We landed in Vancouver last week and are very impressed by the city and the people here. We tried a nice neighborhood bar “Stockroom” and met some locals who were NOT IN TECH - finally out of the San Francisco bubble. We discussed the food truck business (more on that in the next post), bartending and of course Lululemon :)
Inspired by Lululemon HQ - Vancouver is the brith place of Lululemon, coming out of SF pushed me to think beyond tech and read more. Lululemon is actually a solid example of “blitzscaling” its a $43Bn company i.e grown 5x the the last 5 years using fabric and design innovation, their community and technology
Sharing a quick tldr on their journey:
1. [Launch] Founded in 1998-2000 by Chip Wilson as just a yoga pant brand opened its first store in Vancouver
2. [PMF] 2002 People started loving Lululemon and won the mot Innovative Retailer of the year. Finding Product Market fit in both the product (the yoga pants and apparel) and in their D2C (direct to consumer) business model
3. [Get Ready to Scale] 2004-2008 Opened stores outside Canada in United States, Japan, launched new product, fabrics and a tech enabled supply chains and consumer app (web/mobile).
4. [Blizscaling] - 2008+ 137 stores by 2012 to 500+ stores in 2022, with 50% of its sales coming from e-commerce (web/mobile)
These offline to online or offline first stories inspire me a lot as they are in an intersection of an inspiring founding team, meeting operational hustlers and later using tech to scale to globally.
Last few months, I am spending a lot of time in learning about offline products/businesses which can be transformed using tech. My most recent discussion was about a small bank (credit union) in Canada it was amazing to see the potential to transform the business with basic tech (forget state of the art AI).
Product Management as a discipline is very powerful, I really want to use the learning from Consumer tech and transform old traditional offline businesses. Hit me up if you are interested or are aware of any such problem/product/service or a biz.