Lululemon founder Chip Wilson: You dont want certain customers coming in
In 2013, Canadian athletic-wear company Lululemon made it abundantly clear that they, as a company, did not want to sell their products to anyone other than slim white women. Lululemon founder Chip Wilson blamed women for having problematic bodies and wanting to have athleticwear made in every size, accessible to every consumer. People who worked at Lululemon stores spoke about how it was company policy to hide the size 10 and size 12 gear in a pile in the back of the store, all while actively discouraging anyone that size from shopping in Lululemon stores. The backlash was bad enough that Chip Wilson stepped down from the CEO position and Lululemon spent the past decade trying to broaden their consumer base across the board. Well, guess who hates that? Chip Wilson.
While many CEOs are shouting about their increased efforts to ramp up diversity across their business one founder is promoting the exact opposite. Lululemon’s billionaire founder Chip Wilson insists that exclusivity trumps inclusivity while blasting the posh leggings company he stepped down from 10 years ago.
“They’re trying to become like the Gap, everything to everybody,” Wilson, who has an estimated net worth of $8.7 billion, said in an interview with Forbes. “And I think the definition of a brand is that you’re not everything to everybody… You’ve got to be clear that you don’t want certain customers coming in.”
Still, the activewear giant is clearly onto something: Wilson has added almost $4 billion to his net worth since 2020, nearly all because of the rise in value of his 8% stake in Lululemon stock.
It’s not the first time Wilson has expressed his disdain for his brainchild’s “whole diversity and inclusion thing”, having repeatedly faced backlash for anti-Asian, sexist, and fatphobic comments. The American-Canadia entrepreneur most infamously insisted that the company’s most popular product, its leggings, are not for everyone—or more specifically, plus-size women—when they came under fire for being see-through.
“They don’t work for some women’s bodies,” he told Bloomberg Television’s Street Smart in 2013, before stepping down as the firm’s CEO and then leaving the board entirely in 2015.
Wilson previously declared that when founding Lululemon back in 1998, he specifically came up with a brand name that has three L’s because the sound does not exist in Japanese phonetics. “It’s funny to watch them try and say it,” he told Canada’s National Post Business Magazine.
He has also spoken in favor of children working in factories to earn money and avoid poverty, blamed birth control for rising divorce rates, and described plus-size clothing as “a money loser” for businesses.
In a statement provided to Fortune, a Lululemon company spokesperson said that Chip Wilson “does not speak for lululemon, and his comments do not reflect our company views or beliefs. Chip has not been involved with the company since his resignation from the board in 2015 and we are a very different company today.”
When I was looking through his 2013 comments, I was struck by how far the athleisure industry has come in the past decade. Nowadays, every mass market athleisure company prides itself on their plus-size lines and those companies are years into image-overhaul campaigns to make themselves more inclusive to all consumers. Granted, Wilson’s comments were seen as antiquated and ridiculous in 2013. His current comments are even worse – it shows that he hasn’t grown or learned anything, that he still wants Lululemon to gatekeep their customers – no one above a size 8, no Asians, no one with thick thighs, and it certainly sounds like he doesn’t want Black or brown customers either. (Sidenote: Lululemon has gotten into the tennis sponsorship business and their tennis brand ambassador is Leylah Annie Fernandez, a Canadian of Filipino and Ecuadorian heritage, which I’m sure pisses off Chip Wilson to no end.)
Photos courtesy of Getty.
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