Back in 1998, Chip Wilson predicted that yoga would be one of the next big trends in retail. He launched Lululemon that year in his home city of Vancouver, Canada. That decision catalysed the “athleisure” movement, making it cool and stylish to wear athletic clothing every day.
In late 2023 the now 68-year-old Wilson, whose estimated net worth is over $7.5 billion, had another prediction, “I feel like I’m right in the middle of the biggest change in the way people have dressed in the history of the world,” he told Forbes.
Wilson was not talking about Lululemon, the company he founded but where he left his role as chair of the board in 2013 amid controversy following his comments about women’s bodies. He was referring to the success of his newer investment: Helsinki, Finland-based sportswear outfit Amer Sports, the parent company of outdoors brands like Arc’teryx (outerwear), Wilson (tennis rackets), Salomon (running shoes and ski gear) and Atomic (ski gear).
In 2019, right around the time Lululemon revoked his right to nominate a director to its board, the entrepreneur spent around $1.1 billion of cash from selling Lululemon shares to buy a nearly 21% stake in Amer Sports. He was part of an investor group led by Anta, the owner of Fila and largest athletic company in China, that spent a combined $5.2 billion to take over the Finnish conglomerate.
His stake in the company is now worth about $3.2 billion, double its value when it went public in February 2024. (Wilson bought an additional $324 million worth of shares at the IPO.) That’s just $200 million less than his remaining 7% stake in Lululemon, whose stock has dropped about 16% over the past year amid rising competition from the likes of Alo Yoga and Vuori. Despite having no active role in running the company, Wilson is still Lululemon’s largest individual shareholder – and occasionally a thorn in its side. .
Wilson has also made a decent return so far investing in Anta directly. He bought nearly 16 million shares of the Chinese conglomerate back in 2019 for $100 million–they are now worth $160 million.
In an interview in late 2023, Wilson told Forbes his key focus was on Amer, whose sales are predicted to surpass $5.1 billion in 2024, up from $4.4 billion in 2023 and $2.5 billion in 2021. “It’s just where my brain is probably 90% of the time,” said Wilson, who serves on the company’s board of directors with Anta cofounder Ding Shizhong, medical scrubmaker FIGS cofounder Trina Spear and former CEO of Hugo Boss Bruno Salzer. The Lululemon billionaire also said he was attempting to transform Amer brands from “very male, very engineering, very wholesale”-focused to be more appealing to the everyday customer.
From the outset his Chinese partner had high hopes for Wilson to help make Amer more international. “We reckoned that he is a very talented person, has great passion on brand management. He also likes the Anta brand a lot,” read a transcript from a 2019 conference call with Anta management. “We will meet very often in the future.”
Amer’s biggest markets in 2023, the last year the data was available, were in the Americas, which made up about 40% of its revenue, and Europe, the Middle East and Africa, which comprised a combined 33%. But that is changing as its business in China and Asia Pacific grows rapidly, up 54% and 42% during the first nine months of 2024, according to its latest financial results, eclipsing the tepid pace of growth in the other key markets by a factor of 7-fold and 10-fold, respectively.
According to Morningstar analyst Ivan Su, Amer’s recent success is tied directly to the booming popularity of outdoor wear in China. “In the U.S. and Europe, outdoor [apparel] has always been there. But in China, outdoor is something that only started to become mainstream during Covid-19,” explains Su.
When Amer first went public in 2024, outerwear brand Arc’teryx was viewed as its “golden goose,” says Su. But other brands, including Salomon and Wilson, have done better than expected, especially in China. “Salomon is gaining traction in the hiking crowd,” he adds. And Wilson, which is best known for its classic rackets, is having success selling its apparel–especially to female tennis players in China.
Outside of his investments in Amer and Anta, Wilson has funneled about $70 million into finding a cure for facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy (FSHD), a rare form of muscular dystrophy that he was diagnosed with 30 years ago. He’s also an investor in other up-and-coming retail companies including Sheertex, a firm that makes tights out of bulletproof vest materials.
All of these investments have given Wilson a chance to earn back respect in an industry that turned against him. He famously stepped away from Lululemon amid backlash after blaming an issue with see-through leggings on “some women’s bodies,” specifically those with thicker thighs. He’s continued to make controversial comments since his departure. In his 2023 interview with Forbes, Wilson criticized Lululemon’s push toward “diversity and inclusion” and described some of its models as looking “unhealthy,” “sickly” and “not inspirational.”
Wilson is candid about his own shortcomings, and strengths. On his website, “chipwilson.com,” the entrepreneur includes the following in his bio: “I am a terrible salesperson, but I know how to make the best product in the world and price it to sell in quantity…I think an entrepreneur is someone who is too incompetent to work for anyone else and is driven to bring unpopular ideas to fruition.”
This article was originally published on forbes.com and all figures are in USD.
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