The buttery-soft, size-inclusive activewear brand that grew from an LA trade show to a Levi Strauss company.
In 2005, an aspiring activewear designer and a t-shirt entrepreneur crossed paths at a Los Angeles trade show. Jodi Guber Brufsky, a life coach and yoga teacher, wanted to build a body-positive line that made women feel good in their own skin. Michelle Wahler had the graphic-design chops and the operating instinct. They partnered, leaned on a local LA factory, and started Beyond Yoga - a brand built on a simple, then-unfashionable premise: that comfort and inclusivity were not a small corner of the market, but the market itself.
For years, the label operated quietly, selling largely through wholesale channels rather than chasing hype. That patience turned out to be a strategy. By offering flattering, buttery-soft pieces for women of many shapes and sizes, Beyond Yoga built a loyal following one re-order at a time - the kind of organic loyalty that is hard to buy and harder to fake.
The timing helped. The brand grew up alongside a cultural shift in which yoga pants stopped being gym-only and started being worn to the grocery store, the school pickup and the coffee shop. Beyond Yoga's studio-to-street positioning fit that change neatly, and its LA roots gave it a casual, sun-warmed sensibility distinct from the technical, performance-first tone of some rivals. What began as a small operation with a single factory and a clear point of view became, over roughly a decade and a half, a brand large enough to attract one of the most recognizable names in American apparel.
“Beyond Yoga is on a mission to give every body, shape and size luxury-level comfort in activewear.”
At its core, Beyond Yoga makes activewear and athleisure designed to move from a yoga mat to the rest of the day without missing a beat. The foundation is Spacedye - the brand's signature performance fabric, known for a heathered texture, four-way stretch, moisture wicking and UV protection. It is soft enough to lounge in and functional enough to train in, and it became the material that carried the company. The bestselling high-waisted Spacedye legging alone has sold more than three million pairs.
The customer is, first and foremost, a woman who wants clothing that fits and feels good across her real life - yoga practitioners, everyday wearers, and lifestyle shoppers who value comfort as much as performance. Crucially, that customer is not defined by a single size. Beyond Yoga ranges from XXS to 3X and wear-tests its inclusive sizing on real bodies rather than sample-size mannequins. The brand also refuses to retouch its models - a policy that reads less like marketing and more like a promise.
Around the signature leggings sits a full wardrobe. There are sports bras and supportive tops, crop tanks, tees, joggers and matching sets, plus a growing lineup of dresses, skirts, jumpsuits and outerwear. A cozier LuxeFleece line answers the off-duty, couch-and-errands part of a customer's week, while maternity styles and toddler and children's wear extend the brand across life stages. The through-line is not a single silhouette but a feel: pieces that a customer reaches for because they are comfortable, not just because they are new.
Activewear has long been designed for a narrow band of bodies and then stretched, awkwardly, to fit everyone else. Beyond Yoga inverts that. By building for a wide size range from the start and grounding the line in genuinely comfortable fabric, it removes the quiet friction many shoppers feel in a fitting room. The result is apparel people actually re-wear and re-buy, which is the whole game in a category crowded with lookalike leggings.
The company's biggest turning point reportedly began with a cold LinkedIn message. That outreach connected Beyond Yoga to Levi Strauss & Co., which was hunting for a credible entry into activewear - a category executives note is roughly five times larger than denim and growing faster. In August 2021, Levi's acquired Beyond Yoga for approximately $400 million.
The bet paid off quickly. Under Levi's ownership, Beyond Yoga grew past $100 million in annual revenue, opened brick-and-mortar stores for the first time, and became a brand Levi's leadership has publicly described as a potential billion-dollar business. In one fiscal fourth quarter, revenues jumped 37 percent - and 45 percent on an organic basis - to $46 million.
For Levi Strauss, the logic was structural. Denim is a mature, cyclical category, and activewear offered a larger, faster-growing pool of demand that its supply chain, wholesale relationships and retail muscle were well suited to serve. Beyond Yoga gave the company a credible, already-loved brand rather than a from-scratch launch - a way to enter a competitive category without starting at zero. For the founders, the acquisition brought scale that a boutique wholesale operation could not reach alone: capital for stores, systems for growth, and a partner accustomed to operating at global scale.
“The activewear market is five times bigger than denim and growing at a faster rate.”
Leadership changed hands in early 2024. Co-founder Michelle Wahler stepped down, and Nancy Green - who previously scaled Athleta from 39 to 175 stores - took the helm. Her strategy addresses an obvious risk: when she arrived, roughly 90 percent of the business ran through a single fabric, Spacedye, with leggings dominating sales.
Green's answer was expansion, not defense. Over the last two years the brand has launched knitwear, outerwear, dresses, jumpsuits and children's clothing, and introduced materials like linen, wool and fleece. Lifestyle categories now drive the majority of revenue - an evolution from performance-only activewear into a broader wellness and lifestyle label. In parallel, Beyond Yoga is building out physical retail deliberately, growing from 8 to 14 stores by the end of 2025, including its first East Coast location in Greenwich, Connecticut, with a stated line of sight to 200-plus over time.
In a field that includes Lululemon, Athleta, Alo Yoga and Vuori, Beyond Yoga's edge is less about a single feature and more about consistency of philosophy. The size range is genuinely broad and tested on real bodies; the no-retouching policy signals who the brand is for; and the Spacedye fabric gives it a recognizable, repeatable product signature. Where some rivals lean on studio-cool marketing, Beyond Yoga has leaned on comfort and inclusivity as the product itself - and the loyalty that built is what attracted Levi's in the first place.
Beyond Yoga runs an omnichannel model: direct-to-consumer e-commerce on Shopify Plus, wholesale distribution to retail partners, and a growing fleet of experiential stores and pop-ups. It sits inside Levi Strauss & Co. as the company's flagship move into activewear - a hedge and a growth engine as denim matures. Headquartered in Culver City, the brand employs roughly 320 people and remains female-founded and nearly 90 percent female-led, a culture rooted in body positivity and wellness rather than bolted on to it.
What can people do with it? At the simplest level, wear it - to a workout, to work, or to the couch. But the brand's larger promise is subtler: clothing that fits a wider range of bodies comfortably, without the fitting-room friction that quietly nudges shoppers away. For Levi Strauss, Beyond Yoga is a proof point that inclusivity and comfort are not a niche play but a scalable business. For customers, it is a place where a size XXS and a size 3X are designed with the same care.
The company's core competence is fabric and fit. Spacedye is not just a marketing name; it is a proprietary knit whose heathered look comes from yarns dyed at multiple points along the thread, engineered for stretch, softness and recovery. Building a legging customers buy three million times over requires getting the small things right - the waistband that stays put, the seams that do not chafe, the opacity that holds through a deep bend - and doing so across a wide size range. That fit discipline, paired with a merchandising instinct for what a modern woman actually wears from morning to night, is the expertise the brand keeps compounding as it moves into new materials like linen, wool and fleece.
Its market position sits in the premium-comfort tier of activewear: more design-led and softer-handed than mass athletic labels, more inclusive and less status-driven than some of its studio-cool peers. As part of Levi Strauss, it now has room to test how far a comfort-first, size-inclusive brand can scale - across categories, across store counts, and across the line between activewear and everyday lifestyle apparel.
A few things set the brand apart in conversation. Its models are never retouched. Its inclusive sizes are wear-tested on real bodies. Co-founder Jodi Guber Brufsky came to fashion from life coaching and yoga teaching, and early funding came in part from her father, a well-known Hollywood producer. And the Spacedye fabric earns its heathered look from yarns dyed at multiple points along the thread - a small technical detail behind a very large commercial result.
Video links open YouTube search results for the “How I Built This” founder episode and Spacedye product demos. Financial and story details are drawn from public reporting by Levi Strauss & Co., WWD, Modern Retail, Glossy, SGB Media and Wikipedia.