Interview of the month : Stephen Spencer, Director Of Real Estate Development for Europe

Data can be highly instructive, provided the analysis models are genuinely custom built

Lululemon, the Canadian maker of high-end athletic apparel, is expanding its fleet of shops in Europe, with the help of CBRE. The brand’s Director Of Real Estate Development for Europe, Stephen Spencer, tells us about the advantages of Calibrate, a revolutionary market research tool developed by CBRE.



What is your strategy for store openings in Europe?

We already have a strong presence in the UK and we’re moving forward in a certain number of countries in Western and Northern Europe. We start by opening showrooms to establish a first contact with guests, building our community and introducing who we are and what we stand for, once we have been in the market for a period of time we will open a store. Paris is one of the cities we are actively exploring right now. We have several showrooms in the city and the signals we get show we are being pulled into the the market as our community grows and the love for a sweat life expands.

CBRE is your exclusive partner in Europe and you are using its tool called Calibrate. What do you think?

We were one of the first to use it, starting in London. Working together, we built a tool tailored to our request, according to our criteria. For example, we want to rank the sectors we study according to spending levels not just for sports apparel but also in the breakdown for performance clothing as well. And we have precise questions about co-tenants, we need to know where the fitness studios are… Calibrate tells us what other sectors consumers in our targeted zone also visit. Cross-referencing that kind of information is essential to our analysis.

At the same time, this amazing amount of data has to be screened and so we concentrate on the truly pertinent elements for our brand […] and that can be summarized in a 5 to 6-page study.

To what extent do new technologies and the data they provide influence your site selection process?

For us, its’ very important, provided the analysis models we use are genuinely custom-built. We know how to build the profile of our guests via detailed indicators such as their consumption of healthy foods, for example, their membership at sports clubs, do they practice yoga and meditation, etc. Checking if this type of profile is present enough in a given geographic sector, according to the data provided by a tool like Calibrate, is the most objective way of knowing if we will reach our target clientele. We compare this information with what the people on the ground [Ed.: showrooms] have to say and with the data from our e-commerce site. If they are telling us the same story, we know we are ready.

But then it takes patience: once we have so perfectly targeted our location, we don’t want to go anywhere else! So, we have to wait for the right opportunity.