Ty Haney has spent a decade proving that the second act of a consumer brand is often harder than the first. She started Outdoor Voices in 2013, at 23, fresh out of Parsons School of Design. The pitch was almost disarmingly simple: activewear you would wear to do ordinary things, not to chase a personal record. She wrapped it in a hashtag, #DoingThings, and a phrase that doubled as a worldview - free fitness from performance.
It worked. Outdoor Voices grew into one of the defining names of the athleisure boom, reaching well over $160 million in annual revenue at its peak. Haney landed on Forbes 30 Under 30, then on the inaugural cover of Inc. magazine's Female Founders issue. For a stretch she was the face of a certain kind of optimism about direct-to-consumer brands built on community rather than advertising.
Then it came apart. In 2020, after roughly eight years running the company, Haney stepped down amid investor pressure and internal leadership friction. She rejoined the board briefly, then left again in early 2021. The brand she had defined kept operating without her. For most founders, that would be the ending.
Building the thing that was missing
Haney's read on her own company was specific. Community, she believed, was the real engine of Outdoor Voices, and yet there had never been a proper system to build it, measure it, or reward it. A hashtag could create a moment. It could not create loyalty you could count.
So she built that system. In 2022 she launched Try Your Best, known as TYB, a community and loyalty platform for consumer brands. The premise inverts the usual playbook: instead of renting attention on third-party social feeds, brands use TYB to own a direct relationship with their most engaged fans, rewarding them with points, early access, drops, and digital collectibles for the actions that actually build a brand - sharing, creating, showing up.
The idea traveled. TYB now counts more than 200 consumer brands as customers, including Rare Beauty, Glossier, Crocs, Urban Outfitters, Saie, and Set Active, and has grown past two million users. In June 2025 the company raised an $11 million Series A, co-led by Offline Ventures and Strobe, with participation from Coinbase Ventures, Castle Island Ventures, and Unusual Ventures - bringing total funding to roughly $20.8 million.
The comeback
The plot then folded back on itself. In 2024, the investment firm Consortium Brand Partners acquired Outdoor Voices. Haney, quietly at first, rejoined the company she had founded to lead its relaunch. By July 2025 the return was public: she was back as CEO and part owner of Outdoor Voices, five years after being pushed out of it.
What makes the return more than a nostalgia play is how she wired her two companies together. TYB is built directly into the Outdoor Voices relaunch, so the loyalty platform she created after leaving now powers the community of the brand she came back to. Each business feeds the other. It is a rare arrangement - a founder running two companies at once and using one to solve the exact problem that, in her telling, the other never fully cracked the first time.
Along the way she also co-founded Joggy, a plant-based energy brand that scaled into hundreds of retail doors, including Target. Three companies, one throughline: get people doing things, together, and give them a reason to keep coming back.
Where it comes from
Haney was born in Long Beach, California, and grew up in Boulder, Colorado, in a family where starting a company was the normal way to make a living. Her mother co-founded the sportswear label Fresh Produce; her father ran a screen-printing and embroidery business. She was an athlete as a kid, running cross country and track, and at one point considered competing in college. The instinct to make things - and to move - shows up in every venture since.
It also explains the pattern. Haney's career reads less like a straight climb than a series of restarts, each one carrying forward a lesson from the last. Outdoor Voices taught her the power of community and the cost of losing control of a company. TYB is the attempt to systematize the first and hedge against the second. Being public about all of it - the ouster, the rebuild, the return - has made her a case study for a broader shift, as more founders repurchase and rejoin the companies they started.
What she wants next is less about apparel than about infrastructure. Her bet is that community will become the operating system for consumer brands, the layer that lets them own their audience instead of leasing it from platforms that can change the rules overnight. Whether or not that bet pays off, Haney has already demonstrated the more unusual skill: she keeps building after the parts most people would call an ending.
Good To Know- The #DoingThings hashtag she championed became cultural shorthand for casual, everyday movement.
- She runs Outdoor Voices and TYB simultaneously and connected them, using TYB to power the brand's community.
- Her entrepreneurial roots run deep - both of her parents started their own companies.
- Joggy, her plant-based energy brand, scaled into hundreds of retail doors including Target.