I’m an athleisure guy. On days I’m tooling around town or headed to the ballpark, I can be found rocking Legends Luka shorts and their Aviation tee, a Melin hat and a pair of Nike Pegasus running shoes.
But my fondness for fashion-forward fitness started with the OG of athleisure – Lululemon.
Launched in 2000 and now worth over $39 billion, Lululemon invented and popularized high-end yoga pants and has since expanded into a full wardrobe of athletic, smart-casual and even dress clothes for men and women.
Chartr.co had a recent article talking about their post-COVID business surge (sound familiar?) and more recent decline in growth (also sound familiar?!) due to a number of factors.
Not the least of which is the plethora of market-share-stealing athleisure brands that have launched since Lulu opened their doors almost 25 years ago.
As an athleisure connoisseur, I am targeted with ads for all kinds of random athletic wear companies daily in my Instagram feed.
But if you look at the niche activewear companies who have started rising to Lulu levels, you see they followed the same success pattern as their forefathers in the fitness apparel space.
Why? Because Success Leaves Clues.
Take Vuori for example, an Activewear company currently valued at $4 billion. These guys didn’t reinvent the wheel when they went to launch their brand in 2015. They followed the Lulu playbook.
For example, Lululemon started with a Niche – women’s Yoga pants. That was their flagship product, they perfected it, and expanded from there.
Vuori did the same thing. They launched with one product – men’s shorts designed tough enough for a workout, but nice enough to look good running around town. Their fashion-meets-fitness design gained popularity, and now Vuori has 16 different categories of men’s and women’s wear on their website and in retailers.
More: Lululemon boasts more than 450 retail stores in the U.S. alone. So when Vuori wanted to get into the Brick and Mortar space, they looked to Lulu.
According to a recent Wall Street Journal article, of the 50 storefronts Vuori operates, an impressive 80% of them are within 1/2 mile of a Lululemon shop. Almost literally a stone’s throw away.
I could go on, but you get the point.
Success Leaves Clues.
If you look at the most successful elective surgery practices in your niche – the ones who have weathered economic turbulence and continue to thrive – you will find a handful of common “Success Traits” among them.
Now, trying to decipher, reverse engineer and implement these traits on your own is time-consuming and frustrating. Which is why we designed our Green Room Coaching Community to take the guess work out of it. We teach your team how to embody and communicate these “Success Traits,” and ways you can adopt and implement them in harmony with your unique brand.
As a Green Room member, make sure you and your team are jumping into our Coaching Community at least 2x a week, joining our live coaching calls and working through the plethora of persuasion tools, lessons and masterclasses we’ve shared, in order to continue building the Success Traits that are foundational to your premium brand.
And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to reach out!
– Troy “Man of (Ath)Leisure” Cole
PS – The Chartr.co newsletter is fantastic if you like data and enjoy learning about recent business trends. Highly recommend!