Inside Lululemon ‘Well-being Playground’ at CIIE In Shanghai

After creating a larger-than-life unrolled yoga mat for last year’s CIIE expo, Lululemon unveiled a “well-being playground” for this year’s CIIE.

The athleisure brand’s two-story booth — filled with vibrant colors and playful elements — is meant to invite both professional guests and consumers to “move, play and experience a state of well-being where body and mind move as one,” said the brand in a statement.

As visitors enter the booth, they are first greeted by “Shrinking Runners,” a large-scale art piece created by the artist Geoff McFetridge, before seeing the brand’s hero products across six key categories — including Yoga, Run, Train, Tennis, Golf and Lifestyle. Visitors can also discover the 10-year evolution of the Align franchise, one synonymous with the brand.

With an emphasis on holistic well-being, an area of the pavilion is dedicated to the brand’s 2025 China Wellbeing Report, while a listening station is dedicated to podcasts focused on well-being.

“It’s an honor to be back at the CIIE, and we look forward to connecting with more guests,” said Calvin McDonald, chief executive officer of Lululemon, via a video presentation.

“Our goal is not just to grow in China, but to grow with China. We are firmly committed to a long-term presence in this market, contributing to the Healthy China 2030 initiative,” McDonald added, referring to a national policy framework that outlines the goal of having 530 million Chinese residents regularly participating in physical exercise over the next five years.

Banking on China’s growth opportunity, Lululemon recently leased an entire office block at Xuhui District’s Westbund Central property, which serves as its store support center. 

“As a multinational company registered in Xuhui District, Lululemon actively participates in building the city’s cultural, commercial, tourism, and sports ecosystem,” Xuhui’s District Mayor Wang Hua said at the Lululemon pavilion’s opening ceremony.

Despite macro headwinds, Lululemon stood out in the market for achieving double-digit topline growth.

During the second quarter, sales grew 25 percent to $393 million in mainland China, now the brand’s second-largest market.

According to Bernstein, Lululemon’s sales grew 135 percent year-over-year in September, with strong momentum online. “Lululemon, On and other niche Western brands with low market share are growing rapidly despite macro headwinds given their small base and growing brand awareness,” said Bernstein in the report.

The growth momentum is a reflection of Lululemon’s grassroots initiatives — this year, its “Summer Sweat Games” initiative took place across 42 cities where over 16,000 participants came together.

To celebrate the 10th anniversary of the Align franchise, Lululemon hosted a 5,000-person yoga event at Beijing’s Worker’s Stadium, followed by local events across 43 cities within the next month, hosting a total of over 10,000 participants.

The events, where the brand’s ambassadors, including the singer Chris Lee and comedian-turned-director Jia Ling, work out alongside its guests, helped the brand secure a sweet spot between fashion and activewear.

Most recently, Lululemon announced a partnership with the Universities 100 Miles Relay, a collegiate running event. The relay, founded in Shanghai, has engaged more than 3 million young runners across over 1,000 universities in the last decade. On Dec. 7, the grand finale of the event will take place in Shanghai, culminating in a competition featuring over 1,000 college students from 100 local and international universities.

“We are here in this booth to really inspire movement and joy and also to build partnerships,” said Nikki Neuburger, chief brand and product activation officer of Lululemon, during a group interview at the booth. “This is a great opportunity for us to build connections and cross-border collaborations with both global and Chinese government officials, ambassadors, and guests alike.”

Another highlight at the pavilion is a recreation of the design station of Antonia Iamartino, Lululemon’s senior director of franchise innovations, research and product innovation. 

Original sketches, color swatches and archival images tracing the history of yoga wear — which went from loose to form-fitting — along with rolls of Align fabric offered a visual display of how Align evolved from an idea into a global franchise over a decade.

“We do a ton of research to gain insight into how people want to feel in yoga, and we partnered with our ambassadors to really be in discovery around what that would look like,” said Iamartino in an interview with WWD. Iamartino shared that a recent focus group with its Chinese athletes and ambassadors at its Vancouver headquarters continues to inform product, material and overall experience updates that facilitate guests’ “unmet needs.”

“For the future of Align, it will be a continuation of matching both what people need for function and then what they would like to have from an aesthetic and trend perspective,” said Iamartino.

For instance, a new version of its iconic Nulu fabric — Warm Nulu — hit store shelves this November, striking a chord with the brand’s local ambassadors.

“They all talked about wanting to feel like they have rolled out of bed and still had that warm, cozy feeling, but they could practice and feel that the whole time they were practicing,” Iamartino elaborated.

According to Neuburger, the tennis category is growing faster than in the rest of the world. “Our product teams are really using that insight to inform the global design, global assortment,” said Neuburger.

This year, brand ambassador Chris Lee also made a surprise appearance at the opening ceremony. “I’ve experienced many of my ‘firsts’ with Lululemon, and I’m truly excited for my first experience at CIIE,” said Lee.

Before sliding down a spiral slide, Lee checked out the second-floor social space where guests can enjoy playbacks of “Conversations on Wellbeing” podcasts that the brand initiated.

This September, the performance brand jointly released the 2025 China Wellbeing Report with the Research Center for Positive Psychology under the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at China’s top academy, Tsinghua University. Print versions of the report were available for visitors at the booth’s Tsinghua Wellbeing Report Area.

Kaiping Peng, principal investigator of the report and a professor in the Department of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences at Tsinghua University, said understanding and enhancing the well-being of the Chinese people is one of the most vital subjects today.

To tackle the issue, Peng and his team surveyed more than 50,000 Chinese people and used big data and AI to analyze Chinese written materials, including classic works of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taoism, novels and essays from the Ming and Qing dynasties, archives of People’s Daily content, as well as user-generated social media content to unearth the cultural DNA of Chinese well-being.

This year’s CIIE fair gathered over 4,100 overseas enterprises from over 155 countries, regions and organizations.

To offset CIIE’s hectic mood, Lululemon hosted a special yoga event during the weekend, which drives home its well-being philosophy.