Reuters
Lululemon founder Chip Wilson has published a new book, titled "Little Black Stretchy Pants."
- Lululemon founder Chip Wilson has published a tell-all ebook that eviscerates the company's current and former directors and chief executives.
- In the book, titled "Little Black Stretchy Pants," Wilson writes that Lululemon "self-imploded" by allegedly lowering investments in quality control and focusing too heavily on strategies that would drive up the company's stock price.
- He claims that he told ex-Lululemon CEO Christine Day in a meeting that she was a "world-class chief operations officer" but a "terrible CEO" and alleges that she "fake" cried in response.
- Wilson rails against the term "athleisure," saying it denotes a "non-athletic, smoking, Diet Coke-drinking woman in a New Jersey shopping mall wearing an unflattering pink velour tracksuit."
Lululemon founder Chip Wilson has published a tell-all ebook that eviscerates the company's current and former directors and chief executives, as well as the media and Wall Street analysts.
In the book, titled "Little Black Stretchy Pants," Wilson writes that Lululemon "self-imploded" when its executives, and particularly former CEO Christine Day, allegedly focused too much on driving up the company's stock price and in turn, lowered investments in quality control.
This strategy, Wilson claims, ultimately led to Lululemon's catastrophic 2013 recall of 17% of its pants for being too sheer, which cost the company about $60 million.
"A lifetime of research into how to make best-in-the-world non-transparent black stretch pants all came undone in an instant," Wilson writes in the new ebook. "The sheerness issue was our fault, plain and simple. I was mortified for Lululemon."
Wilson addresses a variety of other surprising and somewhat unpopular opinions and topics throughout the book, including his tacit support for child labor and his belief that the birth control pill led to higher divorce rates and breast cancer.
Here are some of the most interesting highlights: