Chip Wilson can run, but he doesn't hide from difficult topics.

The founder and chairman of Vancouver-based Lululemon Athletica Inc. is organizing a run, the Chip's Not Dead Yet Memorial Mile on June 20, to raise $1.5 million in its first three years for the BC Children's Hospital.

He has also just joined the board of Right to Play, an international organization led by former Norwegian speed skater Johann Olav Koss, that obtains sports equipment for children in Third World countries.

In early April, Lululemon promoted former Starbucks executive Christine Day to the post of president and chief operating officer and announced she will replace the retiring Robert Meers as CEO at the end of June.

Bayne Stanley, Business Edge
Lululemon Athletica founder and chairman Chip Wilson says he learned the importance of living in the moment from his father.

"Through her extensive experience at Starbucks, she knows how to take a culturally rich company through rapid growth to reach its full potential," Wilson said at the time.

So what's Chip Wilson all about?

"Social trends and changes, and how they affect sports, and how that affects clothing," says Wilson.

But controversy clings to Lululemon like, er, a sweaty T-shirt.

In recent months, he has had to deal with comments he made about Chinese child labour, his firm's association with the Landmark Forum training program, New York Times-commissioned lab tests that refuted Lulu's claim that some of its shirts contained medically beneficial seaweed and a related federal Competition Bureau order to stop making such claims. And to top it off, there were accusations that the name Lululemon offends Japanese people.

But Wilson remains more than willing to step up to the start line to talk about these issues and the phenomenal growth of his company.

1. Why are you funding this run?

"No. 1 is because I have five boys and it's like I have a 1-800 number to the Children's Hospital. They've all spent a lot of time there. One boy had hip surgery and I actually got to go into the back halls and see what was going on. I could have given a large donation, but I wanted something that would be sustainable over time. It's called the Chip Not Yet Dead Memorial Mile because I didn't want to wait until I was dead to have something named after me. I kind of wanted to attend my own funeral. You don't know war unless you know peace. You don't know black unless you know white. You don't really know how great life is until you learn to give back. Both my younger boys had meningitis ... That's notwithstanding the five or six times I've been there for broken arms (and) legs."

2. How did you get the nickname Chip?

"My real name was Dennis, but I've never been called that. My dad's name was Dennis and my mom didn't want to get the males in the household confused. It could have been one of those shotgun marriages. She wasn't sure if she was going to be with my dad forever."

Chip Wilson

3. What did your parents do?

"My mom was the first lifeguard at the Plunge (a famous pool at Mission Beach) in San Diego and was basically what I would call a home hobbyist with sewing machines and fabrics and that kind of thing. I got to see all that. My dad was athlete of the year in 1952 (after graduating from Western Canada High School in Calgary and attending university in Southern California) and would be a phys-ed teacher and vice-principal for the rest of his life, all in Calgary."

4. What were the lessons that you learned from them?

"My dad was one of the original hippies. What I learned from him is that to live in the moment is what it is to live. If I had to learn anything from my mom, it is that anything is possible."

5. Aside from your parents, who were your early mentors?

"My swimming coaches, Les Cosmen and Ted Thomas. They were incredible people back in the days when (there were) amateur coaches. They put in hours and hours for nothing. For very little return. I was fairly fortunate. We didn't have much money, but I was a national team swimmer. Actually, I think I could have been (an Olympic swimmer), but something happened in 1976 when the Olympics were in Montreal. They moved (the shortest butterfly events) from 50 and 100 metres to 200 and 400 metres. I was six-foot-three and 200 pounds. I was the world's best in the 50 metres, but I couldn't sustain the long distances ... The lesson from swimming is, the harder you work, the better you can do. It gives you great goal-setting (skills), because there's always the goal, the record or the medal that you want to get to. That's ultimately ingrained in the athlete development."

6. How did you decide on a career in the garment industry?

"I think it's just genetics - my mother and father and the right circumstance, graduating from university (with) no job and trying to figure out what to do. Actually, I'd go to California every summer and I'd come back with all these clothes that nobody had. I saw a pair of shorts on a girl there that I thought were incredible and I brought them back for my girlfriend at the time. She loved them so much that I decided to start making them. Then I decided I'd really make the first pair of long baggy shorts for men. Before that, there was (only) a fairly tight, 1970s kind of thing. (My product) was kind of a revolutionary kind of short at that time. So I had two items that were really great.

"I made a couple hundred of each of them and went to The Bay and Eaton's - and they wouldn't buy them. So I had to set up my own store, a surf-ski company ... There was no middleman, no wholesaler. In about 1983 or '84, I knew snowboarding was going to be the next big thing. Surfing and skateboarding were taking a downturn. But I had to change the name of the company from Westbeach Surf to Westbeach Snowboard. For the very first time in my life, I learned that people don't like change. So I actually had to change the name and to change the mindset for people (about) who we were."

7. How did you raise money for Westbeach originally?

"When I was 19, I had gone and worked on the Alaska oil pipeline, and I probably made, in Canadian dollars, maybe $100,000. I put myself through university in high style and bought a house. I had the money to start my own business. Plus, I worked at Dome Petroleum at the same time, while I was starting, so I was getting the cash flowing a bit more. The market was so small at the time and I didn't really understand the business or how big I could be. My expectations were so small that the money I started out with was minimal, like, $10,000."

8. Why did you sell Westbeach?

"There were a couple of reasons. One was that it was a three-way partnership, which actually had a lot of problems. We had come together but could never really get to the other side. Japan was 80 per cent of our market, but the Japanese yen was starting to collapse and the snowboarding trend in Japan was showing signs of eroding. Then we just got the right offer at the right time. We were about a week from not being able to make payroll. I sold Westbeach in November of '97 and then I worked down in the States in Portland (Oregon). Then I came back here to Vancouver and really had no concept of what I was going to do. I started yoga classes and I got the eye that this was going to be the next big sport. People that were doing it were doing it in cotton clothing and sweating. The clothing wasn't working."

9. How did you get into yoga?

"From skateboarding and surfing and snowboarding all my life, I had very poor balance. It took a toll and I started looking for the panacea. I wanted to make myself feel better and still be able to do what I liked - snowboard and play squash."

10. How would you describe the philosophy behind Lululemon?

"I guess it would be creatively creative. In other words, creating the time to be creative in life. A lot of that is about understanding how to freely choose in life and freely choose to live in the moment, because I believe that's when powerful creativity occurs."

11. How do you try to spread that philosophy in your day-to-day operations?

"Well, we have some courses that we send people to, the Landmark education course, called the Forum. That would be the one that we basically set up on creativity and self-responsibility ... and then comes a culture of achievement.

"In eight hours, we give people a lesson that it takes most people about 40 years to learn. If all successful people did the same thing, it would be very easy to become successful very quickly."

12. Some people have questioned why your managers take Landmark training, and some people question Landmark, because it has ties to the EST (Erhard Seminars Training) movement. They suggest that Landmark is like a cult. How do you respond to those criticisms?

"Because it's a creative organization, it's recreated itself thousands of times since the EST program (started) and probably has very little in common with the EST program anymore. Every business has to start a certain way and evolve in some ways. It shows up like a cult because it has become a very simple concept that releases people from a lot of their blocks in life. When people are released from those blocks, it has that aura. People who don't understand greatness are scared by greatness. Canadians especially, I find, are like a wall of mediocrity. The whole socialist backlog that we've heard for so many years that it's wrong to be rich, that it's wrong to be powerful, that it's wrong to be great, that's it's wrong to be an individual - that's just wrong."

13. What has Landmark done for your employees and the business?

"It sets up a culture of no complaining and of being responsible for the job that you're doing, for clear communication, and not bringing your own personal crap to work."

14. How would you describe your management style?

"My management style would be 'run it and let it be run.' Everyone that I hire is smarter than me. At times, decisions have to be made, but it's better to give people who know better more power to see whatever they're doing to fruition."

15. What was the turning point in Lululemon's success?

"I know the day it happened. That was the day that I got married, on April 20, in 2002. The one store that we had did $30,000 (in sales) that day, which was unbelievable when you looked at the store. We had all of the right inventory and everything was good."

16. It seems that Lululemon has become a lightning rod for criticism. How has all of it affected you?

"It hasn't affected us at all. You spend seven years getting nothing but good stories written about you. It's not news anymore to write good stories about us. I'm actually waiting for someone to write the next big story about this whole business of short sellers. We, as a company, have to be so diligent about our reporting in everything that we do. As a public company we are scrutinized to the very max, and the stock doesn't get any equity at all. These short sellers, they can go and basically create any story they want. It doesn't even really have to be backed up. It doesn't even really have to be true. With the way the Web is now, information gets out in a day and gets printed anywhere. There's a certain amount of people that see things as true. I think that's the big story."

17. Critics say you said it was OK for Chinese factories to use child labour. How would you respond to that?

"That was a long time ago. It was about three years ago. Again, I think the real story there is they had somebody who had a left-wing agenda. They wanted to take something which is not what I said, just to back up their story. What I said is, 'What if you had a child, like you have often in Canada, that doesn't work in the school system and is just out there? Do you let them do nothing? Or do you try to give them a vocation and teach them something?' In most cases, I think it makes a lot of sense to have the children working, especially over there, because there's really no infrastructure over there."

18. But, if you had your way, you'd rather see them in school?

"Yeah, for sure. Anyone would. I've got five kids. I'd never want to (keep kids out of school) ... I also know that you can call it child labour, because that's what left-wing people like to call it. I call it a good education."

19. What would you say in response to some of the criticism about seaweed material in your company's shirts?

"It appears as though it's a short-seller story. The New York Times has their lab tests and we have our lab tests, and the two twains shall never meet. They have the power because they're the press. It's a big issue with them ... It's more of a (U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission) type of thing.

"There's all sorts of tests you have to do now (under SEC and Competition Bureau rules) in order to claim (the shirts were made of seaweed) so we had to take (labels about the seaweed content) off ... We have to be squeaky clean as a public company, and we're OK with that.

We want to (have) integrity, but I don't think we were out of integrity with that."

20. What would you do if you weren't running Lululemon anymore?

"It would be impossible to not be in the athletic clothing business. That's all I think about. I'm interested in charities and I want to give back to the world, but I find that I can do that best by creating money by what I know best - which is athletic clothing."

Chip Wilson

* Title: Chairman and chief designer, Lululemon Athletica.

* Born/raised/age: Orange County, Calif./Calgary/52.

* Education: Wilson attended the universities of Alberta and Calgary, graduating from the U of C with a commerce degree.

* Family: Married to Shannon, father of five sons, aged 2-19.

* Career: Wilson founded Lululemon in 1998 and served as president and CEO until 2005, when he became chairman and chief product designer. Prior to creating Lululemon, he founded Westbeach Snowboard Ltd., a Vancouver-based surf, skate and snowboard retailer. Before entering the garment industry full time, he spent five years as a landman with Calgary-based Dome Petroleum.

* Awards: The Retail Council of Canada named Lululemon the 2003 Innovative Retailer of the Year in its small store classification.

* Moonlighting: Wilson recently joined Right to Play, an organization that obtains sports equipment for kids in Third World countries.

* Passions: Sports of all sorts and fashion.

Lululemon Athletica

* Brass: Chip Wilson, chairman; Christine Day, president and CEO-in-waiting; Robert Meers, retiring CEO; John Currie, chief financial officer.

* Profile: Lululemon manufactures and sells athletic clothing for yoga and other sporting pursuits through corporate stores and franchises under the same name. Founded in 1998, the company operates approximately 81 stores in Canada, Australia and the U.S. It recently closed four stores in Japan. Wilson began Lulu as a private company and sold 48 per cent to equity investors Advent International and Highland Capital Partners in a deal valued at US$195 million. Last year, the company went public. Its share price has fluctuated dramatically since then, but the company has enjoyed strong profits.

* Stats: Lulu's net income jumped to $30.8 million in 2007 from $23.2 million in 2006. The company reported an 84.5-per-cent increase in net revenue last year to $274.7 million from $148.9 million. The increase was attributed to a raise in comparable store sales, sales from new-store openings and the stronger Canadian dollar.

* Recent Stock Price (TSX:LLL): $31.95 (52-week range, $21.20-$58.77).

* Website: www.lululemon.com

* HQ: 2285 Clark Dr., Vancouver, V5N 3G9 * Phone: (604) 732-6124