How activewear brand Popflex duped its own products with its new Blogilates line at Target

Last April, when Taylor Swift was spotted wearing activewear brand Popflex’s Pirouette Skort, the product experienced record sales—and 19,000 preorders—sending founder and CEO Cassey Ho scrambling to meet demand. Secretly, behind the scenes, she was stretching herself thin designing her debut line for Target, which hit stores nationwide last month.

Ho, who rose to fame as founder of Pilates platform Blogilates, previously launched workout equipment with Target under the name in 2020. When Target contacted Ho in December 2023 about an apparel line, she set out to design more affordable versions of Popflex products, which range from $60 leggings to more than $100 for outerwear.

“We started off the deck with comments from people being like, ‘Why can’t I get this at Target?’ ‘When’s it going to be at Target?’ ‘I can’t afford Popflex,’” Ho told Retail Brew. “The whole point was to make this more accessible for more people.”

The 108-page deck she presented to Target ultimately became an activewear line priced starting at $15, available at the retailer for six weeks. The line has already gone viral, garnering TikToks of product try-ons, reviews, and comparisons to Popflex.

Creating the line while balancing the sudden popularity and stamping down skort dupes that popped up made 2024 a “difficult” year with constant problem-solving, Ho said. Adapting the line to be not only cheaper, but sold in stores for the first time, wasn’t easy, and Ho shared how a team of seven made it happen and the risk it took to, well, dupe itself.

A bit of a stretch: While Popflex, founded in 2016, could spend nearly three years taking an item from design to the digital shelf, the Target turnaround was just under a year. Ho said the company largely used “tried-and-true” patterns from PopFlex, though Target gave her directions like making products “look emotional on the hanger,” using “romantic” embellishments like ruffles and colors like purples, blues, and pinks. Gena Fox, SVP of Apparel and Accessories at Target, told Retail Brew in an email that the line combines “style and affordability.”

Popflex’s Pirouette skort ($60) is now the “Ballerina skort” ($35)—Ho hopes it’ll end her ongoing battles with fast fashion dupes of the product that’ve cropped up since last April—while the Zip Cloud Hoodie ($70) became the Marshmallow Hooded Sweatshirt ($35). The company had to source different fabrics, and often use slightly less, to meet the lower price point, so the skort may not be quite as fluffy—it utilizes fewer gathers—nor the hoodie quite as dense, she noted.

Ho said she considered comments she’d been receiving on social media about product features consumers could do without for a lower price, like removable bra pads, which the new line has nixed. But she still maintained quality standards like fabrics being stretchy and “squat proof,” she noted.

With such large unit orders to satisfy nationwide merchandising, any small mistake would be huge, she noted. At one point, her team realized Blogilates’s black fabrics for tops were a different black shade than its bottoms, a move that could be fixed with different color names online but wouldn’t fly in stores, she noted. This left 57,000 yards of black fabric unusable, forcing them to re-weave and re-dye fabric, plus pay air shipping to meet Target’s deadline. (Popflex is working to determine use for the extra fabric in its designs, Ho said.) Creating hanging tags with barcodes and sizing stickers was also a learning curve, she said.

Break a leg: Ho said customers have requested a lower-price point version of Popflex for years. However, ahead of the Target announcement, when Ho posted on social media asking followers if she should do that, many comments advised against it over fears of jeopardized quality and cannibalizing Popflex sales, which Ho admitted “got me really nervous.” An Instagram poll she posted was 60%-40% for and against the move, she shared.

Despite the initial pushback, the line has garnered a slew of social media attention since its December 28 debut, and she estimated it had sold out 60% when we spoke. She said the release also boosted Popflex’s sales, serving as a “discovery channel” for consumers unfamiliar with Popflex and Blogilates (the tag on the clothes features a brief bio of Ho, noting her as CEO and founder of both brands).

With the two brands, "almost everyone is happy,” Ho noted. Every consumer’s perspective of fair pricing and quality is different, but she’s found cost-sensitive consumers are ultimately willing to take small concessions when the “biggest barrier” for many has been price, Ho said, while those wanting higher quality will opt for Popflex.

“If they’re telling me something, they’re speaking from a place of need, and all you have to do is satisfy their need, and there you go, you’ve got a business,” she said.

Still, Ho is sticking to some beliefs about quality: $20 leggings are simply “not gonna happen,” she said—unless consumers want them to be see-through.