BCBusiness

46 BCBusiness nOVEmBER 2018 COURtEsY Of Chip WiLsOn/VERY pOLitE agEnCY understand they need a hell of a lot of edu- cation before they sign a deal to make the bridge between the two. How do you feel toward the people who pushed you out of the company you founded? I don't think they knew what was going on. When you end up with management that have three-year options, they kind of work from survival mode, like, I'm going to hit the jackpot if I just do this. And you get execu- tives that have been really good at playing the corporate Machia- vellian game, and they're good at strate•y not just for the company but for themselves, too. I didn't realize how manage- ment, so to speak, was manipu- lating the situation, and that the board didn't understand that they were manipu- lating the situation for their own personal gain. So when I went to the board and said that you're not taking care of the company for the long term and I think you need to go—because the board hires and res the CEO—so we can have a long-term-driven CEO in here, they didn't like that. Is it their fault? I don't think it's their fault, because they made decisions based on bad information. Because they'd only come in once every quarter, they didn't have insight as to what was really going on. Someone like myself, or maybe two or three of the top management who weren't under the CEO, could see what was hap- pening from a totally different point of view. But if you've got a Machiavellian CEO, they've got a strate•y for making sure that my voice or the voices of people who had been there a while would not get heard. You've had a few skirmishes with the media. How do you think you were treated unfairly? I don't think I've been treated unfairly. I look at it and go, Why did that happen? To me, it's so obvious we've moved from 10 media outlets in 1995 or something to, I don't know, a billion. So I know what happens when you have a product like, let's say, snowboarding, and you start o‹ with three companies and you go to 500. It's no longer based on product and price. Sometimes it's based on sensa- tionalism—how to get your name out there. I started to feel sorry for the media because to create advertising dollars, they needed to get hits. To get hits, they needed to create sensationalism. Much of the time, it wasn't the writer, or in the Bloomberg [Television] case, I don't even think it was the woman who was interviewing me. I think it was the businesspeople behind the scenes trying to make money. What new social and lifestyle trends do you see emerging in the next few years? How much of those do I want to give away? With technolo•y, wars will not be the way they were before, and men and women will become more and more alike. This is probably what I think about more than anything, because my premise at Lulu- lemon was that [in 1998, 60 percent of uni- versity graduates were women]. Because of divorces, girls got really clear they needed an education. But because a lot of boys were being raised by single mothers, they didn't have a template for how to become a man. What does that really mean to how men and women are interacting in the workforce now, and how has it come up in the whole #MeToo thing? And where does #MeToo come from and why, and is it a pendulum swing? These are the things that I'm mostly thinking about, and then I go, Where's the business opportunity in that? What is your outlook for Vancouver, and for B.C.? I've been doing production in Asia for 35 years, or something like that. Every time I would come from Tokyo or Singapore or Hong Kong and I'd land in Vancouver, I'd go, Buy land, Chip, buy land; they're com- ing, they're coming. We are just in the start of something massive. So many Asians are going to come here, I think that what we see now and what it will be like in 50 years, you won't even recognize it. I think we're in a very inter- esting time right now where we have three very left governments in Vancouver. And from what I hear and I know even about myself, all business has stopped. Nobody's investing; nobody's doing anything. With no investment, there's no turnover of that money and multiple people making money down the line. It just seems to be a reincarnation of what we see over and over again. I think it's going to be very, very disastrous in business over the next 10 years. What is your biggest regret? I can't regret anything. Even when I went public, I went, Gee, I want to go public in case any of my children do; I want to have all that knowledge because I came from a phys-ed-teacher father and a mother who didn't know anything about business. I felt I had to learn for the next generation. I know that there are 100 regrets every- one's going to have in their life, and that's just what life is. It's just that regret holds onto people, and it stops them from being powerful and moving forward. Seeing something as a failure to be learned from gives opportunity to build a future that would otherwise never have occurred. What's next for you? I'm really, really enjoying buying real estate in Vancouver, and doing what I was doing with Lululemon, focusing on that single 32-year-old professional—where they want to live, where do they want to work, how do they think. I love that. We're moving a lot of our investment down to Seattle to diversify. At my age, I have ve boys, and they're all at a stage where I could do a lot of dif- ferent things. But ultimately, I'm a family guy, and I want to see my children be good citizens. And we have a large foundation; we have a really interesting idea for it that I don't want to say yet, but I want my chil- dren to follow up on that through future generations. I think it's going to be incred- ible for Vancouver and B.C. ž This interview has been edited TAkING sTOCk Lululemon goes public on the Nasdaq in 2007

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