How Castore Can Win Over Gen Z: Lessons from Lululemon’s Success...
If I were CMO of Castore, here are the strategies I’d implement to win over Gen Z consumers—straight from Lululemon’s playbook...
Happy New Week!
This week, I explored one of Britain's fastest-growing sportswear brands making waves in the football industry and beyond—Castore.
Founded by Liverpudlian brothers Tom and Phil Beahon, Castore has built its reputation on premium quality, high-performance apparel, and exclusivity. With an ambitious mindset and relentless pursuit of excellence, the brand has secured high-profile partnerships with elite athletes and top-tier teams, including:
Andy Murray
Bayer Leverkusen, Rangers, and Everton
Red Bull Racing and McLaren F1
While Castore’s performance-driven approach has established its credibility, the future of sportswear lies at the intersection of sport, lifestyle, and culture—something brands like Lululemon have mastered.
Lululemon’s Lifestyle Playbook:
Experiences lead to connections: Marketing has evolved from traditional advertising to creative immersive brand experiences that foster deeper connections with consumers. Today, brands need to build touchpoints that resonate with their audience’s lifestyle and values. Lululemon exemplifies this shift with its experiential store concept, offering fitness studios, a fuel bar, and trial classes.
Leverage Community Leaders: A great brand story only matters when you have people to share it. Lululemon has mastered this by building a community of customers whose lifestyles align with the brand’s values. Taking a grassroots approach to community-building, Lululemon has developed various brand programmes to recruit ambassadors, affiliates, and creators—offering them support in exchange for authentic access to their communities. By sharing authentic videos from their affiliates and creators on social channels, Lululemon leverages social proof—amplifying the authenticity of their message when it comes from real community members in their own voice rather than the brand itself.
Go wide & deep: Lululemon began as a yoga brand but has since expanded into a broader fitness apparel company focused on movement rather than any single sport. This shift allows them to reach a wide audience through diverse content formats and stories, all grounded in their core values of performance, health, and wellness. While their reach is broad, the brand goes deep by connecting with consumers who share these values through storytelling content that resonates with their audience’s lifestyle, aspirations, and commitment to well-being.
Today’s consumers seek more than just apparel—they seek identity, values, and aspirations in the brands they wear. Castore has a golden opportunity to evolve into a performance-driven lifestyle brand that resonates with consumers through authentic storytelling, community engagement, and shared values, ultimately fostering deeper loyalty and long-term growth. These trends are shaping the future of the sportswear industry, and for Castore to win in the DTC space, this is an approach they have to adopt.
If you're in the sportswear industry and want deeper insights, let's connect—schedule a call with our team today!
Castore has recently parted ways with some of its high profile partners. Bayer Leverkusen is named in the article but New Balance announced themselves as partner recently. This is absolutely not a critism, no partnership is without challenges and change is part of the game but to suggest the Lulelemon playboook after the brands well documented offensive comments towards it's consumers seems wild