I think about Lululemon a lot professionally because they're the perfect case study in 'the product isn't the product.' Their leggings are good. But are they four-times-the-price-of-alternatives good? In a purely material sense, no. You're paying for something else entirely.
What Lululemon built is a community infrastructure that turns customers into ambassadors without paying them. The in-store yoga classes. The local running clubs. The ambassador program that elevates local fitness personalities. The goal-setting sweatlife events. None of this is about selling yoga pants. All of it is about making the brand a third place for fitness-oriented people.
None of this is about selling yoga pants.
This is brutally difficult to replicate and their competitors keep trying and failing. You can't committee-decide your way into authentic community. Lululemon's community happened because the brand was genuinely built by people who lived the lifestyle. The employees are the community. It's not a program you can bolt on to any athletic brand.
I'm working on something adjacent to this right now at Nemo, a project where the client wants to build community around their brand and the first conversation was: 'are your people actually in this community, or are you trying to infiltrate someone else's?' That question separates the Lululemons from the pretenders.
Community as moat only works when the community would exist even without the products. Lululemon's people would still run together if the brand disappeared. That's real. Most brand 'communities' would vaporize the moment the incentives stopped. That's marketing.