lululemon

Chip Wilson, a Canadian who had already built and sold a surf, skate and snowboard clothing business, took up yoga in Vancouver in the late 1990s and saw an opening: the cotton clothes most people practised in were ill-suited to the work, and nobody was designing technical apparel specifically for women's yoga. In 1998 he founded lululemon athletica, initially sharing space with a yoga studio, and developed a smooth, stretchy, opaque fabric that would become the basis of its trademark pants. The first standalone store opened in Vancouver in November 2000.

The brand grew through community rather than conventional advertising. Stores employed local yoga instructors and fitness enthusiasts as ambassadors, hosted free classes and plastered their walls with a manifesto of aspirational slogans, while the products were priced well above ordinary activewear. The company floated on the Nasdaq and Toronto exchanges in July 2007, and its pants, designed to flatter as well as perform, spread from the studio to the school run and the office, helping to create the category now called athleisure.

Growth brought turbulence. In 2013 the company recalled a batch of black pants found to be unacceptably sheer, and Wilson made remarks about customers' bodies that drew widespread criticism; later that year he stepped down as chairman, and he left the board in 2015, remaining a major shareholder and vocal critic. Laurent Potdevin, who became chief executive in 2014, resigned in 2018 over conduct issues.

Under Calvin McDonald, chief executive from 2018, lululemon broadened its reach, expanding into menswear, footwear and international markets, especially China, and briefly owning the home-fitness company Mirror, bought for US$500 million in 2020. Revenue grew to more than US$10 billion. By the mid-2020s, however, competition from newer brands such as Alo and Vuori and slowing sales in North America weighed on the business, and in December 2025 the company announced that McDonald would step down.

In April 2026 lululemon named Heidi O'Neill, a long-serving Nike executive who had been its president of consumer, product and brand, as chief executive from September 2026. Less than three decades after a yoga studio in Kitsilano, the label has turned a single pair of trousers into one of the most valuable brands in sportswear.