empire.

DeAnne and Mark deliver a polished narrative about how they built their company from the ground up. With wide-eyed credulousness, they describe how LuLaRoe’s business model emerged from a desire to help people, to share the wealth-creating opportunity they had discovered as widely as possible. Nearly a decade ago, they began producing maxi skirts, and later leggings, in bright colors and patterns as cheaply as possible and selling them for a markup out of a van. Soon, some of their most enthusiastic customers began buying their products wholesale and selling them at parties hosted in private homes. Later, these “retailers” would pay $5–10,000 to begin selling LuLaRoe products, while the “upline” retailers who had recruited them would receive monthly bonuses that were calculated according to how much product their “downline” recruits had sold.

It was a classic pyramid scheme structure, and hardly unique: many other “direct sales” companies operate the same way, trading in products like candles, cosmetics, vitamins, or Tupperware. These companies find success primarily by preying on the particular needs and desires of working-class women who want to be at home spending time with their children but need to contribute to their families financially to make ends meet.

In a country with no mandatory paid parental leave and very little publicly funded childcare, women who find themselves in this double bind are incredibly vulnerable to the message that multilevel marketing companies (MLMs) are peddling: that you can have it all, for an up-front fee. Buying into the company will allow you to earn full-time pay for part-time work, from home, while being part of a supportive community. As one of LuLaRoe’s former retailers says, “In a perfect world, who wouldn’t want that?” LuLaRoe updated these common MLM themes with a message of feminine empowerment intertwined with entrepreneurial idealism (You can be a girlboss and run your own business!) to draw in tens of thousands of women at the company’s peak in 2017.