Lululemon’s Success and Lessons
Lululemon was founded by Chip Wilson in 1998. It was built on providing both quality and fashionable yoga attire to active women. They have primarily focused on developing the customer experience segment of the RVP formula providing both care and entertainment to their shoppers including services such as free yoga classes and free hemming. Since the opening of its first store November 2000 in Kitsilano Vancouver BC, Lululemon has quickly expanded and become one of the most dominate players in the yoga appeal industry holding a market value in excess of 3 billion dollars.
2010 provided to be a record year for Lululemon in many areas. The fourth quarter sales jumped 53% from the fourth quarter of 2009. Per store sales also rose 30% leading to a record high average of $1726 sales per square foot.
Lululemon’s success in the past year may be contributed to lessons that they learned from the Recession. CFO John Currie told Bloomberg "Thank God for the recession. It forced us to slow down and actually approach our real-estate strategy in a disciplined way." Lululemon carless approach to expansion caused high cost little demand stores to be built. The 35 stores that were opened throughout the United States in 2008 were the least productive in the company’s history after poor market research was done. Today Lululemon focuses on individual neighborhoods when deciding on a new store location using factors such as income level to better reach their target customers of sophisticated and educated women. Currie reports, "At this point, we have maps that say, not only do we want to be in Kansas City or Minneapolis, but we know what neighborhoods we want to be in." LuLulemon plans on expanding from 120 store to 300 stores in the United States possibly opening up as many as 25 new ones in 2011 using their new approach to real-estate.
http://investor.lululemon.com/
http://www.bnet.com/blog/retail-stores/what-lululemon-learned-from-the-recession/1478
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-20/lululemon-yoga-wear-store-expansion-disciplined-after-recession-lesson.html
2010 provided to be a record year for Lululemon in many areas. The fourth quarter sales jumped 53% from the fourth quarter of 2009. Per store sales also rose 30% leading to a record high average of $1726 sales per square foot.
Lululemon’s success in the past year may be contributed to lessons that they learned from the Recession. CFO John Currie told Bloomberg "Thank God for the recession. It forced us to slow down and actually approach our real-estate strategy in a disciplined way." Lululemon carless approach to expansion caused high cost little demand stores to be built. The 35 stores that were opened throughout the United States in 2008 were the least productive in the company’s history after poor market research was done. Today Lululemon focuses on individual neighborhoods when deciding on a new store location using factors such as income level to better reach their target customers of sophisticated and educated women. Currie reports, "At this point, we have maps that say, not only do we want to be in Kansas City or Minneapolis, but we know what neighborhoods we want to be in." LuLulemon plans on expanding from 120 store to 300 stores in the United States possibly opening up as many as 25 new ones in 2011 using their new approach to real-estate.
http://investor.lululemon.com/
http://www.bnet.com/blog/retail-stores/what-lululemon-learned-from-the-recession/1478
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-20/lululemon-yoga-wear-store-expansion-disciplined-after-recession-lesson.html
posted by Melissa at
7:44 PM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home