Don’t be a Lululemon, Cover Yourself and Your Consumers
Once again Lululemon is in the news for angering their once devoted following. This most recent fallout comes shortly after Lululemon chose to patch and resell their infamous see through yoga tights. From a PR and brand management perspective, there are a lot of lessons to learn from this year of Lululemon gaffes. What about the reporting processes that contributed to this mess? Looking at the sequence of events that led up to the initial recall, there were signs consumers were getting frustrated with the decline in the quality of Lululemon’s products. Why did it take them so long to address the quality concerns? Could they have acted sooner if they had been tracking quality feedback more efficiently?
According to Lululemon, they didn’t know about the defective tights until retail store managers brought it to their attention during a weekly call in early March of 2013. Prior to that meeting, Lululemon claimed customer complaints regarding sheerness were about 1%, but in early March that jumped to 12%. Once the concerns were brought to everyone’s attention, a recall was put into place for the 17% of pants that were supposedly impacted. They then went about blaming the quality issues on the manufacturer, their own testing procedures and eventually women’s bodies and how they use the pants. The debacle was projected to cost them $67 million in revenue for 2013.
Digging around online, it’s easy to find consumer complaints about product quality for Lululemon’s tights that date back further than 2013. Looking at the complaints section on Lululemon’s blog post about the recall shows consumers had quality concerns for a while, and about more products than just the black pants in the recall.
What can retailers learn from this example besides never ever blaming your customers for quality issues? Here at PolyVista, we don’t think a retailer should ever be in the vulnerable position of being this exposed. Your brand doesn’t have to be compromised like this, ever. By implementing a product quality and consumer complaint alerting system like PolyVista Alerts+, you can avoid the time lapse between consumer concerns being captured and a manager getting around to telling leadership about it. Data within your customer’s complaints could help you avoid quality issues like this. Don’t make the mistake of thinking about customer complaints as just a customer service issue, use them to help you maintain quality control and to protect your brand’s image.
