Lululemon is more than just leggings—it’s an ethos. In the final episode of Murder at Lululemon, Vanessa and Natalie examine the company’s goal-setting philosophy, and its ties to a seminar training company. Former employees share their experiences working inside Lululemon’s high-performance environment, revealing a world where retail meets personal transformation. (Lululemon did not respond to a list of reporting inquiries). Click ‘Subscribe’ at the top of the Infamous show page on Apple Podcasts or visit GetTheBinge.com to get access wherever you get your podcasts. Find more great podcasts from Sony Music Entertainment at sonymusic.com/podcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices A Campside Media & Sony Music Entertainment production. To connect with Infamous's creative team, plus access behind the scenes content, join the community at Campsidemedia.com/join Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: Why should you listen to the entire series on Murder at Lululemon?
Just a reminder, if you haven't listened to our series on murder at Lululemon, please scroll back and go all the way to part one. Start there before you listen to this one. To be clear, a lot of what we're covering in this episode is in the past.
Lululemon has a new leader, they have new practices now, and they also did not respond to a written list of questions that we sent them about some of the material that we've been covering in this series. You know, I do think the company is quite different now. I was in the Soho store myself the other day, and I didn't even see any inspirational sayings around. I just saw a lot of athleisure wear.
Chapter 2: How did Lululemon respond to the murder of Jana Murray?
But to get back to our story, one thing we haven't talked about yet is how the company reacted to the murder of Jana Murray. Here's attorney John McCarthy, who you've been hearing from a lot.
We did have an interaction with Lululemon Corporate, and our contact had to do with mainly with finding out informational backgrounds, information they had mainly about Brittany and why she got moved from a previous job. And also just they were very cooperative in terms of they turned the store over to us.
I mean, basically that store got closed down and we must have been in possession of that score for several weeks to basically do the forensic testing and stuff. So most of it was logistical kinds of contact, background on Brittany, and just the logistical coordination to have access to the crime scene until we got done doing the investigation.
Even Brittany herself, while the investigation was going on, said her interactions with Lululemon were positive.
Have you had a chance to talk to the Lululemon people? Did they reach out for you already?
You want to say it was their executive VP of HR actually came by today?
Yeah, that's what your sister was saying. Yeah, she came by today. Are they local? It's a Canadian company. So they came here from Canada.
This episode, we're going to talk more about the originally Canadian company Lululemon and what the store is and represents. Now, I do want to talk for a second about my teenage daughter, who really covets their leggings and wants badly to wear them. I do not want to pay this much for teenage leggings, but I asked her recently how she feels about them.
The popular girls wear it. I think they're well-made, and it's just like a brand name thing. Like, why do you like Gucci so much? Because it's like a brand name. Like, you can't really say why. I just like it because it's like a brand name.
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Chapter 3: What is Lululemon's company ethos and how does it impact their employees?
Yeah, no.
So that's the way a 13 year old perceives the brands that are all around her. You just want them because they're brands, not because they stand for something else. But of course, as adults, we know it's more than just that. Lululemon isn't just well-fitting leggings. It's a whole ethos, one about striving and goals and becoming your best self. So this episode, our producer,
Lily Houston Smith, is going to interview a bunch of different people who have interacted with Lululemon to unpack all of that a bit. She's starting with Kat, the educator who was way at the beginning of this series, the one who worked in the store in Soho and talked about how we all know some people who are into yoga because there's darkness lurking in them.
I think we've all seen the type of person who gets super into exercise generally because there's darkness lurking and there's anger there. And there is at Lululemon this culture – or there was when I worked there. I don't know what it's like anymore.
But this culture of intensity, like you're going to your workout classes and you're wearing the clothes and you are setting your goals and you're going to achieve your goals. And I can see how it's not a lot of lackadaisical laissez-faire kind of personalities.
Selling yoga clothes ended up being a great experience for Kat. There was no grisly murder at her store. Jaina's tragic death actually happened years before she worked there at a totally different branch of the store in Bethesda. And actually, when we told Kat about the murder, she said she'd never even heard about it. But she also said she wasn't that surprised.
Now, obviously, we can't blame Lululemon for Brittany's actions. Between her shoplifting and the restraining order that had been issued against her, she had clearly had a troubled history. We aren't saying in any way, shape, or form that Lululemon was responsible.
But the way that Lululemon created goals and ethics for the employees, and Brittany's sense that these things would set her life on the right track, and her anger over being caught shoplifting, which she likely knew was going to lead to her being fired and being knocked off that track, getting that job at Equinox, fixing her money problems, all the things she was aspiring to do.
Well, all of that does seem to me like it may have contributed to Brittany's mindset that night. Here's Lily talking to Kat about how the store sometimes felt like more than a normal retail job. And we're just going to let them talk for a while.
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Chapter 4: What are the personal experiences of former Lululemon employees?
And also because it was Soho, I remember it was like all black everything inside. In a lot of other stores, they would put in more colors. But because it was Soho, it was like women here wear black. Something from the way the store looked that is truly funny is that there was this window and it had like a window seat.
And sometimes they would let slash encourage slash ask one of us to go do yoga in the window. And I barely knew how to do yoga, but it was amazing because you didn't have to talk to anyone, you know, because sometimes in retail, you just can't like you just can't do it. So we would alternate just going in the window and doing like a flow as if it was like Cirque du Soleil or something.
And it was wild. That's why I feel like I've never seen that. I've never seen people. No, I've never seen anyone at any other store do it. So I don't know if that was just something that went on at our store or what the thought behind it. But people would stop and take pictures of you and stuff. And I would be like, this is – I hope that I never have to see any picture of myself doing this.
I'm just doing this so that I don't have to talk about sports bras for two minutes.
So can you describe the clientele, like who's coming in to this store?
Yes. So at my store, it was a lot of tourists because it was in Soho. But also it was just a lot of really chic, thin women who were pretty intense and kind of weren't in there to chat. You know, a lot of them probably had pretty high-powered jobs and were hitting SoulCycle at 5 a.m. and just needed their clothes to do that in. But something that was interesting about Lululemon was –
Every store had kind of a tailored approach to their clientele based on where they were. On the Upper East Side, they took a personal shopper approach, which we did not do in SoHo. So you just kind of waited by the door and then someone came in and you were their personal shopper for their whole experience, which I did not enjoy. I think for some reason, I think it was called POP.
And their personal shopper or something was worked in there. But we never did it at SoHo Women's. The thing, the job that I often took at my store and the first job I ever had there was called DOFI, which stands for Director of First Impressions. So that was just being a greeter, but it was called Dopey.
So from talking to some other people and reading, some of the sense I've gotten from the managers at Lulu and about just the culture is that there is this kind of blurring of personal professional, that there's this like encouraging to talk about maybe sort of personal things. Can you just talk about some of that?
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Chapter 5: How does Lululemon's goal-setting philosophy affect its staff?
Well, what does manifesting out loud look like? Like, what would you say to manifest out loud?
Like, it would make us go around. I mean, make sounds severe, but we would go around and read our cards. We would write them on these cards and say our goals out loud because there's allegedly science, and I believe this. I'm sure that they weren't lying about it, hopefully, but around how much more likely you are to achieve your goals if you say them out loud.
And have people holding you accountable to doing them. And so, you know, I would go around and say, you know, I'm going to write 5000 words this week. And someone would say, I'm going to go to X number of dance classes, which is in service of my goal to get equity by October or whatever. It can feel really serious.
And I mean, I don't know, because there's something to be said for when you're living your life and things are maybe going on in your life. And then you go into this store and it becomes this almost magnifying glass or microcosmic thing. This one time, my coworkers used to give me so much shit about this.
Like there was this woman who came into the store and she wanted this, an energy sports bra for her daughter. And her daughter was a size six. This was eight years ago. And I remember these details. And I it was Christmas time and we didn't have it in the store. And I went down to the basement and we didn't we just didn't have it in that size. And it was really easy to order them online.
This was not a big deal. The woman was super nice. And for some reason, when I went to tell her that we didn't have it, I just burst into tears and was crying to this woman was like, we don't have the size. I'm so sorry. And she was like, it's fine. Fine. And I, to this day, don't know why I got so emotional about that. It's just a lot. It's just a lot.
And because they ask you to bring your full self, but also don't. It can create an environment of dissonance, I guess. Does that make sense? Yeah, it does.
Was that your only, quote, breakdown in the store? Or were there other times?
No, there were definitely other times. There was definitely more than one breakdown. I didn't kill anyone, but there was more than one breakdown. Okay.
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Chapter 6: What role does athleisure play in modern American culture?
And that's one of the self-help books that Chip says he lives by. Now, this is actually pretty similar to the way that lots of millennials want to think about work. You shouldn't just be a cog in a machine or a set of hands on an assembly line.
Instead, you should seek to find some personal fulfillment in your professional life, especially since most of us spend more than half our waking hours doing it. But not everyone appreciates this idea. Lily's going to talk now to a former Lululemon employee who worked at the Bloor Street location in Toronto in the mid-2000s. She's going to talk first about meeting Chip.
I don't know if he went to all the stores, but I think he went to a bunch of the like flagship stores. I'm sure just as a goodwill thing.
This former employee's name is Elena. She was working in this boutique, selling the pants, the clothes, most of it made with a very cool technical materials that Chip Wilson had figured out.
So he came through our store and like did the super bluff person, the very like presidential kissing babies thing where he like went through the store and like
introduced himself personally to each one of the people that was working there and asked you know how how do you like this or how do you like that you know very blah blah blah felt very much like the president walking down the line kissing the babies what were the responsibilities like in the store was it sort of typical retail or did it go beyond i mean for the most part it was like the responsibilities in the store were pretty typical retail but they also like
literally part of my orientation process was having to do this like goal setting worksheet that they, they then hung everyone's personal goal setting worksheet, like up in the back office. So everyone could see it.
And it wasn't just goals related to the op, like to the venue, but also like your personal goals, what you want to accomplish, what you want to heal from like things that, you know, in, especially in hindsight, you're like, how did any of these people who I of course now know we're literally just,
people like me who had maybe worked there an extra six months longer and had done the extra weekend of manager training, like they were not therapists and yet they were putting all of that information out there. And not only that, but when we would do like evaluations or talking about, you know, our performance reviews or whatever, it was never just about our performance in the store.
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Chapter 7: Who is Chip Wilson and what are his views on employee potential?
Do you remember just like more sort of company culture things like particular lingo that they used?
Yeah. I mean, it was, I'm trying to think like, it's also been almost 20 years. So like, I mean, everything was always about positivity. Like they gave, they used the word feedback all the time. They were constantly looking for customer feedback, client feedback, but they always wanted it spun very positively.
So like, for example, if a client or customer was like, Hey, I want to give you feedback on these pants. They stain really easy. If you wrote that on the board, you would get in trouble because it wasn't a positive spin.
They would want you to write it like these pants could be improved with stain resistance, as opposed to like, these pants are very easily stained with sweat and body oils, which like is a valid concern. Yeah. In athletic wear. They used the term defensiveness to try and kind of stop any negative feedback about the company or their policies.
So anytime, like for example, when I took over merchandising, we were on Bloor Street and our window was directly beside Hermes. And I was given a budget usually of between $100 and $150 to like put together, like buy things to put together our window. And like, I thought I got pretty creative and not to say that I'm a fucking genius. I'm sure some of my stuff could have improved.
But I remember having one of the like head merchandisers from head office come to give me feedback. And some of it was useful and whatever, but then they got into like, well, let's take a comparative look at us and Hermes. Like, how could we look more expensive? And I was like, well, an easy way would be for us to increase our budget.
Like I know from speaking to the merchandiser there that they spend 10 grand on a budget and we spend at best 150. And immediately it was like, well, you don't need to be defensive. So yeah, defensiveness was very much just a general term for any time you disagreed with anyone.
So yes, Lululemon is a very intense company. One of the things the company used to do is let employees take an intense, inspirational course through a company called Landmark Worldwide. Landmark runs workshops in which people have breakthroughs about where they are stuck in their lives.
And according to that New York Times Magazine article, quote, every employee is strongly encouraged to enroll in the Landmark Forum at Lululemon's expense. Chip Wilson also told the reporter that when he first discovered Landmark, he was struck by the idea that, quote, once I take responsibility, then I have power. And he's talking about, of course, having power in your life.
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