How to Stay up to Date on The Latest New Products and Previews for Lululemon

As lulu fans, we like to stay on top of what’s coming.  Besides just being exciting, knowing what’s new and what’s coming helps us to curate our collections to be extra-amazing.  I mean, that’s probably at least part of why you’re here right?  Today, I’m sharing the tricks I use personally for myself and for this blog to get all the latest info.  Armed with this post, you can inundate yourself with as much or as little lulu news as you find relevant and useful.

Weekly Uploads Around the World

First, of course: new products for US and Canada are uploaded to lulu’s website every Tuesday, currently at 6:45 ET/3:45 PT.

On top of that, international uploads are a great way to get some sneak peeks of what’s coming to North America, although you cannot order from any country except your own, unless you have a local address or a friend.  Australia/NZ uploads go up in the very early morning hours Monday (North American time), so for anyone in North America, it’s basically up first thing in the morning.  This is Monday evening local time.  Take note that because the seasons are flipped in the southern hemisphere, what you see down under isn’t necessarily a guarantee of what’ll reach the US and Canada.

Asia Pacific (Hong Kong, Singapore, etc) and Europe get uploads Tuesday.  Europe’s upload is live Tuesday mornings, which I check at lululemon.co.uk.  Though I’m not sure of the exact time, it’s generally up as soon as I remember to check it.  Asia Pacific is usually updated between the hours of noon and 3p Pacific time (the exact time is not consistent), at lululemon.com.hk.  These uploads are, roughly, very late night Tuesday local Asia time and Tuesday afternoon local Europe time.  The goods on these uploads tend to match up with North American product drops pretty well, although sometimes lulu keeps us waiting for weeks.

Take note: these days and times are subject to change.  Some weeks, IT issues delay product drops.  Also, local holidays can affect timing.  And of course, sometimes uploads end up randomly being at different times for reasons only lulu HQ knows.  This is just info that I’ve gathered as an observant fan, I obviously don’t determine the times myself.

In-Store Product Drops

Stores generally receive new product shipments on Mondays and Thursdays each week.  Individual stores can vary, and some stores don’t put product out on the floor until the day after they’ve received them.

Some stores will post pics of new products on their Facebook pages, which is sometimes the first look at new products that aren’t yet online anywhere.  If you’re like me and don’t live near a store, being able to see what’s new in stores is great.  Seeing the products on different bodies can be a big factor in persuading you to buy or not buy an item, since store pics help you get a sense of how it looks in “real life” on a variety of body types.  If an item isn’t available online, being aware of what’s in stores can also help you know when and who to call when you need to get an item shipped to you from a store.  Overall, this source of news can be really helpful, but is also the least straightforward to obtain.

You might think that you’d have to like each store’s individual Facebook page to get updates, but that’s actually not a good solution for a few reasons.  Most importantly, Facebook uses algorithms to pick and choose which posts show up in your news feed, as opposed to showing you all posts made by your friends, groups, and liked pages in chronological order.  This means you won’t necessarily see the lulu store posts in a timely manner, if they show up in your feed at all.

Fortunately, there’s another way to effectively find posts that keeps your news feed clean and tidy, and it comes in the form of Facebook’s little-known feature called interest lists.  Using this feature, you can create a feed of any collection of pages you want.  You don’t have to like a page to include it on a list.  This feed aggregates posts from all the pages you selected into one place  It shows all posts in chronological order and in real time (basically, it’s an RSS feed).

When I first created my store feed, I painstakingly cross-referenced lululemon’s store finder, searching for and adding the Facebook page for each individual lulu location.  This took several hours on the front end, but fortunately, the bulk of the work only has to be done once!

Luckily, if you don’t want to go to the trouble of creating your own store feed, interest lists can be shared!  Here is the link to my store feed, which includes all lululemon stores, showrooms, and outlets around the world (currently, almost 400!).  I also have a list of US stores only, Canada stores only, and international stores for cleaner, more specific browsing (disclaimer: I don’t always keep up with these as much as I do the main feed so it may be missing a few).

If you click the “follow” button, a link to the interest list will be added to the “interests” section of your Facebook sidebar.  In case you’re wondering, following a list will not add it to your news feed; it is a completely separate feed.  You can simply click on the link under your interests anytime you want to scroll through the feed. (I don’t believe following interest lists is publicized anywhere on your profile, if that’s something you are worried about.) For even easier access on your Facebook dashboard, you can click the gear and “add to favorites”, which will bump the link to the feed up into “favorites” section at the top section of your sidebar.  Of course, you could also simply bookmark the list page or save the link elsewhere.

Be warned: there are A LOT of posts, and they aren’t necessarily all relevant.  But if you want to see as much pictures and info as possible in real time, this is the place to find it!

Note: you do have to have a facebook account to view and use this feed.  I’d like to also have another method to pull the feeds from Facebook into a third party client, but I don’t currently have that set up.

Weekly “What We Love” Previews

On Thursday evenings, Katelin from lululemon HQ posts a collections of product previews showing exactly what will be on upload the following week.  These posts refer to what’s going to be online, not necessarily what’s in stores (in some cases, the previews are things that already arrived in stores).  These posts are hosted on heylululemon, lulu’s feedback forum.  Katelin typically posts these previews on Thursdays around 3-5p Pacific time, and the easiest way I’ve found to check if it’s been posted is to go to Katelin’s heylululemon user profile and take a look at her latest posts.

Other Timing to Note

Typically, the first upload of the month is the largest.  Generally, this is when you’ll see the most new colors and new styles compared to the rest of the month.

Besides monthly fluctuations, at the start of each season, there’s an especially huge bombardment of new products and previews.  The start of the seasons for lulu’s purposes are every 3 months, namely February, May, August, and November for spring, summer, fall, and winter, respectively.  On the first Monday/Tuesday of these months, product drops in stores and in all uploads around the world are especially huge.  On top of that, lulu changes the product banners in each section of their site to reflect the new season.  These changes coincide with the first upload of these months, and you can navigate through all the sections of the website (e.g., tops, shorts, etc) to look for sneak peeks of new products.

Also around this time, lulu will release a sneak peek video on YouTube for the season.  Visit their YouTube channel to check up on their latest video uploads.  The timing of these videos can vary.  Sometimes it’s a week or two before the season’s start, and sometimes it’s a week or two after.  For their most recent video for summer ’15, they actually posted it to the main lululemon Facebook page before publishing it anywhere else, so keep an eye on that page around season change time, too.

In Sum

I hope you’ve found this info helpful and that it’s clarified how and when lulu news actually happens.  As a bonus, I created a couple graphics to sum up the high points of this post.  Feel free to print them out, share them, pin them, wallpaper your living room with them, use them as fireplace kindling, or whatever you like.

 

Quick reference guide for overall news timing

The all-important upload time