Yoga pants’ recall: Least a company can do to protect its bottomline

Product recalls are fairly commonplace. However, recalling yoga pants is stretching it a bit. One batch of Canadian company Lululemon’s best-selling exercise bottoms arrived on shelves too transparent for comfort, even though there was no change in either material or supplier.


Maybe the difference between “form-fitting” and “tight” and between “seethrough” and “revealing” proved to be too thin for the offshore manufacturers to figure out.

The buyer dismay harked back to Elvis’ 1967 crooning: How can I take this yoga serious, when all it gives me is a pain in the posteriors? With yoga pegged as one of the top 10 fastest-growing industries in the US — along with self-tanning products, social network game development and hot sauce production, among others — the brand’s sales have quadrupled and share price grown 740% in four years.

Thus, the recall over transparency issues — and the consequent fear of indefinite shortages affecting the company’s own bottomline — causing its stock prices to do a sirsasana requires to be internalised with yogic levels of equanimity. While the company’s products have gained a close-knit bunch of customers, it does seem that its shareholders’ chakras are not entirely aligned with the company’s motto, “Friends are more important than money….”