Going Public

"At nine-thirty on the morning of July 27, 2007, I stood on a riser in the NASDAQ Exchange in New York City. Beside me were my family, an assortment of our core staff, and our new Board of Directors. I took a breath and pressed the button to ring the bell. We’d done it. We’d taken lululemon athletica public."

Read on for the full excerpt from my new book, Little Black Stretchy Pants—the unauthorized story of how I built lululemon, available now in hardcover on Amazon, as well as Audible and Kindle.

Going Public

“I always kind of joked that lululemon was like the sister we never had,” my son JJ recalls. “And growing up, I always kind of thought, ‘Well, my dad owns and runs a women’s athletic apparel, yoga-based business. And that’s what he does every day. He gets up, and he goes and makes little black stretchy pants.’ I kind of had an understanding, eventually, of what was occurring. It was part of my life growing up. The IPO happened when I was eighteen.”

The day of the IPO was huge for us, but I felt as if I’d already experienced it. An entrepreneur is easily able to put themselves five to ten years into the future. They build into the future, and not for the present, so I had envisioned this for lululemon already. It was akin to being a designer. A designer designs a garment but doesn’t see it come into the store until eight months later. By that point, the designer has long since moved on to future designs.

Almost as soon as the bell was rung, our stock jumped from its initial price of $18 to $25 a share. As planned, I now owned 30 percent of the company. We marked the day in a memorable way. We’d already arranged it so that Times Square was shut down to traffic during the day on the 27th, which allowed us to stage a massive yoga demonstration right there in the centre.

The demonstration was Eric Petersen’s idea, and it went off perfectly. Eric would later say the day of the IPO was among his proudest moments at the company. “Everyone at lululemon felt like they were involved in the process,” he commented. “It could have been a divisive time in the growth of the company, but it wasn’t.”

Lori Jane Budd, who managed our first store in NYC, says: “It was a very exciting time to be the manager of the only store in NYC with all the hoopla surrounding this giant step for the company. After having the thrill of watching the bell being rung, the excitement and traffic increased even more in the store. On the day of the IPO, a banker walked into the store on 64th and Broadway and said, ‘Who are you guys?! I just made a shitload of money off you!’”

I also wanted to do something for all of our employees, so we had every electronic billboard in Times Square displaying rotating pictures of everyone working in our stores. If you were working for lululemon at that time, you would have seen your face in Times Square. The whole thing brought the company together. It wasn’t just those of us down there for the IPO—it was a positive way of enrolling and involving everyone in the entire company in the experience.

July 27th also marked the fulfillment of a promise I’d made to the staff years before. When lululemon was much, much smaller, I’d told a group of our people that if we ever went public, I would give them 10 percent of my shares. I did this, which created thirty or so multimillionaires—most of them women (who have since gone on to build their own businesses).

Coming to New York and experiencing the final stage of our company going public wasn’t just symbolic for our staff, it meant that they were now its owners. The investing world seemed to believe in our new way of doing business. We had a successful formula that was producing the top apparel metrics in the world.