I’m balancing on my head, and I don’t think I’ve ever been more relaxed. I am one of about 30 women who have assumed similarly vertical positions early on a Sunday morning in a yoga studio on New York’s Upper East Side. Tibetan chants and dimmed lights block out the city’s chaos just beyond the door. Motivational quotes painted on the walls — jealousy works the opposite way you want it to! — seep into my consciousness.
Seconds after our petite Indian yogi leads us through our final “ommm,” piercing lights flicker on. People roll in tables of merchandise like stagehands between acts of a play, converting our urban ashram into a retail temple. The women gathered at Lululemon Athletica — the Mecca of yoga lifestyle gear — know the drill. The free class is over, and they lunge toward the register to retrieve their 15% off coupons, still catching their breath from their last downward dog. One woman already has three $52 Alluring tank tops in hand. “If you want to be successful in this industry,” says Christine Day, Lululemon’s CEO, “it’s about being authentic.”
A cult following is the most coveted accessory in retail, and Lululemon’s is even more lustworthy than its Velocity Gym Bag. It wasn’t built on the work of some Jobs-ian swami, however, but on the sources of Lulu founder and chairman Chip Wilson’s own spiritual awakening. Wilson has mixed a heady self-actualizing cocktail from equal parts Landmark Forum (seminars based on the philosophy of Werner Erhard), the books of motivational business guru Brian Tracy, and Oprah-endorsed best seller The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. He is now hard at work formalizing them in a Lululemon “internal constitution.”
“It’s the first time I’ve heard of anyone almost directly using the techniques of cults and applying them to their business,” says Douglas Atkin, author of The Culting of Brands. Drawing on those techniques, and with virtually zero advertising, Lululemon has converted the most popular yoga teachers from Beverly Hills to Boston (and their students) into a devoted — and self-propagating — clientele. In a little more than 10 years, Lululemon has grown from a single storefront on the surf side of Vancouver, British Columbia, to a public company with more than 100 outlets and $340 million in annual revenue. “I have not been able to find any company that compares with what they do,” says Suzanne Price, a retail analyst with ThinkEquity, who points to Lululemon stores ringing up $1,800 in sales per square foot, compared with only $600 for retailers such as J.Crew and Abercrombie & Fitch.
