Go Suck A Lemon
Lululemon has a message for its loudmouth founder, and it's not namaste
This Week In Blunders Oct. 5-11
“Most of what we call management consists of making it difficult for people to get their work done.” – W. Edward Deming
Nothing is calm at the yoga wear company that Chip Wilson founded in 1998.
Lululemon Athletica stock is down 67% from its lofty peak of more than $511 per share in September 2023. And on Tuesday, Wilson took out a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal complaining that Lululemon is “in a nosedive” because it is “losing its soul.”
Wilson, 70, likens the disaster to a plane crash resulting from a compounding series of corporate blunders.
He accuses Lululemon’s board of running off top talent, cheapening store design, resorting to non-technical fabrics, and squandering billions on an ill-fated merger and a “wildly inappropriate Disney collaboration.”
Basically, he says, Lululemon has been run by a bunch of MBAs in suits who can “speak Wall Street” but don’t “understand the product.”
They built their resumes chasing quarterly profits. But they lost the company’s premium brand positioning to Alo Yoga, Vuori, The Gap’s Athleta and even that Sweaty Betty in the U.K.
Instead of considering a single thing Wilson had to say, Lululemon’s board decided to take him to the yoga mat with this statement:
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