Sierra Hollister is 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.
Photographer: Juan Diego Reyes/BloombergThese Yoga Instructors Are Pressing Lululemon to Clean Up Its Supply Chain
Thousands of yoga instructors and students, including some former company brand ambassadors, have signed a petition to get the apparel giant to convert its supply chain to renewable energy.
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.”