Chapter 5 briefly discusses how people historically sought to understand a firm’s strengths and weaknesses.  One interesting historical fact mentioned was that Harvard Business School began analyzing the role of the general manager as a firm’s distinctive competency as early as 1911. 

The work stated that decisions made by general managers (managers with significant profit-and-loss responsibility in an organization who typically have more than one function reporting to them) had significant effect on the firm’s performance.  Simply put, high quality general managers were seen as organizational strengths, low quality general managers were weaknesses.   (Barney, 117)

Chip Wilson was Lululemon’s founder, former Chief Innovation Officer and just left the board last week is one such manager that was a strength and a weakness for his company.    Chip’s strengths were in product design, ideation and brand building.  He had the initial idea for Lulu from snow pant material.  He was able to translate the fabric into yoga pants, he went on to build the brand and ultimately create a new type of apparel-- fabrics to support individuals in both their practice of yoga and their daily activities.   He convinced consumers, initially women but now men,  that wearing Lululemon made you cool and consumers were willing to pay an extremely high price for the gear.  

Outspoken, Chip had this to say about his management style.   "If you are doing a brand well, you need to offend somebody, or you're not standing for anything," he told the Times reporter. "I mean, how women can say these things about me given everything I've done to build the women's company? My background has always been people telling me my ideas are crazy. And I've noticed that 90 percent of them have come true." (Novellino). 

But as Chip alludes too, he had some weaknesses too – namely his outspokenness and perhaps his restlessness.  He took a sabbatical from the company in 2012 and went to Australia.     Wilson was then brought back by the company to try to repair the damage to the brand.  Lululemon had produced yoga pants, made of Luon, which were basically see-through.   When trying to fix the damage resulting from poor product quality; Wilson actually fat-shamed those who wore his pants, saying

 “Some women's bodies don't work for the pants. It's really about the rubbing through the thighs, how much pressure is there over a period of time."  This angered consumers and ultimately lead to Wilson resigning from the board and selling most of his shares in Lululemon. 

The challenge of the work done by Harvard in the early 1900s was that the qualities that define a high-quality manager are difficult to measure.   Does being outspoken make you a good company leader?  Is your leadership, a result of luck, skill, because of product or marketing ability?   What are the prevailing characteristics about leaders, like Chip, that determine if they will be a strength or a weakness for their companies?   It’s ambiguous.  In summary, the historical analysis of looking solely at managerial decisions to evaluate the performance of a firm does not go far enough when seeking to understand firm strategy and results. 

Novellino, Theresa. "Founder Chip Wilson Leaves Lululemon Board, Says Sometimes Brands." Upstart Business Journal. Upstart Business Journal, 2 Feb. 2015. Web. 19 Feb. 2015.

Strategic Groups (Chapter 4)

                A strategic group is a defined as a set of firms that face similar threats and opportunities that are different from the threats and opportunities facing other firms in an industry.   (Barney, 106)

Strategic Group analysis can be used when there is ambiguity about the limits of an industry and even differences in the structure of threats and opportunities that similar firms face.   Lululemon is a good example of an industry where strategic group analysis can be important. 

First let’s identify an industry .  Here we are discussing the athletic wear/athleisure wear.    We have discussed in past blogs that industry defines items that individuals wear when working out or just running errands around the town.   Basically, it has become cool to wear yoga pants as real pants and many humorous facebook posts and you tube videos are dedicated to this trend. 

Now let’s focus on all the competitors:   Lululemon often competes with Nike, Reebok, Under Armour, Lucy and Athleta.

Using Strategic Group Analysis,  I might define the following:

Nike, Reebok, Under Armor are  in Strategic Group 1

Lulu, Lucy and Athleta, Fabletics are in  Strategic Group 2.

The reason for this differentiation is due to the isolation of mobility barriers (106) which is similar to identifying barriers to entry at the industry level.   

Here, I might look at the following: 

First mover status = Lulu and Lucy and Athleta were all in the printed yoga pant space first

Industry Status = Nike, Reebok, UA were all established sports brands with broad product offerings
Technology/R&D = Fabric –Lulu was the first set of unique material used to make a better pair of yoga/running pants

Gender Focus -  Lulu, Lucy, Athleta, Fabletics began as all women only (although Lulu now has a men’s line) 

Price = Lucy,  Lulu, Athleta all price their pants between $60-100 while Nike, UA, Fabletics and Reebok all price under $50 traditionally. 

After isolating these barriers, I might build out a similarity matrix by doing simple correlation analysis, comparing the number of the firms in the industry, in my example there are  7 firms, so it would be a 7 x 7 matrix.  Each element on this matrix (I, J) would be the correlation between the vector of measures of conduct for firm (I), with the vector of measures of conduct for firm (J), effectively comparing firm behavior.    Each axis would represent firm conduct in the industry, above First mover status, Technology/RD, Gender Focus, Price.    In this matrix, it would be likely that I could see firms facing similar threats and opportunities clustered together on the same axis.  My analysis allows me to describe how competition effects and evolves across and within strategic groups in the athleisure wear  industry.  The limitation though is that since probability theory is not associated with cluster analysis it can be challenging if not impossible to identify if a strategy group defined through cluster analysis is statistically significant.  Therefore, the best use of this tool is more for gaining a deeper understanding of the level of threats and opportunities that a firm faces.  

SCP at Lulu

Yesterday, I read probably the most insightful article to date about Lululemon’s strategy.   In a New York Times magazine article, Lulu founder, Chip Wilson talks about his strategy and missteps at Lululemon, the company that “started the ‘athleisure’ trend and is changing the fashion industry.” (Business Insider)  Wilson spoke about his ideal customer and also his current work on a new company Kit and Ace, discussing his strategy for both.  Interesting topics as our class explores how companies evaluate  their environmental threats. 

According to Business Insider, “Wilson created a ‘muse’ who inspired the merchandise, an ideal customer, “a 32-year-old professional single woman named Ocean who makes 100,000 a year.  Ocean is engaged, has her own condo, is traveling, fashionable, has an hour and half to work out a day.”  (Business Insider)

Don’t I wish. 

Wilson goes on to say, “if you’re 20 years old or graduating from university, you can’t wait to be that woman.   If you’re 42 years old with a couple of children, you wish you had that time back.” (Business Insider)

Agree. 

He talks about how he invented the Lululemon pants, his rise and fall out of power and his ultimate resignation of chairman and his new work at Kit and Ace. 

Using the framework of the structure – conduct – performance (SCP) model, its’ easy to see why Lululemon was/is now in the position to change the fashion industry, why Lulu resonated with so many “Oceans, like myself and discusses some of the strategic challenges that Lulu will face in 2015. 

The SCP is a theoretical framework that evolved as economists were looking for an approach to understand the relationships between a firm; its environment, behavior and performance.  Originally, with the goal of describing conditions where perfect competition would not develop in an industry; so as to help government regulators identify monopolistic behavior.  Now strategic analysts such as myself, and Lulu founder Chip Wilson, used SCP flipped upside down to identify competitive advantages for firms. 

SCP says that Industry Structure (# of competing firms, homogeneity of products, cost of entry and exit) influences Firm Conduct (price taking, product differentiation, tacit collusion, exploiting market power) and ultimately performance (performance of individual firms and then ultimately the economy as a whole).

When Lulu began it was because Wilson saw that he could translate body slimming long underwear fabric that he had developed into yoga tights and “have his own retail stores and sell the pants for $90 to $95….  betting that women will buy billions of them.”   (New York Times)

Wilson had capitalized on Industry structure - at the time there we no competing firms with the fabric, the product was unique and customers, “Oceans,” loved the product.  There were also quasi high barriers to entry as it was risky to start a new clothing company and current athletic competitors like Nike and Under Armor didn’t have the same quality of fabrics that Lulu had.  Lulu had for a short while, an oligopoly in leisure wear. 

This allowed Wilson, as he stated to charge extremely high prices for the product, which was differentiated from anything else out on the market at the time.  “Oceans” flocked to Lululemon allowing them to open more stores, create and sell more pants achieving a completive advantage. 

In the beginning, under the five forces model level of threat in the leisure wear model was low.  Lulu had few rivals, limited threats of entry, they were the powerful supplier of their proprietary fabric, their buyers ‘Oceans were buying the product and there were not many substitutes in the market.

In 2015,  threat of entry in the athleisurewear industry is high.  

Ultimately, old competitors, and new entrants, like Althelta (GAP), Under Armor and Nike began to put out similar fabrics, eroding Lulu’s market share.  Some even looked for substitutes in products like skinny jeans. Chip Wilson will tell you that he angered their now powerful buyers through his comments about who should wear these pants and the quality of their new fabric (see through Luon)  ultimately these buyers responded and many left the brand. Chip Wilson left too, stepping down last week as Chairman. 

Now Chip Wilson is using his knowledge and background from Lulu and a new competitive fabric, that Lulu turned down, to try to create the perfect competitive advantage for Kit and Ace.  Wilson is working to re-create the same level of success that he had at Lulu.   We will see how he does in 2015, in the meantime this Ocean will be heading back to eBay to scoop up some more athliesure wear. 

Works cited:

"Lululemon Founder Chip Wilson Resigns From Board." The New York Times. The New York Times, 02 Feb. 2015. Web. 02 Feb. 2015.

Lutz, Ashley. "Lululemon Calls Its Ideal Customers 'Ocean' and 'Duke' - Here's Everything We Know about Them." Business Insider. Business Insider, Inc, 02 Feb. 2015. Web. 03 Feb. 2015.