Chip’s challenge: Vancouver billionaire and Lululemon founder Chip Wilson seeks cure for rare genetic disorder

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Chip Wilson, the Canadian billionaire best known for being the founder of Lululemon Athletica Inc., announced his retirement early Monday morning during an exclusive interview with the Financial Post.

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The 67-year-old, mind you, isn’t bidding farewell to the multiple business ventures he’s involved with, including owning almost 11 million shares of Lululemon, plus an $800-million-or-so chunk of equity in Amer Sports Oyji — a privately held sporting goods giant with a host of well-known brands beneath its umbrella (Salomon, Arc’teryx, Atomic, Wilson, Precor and more) — as well as Low Tide Properties Ltd., a Vancouver real estate company with holdings north and south of the border.

Wilson’s self-proclaimed send-off, rather, is related to The Grouse Grind, a ritual that has been vital to his morning routine for several decades. The Grouse Grind, a.k.a. The Grind, is not a dance move, but a power hike up Grouse Mountain in the city’s north end. It ends with a view at the top that sure beats sweating one’s way to endorphin-fuelled deliverance on an indoor stair climber.

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Diehard grinders pride themselves by racing top to bottom in less than an hour. Wilson and his crew of buddies, consisting of other entrepreneurs and business-types he likens to golf pals, only without the golf, regularly clocked the return trip in 40 minutes flat.

Giving up the Grind isn’t a sore point for Wilson, so much as an admission that the rare form of muscular dystrophy he was diagnosed with at age 32, and had never spoken of publicly until Monday, has rapidly progressed from being a condition he has tried to ignore to one that seems determined to put him in a wheelchair.

“There has been a real downturn my last four months,” he said from his home in West Vancouver. “I can walk for maybe an hour, an hour and a half, but I am listing to one side, and I look like an old man. If it continues this way, I suspect I will be in a wheelchair in seven or eight years.”

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But the billionaire has no intention of going down without a fight. Facioscapulohumeral muscular dystrophy type 2 (FSHD2) is a genetic disorder that gradually lays waste to an individual’s upper body muscles, wrecks the spine, causes foot drop and quashes a person’s ability to smile.

There is no cure for it, at least not yet. Wilson, whose smile is still intact even as his body falls apart, is committing $100 million to fund a new venture, Solve FSHD, with the goal of finding a cure within five years.

I suspect I will be in a wheelchair in seven or eight years

Chip Wilson

To accomplish the job, he is asking scientists, biotech and biopharma companies, muscular degeneration specialists and other researchers working in similar muscular dystrophy streams to get in touch with his new organization. They can then apply for grants, share research, enlist study subjects, launch clinical trials and take aim at a genetic wrench that is typically hereditary — though Wilson’s strain of FSHD is not — and impacts more than a million people worldwide.

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“We have coordinated now with basically every scientist in the world who is working on this,” he said. “I consider myself very lucky, more so, because I have the money, the time, the resources to do something.”

Part of his effort also involves awarding a “prize” — a carrot, if you will — in the $30-million range, to the individual or outfit that succeeds in finding the cure.

I consider myself very lucky … because I have the money, the time, the resources to do something

Chip Wilson

“The idea behind the prize is to bring everyone out of the woodwork, even people with crazy ideas,” Wilson said.

As an example of crazy, he cites Phillip McCrory, the Alabama hairdresser and unlikely innovator who saw an oil-slick-coated sea otter in footage of the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill and wondered if human hair from salon floors could be deployed to soak up future spills. Spoiler alert: it has.

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The moral of the anecdote is that good ideas can come from unlikely places, and Wilson, and those like him with FSHD, are in need of a winner to return to good health.

Physicality has always been core to his identity, but the disorder has deprived him of being able to achieve the so-called runner’s high through exercise. This is not a trifling thing for someone who used to complete Iron Man triathlons and climb mountains for kicks. Instead, he now meditates multiple times daily, and said he can still achieve the high without breaking a sweat.

But no matter how bad things get for him physically, his mantra is to only see the bright side, refuse to get depressed and never forget that younger people afflicted by FSHD often end up in a wheelchair, or worse, before their 20th birthday.

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“The brain is incredibly powerful,” he said. “I am experimenting with its power all the time.”

If that sounds a tad too New Age for you, consider that the man doing the meditating is the same person who hooked North Americans on form-fitting, fashion-as-exercise pants that cost $100-plus a pop. (He also got in hot water for saying how those pants didn’t work for some “women’s bodies” a decade ago, but that’s another story).

Wilson in 2015 resigned from his seat on the board of the company that makes those pants. If he has any business regrets, it is that he didn’t adopt a dual-class share structure and retain the ability to handpick the chief executive before going public in 2007.

The Lululemon he nurtured to great heights, he said, was about the culture, the people and the future of activewear, but he believes it’s now driven by bean counters solely interested in maximizing the bottom line without any bigger vision.

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Wilson is still an investor — his shares are worth about US$4 billion, give or take — but he views the company like a wayward child that stopped paying any attention to the wisdom of dear old dad.

“I am not one to dwell on my mistakes, but I made a bunch of mistakes in governance,” he said.

The future of clothes, as Wilson sees it, resides outdoors with brands such as North Vancouver-based Arc’teryx. Generally regarded as the Cadillac of high-performance outdoor threads, Arc’teryx ski jackets cost more than $1,000, while its tailored, durable pants — yes, more pants — start at $200.

That may seem a strange vision for someone who just announced his retirement from his favourite outdoor activity, but Wilson executes an about-face, of sorts, just as a 45-minute interview winds to an end, rescinding his earlier announcement and reframing it more as a change of pace.

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The Grind, he reckons, just needs a fresh approach. Instead of attacking it with his pals and trying to beat the clock, he thinks doing the hike in 100-metre spurts, packing a lunch, taking water breaks and listening to a podcast along the way might be doable.

He is Chip Wilson, after all, Mr. Upbeat, and there is good reason to remain optimistic, with $100 million of his own money earmarked for finding a cure for FSHD and scientists, hairdressers and radical thinkers of all stripes being encouraged to get active in tackling the genetic disorder.

The guy putting up the money certainly isn’t planning to sit still.

“I’ll always be in movement,” Wilson said. “Even if that means crawling down the hallway — I’ll be moving — and I’ll be happy about it.”

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