Lululemon’s billionaire founder Chip Wilson recently did an interview with Forbes and slammed his company that 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 during the interview. “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.”
While most people are shocked about his comments, this isn’t the first time Wilson has spoke his mind and received backlash. According to Fortune, the billionaire previously made some anti-Asian, sexist, and fatphobic comments. During a previous interview Wilson made it clear that his company’s leggings weren’t for plus size women. “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 companies.
In November 2020, the Canadian-headquartered international company formed a new department named Inclusion Diversity, Equity, and Action, known internally as IDEA, which was tasked with increasing the diversity of staff and expanding DEI training, development and discourse.
However, over a dozen employees at the firm told the Business of Fashion it was launched to protect the company’s image first and foremost and that the company often denied Black employees job opportunities in favor of “less-qualified white counterparts.”
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