Lululemon taps former Burberry exec for new C-suite position
Lululemon Athletica has expanded its senior leadership ranks with a Burberry veteran.
The athletic-inspired apparel and footwear brand has appointed Elizabeth Binder as chief merchandising officer, a new role at the company. She reports to Sun Choe, chief product officer of Lululemon.
Most recently, Binder served as chief product officer of U.K.-based apparel company Boden. Prior to joining Boden in October 2020, she spent 11 years at British luxury brand Burberry as senior VP of merchandising. Earlier in her career, Binder held merchandising at J. Crew.
“Throughout her career, Liz has proven her ability to bring teams together through times of immense acceleration and business expansion, and lead with clarity and vision,” said Choe, in a report by WWD. “Liz’s proven leadership coupled with an astute understanding of consumer needs will help accelerate and scale all that is possible from a product, design and distribution standpoint.”
Binder’s appointment comes as Lululemon has been expanding its product team amid a growth strategy that calls for a doubling of the business from 2021 net revenue of $6.25 billion to $12.5 billion by 2026.
The key pillars of the strategy include product innovation and a plan to double men's, double direct-to-consumer, and quadruple international net revenue relative to 2021. In September, the company expanded its presence in Paris, opening a flagship (its first in Continental Europe) on the Avenue Champs-Elysées.
Most recently, Lululemon said it deploying a new RFID platform in hopes of obtaining real-time product information. The company is rolling out the Nedap iD Cloud RFID solution in an effort to maximize the availability of products at its more than 600 global stores. Lululemon is utilizing the technology in an effort to provide real-time inventory data so that stores can have the right product assortment available on their floors.
[Read More: Lululemon optimizes product availability via RFID]
At the end of its third quarter (Oct. 30, 2022) Lululemon had 623 stores.