Lululemon eavesdrops on its customers in fitting rooms

In 2012, a curious detail about Lululemon's retail playbook surfaced: the yoga-apparel company deliberately positioned its employees to eavesdrop on customers in and around its fitting rooms.

It was not accidental overhearing. According to a business-ethics case study of the company (the Daniels Fund Ethics Initiative's profile of Lululemon), the retailer trained store employees to listen in on shoppers as a deliberate alternative to spending on marketing software or sending out survey requests. Stores set up their clothes-folding tables next to the fitting rooms so that employees could better overhear complaints and observations \u2014 product intelligence gathered at retail's most candid moment, when a customer muttering to herself in a fitting room is at her most honest.

Then-CEO Christine Day was reportedly the practice's most famous practitioner: she spent much of her time in retail stores, posing as an ordinary customer, listening to complaints and observing shopping habits firsthand.

The company framed it as radical customer intimacy \u2014 a way to keep a close, open relationship with shoppers without hoovering up data the big-data way. Critics saw something less flattering: a brand that prized its pipeline of unguarded customer feedback over the basic expectation that what you mutter in a fitting room stays in the fitting room.

Whether it was smart marketing or a privacy overreach depended on who you asked. But it was, by all accounts, deliberate \u2014 and it worked. Lululemon built one of retail's most loyal customer bases on exactly this kind of obsessive, on-the-ground listening.

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