Newday Spotlight: Lululemon Athletica Inc.

This week’s Newday Spotlight is Lululemon. Lululemon (NASDAQ: LULU) makes it a priority to improve both environmental health and personal health. Every year, they measure the company’s energy use and carbon footprint.

Lululemon’s product life cycle assessments indicate that their biggest environmental impacts are in their supply chain. They plan to address these impacts with the help of the Sustainable Apparel Coalition, of which they are members. Product life cycle assessments help Lululemon understand the full environmental impacts of their facilities and allow them to develop comprehensive policies to manage their environmental footprint. They are constantly identifying opportunities to improve their environmental performance as well as benchmarking their results against industry peers.

Lululemon does not own manufacturing facilities, but they carefully select vendors through a screening process to consistently uphold their values. When working with vendors, they require the HIGG INDEX 2.0 facilities module, which considers key environmental impact areas: greenhouse gas emissions, water use, wastewater/effluent, air emissions, waste, and chemicals management, and energy use.

Newday includes Lululemon in the Gender Equality portfolio, which is focused on equal pay, female leadership, and parental leave. In March of 2017, executives promised that Lululemon would achieve equal pay for equal work by the end of 2018. And they did just that: Lululemon reached 100 percent gender pay parity for its 14,000 employees worldwide. Sun Choe, Lululemon’s Senior Vice President of Merchandising said in a recent interview that, “In many ways, we’re an organization that has been built for women, by women, and we feel really strongly in women’s ability to transform not only Lululemon but also the world.”

At Lululemon women make up 75 percent of the overall workforce and comprise 90 percent of the employees in their retail stores. At the director level, they have a 50 percent male-to-female representation. In addition, since the CEO departed in February, two of the three transition leaders are women.

Lululemon is working to achieve great environmental health and personal health. But they also recognize that there is still a lot of work to do. Celeste Burgoyne, Lululemon’s Executive Vice President for the Americas said recently in an interview, “We know there’s more we can do,” says Burgoyne. “This is just the beginning.”