LOHAS
LOHAS
- Lifestyles of Health and Sustainability — a market segment of consumers who choose products and services for their personal health, their environmental impact and their social values.
Overview
- LOHAS is a marketing term for a kind of customer. It covers people who buy organic food, natural personal care, green building materials, renewable energy, eco-tourism, yoga and alternative medicine, and who want products "of equal quality" that are "also virtuous," in sociologist Paul H. Ray's phrase.
- Gaiam sorted the market into five segments: sustainable economy, healthy living, alternative health, personal development and ecological living.
History
- 1994 — Paul H. Ray begins a national survey of American values.
- 1996 — Ray names a values cluster he calls the "Cultural Creatives": people who carried the 1960s concerns with ecology, peace and human rights into their everyday choices. He counted them at about a quarter of American adults.
- 2000 — Ray and Sherry Ruth Anderson publish The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World.
- Late 1990s — journalists Frank Lampe and Steven Hoffman connect the Cultural Creatives to the booming natural and organic products market. Their company, Natural Business Communications, coins "LOHAS" as a trade term, researches the segment with Ray, and publishes the Natural Business LOHAS Journal.
- 1998–1999 — Jirka Rysavy's Gaiam buys complementary businesses such as Living Arts and InnerBalance Health to build one trusted brand across the LOHAS market.
- 2006 — the Worldwatch Institute puts the LOHAS market at about $300 billion, roughly 30% of U.S. consumer spending.
- 2007 — Natural Marketing Institute research counts about 41 million Americans, 13% of the population, as LOHAS consumers. In Japan about 17 million adults, 12% of the population, fit the segment.
Sources