Third time’s the charm: Vuori’s CEO failed with his first two start-ups, this one is worth 4.8 billion

For two surreal years, Vuori founder Joe Kudla was a fashion model. He was 1.88 meters tall, muscular, had dark eyes and a Roman-inspired chin. Shortly before graduating from the University of California, San Diego in 2000, a talent scout approached him on a beach after a surf session. Although he had a career as an accountant ahead of him—he had studied accounting and had a job offer from Ernst & Young—at the age of 22 he found it much more fun to take a break in Milan to dedicate himself to modeling. Unfortunately, it was not. He soon began to hate posing in front of the cameras. What really caught his attention were the clothing designers he encountered during pre-show fittings and advertising sessions. His creativity inspired Kudla, who had always considered himself an unartistic person. Now he suspected that “maybe there was a creative side within me.” Kudla, now 48 years old, has since embraced that creative side with enormous success. Since launching its clothing company, Vuori (pronounced Ví-or-i), in 2015 — reaching profitability just two years later — the young sportswear brand has been cutting share from established giants like Lululemon Athletica and Nike. Valued at $5.5 billion (€4.826 million) in a 2024 financing round in which SoftBank, Norwest and General Atlantic participated, Vuori operates around 150 stores and plans to open another 30 this year in Canada, England, Mexico and other markets. It has also signed deals with athletes, actors and models, including Tom Holland and Cindy Crawford, and employs more than 700 people around the world, with plans to hire another 100 this year. Most impressively, Kudla seems to have accomplished all this without losing a single bit of peace of mind. “Ultimately, what motivates me every day, on a deeper level, is growing and evolving as a person,” he says with a slow attitude typical of Southern California. The CEO is sitting on a comfortable couch in his office at the company’s headquarters in northern San Diego County. A pristine beach is just a few minutes’ walk away, and surfboard racks line the company gym. The campus is filled with soft tones, tropical plants and abundant natural light. It all fits with Vuori’s laid-back aesthetic: a cross between Apple and Billabong. “We were inspired by brands we admired as kids that evoked that Southern California spirit,” he explains. “We put them through a more refined filter.” Kudla’s office overlooks Vuori’s design area, strategically located there because, according to him, “in our business the product is the most important thing.” And Kudla, like the true king of Vuori, pays meticulous attention to every detail. In fact, it remains the internal reference model for new men’s clothing. The designers first fit the prototypes on a mannequin with the same proportions and then try the garments directly on it in the fitting room. He is proud of this role. “It keeps me intimately connected to our product,” he says. “Nothing escapes.” Like so many San Diegans, Kudla came from somewhere else. He had a quiet childhood playing in the woods on Vashon Island, a small island off the coast of Seattle without a single traffic light. His mother, who ran a natural products store and worked as a therapist, had an interest in Native American spirituality and, he said, was “always looking for answers to life’s big questions.” His father was an acupuncturist. “The best gift my parents gave me was the idea that life is short, we are on a path of growth and you should follow your heart and do what you are passionate about.” When Kudla was ten years old, her parents divorced. Together with his mother and younger sister he moved to Bellevue, a technology center in Washington state. There, upon coming into contact with economic prosperity through his friends, he began to imagine a more comfortable life. «My family didn’t value material possessions. In a way, that’s what attracted me to entrepreneurship, because I did want to experience those things.» After her experience as a model in Milan, she finally joined Ernst & Young, today known simply as EY, where she audited local companies for two years. “That was like my MBA,” he remembers. “I was able to see how many different businesses worked inside.” While working there, she started a contemporary women’s fashion brand with a designer girlfriend as a side project. They ended up getting married, but both the marriage and the company ended up failing. Still, that experience was a crash course in the clothing business. He later created a graphic t-shirt brand with an artist friend and called it Vuori, a Finnish word meaning “mountain.” After the 2008 financial crisis, they had to close it. This double business failure led Kudla to go through a difficult period. She found relief in yoga. Its daily practice opened a period of deep reflection. During those sessions, she observed that the yoga and fitness industry, which was growing rapidly in the United States, was focused almost exclusively on women. “The only place you could buy men’s sportswear was Dick’s Sporting Goods,” he recalls. “The idea that sportswear could become everyday fashion for men was practically non-existent.” It was a pre-pandemic time and all-day comfort was not yet high on the agenda for many adult men. «I thought, ‘This idea is too good. I can see this brand absolutely clearly in my head,'» he says. “I was fully aware that if I didn’t do it, I would regret it on my deathbed.” Together with a friend, former professional skateboarder Chris Miller, he spent a year developing a business plan. He recovered the name Vuori because, as he explains, “the fundamental posture of yoga is the mountain posture.” They created a brand manual that reflected “the community he had cultivated in Encinitas,” the coastal city north of San Diego where he had settled in 2003: “people who surfed, practiced yoga and asked deep questions about life.” Then he started looking for investors. The first one he got, a fellow UCSD graduate, attracted five other friends, who invested between $50,000 and $100,000 each. No one had seen a product yet; It was the vision that convinced them. Miller would end up following other professional paths, although Kudla says they remain friends. At first, a fashion consultant helped him design the clothes. She scoured trade shows for materials and worked with a factory in China until her fabric “looked like something the world had never touched before,” she says. China continues to produce a small portion of the collection, although most of the garments are now made in Southeast Asia. Its first products, launched in 2015, were the Strato Tech t-shirt ($58 currently), the Strato Tech hoodie ($78), and the Kore shorts ($68). He convinced some yoga and fitness stores to sell them, but sales were poor. So he changed his strategy. He rented a space in Encinitas and transformed it into a community center hosting art shows, yoga classes, parties, and events with rotating beer and wine vendors. Men’s sportswear was also sold there. As Vuori’s local popularity grew, Kudla opted for the direct-to-consumer model. “We didn’t want to raise a lot of money, build a big infrastructure and then grow to fill it,” he explains. “Everything we have done has been measured and financially disciplined.” Thanks to customer surveys, he discovered that the brand’s success “had nothing to do with yoga.” “People loved the product because of its versatility.” With that information, he pivoted the brand toward a broader fitness philosophy, and sales skyrocketed. In early 2016, Vuori opened its first flagship store in Encinitas, a coastal city north of San Diego. Two years later, she launched her first women’s line, led by the DreamKnit Jogger pants ($110). Today, women represent more than half of total sales. Vuori, a company that is not listed on the Stock Exchange, does not reveal its turnover figures, although Kudla assures that the pandemic was “a real turning point”, as consumers leaned towards more comfortable clothing during confinements. Today, the brand is present in high-end department stores such as Bloomingdale’s and is quickly becoming a style staple for active and well-off people both in the United States and abroad. When recounting the origins of Vuori, Kudla often uses the pronoun «we» to refer to the various advisors of the early years. However, it is clear that the brand is ultimately an extension of itself. Vuori is his great creation. Well, in addition to his two daughters, ages 6 and 9, and Bodie, a Cavapoo he shares with his wife, Elan, whom he married in 2017. That mentality does not exclude a possible IPO. “It is certainly one of the options we are considering,” he says. Even so, he seems satisfied to continue moving forward without being disturbed by the tyranny of quarterly results. As he walks around the building, he points out a mannequin that has exactly the same measurements and proportions, just as he had described. “Don’t judge me,” he says, laughing. “But this is me.” He watches his inanimate double and reflects on the winding, yet somewhat circular, journey that took him from runway model to CEO of a casual sportswear company. “The first design always represents the intention of where we want to go. But when you see it in the real world, you always make changes,” he says, true to the West Coast spirit. “You keep iterating until you reach perfection.”