When it comes to international sports brands, most people first think of Nike, Adidas, Puma, you name it. However, in recent years, Lululemon, a yoga sports brand, has been expanding its influence among urban white-collar female consumers and even won many people’s hearts. Lululemon has become the hottest sportswear brand in the world and also became the so expensive leggings, which is totally different from wholesale seamless leggings manufacturers.
What is lululemon?
Lululemon is a Canadian brand of yoga apparel that has been around since the late 1990s. Lululemon started out as a small shop next to a yoga studio, but over the past decade, Lululemon has leveraged its expertise in vertical retail and vertical social operations to grow into a renowned yoga apparel brand with a worldwide following.
How popular lululemon are?
Sales are the most telling, and Lululemon’s performance in the first half of this year has been remarkable amid the global coronavirus epidemic that has chilled sportswear brands in recent years.
In the first quarter of this year, the company’s total revenue exceeded $1.2 billion, up 88% from a year earlier. In the second quarter, Lululemon’s sales and profits continued to grow faster than expected, giving it more attention. What’s the magic of Lululemon?
Why is lululemon so popular?
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Connecting communities and consumers
As Lululemon’s popularity grew, more and more people began to study how Lululemon quickly
built its global influence from a niche brand, the use of connecting communities and consumers are the most central part.
Early on, Lululemon’s focus on women’s yoga wear and its store’s dual functions as a yoga experience and apparel retailer were an early sign that Lululemon was different from other regular sports brands.
Since then, the brand has almost been following its early development ideas. It does not set up a marketing Department, or run advertisements or seek celebrity endorsements. Instead, it chooses to build a closed-loop of community opinions mode with course experience and retail store experience, and gradually develops and grows through this mode.
The forward-looking concept of marketing and community marketing is not outdated now. The cultivation of community and the construction of cultural identity have helped Lululemon gain a very solid “mass base”, which is the key to Lululemon’s success.
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How does lululemon make that happen?
On the one hand, the brand chooses to build a key group by maintaining professional groups such as yoga teachers, fitness instructors, and core shop assistants to make them become opinion leaders. By forming such a team of Opinion leaders, “brand ambassadors” that can influence more people are formed. The benefits are clear, cost-effective, and word-of-mouth.
Currently, Lululemon builds its KOL team through more than 1,000 store ambassadors, yoga ambassadors, and elite athletes ambassadors in its stores around the world. These people are both brand users and brand spokespeople, and they also provide consumer feedback to the brand.
Lululemon, on the other hand, is trying to get customers involved by putting KOL’s influence into its in-store experience shops, where it offers yoga, Pilates, and other professional exercise classes.
In addition, the brand also builds an online platform through social media communities and launch relevant course activities and introductions on the platform.
It can be seen that the core of Lululemon’s community operation mode is stored, and the core driving force is KOL. Each store of Lululemon can achieve a deep connection with consumers, thus gradually influencing more consumers and generating more sales performance.
That’s why is lululemon so popular.