Shannon

"designed our first professionally-built store. Then I took out an ad in our local weekly newspaper offering a free lululemon outfit to shoppers if they came naked on the store’s opening day. The response was unbelievable. It was so strong that I became concerned there would be a naked riot, and we would be forced to hand out our entire inventory free-of-charge. I went back to the paper and placed a second ad. This time I clarified that only the first thirty naked Guests would score free clothes. I had forgotten about Vancouver culture, and that given a chance, the whole city would show up naked. On the day of the opening, at around four o’clock in the morning, people started lining up outside. It was a drizzly, cool October morning in Vancouver, but groups of people were showing up wearing raincoats and nothing else. It was still dark outside, but I could see the numbers were growing. The inside of the store was still swarming with our efforts to get it ready. Not long after the line formed, the media showed up with trucks and vans. As dawn broke, a large crowd of spectators had assembled. Milestone’s—the restaurant across the street—had a balcony packed with people craning over their breakfasts to get a look at those lining up. Even lululemon’s meek, mild accountant who couldn’t have looked more out of place, had shown up not willing to miss the spectacle. As we got ready to unlock the front doors, I was very excited… until I got a good look at the group of people clustered by the front door. The first two customers lined up were young girls who couldn’t have been older than fourteen. I turned from the door and went to find Darrell Kopke in the back. I was verging on panic, thinking about the media and the video cameras filming, the crowd of spectators, and these kids about to strip down. What was supposed to be a funfest was suddenly verging on becoming a PR catastrophe. After a couple of minutes to assess the situation, I asked Shannon to help greet the naked Guests. We went to the door, opened it up, and stepped out to the crowd. I shouted, “You guys are fantastic—thanks for coming!” The tension broke that instant and there were cheers and clapping. Then we counted off the first thirty naked people over the threshold. As it turned out, those girls at the front of the line weren’t alone. They were sisters—and they came with their equally naked mother and grandmother. Dozens of Guests continued to show up naked to the store all day, just because they could do it. Three naked men came in the morning and just didn’t want to leave. It was a little creepy, but we went with it. We had no issues with the police, and this reminded me why I love Vancouver so much. There are plenty of cities in North America where this kind of event in 2002 wouldn’t have gone over nearly as smoothly."

"We now have five, all from the same mother, Shannon, who I found twenty-five years ago abandoned on a country road while I was biking in Ireland. She was just nine months old and followed me around for a day until I picked up and took her back to the U.S., where she lived until she was sixteen on our farm in Connecticut. When she started to decline, I couldn’t imagine not having her in our lives. I’d heard about the successful cloning of dogs in South Korea and decided to try. The results have been extraordinary. The pups, born from Shannon’s DNA, do not have her exact coloring or sequence of spots, but I see in each of them the essence of Shannon’s spirit and soul. And yes, I know it is controversial and an indication of how outrageously advantaged our lives are. I hold no illusions about that."