Yoga pants to the rescue?

How Old Navy Saved a Life
Yoga pants to the rescue.

By GapWeb Daily
June 2, 2010

A four-way recovery stretch fabric. Pure comfort. A great value.

But stopping a bullet? No. That was never part of any quality assurance conversation.

Still, that’s exactly what happened. Old Navy yoga pants are being credited for a dramatic rescue – sparing a woman’s knee from a stray bullet.

And now she’s giving the brand the best word of mouth marketing it could ever ask for.

“All my guardian angels were on my side that day,” said Nicole Flourney, who added that she’d definitely be shopping Old Navy again.

The improbable story unfolded May 19, when Nicole was driving through Oakland, Calif., after having picked up her brother-in-law. It was 10:45 p.m.

The bullet was tucked deep inside this piece of cloth.

A single shot cracked through the night. The bullet punched through the passenger door of Nicole’s 1996 Dodge Magnum. It ricocheted off the radio. Nicole knew something bad had happened because the bullet also shattered glass.

“I didn’t realize that I’d been shot,” she said. “When I applied pressure on the gas pedal, I felt this tinge of pain.”

The bullet, as it turned out, had lodged into her right knee joint. The yoga pants – 93 percent cotton, 7 percent spandex – apparently helped prevent the knee from shattering. Or worse.

Everyone told her that. The police. The paramedics. The doctor on the swing shift.

In fact, later that night, at the hospital, surgery wasn’t even required. The doctor pulled, three times, to extract the bullet, which was lodged into the lucky pants.

Amazing.

“The doctor told me that, if these pants didn’t have 7 percent spandex,” Nicole said, “I would have had a shattered knee.”

For Nicole, a medical assistant in Union City, Calif., luck started the whole thing. She bought two pair of yoga pants at oldnavy.com in January. She began wearing them to work because they were so comfortable.

Imagine, she thought, if she’d been wearing thin, flimsy hospital scrubs that night?

“The whole night, everyone kept saying how amazed they were about the injury,” she said. “They took pictures and were just in awe that these pants literally didn’t allow the bullet through its material.”

It was traumatic, scary, emotional. And, at the end, relieving – even somewhat funny.

“Everyone kept telling me,” she said, “that they’re all going shopping at Old Navy.”