Why She Buys (34 page)

The answer is what you see today if you walk into any lululemon store. Here’s what you’ll find:

•
Pictures of local people on its walls
.

Each store is decorated with pictures of local yoga practitioners, athletes, runners, and dancers striking poses in photogenic places around town. Next to the dressing rooms, a collection of bulletin boards features information about local yoga classes, local instructors who are the company’s “ambassadors,” and the names and interests of the lululemon employees who work in that particular store. The ambassadors are a key to the company’s retail strategy. Before it opens in a new market, lululemon spends months approaching local yoga studios and their influential instructors, and gives them clothing in exchange for feedback on the fit and designs. As a result, every influential yoga person in town is spotted wearing lululemon, not only in the street but also in the photos on the stores’ walls.

•
The salespeople are athletes
.

lululemon hires athletes and yoga practitioners who, in their words, “have a life outside of work.” Instead of spending money on marketing (lululemon does no traditional mass-market advertising, nor does it advertise sales of any kind), it plows its money into employee training.
“I believe in the law of attraction,” says Chip. “If you bring great people in, they’ll attract other great people, and the business will take care of itself.”

•
They call you by name
.

Each dressing room features an erasable whiteboard on the outside of the door, where the lululemon salesperson writes down your name—and even asks how to spell it properly. For the rest of the time you’re trying on clothes, you hear someone calling out your name to ask if you need help. It’s a simple but impressive technique. The stores also feature seating for the shopper’s companions.

•
They promote their vision
.

lululemon prominently displays the company’s manifesto on the wall of its stores, including nuggets such as “Dance, sing, floss, and travel,” and “Your outlook on life is a direct reflection of how much you like yourself.” The manifesto is also printed on lululemon’s bags, which are so popular they were featured on the front page of the
New York Times
as a fashion trend.

•
They offer free on-site tailoring of your purchases
.

Not only is this something that’s extremely rare in women’s mass-market apparel, it’s all but unheard of in the sports apparel category.

•
They ask for your feedback and prominently display it
.

There’s a chalkboard asking for comments on the fit and sizing of lululemon products. Customers are invited to post their thoughts publicly.

•
They host free yoga classes every weekend
.

Classes are usually held at the stores and are free and open to everyone. lululemon says that its mission is to introduce more people to the benefits of yoga any way it can, and when you’re out under a tree with staff members learning how to do a sun salutation, you believe it.

Eric Petersen, one of the company’s senior executives, sums up the retail experience this way: “It’s the small things that matter. This is why we have an amazing guest experience. We care about people’s communities, not just the media in those communities. The things we do are so simple and so primitive, and yet everyone else overlooks them. It’s really easy. We hire passionate people and we listen to what they and our guests have to say. We’re engaged in a continuous conversation. That’s it.”

Lessons for your business

Takeaways from lululemon include:

•
Employees can be your greatest form of advertising
.

lululemon does no mass-market advertising and never has. Yet it’s a top hot-growth company. It’s done this by investing money in the people it hires and the products it creates.

•
Wooing local influencers pays off
.

Before it opens one of its stores, lululemon spends months creating relationships with influential yoga practitioners and athletes in the area, who help spread the word about the company’s imminent store opening and provide vital third-party credibility for its products.

• Personalization doesn’t have to be expensive or high-tech
.

The simple whiteboards on the dressing room doors of each store allow employees to address the customers inside by name. Being helped in this way in a retail environment is something so unexpected that it floors customers and makes them feel great about buying from “their” lululemon store.

A Tangled Web: Selling to Women Online

H
OW
many principles of great retailing translate online? The answer is most of them, and then some. Understanding what women want in e-commerce is critical because women outshop men across most major consumer categories online, just as they do in traditional retail outlets.
⁵
It’s women who are driving the growth of retail innovations like local- and group-buying sites, flash-sale sites, and digital couponing. When you consider that the e-commerce market in the United States alone generated more than $227 billion in sales during 2010, there are literally billions of reasons to make women happy online.
⁶

Women’s behavior online tends to mimic their offline behavior. They window-shop, chat with friends, hunt for deals, ask like-minded people their opinions, and look for a pleasant, convenient, and even inspiring shopping experience. They do a tremendous amount of product research online, which wasn’t as possible back in the days before the Internet, when they had to rip out pages from magazines and stick them in a drawer or file folder.

Ever the errand consolidators, women view online shopping
as an important tool in their multitasking arsenals, and women at every age and life stage are drawn to its convenience. For mothers of young children, it offers extraordinary advantages. This is easy to understand if you’ve ever escorted a posse of small children to Target. How nice it must be to put the kids to bed, pour a glass of cabernet, turn on the TV, and go to
Target.com
instead. The benefits of online shopping are beyond what anyone could have imagined ten years ago. The Internet is even turning women into online merchants themselves. Who needs to host a garage sale when you can get rid of that old couch on Craigslist or eBay instead?

There are some important considerations when it comes to appealing to women online. Even today, buying products on the Internet is viewed as riskier than buying them in a store.
⁷
People still worry about the confidentiality of their credit card information, and this is especially true for women. If you’re a small business that’s not widely known, making your financial privacy policies known is crucial.

Studies show that the number one complaint of people shopping online is that the item they received didn’t look like it did online.
⁸
For women, that means they have to return it, and that’s an inconvenience, no matter how liberal the return policy. This is where a good zoom feature becomes critical. If a retailer is showcasing a purse, for example, it should be shown from every angle, including the inside, so that women can see what the lining looks like and whether or not the product has interior pockets. Women need this level of detail to feel confident in buying something they can’t inspect for themselves.

The website
Sears.com
does the zoom function one better through its “My Virtual Model” feature. The site allows shoppers to input their height, weight, and personal
characteristics—even a photo of themselves—to create their own animated online model to try on clothing. It also offers the same feature for the home fashions section of the site, enabling shoppers to click and paste everything from furniture to paint colors in images of rooms. It’s brilliant and totally unexpected.

The second biggest online shopping complaint is not being able to talk to a live person about purchasing questions or concerns.
⁹
Some websites hide their 800 numbers as if they were plutonium, and that kind of poor customer service is simply unacceptable. Post it prominently on the home page of your website, as Nordstrom does, and cater to different preferences by offering every type of customer service technology you can afford, from live chat to e-mail.

Principles of female-friendly e-commerce sites

Broadly speaking, women like to feel smart about purchases they’ve made online, they like to feel good about the companies they’ve bought from, and they like to feel proud that they’re such savvy shoppers. In other words, they want the same outcome they seek in the offline world of retail, but with dramatically more convenience. The following are some tactical ways to achieve this on the Internet.

• Women like being involved in clubs and membership programs that let them hear about new products and discounts before anyone else
.

Who doesn’t like to be part of the in-crowd? Exclusive access to time-sensitive offers is the appeal of invitation-only businesses like Gilt Groupe and the growing number of flash-sale and sample-sale sites around the world. Check out Internet darling DailyCandy (and its sister
sample site, Swirl) to see one of the Web’s true pioneers in creating female appeal. DailyCandy set the gold standard for delivering messages to women with a wink, a
pssst
, and copy that consistently makes them feel like they’re in on something special.

•
Women like websites that recommend matching products when they select an item
.

This is an incredibly powerful way to upsell, for every single category out there. (Would you like birdseed with that bird feeder?) Offering recommendations simply mimics what great salespeople do in brick-and-mortar stores: they suggest items they think you would like, based on knowledge of your past preferences. Amazon is the king of recommendations, which are a helpful tool for women in any category. As we’ve discussed in this chapter, women think holistically and like to kill several birds with one stone, so they’ll appreciate being able to look at recommendations that will save them time and make their shopping experience more productive. It’s a modern way to deliver old-fashioned service.

•
Women like to know what other people are buying
.

Women’s fashion trends change exponentially faster than men’s. My dad wore what seemed to be the same pair of khaki pants for twenty years. Flag what’s trendy and popular in clever ways, like the way
Target.com
sometimes uses the label “Best Seller” as a euphemism for “this is what everybody else is buying.” In any category, women are interested in knowing what the hot or popular items are. Increasingly, retailers are leveraging
Facebook to showcase items to customers that their friends have “liked.”

•
Buying gifts online has been the greatest boon for women since the invention of the wheel
.

Women like to shop for gifts online because the stakes are so much lower than buying products for themselves—you never have to try on a gift—and the shipping is a beautiful thing. Your website should help women in their gift-giving quest by flagging age-appropriate, gender-appropriate gifts in clear language (if she doesn’t have kids, how does she know what an eight-year-old boy might want?) and, of course, offering low-cost or free gift wrapping.
Starbucks.com
does something clever—it gives people the ability to personalize its Starbucks gift cards online for almost any occasion, complete with a custom message right on the card, like “Happy 25th Birthday, Sam.” At last, the impersonal gift card has been personalized, by the clever folks at Starbucks.

•
Women like a “clean” Web environment
.

The study of female design preferences is a new one and deserves to be taken seriously. New research from the U.K. indicates that women are drawn to bright colors, rounded lines, 2-D representation of objects, and patterned or detailed surfaces.
¹⁰
In a world where there are relatively few female Web designers, it’s important to conduct usability testing with women. Too much clutter online, for example, can make women shut down. It might be exciting to look through a messy sale table at a store, just in case there’s a great find underneath, but there are few equivalents for this online. A good keyword search engine
for your website is critical. Women notice everything, and when there’s too much to notice, they can get information overload and abandon ship, especially when they’re not tech savvy.

•
A website’s return policy can make or break a deal
.

Most women barely have enough time to buy a product, let alone return it. The websites with the most generous return policies—like
Zappos.com
—are often the most successful. “My favorite shopping websites tend to be online versions of brick-and-mortar stores, as long as I can make a return at the store,” says Leslie, a public relations executive. “I absolutely hate having to hassle with the post office to send something back, and I hate having to pay to ship it back.” The success of the Zappos online shoe business has been driven in large part by the goodwill generated through the company’s generous return policies.