Lululemon vows to fix blunders
TORONTO — While Lululemon Athletica waits for incoming chief executive Laurent Potdevin to start working on the retailer’s bruised reputation when he begins his job next week, chief financial officer John Currie is working overtime to put the company’s blunders of 2013 behind it.
“You always hear the phrase that any PR is good PR, but we learned that that is not always the case,” Currie told an industry audience Tuesday at the ICR XChange conference in Orlando, Fla., a day after the Vancouver yogawear giant warned of declining fourth-quarter traffic and cut its quarterly estimates.
The public face of the company since departing CEO Christine Day was absent from the apparel retailer’s third-quarter call last month, Currie made the remarks after a problematic year of quality control problems at Lululemon, Day’s surprise exit announcement in June and controversial comments from founder Chip Wilson suggesting some women’s bodies were not suited to wear Lululemon’s pants.
“I just want you to hear that we are taking it seriously,” Currie said, after a moment of levity during which he showed a slide with the caption, ‘What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.’
It depicted a cartoon mouse using a mousetrap for bench press exercises.
“We get it. We have a great brand and we could be complacent and we could expect the guest and the traffic to come back, but we are not going to be complacent. It’s incumbent on us to do everything we can to turn the conversation around to more positive again.”
The company is focused on recapturing its customers’ trust after conducting extensive consumer research to determine how much damage the brand has sustained from such a negative year.
“On the positive, what we have going for us is off-thecharts brand loyalty,” Currie said, showing a chart ranking Lululemon as the frontrunning favourite in the Canadian and U.S. markets against rivals such as Under Armour and Nike.
But Currie remained mum on any negative elements that showed up in the research, and was tight-lipped about what executives are planning to do in 2014 to win back disgruntled consumers.
Lu lu lemon had good traction from running a socalled “no humbug” loyalty program during the Christmas period, he said, that allocated a few thousand dollars to each store to enable staffers to do random acts of kindness for customers, and the CFO suggested more such initiatives are in the works for the coming year.
On Monday, the former stock market darling saw its Nasdaq shares plunge to the lowest intraday level in two years after cutting its estimates for the second time in as many months. Its shares slipped 44 cents US on Tuesday to close at $49.26.