Little Black Stretchy Pants

by Chip Wilson

  As far as the focus groups went, we invited ten groups of ten women. Their ages ranged between twenty and forty. The focus groups took place over a couple of months at an apartment I’d recently moved into, about a block from Kitsilano Beach.

  “The focus groups were fun,” Amanda Dunsmoor would later recall. “We would just gather around Chip’s kitchen table. Most of the people he knew from the community, some were yoga instructors. I remember there was an artist there, reworking a logo. The focus groups helped me understand what people were wanting in yoga wear, and that was essential for me because I had never done yoga. I would not have been able to do it if not for their feedback.”

  It didn’t take long for us to create an effective way of running our focus groups, despite having no real training. Our questions included asking the participants what they thought of twenty possible names, twenty possible logos, and their favourite running shoe brand.

  We also asked about vitamin usage, emerging trends in athletics, and whether our participants had ever visited a massage therapist, homeopath, or chiropractor. We even asked about their favourite music and what could be improved about women’s change rooms and the entire shopping experience.

  Most importantly, we asked each person in our focus groups to bring one piece of athletic clothing they loved or wanted improved.

  One of our first designers, Shannon Gray, says, “The focus groups were so important to the evolution of lulu’s product design and became part of the design process for many years. We asked people to bring their favourite pieces of athletic clothing. We were able to learn from all types of athletes what they loved and what they felt was missing in the market. We were able to learn what companies were doing it better than us and how we could leapfrog what they were doing.”

  We started to see trends. We learned that asking open questions about a wide variety of topics encouraged the participants to engage in conversation with one another, rather than just replying to us. This, we found, was what got us the interesting and useful information.

  Usually, during each group, I would have three “aha” moments. But I also found this was the same for the participants. One woman would say something that would cause the rest of them to suddenly get animated and think of the topic or question in a whole new way. When this spontaneous conversation happened, we would sit back, listen carefully, and take notes.

  Something I’d learned through personal development was that you can’t create the future without first clearing up the past, so we made a point of having the participants talk about what didn’t work for them in the athletic clothing or the retail experience that were available. Once this clearing was finished, and the participants got any background issues out of the way, we could move into questions to solve the unknown future.

  We wanted to know what our participants thought of the future of athletics, and what athletic apparel needed to perform to provide for changes. For instance, snowboarding had gone from hard-boot, ski-racing clothing, to free-ride, to pipe-riding, to powder—each stage in this evolution requiring different apparel. Likewise, as it grew in popularity, yoga morphed from one version to the next. Power, Bikram, flow, sports yoga, meditative yoga etc.

  The most satisfying part of the focus group experience was watching people’s reactions as they touched our fabric for the first time. No one had created a technical fabric that felt like cotton before. I already thought this material was special (although it had yet to be perfected), but the feeling of seeing someone’s eyes open wide as they touched it demonstrated that we’d made something unlike anything that had come before.

  I believed in my gut this pant innovation would affect people’s behaviour and the way they lived their lives. Once our focus group participants felt the fabric with their hands, they could hardly wait to put it on and feel it against their bodies.

  The people in these focus groups could see the possibility of performing without all the hang-ups of transparency and fabric turning shiny when it stretched. But it went beyond that: what I really saw was the possibility of customers using our clothing not just for yoga but to the studio, or gym, and back. Solving the camel-toe problem was probably the key invention. Without that solve, the pants couldn’t be worn on the street. I knew Super Girls valued time above all else. If they could go to a yoga class and then to coffee and then shopping without needing to change between activities, I could save them forty-five minutes a day.

  Westbeach succeeded in surf, skate, and snowboarding because the athletic look of those sports transferred out onto the street. I failed at street clothing for triathlon, beach volleyball, and mountain biking because they did not make that transition. I knew the real success of lululemon would be in the ability of the apparel to perform twenty-four hours a day, in several settings, if needed.

  Voting

  At the end of every focus group, I came away with three or four improvements I’d never even considered. The groups talked about the length of pants and the psychology of sizing. Because of taking the time and effort to run these groups, I not only came away with what has since become an iconic name and logo, I also avoided countless mistakes that would have proved costly, or even, disastrous.

  I took twenty names—including Athletically Hip and lululemon—to the focus groups. I was almost certain the participants would go for Athletically Hip, but to my surprise the overwhelming favourite was lululemon.

  Also, to my surprise, the participants selected the subtle, stylized letter A, intended for Athletically Hip, as the best logo.

  To this day, I answer the, “Where did the name come from?” question daily.

  Long Pants

  In 1996, I was selling snowboard boots at Westbeach, and in the first week, all the size thirteen to fifteen boots sold out. Further back, in 1973, when I was a six-foot three teenager, I was five inches taller than almost everyone I knew. By 1997, my height felt normal. The population was getting taller.

  I’d never been able to find pants of a decent length for me, especially with shrinkage after a wash. So here was another issue I could solve. As I had spent considerable time in Japan, I noticed most stores had sewing machines for on-site tailoring. The Japanese body is generally long in the torso but short in the arms and legs. For Japanese retail stores to sell American goods, every pant needed to be hemmed on the spot.

  I loved this idea and wanted to incorporate it into the very early stages of lululemon. As I saw it, with our own stores, we could build the cost of hemming into the product and provide a pre-shrunk pant that was the perfect length for tall women. I decided I was committed to making perfect pants for tall girls.

  Styling and Design

  On my trips to Europe in the seventies, something that stood out to me was how people dressed—specifically, how well they dressed. The design lines in their clothing created an illusion that their bodies were more fit than they were. I could see how much thought Europeans put into styling. It differed greatly from what I’d seen in New York fashion magazines or non-existent fashion on the West Coast. There was nothing functional about European fashion—it just looked really good.

  I would think about how to bring these two dichotomies (European style and West Coast function) together into something that had never existed before. That was the birth of the idea that eventually became athleisurewear, and its inception can be largely credited to my seeing the world at a young age.

  Until lululemon, fashion dictated that either the top or the bottom was tight, but not both. Incorporating stretch yarns made fabrics more form-fitting, and for the first time in history, women wore a tight top and a tight, low-rise bottom. Because of hot yoga rooms, a crop top was a functional necessity and the combination of all three created a look no one in fashion would have ever thought possible.

  My success at Westbeach and then at lululemon was due to honing a perfect combination of Euro-style and West Coast function, but function always came first.

  Accentuating what made people feel confident—wider sho
ulders, smaller waists, slimmer hips—meant Guests would feel good and look good in our clothing. I realized that the shape of our logo provided a perfect contour to enhance the natural shape of a woman’s body. I designed the lululemon logo right into tops and hoodies. This was a critical shift in brand design for us because we could subtly show our logo without it reading as such.

  I wanted the same for pants. There was a huge debate about where to set the seam lines on pants. Women told me they preferred side seams because when they looked in the mirror, side seams slimmed their hips. I wanted to move the side seams to the back to frame the bum and make the bum appear smaller.

  I persisted because I believed that eventually, men would tell women the pants looked great without really understanding why. It was like what I’d observed in the nineties surf industry; girls wanted their boyfriends to wear the Australian-inspired surf shorts without realizing it was the cut that made them so flattering on their boyfriends’ athletic bodies. The same occurs when men wear tighter jeans.

  I wanted beauty to be where the visible meets the invisible. More than anything, I wanted lululemon to stand for great quality, and I wanted our Guests to be proud to wear it.

  That’s how lululemon athletica came to be.

  ____________________

  3 Eliyahu Goldratt, The Goal (North River Press, 1984.)

  4 Stephen Covey, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People (Free Press, 1989).

  5 Brian Tracy, The Psychology of Achievement (Simon & Schuster, 1989).

  6 Jim Collins, Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap…and Others Don’t (Random House Business, 2001)

  7 Ibid., 95

  8 Ibid., 95

  9 Miller, Claire Cain. “The Divorce Surge Is Over, but the Myth Lives On.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 2 Dec. 2014, www.nytimes.com/2014/12/02/upshot/the-divorce-surge-is-over-but-the-myth-lives-on.html.

  10 Roni Caryn Rabin, “Birth Control Pills Still Linked to Breast Cancer, Study Finds.” The New York Times, The New York Times, 6 December 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/12/06/health/birth-control-breast-cancer-hormones.html (Accessed on August 16, 2018).

  Chapter 12:

  lululemon Takes Shape

  An Elevated Location

  It was exhilarating to create something from nothing, to put into place the early blocks of the business, to put together that totally original puzzle. Although I listened to the input of others, I knew what I heard was just more of the same. Lululemon athletica was not born to play by the normal rules of retail, because we didn’t know the rules in the first place. The time had come to put a lifetime of failures and experiences together. To do that, I’d need a concept store.

  There was nowhere I wanted to be other than West 4th Avenue in Kitsilano, just up from the beach, not far from where Westbeach’s Vancouver store had been located. I wanted the newly-named lululemon to be associated with Kitsilano and the people who lived there. It seemed inhabiting a location on West 4th would be important, perhaps vital, to our success. Lululemon was inspired largely by university graduates drawn to this unique, athletic, semi-hippie-like part of the city.

  I didn’t have enough money or product to rent a regular store location, so I found a space behind an inconspicuous door and up a drab-looking flight of stairs, instead of an inviting street-level storefront.

  I decided there had to be a way to use this central yet cloistered location to my advantage. This required maximizing large floor space and strategically displaying products, so people would enjoy the experience and stay as long, or as little, as they wanted.

  The store, I thought, could be made into a sort of interactive design laboratory. We built a sewing lab right there. I felt the process of designs being conceived on the spot would be part of the brand and would create word-of-mouth excitement about what we were doing.

  As Amanda recalls: “We had our office area in one corner and racks of clothing set up on the other side. It created a fantastic design environment because I could interact with customers and find out directly from them what worked and what didn’t. I would take their feedback, and I would incorporate it into the next cut or the next design. Even though many people doubted our upstairs location, I loved the vibe we had in that store. It was so barebones that it had this very cool boutique feeling.”

  As the store got going, we dedicated a third of the space to design, and a third to stocking inventory. The remaining third was the clothing display area. It was clear I couldn’t fill our display area with lululemon’s six to eight styles, so I brought in other brands to plump up the inventory, ensure our customers had a reason to come up the stairs and to research competitors’ pricing. I brought in Champion, Adidas, Fila, Gaia, Calvin Klein Underwear, Cannondale cycling gear, and even some of the existing dancewear apparel that I’d set out to improve upon. I bought t-shirts from American Apparel and changed the neck labels to say “lululemon” and printed reflective graphics on the front.

  Shannon Gray was responsible for ordering and meeting with the sales reps from these other brands. From observing the items to which customers were attracted, she was able to determine if the top-selling products were about fit, function, fabric, or price. She used this background information to assist in designing new lululemon styles.

  I knew building word-of-mouth about lululemon quality would take time. Meanwhile, I wanted our space to be as efficient as possible. We painted the space white and put down the cheapest carpeting I could find because the linoleum floor was ugly. Even though it wasn’t a storefront at street-level, it was still very memorable. The front windows had an amazing view of the mountains, and the whole space had innately good energy.

  One day, my yellow lab, Bagels, tripped and spilled essential oils over a part of the rug. This turned out to be a stroke of good fortune: the amazing smell lasted for eighteen months, and customers loved the aroma.

  Good energy, the tunes of Al Green, and a view of the mountains meant I didn’t have to sink money into too many adornments. Instead of buying racks, I put screws in the ceiling beams from which I hung wood doweling with rope. These were used to display our clothes. Little tricks like this helped me to outfit the first ever lululemon store for less than $4,000.

  A Functional Design

  During our focus groups, women expressed that the cost of their time was critical. I thought this through and calculated how long it took a customer to find a garment in a store. I then compared that to what that customer would have earned at work had they not gone shopping. This information drove the store to be set up for function rather than by colour-ways or outfits (as is typically done in fashion stores). Our pant wall allowed our busy Guest to visually, and expeditiously locate the perfect garment for her athletic function, in her size, and in her desired colour.

  The thought of the maximizing the working woman’s time ultimately drove the functional store design. I was fanatical about creating the right combination of store size, store location, number of Educators on the floor, number of change rooms, number of cash desks, and the price/quality of the clothing.

  It was a worthwhile exercise. Over time, lululemon stores would yield the third highest sales-per-square-foot in the world… behind only Apple and Tiffany.

  Logoing

  When I was young, I wanted t-shirts with big logos. I wanted other people to understand who I was, and because I was inarticulate and insecure, the logos talked for me. When I wanted to meet a girl, I hoped the logo on my shirt would tell the girl I was cool. With surf-skate-and-snowboard, the target market was fourteen- to eighteen-year-old boys, so the logos were large, necessary, and driven by sponsorship. A company would pay an athlete to wear their branded apparel, which would inspire young boys to buy that apparel.

  As I grew older, became confident, and stopped growing, I could afford better quality clothing that lasted longer, so I no longer needed the big logo. I didn’t want disposable t-shirts, and I didn’t want my apparel to be dominated by a logo. I wanted my clothin
g brand to match the quality of person I aspired to be.

  I always believed a well-educated, marketing-savvy consumer could easily see through the purchased loyalty of sponsorship. A more sophisticated consumer was looking for a product that had better quality and a smaller logo. The size of the lululemon logo was one inch in the first year. We shrunk it to half-an-inch the second year and placed in on the backs of garments. We made the logo reflective, so it would be functional.

  Educators

  Back when Westbeach had become popular, competitors had set up around us, making Kitsilano one of the most concentrated areas for sports apparel retail in the world. I knew I did not want customers to enter lululemon and expect to get the same treatment that they would get elsewhere, where a salesperson approaches them, suggests such-and-such would look good on them, that this item is discounted, or that clearance apparel is in the back.

  One of lululemon’s very earliest Operating Principles was never to tell a customer something looked good on them. We assumed our intelligent customer did not need to be talked down to. Talking fashion used up our customers’ time; it was fake and added nothing to the experience.

  My next step was developing a staff training system for how best to deliver a technical product. I wanted to rename every component within our unique business philosophy. I didn’t want to call staff “salespeople” because I hated the connotation of one person attempting to fool another.

  While making snowboard jackets, I had wanted to insert technology not visible to the customer. Salespeople and hang-tags at a wholesale sports store frustrated me because neither could explain the superior hidden value of technology-enhanced apparel. On the other hand, in my Westbeach retail stores, I could describe hidden technology to customers, which, in turn, meant there was no problem getting top price. I had to have my own stores and educate the customer.