bcbusiness.ca APRIL 2016 BCBusiness 35
describes it, "to bring those grassroots
stories to life," through decentralization
of Lululemon's social media channels.
"We're in a position now where it's no
longer 'one founder, one voice.'"
b
ack in the summer of 2013,
when Lululemon came calling,
Potdevin almost didn't take the
job. "I was in the middle of getting
separated from Cathy"—the mother of
his two children: Luc, 15, and Estelle,
13. "I was happy at Toms. The kids had
relocated from Vermont—I was like, 'I
can't look at it.'" He hung up the phone.
But then he started to think about it
and realized his whole career had been
building toward this point. A trained
engineer, Potdevin had followed his
master of engineering in Switzerland
with an
MBA at Paris's exclusive École
Supérieure des Sciences Économiques
et Commerciales (ESSEC),
where he spe-
cialized in a new program focused on
managing luxury brands. Fashion house
Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy sponsored
the program—and right out of school, in
1991, o¨ered him a job. "I spent a lot of
time in the factories. I sewed a lot of bags
and cut a lot of leather hides. The atten-
tion to detail—how you're cutting the
leather around the defects—was impec-
cable." Eventually he would be sent to
Los Angeles to restructure an
LVMH fac-
tory there before taking over the compa-
ny's North American operations, based
in New York.
In 1995, he was introduced to Jake
Burton, whose eponymous snowboard
company had become a cult favourite
and was taking o¨ around the time of the
1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, where
snowboarding debuted as a medal sport.
Potdevin had grown up skiing, but had
also—as a young entrepreneur—built 10
snowboards of his own ("We sold eight
of them… they were not that great. You
couldn't get on the chairlift"); he liked
the idea of moving into a more entrepre-
neurial environment and back into the
milieu of outdoor sports he'd grown up
with in Switzerland. Potdevin spent 15
years with Burton, the last ve as presi-
dent and
CEO. "We had a blast building
a brand, a sport and an industry. We
went from being this countercultural
teenage boy smoking dope on a chairlift
to building an Olympic sport."
( BCBusiness.ca/GoDigital
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Stay Smart.indd 1 16-02-25 10:27 AM
