How startups should position their product: Be like Lululemon’s day 1.
Lululemon is now a general athletic brand for everyone, but when they started they were about one thing only – yoga pants for women.
The key here is not to see yoga pants as they’re worn today. You should go back to the late ’90s and think about yoga pants in that era. Back then yoga pants weren’t mainstream, even to women. But those small % of women who practiced yoga every day were probably looking for better outfit quite desperately.
Another key is, even in their day 1, Lululemon could have easily wanted to become a “women’s athletic apparel brand” or even “women’s yoga brand”. They could have thought focusing on women or women’s yoga could have been sufficiently focused. But they didn’t – they just did one product, yoga pants.
So the classic advice of “build a product that’s hated by 90% but absolutely loved by 10%” applies here. The result? Lululemon’s super niche beginning has now become a $40bn company.