Going down Main St. in downtown Chico, locals may have noticed that the once brightly colored teal storefront of LuLu’s Fashion Lounge has been replaced with pink and black decor and a sign spelling out “The Fashion Lounge.”
After 13 years of selling juniors clothing to Chico residents, LuLu’s owners Debra Cannon and her daughter Colleen Winter decided it was time to close the store and focus on their strongest asset, LuLu’s Web site.
“We loved being downtown and having our store, but on the other hand our Web site was growing,” Cannon said. “We felt like we weren’t giving the store our best attention because we were spending so much more energy on the Web site.”
The Web site has a wide variety of products with everything from shoes to jewelry to hair accessories to clothing. They already had a warehouse on Humboldt Ave, so the transition wasn’t too difficult once they found someone to turn the store over to. On July 1, 2009 they handed their trendy fashion boutique over to the new owner, Anita Jacobson.
The decision to sell the store came down to numbers. Selling online gave them an unlimited amount of people to reach with their product. Currently they have almost 200,000 registered customers and the majority of them aren’t from Northern California.
“In Chico you have your audience of so many people that are here and the people that come out of town and it’s a finite number,” she said. “Online, the more you market, the more people that find you.”
LuLu’s has gained a huge cliental throughout the country. They ship out between 400 to 1000 packages daily with 74 percent of their packages being sent to the East Coast. They even ship to international customers.
Their huge cliental base was gained through many avenues of marketing. LuLu’s has been featured in several popular magazines, such as Self, Country Living, Lucky, Glamour, Teen Vogue, Seventeen and Cosmopolitan. They have also made a huge presence in social marketing sites like Twitter and Facebook.
“Due to marketing and wonderful magazine editorial coverage we now have a population of customers that previously had no knowledge of us and it grows daily,” Cannon said.
Currently LuLu’s is redesigning its Web site to be even more socially interactive, she said. Customers will soon be able to review products, post a photo to their customer profile, see star ratings of all products and share their favorite items more easily with friends and family. They are also working on creating more contests and videos on their blog, Twitter and Facebook.
The main reasons people are attracted to LuLu’s products are the current styles at great price points. Most of the products they sell range between $30 to $60.
“The designers that we deal with knock off the latest fashions really quickly. So you might see something on the runway from Marc Jacobs and then we have something similar the next week for $35,” she said.
Keeping styles in the moment has been the key to LuLu’s success, Cannon said. They update their Web site daily with new products and send out e-mails to their customers twice a week. They also just launched a lookbook, which will feature outfits for current trends.
Many locals are already missing the signature LuLu’s T-shirts and cute clothing the store brought to Chico, but luckily their products aren’t out of reach.
Many of their clothes can be found in Trucker, another family owned business in downtown Chico, or of course on the Web site, www.lulus.com. The owners have no plans of opening another store in the future.
“We have opened our store to the world,” Cannon said. “The potential there is unlimited.”
To find out more about LuLu’s, visit lulus.com.
By Kayla Cook
