The ‘Shameless’ Dupe Challenging Lululemon’s Sustainable Image

In London’s tony Marylebone neighborhood over the past two days, many passersby couldn’t help but do a double-take. The crisp storefront had all the trappings of a familiar activewear giant: minimalist decor, cross-legged mannequins, coordinating tank-and-legging sets, even a yoga class. But the motto on the glass—“Violating copyright, not the planet”—would have given them pause. As would the name on the lintel: Mumumelon.

It may sound like an obvious send-up of Lululemon, but Mumumelon is playing for more than laughs. Launched Thursday on the heels of April Fool’s, the “deliberate, shameless dupe” has a deadly serious aim: to expose the gap between the yoga pants purveyor’s climate rhetoric and coal-powered supply chain—and to spur a shift from fossil fuels to renewable energy.

Lululemon’s greenhouse gas emissions have climbed every year, nearly doubling between 2020 and 2024 to more than 1.69 million metric tons, said Ruth MacGilp, fashion campaign manager at the environmental watchdog Action Speaks Louder. Roughly 99 percent of those emissions, she added, come from the brand’s supply chain, where many factories still rely on coal and other fossil fuels. This comes despite multiple sustainability pledges, including one to phase out on-site coal in manufacturing by 2030.

Both Mumumelon and the short-lived pop-up are the brainchild of Serious People, a so-called “creative climate studio” that’s built a reputation for taking the mickey out of agencies and financial institutions to pressure them into dropping their fossil fuel clients. 

It skewered Ogilvy for working with BP and the American Petroleum Institute by creating Ogilvyland, a fictional fossil fuel-themed funfair with rides like Coal Mine Mountain, Rising River Rapids and Woody’s Woodland Fire Rescue. To “annoy fossil fuel financiers,” Serious People made “Asset Manager Quest,” a game that spoofed Abrdn’s heavy fossil fuel investments. For Edelman, it rolled out Oilwell, a satirical meditation app claiming to help users “embrace climate chaos” through exercises such as  “Smog Breathing,” “Drought Meditation” and “Lifeless Rock Visualization.”

It’s through these projects that Oli Frost, Serious People’s co-founder and creative director, can tout a litany of titles: keeper of the flame at Ogilvyland, writer and composer for “Asset Manager Quest,” spiritual lead and mind manager at Oilwell and, now, chief counterfeit officer at Mumumelon.

“Lululemon sells you wellness and harmony in yoga pants, and then burns coal to make them,” Frost quipped. “We might have launched a fake brand, but they’re the ones faking it.”

Lululemon did not respond to a request for comment, though it has said in the past that it remains committed to its decarbonization plan, including making “tangible investments” to meet its 2030 climate goals “on the path” to being a net-zero company by 2050.

“We recognize that achieving net zero will be challenging and requires innovation within the apparel sector, cross-industry collaboration, and policies that incentivize and scale new technologies. In short, we cannot meet a net-zero ambition on our own,” it wrote in its 2025 impact report. “Our long-term strategy will define where we can innovate (e.g., material innovations, textile-to-textile recycling), and where we need to collaborate or advocate for policy support (e.g., accessibility of renewable electricity).”

Mumumelon marked Action Speaks Louder’s first foray into parody. The group’s engagement with Lululemon had hit a wall, MacGilp said. She and her colleagues felt they needed to escalate matters, including using satire to “show them what’s possible.” Mumumelon, she added, was also “just a really funny word,” one that doubled as a phonetic jab at a name Lululemon founder Chip Wilson once admitted he chose because he found it “funny” to watch Japanese speakers struggle with the letter “L.”

The 40-or-so pieces on display at Paddington St. were more than convincing stand-ins for Lululemon gear. While not for sale—they will go to influencers and staff—every item was produced by British brand Community Clothing and a Pakistani supplier using wind and solar power. Leaning into the bit—and, in so doing, admitting its imperfections—Mumumelon drafted a plan on mumumelon.co to fully electrify its supply chain by 2040, since most textile energy consumption comes not from electricity but from heat generated by burning fossil fuels for hot water and steam.

The message from Action Speaks Louder and Serious People is a pointed one: If a dupe can do this, why can’t Lululemon with $11 billion in 2025 revenue? The athletic-wear maker has even backslid on earlier commitments, MacGilp said, including removing time-bound renewable electricity targets for its supply chain from its corporate website and scrapping a 2025 goal to halve single-use plastic. Lululemon should instead support suppliers switching to wind and solar, finance electrification solutions like industrial heat pumps, invest in the communities making its clothes and publish a “real” climate transition plan grounded in science rather than what she called “vague ambitions.”

“What we’ve seen the last couple of years is actually less disclosure from them,” MacGilp said. “You can no longer see their previous impact reports on their website anymore. They’ve taken down some of their targets as of last year. So what we want to see is a public-facing commitment that would send a really strong market signal that they’re still committed to their science-based targets.”

This isn’t the first time Lululemon has been lampooned. In 2022, environmental nonprofit—and fellow Canadian—Stand.earth trolled the debut of the brand’s first running shoe, the Blissfeel, with a farcical yoga activation outside one of its stores in Vancouver’s Kitsilano neighborhood—complete with group stretching exercises and sneakers on pedestals brimming with fake coal.

Nor is it the only fashion company to fall victim to pranksters: A year later, activist group The Yes Men worked with the labor rights consortium Clean Clothes Campaign to launch “Realitywear”—a line of distressed clothing “baked-in” with blood, sweat and tears—at Berlin Fashion Week. The stunt announced a fictional Cambodian co-CEO, Vay Ya Nak Phoan—meant to work alongside actual CEO, Bjørn Gulden—to “highlight Adidas’s hypocrisy” over reports of wage theft and other labor rights violations. The hoax was so convincing that some media outlets initially reported it as genuine, prompting Adidas to hurriedly issue a clarification.

This wasn’t a protest in the “traditional sense,” Ilana Winterstein, then-urgent appeals campaigner at Clean Clothes Campaign, said at the time. Instead, it was a “vision” of an “alternate reality” where a multi-billion-dollar business prioritized workers’ lives over profits. The activists claimed Adidas owed $11.7 million in back wages to over 30,000 Cambodian workers whose pay was withheld during the Covid-19 pandemic. “Phoan’s” first act in office was to sign the Pay Your Workers agreement—an actual initiative by Clean Clothes Campaign and others urging brands to fully compensate workers, protect their right to freedom of association and negotiate a severance guarantee fund.

With Mumumelon, Serious People “don’t set out to be funny,” Frost said, but to “point out the distance between a company’s ‘commitment to sustainability’ and their actions.”

“The gap is inadvertent comedy gold 70 percent of the time,” he added.

Creative tactics pack more emotional punch than press releases, MacGilp said. Brands are used to reports and likely just as numb to petitions. It’s also a challenge to draw media and social media attention to the “same old messages in the same old way,” she said. Humor, on the other hand, always engages people.

“Ultimately, with all campaigning, you’re trying to get the attention of decision makers—those with the power to make the ask happen,” MacGilp said. “Sustainability teams have somewhat limited power, so with this tactic in particular, we’re just trying to make some noise to get the attention of the executives. It needs to go up the chain.”

The campaign has also captured sizeable consumer attention, even if many pop-up interactions didn’t start as planned. A few people misread the name as Mamamelon, assuming it was a new Lululemon sub-brand for moms. Several tourists wanted to buy things. A man wearing head-to-toe Lululemon, a branded shopping bag in hand, also wandered in. (Stunned, he wondered aloud if he should return everything he just bought.)

“But once we gave them the basic idea of why we were here, explaining that we were making a point about Lululemon’s climate impact, I’d say the majority really got it,” MacGilp said. “I think even if people aren’t adept in any kind of sustainability, they understand that big brands are ripping them off and making claims that can’t be backed up. And they know that fashion is bad for the planet, even if they don’t know the specifics.”