Lululemon, founder Chip Wilson at odds over board nominees

A clash between Lululemon Athletica Inc. and its estranged founder will come to a head at the retailer’s annual general meeting.

Regulatory filings the Vancouver-based retailer made this week put forward a slate of new board nominees, while Chip Wilson, the man who built the athleisure brand, is pitching his own trio.

Lululemon told shareholders to vote “only” for its nominees — former Levi’s CEO Chip Bergh, ex-Unilever executive Esi Eggleston Bracey and one-time Gap chief financial officer Teri List — and to ignore Wilson’s group.

The company said its nominees are worthy of votes because they have “the strong executive leadership background, board experience, and extensive expertise spanning global consumer brands necessary to oversee the company’s long-term growth and value creation strategies.”

Meanwhile, Wilson has put forward On Holding AG co-CEO Marc Maurer, former ESPN chief marketing officer Laura Gentile and ex-Activision CEO Eric Hirshberg.

He says they are “highly-qualified” and “will catalyze restoration of Lululemon’s once bold vision and product-centred brand and stop the value destruction the board has overseen for years.”

Lululemon has been at odds for years with Wilson, who founded the company in 1998 and is still a shareholder but is no longer part of its management or the board.

Tensions between the two sides flared again late last year, around the same time CEO Calvin McDonald announced he was stepping down. 

Wilson urged the brand’s leaders to use the window as an opportunity to revamp its leadership with his board nominees, so it can better compete with rivals and keep its share price from falling.

Some have criticized the company, saying it has lost customers because its product mix has grown stale while brands like Alo and Vuori have better capitalized on trends.

Lululemon hasn’t acted on Wilson’s suggestions, choosing Bergh and Bracey for its board recently. It named former Nike executive Heidi O’Neill as CEO earlier this month, though she won’t start the job until Sept. 8. 

On Wednesday, Wilson criticized O’Neill, saying “a near 30-year veteran of Nike Inc., is not the symbol of transformative, creative-first leadership that can instil shareholder confidence in today’s world.”

He also complained the board is letting her delay her start. 

“It escapes logic how this board felt the business would be best served without a permanent CEO for nearly 300 days and why the next CEO should face months of public scrutiny before starting in the position,” he said in a news release.

Lululemon has said it chose O’Neill because she has experience strategizing at consumer-focused brands.

Its filing Wednesday details Lululemon’s history with Wilson over 11 pages, describing how he moved from founder to an antagonist, when he left the board in 2015 to help his son and wife form rival retailer Kit and Ace. (They have since sold the company.)

Lululemon dates his attacks on the retailer back to June 2016, when he launched a website to “publicly criticize the company and agitate for changes to the board and management.” A year later, he campaigned for the firm to buy competitor Under Armour.

His latest crusade for change took shape last year and included an October 2025 advertisement in the Wall Street Journal, where he likened the company to a “plane crash” and “sinking ship.”

Lululemon said he also paid for trucks displaying advertisements that “denigrated the brand” to sit outside its Vancouver headquarters this past March and by one of its New York stores in April.

Despite those moves, the company describes how over the course of the last year it kept communicating with Wilson, who it alleged wanted all of his candidates appointed and “insisted that any other new directors ‘must have read my book.'”

Wilson has written two books on the company. “Little Black Stretchy Pants: The Unauthorized Story of Lululemon” was released in 2018 and “Lululemon and the Future of Technical Apparel” in 2025. 

Lululemon also said Wilson told the company he had been advising their competitors, Alo and Vuori.

For his part, Wilson said Lululemon is “in trouble because it has lost focus” and its board is “structurally set up to resist change.”

“Billions of dollars in brand power have been lost, which cannot be regained with the same selection pattern of directors who Lululemon continues to onboard,” he said. 

“Lululemon is not a toothpaste brand. Exiting one Proctor and Gamble bean counter on the board for another will not fix Lululemon’s decline.”

Without the changes he wants made to the board, Wilson said, “how can shareholders expect anything other than further destruction?”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published April 29, 2026.