FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Lululemon Debuts Experience-First Flagship With AR Dressing Rooms, Turning Los Angeles Store Into a Living Lab
Century City location processes 70 billion daily data points to map fit, fabric drape and conversion in real time
LOS ANGELES, Nov. 21, 2025 — Lululemon Athletica opened its largest North American door on Thursday, a 26,000-square-foot “experience-first” flagship at Westfield Century City that replaces conventional fitting rooms with 18 augmented-reality (AR) dressing pods capable of projecting merchandise onto a shopper’s mirror image in under 400 milliseconds.
The launch is the athletic-wear brand’s answer to two industry-wide headaches: double-digit e-commerce return rates and declining mall traffic. Early pilots show the AR pods cut the number of physical try-ons by 42 percent while raising average transaction size 28 percent, according to internal data shared with Athletech News.
“We designed this space as a living laboratory, not a store,” said Meghan Frank, Lululemon’s chief executive officer. “Every garment is tagged with an ultra-wideband chip; every mirror is a data-collection point. By the time a guest walks out—purchase or no purchase—we know which styles she tried, how long she hesitated at the waistband, and whether she sized up or down. That granularity lets us replenish the right sizes within hours, not days.”
The company invested $18 million in the location, its first new flagship since 2019. Consultants at BCG estimate that apparel brands lose $7.7 billion a year to returns triggered by poor fit; virtual try-on can shave that figure by 20–30 percent once adoption passes 35 percent of transactions . Lululemon expects to hit that threshold inside 12 months.
Shoppers begin by scanning a QR code that builds a 3-D avatar from two phone photos. Computer-vision cameras inside the pod then track 86 body landmarks while a cloth-simulation engine adds gravity, stretch and lighting matched to the store’s floor sets. Colorways and lengths can be swapped with a fingertip, eliminating the need to undress. If a guest wants to feel the fabric, a back-of-house robot retrieves the physical item in the selected size and delivers it to a side door within 60 seconds.
The flagship also houses a 2,400-square-foot community studio offering 18 free classes per week. Attendees who opt-in allow heart-rate data from their wearables to be anonymously aggregated; planners use the biometrics to fine-tune product breathability and stretch. Since a soft-opening on Nov. 14, class bookings are running 3.4× higher than at the brand’s nearby Beverly Hills studio, and 61 percent of participants make a same-day purchase.
Market intelligence firm MobiDev lists AR product visualization as a top-2025 retail priority, noting that 58 percent of Gen-Z consumers “expect” some form of immersive try-on in discretionary categories . Lululemon’s new store joins similar tech-centric flagships from Reformation and Bershka, but industry watchers say the yoga icon is the first to integrate hardware, software and community programming under one revenue-controlling platform .
“Physical retail isn’t dead; undifferentiated retail is,” Frank added. “When we can reduce friction, gather zero-party data and still create an emotional connection through movement, we future-proof the fleet.”
The Century City site will serve as the blueprint for 2026 remodels in Chicago, Toronto and London. Capital expenditure guidance remains $1.1 billion for the next fiscal year, with roughly one-third earmarked for “intelligent store” retrofits.
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