How Lululemon Won Athleisure | Mirror, Mirror | 2

Business Wars

Wondery

History, Business, David Brown, Management

4.6 • 13.2K Ratings

🗓️ 29 October 2025

⏱️ 38 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

It's the 2010s, and the athleisure market has exploded. As Lululemon has grown into one of the world's biggest athletic wear companies, brands like Nike and Adidas want a piece of the pie—and new, smaller companies are adding to the competition. Soon, everyone will be selling the same type of yoga pants that Lululemon created. To survive, Lululemon will need to expand its business-model. That means distancing itself from its founder and venturing into a brand new world: tech.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	It's November 5, 2013.
0:12.7	Lulu Lemon's founder and chairman, Chip Wilson is talking to a journalist for the Bloomberg TV program, Street Smart.
0:19.4	Wilson's come on the show to do damage control. Back in March,
0:23.2	complaints started flooding in about their iconic yoga pans. Customers said they became see-through
0:28.8	whenever they moved or stretched in them. The company issued a recall of 17% of its pans,
0:34.9	offering customers a full refund. The debacle led to a roughly $2 billion
0:39.8	loss in market value and a $67 million loss in revenue. Nine months later, Lulu Lemon is
0:47.4	still fighting to regain trust from both investors and customers. Wilson is supposed to explain
0:53.7	what happened and offer a sense of transparency.
0:57.6	But before long, the interview goes off the rails.
1:01.4	There have always been pilling.
1:03.3	The thing is that woman will wear our seat belts that don't work,
1:06.4	or they'll wear a purse that doesn't work, or quite simply,
1:09.6	some women's bodies just actually don't work for it.
1:13.2	The female journalist across from Wilson looks shocked. He just blamed the problem on women's
1:18.7	bodies, women who dominate his customer base. And then he doubles down. It's, you know, really about
1:25.7	the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there.
1:29.3	In trying to dig Lulu Lemon out of a scandal, Wilson has just started a new one.
1:35.3	His comments make international headlines and launch a backlash.
1:40.3	Commentators offer their own critiques of Wilson, like this one from Bloomberg TV.
1:45.0	The reality is, when you run a company like that and your main consumer is this female audience,
1:52.0	you just can't say stuff like that. You just can't.
	...

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