by Chip Wilson
Rather than having two or three top snowboarders at a million dollars each, I went to the individual mountains and found the half-dozen talented snowboarders just under the sponsorship level. These snowboarders were typically a little bit younger and friendlier than their more famous counterparts. They were also heroes of their community. They hadn’t developed big attitudes or egos.
Our first team consisted of Kevin Young, Devun Walsh, Emanuel Krebs, Paul Culling, and Randy Friesen, all snowboarders who would become household names in the sport. Another one of our first team riders was a guy named Ross Rebagliati, who would win the first ever gold medal in snowboarding at the 1998 Olympics in Nagano. Famously—or infamously—Rebagliati tested positive for THC, had his win disqualified, then had that decision overturned by the IOC and his medal reinstated after they deemed marijuana not to be a banned substance.
As the relationship with our team evolved into a less formal, more economical kind of sponsorship, we gave our riders free clothes and arranged their travel. We would also arrange photography of our snowboarders at various events and locations, then put the pictures in TransWorld to promote our riders’ images for their big-paying board sponsors.
This community branding system worked out to be cheaper by millions of dollars—plus far more effective—than the marketing hoops our competitors were jumping through with sponsorship.
I didn’t want to “buy” the snowboarders on the Westbeach team. A strictly financial relationship felt inauthentic. Whenever I saw a sponsored athlete from Nike, my mind screamed “fraud” as I thought they were bought to promote the Nike brand without an authentic belief in the product.
For amateur athletes, the money was a godsend. I wanted to make technical clothing for the sport and have these young guys test it. This gave me an early taste of focus groups composed of my ideal customers, an important methodology I would use with lululemon.
The First Focus Group
The first design group I put together consisted of our snowboard team, who were all fourteen- to sixteen-year-old boys. In all honesty, back then, my ego was looking for their stamp of approval. I knew that at thirty-two I looked like a grandpa and they might automatically reject whatever I showed them just because it was designed by an old man. I wanted them to test the products, tell me the clothing was awesome, then talk it up amongst their friends. I imagined these young guys acting as ambassadors and helping sell the line they’d tested. I was an inauthentic manipulator.
But, as the first focus group went forward, something happened that I didn’t anticipate.
When I presented our riders with the clothes, they were not excited. They took one look at the line and, instead of telling me how impressed they were, their eyes told me they had different ideas. It was a hard thing to hear, but I knew it was crucial for me to understand this demographic, so I set about listening to what they genuinely wanted.
The snowboarders told me to make the apparel “fat,” or oversized. Hip-hop-inspired, gun-hiding clothing was developing as an underground trend. These riders knew what they wanted, and they were clear in their advice. I was skeptical, but I took them at their word. I was astute enough to know I wasn’t listening to teen music and I wanted to see the world through their eyes. I made the changes and redesigned everything to be “super fat.”
Westbeach recreated snowboard clothing; the designs were the polar opposite to those of competitors and definitely as far from tight ski gear as possible. I learned my lesson about the power of listening to my target market, even if their initial feedback wasn’t what I’d wanted to hear.
By the following year, however, I seemed to have forgotten that lesson.
Next season, I brought out a similar oversized look and again presented it to the snowboarder focus group. Once again, I went into this expecting their thumbs up. Wrong again. What they were looking for this time around had changed completely. They told me to make the clothes slimmer again, and they asked for solid colours instead of colour blocks.
I thought I knew better. We’d had such success with the oversized look I didn’t want to change it up so quickly. I was also convinced that solid colours were a mistake since it looked like too plain. I ignored the kids and went with my own designs, unmodified. Once again, they knew best. If we had slimmed the size and offered solid colours, our line would have sold like crazy. I’d ignored our target audience at my own peril.
Another critical thing I learned at the time was a concept I’ve come to think of as. “If you have to say it, you ain’t it.” In branding and marketing terms, this concept refers to the inauthenticity that occurs when a company includes what they do or produce in their brand name. For example, Westbeach Snowboard, which was the formal name of our company, rings false. A brand identity should be strong enough, and so in tune with its core customers that it speaks for itself.
Our design team didn’t want our apparel to say Westbeach Snowboard. They wanted the word snowboard out.
The Japanese Take on Snowboarding
Snowboarding was our entry point to becoming a truly global company. The Berlin Wall had fallen, and we saw our goods being sold into East Berlin. At the same time, orders were coming in from state-owned stores in the mountains north of Beijing.
But, it’s impossible to talk about the rise of snowboard culture without mentioning Japan, as indicated in the prologue to this book. The Japanese snowboard market was fascinating. Japanese customers seemed to have no problem buying a snowboard, mounting it on top of their car, and never using it. Many customers in Japan simply wanted to look like they were snowboarders. It should be noted there actually is fantastic snowboarding in the mountains of Japan, but the appearance was often as important as the actual sport.
Soon, Japan became 30 percent of our business, as it was with all other snowboard companies. By the early 1990s, the yen had become a hugely powerful currency, because of the Japanese economy’s incredible growth from the end of the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. Everywhere I looked, Japanese people seemed to be buying up as much western culture as they could, from Pebble Beach Golf Course to buildings in New York, to the snowboard scene.
Keeping Japan going was the trick. Part of this was finding the money to match the growth and demand, but another part was meeting Japanese quality standards. After Westbeach had been distributing in Japan for a year or two, I sat down with our Japanese partner and said, “How are things going, what do I need to know?”
“Oh, very good,” he told me, “but we’re burning 20 percent of everything that you give us.”
This was obviously shocking for me to hear. “What do you mean you’re burning 20 percent of everything we’re giving you?” I asked.
“We meticulously go through all the inventory you send,” he explained. “If there’s even a little thread out of place, we burn the item. We don’t want to wreck the brand.”
That was when I first understood the Japanese demand for quality and how it was exponentially greater than anything we look for in North America. When a Japanese person goes to buy a car, they’ll spend two hours looking for the tiniest scratch on the body. The importance of the visual effect of the purchase is unbelievable.
For me, this was really an insight into what quality is, and how a particular culture evaluates it. This insight gave context to what it was to be committed to quality. If we could meet Japanese quality standards, we could meet quality standards anywhere.
The Ski Association
In 1991, I was invited to Banff to speak at a meeting of the Canadian Ski Association, an organization that consisted of ski and equipment reps and resort owners and operators. These people were the old guard of skiing. They were still scared of snowboarding and did not understand what to make of it. In their view, skiing, as a sport, was on the verge of dying—and with it, their livelihoods.
While in the car on my way to the Rocky Mountains to give my talk, I heard a story on CBC Radio. It was a profile of the time when Sherlock Holmes creator Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle moved from London to Switzerland. Doyle made this move because his wife had respiratory disease and needed the cleaner air of the Alps.
While Doyle was in Switzerland, he filed a few articles for The London Times. One article he wrote was about how appalled the Swiss were by the new sport of downhill skiing because they thought their national sport of tobogganing was at risk.
I referred to the Doyle profile when I gave my talk in Canmore. “Look, winter sports are always evolving,” I told them. “We have skiing, but, now, we also have snowboarding.”
Knowing what I knew about the cyclical nature of trends, I also predicted skiing would make a comeback, perhaps in fifteen or twenty years’ time. I said my own boys would look at me as old-fashioned, still using my snowboard while they hit the slopes on their skis. Sure enough, starting around 2010, skis began to mimic snowboard designs, and skiing was revitalized. Two of my five boys only ski.
Some of this perspective had come from our rebranding as a snowboard company. I thought back to how difficult it had been to enroll my partners—and the company itself—in snowboarding, even though it had turned out to be the right move. Whatever the next trend might be, it was reasonable to assume there would be just as much difficulty enrolling everyone in that new vision. Making bold moves with no provable outcome is scary to security-driven finance people.
Our communication had improved exponentially, and that improved communication led Scott, Richard, and me to align on the idea of selling Westbeach, sooner rather than later.
The rest, as the saying goes, is history, from the sale of Westbeach that I talked about in the prologue, to the inception and beginning stages of lululemon. I had put in the ten thousand hours (at least that many) that author Malcolm Gladwell posits is the amount of time needed to master a discipline.
As my new venture got underway, would my lessons with Westbeach in partnership, vertical retail, wholesale, and integrity be enough to prepare me for what was to come?
Chapter 10:
The Genesis of lululemon
The Poster on the Pole
Following the end of my time at Westbeach, I returned to Vancouver. It was 1998. I was enjoying more time with my sons, JJ and Brett, reconnecting with friends, and living by the beach in the most beautiful city in the world.
When we sold Westbeach to Morrow, my position within the company was relocated to Salem, Oregon. This put a six-hour drive between me and my sons, which I did most weekends. “Our dad wasn’t around very much, but he knows that,” my son JJ recalls. “He tried to tell us, ‘I’m doing this for the family. I’m not here today, but I will be tomorrow,’ and just try to make something work for us. When you’re five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, you don’t understand what that means.”
As a lifelong entrepreneur, I knew that finding a mid- to high-level position in another company would be tricky, if not impossible. In my mind, an entrepreneur is too incompetent to work for anybody else. At forty-two, the money I’d made from the sale of Westbeach was too little to retire on, but it gave me some time to think about my next move.
I decided to take the Landmark Advanced course (a follow-up to the Landmark Forum I’d taken several years earlier) so I could review my life from an outside perspective. During the three-day course, I came to understand what I considered success in my life. The theme for any future venture would be “giving without the expectation of return.” If I were ever to build a new company, my priority would be developing people to be great.
I knew the only big job I wanted was to be the CEO of Nike. I was perfect for that role. No one understood athletics, shoes, sports psychology, sponsorship, and technical apparel like I did! Although at that point, the big future I saw for global athletics was mostly an unwritten script in my mind.
I even considered starting the next chapter of my life as a barista in a coffee shop—a job I could treat as a means of cash flow only—which would allow me to follow my curiosity wherever it led me.
With the money I’d made on the sale, I bought a reliable car and a house in the Vancouver beach neighbourhood of Kitsilano. I also made sure my sons were in the right school for their learning preferences.
Meanwhile, with an unknown future ahead of me, I had my physical health to think about. From competitive swimming to football, from wrestling to triathlons, and from skateboarding and snowboarding to squash, I’d beat myself up. My back was a constant source of intense discomfort.
I was looking for a panacea for my pain when I saw a poster on a telephone pole, advertising a form of exercise called yoga. A short time later, I found myself in Fiona Stang’s yoga class, feeling an undeniable creative impulse once again.
The Yoga Class
Besides the instructor and me, there were five other people in the class—all females between the ages of eighteen and twenty-eight. I was forty-two and trying yoga for the first time. The class was taking place not in a dedicated studio, but at one end of a chilly, air-conditioned gym. Fitness machines were whirring just a few feet away as we rolled out our mats.
This was Kitsilano in 1998. “Kits” was Canada’s version of San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury during the seventies. It was a mecca for the post-university, not-yet-married, athletic crowd. There were expansive views of the snow-capped North Shore mountains, multiple yacht clubs, long beaches, and hundreds of offshore islands. It had more athletic supply stores than any other place in the world. It was the origin of Greenpeace, organic foods, and an athletic lifestyle that was second-to-none.
At that time, yoga was a hippie concept in the same vein as meditation and the wellness communes that sprinkled the greater Vancouver area.
I was fortunate that the instructor, Fiona Stang, was very good. Fiona was poised, confident, smart, and approachable. She told me that she’d just moved to Vancouver from New York City, where she had been working in convertible bonds on Wall Street.
“I wanted the ocean and the mountains,” Fiona told me. “My husband and I chose Vancouver, and here I am in this beautiful city teaching yoga. It’s perfect.”
I quickly learned that yoga required applying a level of concentration and awareness that left me with the same endorphin rush as the athletics of my past. It didn’t come naturally to me; I’m a big guy and not blessed with an innate sense of balance, but I like to push myself in areas I haven’t explored before.
I loved yoga from the first time I tried it.
New Creative Impulses
As I watched the class grow from six to thirty students in one month, I anticipated that yoga would be as strong a social-athletic movement as the surf-skate-snowboard business before it. I understood technical apparel, and I knew there was a much better solution than the sweaty, baggy, binding cotton the other students were wearing. In 1998, gym fashion was simply your worst throwaway clothes.
I knew a lot about sweating. For most of my life, I had three workouts a day, so I was sweaty most of the time. What I wore had to handle that. I wondered, “why shouldn’t my clothing be unrestrictive and luxurious and save me time with cleaning and caring?” I knew that if I had to think about my clothing while I was competing, then the clothing was wrong. I wanted to provide a solution for terrible athletic apparel. I wanted clothing that allowed for my mind to ease gracefully into the moment.
After my exposure to yoga, there was a brief period where I tried to ignore my creative impulses. I tried to ignore the urge to take a chance. If I stuck with the idea of being a barista, I could avoid years of uncertainty, stress, hard work, mounting responsibilities, and fiscal pressure. I could run from the way of life I’d been so glad to leave behind when we sold Westbeach.
No matter what I told myself, my creative urges intensified. I knew that I could spot athletic trends five to seven years before they emerged, and I knew that this was what was occurring for me now. I was also forty-two and mindful of the fact that my goal had been to retire at forty. I let my mind wander, and, rather than coming up with reasons not to start another bu
siness, I simply decided that if I started a new venture, I would approach it differently.
I’d started Westbeach with little capital and little experience. Now that I had a good amount of both, I could begin with a blank slate and create something in-line with my beliefs. Many of these beliefs were formed by the many audiobooks I’d listened to on the six-hour return car rides from Vancouver to the Morrow offices in Salem. I’d listened to just about every audiobook I could find on business success, self-development, and the realization of human potential.
At my next yoga class, I talked to Fiona—my only expert on the subject at the time—about the clothing she and other yoga instructors and practitioners wore. Fiona told me instructors wore a particular line of dancewear. This line, however, only worked on the very fittest bodies, as the fabric was thin and pattern pieces were cut skinny to save money. When someone wearing the dancewear line bent over, the Lycra would stretch too far and become shiny—almost like a lightbulb. The thinness of the fabric resulted in transparency.
Transparency was the first issue that I wanted to solve. I believed that if I could solve the transparency problem, address camel-toe, and thicken the fabric to mask any imperfections, I could create a perfect athletic garment for women. If I could get a technical fabric that felt like cotton instead of plastic, then add properties to make it moisture-wicking and anti-stink, I could create the perfect pant. Nothing like this existed in the world.
With Westbeach, I had worked for two decades with teenage boys as a customer base. I would need a woman’s input to develop properly the apparel I had in mind. I asked Fiona if she would be interested in a superior product at triple the price of the line she’d been wearing. She said yes. I explained to her that I was thinking about starting a yoga apparel brand and that I wanted her to share her thoughts and feedback with me. She said yes again, and I took a big step toward putting my plans into action.
