Issue of the week: When body-shaming backfires

“The workout never seems to end” for Lululemon’s PR team, said Kyle Stock in Businessweek.com. The yoga apparel company’s founder, Chip Wilson, offended customers last week when he “implied that plus-size people should shop elsewhere.” Some women’s bodies, he said, “just actually don’t work” with the chain’s clothes. Look, “we get it: Lululemon is an aspirational brand for customers.” Yet when more than a third of U.S. adults are obese, “one would think a $10.1 billion company ostensibly devoted to health and fitness could find a way to inspire that market, or at least not insult it outright.” Even if the pricey yoga retailer is determined to cut out a third of its potential customers, “it would be wise to be quiet about it.”

“Who doesn’t say something stupid every once in a while?” said Ronna Benjamin in HuffingtonPost.com. Wilson’s boneheaded utterance is no reason to give up on a good company. After all, this is hardly the first time Lululemon has stumbled with the public. I never understood the rationale, for example, of its yoga bags emblazoned with Ayn Rand quotes, and no one will forget the debacle from earlier this year, when the company lost $67 million recalling yoga pants that were so sheer you could see through them. As for Wilson, he has stuck his foot in his mouth before. Remember when he said that an increase in breast cancer in the 1990s “was due to ‘cigarette-smoking power women’ taking the pill and working”? But let’s give Lululemon a break, despite the “sour grapes and the stupid bags.”

The company will pay for flouting the adage that “the customer is always right,” said Emily Shire in TheWeek.com. When you’re hawking exercise gear for $98 a pop, “you wear kid gloves whenever talking about your customers and pray that you can keep convincing as many of them as possible that everyone’s butt looks great in pants that cost nearly as much as a flight from New York to Miami.” Lululemon should learn a lesson from Abercrombie & Fitch’s recent dustup over exclusionary sizing. When companies start embracing a Mean Girls persona, they can’t expect their clientele to hang on for the ride.

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Sadly, “this kind of thing is in character” for the company, said Melissa Harris-Perry in MSNBC.com. Lululemon has already refused to make pants bigger than a size 12, claiming the extra fabric would make their cost prohibitive. Such gaffes “could maybe be forgiven if the $100 pants were perfect. But they’re not.” And instead of blaming customers for their poorly made products, retailers might “do well to design clothes to accommodate our bodies.” Lululemon and other trendy retailers pay a price for taking their fanatical followers for granted. Sooner or later, some women will take their business “to another retailer—one who won’t expect us to pay exorbitant prices for the privilege of being body-shamed.”