BCBusiness

44 BCBusiness nOVEmBER 2018 COURtEsY Of Chip WiLsOn/VERY pOLitE agEnCY the largest individual shareholder, with a 12-percent stake—but the company he took public in 2007 has been very good to him •nancially. On October 1, he stood at No. 483 in Forbes magazine's real-time ranking of the world's richest people, with a net worth of US$4.3 billion, way up from US$2.6 billion this past March. Lululemon, whose revenue in •scal 2017 topped US$2.6 billion, now employs some 13,000 people and operates 415 stores worldwide. The company's stock closed at almost US$162 on October 1, more than double its value at the start of the year. Calvin McDonald, previ- ously a senior executive with cosmetics retailer Sephora, recently took over as CEO; he replaces fellow Canadian Laurent Potdevin, who stepped down in February over alleged misconduct. Why did you write this book? We started Lululemon, and we didn't even have a chance to take photographs; they're very sparse. And there was not one single moment when we could sit down and write the story of it. It was important, because I think as a Canadian, there was never that self-promotion behind it. And so as life went on and the social media thing started to come on, some- where around 2006, because we never documented anything about Lululemon, the world started creating the story for Lululemon. I think it became important, probably for me from a psychological point of view, to document the true origins of it and the feeling behind it and the reason it was created in the •rst place, to counteract stories people made up. Because there's been a perception out there that I'm a wildcard to work with, a bunch of other things, I've had to reset the story. You call the time you spent on West- beach your 18-year MBA. What advice do you have for young entrepreneurs who want to educate themselves? I love this line: there's no performance without action. When an opportunity pres- ents itself, take it, no matter where it is. I say to my kids, "You're going to fail miserably 15 times in your life. You're going to have four terrible relationships with girls. This is just the way it goes." And it's really impor- tant that those failures come, and there's learnings from them. How do you account for your ability to spot athletic trends years in advance, as you did with Westbeach and surf, skateboard and snowboard wear, and with Lululemon and yoga? I couldn't •t into a lot of athletic cloth- ing originally, so I started thinking about apparel. I noticed at a young age—I was a pretty good swimmer, so whatever I started wearing, other people started wearing. So I started seeing in competitive swimming how stu that would end up on the deck in the swimming pool ended up being some- thing that other swimmers started wearing to school. And then I started seeing that whole Nike sponsorship thing occur. From the age of 10 until about 25, I was a big, big reader—three or four newspapers a day, magazines, audio [books], anything. And I started extrapolating and going, Oh, I see something's happening here. I wonder how that will show up •ve, six, seven years in the future? Whenever I saw three things come together really quickly—it could have been something from a magazine, or a conver- sation, but it would be a brand-new thing I never heard about before, and bang, in a very short time it happened. Then I'd go, Oh, I bet you that's gonna be something. Something is going to occur out of this, and it's going to happen in the future; we can't see it yet. That happened so often in my life that I started going, Oh, this is me being what I was brought in the world to do. This is my expertise. What does leadership mean to you now? A leader creates leaders. It's somebody from Good to Great who develops people who are under them to be better than they are, and they can be totally secure that the better they develop people, the more opportu- nity they're going to have in life. I think what happens is that people get scared to develop people under them that are better because their survival techniques kick in and they think they're going to lose their job if they do. How did you develop the vertical retail model used by Lululemon, and why was it so important? Something incredible like that happens by accident. There's no way you wake up one day and go, OK, I'm going to do

• Cover