Meet Becca Peter, The Amateur Investigator From LuLaRich

A few years ago, every time you logged onto Facebook it seemed like someone new was selling LuLaRoe clothing. If you weren't selling, you were planning your nights around when Facebook Live events were happening to guarantee you had a chance at grabbing your dream pattern of those butter-smooth leggings. But suddenly every consultant I knew was quitting LuLaRoe. It wasn't until "LuLaRich" premiered on Amazon Prime (via IMDb) in September 2021 that the pieces came together — LuLaRoe's house of cards was crashing down — partly due to the involvement of amateur investigator Becca Peter.

Directed by Jenner Furst and Julia Willoughby, the four-part documentary takes viewers into not just how the company unraveled, but the predatory practices they were using long before they got media attention. W Magazine describes the documentary as a "parody of an MLM scheme, not a truthful report of actual events." In Rolling Stone, Elizabeth Yuko writes that "the way LuLaRoe interacts with past, current, and potential members makes the organization seem like no ordinary MLM (think: Mary Kay, Tupperware) but something dangerously close to a cult."

Becca Peter is one of the stars of "LuLaRich" and the voice behind the Twitter account "DefectiveBecca." But who is she really, and how is she connected to LuLaRoe?

Investigating multi-level marketing companies wasn't what Becca Peter planned to do with her life. In fact, she refuses to take all the credit for everything she's uncovered about LuLaRoe. Most of the initial information gathering and crowdsourcing happened in a now-disbanded Facebook group (that is now on Reddit). "A lot of what I've done is just connecting the dots of information," she explains to Roberta Blevins during a two-part interview on the podcast "Life After MLM."

Peter actually was more involved with the sports world than fashion. She explained to Belvins that while many of her college years were dedicated to journalism and activism, track and field were her main focus. But it was doing the research for her website, Pole Vault Power, that she began to really get into investigating. She turned that love of investigating onto LuLaRoe once she started hearing about the issues consultants and customers were having.

Peter, according to the "About" page of her washi tape website, Pretty Packages, is a mom of two kids who lives in Washington state. None of her social media accounts talk about her involvement with investigating LuLaRoe or her involvement with "LuLaRich."

Becca Peter was never a LuLaRoe consultant. In an episode of the podcast "Sounds Like MLM But OK", Peter explains that she was in a lot of different Facebook groups where she made friends with women who were selling LuLaRoe. She admits to Roberta Blevins of "Life After MLM" that she did buy leggings for her kids, but generally from consultants going out of business. But in 2016, Peter started hearing ominous reports of consultant credit cards being compromised. That same year, LuLaRoe changed their sales tax policy for consultants, forcing them to charge clients sales tax even if they were buying from a consultant who lived in a state that had no sales tax.

"Once [the] quality of the leggings went down, things started to change," Peter admits to Blevins in the podcast interview. Then, not only did the quality of LuLaRoe's famous leggings decline, the company stopped issuing refunds for defective clothing, claiming (according to Peter's interview with Blevins) that it was the customer's fault. By the end of 2017, according to Peter, LuLaRoe had 22 lawsuits against them. With admittedly no law background other than a few classes on sports law in undergrad and graduate school, Peter used the skills she'd honed in on doing research into track and field court proceedings.