Even the simplest yoga pose can require your brain to go into overdrive: How should you position your hands and feet? Where should you look? What’s the right way to balance?
On Tuesday, Lululemon launches a new yoga mat designed to cut down on these mental calculations and help you better focus on your practice. The $118 mat is covered with a pattern of 3D ripples, each of which has been positioned to guide you through the most common yoga poses. The idea is that users will develop muscle memory about where to position their bodies, rather than looking for visual cues around them.
Lululemon has a long history of catering to the yoga community since it launched more than two decades ago. For this mat, the designers spent two years conducting focus groups with customers and ambassadors, many of whom are top yoga instructors. “We discovered that what people wanted was to feel grounded in their practice,” says Chantelle Murnaghan, director of Whitespace, Lululemon’s in-house innovation and R&D lab. “When we dug into what this meant, it came down to not being distracted, so they could better focus on their practice.”There hasn’t been much innovation in the yoga mat market over the last few decades. A few brands have created mats with lines on them, along with instructions about how to use them. But customers told Morris these could be distracting and were sometimes hard to see in a darkened room.
In the end, Morris’s team created a pattern of 3D ripples on the mat that can be used in a wide range of poses. “The ripples are meant to be gestural, not prescriptive,” Morris says. “And importantly, you can feel out where the ripples are, so you don’t need to search for them.”
The mat comes out of a broader design philosophy at Lululemon called “the science of feel,” which looks at how people feel while they’re active, instead of focusing on the action itself. This can be tricky, since feelings are subjective, and there tends to be a range of responses to a particular activity. With clothes, for instance, they’ve found that some consumers enjoy the feeling of sweat, while others hate it; some women like feeling movement in their sports bras, while others like feeling compressed.
With this mat, Morris wanted to create room for diversity and variation. “A person’s yoga practice is so personal,” says Morris. “This mat is designed to support a wide range of experiences.”
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