Forgot This Part From the Conference Call Q&A Re: Competitors & Running

Q: When you talk to your customers and you discuss with them where else they might be shopping for similar product, where do you think you're taking share? And to the extent that you can see what some of your competitors are doing, do you think more competitors are trying to copy or come out with similar product to what you have in your stores?

A: our question really about where do we see other guests shop, I mean, the historically, if they're a runner, they have probably been in the Nike run product and then they try our product and they still probably have a family that they -- of products that they use from Nike. And our goal is to continue to win that guest over with our technical product. We've made some great strides, I believe, in the run short in particular and if you just look at -- if you go to any race now, you'll see a well-represented fraction of lululemon and I think particularly in the men's shirt, you see us gaining a lot of share in that category for men as well as our run-response short. So we're continuing to refine that technical product and really go after more of that marathon runner. I would say that we've really gotten the light runner and the half-marathon runners, so continue to refine into that more technical space what's needed. In other categories such as yoga, probably the one thing that we don't have enough of in the lineup for some guests is a more light organic or cotton product. We really find that it's at our quality standard and length that we want to have the garment last for the guest, that we're not going to be doing the filmy tops and a lot of the other things that guests get that are only going to last a season or shorter. And that's not our space, so we kind of don't look at growing market share there because of our technical product focus and our desire not to be seen as active wear, but true athletic wear. So there are some categories we opt out to which leave some white space for competitors, and that's really where we see a lot of the soft line substitution, is into those spaces.

My comments:

So my sister is a marathoner/half marathoner and she wore Lululemon in her first marathon. She liked it a lot. I think she had on a Power Y, a long sleeve Swiftly (Israeli version) and one of the luxtreme crops. She's been doing half marathons lately and bought a pair of CW-X compression tights on the recommendation of one of her friends and much prefers them to luxtreme. She will use lululemon for training but now it's CW-X for the races. As for the Swifty, she likes the ones she got that were made in Israel with lycra in it but doesn't care for the newer Sri Lankan version which deleted lycra out of the recipe. She hates the lack of stretch.