HOW I SOLD LULAROE | The truth about "skirt parties"

hey guys welcome if you're new or welcome back if you're returning today i just wanted to do kind of a quick video about something that always seems to surprise people when i talk about my lularoe experience [Music] so in case you hadn't already seen on my channel i was a lularoe consultant from 2015 to 2017 kind of at the peak of the lularoe craziness you might have heard of this company now from documentaries such as lulu rich or the rise and fall of lularoe and whenever i talk about my lularoe experience this always seems to surprise people so in this quick video i want to explain the five-ish main ways that i sold lularoe kind of ranked by effectiveness and the amount of effort that each one took first i want to give my usual disclaimer this is not intended to be any kind of a guide or how-to lularoe has been a very damaging company for many people i was very lucky to have the experience that i did and be able to get in and out with no financial impact to myself but that is not the case for many people who were involved with this company so please don't take any of this as an endorsement of lularoe and if you're interested in learning more about my personal experience with the company i have a whole playlist with all kinds of other topics about my experience with lularoe so the first way that i sold things was through in-person home pop-ups or parties and this was kind of the way that you were supposed to sell lularoe at least when i joined so um it was you know finding a hostess who would invite her friends to come have a dress party or a skirt party this is the way that dm stood them back when she started the company would you know get a bunch of dresses or skirts and just put them in bins and travel around and have people host her at their homes and invite their own friends so um there is a lot of effort that went into this before the party um you would help your hostess to create invitations or create a facebook event and post in there to build excitement leading up to the party and then of course there's the actual physically getting there so you had to pack up all of your inventory into bags or bins load it all into the car take it to the person's house travel time getting there hopefully they live close by uh hope that the hostess or someone in her family is maybe available to help you load everything into the house and then you gotta set it all up um then hopefully there's actually guests who attend and you know they'll have a couple hours to browse and shop and then you gotta pack it all back up and take it all back home so at a good party it could get very hectic i mean that was actually good i guess that there was more activity going on but it could get really busy with people taking things and trying them on and bringing them in and out and you had to keep track of what was selling at least i did the way that i checked my inventory i had photos of every individual item and so i had to keep track and when i got home remove the photos of the things that sold because of the online parties that i'll talk about in a minute um then of course you had to invoice people kind of there on the spot we had a website through which we could accept credit card payments and um that wasn't really set up to be like mobile friendly at the time so you had to you know hope that you had a good cell phone signal or wi-fi and um that you were able to invoice people online and also that there wasn't an issue with the website which happened sometimes a lot of times it happened on a saturday when everyone was out having their parties and suddenly they couldn't invoice their customers so you always had to have kind of a backup maybe um i had a paypal little card swiper that i could hook up to my phone to accept credit cards that way kind of as a backup but you were really supposed to do all of your invoicing and credit card charges through lularoe's software um and so you know a good party could be fun and it could be lucrative but really after all the prep time the travel the work before and afterwards a lot of times it really just wasn't worth it now kind of i'll call this one 1b would be like other in-person events like vendor events fairs festivals craft shows that sort of thing um there's a similar hassle of packing everything up getting there setting it up breaking it down repacking getting it back home but oftentimes these sorts of events are outdoors or just in less convenient environments there was one vendor event that i went to where they were about to station me next to the booth where they were doing fried food and i was like this is clothing and it's like these are the actual things i'm selling and i can't just launder it uh you cannot set me up next to the fried food stand so it wasn't always convenient and it was probably worse because you know at least at a home party you know people are there to shop at this event um at these events you know you having to kind of draw people in to check out your products um and you don't know who anyone is you don't know you know about trustworthiness or anything like that so those are kind of a step down even from doing the home party and then option 1c i would call like a pop-up party at my home so it would be similar to a party that a hostess hosts at their home except they would invite their guests to my house so it would be less effort for me as far as having to pack things up and move that and travel but uh they would still have to do the work of inviting their guests and get them to come someplace just this time it would be to my house instead of to their house um the hostess would be in charge of bringing any refreshments or anything like that um i'll talk later on about specifically how i set up my house for in-person shopping but um just as a side note the only time that an item was ever lost or stolen that i know of was at a party that a hostess hosted that was held at my house so method number two is the online live videos like a facebook live video and this is probably what everyone thinks of when they think of lularoe sales but i'm pretty sure i only ever did this once and i think it was when i was introducing the new style of dress that i was going to carry and i was like oh i'll do it you know i'll make it fun and special and do my very first facebook live online sale remember we're talking about the dark ages of 2015 2016 2017 so facebook live was relatively new at that time now of course everyone just goes live all the time for everything so that i know that's the way that a lot of people think of now um that lularoe does get sold but it wasn't really how i did it but when i did do it it did involve a lot of setup and preparation time i actually made little numbered tags um one for each item and i printed them so that the number was you know written correctly on one side and then printed in reverse like mirror image on the other side of the tag because on facebook live it um mirrors everything in your camera so if you hold up something with text you would have to like mirror it for your viewers to be able to read it so i printed special tags that did this i think because facebook live was pretty new at the time um my customers at least weren't really used to interacting in that way and so i didn't really have much shopping or interaction when i did it um for sellers whose live streams are busier they might need like an assistant or somebody else to kind of help them keep track of all the comments and keep track of what's selling throughout the live stream sometimes they get very heated and you know there's like questions of like who's seen what and what order comments are coming up in it seems like there's a lot of opportunity for things to be missed just with all the you know quick moving comments and conversation and you know things are maybe playing at different speeds for different people so it seems like a nightmare to me but again i know that that's the way that a lot of people think of as far as how lularoe is sold now but that wasn't really what i did at all so the next method i would say is an online party through facebook and so we didn't again back in those dark ages we didn't have any tools or websites really to automate this yet um some tools were kind of just coming out that might automate posting photos in a group or might collect sold responses so you could set it up that if somebody said sold or a certain phrase and a comment um this site might like aggregate that for you and give you a report of everything that's sold really it was a very manual process and so it might be just an open kind of shopping time that i advertise so i might say that you know this weekend i'm posting all my inventory for everyone in my facebook group to shop from or it could be a specific hostess who wanted to you know host and invite friends but have an online pop-up instead of one of the in-person options and if that was the case then this person would have to add her friends to my facebook group and then when they claimed their items by commenting sold and give me their email address they would also have to give the name of their hostess so i knew to credit her for that sale because there are other people there in the group i never posted all my inventory off in like specific groups for one specific party i would always post it in my own facebook group and if someone wanted to host a party there they would have to bring their friends over to my group so the way i had my group set up i had photo albums for one for each style and then i would empty out all the photos in between these events which was a very manual process of you know one by one deleting all the photos in an album um and then when it was time to post everything again i would upload it all again i would arrange it in order by size within the album i would try to kind of manually mix up the order that things appeared in within their style and size uh grouping just so that like things weren't in the same order every time because there was sort of a theory that you know people might um you know react to something differently if it's next to something different than it was the last time they saw it and it was just very stressful because you kind of always had to be tuned in you were constantly checking for comments or questions or people claiming items when items were claimed i would go physically pull the item right away and start like a pile for that customer and of course at the end of the event the weekend or however long it was you had to send out invoices to those customers and hope that they paid them in a timely manner if they weren't sometimes you had to keep following up with people or maybe there was just no response and you would have to cancel that order and put everything away and then there's the shipping so you know you had to pack everything up get mailing labels get it to the post office or have it picked up so it really was quite a lot of work even though it seems like oh you're just in your home and everyone's just doing everything virtually but it really was a lot of work and extra expense and effort to do an online kind of party and then the final method that i would use to sell items is a private shopping event in my home this was my personal favorite it was definitely the most payoff for the least amount of work that i had to put in sometimes it would be people that i knew sometimes shoppers would find me online and contact me and see about having a private shopping appointment and honestly i can't believe that i would just have strangers over to my home or that strangers would want to just show up to somebody's home but that's how lularoe was back at that time so a lot of times it was just one person a good scenario would be like maybe one person brings a friend or two and they'd all come over to my house and shop together so the way that i would set up for one of these events or for a party if somebody wanted to host an actual party at my house is um here in my living room i would um i stored all my racks in here just kind of pushed off to the corners so i would just pull them out and kind of set them up and i had some other signage and things that i would set up but i kept it pretty um you know pretty low effort um and then in my guest bedroom i have a really large mirror so that would be the dressing room and i have other you know bedrooms or bathrooms if more than one person wanted to be getting changed at one time and with just one person or just a couple people i really could give you know one-on-one recommendations and help pull things out that i could tell that they would like and so actually this was my favorite and most rewarding part about selling lularoe because you could really see somebody kind of fall in love with how they look in something and especially if it was something that they didn't think that they could pull off one of my favorite examples of this is usually the um cassie pencil skirt that was a style that like i'd never even worn a pencil skirt before and it ended up being one of my favorite things that you know that lularoe sold and that i carried um i had several of them i wore them a lot they actually looked very nice and they were comfortable so it was always nice to see somebody you know realized that they looked good and could pull off something that they didn't think that they could and also because of that one-on-one time and attention people had a good time and they were able to find things they liked and take their time and they were inclined to buy more and again it was relatively low effort for me i had to just kind of you know pull out and uncover my racks that i already had and just wait for them to show up so also just as part of this i wanted to mention there was sort of always a like a culture that consultants would keep the best pieces for themselves and like that was one of the perks of being a consultant is you had first dibs on what came in your box and i know a lot of people did that i didn't keep too much of my own inventory mostly because i was and still am very specific about my like personal color palette so uh it had to really be something that i loved in order for me to just pull it for myself but another kind of um i don't know sales methodology i had or just something that i followed was um if somebody really wanted to buy something i would sell it to them usually without any like hesitation or restrictions a lot of people would you know if they had something that was really desirable they would make people buy it in a bundle or you know paired with something else or they would hold it or reserve it um i always feel like a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush that's an old saying so it's sort of like why hold out for something that might happen when you have a guaranteed sale right now somebody wants to buy this thing why should i hold out thinking maybe someone else will buy it later you know paired with something else so hopefully you found that interesting again i know it always seems to surprise people when i tell them that i didn't really do facebook live sales and my most successful selling was really in person and more one-on-one again just like you know time and money wise i think uh the amount of effort compared to the amount that you could earn was really best when i did those one-on-one sales so um again this isn't meant to like help anybody out i'm just sharing my experience if you want to hear all about some of my other experiences with lularoe again i have a whole playlist you can check out and give me a thumbs up if you want me to keep making these lularoe experience videos leave me a comment if there's anything in particular that you want to hear about from this and i will see you next time thanks for watching bye

Channel: LolaGeek

Views: 7,772

Keywords: LuLaRoe, LLR, GOOB, team, downline, upline, sponsor, trainer, coach, mentor, fashion, clothing, inventory, spreadsheet, tracking, photography, dressform, mannequin, backdrop, lighting, boutique, pop-up, party, going out of business, resign, retire, leave, leaving, credit, refund, repay, consultant, retailer, leggings, mlm, ds, join, business, direct sales, resignation, cancel, cancellation, lula, leave the woe, goober, lularoe goob, quit, quit lularoe

Id: 5yEOm4M84NU

Length: 16min 30sec (990 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 04 2022