Dive Brief:
-
Lululemon and Williams-Sonoma this week unveiled a “Ivivva for PBteen” capsule collection of home decor items aimed at tween and teenage girls. Items are for sale at PBteen stores and online at PBteen.com, with an assortment sold in select Ivivva stores and online at ivivva.com, the companies said in a press release.
-
The collection includes more than 40 pieces, including furniture, bedding and decorative accessories, in signature prints from Ivivva’s Fall 2017 season.
-
After the tie-up with PBteen was announced in March, Lululemon last month said it would restructure its kids unit by closing 40 of its 55 Ivivva-branded stores and converting half of the remainder to flagship Lululemon-branded stores; eight Ivivva locations remain open.
Dive Insight:
Because of Lululemon's wind-down of its Ivivva operations, more of this collection will be found online than the companies may have initially envisioned. But that may not not deter consumers much, considering consumers' growing willingness to shop for furniture online and the attempts of furniture retailers like West Elm to bring social media and mobile into the market. Online furniture sales have emerged as a major growth area in e-commerce, rising 18% in 2015, second only to grocery, according to research from Barclays. Some 15% of $70 billion in U.S. furniture sales are now online, according to IBISWorld data.
Target, Amazon and even Ikea — which has been slow to e-commerce — have joined Wayfair and stalwart Pottery Barn in moving to take advantage of consumers’ openness to shop online for larger and bigger-ticket items. Ikea for years largely eschewed e-commerce, conducting the vast majority of its business through its big-box stores and print catalog. The strategy has slowed the retailer’s overall growth, and after reporting overall online sales growth of just 0.4% in 2014, Ikea pledged to increase e-commerce from about €1 billion (roughly $1.1 billion) per year to at least €5 billion (roughly $5.7 billion) in the next five years, in order to meet its targeted sustained overall growth rate of 10% per year.
The partnership between Lululemon and Ivivva benefits from synergistic branding, with both aimed at the tween and teen girl demographic, boosted by the empowerment vibe from Lululemon's Ivivva. “We believe that girls are unstoppable and we are excited that they can now express themselves by creating an Ivivva bedroom space that inspires them to dream big and achieve their goals,” Lululemon Vice President of Sales Partnerships Kristy Maynes said in a statement.
