Conversations on the Mat debuts as Lululemon’s first video podcast: produced for Bilibili and Xiaoyuzhou, fronted by Chinese athletes, and launched days after results confirmed China as the brand’s only unambiguous growth engine.
Lululemon has launched its first video podcast series. In China, not North America. Conversations on the Mat, which debuted on June 8, places brand ambassadors and Chinese athletes on a yoga mat for filmed conversations about breath, recovery and focus, distributed through Bilibili and the audio platform Xiaoyuzhou. The choice of market is the story: the brand’s first move into long-form owned media lands in the one region still delivering unambiguous growth.
Three episodes, one Great Wall backdrop
The debut episode pairs actor and Lululemon ambassador Zhu Yilong with journalist Chen Xiaonan for a conversation on breath and strength filmed on the Great Wall, following Zhu’s first formal yoga practice. The second episode brings together former Chinese national table tennis player Niu Jianfeng and Lululemon ambassador Lin Min, who reportedly spent close to fifteen years as a yoga instructor to the Chinese women’s table tennis team, on the theme of speed and calm. The third installment, released June 10, sees figure skater Zhu Yi join Lululemon ambassador Ryan Leier, a former professional basketball player, to discuss injury recovery and the connection between body and mind. Both arrived at yoga through injury.
The series extends Lululemon’s founding proposition, “yoga is more than what happens on the mat,” into the brand’s first video podcast series.
Owned media goes where the growth is
Four days before the first episode aired, Lululemon reported first-quarter results that cut its full-year outlook and confirmed North America as the weak point of the business: revenue in the region fell three percent, with comparable sales down six percent, according to the company’s June 4 earnings release and call.
China Mainland moved in the opposite direction. Revenue rose 30 percent (23 percent in constant currency) to $478.4 million, with comparable sales up 13 percent, and the region now accounts for 19 percent of total revenue.
Against that backdrop, a China-first podcast reads as capital allocation by another name.
Marketing investment follows momentum. On the June 4 earnings call, management highlighted the sixth annual Summer Sweat Games, a run-and-train activation running from late June through August and culminating in a national championship in Hangzhou. Conversations on the Mat slots into the same playbook: community-led brand building, executed locally, with formats designed for Chinese platforms rather than adapted from Western campaigns.
On the platform choices: Bilibili and Xiaoyuzhou
Bilibili, a China-first, video-led platform often described as a hybrid of YouTube and community forum, skews young and engagement-heavy: a natural fit for long-form, personality-driven formats. Xiaoyuzhou, a leading China-based audio and podcast app often likened to a Chinese version of Apple Podcasts, is built around subscriptions, creator communities and episode-level discovery rather than open-web RSS habits. Neither is a default channel for Western sportswear brands.
Lululemon is building owned media inside the Chinese content infrastructure, not broadcasting into it.
A community playbook that predates the stores
There is a longer arc here. Lululemon entered mainland China in 2013 not with stores but with showrooms and community-building via yoga classes, local ambassadors, grassroots events, and only opened its first brick-and-mortar locations in 2016 with three stores across Shanghai and Beijing. The community-first entry strategy, unconventional at the time, is now the template the brand returns to whenever it needs to deepen rather than broaden its China presence.
A video podcast is the logical next iteration of the community scheme: made to last and, we add, an ideal channel for controlled messaging and reputation maintenance.
