activewear
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Michelle Wahler and the $400 Million Slow Build
Before Levi Strauss & Co. bought Beyond Yoga, Michelle Wahler spent sixteen years making the small decisions: softer fabric, better fit, another wholesale relationship. Stepping away brought a different question: what should she build with her time?
Joe Kudla and the shorts that outgrew their business plan
Joe Kudla set out to dress men for yoga. His customers had other plans - and listening to them helped turn Vuori from a garage venture into a global apparel business.
Nate Checketts Built Rhone Between Train Stops. Now He’s Playing the Long Game.
A childhood camp, an in-seat ordering startup and a briefcase full of fabric swatches all led to Rhone. A useful lesson from Nate Checketts lives beyond the clothing: small irritations can become durable systems.
Davide Mattucci
Davide Mattucci is the Chief Marketing Officer of BYLT Basics, the Irvine, California premium essentials label known for its structured tees and loyalty-driven direct-to-consumer model. He has spent more than 20 years across global apparel brands - prAna, Brixton, adidas, Under Armour and Fanatics - moving fluidly from design and product creation into brand marketing and digital commerce. At BYLT he is helping steer the company's shift from an online seller of product into a full lifestyle brand with physical stores, bringing a 360-degree view of how product, storytelling and marketplace strategy connect with real customers.
Jack Reynolds
Jack Reynolds is the Chief Marketing Officer of Free People and its activewear offshoot FP Movement, both part of Philadelphia-based Urban Outfitters, Inc. (URBN). He was promoted to the CMO role in April 2021 after several years running e-commerce and digital marketing for the brand, and before that spent roughly 13 years at Bertelsmann Media Group managing online and direct programs. He studied English and Philosophy at Dickinson College and originally wanted to work in music as an A&R representative, drifting into marketing while figuring out how to promote artists. Under his marketing leadership, FP Movement has grown from a single 2020 store into a fast-expanding activewear label, backed by campaigns like the 2024 Anomaly-created "Stand Out, Never Still" (starring a pink sheep named Tilly and five Olympic hopefuls) and the 2025 signing of snowboarder Bea Kim as the brand's first winter-sports ambassador ahead of the 2026 Winter Olympics.
Katie Babineau
Katie Babineau is the Chief Marketing Officer of Beyond Yoga, the Culver City premium activewear brand acquired by Levi Strauss & Co. in 2021. She spent roughly fifteen years in consumer technology - Sony Electronics, GoPro, Apple via TBWA\Media Arts Lab, and Snap Inc., where she was Global Head of Marketing - before joining Beyond Yoga as VP of Marketing in 2024 and stepping up to CMO. In 2025 she led the brand's first full reset, a platform called Seek Beyond built around the idea of progress over perfection, with actor and writer Issa Rae as the brand's first celebrity partner writing and performing a spoken-word anthem. She brings a test-and-learn technology mindset to apparel, argues loudly that brand and growth marketing should never be separated, and prefers hyperlocal, in-person community events to another round of picture-perfect ad creative.
Rob Kent
Rob Kent is Head of Marketing (CMO) at Vuori, the Carlsbad, California performance-apparel brand valued at around $5.5 billion. A Cannes Grand Prix-winning brand and creative leader with roughly two decades in the business, he spent a decade running Nike's global brand marketing work at the agency R/GA before crossing over to lead marketing for one of the fastest-growing names in activewear. His career runs from British editorial publishing through blue-chip tech clients to some of Nike's most talked-about brand work.
Ryan Heller
Ryan Heller is the Chief Marketing Officer of Fabletics, the membership-based activewear brand headquartered in El Segundo, California. He leads the company's creative, media and acquisition, CRM, brand partnerships and PR functions. A data-driven marketer with more than a decade inside the TechStyle Fashion Group family of brands, he rose from Vice President to Senior Vice President of Marketing and helped launch customer acquisition for Savage X Fenty before taking the top marketing seat at Fabletics in early 2021.
Ty Haney
Ty Haney is a consumer-brand founder who built Outdoor Voices into a category-defining activewear label starting in 2013, was pushed out in 2020, and rebuilt from scratch. She now runs Try Your Best (TYB), a community and loyalty platform used by more than 200 consumer brands, and in 2025 returned as CEO of Outdoor Voices after its acquisition by Consortium Brand Partners. She also co-founded the plant-based energy brand Joggy.