Don’t hate the player, hate the game. Here are 6 effective (and perfectly legal) sales tactics we can adopt from LuLaRoe.

Have you ever seen someone wearing an obnoxiously patterned pair of color-clashing leggings and wondered how in the world that clothing company made any sales? If so, you just may have been acquainted with one of LuLaRoe’s infamous products that made their founders mega millions within just a few years. If you’ve been spared the jarring designs stretched precariously across chafing limbs in person, you may still have come across the brand when they came under fire for their pyramid scheme-alleging lawsuits, covered in a 2021 Amazon Prime documentary series.

Long story short, yes, Mark and DeAnne Stidham (the founders) were convicted of running a misleading and not-so-legal multi-level marketing scheme, and sure, they paid close to $5M in just one settlement. However, that doesn’t mean we can’t learn a single thing from the success they did engineer in turning one woman’s side hustle hobby into a multi-billion-dollar-revenue enterprise in just a few years.

Here are 6 effective (and legal) marketing and sales tactics we can adopt to emulate similarly explosive sales growth.

In today’s digital age, it can be hard to imagine going outside, door-to-door, in person to do or sell anything. It can be especially hard to imagine scaling that into a multi-billion-dollar business in a five year span. Yet, that’s exactly how DeAnne Stidham started LuLaRoe, from selling handmade maxi skirts and dresses out of the back of her truck.

That said, she didn’t just drive a truckload of dresses to a random street and set up shop or knock on strangers’ doors. Instead, she leveraged planned events with people she knew, concept testing the products, target market, price points, and marketing methods. Those early products and events later morphed into a multi-state traveling sales company, hosting her own dress-selling parties across the southwest, with as many as 15 sales events per week.

If you’re an entrepreneur selling a physical product or someone with an idea, have you ever held 5, 10, or 15 live sales events in one week? No matter how you feel about LuLaRoe, you can’t knock the hustle of a one-woman-show single-handedly planning and running 15 sales events per week in three different states.

The LuLaRoe founders had one thing going for them, and this soon became a near prerequisite for successful resellers: They were a part of a large, tight-knit community. For DeAnne and Mark, it was their church, which belongs to a well-connected national organization of likeminded members with built-in camaraderie and inherent trust.

Belonging to their church wasn’t the prerequisite for becoming a seller, but having some type of network or community affiliation was. This, in fact, was the secret to their rapid-fire scaling success and a common trait among many MLMs that tend to spread like wildfire, despite a seemingly mediocre product.

These days, you can either pay to get in front of people (through ads), play the long game of building up an organic following from scratch yourself, or accelerate the process by cultivating a well-connected team to sell for you. Whether you have to join an organization, offer a very generous revenue split, or pay potential sellers a hefty onboarding bonus, it just may be worth it to give your product its best chance at rapid growth and outsized success without the bottleneck of a dwindling advertising budget.

As someone who’s been a part of teams and built them myself, I can assure you that empowering members almost always improves quality, effort, and outcomes. LuLaRoe did just this by bringing women into the fold of “joining their movement”, which wasn’t just about clothing; it was about giving women an enjoyable way to meaningfully contribute to their families. At least that’s how they pitched it.

You can pay people as much as you want, but you can’t always pay them to care. That said, if you can build community, pride, and incentives into your company’s culture, that loyalty can become the infectious thing that compels great salespeople and converts customers into brand enthusiasts and champions. You have to get pretty excited about patterned leggings to turn them into a multi-billion-dollar enterprise, but LuLaRoe’s founders and resellers did exactly that.

I recently stumbled upon a new startup with a product I was dying to partake in (it has to do with real estate and investing); this startup had been teasing their upcoming offerings for months before they launched, and I was on the waiting list. The day they dropped the next offer — the one I wanted most — I received an email notification that the offer went “live”. I finished up a business meeting, then headed to the website when…it had already sold out and filled up. In less than two hours. It sucked — for me. For the startup, it was brilliant.

LuLaRoe did the same thing: They spent months building excitement about new mystery products, hinting at and teasing them, without telling resellers or customers exactly what they would be. Since they built so much hype, excitement, and mystery into the pre-launch products, resellers were eagerly buying them up in hoards, placing orders without knowing what they were even going to get! Moral of the story? Pre-launch isn’t time to be heads-down working on your product; it’s prime marketing time to whet your customers’ appetites.

Along the lines of a wicked pre-launch strategy, another thing LuLaRoe did exceptionally well in their heyday was to create limited-edition products to maximize FOMO (fear of missing out). No, you can’t get this pattern next month or next season. No, we won’t be bringing back your favorite design if yours wears out. They were ruthlessly limited with their offerings, almost turning each highly limited design into an exclusive collectible. Thus, the brand-champions and top resellers aimed to collect those rare, never-seen-before (and never-to-return) designs, just in case they could become collectibles.

FOMO is a powerful motivator, and sometimes going against the grain of what your customer might want (the ability to re-order a product in the future) may be the secret to unprecedented success. At the heart of successful business is understanding consumer psychology. Do you know what makes your customers tick and how to use it to your business’s advantage?

One of the biggest criticisms of MLMs is their aspirational nature in the way they illustrate unattainable lifestyles 99.9999% of their sellers will never achieve. However, that aspirational marketing is exactly what makes the 99.9999% even think to give it a shot. While I’m not suggesting deceptive selling is ever okay, I do believe associating your company and its marketing with outcomes more impactful than the product itself can inspire both customers and salespeople to strive for more.

This doesn’t just apply to the clothing space; in fact, it rarely does. Think about selling a tech product, a business service, or a type of software. You can sell the product or service itself, or you can sell the aspirational outcome a customer could create by putting that product or service to its greatest use. Same product, vastly different positioning and outcome. Which do you think converts faster and at a higher rate? Exactly.