Michelle Wahler and the $400 Million Slow Build

Michelle Wahler thought Levi’s wanted to do a collaboration. A message had arrived on LinkedIn, the sort of place where a promising conversation can mean anything from a useful introduction to an invitation to attend a webinar. She took the meeting. In 2021, Levi Strauss & Co. bought Beyond Yoga for approximately $400 million.

The distance between those two events contains most of what makes Wahler interesting. She had helped build the company since 2005, with Jodi Guber Brufsky, selling clothes through yoga studios and small boutiques before reaching a much larger audience. The business had grown without repeated rounds of outside capital. By the time a denim company came calling, there was something substantial to buy.

Sixteen years is an awkward interval for a neat success story. It refuses to fit inside a montage. There are too many purchase orders, too many conversations about fabric, too many decisions whose consequences arrive a season later. Wahler’s career rewards a closer look at those decisions. The clothes were soft. The operating discipline had considerably more backbone.

A drawing of a friend, printed on a shirt

Before the leggings came the illustrations. Wahler studied graphic design at the University of Florida and moved to New York, where she worked as a designer and waited tables. Her publishing career included People and Harper’s Bazaar. Alongside that work, she started Unsweetened, a clothing business built around drawings of women, including her friends, printed on T-shirts.

It was a useful early education in the strange journey from having an idea to having something another person will pay to wear. Her apartment became a working studio. A drawing could become a shirt; a friend could become a customer; a small project could begin demanding the attention usually reserved for a proper job. Entrepreneurship had found a fairly inexpensive way into the room.

She already knew that owning a business could go badly. Her father had built a chain of music stores and lost it. As a child, she watched both the excitement of expansion and the consequences of failure. That history gave the ambition some weight. The attractive part of building something came attached to a practical question: how do you keep it going?

In California, she met Guber Brufsky, whose idea for an inclusive activewear company immediately interested her. Wahler began sketching products and sending over ideas. The conversation became a partnership. Guber Brufsky brought the founding vision; Wahler would spend the next eighteen years helping translate it into products, relationships, and a functioning business.

The expensive sample worth a second look

Wahler’s interest in fabric was specific and hands-on. In one account of visiting a supplier, she remembered being steered away from a sample because it cost too much. She wanted to know more. It felt good enough to make the price worth examining. A spreadsheet could establish the cost; somebody still had to decide whether the customer would care.

Beyond Yoga became closely associated with Spacedye, the soft, stretchy fabric that gave shoppers a reason to reach for its clothes repeatedly. That was a product decision with commercial consequences. The business could talk about comfort all day, but the fabric had to finish the argument when somebody tried on the pants.

There was also a pleasingly unfashionable requirement: easy care. Wahler described clothes that could go into the washer and dryer and carry someone through the day. The person buying them had other things to do. Designing around that person’s actual life meant considering the laundry as well as the fitting room. Glamour has survived worse indignities than a tumble dryer.

Even the first product has remained vivid in her memory. She can still identify the early bootleg pant by its style number, SP1001. Years later, as flared silhouettes returned, the company revisited the shape in a higher waist and newer fabric. Fashion supplied the circle. Wahler remembered the inventory code.

Making room on the rack

The founders’ commitment to a wider range of customers had to survive the manufacturing process. Wahler has described beginning fittings on a size medium and then testing the full size run on actual people. Simply enlarging or shrinking a pattern was insufficient. Each size had to work as clothing, rather than exist as an optimistic entry in a dropdown menu.

That took conversations with factories, which had good operational reasons to prefer fewer variations. Small quantities in an additional size were inconvenient to produce. Wahler pushed for them anyway. She also argued for the same price across sizes, even where making a larger garment cost more. The promise of inclusion reached all the way to the price tag.

The imagery required similar care. Beyond Yoga committed to keeping women’s bodies unretouched in its campaigns. Wahler’s experience in publishing had made the mechanics of image alteration familiar to her. Here was an opportunity to make a different editorial decision, repeatedly, with the company’s own money and the company’s own photographs.

Getting those clothes onto a shop floor involved persuasion, too. Some retailers were accustomed to buying a narrow size range. Wahler urged them to show customers that other sizes were available, while keeping the initial order manageable. A shop needed time to reach the people it had previously overlooked. She wanted partners to build that audience without being buried under stock.

Small shops, consequential introductions

Beyond Yoga grew through wholesale. Early accounts included Drishti in Santa Barbara and YogaWorks. Studios and boutiques gave the young business places where customers could discover the clothes and feel them in person. Those relationships mattered because the company was selling a tactile proposition. A photograph can suggest softness; a fitting room can settle the question.

One early moment of recognition came through Jill Roberts, the Southern California boutique. Reese Witherspoon bought Beyond Yoga there and was photographed shopping. Wahler remembered that attention becoming a useful introduction when approaching larger department stores. A buyer considering an unfamiliar label suddenly had something recognizable to attach to it. Celebrity supplied a calling card; the clothes still had to sell.

She kept taking wholesale seriously as the company developed its own online business. In her later telling, those partners were participants in the brand’s growth, with knowledge and relationships worth listening to. The business expanded through a collection of such alliances. That kind of growth can look quiet from the outside while producing a very busy working day.

By 2019, Wahler described herself as “Hyper-focused and friendly but firm.” The combination makes sense for someone balancing a product vision with the demands of production and sales. She also admitted that delegation was difficult. Trusting other leaders took practice. A founder who cares about every detail eventually has to make room for people capable of caring about their own.

“Hyper-focused and friendly but firm.”

Michelle Wahler, describing her personality in 2019

What the $400 million bought

Levi Strauss & Co.’s interest became a completed acquisition in September 2021. Its financial reporting put the aggregate purchase price at approximately $400 million. The buyer gained an entry into premium activewear, alongside its established apparel businesses. Wahler stayed on as CEO, taking the company she had co-founded into a new corporate setting.

The next phase involved physical stores as well as digital sales. Beyond Yoga opened its first store in Santa Monica in 2022, followed by Irvine. An early result was revealing: around half the sales at those first two locations came from new customers. Stores were introducing the brand to people who had yet to buy it online.

The brand contributed about $100 million in revenue to Levi Strauss & Co. in fiscal 2022. By the leadership transition announced in January 2024, it had six stores. There was a larger business, a broader distribution system, and a successor: Nancy Green, formerly CEO and president of Athleta, took over on February 1.

Wahler’s ambitions for Beyond Yoga had extended well past the business she handed over. She had envisaged it reaching $1 billion. That remained an ambition, a measure of how much room she thought the idea still had to grow. Handing it to another leader required accepting that the next decisions would belong to somebody else.

The appointment after the exit

On her first day after leaving, Wahler spent time by the ocean listening to How I Built This, a show she had followed for years. She wanted to tell her own story there one day. In February 2025, she did. The longtime listener had become the person explaining how the business happened.

Other conversations have made the next chapter more concrete. She has spoken about returning time to her husband, children, and friends, and helping female founders with the benefit of experience. Her advice includes learning to delegate and asking people for help. In a 2025 interview, she singled out her mother-in-law, Annie Adams, as someone who helps her think through different angles.

By 2026, that work included teaching at USC Marshall, where she is an adjunct professor of management and organization. She has also described Thursday mentoring sessions with founders and an advisory and investment platform called Quince Hill. In September, she returned to How I Built This for its Advice Line, helping other entrepreneurs think through their businesses.

The details outside work are agreeably ordinary. She likes painting, sketching, puzzles, and dogs. The designer who began by drawing her friends has kept an interest in making things and in people. After the acquisition, the stores, and the long stretch of being the person with the final decision, she has made time to be useful in a different way. Someone else brings a problem. Wahler listens. Then the work begins again.