Ty Haney thinks in headlines. As we’re discussing over Zoom her grand return to Outdoor Voices, the brand Haney founded in 2013 and led up until 2020, she offers some to articulate her points. She has one for the competition in the athleticwear category, which has ballooned since she’s been gone. “My headline there is, there’s room for all of us.” What about working with her new partners at Consortium, the fund manager that acquired Outdoor Voices last year? “The headline is it took time to build a relationship, and understand if I felt solid in the partnership enough to go forward.”
And for what happened the last time she ran Outdoor Voices, which ended in a messy and public falling out: “The headline for me is we need to normalise challenges, in a sense, because they happen every day.”
It makes sense that Haney feels the need to think one step ahead of the media, processing her thoughts in the most baseline, bold-type way. Her rise and fall at Outdoor Voices was closely chronicled: first, she was leading a movement to start the next Nike; then, she was the face of a startup darling that imploded.
Most recently, Haney made headlines when it became clear last week that something was up at Outdoor Voices. The brand wiped its Instagram feed, changed its bio to “doing things, BRB”, and unfollowed everyone except one person: Haney. Immediately, speculation arose that the founder was heading back to the brand she launched at 23 after graduating from Parsons.
The teaser worked as planned. On Monday, Haney is officially announcing that she’s back at Outdoor Voices as founder, partner and co-owner, alongside the team at Consortium, led by managing partner Cory Baker, who first got in touch before it was announced last year that his company bought Outdoor Voices for an undisclosed sum. “I thought that was quite cool, because he wasn’t asking me necessarily to rejoin, but he wanted to put it on my radar because he very much saw me as a core part of the Outdoor Voices vision,” Haney says. She’s been working with Consortium on returning to OV since last August.
She doesn’t consider it a relaunch, as the brand has been operating for the five years she was gone, though as a shell of its former self. All of its stores shuttered last year, and the branding and product assortment have felt frozen in time, heavy on past hits like the Exercise Dress, Rectrek Pants and compression co-ords. Today, that changes, with refreshed branding designed with Emmett Shine, founder of Pattern Brands, responsible for the recognisable look and feel of brands like Hims, Harry’s and Recess.
The collection will be available to shop on 5 August. I’m eager to know what Haney’s take on athleticwear looks like 12 years on, in an age where Gen Z is foregoing leggings and opting for looser silhouettes to work out in.
“The vision is the same,” Haney says. Her goal, which she returns to a few times during our interview, is that she wants Outdoor Voices to be the top recreation brand in the world. She avoids the word ‘athleisure’, which followed OV since its launch days — she never liked it. “It feels like a space that’s still so wide open, and we can step back up into that.” While her philosophy hasn’t changed (“I always come back to thinking about this as a uniform for doing things”), she says the new pieces are more fashion forward, and that the brand will start leaning into more natural materials in addition to its technical fabrics, in line with greater demand for fewer synthetics. For continuity, she rehired former creative director Tiffany Wilkinson to lead on design.
Customers will find updated versions of key pieces like the Court Skort and the Exercise Dress, including one, the Energy Dress, that Haney is particularly excited about. It’s a more sophisticated take on a workout dress, with contrast stitching and an A-line cut. A fitted cardigan and an oversized button down — pink with blue pinstripes, which Haney is wearing as we chat — reach into new corners of the closet. “We’ve pushed the boundaries in being a bit bold on what she would wear,” Haney says of the OV customer. Low-cut spandex shorts paired with tube tops feel like a fresh direction; unlike the coordinating sets of OV past, nothing is too matchy-matchy.
It’s likely to at least catch the attention of current and former fans of the brand; Haney’s challenge now is to successfully introduce the OV aesthetic — heavily associated with millennials — to Gen Z women. To do so, she’s updated her go-to-market strategy. Outdoor Voices was part of the direct-to-consumer (DTC) retail gold rush of the 2010s, flush with VC cash, which she says eventually diluted her business to the point where she lost control. Gone are the days where a brand’s trajectory could be supercharged thanks to Facebook and Instagram arbitrage. Haney now has a new trick up her sleeve thanks to Try Your Best (or TYB), the community rewards platform she launched in 2022 during the Web3 boom, which raised $11 million last month from investors including Offline Ventures and Strobe Ventures.
The concept behind TYB is that brands can build fan channels and reward subscribers with early launches, discounts and more, while using the community to gauge new ideas, get feedback and build brand loyalty. Haney’s CBD brand Joggy was one of the first to launch on TYB, while other brands on the platform include Glossier, Rare Beauty and Poppi. Outdoor Voices will go live on TYB this week with the product launch, giving those that join early access on 4 August. “Really, TYB was a direct reaction to what worked and what didn’t at OV. It came from understanding the power of community,” she says. With all Outdoor Voices stores closed, the focus is on e-commerce, though Haney says they’re in talks with some select retail partners. Some collaborations that will hit on new categories are in line for spring.
It’s clear speaking to Haney that she’s back in her element. She says TYB, Joggy and Outdoor Voices are three pieces of the brand world she’s building. She has big ambitions, saying that she wants Outdoor Voices to be the next Patagonia (a brand more reflective of her current time spent between her hometown of Boulder, CO, and San Francisco). When she left in 2020, Outdoor Voices was at around $90 million in annual sales; the plan is to hit a new revenue high in the next 12 to 18 months. But she says she’s not thinking about growth targets so much as she is building something that lasts, and she says the partners that she has in place this time feel like ones she can trust, ones that she had time to vet and get to know before deciding to return. She’s stepping back in as a part owner of the company she started, which was a non-negotiable. “Ownership matters a lot to me,” Haney says. “How we fund the company, what the expectations are. That matters.”
What happened with her first run at Outdoor Voices feels present. While she initially says she’s “put a bow on those eight years, and I’m very kind and grateful to them”, she later addresses how difficult the period was. “I’m an optimistic person. I think I blocked out those years.” Haney is not the only female founder of her era that left her company in a blaze of allegations of mismanagement and workplace toxicity. Is it vindicating to return?
“From a founder perspective, challenges are par for the course,” she says. “But I don’t think that era where there were so many takedowns was good for women wanting to be founders. So at the end of the day, I couldn’t be more excited for this to be a model to show what’s possible, and I hope that there’s a wake of new interest from young women, to see what’s possible in the brand and business-building world.”
