Joe Kudla and the shorts that outgrew their business plan

Joe Kudla had made the clothes he wanted. The awkward discovery was that his customers wanted to wear them somewhere else. He had imagined men shopping for apparel in yoga studios. The men who bought Vuori were running, training, spending time at home and chasing their children. A pair of shorts had escaped its assigned department. The business would have to catch up.

For a founder, this is an uncomfortable kind of good news. People like your work; they disagree with your explanation of it. Kudla had built the early brand around an activity he knew. Customers were describing a whole day. With cash dwindling, he began learning to sell online, where he could ask them questions and hear the answers directly. Versatility, already present in the product, became the point of the pitch.

That adjustment sits near the center of Kudla’s story. Vuori launched in 2015. In November 2024, a secondary investment valued the company at $5.5 billion. The distance between those events can make the opening chapter look inevitable. It contained two earlier apparel ventures that went nowhere, institutional investors who passed and a distribution strategy that needed changing. The comfortable clothes were the easy part to understand. Getting people to buy them required considerably more discomfort.

An accountant takes the long way to work

Kudla grew up in Washington and came to Southern California for college. At the University of San Diego, he studied accounting and played lacrosse. He graduated in 2000. There was a job waiting at an accounting firm, a sensible next step for a sensible degree. Then a modeling opportunity intervened, and the next destination became Milan.

He received his diploma and flew out that night. What he had initially treated as a summer opportunity became two years of travel, with work in Milan, Barcelona, Germany and New York. The accounting start date slipped away. Clothing offered him a different education: he watched designers turn ideas into collections and saw how a product could carry a story before anyone said a word.

The photographs were only part of the attraction. He enjoyed being around people who cared intensely about what they made. Eventually he returned and asked for the accounting job again. The firm took him back. At Ernst & Young he earned his CPA license and learned the workings of businesses from the inside. He has described that period as his own MBA program.

There is a pleasing symmetry here. Modeling taught him to pay attention to the clothes; accounting taught him to pay attention to the bill. Both skills would have uses in a clothing company, even if the combined résumé was unlikely to appear in a university prospectus. The route also gave him firsthand experience of choosing something uncertain and then returning to a more conventional career.

Two rehearsals, neither a hit

Kudla’s first apparel venture, Sammy Jo, was a contemporary women’s label built with his then girlfriend. They bought fabric in Los Angeles on weekends, worked with pattern and sample makers, and cut fabric late into the night. He fitted errands to sample makers into his lunch breaks at EY. The label reached roughly 20 Southern California boutiques, by his recollection, but was never organized to scale.

He subsequently helped build Vaco San Diego, a recruiting and consulting business. It supplied income and room to keep experimenting with apparel. Another clothing project featured collaborations with people whose stories interested him, including musicians and environmentalists. That business closed after the financial crisis of 2008. Fashion was proving an expensive evening class.

Those attempts gave Kudla practical knowledge without supplying the thing prospective investors tend to prefer: a successful track record. He could talk about fabric, samples and production. He could also talk about failure. The two subjects were closely acquainted. When he approached another apparel business, he brought lessons that had already been paid for, although lessons do not automatically buy the next production run.

The customer had a different itinerary

The gap Kudla saw was specific. He wanted men’s performance clothing with the feel and appearance to work beyond exercise. Encinitas, the coastal town where Vuori began, supplied the setting: surf, movement and everyday life occupied the same wardrobe. Nikki Sakelliou and Rebecca Bray were early hires, bringing marketing and men’s design expertise to the small team.

The first sales strategy leaned on studios that already stocked apparel. It sounded reasonable. A customer came to practice; the clothes were available nearby. But the products were not moving through those racks quickly enough. By Kudla’s account, the brand had only a few months of financial reserves left when it changed direction. A promising category on paper had become a problem at the register.

Online selling made a direct conversation possible. Customers described the clothes as useful across several parts of their lives, and yoga ranked far down the list of uses they reported. Kudla began broadening the message to match that experience. The clothes could accompany a workout, a run or a quiet afternoon. They did not need a new identity every time the wearer changed plans.

The distinction matters because the founder’s original observation still had value. Men did want the product. The venue and the narrow description had limited it. Kudla’s willingness to listen preserved the idea while changing how it reached people. It is a more interesting achievement than simply being right from the beginning, and a considerably more useful one for anybody attempting to sell something.

A hoodie finds its own introduction

One of Vuori’s early wholesale openings arrived through a small act of courtesy. Sakelliou knew someone who worked in REI’s marketing department. Kudla met him at a trade show, asked about the retailer and gave him a bag of clothes as thanks for his time. There was no immediate request for an order.

The contact wore a Vuori hoodie at work. A buyer noticed it and asked who had made it. Soon Kudla was traveling to Seattle to present the collection. REI became an early major wholesale partner, initially testing the brand in 10 stores. In Kudla’s telling, the results prompted an invitation to expand to 70 the following season.

It is an unusually literal example of a product doing the talking. The introduction depended on a relationship, but a garment being worn made the next conversation happen. Kudla kept wholesale in the business alongside e-commerce and his own stores. Each channel let a different customer encounter the clothes. Someone could discover Vuori on a retailer’s floor before ever searching for the brand.

This also required unromantic coordination. Wholesale buyers plan ahead; direct customers expect fresh products closer to delivery. Kudla has spoken about managing those different calendars and about the inventory risks of fast growth. Sell too little and stock remains. Sell too much without buying enough and customers find an empty shelf. The accountant had plenty to do.

The cash register joins the conversation

Kudla’s financial approach was rooted in the constraints of those early years. Friends and family supplied backing when institutional funding proved difficult. That made the money personal. He focused on transactions that could pay their way rather than assuming future purchases would eventually justify an expensive first sale.

“We never acquired a customer at a loss.”

Joe Kudla, on Vuori’s early advertising discipline

Vuori became profitable early and reinvested earnings in growth. The appeal of this approach is easy to explain and harder to practice. A business needs enough stock, enough attention and enough people to deliver orders. Every one of those things costs money before the next customer appears. A compelling brand story cannot settle a supplier’s invoice.

In 2019, Norwest invested $45 million for a minority position. Kudla described plans for inventory, hiring, marketing and measured store expansion. SoftBank Vision Fund 2 followed with a $400 million investment in 2021 at a $4 billion valuation. In 2024, General Atlantic and Stripes led an $825 million secondary tender offer at a $5.5 billion valuation. A secondary transaction buys existing shares; that headline amount should not be read as fresh operating cash.

A shop with room for an art show

Kudla’s view of retail began with an unpromising entrance. Recalling the first Encinitas space, he described a limited construction budget, work the team did themselves and a location with little foot traffic. Opening the doors did not produce a crowd. They divided the space into a shop, an art gallery and an office, then invited the town in.

Local artists and photographers supplied work for shows. Events, classes and gatherings gave people a reason to visit beyond shopping. That early space let the brand participate in the place that had inspired it. For a company selling a picture of coastal life, actually knowing people in the coastal town was a useful start.

Kudla has carried that emphasis into his account of expansion. In 2019, when Vuori operated three stores, he talked about engaging the surrounding communities and hiring people who would treat customers well. He summed up one of the lessons plainly: “there is no substitute for being nice.” It is difficult to improve that instruction with a management acronym.

His priorities also owe something to his stepfather, whom he credits with teaching care, hard work and balance. The connection makes the retail philosophy feel less like a slogan discovered in a meeting. A store requires thousands of ordinary interactions. Politeness, attention and remembering why someone came in are small things that become the experience.

How much Encinitas can travel?

The scale has changed. By 2025, Vuori had opened its 100th store. In December of that year, Kudla identified product innovation and global ambassador partnerships as priorities for 2026. The question accompanying expansion is whether the qualities established in one town can remain recognizable elsewhere. More locations make the original habits harder to carry personally.

He has also returned to his university in a different capacity. In November 2024, Kudla and fellow alumnus Michael Persall announced a joint $2 million commitment to establish an Entrepreneurship Leadership Summit at the University of San Diego. The school subsequently announced the inaugural summit’s launch in 2025. The accounting graduate’s winding career had become material for the next generation of entrepreneurs.

There is no need to straighten that career into a tidy line. The modeling trip, the late-night fabric cutting, the consulting business and the early customers all contributed something different. Kudla’s useful habit was to notice what each encounter offered, including evidence that the latest plan needed work. The customer who wore the shorts somewhere unexpected was giving him another kind of education.

Vuori’s expansion will test new products, markets and relationships. Its opening lesson remains pleasantly concrete: ask where the clothes actually go. A founder can spend years preparing a story about his product. Then someone buys it, gets dressed and supplies a better ending.