![]() What that course of study revealed to him, in his early 40s, as he looked around the mostly female yoga class, was that women wanted well-fitting athletic clothing that also attracted the eye. Like, what do they really want?” But this awkwardness also turned him into a keen observer of women, and he devoted himself to trying to read their cues. Even in his 20s, he says: “I didn’t know how to be with a woman. Having grown up “socially inept,” he says, he had always been perplexed by women. And I’ve noticed that 90 percent of them have come true.”Ĭhip Wilson’s first eureka moment came in a yoga class in 1997. “My background has always been people telling me my ideas are crazy. “I mean, how women can say these things about me given everything I’ve done to build the women’s company?” he asked. He remained a bit hurt, and a little mystified, by the drubbing he’d taken. “If you are doing a brand well, you need to offend somebody, or you’re not standing for anything,” he told me. But even so, Wilson wasn’t exactly saying he was sorry. For the climb up Grouse Grind, where we had to occasionally cling to ropes to keep from plummeting into a mossy abyss, he’d brought along a publicist - also bedecked in Lululemon - from Sphere Consulting, a top Washington public relations firm. Now, however, Wilson seemed to be trying to rehabilitate his image as he prepared to start a big new venture. As Lululemon’s biggest shareholder, and as a member of its board, he says, he was told by the company’s executives that it was his fiduciary duty to refrain from further public statements. Over the next year, his net worth would plummet 47 percent, according to Canadian Business magazine - to just $2.1 billion. Thus began what Wilson thinks of as his incarceration. ![]() Within two months, Lululemon’s stock price had dropped by nearly a third and Wilson had announced his resignation as chairman. (He was told, he says now, that the video was intended only for dissemination within Lululemon.) The backlash was swift: ABC News asked, “Worst apology ever?” Stephen Colbert pounced, comparing Wilson’s handling of the episode to “lifting your leg to pee on customers and then blaming them for being wet.” After playing a clip of Wilson’s mea culpa, Colbert continued: “You hear that, ladies? Chip Wilson is sad that your chafing ham hocks made him put his employees through this difficult time.” In his twitchy, quivering statement, he didn’t apologize to customers or more generally to women. It was not Wilson’s first tone-deaf public moment, but it would prove the most costly, especially when, a week later, he recorded a video apology that went viral on YouTube. “It’s really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there over a period of time.” “Some women’s bodies don’t work for the pants,” he said. After a monthslong public-relations disaster, Wilson, who was chairman of the company, went on Bloomberg TV that November to share what he thought was a reasonable explanation. Some women who tried to return the pants at Lululemon stores said they were told to put them on and bend over so staff members could determine just how see-through they were. In March 2013, Lululemon recalled 17 percent of its black yoga pants - which don’t come in a size larger than 12 - because its proprietary Luon fabric was too sheer. ![]() Wilson made a fortune convincing women that nirvana was just a $100 pair of stretch pants away, but he lost his sure footing over the past two years. He needed that, he said, because “I feel like I’ve kind of been in prison.” The hike gave him a Zen feeling and kept him in the moment, just as yoga once did. Wilson said he was climbing the 1.8 near-vertical miles for the sixth time in six days. “Only 14 people have died this year!” he joked, breaking into a trot. Hikers were warned of their assumption of risk, and the hazards detailed included property loss and death as well as “slippery, unstable and dangerous trail conditions avalanches rockfall cliffs, gullies, ravines and waterfalls rapidly changing weather conditions overexertion, dehydration and exposure encounters with domestic or wild animals” and, not least, “becoming lost.”ĭennis (Chip) Wilson, the 59-year-old founder of the Lululemon Athletica clothing line, who was dressed all in gray - long Lululemon shorts and a tightfitting shirt, with size 14 Nikes on his feet - was unconcerned. The morning sun threw a halo of light on the billboard-size liability waiver standing at the trailhead of Grouse Grind, a steep, dangerous ascent just outside Vancouver, British Columbia.
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