Nate Checketts was building companies before he knew to call them companies. At 11, there was lemonade. At 13 and 14, there were golf balls fished out of the lakes beside his grandparents’ course and sold back to golfers. At 15, there was a children’s camp in his parents’ backyard. It ran for eight summers and, at its busiest, hosted more than 200 children each summer. Plenty of founders retrofit a myth onto childhood. Checketts supplied receipts - and, one imagines, several damp Titleists.
The pattern matters more than the precocity. Each project began close to home. He noticed something ordinary, assembled a service around it, then watched whether people paid. The habit survived college, where he studied finance at Brigham Young University and helped build Mangia Technologies, a mobile system that let stadium spectators order food from their seats. Its patents were later acquired by the San Francisco 49ers.
By the time Rhone arrived, Checketts had launched four companies before turning 30. Yet the apparel business did not spring from a lifelong romance with lapels, hems or the precise emotional register of navy. It came from another piece of observed friction. Premium activewear had flourished for women. Men could choose from legacy sports giants or specialist gear, but the premium, all-day proposition looked oddly vacant.
The office with scheduled stops
Rhone started in 2013 as something between a conviction and an elaborate commuting arrangement. Checketts and co-founder Carras Holmstead held demanding jobs in New York and lived outside the city. On the train in, they planned the business, called designers and debated fabrics. At the terminal, the fledgling company went back into their briefcases. After work, it came out again for the ride home.
The schedule had the severe geometry of a railway map. On some mornings, Checketts left home at 4:30 to secure enough screen time before the regular workday. He tried to preserve dinner and bedtime with his family several nights a week. Other evenings stretched to 10 or 11. Asked later whether he felt overwhelmed, he did not offer the polished founder’s retrospect. He said the answer was yes, all the time.
That candor is useful because Rhone’s origin is often described as inevitable: a market gap spotted, a premium product made, a brand born. The lived version was less tidy. Checketts had no background in fashion, ecommerce or retail. For roughly three years, he felt like a novice in nearly every part of the business. He now describes that absence of inherited wisdom as an advantage. Outsiders are free to ask why ankle socks slip, why a zipper sits where it does or what a fabric is actually doing besides carrying an expensive name.
“For the first 3 years, I felt like a complete novice with regard to nearly every part of the business.”Nate Checketts
Beginner questions, professional consequences
Rhone’s earliest proposition was narrow: performance clothing made with the attention premium women’s brands already brought to their customers, designed around how men moved through work, exercise, travel and everything between. The promise reached beyond stretch toward coherence. The same garment should feel plausible on a commute and after it.
The company’s testing culture grew from Checketts’s beginner questions. Products went to demanding athletes. Materials, fit and placement were reconsidered. A silicone grip on an ankle sock could matter because nobody enjoys spending a morning renegotiating with hosiery. Checketts talks about brands as icebergs: the shopper sees the product above the water, while the decisions about fabric, design and features sit below it. Most of the work is invisible. Its absence is not.
There was an early, clarifying response. A Wall Street Journal story about the young company produced roughly $100,000 in sales over a few days. Emails came from customers around the country who liked both the aesthetic and the mission. The signal made Checketts’s eventual leap from an organization as large as the NFL to a startup of five feel less reckless. He described the switch with a word that reveals his temperament: invigorating.
The energy required a counterweight. Once Rhone became the full-time job, there were no train terminals forcing him to close the briefcase. Checketts had to reintroduce boundaries and a schedule. This, too, became an operating belief. Balance was not a static achievement but a regular calibration with colleagues and family. The product promised versatility; the founder’s calendar needed some as well.
The acquisition they did not take
By late 2016, Rhone had two serious offers. Athleta, owned by Gap, proposed buying the whole company. L Catterton offered a minority investment. The founders chose the latter, preserving control while bringing in capital. The decision was hardly painless in retrospect. Gap launched its own men’s athleisure brand, Hill City, two years later, although the line was shuttered in 2020.
Rhone kept widening its day. A commuter collection pushed technical fabrics into dress shirts and trousers. Physical stores followed. The timing supplied some dark comedy: shortly before pandemic lockdowns, the company signed several leases, including a long-term Fifth Avenue flagship. Ecommerce performed well, but retail expansion and uncertainty exhausted Checketts enough that he considered selling.
Then the organization changed. In 2021, Rhone added its first C-suite leaders across finance, growth and product. Profitability arrived. New private-equity offers followed. A conversation with NFL executive Brian Rolapp reframed the question. If Checketts believed more strongly in the business than ever, why not try to keep it?
“I’m just getting started. There’s still so much to do.”Nate Checketts, on hearing his accomplishments listed back to him
In 2023, the founders, the Checketts family and a group of investors bought out L Catterton’s stake. The transaction returned the company to family-led control. It is a less familiar startup ending: not an exit, but a decision to remain. Checketts’s father, veteran sports executive Dave Checketts, had initially wondered whether the apparel idea would pass. He later joined the board and helped assemble the investor group. Continuity became a strategy, not merely a sentiment.
A wider wardrobe, the same test
The long game does not mean staying small. By 2023, Rhone reported nine-figure revenue and a rapid store rollout. A women’s collection arrived in May 2024, years after customers began asking. Checketts had been hesitant. The market already contained many women’s activewear labels, and he did not want the usual lazy translation of a men’s line. Thirty percent of Rhone’s customers were already women, often buying for men in their lives. Their repeated question - when will you make something for us? - eventually became evidence too conspicuous to ignore.
The launch was presented as a proper commitment, not a capsule or a test. Women inside the company led the work. The line extended Rhone’s premise without photocopying it: performance pieces meant for a complete life. Partnerships with the LPGA followed the same logic, while the NBA relationship put the brand near another group of exacting product testers.
By 2025, Checketts could describe Rhone as a nine-figure omnichannel company that had grown from a single pant. He had also made more than 50 investments, largely around consumer brands, giving him a second vantage point on founders. Yet his most repeatable ideas remain stubbornly unglamorous. Study the customer. Place every detail on trial. Choose goals that fit the mission. Monitor them after the excitement fades.
He once said growing a business is the ultimate puzzle. The remark explains both the ambition and the patience. Puzzles punish force. They reward attention, memory and the willingness to stare at a small piece until its place becomes obvious. Rhone’s story is full of those pieces: a lake golf ball, a stadium food order, a slipping sock, a train timetable, a private-equity term sheet, a request from a woman already buying the brand.
Checketts keeps arranging them. The company has long used “Forever Forward” as its phrase for progress. His career supplies a quieter definition. Forward is rarely a dramatic leap. More often, it is the next useful question, asked on schedule, with the briefcase open before the train reaches the station.