When Joe Kudla talks about the Vuori customer — the loyal, die-hard consumer of the company he founded a decade ago — Jimmy Spencer is exactly the kind of person he has in mind.
“Oh, I’m Mr. Vuori,” said Mr. Spencer, 41, a Californian who works in sports media and bought his first Vuori T-shirt about six or seven years ago. He estimates he now has 45 items in his closet, including fleeces, jackets, shorts, a stack of those tees in various colors and Vuori’s Meta Pant — five-pocket tapered trousers that are made from a polyester fabric typically used in performance apparel.
“I work in L.A., and no one is wearing suits postpandemic,” Mr. Spencer said. “What Vuori has been able to do for me is create a very casual but nice, high-quality look for me to slip into every day.”
Look around you and you may find that tech pants are everywhere. Tech, in this case, refers not to technology but to “technical” textiles, such as nylon and polyester, that give the pants stretch, breathability and moisture-wicking properties. They have replaced suit trousers, khakis and even jeans as the preferred style for many men, and Vuori has erected dozens of stores — from Atlanta to Austin, from Philadelphia to Palo Alto — to cater to them. Young professionals wear these pants to their offices, where dress codes have loosened considerably post-Covid, and they have become a costume of a new male archetype: affluent tech executives who prefer athleisure and Apple Watches to power suits and Rolexes.
To put a number on just how popular this style is, look to November, when Vuori closed an investment round of funding for $825 million, bringing the company’s valuation to $5.5 billion.
“It’s still early days for Vuori,” Mr. Kudla, 46, said on a video call from Carlsbad, Calif., just north of San Diego, where the company is based. He cut a striking figure in a high-collared jacket from the brand’s recent foray into outerwear, and has the weathered yet disarming good looks of a former model, which he is.
“We have just over 80 stores in the U.S. and five globally, but we have the opportunity to build hundreds,” he added. “I feel like we’ve just gotten started, and now we have new partners on board, I think the future looks really bright.”
Chris Carey, a partner at Stripes, which led the recent round of funding alongside General Atlantic, had been eyeing Vuori since 2017, when the company had annual revenue of about $7 million. A proprietary Stripes tool that uses various data points to predict a brand’s potential success had flagged the brand.
“Vuori’s product strength was validated by our consumer research,” Mr. Carey wrote in an email. “Vuori has the highest net promoter score amongst its peers in the athleisure space, and is the highest rated on fit, performance and comfort.”
As the luxury brands have seemingly hit a wall with consumers, Vuori operates in a market poised for growth.
“Vuori is operating in the $95 billion activewear category,” said Mr. Carey, who noted that he himself was a customer. “And we expect the market to continue to grow rapidly as consumers seek healthy, active lifestyles and also embrace the casualization and comfort provided by athleisure.”
“Whether you call it a commuter pant or a travel pant,” said Kristen Classi-Zummo, an apparel industry adviser at Circana, formerly NPD Group, “what it really just is, is this trend of nonactive categories that are being designed with active properties.”
According to her, the “active casual” apparel category, which encompasses tech pants, has outperformed the pure “active” category recently, with the former up 15 percent over the last year and the latter up 5 percent.
“The reason it’s winning,” Ms. Classi-Zummo said, “is because it’s really for our blended lifestyles.”
Born and raised in Washington State, Mr. Kudla was drawn to the laid-back lifestyle and proximity to the beach that Southern California promised, so he attended the University of San Diego. After graduation, he received his first taste of the fashion industry when, while surfing, he was scouted to be a model — a brief professional detour that provided him access to the inner workings of European luxury brands such as Dolce & Gabbana and piqued his interest in fashion design.
After his career as a model ended, Mr. Kudla returned to San Diego to work as a senior auditor for Ernst & Young. His first entrepreneurial pursuit was helping his girlfriend at the time with a short-lived contemporary women’s clothing line. He then founded Vuori as a graphic T-shirt line, named after the Finnish word for mountain. The brand, however, failed to attract interest from retailers or consumers.
A chance encounter with an executive business coach and intuitive, or psychic medium, shifted Mr. Kudla’s trajectory.
“She told me that the business that I was working on is going to be wildly successful, but it wasn’t going to be in its current form or with my current partner,” he said. “And that was very hard for me to hear. She told me all these things about my family, and it got my head spinning — it was very emotional for me.”
The very next day, Mr. Kudla began a process of what he called “personal development and growth as a human being,” committing himself to a yoga and meditation practice. The idea of Vuori as it is today crystallized during this time.
“You didn’t have this overall ‘active lifestyle’ positioning,” Mr. Kudla said, “where it was a fashion-meets-function product that could work in a yoga class, but you’d feel comfortable wearing it to a dinner afterward or hanging out with friends — and that was very much the lifestyle I was living.”
Most sports apparel at the time was designed for a specific activity — running, say, or basketball — and often came with flashy design flourishes, Mr. Kudla recalled, like racing stripes, logos or reflective accents. Instead, he wanted to create something that had a subtler, everyday aesthetic but retained those activewear properties. He knew there was a market because he noticed that men in San Diego, instead of wearing athletic shorts to yoga class, often opted for more understated board shorts.
Mr. Kudla raised around $400,000 from friends and family and in 2015 relaunched Vuori with the Kore Short, a versatile style that resembled a board short but featured details like an elastic waistband and a supportive liner. His thought was to sell it at boutique fitness studios, which were flourishing.
“But people would say, ‘I don’t understand what you’re trying to do,’” he said. “They’d say: ‘These look like swim trunks. They don’t look like athletic shorts.’”
With money starting to run out, Mr. Kudla decided he needed to change course, so he focused on a direct-to-consumer model and began marketing on social media. His posts spotlighted the words that he said customers used when describing to him how they had adapted the Kore Short into their daily wardrobe: “running, training, hiking, traveling, chilling.”
“And it was like all of a sudden it started connecting,” he said. “People started understanding what we were trying to do. We weren’t pigeonholing the brand — we were saying it is about this versatile, athletic, active life. And we started seeing great results, and that was the first moment we were like, ‘OK, we have an engine.’”
Mr. Kudla used that engine to quickly build his brand. He made his first million within a year and was profitable within two, able to start paying back his early investors, he said, a fact he credits to the fiscal conservatism instilled in him by his accounting background. He is pleased to say he has never acquired a new customer at a loss.
“This was a time when brands believed that you can spend two times the value of the sale in acquisition costs because over the lifetime they’ll pay back,” Mr. Kudla said. “That turned out to be a flawed strategy.”
Instead he stayed true to his vision, which has paid off. “Today the old-school way of building a business on the fundamentals of profitably is very much in vogue with investors again,” he said.
Another engine of growth was wholesaling to retailers like Nordstrom and REI, which bolstered Mr. Kudla’s vision of a brand that could exist alongside both fashion labels and outdoor gear. He then started to expand the collection, introducing women’s wear in 2018 — it now makes up around 50 percent of sales — and the Meta Pant in late 2019.
He was also garnering attention from outside parties interested in a brand that seemed to resonate with consumers — and was able to turn a profit. Vuori took on outside investment twice before November’s round: an undisclosed amount in 2019 from Norwest Venture Partners and, in 2021, $400 million from SoftBank, which placed Vuori’s valuation at $4 billion. That capital has helped the brand expand into new categories, invest in sustainability efforts and push further into retail.
“Vuori has a massive opportunity ahead in expanding its retail store presence in new markets,” said Mr. Carey of Stripes, which has a track record of investing in other buzzy fashion brands, like Khaite and Reformation. “And Vuori expects to exceed 100 stores in 2026. Retail stores will continue to drive brand awareness while they also continue to support their direct-to-consumer business and wholesale partners. In addition, Vuori is focused on becoming a global brand, with a focus on expansion in key markets in Europe and Asia.”
Vuori sits alongside brands like Lululemon, the industry powerhouse that was founded as a women’s yoga line in 1998 and added men’s wear in 2014. Lululemon’s ABC Pant is one of its top sellers, said Mhairi Campbell, the brand’s vice president of global men’s merchandising. It has become an “if you know, you know” product, she wrote in an email, and is often the entry point to the brand for men. The ABC Pant comes in five styles and four fits, and in 2022 Lululemon introduced a version made for golfing.
The tech pant has become absorbed by the fashion world at large, found at brands that specialize in athleisure, athletic wear or just plain old-fashioned clothes. Everyone from Michael Kors to J.Crew offers a version. Perhaps most telling is that Levi’s, the San Francisco-based behemoth synonymous with denim, introduced its own tech pant last year.
“We’re excited to offer the consumer more wearing occasions through our diversified bottoms portfolio,” said Janine Chilton-Faust, Levi’s global vice president of men’s design. In 2023, Vuori announced a new chief marketing officer, who held the same role at Levi’s.
Today, Mr. Kudla’s vision of a casual, athletic lifestyle is best expressed at his new 180,000-square-foot campus in San Diego, all creamy plaster walls and beachy wood accents, just a stone’s throw from the ocean. It’s a far cry from when Mr. Kudla ran the company out of a garage, with no heat or air-conditioning.
And while the scope of his role as founder has evolved drastically since those early days — when he made his own social media ads and begged fitness studios to stock his goods — one responsibility remains significant to him.
“I’m still our fit model for men’s,” Mr. Kudla said, with a bashful grin. “That’s a job that I’ll never give up.”
