Luxury brands are not doing well because of inflation and wars.
In 2013, the founder of a Canadian yoga pants company banged: leggings are not for fat people.
A scandal arose and the company’s founder resigned.
The commotion subsided.
It’s been 11 years, but the ex-director of the Canadian company Lululemon, which manufactures yoga pants Chip Wilson doesn’t seem to have learned from the recent reputation disaster.
Last week, the company’s 68-year-old founder Wilson was slammed by a financial magazine Forbes in an interview that she doesn’t want to see Lululemon yoga pants on people who eat at fast food restaurants.
– The brand does not mean that the company offers everything to everyone. I think a brand needs to make it clear if it doesn’t want certain groups of people as customers, Wilson reasoned.
The Lululemon company dismissed Wilson’s remarks.
Wilson on social media has been criticized out of anger.
Wilson’s previous speeches interpreted as racist have also attracted criticism.
In a 2004 interview with the National Post Business Magazine, Wilson said that he named his company Lululemon because Japanese phonetics does not recognize an expression with three l’s in a row.
So the name of the Lululemon company cannot be pronounced in Japanese.
The brand’s popularity exploded during the corona years. In 2020, Lululemon became the seventh largest apparel company in the world and increased Wilson’s total net worth to $8.81 billion.
After Wilson’s exits, the value of the company’s shares has fallen.
Luxury store in pinte
British of The Telegraph according to the Lululemon brand belongs to the so-called luxury segment, because you can pay up to one hundred euros for the brand’s leggings.
However, the luxury business is not doing well.
For example, the British luxury fashion brand Burberry warned on Friday that its turnover will be lower than expected this year due to the slowdown in demand. The value of the Burberry company’s shares has fallen by 39 percent over the past year.
French luxury brand owners LVMH and Kering have also reported declining demand for luxury products in the United States and Europe.
The war in Ukraine and the Middle East, as well as consumer-disciplining inflation, have tightened the purse strings in Europe and the United States.
Meanwhile, the Asian market has still not recovered after the pandemic.
Source: Reuters
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