Meet the yoga instructors pressing Lululemon to clean up its climate act

Soon after Lululemon Athletica opened a store in Asheville, North Carolina in 2012, Sierra Hollister noticed something different at the yoga classes she teaches in the city.

The athleisure giant’s employees started showing up and telling her how great it would be if she’d become one of the store’s yoga ambassadors, those local practitioners whose pictures decorate the walls of retail outlets and whom the company describes as “an extension of our brand”.

Hollister wasn’t interested. “I said no, repeatedly,” she recalls. “Not because I had any problem with Lululemon at that point, but because I thought it was kind of ethically slippery to agree to wear a brand, especially an expensive brand.”

Fending off Lululemon, however, wasn’t so easy. Over the next few years, Hollister says, it raised thousands of dollars for Light a Path, a non-profit she co-founded to bring yoga to the incarcerated.

Finally, she gave in and agreed to be an ambassador in 2017. There was no money in it for her, but Hollister says she was given a store gift card with an “enormous amount” of money on it, gift passes to saunas, and for a while, she could work out anywhere and the company would pay for it.

And Hollister was surprised how smitten with Lululemon she became when people at the company told her of their commitment to address climate change. “I drank the Kool-Aid,” she says. “I believed what they said.”

No longer an ambassador, Hollister is now a prominent voice in a global campaign by members of the yoga community to pressure Lululemon to match its climate action with its climate rhetoric.

As of January, more than 7,000 instructors and students had signed a petition circulated by the environmental groups Stand.Earth and Actions Speak Louder, calling for Lululemon to convert its supply chain to 100 per cent renewable energy, no small feat when that many of its suppliers are in countries like Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Cambodia, where coal is still widely used to power factories.

Granted, plenty of yoga teachers seem perfectly happy with Lululemon and have no interest in criticising its climate practices. “Just to be clear, the majority of yoga teachers aren’t talking about this,” says Tejal Patel, an instructor in Los Angeles supporting the campaign.

“The majority of yoga teachers just want to talk about doing handstands and post pictures of themselves on the beach.”

But for those who’ve lent their names to the petition drive, Lululemon’s reliance on fossil fuels couldn’t be more at odds with its three oft-stated corporate pillars: “Be human. Be well. Be planet.”

“The gap between what they say and what they do is so big,” says Philipp Strohm, chief executive officer of YogaMeHome, an online yoga instruction company based in Vienna, Austria. “They need to make some changes.”

A Lululemon spokesperson says in a statement that “Lululemon is focused on helping to create a garment industry that is more sustainable,” and that the company has converted its owned and operated facilities entirely to 100 per cent green energy.

According to the company's 2022 Impact Report, it has reduced greenhouse gas emissions from those operations by 78 per cent since 2018.

However, the spokesperson acknowledges that the bulk of Lululemon’s emissions come from its supply chain.

The company has made similar pledges about reductions on this front, and says it’s working to get its key suppliers to adopt “carbon reduction roadmaps”. But any lofty goals seem increasingly out of reach as its supply chain footprint rose by 129 per cent from 2018 to 2022, according to Lululemon’s 2022 Impact Report.

This has occurred at a time of rapid financial growth for Lululemon. The company more than doubled its yearly net revenues between 2018 and 2022 to $8.1 billion (€7.6 billion) making it the envy of the fashion industry.

The number of its stores rose by nearly 50 per cent to 655 during the same period. As of late January, the company’s $60 billion (€56 billion) market cap was larger than any other North American apparel maker with the exception of Nike.

Lululemon’s challenge is that producing its trendy clothes is inherently carbon intensive because so much of its items are made from polyester, which is derived from petroleum.

And like other apparel companies, many of Lululemon's overseas suppliers rely on coal-powered energy to finish and dye their fabrics and getting them to transition to greener power isn’t easy. A Lululemon spokesperson noted that the company launched its first products last year made with plant-based nylon and is trying to incorporate more recycled materials into its garb.

Maxine Bedat, director of the fashion-focused think tank New Standard Institute, sees a connection between Lululemon’s revenue growth and its rising pollution. “It’s very basic,” she says. “If product creation is going up, emissions will grow."

Last year, Stand.Earth gave Lululemon a C- on its annual scorecard of 43 of apparel industry’s leading companies on their efforts to wean themselves from fossil fuels. But none of them aced the exam. The highest scorer was H&M, earning a B-. Luxury brands like Prada and Salvador Ferragamo got Fs.

So why single out Lululemon? The campaign’s organisers were convinced that if Lululemon would convert its supply chain to renewable energy, its peers might follow.

“It’s one of the biggest fashion brands, and its focus is on wellness, sustainability, people and planet,” says Stand.Earth spokesperson Erdene Batzorig. “We felt that Lululemon had the potential to be a leader in this industry.”

They also believed that Lululemon might be especially susceptible to a moral appeal. “It’s marketed itself as the premiere brand of yoga, right?” says Anusha Wijeyakumar, a yoga instructor in Southern California involved in the campaign. “That's why people just think, well, everybody loves Lululemon.”

Batzorig says Stand.Earth and Actions Speak Louder have had conversations with Lululemon, but nothing much has come from them yet. “They currently still have no plans to transition to a renewable energy supply chain,” she says. “That’s been our main ask.” She declines to go into more detail because the discussions are confidential.

Veronica Bates Kassatly, an independent sustainable fashion consultant, isn't sure how far a public company like Lululemon can go in reducing its emissions if it means increasing its production costs and ultimately prices of its yoga gear.

She says teachers would be smarter to go after a privately held company like Patagonia, which earned a C from Stand.Earth despite its stated commitment to reducing its footprint. “ Patagonia could decide tomorrow that it was not going to buy its stuff anymore from Sri Lanka,” she says. Patagonia declined to comment.

Hollister got involved early in the campaign, and she’s recruited other instructors, including another former Lululemon ambassador, Michael Johnson, a fellow Asheville resident.

Johnson did his stint from 2013 to 2015. He says Lululemon hired a photographer to take his picture during a class and for a while, it adorned the wall of one of the company’s stores.

However, Johnson says he never felt entirely comfortable with the role. “It just seemed kind of plastic and fake to me,” he says. “I didn’t necessarily hide my lack of enthusiasm.”

Johnson doesn’t sound hopeful that Lululemon will green its supply chain anytime soon. His friend, Hollister, doesn’t see why not. “They can totally afford to drop coal,” she says.

Meanwhile, she's trying to figure out what to do with all the free clothes she collected during her ambassadorship. “I literally have three big tubs of the stuff,” she says. “My daughter borrows things all the time.”