Although Lululemon operates in the same industry as Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, somehow Lululemon’s profit margins are by far the highest amongst its peers. With an average operating income margin of 20% over the last 5 years, it is 8% higher than Nike, 12% higher than Adidas, and an astonishing 20% higher than Under Armour, who struggles with an operating margin of literally 0%.
For Lululemon to command such high margins within the cut throat retail apparel industry, it has to be doing something different from the rest of the crowd. While some people may think Lululemon’s success is a result of its higher percentage of female customers since it is often believed that women have a higher propensity to spend on clothing than men, the true drivers behind Lululemon’s extraordinary profitability lie in its innovative business strategies and unique competitive advantages.
In this article, we will analyse how Lululemon is able to achieve unrivaled profit margins and tremendous success by creating, marketing and capturing value differently from the rest of the industry.
How Lululemon Creates Value
Within the activewear space, it is hard to find any company that charges higher prices than Lululemon. A pair of Lululemon female leggings starts at $88 and goes up to $168, whereas at Nike for example, female leggings can be found for just $48. A pair of male golf pants from Lululemon costs $148, while comparable styles from Nike are priced at just $75.
The reason Lululemon is able to charge such a large premium is due to a couple of factors.
Firstly, their products are widely known for their exceptional quality thanks to a combination of innovative fabrics and superior designs. Just ask anyone of your friends who owns a pair of Lululemon leggings, and chances are that they’ll tell you these leggings fit very well, are extremely comfortable to wear, and they look and feel the same even after years of washing. Not only that, but they are also extremely versatile – meaning they can be worn for not just workouts, but also as casual day to day wear and even for work.
Secondly, Lululemon has some of the best complementary services within the sportswear industry. For instance, they offer free hemming services at their stores for all pants and tops, and they also have a policy where they will replace or repair any product that doesn’t meet their quality and performance standards.
A third reason why Lululemon can charge such high prices, is because the demand for athleisure apparel, which is term used to describe athletic clothing that are both functional and fashionable, has exploded in recent years. Due to cultural shifts such as people exercising more regularly, an overall relaxation in dress code, and the rise of remote work that started during covid, the demand for comfortable yet stylish clothing has surged, and items like yoga pants and sport bras that used to be worn almost exclusively in the gym have now become common everyday staples that people wear daily on the streets.
As the company that is often credited with inventing yoga pants, Lululemon has been making this style of clothing for many years, and so in the minds of many consumers Lululemon is the embodiment of athleisure, and this association drives massive demand for their products and translates directly into strong pricing power.
Lululemon Thrives Despite Increasing Competition
What is particularly remarkable is how Lululemon has continuously thrived in an increasingly saturated athleisure market. This market has witnessed an influx of new entrants from all corners of the apparel industry. Established sportswear giants like Nike, Adidas and Puma have all pivoted from making specialized sports gear towards more casual and versatile sportswear. Fast fashion retailers like GAP, Uniqlo and Forever 21 have also ventured into athleisure with their own sportswear lines. Even luxury brands like Dior, Louis Vuitton and Chanel have entered this space.
Yet in spite of all these new players crowding into the same market, Lululemon has managed to maintain a steady operating margin of around 20% over the last decade. Moreover, among major sportswear brands, it has also experienced the largest growth in 2022 where it saw revenue growing by 30%, whilst the second highest is Puma at 24%, and Nike and Adidas only saw growth of around 5 and 6% respectively.
Though given the large pricing premiums Lululemon charges for their products, naturally there has been an increasingly large appetite for Lululemon dupes, which are products that closely resemble Lululemon’s offerings but at significantly lower price point. Social media platforms have been flooded with content that provide tips on finding the best Lululemon dupes, with the #lululemondupes hashtag on TikTok garnering more than 150 million views.
However, despite of a surge in Lululemon copycat brands, there are still tons of people who are willing to spend over $100 on Lululemon leggings even though they can find dupes for just $20 on Amazon. In fact, Lululemon’s customers’ loyalty to the brand is so strong that their customers are often described as a “cult following”.
Lululemon’s Unique Marketing Strategy
And while their exceptional product quality has been key to creating a strong brand, just as important is Lululemon’s unique marketing strategy. People often say great products sell themselves, but in reality, that’s hardly ever the case – even companies like Apple and Tesla that have arguably the best products in their field still rely on employing effective albeit different ways to market themselves and to connect with customers.
And in Lululemon’s case, they rely on a community-led go-to-market strategy that is rarely seen within the retail apparel industry.
Lululemon’s marketing strategy is drastically different from most major brands. Typically, these brands would splurge hundreds of millions of dollars on big name celebrity endorsements. For example, Nike has sponsored global icons like Michael Jordan, Tiger Woods and Rafael Nadal. Adidas has sponsored superstars like David Beckham, Beyonce and Lionel Messi. And Under Armour has sponsored high profile figures like Steph Curry, The Rock and Tom Brady.
In contrast, Lululemon opts for a completely different approach where they partner with largely unknown local fitness leaders instead, who Lululemon refers to as “brand ambassadors”. Brand ambassadors are often yoga teachers, local athletes, or social media influencers who can pull off the “sporty and healthy” image that Lululemon champions.
This type of grassroots approach to marketing offers two distinct advantages. Firstly, these ambassadors are highly authentic people and are much more relatable. Unlike big name celebrities whose lifestyles are often unimaginable to most customers, Lululemon’s brand ambassadors live much more ordinary lives. They present attainable images giving customers genuine hope that they could achieve similar fitness results by using Lululemon’s products.
Secondly, this strategy is also much cheaper. Aside from a small number of global brand ambassadors, most of Lululemon’s ambassadors are not paid any money, but are instead compensated with perks such as free Lululemon apparel, priority access to new products, and most importantly exposure to Lululemon’s customers. Since many of these ambassadors are yoga teachers and fitness instructors, when they host Lululemon events they get to meet new people who are interested in exercising and could one day become their customers at their own fitness studios. They also benefit from being featured on Lululemon’s social media and website, which generates additional awareness for them and this visibility helps them build their businesses.
In return, Lululemon get to have authentic local Key Opinion Leaders (KOLs) do all sorts of things for the company, such as posting social media content of themselves wearing Lululemon gear, host community fitness events like yoga classes, and assist in testing and providing feedback on new Lululemon products, all at virtually zero cost to the company.
As a result, Lululemon spends a smaller proportion of its revenue on advertising compared to other major sportswear brands. Over the last 3 years, Lululemon’s average advertising expenses was under 5% of revenue, whereas for Nike it’s 8%, Under Armour 11%, and Adidas 13%. This is a big part of the reason why Lululemon’s operating margins are so much higher than the others.
Lululemon’s Vibrant Community Strategy
But aside from being a cost effective way to market the brand, brand ambassadors play another important role for Lululemon – they are facilitators that bring people together to form a vibrant community centred around exercising, which Lululemon fondly refers to as “The Sweatlife”.
Brand ambassadors would often host free yoga and meditation classes at Lululemon’s stores, where attendees can then socialise with each other afterwards. Every week, many of Lululemon’s stores would push their products aside, roll out yoga mats and turn these spaces into yoga studios. So Lululemon’s stores aren’t merely real estate for retail, but they also serve as hubs that foster connections among customers via exercise.
This emphasis on community isn’t confined to small in-store events like yoga classes, but Lululemon also organizes larger outdoor events, which in 2022 included events such as the 10K runs in Atlanta and Houston, as well as the Summer Sweat Games held in China.
Through these extensive community-building initiatives, Lululemon instils within its customers a profound sense of belonging to “The Sweatlife” community, one that empowers them to lead healthier and more fulfilling lives. As a result, compared to other brands that rely on celebrity endorsements for marketing, Lululemon develops a considerably deeper relationship with its customers, one that feels less transactional and more emotional. Rather than simply selling a product, Lululemon sells a lifestyle.
And while this strategy is much harder to execute and scale, as it requires building relationships with a large number of local fitness leaders in each city, this deliberate strategy has been instrumental in cultivating the remarkable customer loyalty that Lululemon enjoys.
Lululemon Captures More Value with DTC Model
Lululemon’s distinctive go-to-market strategy has allowed the company to effectively communicate the value of its products and brand to customers. However, for any company to actually benefit from the value their businesses have created, they would need to be able to capture that value, and Lululemon does so brilliantly with a business model that is once again different from the rest of the industry’s.
To maximize the amount of value it captures, Lululemon operates a primarily DTC business model. Lululemon’s DTC segment makes up 90% of their total sales. This is nearly 3 times higher than other major brands like Nike, Adidas and Under Armour, who’s DTC segment made up only around 36% of all sales on average over the last 5 years.
For these companies, wholesale is their largest distribution channel, accounting for nearly 60% of all sales. The reason why a DTC model allows for higher value capturing, is because the wholesale model involves selling products at a discount to middleman retailers such as Dick’s Sporting Goods and Foot Locker, who then resell the products at a markup to the end consumers. In contrast, the DTC model eliminates these intermediaries and allows for direct sales to consumers at the markup price, which therefore results in the company keeping more of the pie to itself.
As a result of their DTC-oriented business model, Lululemon has enjoyed exceptional gross margins. With a gross margin of 56%, it is much higher than Nike’s 45%, Under Armour’s 47%, and Adidas’ 50%. Remarkably, Lululemon’s gross margin is on par with Google’s, one of the most successful SOFTWARE companies in history.
DTC Model Proves Challenging for Other Brands
Given the potential for higher margins with a DTC business model, it is unsurprising that other apparel brands have been shifting towards this model over the past decade. For instance, Nike unveiled its Consumer Direct Offense strategy in 2017, leading to the company’s exit from roughly half of its retail partnerships four years later. Similarly, Adidas announced a transition to a “DTC-led business model” in 2021, aiming for DTC to represent 50% of all sales by 2025.
And with the growth of e-commerce, these companies have been largely successful in growing their DTC segments, which have accounted for an increasingly large portion of total sales as a result.
However, there has been an interesting twist in recent developments. Instead of continuing to focus on DTC growth, many of these companies have started to revert back to wholesale, the model they were originally trying to pivot away from.
For example, in 2023 Nike started quietly reintroducing more wholesale partnerships, likely in an effort to increase sales volume and thus reduce the inventory levels that had built up over the past few years. Adidas is also rethinking their bet on DTC as their DTC segment continues to decline after cutting ties with Kanye West, who’s Yeezy business used to account for 7% ($1.7bn) of Adidas’ total revenue (in 2021). Columbia Sportswear is another brand that is shifting back to wholesale, as evident in their recent announcement to “double down” on wholesale growth.
So despite of DTC’s potential to boost profit margins, brands that have traditionally relied on wholesale are finding it challenging to fully transition to a DTC-oriented model, even in the midst of the e-commerce boom.
Lululemon Sticks with DTC Model
Unlike many other brands that only saw their DTC segment grow as a result of e-commerce, Lululemon on the otherhand has always maintained a predominantly DTC business model throughout its history, even before the company ventured into e-commerce.
Lululemon’s DTC segment has consistently made up over 90% of total sales every year since 2008, which is as far back as their publicly available data goes. Long before the e-commerce era, while other sportswear brands were still selling mostly through wholesalers, Lululemon was already selling DTC exclusively through its own physical retail stores.
By doing so, Lululemon effectively controlled the entire supply chain where they designed, produced and sold their own products directly to consumers, a strategy known as “vertical retail”, which Lululemon’s founder Chip Wilson claims is a strategy they’ve pioneered and that Apple & Tesla had copied from them.
While whether Apple and Tesla actually copied Lululemon’s vertical retail strategy remains very much debatable, what IS for certain though is that Lululemon was one of the earliest major apparel brands to go direct to consumers, and a key factor in their success with this business model is their ability to strike the right balance between offline and online distribution channels.
Lululemon’s Omnichannel Approach
In recent years, we have seen many start-ups attempt to disrupt all sorts of markets with a seemingly simple online DTC business model. Whilst there have been a few success stories with companies like Allbirds and Everlane, the number of start-ups that ended up failing is too many to count.
Factors that have led to their demise include high customer acquisition costs driven by a surge of online ad prices, as well as generous return policies that have become the industry standard worldwide. A common scenario experienced by most of these failed start-ups involves spending a fortune on ads to convert online traffic into customers, only for those customers to then return the product due to sizing issues or other reasons, making it incredibly difficult to turn a profit.
However, this is less of an issue for Lululemon thanks to its extensive network of company-owned physical retail stores that they’ve built up over the years. With physical stores, not only can customers try on the products first before purchasing, which reduces the likelihood of them returning the products later, but they can also become better educated about the products with salespeople there to answer any questions they have.
Physical stores are therefore a critical component of Lululemon’s DTC strategy, and Lululemon has built just enough physical stores so that customers can familiarize themselves with the products and then make purchases off e-commerce effectively.
This is why many brands that used to sell exclusively online are now opening physical stores as well. However, this model does come with its own challenges, such as the high capital requirement for store leases and finding the right personnel to manage and operate the stores.
Nonetheless, Lululemon’s successful execution of a DTC-oriented business model, a strategy that has proven to be challenging for both small and large companies to replicate, is one of the key reasons behind their exceptional profit margins.
Lululemon’s Innovations Fuel Growth
The unique ways in which Lululemon creates, markets and captures value has resulted in tremendous growth for the company. In 2019 the company announced a growth initiative called “Power of Three”, which set out an ambitious target to double men’s revenues, double digital revenues and quadruple international revenues within 5 years by 2023, to which the company completed a year ahead of schedule.
In fact, their growth has been so strong that the company even announced a “Power of Three x2” plan in 2022, where they aim to repeat their performance of doubling men’s revenue, doubling digital revenues and quadrupling international revenues AGAIN over the next 5 years.
Lululemon Faces New Challenges
However, the business world is never without challenges and uncertainties, and some of Lululemon’s recent strategic moves have raised questions from critics. For instance, their poor acquisition of Mirror, the at-home workout hardware company, made at the peak of the at-home fitness boom during covid, has resulted in the company writing off nearly the entirety of its $500 million acquisition. Their recent partnership with Peloton to offer digital classes is part of an attempt to pivot the failed hardware business into a new software business called Lululemon Studio. But with at-home fitness looking like a thing of the past, the success of this venture doesn’t look too promising.
Additionally, in 2022 Lululemon has also entered into new sports categories like golf, tennis, and hiking, and they even expanded into the competitive footwear market, placing them in direct competition with Nike again, only this time on Nike’s home turf. Some critics are questioning whether these moves are overextending the company, with the concern that Lululemon might turn into a jack of all trades, but a master of none.
Yet regardless of the answer, these new ventures only represent a small portion of the company’s overall business. The fact that remains is that Lululemon’s core business is still extremely robust thanks to their competitive advantages that were borne out of previous innovations.
For example, their innovations in products has given them seemingly unmatched product quality and made them the embodiment of athleisure. Their innovations in marketing has resulted in a cost effective way of building up a strong community of loyal customers who continue to buy their expensive products despite of a huge range of cheaper alternatives, and their innovations in business model by going direct to consumer when everyone else still relied on wholesale has enabled them to capture additional value.
Together, these innovations have not only helped Lululemon retain profit margins, but they have also fueled the company’s continuous rapid growth and market share expansion, placing them in a position where they are still very much ahead of its time… at least for now.