Little Black Stretchy Pants Read online

  “We kind of went all-in on snowboarding,” says Scott, “and, of course, that made our company just skyrocket.” We went over to ISPO, the largest sporting goods trade show in the world, held in Germany. We were the first to introduce this new sport—snowboarding—and because there was in a three-year snow-drought there, we seemed crazy. But, the success this brought us was that we were now cemented as the very early players in the snowboard industry.

  “As snowboarding grew,” Scott adds, “we rode that growth.”

  ____________________

  2 Hondo, “Fathers of Snowboarding: Ken Achenbach,” Transworld Snowboarding, June 17, 2013, https://snowboarding.transworld.net/photos/fathers-of-snowboarding-ken-achenbach/.

  Chapter 8:

  Hard Times

  Near Bankruptcy

  We’d recently visited bankruptcy lawyers to understand how the process worked because we felt Westbeach was on the verge of collapse. We had been in snowboarding for only a short time, but like surf and skate before it, product supply was overtaking demand and prices were dropping.

  I wanted to get out before snowboarding became a commodity business. Sports stores now had negotiating power and were making the brands pay more of their shipping, warehousing and marketing costs. We couldn’t continue to fund the wholesale model, and financial pressure was closing in on all sides.

  My partner Richard also wanted to settle down, focus on a home, and build a family. He wanted to work shorter days, maybe six or eight hours, whereas I wanted to work double that, at least. Richard and I were not working well together. A huge part of that was our inability to communicate effectively. In survival mode, I defaulted to a command-and-control, Team of One style of operating, while Richard reverted to deception, and Scott reverted to being non-committal.

  We all had our Acts in full bloom.

  A Landmark Moment

  For as long as I’d known him, Richard had been taking classes and courses in transformational development. My perception was that the lessons he learned were mostly fleeting, but in early 1990 he came into work super-excited about a weekend workshop he’d taken called the Landmark Forum. I found out this was a business that had evolved massively since its original inception as EST.

  Over the next couple of weeks, both Scott and I noticed a massive improvement in Richard’s state of mind and integrity. Richard attributed it all to his experience at Landmark and asked us to take the course ourselves. We all wanted to improve things at Westbeach, that much was clear, so Scott and I signed up to do the course together.

  To illustrate more about Landmark, I’ll give you an example from when I took the course. There was a woman who was about forty years old and had been raised in a union family. She told us how her father came home every day and complained about the union bosses, how the workers like him did all the work while the bosses got all the money.

  This had formed the story and the context for how this woman had viewed her life since her childhood. She told us how she’d gone to university, entered the workplace, got a good job, and a promotion. She’d reached a point where she was making $100,000 a year in a leadership position, but she was still haunted by her father’s attitude.

  Her father had hated management, leaders, bosses—anyone making $100,000 a year who he’d call a corporate bum. So, subconsciously this woman found she was constantly undermining herself. She would succeed, get to a job of $100,000 a year, then quit because she just couldn’t handle being the person her father had always hated.

  At Landmark, this woman was introduced to the possibility of imagining amnesia. What if she had no memory of her past, of anything her father had said about bosses and management? If that was the case, this woman, with all her knowledge, ability, and education, could and would feel powerful to go beyond her father’s barrier.

  The only person who’d been undermining her was her, and she was doing so based on a disempowering story she’d told herself. If free from her story of her father, there was nothing she couldn’t do.

  The extent to which my past was exerting control over my present was revealed to me during the course. I realized that I constantly constructed stories based on past experiences to make sense of my interpretation of other people’s actions and behaviours. What I had failed to recognize was the fictional nature of the stories themselves. Even as I’m writing this book, I am considering what stories I have created and what is fact.

  I got to understand that what were just my best guesses had become facts in my mind. I based the course of my life on these guesses, believing them to be absolute truths. As stories accumulated over the years, they constrained me more and more.

  The Landmark Forum was a huge awakening. I thought of all the things my dad had said, based on his visits to EST and the Esalen Institute in the seventies, that I had dismissed without even considering. I heard for the first time what he’d been trying to tell me.

  The course was transformational because it opened up 70 percent of my brain that was clogged with unnecessary thoughts. The Landmark course was really no different than shutting down a slow hard drive to clean viruses and rearrange information.

  I also got clear I was going to die, and I was tired of a “fine” life. I wanted an “extraordinary” life.

  The viruses in my brain were:

  Managing lies I have told, so I don’t get caught.

  Repetitive complaining.

  Not taking responsibility for my actions (i.e. selling a lemon of a car).

  Acting inauthentic so I “looked good” to others (pretending to be what I was not).

  Spending brain power doing what parents, friends, or society think I “should” do.

  Consistently using the words “wish,” “should,” or “try,” and skirting responsibility instead of taking action.

  Creating excuses for not doing what I say I will do (like showing up on time).

  Letting my past experiences limit my future choices (i.e. my purple shirt experience).

  Not forgiving people for what I think they have done to me.

  In my observation of thousands of people who have taken the Landmark Forum, the number one issue inhibiting people from living an extraordinary life is their inability to forgive their parents for the lousy job they did raising them. Mostly I experienced that people’s interpretation of what occurred in their childhood and what actually happened was not the same. I have a theory that nature creates this weird human condition to cause friction to get adult children out of the house.

  The course opened my life to a bigger purpose. In the words of Werner Erhard—the man who founded EST—I learned what “making a difference in the world” meant. Landmark helped me understand my life could be less about me, and more about inspiring people to know their own magnificence. As you might imagine, my context for living in the world change dramatically.

  Since we’d all taken the course, Richard, Scott, and I suddenly had a powerful new language to help us communicate. The Landmark concepts gave us a common language and understanding of what we wanted for our lives and our business.

  I became committed to doing and completing everything that came out of my mouth. I wanted people to count on me. If I said I would do something, I had to do it, do it on time, and do it in a quality manner. If something went wrong, either I could blame other people for the problem, or I could take responsibility for it. Only when I took responsibility would I have the means to fix the problem.

  Looking at the past, I saw that my youth was a regimented life of eight swimming practices a week for seventeen years. When I quit swimming, I remember saying to myself, “I am never showing up on time, anywhere, for the rest of my life.” For instance, I would tell people I would come to dinner at 7:00 p.m. or meet someone at 10:00 a.m., but I had no internal commitment to do what I had agreed to. I was always late. About three years later I noticed no one was calling me and my friends had all but disappeared.

  I had learned that I was out of integrity, no one could count on me, a
nd consequently, people stopped asking me to make plans. When I got clear that I was responsible, I also knew I could take action. I talked to all my former friends, apologized, and said I understood I had messed up and upset them. I then asked what I could do to put myself back in integrity. The answers were mostly muted, so I just committed to showing up on time. It took me three years to re-establish my reputation as someone who could be counted on.

  “To this very day, I will say Landmark saved Westbeach,” says Scott. “Suddenly, regardless of whether you like somebody or not, you recognize you’re on the same team, and you start working together. Landmark helped us to communicate, and to redirect our focus from our problems to solutions.”

  We asked other people at Westbeach to attend the Landmark Forum. This was a hard thing to ask, because Westbeach, by this point, was a mature company, meaning it was difficult to alter the culture and sense of identity that had formed. Employees who’d been around for a while weren’t interested in improving themselves. We found our employees were more interested in spending $500 on a jacket than exponentially developing their brains.

  To an outsider, Landmark wasn’t tangible. It wasn’t something they could touch, and, in fairness, it seemed a little cultish to people who hadn’t taken the course. We couldn’t afford to send our employees, either, so if they attended the Forum, they would have to pay out-of-pocket. In the 2000s Oprah had a Vancouver man called Eckhart Tolle come to the show to discuss the book The Power of Now. I have often theorized that Mr. Tolle attended the Landmark Forum, and then wrote a book about the course.

  Still, it gave me the idea of working the Forum into the very beginning stages of a company, before that closed-minded maturity could set in, and before employees would be happy with mediocre lives and a mediocre company that was just “fine.” And this was exactly what I would do with lululemon. Ultimately, Landmark helped us work together to set Westbeach up to be sold.

  If we hadn’t done the course, we would have self-destructed, and I would never have had the money I used to start lululemon.

  Divorce

  All my working and business travel led my wife and me to divorce. Sadly, for almost four years, I felt like I saw my children very little. The reality was that I saw my boys more than most fathers did because I had to schedule my time and prioritize. I had to travel, out of necessity, for the business I was in—I had to make money to afford alimony and to keep both households afloat.

  The boys were too young to understand what was going on. Within a few years, they figured out their family was different. It seemed to cause a lot of confusion. JJ especially had difficulty with the transition as he always wanted the family to be together.

  I don’t think there’s any such thing as an easy separation or divorce—some go slightly better than others. After my ex-wife and I did the Landmark course we had the communication tools to put the past behind us and make our boys our number one priority.

  Chapter 9:

  The Business of Snowboarding

  Snowboarding Success

  “The period between 1990 and 1995 was when the real fun started,” says Scott Sibley. “We were major players. We built a distribution team and produced our own apparel. We had major lines of production. We had distribution networks in Europe and in Japan.”

  As our brand grew, so did the requirements on our in-house production (we could never produce snowboard apparel in-house, but we still produced our surf and skate wear). To help with this growth, I put an ad in the paper for a production manager.

  One person who responded to the ad was a young guy named Frankie Hon, who had just arrived in Canada from Hong Kong. Frankie’s experience was in distribution, not production management, but from the moment I met him, I could tell how smart and committed he was. I gave Frankie the job.

  “My family immigrated to Canada in 1990, and I started looking for a job,” Frankie remembers. “Chip interviewed me and offered me a job with Westbeach. The position had no title, but the intent of it was to coordinate with the existing production team. I was very impressed that he offered a job to a newcomer like me who had no Canadian experience.”

  Frankie was with Westbeach for two years. Then, Frankie met and married a woman named Elky, a fellow Chinese immigrant living in Vancouver. The two set up their own Vancouver-based garment factory. Frankie and Elky took much of our production team with them—but that was okay because our relationship was very strong.

  “With Chip’s encouragement, I started my own business in Canada,” says Frankie.

  A few years later, Frankie and Elky would start a larger manufacturing business, Charter Link Ltd., in Hong Kong. They would be a vital partner for me in the early days of lululemon, and it all started with the personal relationship we’d established at Westbeach.

  Growing our in-house production, then eventually taking it externally, were just two aspects of the growth Westbeach was experiencing through the crazy early-nineties. Even though financing was an ongoing challenge, the demand was massive, and the market was forgiving. My partners and I had to put into practice everything we’d developed over the previous five years—including our commitment to integrity and communication.

  Advertising to Distributors

  There were a few things we did differently or did for the first time, to put ourselves at the head of the snowboarding movement. One idea I had was to put ads in TransWorld skate and snowboard magazine. TransWorld, established in 1983, was the worldwide go-to bible for surf, skate, and snowboard news. But there was an important distinction that should be pointed out—the ad I put in TransWorld was not targeted toward customers; it was targeted to international distributors in order to exponentially grow sales and manufacturing quantities.

  Previously, when our focus was surf and skateboard, we’d never advertised. We didn’t need to. I was first in the surf and skate business in Canada, and throughout the early eighties, I’d received a lot of newspaper attention and editorials because I was the only adult who understood the youth market. This meant I never had to spend money on advertising.

  It also actually helped us not to advertise, since there was an underground authenticity to surfing and skateboarding. Traditional advertising would have only taken away from that.

  Building on Letters of Credit

  We continued to operate on letters of credit, as we still didn’t have enough money to afford upfront costs. Under this system, a distributor in Japan (or multiple distributors in Europe) would receive a sample line of Westbeach products. The distributors could show the sample line to potential customers.

  Once orders were placed, the distributors would give us the orders with an accompanying letter of credit. We would then transfer that letter of credit over to our manufacturers in Asia. The manufacturers would ship the product orders directly to the distributors in Europe or Japan. From that profit, we could make the clothing for Canadian stores to pay sixty days after delivery.

  That was how Westbeach, once it rebranded as a snowboard apparel company, was built on virtually no money.

  The key to this whole process was reaching the right distributors, and that was to whom the TransWorld ads were targeted, not consumers. I wanted to let the skateboard world to know we were the first and most original of companies in the new snowboarding industry.

  If prospective distributors in Japan and Europe were looking for an authentic brand to sell in their markets, the TransWorld ad would point them to Westbeach. This advertisement was an investment, a plan to make us look bigger than we were. And it worked.

  Big Air Contest

  I’d also considered other ways to promote the Westbeach brand, with the specific goal of break-even marketing. I thought a lot about what kind of event would attract people from around the world to snowboarding, and what occurred to me was a big air contest.

  At the same time, Whistler Blackcomb had been trying to figure out how to make their season longer—how to make April as strong as other months. They’d planned a big ski festiva
l (with a small snowboard component) to happen during one of the last weeks in April. I incorporated my idea with Whistler Blackcomb’s festival plan. Westbeach, as always, was short on money, but we had to put $50,000 into the event to make it happen.

  The first Westbeach Big Air contest, held in April 1991, was a total extravaganza. Over the next few years, it developed into a nighttime event at the base of Whistler Mountain. There were amazing snowboarders performing tricks and stunts, jumping over huge gaps, and going through hula-hoops of fire. Down at the bottom of the hill, we had cheerleaders under the big air jump and beautiful women in hot-tubs if the riders wanted to join. The crowd was huge, ten thousand people, and the vibe was crazy.

  At one point, I had $5,000 cash which I rolled in toilet paper and fired out of a slingshot into the crowd. The wind hit at just that moment and blew all the money back at me. That didn’t stop a mob of people from overwhelming my position to get at it. On-site security didn’t stand a chance. That Westbeach Classic Big Air was a gigantic success and strongly contributed to Westbeach’s unique brand identity.

  After we ran Big Air for two years, Kokanee Brewing paid us to rename the event. From then on, Kokanee ran the event and covered all the expenses and paid us $50,000, and the event was called the Kokanee Westbeach Big Air. I’ve always loved developing marketing ideas that generated revenue.

  Sponsoring Snowboarders

  The majority of other snowboard companies were only marketing by sponsoring athletes. Many of these athletes were kids, really, between fourteen and eighteen years old, at the top of their game in a sport that hadn’t existed before. Big board manufacturers would pay a top snowboarder up to $1 million a year to use their branded boards at high-publicity events.

  The board manufacturers (such as Morrow, Sims, Burton, and Ride) of the world could pay that kind of sponsorship through the sheer volume they made, mostly selling in Japan. Westbeach couldn’t afford that, so we had to think of other innovative ways to market.