Lululemon Athletica and a Series of Bad Marketing Decisions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Chip Wilson was so inspired by his yoga classes that he decided to experiment with different fabrics to come up with the ultimate yoga wear. When taking yoga classes, he noticed that cotton clothing that was typically worn did not perform well, given the sweating and stretching required for the exercise. Having previously owned a snowboarding apparel company for 20 years, Wilson was used to running a successful athletic apparel business. Thus, in 1998, Chip Wilson founded Lululemon Athletica, a popular yoga apparel company. However, Chip's previous experience in snowboarding did not prevent him from making a series of bad marketing decisions that resulted in a firestorm of negative publicity for Lululemon Athletica. In 2013, Chip Wilson was forced to resign as chairman of the board. The board of directors hired Laurent Potdevin to take the company in a new direction. However, Potdevin was left with a badly damaged brand image that he needed to clean up rather quickly. Company Background Chip Wilson opened the first Lululemon Athletica store in Vancouver, Canada. This store included a design studio, retail space to display the apparel, and shared space with a yoga studio. The first multi-purpose Lululemon Athletica storefront was popular, and business steadily increased for the company. Over time, the company added more retail outlets, and by 2013 there were more than 200 Lululemon Athletica stores in over 40 different countries around the world. As the company expanded, Lululemon Athletica became known for its fashionable, high-quality yoga pants--one pair of yoga pants sold for as much as $98. Celebrities such as Reese Witherspoon, Gisele Bundchen, Kelly Ripa, and First Lady Michelle Obama became fans of the brand, and the stylish, upscale merchandise quickly became a fashion trend. Lululemon Athletica became more than just yoga apparel; it became lifestyle apparel for everyday wear (Weinger, 2013). A Series of Public Relations Nightmares In 2006, Lululemon Athletica sold bags that were part of its Vita-Sea line of products. The company claimed that the bag released amino acids and vitamins and was made of seaweed, which reduced stress for consumers who carried it. The New York Times conducted a study that found the claims made about reducing stress were false and that the bag was actually made of pure cotton (Story, 2007). In 2008, the company sold a bag with inspirational quotes printed on the outside. Shoppers discovered that when the bag was washed, less than positive messages were revealed underneath the top layer of text. For example, according to CTV News Toronto (2008), quotes found on the inside of the bag referred to being most creative when drunk, stoned, or just after an orgasm (CTV News Toronto, 2008). Lululemon Athletica responded by stitching a covering over the offensive language on the bag but that did not quell consumer complaints, so the remaining bags were pulled from the stores. In 2011, the company received even more negative press when the media began to cover the trial and guilty verdict of one Lululemon Athletica employee who murdered her co-worker in a Washington D.C. suburban outlet store (Lawrence, 2011). The murder and related conviction brought the company and its business practices under even greater scrutiny from the press and wider public. In 2013, Chip Wilson moved the manufacturing of Lululemon Athletica's products from Vancouver, Canada to Taiwan in an attempt to reduce costs and increase margins. According to the company, the yoga pants manufactured in Taiwan passed all of the basic metric tests for fabric hand-feel and construction. However, when consumers tried the pants out and began doing yoga poses in them, the transparency of the fabric was noticeable (Berg, 2014). Customers were outraged by the sheerness of the pants and felt their privacy had been violated. Lululemon Athletica decided to recall the product, and acknowledged the problem on the community blog of the company's website. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.014 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".