Inside the cult of Lululemon
Yoga mat maker sends employees to personal development workshops to ‘work on the self first’,
How a brand that rarely advertises inspires so much devotion,
‘Sweat once a day” is printed on every Lululemon shopping bag. It’s part of the company’s manifesto.
It’s also tattooed on the forearm of at least one female participant of last weekend’s SeaWheeze half marathon.
The corporation, which started with stretchy yoga wear and branched out later into technical running gear and other sportswear made of trademarked luon fabric, launched the race in 2012 with 7,500 participants.
This year, 10,014 luonclad runners raced the 21-kilometre route around downtown and Vancouver’s seawall: the event was capped at 10,000, but 14 extra were allowed to represent 14 years of Lululemon in Vancouver.
More than 70 per cent of the runners were from outside Vancouver, including a team of 125 runners from Austin, Texas.
Someone proposed at the finish line — and she said yes. More than 2,000 people showed up for a sunset yoga class at Kits Beach the night before the race. Feverish crowds waited for hours to buy official SeaWheeze race gear from a pop-up store in the Convention Centre.
How does a company, founded by Chip Wilson in 1998 with one store on 4th Avenue, inspire such devotion to a brand that rarely advertises, and identifies itself with only small, subtle logos? (The logo is not an omega from the Greek alphabet, but rather a stylized letter A from “athletically hip,” a brand name discarded early on.)
Though the brand is highly visible in Vancouver, company representatives give few interviews and local media are rarely invited inside the Cornwall Avenue headquarters. As part of the SeaWheeze publicity tour, Lululemon executives pulled back the luon curtain to discuss how the company became such an international force with 225 stores in Canada, the U.S., Australia and New Zealand, and other showrooms in Europe and Asia.
“The brand was built through word of mouth and community. We’re becoming a global brand but we’re very much local in the communities in which we operate,” said Laura Klauberg, vice-president of global brand and community. Company representatives encourage local yoga instructors and athletes to become brand “ambassadors” to promote sales and product knowledge. Billboards are few and far between, and television advertising is non-existent. Print ads appear only in Yoga Journal.
Although menswear is growing in focus, the target market remains women — from teens to those in their mid-60s — who are interested in staying healthy and fit.
Lululemon is designed with specific, hypothetical customers in mind: Ocean and her husband Duke.
Ocean is someone who is “super athletic, who is probably in (her) early 30s, who practices yoga, who probably is a runner, very successful in her career. There’s a very specific muse we create our product around,” Klauberg said.
Klauberg pointed to the shopping bags printed with aphorisms like, “Have you woken up two days in a row uninspired? Change your life!”
“That is super inspirational to people. It inspires the way they live their life,” she said. “It’s about being healthy and living a great life.
“It’s the clothes, but it’s more than the clothes. It’s a lifestyle brand and the clothes are the catalyst to changing people’s lives.”
The cult-brand status not only drives sales — Lululemon’s revenue has grown to $1.37 billion in 2012 from $40.7 million in 2004 — but also draws devotees to the retail stores and head office.
“My kids are always teasing me. They like to say to me I drank the Kool-Aid. And I say maybe I drank it, but it’s such good Kool-Aid. Who doesn’t want to live their best life and be so happy to go to work?” Klauberg said.”