The Lululemon yoga mat uses 3D laces to perfect your postures

Lululemon spent two years designing his new mat. He partnered with the Canadian Sports Institute in Calgary, Alberta, to study how people used their yoga mats. The team developed a kind of “heat map” of use areas by monitoring the points that people touched the most during their practice. These data, combined with the analysis of the worn areas of the used yoga mats, gave the design team a clear picture of where the ripples should be placed and where the filling should be prioritized.

Most of Lululemon’s previous yoga mats have been made with a rubber base layer topped with an adhesive polyurethane surface layer. According to Morris, the usual method of creating a three-dimensional surface such as the ripples on the Take Form carpet would be by embossing, pressing a matrix heated to the surface to make the material take shape. The problem is that Lululemon cannot apply this process to his yoga mats, given their construction. The rubber base does not retain the matrix memory and the surface layer uses a type of porous polyurethane that melts from heat.

The solution was to develop a foam mixture that would harden and maintain its shape. This strip of foam is then inserted between the rubber runner and the polyurethane surface. Lululemon will not exactly describe how this foaming process works, citing its proprietary nature, but Morris compares it to baking a cake.

“Foams start as liquids and, as a cure, foam,” he says.

The Take Form mat costs between $ 118 and $ 128 depending on the version and will be available worldwide on March 23rd.

The market for new yoga mats, whether or not they are adorned with 3D ripples, is very different now than it was when Lululemon began to develop the shape of the dam. Stimulated by the isolation of the pandemic, demand for home training equipment exploded in 2020. But even as vaccines become more available and the world moves toward some semblance of normalcy, this trend of people who prefer to sweat at home instead of in gyms and yoga studios may not go away.

Alignment mats can be especially helpful if you don’t have a yoga instructor planning and actively monitoring your form.

The gear offered by this type of self-guide fits Lululemon’s strategy of fully embracing the home training trend. Although the company lost sales from its retail stores at the start of the pandemic, its online sales increased. In addition, in June last year, Lululemon acquired home fitness company Mirror for $ 500 million. Pairing a mat that helps align with personal lessons included directly in your home using Mirror is pretty close to the experience of face-to-face yoga instruction. Now, if the company wants to jump into the next obvious yoga trend, it just has to start selling a few goats.

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