According to iResearch's "2021 China Yoga Industry Development Trend Research Report", in 2020, more than 60% of Chinese female sports and fitness enthusiasts have participated in yoga practice.
With the rise of the yoga sports and women's fitness market, the consumption of yoga clothes has been heated up.
According to incomplete statistics, in the past 13 months, at least 4 domestic emerging sports brands have received financing, with a number of financing amounting to 100 million yuan.
In the third quarter of 2021, lululemon, a well-known yoga apparel brand, achieved revenue of US$1.5 billion, a year-on-year increase of 30%, and net profit of US$188 million, a year-on-year increase of 30.73%.
Relying on a pair of yoga pants, lululemon has supported a market value of 100 billion yuan, and has attracted more and more participants to enter the game, including not only well-known sports brands such as Nike, Adidas, Under Armor, Anta, and Li Ning, but also domestic emerging brands such as Keep, Particle fanatics, runaway loli, etc., have aimed at the female sportswear market represented by yoga pants.
The industry believes that in the current domestic yoga pants consumer market, there is no sportswear brand that can be compared with lululemon, but the sports segmentation scene is very diversified, and there is no need to follow in the footsteps of lululemon.
Why are more and more girls wearing "yoga pants"?
After returning home from yoga practice every night, Bai Qing (pseudonym) will choose yoga pants and sports underwear for the next day.
Starting in May 2020, such days have been going on for more than a year.
"After quitting my job, exercises focused on yoga practice took up most of my daily life, and my dressing style became a sporty style, and yoga clothes accounted for a large proportion."
Indeed, the rise of the concept of "her economy" and self-pleasure has set off a new wave of women's fitness.
As an important new segment of women's fitness exercise, yoga has a promising prospect.
According to iResearch's "2021 China Yoga Industry Development Trend Research Report", in 2020, more than 60% of Chinese female sports and fitness enthusiasts have participated in yoga practice.
According to the Zhiyan Consulting Report, from 2015 to 2019, the compound annual growth rate of China's yoga consumer market was as high as 37.8%, and this field is considered a rapidly developing blue ocean market.
Yoga sports belt heated up the consumption of yoga clothes.
On Double Eleven last year, sportswear represented by yoga pants were sought after by female consumers, and the turnover has repeatedly hit new highs.
JD.com’s "Good Start" event started 10 minutes later, and the turnover of high-end professional women's yoga clothes increased by 250% year-on-year.
Yoga pants are not exclusive to girls who love sports.
With celebrity trends and sharing on social platforms, yoga pants have become an indispensable fashion item for girls to go to work and go shopping.
As a fashion item, yoga pants that highlight the figure have become the choice of more and more female consumers, but some people do not understand it. Knowing the platform about "Why girls on the street wear'yoga pants' more and more The topic of "multiple" attracted 6,574 people's attention and 16.58 million viewers.
On January 4, the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter searched for "yoga pants" on the Xiaohongshu platform, and 70,000+ notes appeared. The top-ranked notes in the search results mainly included yoga pants sharing and lululemon yoga pants. Same style and flat for sharing, web celebrity yoga pants evaluation, etc.
Xiaohongshu blogger “@ 42,000 favorites and more than 1,000 comments.
Among the many shared notes about yoga pants, comfort, fashion sense, and cost-effectiveness are the keywords that netizens discuss.
market
Brands and types of various domestic emerging yoga pants are emerging
There are many content sharing of yoga pants and many brand choices.
In the current market, in addition to the professional sports brand lululemon that launched yoga clothes, Under Armor, Lorna Jane, and Alo Yoga are also popular brands.
In addition, many traditional sports brands continue to pour into the yoga pants market, such as Nike, Adidas, Anta, Li Ning, Puma and so on.
Among them, in 2020, Puma released Puma Studio, a yoga product line, and Danskin, a high-end female sportswear brand under Li Ning Group, released yoga pants and other products.
Domestic emerging sportswear brands, such as Keep, Particle Fanatics, Runaway Loli, Maia Active, etc., are cut from the perspective of women's sports, and have gradually emerged in recent years.
The Beijing News Shell Finance reporter noticed that many brands of yoga pants have various names.
There are ordinary "sports fitness pants", "shark pants", "cloudy pants", "waist pants", "zero-feel pants", "naked pants" and so on.
Chang Ning (pseudonym), a post-90s office worker who often wears yoga pants as his daily outfit, told the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter that the characteristic naming can largely arouse the curiosity and attention of consumers, but it will not really influence consumers. decision making.
In addition to the different naming, the price and main features of different brands of yoga pants are also very different.
As a professional sports brand of yoga clothes, lululemon and Lorna Jane divide yoga pants into different series according to different exercise types and intensities. For example, lululemon has align, instill, wunder under, wunder pace, base pace and other series, owned by Lorna Jane Must have, ultimate, new amy, everyday and other series.
Bai Qing told the Shell Finance and Economics reporter of the Beijing News, “If you don’t buy professional brand yoga pants, you will never think of an ordinary pair of yoga pants. There are so many categories.”
In terms of wearing experience, Xu Qiao (pseudonym), who has successively started Lorna Jane, Maia Active, lululemon, and Nike brand yoga pants, said that Nike's yoga pants are very breathable and sweat-absorbent, but the waist and hips are more effective.
As a professional yoga pants brand, Lorna Jane's products are remarkable in terms of support strength, firmness, wrapping and comfort.
Maia Active "cloudy pants" has a surprisingly good skin-friendliness, waist-waisting, and hip-lifting effects, but the latter two are inferior to lululemon in terms of comfort, elongated leg lines, and improved hip lines.
"For now, I still think that lululemon's yoga pants are the best. You can only really feel it when you wear them."
Price
Up to 1,000 yuan yoga pants "Hermes" down to less than a hundred yuan "flat replacement"
Although lululemon and Lorna Jane have the same product classification ideas, the prices are quite different.
Unlike Lorna Jane yoga pants, which fluctuates between 300 yuan and 800 yuan, lululemon's yoga pants start at 400 yuan and the highest price is 1680 yuan.
According to incomplete statistics from the Beijing News Shell Finance and Economics reporter, the average price of a total of 318 women’s sports tights in lululemon’s official flagship store on Tmall is 824 yuan, of which about 16% are more than 1,000 yuan. Yoga pants above 850 yuan account for about 60%.
Lululemon is known as the "Hermes" in yoga pants because of its price of thousands of yuan.
In terms of price, apart from Adidas, which has a few yoga pants that sell for more than 1,000 yuan, which can "compete" with lululemon, the prices of yoga pants from other traditional sports brands are lower than lululemon.
Nike's yoga pants are priced below 650 yuan, Anta and Li Ning's yoga pants fluctuate around 300 yuan, and Xtep's yoga pants are priced around 100 yuan.
In addition, the price of yoga pants from emerging sports brands such as Maia Active and Particle Fanatics is slightly higher, about 400 yuan, of which Maia Active "waist pants" are priced at over 800 yuan, and the price of the runaway loli yoga pants is 200 yuan. about.
Although brands such as Adidas and Maia active have high-priced yoga pants, there is a big gap between sales and lululemon.
The Beijing News Shell Finance reporter found on the Taobao platform that in the Lululemon official flagship store on Tmall, the monthly sales of a pair of sports leggings priced at 1180 yuan are 26 orders, and the monthly sales of sports leggings priced at 850 yuan are 3000 + orders.
In the official flagship store of Adidas Tmall, the monthly sales volume of a pair of sports leggings priced at 1,099 yuan is 3, and the monthly sales volume of sports leggings is 899 yuan.
In the Maia active Tmall flagship store, the monthly sales volume of "Waist Pants" priced at 839 yuan is 58 units, and the monthly sales volume of "Waist Pants" with the highest monthly sales in the store, exceeding 4000 units, is priced at 302 yuan.
In addition, the monthly sales volume of the 199 yuan loli yoga pants is 1,000+ orders, which is not as good as lululemon's monthly sales price of 850 yuan yoga pants.
In addition, the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter found on the e-commerce platform and Xiaohongshu that in the information search of yoga pants, there are many results such as "lululemon original factory" and "lululemon yoga pants flat replacement".
The prices of these flat replacement products range from one hundred yuan to several tens of yuan. Although the appearance is no different from brand yoga pants, there are big differences in the skin-friendly feel of the fabric and the degree of body modification.
capital
A number of "yoga pants" received financing part of nearly 100 million yuan
The market enthusiasm has attracted the attention of capital while attracting brands to enter the yoga pants track.
Maia Active recently announced that it has completed the C round of strategic financing invested by Belle International, with a financing amount of nearly 100 million yuan.
This is Maia Active's fourth round of financing since 2017.
In November 2021, cross-scene sports fashion brand RAW.J completed two consecutive rounds of tens of millions of yuan in financing from Gimpo Disu and Deju Brothers Venture Capital; in April, sports brand MOLY VIVI completed nearly 100 million yuan in A round of financing, Exclusive investment by Jingwei China; In November 2020, Particle Fanatics completed a 100 million yuan C round of financing exclusively invested by Hillhouse Ventures.
Public information shows that Maia Active was founded in 2016 and is positioned as a designer sportswear brand specifically for Asian women. "Waist pants" and "cloudy pants" are star items.
RAW.J was founded in 2020 and focuses on cross-scene women's fitness clothing. Its products include air vests, fitness leggings, sports sweaters and sports jackets.
MOLY VIVI was established in 2019, positioning itself as a high-tech sportswear brand, owning a number of series of women's fitness clothing such as MOLY VIVI FREE.
Founded in 2014, Particle Mania is positioned as an independent sports brand that takes into account functionality and high appearance. Its product series include zero sense, warming, golden section, antler line, etc.
Although the positioning and products of the above-mentioned four emerging sports brands that have received financing in the past two years are somewhat different, the sales channels remain consistent, and they are all online channels.
In addition to RAW.J, the other three brands have all laid out offline stores. Among them, Particle Fanatics opened offline stores in 2017. The official website shows that it currently has three stores in Shanghai and Beijing; MOLY VIVI will open in 2020 and is currently in Two stores have been opened in Shanghai.
Maia Active opened its first store in Xintiandi, Shanghai in 2019, officially laying out offline.
Maia Active will add 15 new stores in 2021. By the end of the year, it will have 18 directly-operated stores in the core business districts of 8 cities. It is expected that the number of offline stores will increase to 50 by the end of 2022.
Independence and not being defined are the main labels of some women's sportswear brands in marketing.
Particle Mania officially announced Zhou Xun as a global spokesperson in early December last year. Maia Active uses amateur models to replace celebrity endorsements to create a brand image.
In addition, Maia Active has also created a brand community, planning themed exploration activities in the cities where stores are set up, such as the popular paddle board yoga, Frisbee camping, etc., turning community activities into entertainment and social networking places.
Particle Mania also regularly organizes target consumers who love sports to participate in offline activities on different themes.
Brand interpretation
The success of the originator of yoga pants is difficult to replicate
Up to now, lululemon, known as the "originator of yoga pants", is undoubtedly the biggest winner.
In addition to the high customer unit price, there is also the high repurchase rate of consumers.
"Planting grass" lululemon yoga pants for more than a year, Bai Qing, who thinks he is sane, has bought 3 pairs of yoga pants, and his rough estimate is not less than 2,000 yuan.
And Changning, who got 4 pairs of yoga pants after being obsessed with lululemon for half a year, spent about 3,000 yuan to buy lululemon yoga pants.
The Beijing News Shell Finance reporter found on the Xiaohongshu platform that there are many consumers of lululemon yoga pants who are more enthusiastic than Bai Qing and Chang Ning, and some even spend 20,000 to 30,000 yuan in three months.
Create community operations, top fabric craftsmanship is difficult to "cottage"
With the support of "high customer unit price and high repurchase rate", lululemon, established in 1998, achieved explosive growth. Its market value rose from US$1.6 billion in the initial listing to US$46 billion (about 300 billion yuan) today, surpassing Adidas. , Becoming the "second runner-up" in the sports and leisure field second only to Nike.
Especially in 2020 when the epidemic broke out, lululemon still maintains a rapid expansion posture.
In fiscal year 2020, lululemon's revenue exceeded $4.4 billion.
As of the third quarter of fiscal 2021, lululemon has a total of 552 stores worldwide.
According to Cheng Weixiong, a brand management expert in the footwear industry and general manager of Shanghai Liangqi Brand Management Co., Ltd., the community operation model created by lululemon is a major reason for its success.
Through yoga coaches and other KOLs "plant grass", in-store staff recommendation, consumers to share product experience, tell stories around lifestyles, and subtly influence consumers' lifestyles and consumption scenarios.
Cheng Weixiong said that lululemon's mature lifestyle has created a potential atmosphere of "not wearing lululemon and being embarrassed to enter the yoga studio" in scenes such as yoga studios.
Bai Qing told the Beijing News Shell Finance reporter that such a phenomenon does exist in the yoga studio where she exercises, and everyone will quietly look at other people's clothes during class.
According to Bai Qing's observation, in her yoga studio, about 90% of yoga pants worn by yoga practitioners come from lululemon.
In addition, Cheng Weixiong also pointed out that lululemon's success is also due to its product attributes that cannot be counterfeited (that is, it has top-notch fabrics and craft designs), and the good interactivity of online and offline scenarios.
The Beijing News Shell Finance reporter noticed when visiting lululemon offline stores that the in-store salesman not only knew the value of his own brand and product features, but he was also an out-and-out sportsman. Consumers were communicating with these "educators". At that time, the resonance is very strong.
After being repeatedly challenged, why should domestic brands follow blindly?
Cheng Weixiong said that although lululemon has many imitators, its success is not reproducible.
Looking at the Chinese market, in the field of yoga pants, from the current brand premium, product quality and product supply chain, there is no domestic sports brand that can be compared with lululemon.
If lululemon is a brand at the top of the pyramid in the field of yoga pants, then the emerging domestic sportswear brands are at the waist or bottom at most.
In Cheng Weixiong's view, for emerging domestic sportswear brands, the key to imitating and learning lululemon is not the model but how to better understand the needs of the target user group and the interaction of offline channels.
"For a long time, the interaction of clothing products must return to a visible and touchable experience, especially for brand premium products. The experience is even more indispensable. Affected by the epidemic in the past two years, many Brands are accelerating online layout, but online channels are only an extension of experience or new channels brought by technological iterations. If companies use online channels as the only channel, there will be problems.” At the same time, he also pointed out that lululemon is in yoga. The status of the "shenzhen" in the field of clothing is not unshakable.
In fact, the brand has been facing challenges.
In addition to traditional sports brands that are slowly working in the same field, lululemon has been challenged by Vuori, a sportswear brand that focuses on men's yoga pants in the US market.
After receiving a US$400 million investment in the second phase of the SoftBank Vision Fund in October last year, the brand founded in 2015 took 6 years to achieve a total valuation of US$4 billion.
In fact, lululemon, which started as a service to female consumers, has long realized the limitations of focusing on a certain type of consumer group.
In 2017, two years after the establishment of Vuori, lululemon expanded its target consumer group to men. In 2019, it launched the first men's exclusive yoga wear.
As of the third quarter of 2021, lululemon's menswear business sales growth has exceeded that of women's clothing business.
Lululemon said that the plan to double the menswear business by 2023 is being realized ahead of schedule.
In addition, lululemon is also expanding its categories, in addition to sportswear, it also launched a personal care category, acquired a fitness equipment company, and plans to launch footwear products in 2022.
For emerging domestic sportswear brands, Cheng Weixiong also has the same advice as lululemon’s business layout logic: “Sports segmentation scenes are very diversified. The development direction that meets the needs of the brand's target users can be neutral in the industry."
Beijing News reporter Wang Zhenzhen