Lululemon on the benefits of the letter L

That's a lot of tree poses. Photo:Lululemon

by Eli Altman

A friend of mine forwarded me a great article in New York Magazine about Lululemon. The article discusses the evolution of the Lulu brand, as well as a bunch of interesting company quirks and practices. To my surprise, there is also a cool bit on how the founder, Chip Wilson, came up with the name Lululemon:

“One of his previous brands had an L in it, which proved popular in Japan, possibly because the el sound does not exist in Japanese, and thus the brand was considered authentically Western. When he decided to do a yoga line, Wilson challenged himself to put as many L’s in one name as possible and came up with Lululemon.”

This sounds like a fun way to go about naming–it certainly yielded a fun and interesting name.

While Lululemon hasn’t opened a store in Japan yet, they do have a showroom in Hong Kong. So while we don’t know if the ‘L’ strategy will work in Japan, it certainly seems to be working everywhere else.