Page 46 - Entrepreneur-November 2018

Q&A

You’re self-publishing this
book, pouring millions into
marketing it. Why?
There’s so much pressure
to go the regular route—so
much pressure. Everyone says,
“That’s the way you should do
it.” Well, I look back to what
I did with Lululemon. People
said, “You should wholesale.
That’s how it’s done.” But the
real reason Lululemon was
a success is because I missed
the middleman. We set up
the company to have no
wholesale. And so I started to
look at the book and to head
down this regular route like
everybody else, and I went,
“This makes no sense to me.”
I wouldn’t be who I am if I
didn’t put my money where
my mouth was, so to speak.
In self-publishing, you’re also
trying to speak directly to
people with no middleman
to filter through. Do you feel
misunderstood?
I think there’s definitely
different levels of being
hip Wilson has a long, tangled history with athleisure brand misunderstood. I think I’ve
been fully understood by
Lululemon. He created the company in 1998 and stepped the employees of Lululemon
down as CEO in 2005 after selling nearly half of it to private but misunderstood by the
equity. He has since held various roles and remains its larg- board. They’re not bad or evil
people or anything. We see
est individual shareholder (which makes him a billionaire), the world through different
but he’s been gone from its board since 2015, following an lenses. They have a different
infamous misstep: In 2013, as the company dealt with a prob- context for what is success.
Clem of its products pilling, Wilson told Bloomberg TV that In the book, you ask yourself:
“some women’s bodies” aren’t right for Lululemon. He later said he was Was my identity as a per-
son too wrapped up in the
talking specifically about how some women were incorrectly using the identity of Lululemon? Have
product as a compression garment instead of workout gear, comments you struggled with not being
that sparked a nationwide story about body image. Since then, Wilson involved day-to-day in the
company you created?
has routinely and publicly criticized the company’s leadership from In 2014, I sold more of my
the sidelines—and in October, he self-published a memoir called Little shares because the board
Black Stretchy Pants that lays out an argument for his return (and was very stale, and the gov- PHOTOGR APH BY GE T T Y IMAGES/JOE R AEDLE
ernance structure was not
says he intends to become involved in the company once again). Here, allowing the board to turn
Wilson and Entrepreneur have a candid conversation about a founder’s over as fast as the world was
role in a company, and how to know when that relationship should end. changing. My strategy was
to sell two board seats to
[the private equity buyers]

18 / ENTREPRENEUR.COM / November 2018