When we enter Vuori’s design center at the brand’s San Diego HQ, Sarah Carlson, VP of women’s product design, asks if we want to get started or take a minute to “ground in our space”. The other journalists and I — brought together for the tour from New York, London and Los Angeles — opt for the former, as we delve into Vuori’s upcoming collection. But you get the sense that, at Vuori, a few moments of meditation is a company norm.
The brand is very California, very “chill” — a word uttered repeatedly throughout the day at Vuori’s sun-drenched base. In his welcome address, CEO Joe Kudla says it multiple times (“It’s this contrast of going for the win, but being chill about it,” he says of the brand’s ethos), as do multiple members of the team, at one stage or another. It’s a testament to the brand’s Encinitas beginnings: Kudla founded Vuori 10 years ago out of a “garoffice” (garage office) in his friend’s backyard, selling men’s athletic and lifestyle gear. Last year, three office spaces later, Kudla moved the brand into its current 200,000-square-foot space, where 630 San Diego-based employees can attend gym classes and drink Vuori-branded smoothies in the outdoor corridors between meetings — many of which are outdoors, too.
It’s emblematic of how much Vuori has grown in its first decade. Kudla has stuck to his vision since the founding Kore Short. The goal from the start was to build “performance apparel”, inspired by Kudla’s Encinitas surroundings. In Kudla’s vision, then and now, performance apparel doesn’t just mean high-tech athletic gear — it encompasses well-functioning everyday wear, too. This is the offering that exists today, on a much larger scale. The brand has surpassed its goal of 100-plus stores by the end of 2026. When Vuori announced this target at the end of 2021, it had just 13 doors.
The question now is how much more Vuori can grow. As the brand looks to scale internationally in 2026, will the leisure-meets-performance messaging resonate? (Many in the UK, for instance, think of Vuori as an activewear brand.) Kudla knows this is a hurdle, but thinks that with the right communication, customers will get it — and buy it.
“Vuori lives in this duality where you’ve got this laid-back, coastal, Southern California vibe meets technical innovation. And those two don’t naturally go together,” he concedes. “That’s why we’ve always said we are a new perspective: we were trying to do something different that we couldn’t find in the market. And that’s very much still the undercurrent of who we are as a brand.”
For Vuori, the pandemic was a turning point, as more people adopted lifestyles that matched the brand’s style-comfort offering. “It was a moment that put Vuori into mainstream consciousness,” says Kudla. Vuori, which blends activewear with more lifestyle-oriented aesthetics, worked for how people lived their lives at that time, he says: home offices, Zoom calls, long walks. But, unlike other brands that saw a pandemic pop, Vuori was able to parlay its product range to further growth as consumers moved back offline (its Meta pant is a men’s office favorite, from San Francisco to New York). “If you were Peloton, you sold a lot of stationary bikes [in 2020]. Then, we came out of Covid and that was it — everybody had bought their stationary bike,” Kudla says. The pandemic spurred major growth in Vuori’s loungewear product. But now, it’s fitness and lifestyle that are booming.
At the end of 2024, Vuori reached a $5.5 billion valuation after a $825 million investment round led by General Atlantic and Stripes, which remains the most recent valuation. Kudla is confident in growth amid an increasingly wellness-focused world. Alo and Lululemon are the brand’s biggest competitors, he says. Both also blend activewear and lifestyle product, though Kudla contends that Vuori leans deeper into outdoor-friendly styles than the others, a testament to its Southern Californian roots. The other big differentiator? Men.
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As athleisure brands built on selling to women scramble to capture male spend — and incumbents make women’s plays — Vuori’s strength lies in its ability to extend across genders, Kudla says. The brand was founded with its menswear offering, which the CEO describes as a “rocket ship”, driven by men keen for a more lifestyle-oriented, everyday offering that wasn’t from an ultra-sporty incumbent. Still, womenswear was always in the longer term plan, he says. (Women’s launched in 2018, three years into founding.) Now, Vuori’s customer split hovers around 50-50.
Ten years in, Kudla is planning for further growth, this time outside the US (the initial roadmap includes openings in select cities across Europe, the UK and China). To do so, he’s heading into 2026 with two priorities: product innovation and global brand ambassador partnerships, both of which Kudla hopes will drive recognition and loyalty abroad, as well as back home in the States.
“My wish for the brand is that we stand for the next wave of wellness, which isn’t about more gadgets and things that we put in our bodies, but more about our relationships with ourselves and learning how to adapt to this changing world,” he says.
Style and substance
Vuori may compete in the athleisure market, but this didn’t stop newly minted brand ambassador and tennis player Jack Draper from wearing the brand at the 2025 US Open. It’s a testament to the technicality of Vuori’s product. Though Alo has NBA player Jimmy Butler and Cincinnati Bengals quarterback Joe Burrow, you don’t see the athletes sporting the labels on the court or field. Instead, it’s for training and tunnel walks. (Vuori plays in this arena, too; Detroit Lions quarterback Jared Goff is an ambassador, and features in the brand’s lifestyle marketing content.)
“We don’t get a lot of credit for being a super technical brand because of the way we carry ourselves; it’s a more laid-back aesthetic. But under the hood, our product performs really well,” Kudla says. “It wasn’t a stretch for us to make product for Jack to play in, and he was blown away by the quality of our technical product, even though the Kore Short that he was playing in we designed and built 10 years ago.” (The Kore Short was Vuori’s first product.) This is why tennis, golf and running are logical sports for Vuori to tap into, he adds. “You can naturally take our product right out of the store and go play tennis, whereas you’re not going to do that on the basketball court or football field.”
Still, the CEO is under no illusions — even with Draper’s backing, Kudla doesn’t expect Vuori to become the go-to tennis brand. “We’re not getting into the business of tennis because we want to sell more tennis shorts than any other brand. We’re getting into the game of tennis because we love the mindset of the player and the style and the way it influences and informs the clothing that we make for training, for everyday life,” he says. “It’s more about the person than it is the sport.”
To this end, Vuori has no plans to focus on highly technical, sport-specific gear. “It’s not like our customer is a runner or a CrossFit guy,” Kudla says. “Our customer appreciates a diverse, multidimensional, active life.” This translates across Vuori’s product. “It’s not like, like this is the short for this, this is the legging for that. It’s about universal principles like comfort, premium, quality materials and consistent fit.”
Vuori is keen for its brand partners to co-create. Like Nike relies on athlete testing, Vuori will now get feedback from its ambassadors — whether fitness influencer Kirsty Godso, model Kaia Gerber or Draper, all of whom came on board in 2025 — to inform its future product. “We have the resources and the teams to create two-way relationships where we can learn from them,” Kudla says. “It’s been so fun to work with Kirsty and Kaia because they have so many great ideas in terms of product, and they share what they like and don’t like. Kirsty’s been living in activewear for 15 years, so she has this unique understanding of both technical innovation and aesthetic, which is the perfect marriage for Vuori.” The brand has regular feedback sessions with Godso; Kudla and her text ideas back and forth regularly. Vuori is also launching an iteration of its Kore Short, the Hardkore Short, which Draper will wear on the court in 2026.
Beyond those in its orbit, Vuori products remain inspired and informed by the Cali lifestyle, Kudla says. It’s why the brand diverged into ski last month; not to capture ski gear market share, but because it’s part of the Vuori lifestyle. “While it’s not a huge business, we make really great shorts designed for surfing,” Kudla says. “And in the winter [our customers] are skiing at Mammoth and in the High Sierras, so we made product for that. It rounds out this active lifestyle that’s informed by this natural playground that surrounds us here in Southern California.” (All of the ski gear is fully functional; none is designed simply for aprés.)
It’s also why Kudla doesn’t think of Vuori’s denim launch — also this year — as a stretch, though he gets why it could be perceived as such. “We are just as much a lifestyle brand, taking lessons from this active lifestyle, as we are a workout brand,” he says. “We’ve always existed in the in-between and played in both worlds.”
Going global
Can this SoCal lifestyle go global?
“When I think about California style — coastal Southern California style — I think of it more as an ethos and a lifestyle than an aesthetic,” Kudla says. “It is not as rigid and structured. It’s comfortable, but it’s sophisticated, it’s effortless without sacrificing style. Those principles don’t isolate themselves to the beach. I think they travel.” New York, for instance, is in Vuori’s top five markets. Kudla shouts out Shanghai, where the brand opened in 2024 following a successful 2023 pop-up. Neither city is known for its nature, but this doesn’t stop residents from buying into the brand. In New York, it’s as ubiquitous in office buildings as it is at Equinox.
The plan for 2026 is to pick global cities with big opportunities — high-ceiling markets, Kudla says — and go deep. “The strategy is not to go too broad,” he says. “In China, for example, we opened three stores in Shanghai, with more on the way, before we thought about Beijing. Instead of thinking about China, it’s thinking about Shanghai. Instead of thinking about the UK, it’s thinking about London.” In the near term, Vuori’s priorities are London, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen and Seoul, with Dubai and Mexico City on the cards also. By the end of 2026, Vuori plans to have 15 store locations outside the US.
Aside from its city-specific growth playbook, which is also omnichannel (e-commerce, physical stores and select wholesalers), Vuori’s strategy to grow globally is via its ambassadors. It’s a tried-and-true strategy for activewear labels, but one that Vuori has held off until now. In 2025, Vuori signed ambassadors including the Gerber family and Draper, with more announcements to come in 2026. “We’ve been a product-led organization since inception,” Kudla says. “Now, we’re on a global growth journey and we need to build awareness in a new way. The next phase is about reaching a new consumer, and we don’t think we’ll do that through traditional advertising channels.”
Kudla is confident that this celeb-centric strategy, coupled with a continued commitment to top-quality product, will help the brand ride the wellness wave outside of its US home base. “I think there’s a resonance with the lifestyle,” he says. “Wellness is a reaction to the busy culture that we lived in for so long. Activewear and this coastal, more laid-back aesthetic is in some ways a bit of an antidote to the busyness. The casualization of the world means this California DNA is resonating globally.”
