Chip Wilson
Founder and Principal, Hold It All Inc.. On 1 show, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveinvestorauthor@chipYVR ↗chipwilson.com ↗Wikipedia ↗
Chip Wilson is the founder and former CEO and chairman of athletic apparel company Lululemon Athletica. He also founded Westbeach Snowboard, manages holdings through Hold It All, and authored the memoir Little Black Stretchy Pants.
1shows
2appearances
44statements
4resolved
4supported
0contradicted
100%fully supported
16said about them ↓ Everything Chip Wilson said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Wilson: Bought four $40k flat-seam sewing machines in Japan for Lululemon
“I went to Japan. I'd heard about these machines that were 40,000 dollars a piece, which was Huge at the time, and I, ah, bought four of them.”
Wilson: Lululemon's logo is a stylized 'A' from 'Athletically Hip'
“The logo actually came from Athletically Hip. So it was a stylized A from the athletic.”
Wilson: Shannon Gray became Lululemon CEO within two weeks of being hired
“I hired this woman who Shannon Gray was her name. The first person I'd ever seen that had a design portfolio with using stretch clothing, and within about two weeks, I, after hiring her, I left her in charge of Lou Lemon as the CEO for a year, and I went back …”
Lululemon Used Cheap Back-Alley Pop-Ups To Seed Markets Before Building Stores
“So we would go into every city in the future, set up a store in a back alley or in a side street and develop our market, invite yoga instructors in before we spent, you know, 600 to a million dollars on a store.”
Wilson: Intended to sell 30% of Lululemon, but sold 48%
“You know, I really only want to sell 30% of the stock to the private equity guys, but I ended up selling 48.”
Wilson: West Beach lost $1M on wholesale while retail made $1M
“My wholesale business was losing a million dollars a year, and then I had these two retail stores that were making a million dollars a year.”
Wilson: Direct-to-consumer retail captures $60 profit on $20 items versus wholesale
“If I made something for 20 dollars, then I would have to sell it to Dick's Sporting Goods for 40, and then they would sell it for 80. Where in my own retail stores, then I was putting it in there for 20, and making 80 dollars, so there was a 60 dollar profit i…”
Wilson: Walked away with $800,000 after taxes from West Beach sale
“So I walked away with a million, and after tax, 800,000, and then you've got a, you know, I had paid myself probably 30 to 40,000 dollars for 18 years.”
Wilson: In the 1990s, gym culture ignored athletic apparel aesthetics
“At the time, the fashion of gyms was to wear your very worst clothing, and mostly because probably 90% of people in gyms were men, and, ah, and you know, you knew you were gonna sweat in it, you were gonna get ugly in it, and you just wanted to throw it in the…”
Wilson: Spent $160,000 buying four Japanese flat-seam sewing machines
“I went to Japan. I'd heard about these machines that were 40,000 dollars a piece, which was Huge at the time, and I bought four of them.”
Wilson: The Lululemon logo originated as a stylized 'A' for Athletically Hip
“But the logo actually came from Athletically Hip. So it was a stylized A from the athletic.”
Wilson: Lululemon could not finish first retail store without $50K severance
“And if it wasn't for that 50,000 dollars, we never would have been able to finish our store.”
Wilson: Placed Lululemon logo on waistband to avoid corporate chest branding
“I put it there because I was very clear that I didn't want big logoing, and I thought that somebody should look in the mirror and not see any logos. And I definitely didn't like logos on the left breast because I looked at it as being Kind of corporate logoing…”
Lululemon tested new markets using cheap alley pop-ups before investing in stores
“So we would go into every city in the future, set up a store in a back alley or in a side street and develop our market, invite yoga instructors in before we spent, you know, 600 to a million dollars on a store.”
Wilson: Snowboard clothing commanded 4x to 5x the price of surf and skate apparel
“Snowboard clothing was four or five times the price of surf and skate t-shirts and shorts.”
Chip Wilson: Saving inches on layered fabric yields thousands of dollars
“Once I got into big production and you'd lay 50 to a hundred layers of fabric down, When you can save even five, six, seven inches of fabric it can mean thousands of dollars.”
Wilson earned $175,000 working on the Alaska oil pipeline at age 19
“In today's dollars, probably about 600,000. And back then it was about 175,000 American.”
Wilson made $1,000 daily selling shorts compared to $120 oil company salary
“And in a day we'd make like a thousand dollars a day selling the shorts, and I was making like a 120 dollars at the oil company, so it wasn't tough to figure out the math of that.”
Wilson: Japan made up roughly 30% of global snowboarding sales
“Japan had just exploded, so it was about 30% of all snowboarders business.”
Wilson: First Lululemon Store Doubled as a Morning and Evening Yoga Studio
“The only way I can, I figure out how to do it is to combine my business with Fiona Stang, my yoga teachers, and I had all my clothing on rolling racks, and we'd move it all out to the side and have yoga classes there early in the morning and then at night.”
The other half of the tape: Chip Wilson's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 15 times in 8 episodes across the shows. 1 statement on the record names them. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Guy Raz 15
Statements about Chip Wilson, by other people (1)
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
How I Built This 15
2025 4 mentions in 2 episodes 2 per episode
2024 2 mentions in 2 episodes 1 per episode
2023 6 mentions in 2 episodes 3 per episode
2021 1 mention in 1 episode
2019 2 mentions in 1 episode
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Chip's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| HOW I BUILT THISLEDGER | Founder and Principal, Hold It All Inc. | 2 | 44 | 100% 4/4 | full record on How I Built This → |