I recently read David Zhang’s blog on LuLulemon’s stance on large-sized cloth. And I think it did a great analysis on why LuLulemon is reluctant to produce plus-size clothing. As a yoga-apparel company, LuLulemon targets only at fit women whose pants sizes are smaller than 12. They also claimed “discouraging plus-size customers has actually been part of the brand’s strategy.” Expectedly, this strategy arouse feminist outrages, which even upgraded after Chip Wilson, the cofounder of Lululenmon, commented in a Bloomberg Interview, “some women’s bodies just don’t work for [the pants]”

Definitely, Lululemon has its own reason for not producing plus size. As David put it, they “ found stocking large size of clothes in the store inconvenient and unprofitable.” In David analysis, because of their strategies, they are gradually losing the old customers as people ages and starts putting on weight. In addition, I think Lululemon underestimated the loss from plus-size customers. Since Lululemon is mainly targeting the US and Canadian market where there is a considerable number of large size people, they are losing huge amount of potential customers. As there is a tendency for increasing nutrient awareness, more plus size people wants to pursuit a healthy lifestyle and a fit figure by taking yoga classes. Therefore, there is a large demand from large size people.

 The stubbornness of Lululemon is causing them to lose competitive advantage in yoya-appareal market since their strong competitor Abercrombie announced to add XL and XXL to its product line. This tells us adapting to the consumers’ need is important for a company to achieve success.