Lululemon Athletica is a company based out of Canada. It is a retailer in athletic apparel and is headquartered in Vancouver. It started as a company that sold just yoga pants and other yoga products in 1998. It has now expanded to selling athletic wear, accessories, and lifestyle apparel. The company retails internationally as well as on the internet. As of today, the company owns 491 stores in the USA and around the world. Today’s topic- Lululemon Case Study.
Lululemon Athletica, based out of Vancouver, Canada, is a public company founded by Chip Wilson in 1998, 23 years ago. The first store officially opened in November 2000. They integrated Amazon Web Sevices into their work environment to automate a lot of their functions. They run their development and test environments on the AWS Cloud. A detailed case study regarding its partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS) shall ensue through the course of this article.
Need for Automation
In an age of e-commerce, it is a fact that digital services need to be top-notch and have to be constantly updated for users to continue using the platform. Sam Keen, the director of product architecture at Lululemon, recognized this need and decided that Lululemon had to push out new applications and their updated features as fast as possible. However, the company could not perform at a quick pace as its IT environment was not as big as it needed to be to push out features and updates fast enough. It took them days together just to test new features and develop environments. They were spending too much on the same, and the whole segment was not cost-productive. Small-scale experiments also ended up taking too long to produce definitive results.
The solution was to streamline all their processes towards continuous integrations and delivery focus. The idea was to automate as many processes as possible and simplify management. The development processes were time-consuming and were easily replaceable by automation software. The company found it more cost-effective and productive to invest in an automation service such as AWS than manually conducting all the processes by themselves.
Reason for Choosing AWS
Amazon Web Services is the market leader in cloud computing and automation services. It was a reliable company and provided timely solutions and automation services. Keen had worked with AWS in other companies and was impressed by the efficiency of the service. He always had great experiences with the service provided by AWS and said that the breadth of the services offered by them is unparalleled. Due to this high rate of efficiency, it gives the company more time on product codebases instead of wasting time on maintaining queuing solutions.
Lululemon has subscribed to multiple services provided by AWS, such as their AWS Cloud Formation, Amazon Simple Storage Service, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Cognito, and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud:
- AWS CloudFormation- Lululemon makes use of this service’s templates for the definition of their development environment. All products they deploy, whether in production or development, are spearheaded by this service.
- Amazon Simple Storage Service- certain immutable components provided by this service do not require additional deployment. Lululemon has adopted this service and makes good use of these immutable components.
- AWS CodePipeline- this is a delivery service that provides a quick and continuous delivery service that deploys these immutable components to servers. This application gives fast updates on the application.
- AWS Elastic Beanstalk- those elements and artifacts are delivered to this service, which helps deploy and scale web applications and services.
- Amazon Cognito- this service helps Lululemon create special identities for its users. They get authenticated through internal user pools.
- Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud- Lululemon intends to make a user application on the AWS cloud for its customers and is using this service to fulfill this.
Benefits
The main benefit of adopting AWS is how smoothly it automates so many of the company’s processes. The automation has largely helped Lululemon decrease the time it spends on development. For example, Lululemon used to take two days to build a production account. However, with Amazon’s AWS CloudFormation and AWS CodePipeline, they can finish that process in minutes. This has allowed them to launch multiple small-scale projects in a very short period and cost significantly less. This has allowed them to expend their resources in other areas rather than settle for the minimum they can do.
Lululemon has been able to allocate its workforce better as fewer steps now require manual intervention. Foreseeability has also improved with the introduction of AWS CloudFormation. The potential impact of any change in infrastructure is predictable by the company, and that change in infrastructure just has to happen in one place. There is a great value addition that this Amazon service provides to Lululemon’s developers.
The automation of Lululemon’s deployment pipeline and continuous integration by AWS has largely benefitted Lululemon as it has improved the company’s development system transparency. Without the services provided by AWS, that level of transparency and simplicity was not plausible under the previous conditions the company’s developers worked under.
Conclusion
Lululemon has significantly benefited from the services provided by Amazon Web Services. The services have enabled extensive automation in the product development segment of Lululemon; the company has been able to allocate its resources better due to the major load off its shoulders. It would be wise for companies aiming for efficiency to adopt Amazon Web Services as it is clear that it shall save companies a lot of valuable time.
Frequently Asked Questions
- What is the main focus of sales at Lululemon Athletica?
The long list of apparel sold by Lululemon includes yoga pants, tops, sweaters, shorts, undergarments, and shorts. They also sell bags, hair accessories, water bottles, and yoga mats.
- What are the services that Lululemon makes use of from AWS?
Lululemon has subscribed to multiple services provided by AWS, such as their AWS Cloud Formation, Amazon Simple Storage Service, AWS CodePipeline, AWS Elastic Beanstalk, Amazon Cognito, and AWS Elastic Compute Cloud.
