Now, after getting their yoga flow on, Lululemon customers can extend their community-based experience by breaking bread with their fellow yoga-pant wearers.
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Yoga classes, the look and feel of the store, and the staff already all do a great job of generating a community vibe within Lululemon’s stores. In addition to eliminating the negative, food at Lululemon’s stores also adds to the positive.įood augments the social experience of Lululemon. It takes the “I don’t have time to workout over my lunch break, try out some new clothes, and still eat” fear out of the equation and opens up potential customers’ minds to a new way of entering the Lululemon experience by eliminating compromising tradeoffs they otherwise would have had to make. It removes an important concern in the mind of Lululemon’s time-starved consumers. The move is pure brilliance because it eliminates the negative. Lululemon, a company already great at brand and experience in terms of how it draws people to its stores by way of its yoga classes and its community feel, now plans to complement its efforts by offering food in tandem with a pure gold marketing handle around its new apparel try-on program. In this use case, food makes perfect sense. The gist of the idea, as described by CNBC, is for Lululemon customers to come into the new store, workout, try out new workout gear (a first for Lululemon at this store), and grab a bite to eat as well. The store includes merchandise, studios for yoga, high intensity training, and meditation, and a new restaurant concept called “Fuel,” which plans to serve burgers, smoothies, coffee, beer and wine, and even on-the-go snacks. Lululemon opened up a new 20,000 square foot store in the Lincoln Park area of Chicago earlier this month. Lululemon’s recent announcement is a shining example of this point. If a retailer plans to add food to its store operations, in the face of these long odds, then it better know how and why its plans will benefit its strategic flywheel. Tilting The Odds In Its Favor - Lululemon Restaurants are such a comically bad business idea that the running joke at the Harvard Business School is that the professors there won’t even take a meeting with students on a startup restaurant idea.Īnd, yet, here retail finds itself, pinning its hopes on food and restaurants and their low probabilities of success, almost like a gambling addict saying to himself, “I know I just lost my house at the craps tables, but you know what? Now I am going to go out and win it all back on the slot machines!” Not even a Tom Cruise-playing Joel Goodson would dare experiment with them in the 1980s while his parents were away for the weekend (and, lord knows, Joel got into some really avant-garde stuff).Īccording to a study by Ohio State University, 60 percent of restaurants fail within the first year, and 80 percent of restaurants do not make it past their fifth year. Restaurants are notoriously bad investments. It is not likely the be all end all answer to the experience question in the wake of Amazon and more broadly e-commerce’s napalm-like destruction of the industrial retail complex, but it does have its place within the right context.
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Food is in no way the panacea for what ails most retailers right now.
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Look no further than millennials, for example, who like eating out so much that, according to a recent 2014 study, they spend a whopping 44 percent of their food budget on doing so!Īs staggering as the above statistics are and no matter how innate eating food is to human beings in general, retailers should still tread carefully though. Food, without question, is a driving social force that motivates people to leave their homes. They want good food, and often they want to enjoy that food in the company of others. It is an easy thing for people and for retail leaders to understand. It is no surprise then that food is often at the center of the retail experience discussion. Experience is therefore integral to physical retailing because, by definition, it is anything that motivates people to get off their couches to do something, to feel something, or again, stating the obvious, to experience something.