Murder at Lululemon
Host Vanessa Grigoriadis explores why two women were found in the back of a Bethesda, Maryland boutique
This is part of Inside the Tent, a series going behind the scenes of Campside’s award winning podcasts.
Infamous is a production of Campside Media and Sony Podcasts. Listen now to Infamous: Murder at Lululemon (Apple, Spotify)
On our weekly show Infamous, we’ve dug into the office culture of many companies as they deal with the duress of a scandal, from 23andMe to Kylie Jenner’s makeup empire to Abercrombie & Fitch. But few companies have had to contend with a murder on the premises.
That’s what happened one night in 2011, inside a Bethesda, Maryland Lululemon boutique. In the back of the store, behind a purple door, two employees were found wounded and lying on the floor, surrounded by makeshift weapons, from a box cutter usually used to open packages of pants, to the store’s mini-Buddha statue, which had been found knocked over on its side.
I heard about the “Lululemon murder” when it occurred back then, but promptly dismissed it as a random event with little to do with the store setting. But after digging into the specifics of the murder, the Infamous team (co-host Natalie Robehmed and senior producer Lily Houston Smith) became obsessed with some of the motives behind the crime. I’m talking about the way the institutional culture of Lululemon, America’s most prominent athleisure brand, intersected with a killer desperate to raise her status in society.
Lululemon is a unique company. It was founded by Chip Wilson, who studied economics at the University of Calgary and once worked on an oil pipeline in Alaska. His first entrepreneurial success was a surf, skate and snowboard apparel company, which he sold in 1997. In 1998, after getting into yoga, he applied his expertise in technical athletic fabrics to yoga pants and launched Lululemon.
The company shot straight to the moon - it is now publicly traded with a market cap over $40 billion, twice that of H&M. This had less to do with the material’s sweat-wicking properties than the way the pants somehow, almost magically, made everyone’s butts look really, really good.
As the company became more and more successful (the yoga pants generally started at $100), Chip also installed his ideas about personal transformation in Lululemon's culture. Salespeople weren’t clerks; they were “educators.” A greeter at the door of a boutique was a “director of first impressions.” Employees “manifested” goals in meetings; they “held each other accountable."
Chip left Lululemon in 2015, but before then he was serious about this stuff. One employee benefit was a completely free personal transformation seminar, conducted with hundreds of people present, that encouraged employees to share their deepest secrets in front of the group, before being encouraged to realize YOU are the cause of every problem in your life.
This is the institutional world that the two Lululemon employees in Bethesda were steeped in. One of them, Jayna Murray, believed so wholeheartedly in Lululemon’s mission that she was willing to work for a low salary even though she had multiple masters’ degrees. The other, Brittany Norwood, had most recently had a job tending to VIP clients like the Jonas Brothers at a fancy hotel. They were both gorgeous, upwardly mobile, intelligent, athletic women. They were the best version of 20-something American females; by rights they should not have ended up hurt in the back of an American retail store.
But there has always been something strange about athleisure, something almost menacing and violent. Author Jia Tolentino, who is currently co-hosting Campside’s White Lotus Official Podcast, put it this way in her book, Trick Mirror: “Athleisure, by nature, eroticizes capital. Much like stripper gear, athleisure frames the female body as a financial asset. Brutally expensive, with its thick disciplinary straps and taut peekaboo exposures, athleisure can be viewed as a sort of late-capitalist fetishwear: it is what you buy when you are compulsively gratified by the prospect of increasing your body’s performance on the market.”
Lululemon's focus on aspiration and perfection, their eroticized capitalism, ties in tightly to the reasons why the murder at Lululemon occurred. But who did it? For that, you’ll have to listen to our series to find out.
You can also read about another Infamous miniseries, The Truth About Ruby Franke. And you can hear producer Lily Houston Smith speak with Vanessa and Co-host Natalie Robehmed about recording more than 100 episodes of Infamous, a show that mixes high culture and low.
Thanks for reading. Subscribe now for updates on Infamous and all of Campside’s hit shows.
Vanessa