Courtney Harwood was a LulaRoe retailer from 2015–2017 in Greenville, North Carolina. She is featured in LulaRich, a 2021 docuseries about the spectacular rise and fall of the multilevel marketing company known for its leggings. In it, Harwood describes a cultlike atmosphere where unlimited spending, often to the point of debt and bankruptcy, was encouraged; dangerous weight-loss surgery was relentlessly pushed; and image was everything. This is her story, as told to Alix Tunell, edited for length and clarity.
I was invited to an online LuLaRoe party in February of 2015. My friend was hosting it, so I ordered two pairs of leggings, two tops, and one dress, just to be nice. But when I got the items in the mail, I was pleasantly surprised. I called myself fluffy back then—I hate the word fat—but I was fluffy, and it was always hard for me to find clothes that fit my shape. The LulaRoe clothes all fit and were so comfortable, although the dress did have a hole in it, which should have been a red flag. I started wearing the clothes to work and ordering more.
My then husband and I were working for a large forklift manufacturer in Greenville [North Carolina]. It’s one of the highest paying employers here, and we were making good money for the area. I have three children—4-year-old twins and a 7-year-old, at the time—and I didn’t feel like I got enough time with them. I was missing their school events because it was hard to take off work, and I was just always rushing around.
One day, I was looking at the retailer map on the LulaRoe website, to find someone close to me [to buy from]. There were fewer than a thousand retailers at the time, and maybe only two or three in North Carolina. Coincidentally, the person nearest to me was a girl I went to high school with, so I reached out to her. She said she could come to Greenville and host a party and that I could invite my friends. I said, “No, I don’t want to do that MLM kind of thing. People at work have seen the clothes and they really like them, but they’re tired when they get off work—they don’t want to come to my house.” She said she’d never done an online party, so I basically coached her on how to set it up and make it a Facebook event and photograph everything.
The party ended up being very successful, and I got 10 or so items for free, for bringing my coworkers and friends. Afterward, the girl said, “Courtney, that was my largest party to date. I made $900 in profit.” She told me I should think about becoming a retailer because I was so great at selling the clothes and there were no other sellers in my area yet. I already had a good job and was so busy, but my husband and I were almost half a million dollars in debt from the house, cars, credit card bills, medical bills, and student loans. I thought, Hmm, $900 in one night… if I did a party once a week and made $500, that’d be an extra $2,000 a month.
I called her back and told her I wanted to do it. I asked her what I needed to join, thinking I’d have to buy a kit for $99 or something. She told me it was a $5,000 sign-up fee. My husband overheard that and was like, “No way, you are not doing that.”
I thought about it for two days, then decided I was going to find a way to get the money. Turns out, LulaRoe had a consignment program, where if you paid $2,500, they’d front you the other $2,500, then you’d pay it back with an extra 20% tacked onto it, for interest. I went to the credit union to get a loan for $2,500 so I could start.
A month later, DeAnne [Brady; cofounder and president of LulaRoe] and her family, who are all officers in the company, came to Raleigh, to have dinner with all the consultants in the Southeast. I was invited, along with 30 to 40 other consultants. I ordered wine at the dinner, and afterward, someone said, “Courtney, they’re Mormon, and they don’t drink wine. Don’t drink in front of them again.”
But DeAnne was very friendly to me. “Oh my God, you’re Courtney Harwood—you’re the one doing the Facebook parties!” she said. “I’ve got to talk to you, because this could be the big new thing.” The next day, we had training, and we had to write down how much extra money we wanted to make each month. I wrote down $500, and DeAnne said, “No, your goal is $5,000 extra a month, starting now.” I was getting anxious. Then she goes, “After you hit that, I’m going to add another zero—$50,000 a month.” I thought, There is no possible way.
But because of the way I was selling on Facebook, I kept moving up the ranks and getting invited to leadership events. I was making enough money to quit my job at the forklift manufacturer within eight months. I hit the highest, most exclusive rank—Mentor—and had gotten very close to DeAnne at that point. She would call me once a week and tell me things I needed to do in order to succeed. I called her Mama D; she felt like a second mom to me. Looking back now, I know that she wasn’t, and she only cared about my success because it would make her more money. You got screamed at and yelled at if you didn’t do exactly as you were told from her.
DeAnne would talk a lot about what plastic surgery procedures she had gotten. She’d throw out in casual conversations with people that she’d had weight-loss surgery, along with a lot of her family members, and soon I noticed that people around me in the company started suddenly losing weight and having plastic surgery. I was like, I guess I might need to look into this, to fit in with the [LulaRoe] image now.
In fall 2016, I was invited to speak at a large event in Indianapolis. Afterward, I flew on the company’s private jet to Detroit, to have dinner with DeAnne and her family—who, again, were all officers of LulaRoe. At the restaurant, DeAnne turned to her son Jordan and asked him what he wanted to split with her. I thought to myself, Split? Why are they being cheap about the meal when they’re always flaunting their money? I can’t hide my facial expressions, so DeAnne noticed that my head was kind of cocked and said, “Courtney, the reason we split meals is because our stomachs are very small. We had gastric sleeve surgery down in Tijuana. You have to go down there—I’ll hook you up!”
I felt so uncomfortable. I was looking down at that point and tears were coming to my eyes, because my self-image had always been horrible, but LulaRoe’s clothes had made me feel pretty for once. DeAnne kept going though, saying, “I’m hooking you up with my sister Lynnae. You just fly out to California, and she’ll coordinate everything for $5,000. We’ll drive you to Tijuana with a group of 5 to 10 people, you’ll have the surgery, come spend the night at my house, and fly home.”
[A LulaRoe officer] was sitting beside me, and DeAnne said to him, “You’ve had the surgery too!” He could tell I was upset and on the verge of crying, so he was just like, “Mm-hmm,” and stayed quiet. So then she pointed out a consultant’s husband who was at dinner who’d also had the gastric sleeve and called him over. “Tell Courtney about the surgery!” I couldn’t believe what was going on.
I ran back to my room crying, ordered wine on my own credit card so I wouldn’t get in trouble, and downed the entire bottle. When I woke up the next morning, I thought, This is all a sham. They didn’t ever want people to look better and love their bodies. I was supposed to go speak in Chicago, but I told DeAnne I was flying home. It also happened to be my twins’ birthday. DeAnne said, “Oh, they won’t remember—they’re only 4.” I thought, But I will. And now I know you think I’m fat and need to go to Mexico for surgery, so I don’t want to be here.
When I got home, I Googled the clinic—Obesity Not 4 Me in Tijuana. There were prices listed on the website, and the gastric sleeve was around $3,500. But DeAnne had told me it was $5,000. I was really confused. A day later, her sister Lynnae texted me: “DeAnne told me that you want to go to Tijuana. Just PayPal me the money.” And I asked, “I’m not paying the doctor?” She said, “No, you send it to me, and I get it over to him.” That’s when I knew they were taking money.
Still, I was nice to Lynnae and just kind of strung her along, because you just don’t say no to this family. DeAnne added me to a group text called Tijuana LulaRoe Skinny’s—I’d say there were approximately 30 of us in there, and some of the people in the chat were smaller than me. I was 5’8″ and I weighed around 169 to 175 back then. There were people in the chat who had had it done, and then there were people [DeAnne] wanted to go to Tijuana. She’s, “lovingly,” as she said, taken a 13-year-old child down there, as well as someone’s husband who wasn’t approved in the U.S. due to a heart condition. There was also a husband and wife who went there. On the operating table, they got scared and said they were leaving. In our chat, DeAnne was just so upset that they didn’t go through with it. She said, “This is the opportunity of a lifetime, and they didn’t take it.”
I couldn’t stop thinking about weight loss and felt so much pressure. But my sister, who did PR for a bariatric company, told me they would never approve [someone with my BMI] for weight-loss surgery in the U.S. She suggested I look into the Orbera balloon if I wanted to lose weight. “They insert it, it trains you how to eat, and then after six months, they take it out,” she told me. I thought that sounded better than going to Tijuana.
The Orbera balloon was $7,000, and by that point, I was making great money, so I decided to just pay for it out of pocket. I texted Lynnae that I was just going to do that instead, and she said that the doctor in Mexico, Dr. Alberto Michel, doesn’t recommend it and I wouldn’t have any success. I told her, “This is the best option for me right now because I’m on seizure medications, along with other medications. I need to be monitored, in case something goes wrong.”
In Tijuana, I was told, you go through this X-ray room after, and they give you your X-ray to take home as proof that they did the surgery—that’s the extent of monitoring. And no one in the U.S. wants to take on someone if they’re having issues from a procedure done in Mexico.
In December of 2016, I had the Orbera balloon put in. I felt absolutely awful afterward—nauseated, weak, and lethargic. You’re supposed to feel better after a couple of days, but a week and a half later, I knew something wasn’t right. I told my husband I was feeling faint and needed to get it removed, then I just hit the floor.
He got me in the car and drove fast with his hazard lights on, and when we got to the facility, they said I’d have to wait two hours. I was on the floor, twitching and drooling, and he said, “She doesn’t have two hours. It has to be now.” I’m not religious, but I remember saying a prayer and telling my husband to take good care of the children, because I didn’t think I was going to make it.
It was the most glorious event of my life when I woke up from the anesthesia. I was out of it, but I felt better, almost instantly. The doctor couldn’t give me a good reason that it had happened, other than to say that some people’s bodies reject [the balloon].
When it was clear I wasn’t going to go to Tijuana for surgery, I got kicked out of the group chat. I heard that Mark [Stidham; DeAnne’s husband and LulaRoe CEO] told a retailer’s husband that he did not want LulaRoe to be a “fat-people clothing company,” and DeAnne told another Mentor that she wanted all of us to be no larger than a size medium and if we were larger, we would not be allowed to speak at public events anymore. She followed through with that. I’m a great public speaker, but I was not asked to speak at the next big convention in California. She put me at a table with two other Mentors who were larger, away from the rest. We were ostracized.
I started getting Botox and fillers, and those made me feel better about myself. It was my choice, I wasn’t being told to have it done, so I was happier. But then I decided to try CoolSculpting, and I feel like that ruined me. My body morphed—it was lumpy, and the only thing I can attribute it to is the CoolSculpting. I did some research on it and learned about paradoxical adipose hyperplasia. I think I have that.
I also have hidradenitis suppurativa, which is a condition where you get painful cysts in different places. Most of mine were under my breasts, and my doctor said a breast reduction and lift would help, so I did that. It did help, but a year and a half later, they dropped, so now I basically have a botched boob job on top of it all.
I regret the CoolSculpting and, obviously, the Orbera balloon. I mean, I almost died. But I’m not against plastic surgery—you just really have to do your research beforehand, choose the right doctor, and do all the follow-up protocols. And if you really need to have weight-loss surgery done and your doctor tells you it’s a good idea, that’s one thing. It’s another thing if your “boss” is the one telling you to—and she’s profiting off of it.
LuLaRoe hid behind the guise of uplifting and empowering women and offering clothing for all sizes, but it was totally the opposite. On October 2, 2017, I became the first Mentor to leave the company. I was still making five figures a month, but I just couldn’t stand behind their values anymore. Or what they said were their values. We were told what to do, how to look, how to dress. If you didn’t do it, you were screamed and yelled at, and then you were ostracized. I have guilt, because people came to me to join when they saw how well I was doing, but now I know I was in a cult. This is a cult.
