Could Lululemon's Naked Run Marketing Magic Happen Today?

It was October 2003. A cold Vancouver morning. Lululemon was opening its Robson Street store and the brand’s then-General Manager Darrell Kopke had an idea, inspired by a tongue-in-cheek email he’d sent to founder Chip Wilson ten weeks earlier showing naked people pressed against a German decathlon store window.

The result? A full-page ad in the Georgia Straight announcing that anyone who showed up naked to the grand opening would get a free outfit. At least 50 people came through naked. People were coming in all day. Helicopters circled overhead. International press picked it up. The store broke records.

“We didn’t take ourselves too seriously,” Darrell says. “That was part of the fun vibe of Lulu at the time.”

The question is, could that happen today?

What Made It Work Then

The naked run wasn’t just a stunt. It was the perfect expression of a brand that had already built something rare: a genuine community that trusted it enough to do something ridiculous on its behalf.

By 2003, Lululemon had crossed what Darrell calls “the chasm to repeat sales.” The early adopters were already obsessed. The brand had built its following not through advertising but through something far more intimate, paying its retail staff to attend yoga and fitness classes in the community, wearing the clothes, having real conversations.

“That was our marketing,” Darrell explains. “We had a philosophy that while we’re in each other’s lives, we help each other achieve our goals.”

There was no marketing department. No head office merchant team. No visual merchandising department. Just smart people in stores, trained to relate to the customer as an equal, university educated athletes who lived the lifestyle they were selling.

The manifesto on the wall was the dogma. The yoga instructors with lineups out the door every Tuesday were the micro-influencers. The ambassador athletes whose pictures hung in the store were the apostles.

Lululemon had, without using any of these words, built a religion.

What’s Different Now

Social media didn’t exist in 2003. The naked run worked in part because the press had to come to it. There was no other way for it to travel. A full-page ad in a local alternative weekly, word of mouth, and helicopter footage was enough to generate international coverage.

Today the same stunt would be live on TikTok within minutes, dissected on X within hours, and cancelled or celebrated depending entirely on who got to the narrative first.

“If a brand tries to please everybody, you’re pleasing nobody,” Darrell says. “The hardest thing to do in branding is to pick a lane, win in that lane, and piss everyone else off. That is the job of excellent branding.”

The current Lululemon, he suggests, has lost exactly that willingness. “The brand is scared not to tick anybody off and just wants to please everybody.” The result is what he calls too much merchandise, confusing merchandise, no compelling story. “They became the Gap.”

The naked run couldn’t have come from a brand in that posture. It required a founder who genuinely didn’t care who it offended, because he was clear on exactly who he was talking to.

The Anatomy of a Cult Brand

Darrell teaches a course at UBC Sauder called Disruption. When he talks about brand building, he reaches for an unexpected analogy: religion.

“If I was to start a cult today, I would need a congregation. I would need a dogma. I would need rites of passage and rituals. I would need aspirational apostles.”

Lululemon had all of it. The manifesto was the dogma. The community ambassadors were the apostles. The free yoga classes were the rites of passage. The store, designed to feel like walking into someone’s living room, was the congregation space.

“People want to affiliate, people want to believe, people want to join in and be part of something. That’s human nature.”

The brands getting this right today, he notes, are the ones building genuine community around a specific, unapologetic identity. He mentions Strawberry Milk Mob, a Vancouver swimwear brand started by a 23-year-old that now employs her whole family, has a kiosk in Pacific Centre, and is doing millions in revenue. She didn’t try to dress everyone. She dressed her person, exactly, and her person became obsessed.

Brandy Melville does the same. Aritzia built an entire house of brands, Wilfred, TNA, and others, each serving a completely different conversation without asking any of them to compromise.

“Your job isn’t to piss people off,” Darrell clarifies. “Your job is to find your ideal customer profile and have them love you, have them obsessed with you. The second order effect of that is that some people won’t be for your brand. That’s not the goal. That’s just what happens.”

Could the Naked Run Happen Today?

Yes, but it would have to be engineered completely differently.

The mechanics of viral marketing have changed entirely. What travels in 2026 is not a helicopter shot of naked people outside a store. What travels is a feeling, a moment of genuine belonging, captured and shared by the people who were actually there.

The brands doing this well are the ones that understand Gen Z not as a demographic to target but as a community to build. Darrell is clear-eyed about this generation: they are the healthiest in human history, they count their macros, they invest, they don’t drink, they’re politically engaged. They communicate in memes because memes are a language, a shorthand for belonging.

“They’re missing a place where they can hang out and connect,” he says. “Fitness clubs are not designed as third places. Coffee shops are fine, but what do you do at night? Why not your brand?”

The brands that crack Gen Z will be the ones that give them a place, physical or digital, to gather around a shared identity. Not a product. An identity.

Lululemon in 2003 was that place for a very specific woman in Vancouver. She could identify herself by the clothes, yes, but more than that, she could identify herself by the community. She went to yoga. She was athletic. She was health-conscious. She was, in the language of the time, that girl.

The naked run was just the moment the outside world noticed what had already been built on the inside.

The Lesson

Darrell didn’t plan the naked run as a viral marketing strategy. He sent a joke email. Chip Wilson ran with it three times. And it worked because the brand had already done the hard work of building something people wanted to be part of.

“The best technology doesn’t win,” Darrell says, speaking about deep tech ventures at UBC’s Creative Destruction Lab, but the principle applies equally to brands. “Only when humans purchase does it win. Disruption is not a technology problem to solve. It’s a human problem to solve.”

The same is true for marketing. A naked run is not a marketing strategy. Community is a marketing strategy. The naked run is just what happens when the community is ready.

Could it happen today? Build the right community first. The moment will find itself.

Listen to the full conversation with Darrell Kopke on Making the Cut, now streaming on Spotify, YouTube, and Substack.

Darrell Kopke is faculty at UBC Sauder School of Business and oversees the Creative Destruction Lab Vancouver.