Comfort is expensive.

Lululemon was built on invention.

A new category.

A culture obsessed with community.

Then it got comfortable.

The brand lost its way.

Founder Chip Wilson called it out in public. He said what most won’t:

scale replaced soul.

In a full-page ad in The Wall Street Journal, he accused the board of chasing financial safety, trading creative DNA for quarterly comfort, and warned that Lululemon had lost half its brand power to performance thinking. It wasn’t a critique of sales. It was a call for a soul transplant.

The irony? They optimized the brand until there was nothing left to believe in.

In brand building, performance was never meant to replace creativity.

As Leland Maschmeyer of COLLINS framed it, the new continuum of brand identity moves from function to dynamism to performance.

Performance is the next stage of expression, built on what the brand already believes.

When performance becomes the purpose, belief fades. And belief is what drives real performance in the first place.

Sit with:

Are the decisions still led by belief, or by what’s safest?

Has the work started aiming for acceptance instead of impact?

Is anyone inside the business still fighting for originality?

When was the last time something felt uncomfortably bold?

Would the founder who started this still recognize the brand today? 

Growth starts where comfort ends. Let’s talk

Ian Adams, Founder the little red sofa

Before founding the little red sofa, I led strategy and creative for brands like Jeep, HSBC, and Unilever at top global agencies and in-house teams across 8 countries. Now I work with founders to turn brand clarity into sustainable growth.