Thursday, April 04, 2013

A company that gets it

Yoga attire (hey Boo-Boo, let's get ourselves a picnic basket!) maker Lululemon has apparently invited their chief product executive to "pursue other opportunities."  Like too many other product managers, this executive thought that her path to fame and fortune was in making the product monotonically cheaper, in this case by making the knit fabric lighter and lighter and lighter.....

Unfortunately for the company, they didn't see through this rather transparent scheme (sorry, couldn't resist) until it was too late, but at least they're doing the right thing now.

Side note; if you guessed that many product managers earn the contempt of quality engineers by doing this, you would be correct.

Side note 2: if you guessed that my family of knitters is incredulous that a chief product executive wouldn't be able to figure out that a particular knit fabric would be see-through, you would also be correct.

2 comments:

Ray D. said...

Wow, don't they even have a test department that would catch this before they had to do the recall?

Or, perhaps they thought that see through yoga pants would increase male interest in yoga?

Bike Bubba said...

I'm guessing that they (a) put the pants on direct to stock after a few good shipments and (b) didn't ever develop a good test for opaqueness of their fabrics.

For (b), consider the number of celebrities who have learned too late that their stretch poly dresses were transparent during flash photography. Either somebody wants the attention, or people haven't learned to care about the problem.