Context & Problem

As lululemon expanded internationally, there was an opportunity to:

• Make the corporate website accessible to non-English speakers

• Better articulate lululemon’s purpose and values across the countries and regions where it operates

Regional teams were described as small and corporate web processes were not fully defined, creating execution risk (inconsistent messaging, unclear ownership, and high operational overhead) if localization expanded too quickly.

My Role

Senior Digital Strategist: I contributed to discovery and stakeholder engagement, synthesized requirements into a structured strategy, and defined the technical, UX, and governance recommendations needed for a full globalization effort.

I worked together with an 8-person team of project managers, website developers, designers, and content strategists.

Research Strategy & Rationale

Instead of treating “translation” as a pure content task, we framed globalization as a system design challenge with three parts:

1. Technical strategy to manage a global web estate with limited resources

2. User experience strategy to promote a unified global brand

3. Governance strategy to keep the site current, relevant, and measurable over time

This ensured that stakeholders could make decisions that were scalable, not just ‘one-off’ localization fixes.

Methods

Discovery research, synthesis, and analysis included:

• Stakeholder engagement to gather business, audience, and technical requirements in key global markets

• Remote workshops to gather feedback from 19 stakeholders spanning SEO, Brand, Content Ops, Localization, Center of Excellence, China, APAC, and EMEA teams

• Final recommended strategy to outline a solution across site architecture, translation workflow, governance operations, and timing

Key Insights

Several patterns emerged from the stakeholder workshops:

• Teams wanted a consistent global message, but regional resourcing was lean and processes weren’t fully defined

• There was an opportunity to streamline translation tools and domain structures to reduce operational burden

• APAC regions required special attention due to legal, regulatory, and cultural requirements (especially in China)

The Solution

We recommended a 3-part solution that included:

• Technical strategy to scale with lean teams

  • Translation approach, language plan, and domain structure

• UX strategy to unify the experience while acknowledging global audiences

  • Website architecture, language selector, visual design

• Governance strategy to make it operational

  • Centralized operating structure, measurement framework informed by SEO and analytics, quarterly planning cadence, content creation and translation workflows

Impact

This strategy helped stakeholders move from “Should we translate?” to “How do we globalize without operational complexity?”

This was accomplished by:

• Organizing multiple stakeholder needs into a single, prioritized roadmap

• Making translation feasible for lean teams through a proxy model and clear workflow expectations

• Mitigating risk for China expansion with a separate domain/hosting recommendation aligned to regional constraints

• Establishing a governance cadence and measurement framework to sustain the global estate long‑term

Final Report

lululemon Corporate Website - Globalization Strategy