Alo Yoga’s German stores land on luxury streets (near Lululemon)

Alo Yoga is reportedly opening stores in Berlin, Hamburg, Düsseldorf, Cologne and Munich, with the company recruiting for roles including store managers, operations leads and sales associates ahead of its first physical entry into Germany, Europe’s largest economy. The move follows the Los Angeles brand’s first France flagship, set to open before the end of 2026 at the Champs-Élysées in Paris.

Store locations as a brand-building tool

In Berlin, the new store will occupy two floors at the corner of Neue Schönhauser Straße in Mitte, next to COS and adidas. In Hamburg it will be located on Neuer Wall, a luxury shopping street; in Düsseldorf, on Königsallee, one of Germany’s most prestigious retail addresses; in Cologne, beside the cathedral. The Berlin location will also place Alo Yoga in the same premium retail district as Lululemon.

Germany is set to become one of Alo Yoga’s largest European store launches to date, with five locations announced simultaneously, following earlier expansion into the UK, Ireland and the Netherlands. The brand opened its first store on King’s Road in London in 2023 and has since added Regent Street, Brompton Road and Covent Garden, alongside stores in Dublin and Amsterdam, with Manchester, Westfield London, Battersea Power Station and Leeds now announced or opening.

Alo, Lululemon and Vuori take different paths through Europe

Lululemon is not standing still while Alo Yoga builds out France and Germany: it’s in the middle of its most aggressive international expansion to date, but aimed at different ground. The company opened its 100th EMEA store in Warsaw in March 2026, its first in Poland, and is expanding into Hungary, Greece, Romania and Austria, largely through franchise partnerships.

That’s six new international markets targeted for 2026 alone, a record pace for the brand, alongside further expansion in the UK. Crucially, though, this is franchise-led growth into new, smaller Central and Eastern European and Mediterranean markets: not a deepening of Lululemon’s already-established presence in Germany and France, where the company already operates an established company-owned retail network. Alo Yoga, by contrast, is only now building its first physical footprint in those two markets.

Vuori is moving far more cautiously in Europe.

The brand’s only European store remains its Regent Street flagship in London, opened in 2024 as what founder Joe Kudla called the anchor of the company’s European business. Rather than following with more stores, Vuori has prioritized e-commerce launches across 11 European and Asian countries as a way to test demand before committing to real estate. Germany is notably absent from that list, which instead includes markets such as Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Belgium, Austria and Portugal. The brand is targeting roughly 15 stores outside the US in total by 2026, a fraction of the scale Alo Yoga and Lululemon are each pursuing in Europe alone.

The backdrop at Lululemon helps explain why a rival’s German and French push lands now. Activist investor Elliott Investment Management built a stake worth more than $1 billion and pushed publicly for an outside CEO candidate, while founder Chip Wilson ran a parallel proxy campaign criticizing the board and proposing his own director slate. Lululemon named 25-year Nike veteran Heidi O’Neill as chief executive in April, effective September 8, and reached a settlement with Wilson in late May that gave him board representation in exchange for ending the proxy fight.

The truce resolved the immediate governance standoff, but not the underlying pressures it was fighting over, primarily, but not only, Americas sales declines.

Alo Yoga arrives without disclosing financial results of its own. The company, controlled by parent Color Image Apparel, has had its sales put at more than $1 billion by Forbes, and Reuters reported in 2023 that it was exploring new investors at a valuation of roughly $10 billion. Founded in 2007 by Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge, the brand has grown well beyond apparel into footwear, beauty, a training app and supplements, alongside a lifestyle marketing push, including a three-day wellness retreat staged with Vogue France off the Croisette during this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

A market still expanding, but not without risk

The category gives the expansion room to work, though the exact size of that opportunity depends on which market researcher is asked. Germany, the market at the center of Alo Yoga’s new push, is Europe’s largest single national sportswear market, valued at $21.9 billion in 2024 and forecast to grow at roughly 6.6% annually through the next decade, according to Global Market Insights: the highest growth rate among major European markets, driven by strong sports-club participation.

France, where the Champs-Élysées flagship is set to open, is one of Europe’s fastest-growing sports apparel markets in its own right, generating an estimated $10.9 billion in 2026 revenue, according to Persistence Market Research, with Paris’s status as a recurring host of major sporting events cited as a structural tailwind. Broader European sportswear and activewear market estimates vary widely by provider and category definition, from roughly $21 billion to more than $145 billion, making country-level figures more useful than continent-wide forecasts as directional indicators.

Nike and Skims’ 2025 NikeSkims launch is a reminder that competition for the trained-body customer is intensifying from multiple directions, not just from Lululemon. Alo Yoga’s growth model carries its own exposure, though. The brand’s expansion has leaned heavily on influencer marketing, and it was recently named in a US class-action lawsuit over alleged failures to properly identify paid promotional content: a challenge that touches the same referral system that has driven its growth. As Alo Yoga converts online visibility into physical square footage across a growing list of European markets, that scrutiny is unlikely to ease.