A Design Studio That Was a Yoga Studio at Night

In 1998, in Vancouver, Chip Wilson watched women doing yoga in cotton clothing and noticed that it was not working. Cotton soaks up sweat, gets heavy, goes transparent and loses its shape.

That is the founding observation of a company now worth many billions of dollars. Cotton is bad at yoga.

It is worth dwelling on how small that is. It is not a vision for a category. It is not an insight about wellness culture or a thesis about the future of retail. It is a complaint, it is specific, and it was checkable that afternoon by anybody in the room.

Now ask why no large sportswear company had done anything about it. They had better materials science, more money and existing factories. They had all of it.

They had not done anything because yoga was small. There were not enough people doing it, in 1998, to matter to a company of that size, and the returns from fixing it were invisible on a spreadsheet at head office.

Which is precisely why it was available.

That is the general shape of the opportunity for a new brand, and it recurs throughout this subject. You are not going to beat an incumbent at scale, speed, price or reach. What you can do is serve a group that is currently too small to be worth their attention, completely, in a way they would notice instantly if they were in the room. And the largest companies, structurally, cannot be in the room.

Then the first space, which is my favourite detail in this chapter.

It was a design studio during the day and a yoga studio in the evenings, partly because the classes helped cover the rent.

Read what that arrangement actually does. Every evening, the person designing the clothes is in a room full of the exact people the clothes are for, watching them move in them, for hours, for free, while also collecting rent.

Most companies would pay a research agency a great deal of money for a worse version of that, conducted quarterly, filtered through a slide deck, three months late.

He gave product to instructors and rebuilt it on what they told him. And the distinction that matters, the one this chapter is really about, is in how he used them.

An ambassador who is paid to wear something will tell you it is great. An instructor teaching four classes a day in a prototype will tell you the waistband rolls down in a forward fold, that the seam rubs after forty minutes, and that the fabric goes see-through when you bend. That is not an endorsement. It is a field test, and it is worth more.

A real ambassador programme is product development and distribution arriving in the same person. The instructor tests the garment, and the instructor is also the most credible voice in a room of forty local customers every single week.

The first shop opened in Kitsilano in 2000 and was built to be a place people gathered rather than a place transactions occurred. Classes after hours. Ambassadors from studios nearby. Somewhere to go rather than somewhere to buy.

If that sounds familiar it is because Kith arrives at exactly the same conclusion about a decade later, from streetwear rather than yoga, and calls it retail as hospitality. Two brands with nothing in common, starting from different problems in different cities, both worked out that the shop should be a destination and the selling should happen inside the visit.

When two people who have never met solve the same problem the same way, that is usually a sign the answer is structural rather than clever.