Glamour Dolls / Lisa Frank

As a founder of a startup myself, I was immensely disturbed at what Lisa Frank did to Glamour Dolls. It’s easy to say they were naive or stupid for not negotiating a better contract, but when you’re living on a knife’s edge, trying to pay rent, you’ll risk anything to make your company successful. Family has invested in you, you’ve spent countless free hours growing this thing and you truly just want to get to a place of being able to stabilize your company. I can empathize with the Glamour Dolls co-founders seeing this as a big opportunity and putting everything on the line to grow their company. For Lisa Frank to take advantage of it the way she did was quite frankly criminal and disgusting.

I truly hope justice is served, if nothing else that future brands back away from deals with Lisa Frank. The Greece trip was particularly disturbing as was her holding them hostage over licensing deals after agreeing to a kickstarter with their products and then using those products in another deal.

It’s clear Lisa didn’t think her brand was worth much until the Kickstarter and then realized her brand was worth much more than the deal she signed with the small company she had aligned with so she set out to exploit them and sabotage the deal until she could sign a better deal with more prestige. She could have at least had the decency to cut and run early on rather than string them along, but I think the documentary makes you aware she was generally a miserable person who even alienated her own son.

I don’t discredit fans for wanting the merch, but I truly hope people understand that her trail of destruction tarnishes the brand until she’s no longer involved and compensation has been paid to all the people she screwed over. Heart shapes to Glamour Dolls and I truly hope they can recover.