Why Activewear Consumers Are Looking Beyond Lululemon

**Sheena Butler-Young** (0:08)
Hello, and welcome to The Debrief from The Business of Fashion, where each week we delve into our most popular BoF professional stories with the correspondents who created them. I'm senior correspondent, Sheena Butler-Young.
For the last decade or so, if you were a certain kind of woman, the decision of what to wear to the gym wasn't really a decision at all. It was Lululemon.
The aligned leggings, the defined jacket, the top that worked both at Brunch and at Pilates. At some point, Lululemon was so popular that the product and the lifestyle became the same thing. But the times, they've changed. First, there were brands like Aloe and Viori. As Athleisure got a second win during the pandemic, they built heat through celebrity visibility and a softer lifestyle-driven cool. Then came a second faster wave of smaller brands, built almost entirely on TikTok and run by founders who felt more like friends than executives. Joining me today is BoF editor, Cath Chen, to discuss whether activewear leaders like Lululemon are truly ceding share to these emerging labels, and are these brands built to last or are they just next in line? Cath, welcome to the debrief.

**Cathaleen Chen** (1:22)
Thanks, Sheena. Glad to be here.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (1:25)
Before we get into what's happening right now, I think it's worth rewinding to understand just how dominant Athleisure's old guard actually was. So there was a BoF case study in 2020 that described Lululemon at the height of the pandemic boom that it was experiencing. So it described it this way. The stock was at an all-time high, there was a strong community model, and it had 92% retention among its top spenders.
Cath, what made that version of Lululemon so hard to compete with, as if the numbers don't already make the case?

**Cathaleen Chen** (1:56)
I think what's really important to note is that Lululemon in the past two decades effectively cornered the market on Activewear as a status symbol.
Like Lululemon was and is to an extent still a status symbol to millennial women and to Gen Z and Gen Alpha teenagers.
And they kind of coined the ability for something functional, leggings, sports bras, something that you wear to the gym to exercise. They effectively invented a new version of this functional product to be as much of a signifier as a luxury handbag or a watch or whatever other status symbols that exist in fashion. Lululemon created that for Activewear. And I think Lululemon walked so that some of these later brands like Aloe Yoga could run. And it's really important to give them that credit. And it comes down to the status symbol of it all.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (3:06)
I want to talk a little bit about the how, like how they did that. One of the things that has come up a lot in BoF reporting over the years on Lululemon's dominance is this whole community model, right? Like the yoga instructors as the actual brand ambassadors, having in-store sweat sessions, that they were able to cultivate a sense of belonging and community, and then affiliate that with product. Why was that so effective? Was that really that novel at the time?

**Cathaleen Chen** (3:32)
I think that a lot of different Activewear brands were leveraging this model. I'm sure the giants of this world, Lululemon and Nike, were doing it first. I mean, Nike certainly did with its Run Club and various sort of local activations. And as working out, exercise, the sort of active lifestyle became more salient among young consumers. Obviously, this community-oriented model became even more effective in driving interest in these brands and giving them credibility as real activewear brands. And you saw Gymshark sort of do their own thing with it, and Aloe Yoga with its yoga studios.
I think this model still very much works today. The difference is that the number of players in the space has exponentially increased.

**Sheena Butler-Young** (4:29)
And by the way, we should probably acknowledge that their product also felt. That was probably a bigger deal by some people's standards than the marketing, than the community focus, was that it to people felt innovative. It looked, they were black leggings, but they looked more interesting somehow. The logo wasn't as recognizable as a Nike logo. Like it meant something. So I want to talk about, you mentioned Aloe following a similar marketing and community building strategy. So Lululemon stock actually peaked, it hit the all time high at the end of 2023, which is right around the same time that Aloe and Viori started carving out more meaningful market share. People weren't just talking about them online, they were growing.
What do you think they were doing that started to get them momentum and buzz? Was it just another option or something else?