Ecommerce Activewear Update
Activewear is one of the most interesting verticals in Ecommerce. It’s one where upstarts, such as Gymshark and Alo Yoga, have been able to capture significant marketshare through the power of social media. We’ve prepared a January 2020 update using Luz’s proprietary data.
Dataset: We selected 20 US-based D2C activewear companies to serve as a sample size of the Activewear Ecommerce industry. These companies, on average, have an instagram following of 997,000 followers. The maximum number of instagram followers was over 5,000,000 and the minimum was 100,000. These companies sell to both Men and Women.
Takeaway #1: Ecommerce slowed down in December but is exploding in January 🚀
The companies in our dataset did a combined $67.5M in sales in the month of December. Based on historical data, our models predicted that the cumulative sales of these companies in January 2020 would be around $80M. Surprisingly, these companies actually did $99.6M in the month of January.
Takeaway #2: Tops is the “top” trending category from December to January
A large portion of the January increase is directly attributable to the Tops category. As a function of total units sold, Tops increased by nearly 30% from December to January. Another interesting takeaway from the data is that Tops had the highest price elasticity of demand, or in layman terms, customers were most sensitive to price when it related to Tops. As price increased, sales plummeted. Any strategy to lower the price point had a larger impact on sales than any other product type.
Takeaway #3: Customers responded to discounts on Leggings
Although tops performed the best when it came to overall price point, leggings performed the best when it came to discounting from Full Price.
This is an example of one of the companies in our dataset Leggings sales. Their leggings are all priced between $70–75. As this company discounted from Full Price, units sold increased heavily. Although this is just one company, this trend held true across nearly all competitors in the dataset.
Conclusion
Activewear is one of the most interesting and competitive verticals in Ecommerce that seems to be redefined every few months. The sheer volume of competitors, each with their own unique strategy, shows clear winning/losing strategies. In the month of January, a few of our takeaways were that Tops are selling extremely well and that customers are highly responsive to discounts in Leggings.
As the world continues to make progress with the pandemic, and as Americans get back to the gym and traveling, we expect activewear to grow substantially in 2021. We’ll continue to track throughout the year, posting monthly updates so please Subscribe if you’d like to be kept in the loop. If you’d like even more information on the current state of activewear, we offer a free monthly activewear report that includes even more details here.
Stay safe!
