In lululemon’s earliest stores, they often had physical cork boards in their stores that guests would use to post events and sign up to events. lululemon Wanderwell is a visionary concept that functions as a guest’s digitized, personalized community wellness events cork board. I worked across both my Thoughtworks product team and lululemon’s Digital and Omni Futures team in developing the concept. lululemon hired our team on contract to research concepts that could address the question – How might we create and strengthen enduring relationships with guests using behavioural design, motivation principles and gamification?
Product design and strategy
Fall 2023
1 PM, 1 Researcher and 2 Engineers
The business outcome we were focused on was how to increase a guest’s lifetime value. Guest’s would often use the lululemon app to purchase products, and in-between purchases they wouldn't engage with the app whatsoever. lululemon wanted to explore opportunities to re-engage guests in between their purchases.
Our team’s goal was to take a handful of concept spaces that lululemon had garnered signal around through past studies, e.g., “a secret, exclusive lululemon club,” and “a map of wellness activities in your area,” and arrive at one, validated concept prototype that we could then beta test in key markets.
Sweat profiles exploration
One of the personalization concepts we tested explored how some guests, when it came to their fitness routines, would have multiple archetypes. Therefore, we hypothesized that guest's would be more interested in a personalized set of categories of wellness activities.
Our team structured our research into 3 iterative sprints. We started broad with a generative, low-fidelity sprint, and then used insights from each sprint to persevere, pivot or park key features of each of the concepts. In total, our research included 50 participants, primarily via methods like user interviews, surveys and in-person wizard of oz testing.
Our Wanderwell prototype was built and shipped as a beta test to major U.S. markets, including Miami and New York. The success metric we used for the beta test was to benchmark Wanderwell against the current “Classes” feature in the lululemon app, which guest's interacted with ~2-5% of the time. If we could show that Wanderwell was being engaged with significantly more often than Classes, then lululemon would consider replacing it with Wanderwell. The beta test is still in progress as of January 2025.
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We also secured a patent for the daily pulse interaction, which was designed as a way to both engage guests and collect data on their preferences to further personalize their activity feed.
