Lululemon bars public from shareholder meeting with key vote on board members

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Lululemon Athletica Inc. blocked non-shareholders and the media from attending its annual general meeting, where voters were deciding whether to appoint two controversial nominees to the retailer’s board.

The nominees — ex-ESPN chief marketing officer Laura Gentile and Marc Maurer, former co-CEO of On — were a key part of a truce the Vancouver-based company struck with its estranged founder last month in order to end his recent attacks on the firm.

The vote was expected to be a test of how shareholders felt about the compromise, but how it transpired is now a mystery because the company limited access and hasn’t released meeting details yet.

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It said anyone who wanted to attend the virtual meeting had to hold Lululemon stock on April 30, well before Lululemon reached its agreement with founder Chip Wilson.

The company did not immediately respond to a request for comment on why it prohibited public access to the event but said it would eventually release the results of the vote in regulatory filings.

While companies aren’t required to offer public access to annual general meetings, York University governance, law and ethics professor Richard Leblanc said he’s never seen a firm restrict who can attend in this way because it limits accountability.

“A public company is intended to be public and transparent, so excluding certain stakeholders from the meeting unless there’s a compelling reason to ... it is not normally done in my experience,” he said.

While based in Canada, Lululemon is publicly traded on the Nasdaq, a U.S. exchange.

Public companies on both sides of the border usually offer public and media access to their annual general meetings through live streams. Sometimes they’re even able to attend the events in person.

“You don’t have to open the floodgates, but if someone has got an interest in covering it — and members of the media do — then it should generally in principle be widely available and subject to scrutiny,” Leblanc said.

“One certainly shouldn’t have to buy a share in a company in order to attend.”

The meeting was of public interest because Wilson has been pushing for Gentile and Maurer to join Lululemon’s board since last year, when he criticized the company for failing to keep up with its competitors and address its sagging stock price.

Lululemon said it was open to considering Wilson’s nominees but accused him of blocking the company from interviewing the people and demanding other concessions.

It put forward its own board nominees before agreeing last month to appoint Gentile and Maurer, so long as Wilson quits his attacks on Lululemon.

To guarantee Wilson lay off the criticism until the lead up to Lululemon’s 2028 annual meeting, the company has also promised to appoint an additional director with product and brand expertise in apparel to the board by Oct. 1.

If Gentile and Maurer are appointed Thursday, it would likely signal an end to an acrimonious chapter in Lululemon’s history that saw Wilson slagging the brand he founded with ads in the Wall Street Journal and on trucks he sent to the company’s Vancouver headquarters and one of its New York stores.

Wilson, who left Lululemon’s board in 2015 but still holds about nine per cent of its common shares, said he was acting because he felt Lululemon had lost its focus and its board was “structurally set up to resist change.”

“Billions of dollars in brand power have been lost, which cannot be regained with the same selection pattern of directors who Lululemon continues to onboard,” he said in May.

Lululemon fired back, saying Wilson was attacking the board even when its performance was stellar.

“Mr. Wilson has outdated perspectives about how to position Lululemon and the future of the company, as well as troubling conflicts of interest,” the company said, mentioning he had advised the retailer’s competitors Alo and Vuori.

“His actions have been damaging to the brand and harming the very stakeholders he claims to represent: shareholders, guests and employees.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published June 25, 2026.

By Tara Deschamps