How I Built This with Guy Raz - Outdoor Voices: Tyler Haney

Episode Date: November 25, 2019

In 2013, Tyler Haney was a 24-year-old graduate of the Parsons School of Design in New York. One day on a jog, she realized that her workout outfits looked, and felt, like they were made for competitive athletes. Tyler envisioned a brand of athletic wear for more everyday activities, like walking the dog or hiking with friends. She launched Outdoor Voices and she got her two-piece "kit" — a crop top and leggings – into a few specialty boutiques. Soon afterward, her brand made it into J. Crew stores and took off. Today, Outdoor Voices has raised close to $60 million from investors and has around 350 employees. PLUS in our postscript "How You Built That," after a lunch with some new moms turned into baby bedlam, Beth Fynbo created Busy Baby Mat — a placemat that would securely stick on any table, keep toys off the floor, and provide a fun surface for babies to eat and draw. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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details, and plenty of space for all of us. And being in that home on Airbnb, right in the middle of Vienna, walking distance from so much of the city, made it feel less like a visit and more like we were actually living there. Plus, taking a trip is the perfect time to host your space on Airbnb. Your place with all of its personal touches and its amazing location could make someone else's vacation even better. Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.ca.com I created a list of 25 VCs and I started emailing, I would say probably 19 got back to me. And out of those 19, when you started to go meet with them, did any of them say, This is awesome.

I'm in. Oh, no. Every single one of those first meetings were like, love that you had the courage to get in here, but this needs work. From NPR, it's how I built this, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

I'm Guy Raz, and on today's show, how a former high school track star took inspiration from a casual jog and built outdoor voices, a brand of athletic wear for people who aren't. necessarily athletes. So think for a moment about energy bars. When Gary Erickson introduced Cliff bars to the world in the early 1990s, energy bars weren't as common as they are today. Even in the early 2000s, when Lara American launched Lara bars, there was plenty of room to stand out. But by the time Peter Rahal debuted RX bars in 2013, there were literally

hundreds of different energy bars to choose from. And trying to differentiate his His bar from the thousands of other brands out there would require a different approach. So Peter focused, at least initially, on the CrossFit community, a relatively niche audience. It was a side door entry into what appeared to be an impenetrable category. But it worked, and eventually, those loyal crossfitters helped turn RX bars into a major energy bar brand. This is more or less the playbook that Tyler Haney used to launch Outdoor Voices. By the time she decided to debut her athletic apparel brand in 2013, lots of people were telling her that the market was saturated.

There was Lulu Lemon and Athleta in addition to the major sports brands like Adidas and Under Armour and Nike. And they were all dominating the so-called a leisure market. But Tyler saw a gap in that market she thought she could fill. You see, many of the big players were focused on performance athletics. The branding seemed to be for people. who wanted to get faster and stronger and work out harder. But Tyler thought there were lots of people who didn't want to do those things, people who just wanted to get out and enjoy the fresh air.

So she decided to build outdoor voices as an athletic clothing brand for everyone else. But surprisingly, for someone who wanted to build a brand for non-athletes, Tyler Haney was at one time actually a super athlete. In Boulder, Colorado, where Tyler grew up, She was a standout track star who was targeted by college recruiters. But as a high school student, Tyler knew two things. She did not want to become an athlete, and she definitely didn't want to go into apparel. In fact, her mom and dad ran a small clothing company, and that business did not sound interesting to her.

I never wanted to be in apparel or fashion, but I was obsessed with the creativity of it. I definitely loved and was obsessed with seeing people start things. And start things from scratch. And so that builder mentality, I've always been a very creative design-inclined person. And so I realized I really wanted to be in New York. That was the place to be. That was where everything was happening. And so started working on a portfolio to apply to Parsons School of Design.

So you get to New York and you start your degree there. And where did your mind take you? where did you start to think, all right, this is what I could do when I'm done. Yeah, I had no idea of what I wanted to do until probably the third year in person. So what instead I did was find a bunch of different jobs while I was in school to kind of test and learn. So in my sophomore year, I went to a company called Launch Collective. They were an incubator for startups and startups in the fashion and kind of design space. And so I got to kind of run through.

working with different companies at very different stages and experienced a lot kind of simultaneously going to school at Parsons. So how did you start to think about maybe actually doing apparel, maybe actually trying this out? What happened? So throughout my four years at Parsons, I had lost any sort of commitment to activity, which was kind of wild given I'd grown up in a, in a place like Boulder and obsessed for sports and many sports. But I recognized that without teammates or coaches or practice or games to stay active, I had completely stopped.

So what happened? Was there just a moment or a day where you were like, all right, I kind of go for a run? I just like I'm really not feeling right. I'm off. Yeah, it was in my senior year. And I kind of remembered, okay, exercise in the past has helped me be more clear, I feel. far from clear let's try this. So pulled out my running gear. It was Nike at the time, atop and bottom. I think it was like bright purple and black and very shiny. Put that suit on

and went jogging for the first time in three to four years on the West Side Highway. And I was out there not even a mile, I think 0.8 miles at a very recreational pace and realized I have not moved my body, I've not exercised in such a long time. This is a wake-up call. This is wild. And when you got home, when you got up at your door, I'm like, were you like, okay, I've got to get back on track here, or were you just sort of crushed here? This is not, maybe this isn't, this isn't for me.

No, I was, I was elated. I was so happy to have just simply threw a bit of sweat, felt like I found myself again. Wow. And so after that, that small run, I wanted more. of that feeling again. And movement became something that I craved on a daily basis again and became this release, this almost kid like recess. It was the time that I could think clearly again and kind of get my wits about me. And so started to kind of build that muscle, that practice, that routine into my life again. And when did you start to see active wear? I mean, like, how did you start

to think that there's a problem with active wear, with the stuff I wear and run? that's a problem that needs to be solved. So I was still wearing my Nike as I kind of got back into running. If you looked at the Nikes and underarmors of the world, they were built on this credo, harder, better, faster, stronger. And, you know, I was wearing kind of shiny, bright spandex that you'd think the clothing had this connotation of high performance, high intensity, yet I was out there moving in it at a very recreational pace.

So there was this personal dissonance between what I was wearing and what I was doing and the feeling I wanted to achieve through what I was doing that I couldn't reconcile. And so on one of those recreationally-paced runs, it dawned on me that there was an opportunity to kind of reframe activity for folks that weren't pursuing it to be the fastest. So you felt like activeware, right, like the Nikes and the Lululimins and those were really, designed for people who were already going to the gym three, four times a week, or running a few times a week, or going to yoga, or had a routine, but that there was no, like, did you ever, did you ever see the movie Dodgeball?

Yes, of course. Yeah, like, there was no average Joe's gym, right? Right. There was no clothing for average Joe's gym. Right. Was that what you were thinking? I wasn't thinking average Joe's. I was really more so thinking the opposite of the competitive athlete.

So there's the Steph Currys of the world where winning is everything. And there's the me's of the world and likely a lot more mees of the world that were just needing to find motivation to be active on a daily basis because it was good for me, made me a happier, healthier person. And that's kind of what I started to piece together on these runs. I started to realize that this pressure that surrounded being athletic was not what would drive people to be active on a daily basis. And so I started to think through creating a company or an experience where it was really rooted in play.

So, Tyler, it sounds to me like you really started to think about brand, right? I want to develop a brand that represents X, Y, and Z, but that you didn't necessarily have the product that you would sell as part of that brand. Like you hadn't started with, I want to make clothes, and then I want to build a movement around this shirt. It was, I want to build a movement, and then I'm going to figure out what the product is. Correct. Yes.

It was this feeling that I was addicted to, obsessed with unpacking and kind of evolving. And for me, I realized that the future of athletics wasn't about being there first, but about being there most frequently and consistently. And so I wanted to start to think about what drove that consistency. Like, what if there's a brand or a path that frees fitness from performance? I mean, there's a lot of similarities between this and, like, Glacier and what Emily Weiss built.

Because she started with a blog and just writing about, you know, skin care and self-care. And the makeup, the cosmetics, came later after she already had this kind of following of people who just loved ordinary women talking about how they take care of their. skin. Yeah, I see what you're saying. It was definitely about building that feeling and brand first. And I started to do it just in a simple way before I had any sort of product. And I started to bring people together, inviting friends to go on drugs with me, inviting them to sign up for half marathons with me, which also my intent was to make it fun. And my intent was to make it, you know, that we'd go out of pace that you could still talk and it'd be social. And it started to to get people together on kind of these jogs and these informal meetups.

And it really did start with community first ahead of product. But do you remember what the tipping point was to do apparel? I mean, you grew up around apparel. Your mom and dad and aunt and uncle had this apparel line. And you knew how challenging that industry was. And so do you remember what it was where you thought, okay, I mean, was there a conversation you had with somebody or you just thought, this is the way to do it? It's got to be athletic wear.

I think these clothes that I had worn, you know, through track practice, et cetera, were packed with this pressure to be fastest. And so the first place that I recognized there was opportunity to kind of like tangibly create something that could be emotionally packed with this. playfulness was with the clothing that I was wearing on these jogs. And so I looked down, I was still wearing bright Chinese bandax, and I said, I want to create an outfit that reflects the freedom and kind of the playfulness of this feeling that I'm excited about right now. Do you remember like the first time you went back to your dorm wherever you were living and you started to sketch out what they could look like? Yeah. It was right out of. school so I think in 2012 which was when I started to put pen to paper and it's funny looking back

because the crop top and the two-tone leggings which are some of our bestsellers today are the first two things I sketched I had no idea how to make them because I had not gone to Parsons for fashion designed by any means but a lot of the greatness of going to a school like Parsons was you were able to visualize your ideas. And so I was very comfortable in a sketchbook. I started sketching out this outfit, this idea of a single outfit for activity that was made of technical materials that were comfortable to move in, but didn't have the connotations of competitive athlete. And it was like a top and it was like stretch pants, right, like that you would run in? Yeah, a crop top. So effectively a sports broth and then and then pants.

But what was the thing that you were going to make different? Was it not going to feel like? How was it going to be different? So for me, it started with the material. So traditional active wear feels shiny, kind of spandexy, very synthetic. I wanted something with more of a natural hand feel that could integrate into your daily wardrobe. So something you'd wear with a cotton sweatshirt or, you know, pieces from your closet.

And so as soon as I had sketched out this top and bottom, And the intent was to always pair those two things together. It became kind of your outfit for doing things, your outfit for being active in a recreational way. I realized that the material was the most important aspect of athletic product. So this is a thing, right? Like we've had Chip Wilson on the show who founded Lulu Lemon, but he founded it in his, you know, 40s after he had already had a snowboard apparel business. And so he was familiar with different materials and sourcing and, you know, know, those kinds of things.

Your family had a small apparel company, but I'm assuming it was mostly just cotton, right? Yep. You're now talking about the most complex material, right? Like, where do you begin? Where did you even know where to go to find out, like, how this stuff is made and how you could, like, know which material to use? Yeah, I mean, I became the Google Queen. Right. So literally, like, and people ask me this a lot, but creating product was not something I studied.

I didn't go to Parsons for that, but there's so much you can learn by Googling and becoming obsessed with finding solutions to your questions. So I was obsessed with figuring out where the mecca of materials for technical yarns was and through Google found outdoor retailer and got myself there. Outdoor retailer? Outdoor retailer, which is that. Yeah, that is the biggest trade show for technical sports vendors to come together. So you're Googling like material, like your search terms where, I mean, I'm just thinking about me because I don't know if you like high tech sweat wicking material, you know, enter. And eventually you land on the site for like a trade show that happens to be the trade show for fabric. Yeah, exactly.

So Googling for hours and hours and hours and days and days to narrow it down. So eventually recognized that was where all arrows pointed to. And so that was held in Utah. All right. So you find out about this trade show. And what did you do? Did you like register as a buyer or as an attendee? I mean, yeah, you pay for it.

So figured out whatever the right credentials were and asked my dad to come along with. me. So from New York, flew to Boulder, hopped in a car, we drove to Salt Lake City. We went to outdoor retailer, and I went and took hands and listened to and spoke to probably 100 plus vendors. So you went with your dad there, and did you go as a business owner or did you, like, when you met people, right, did you say, hi, I'm Tyler Haney and I'm with, did you have a company or a night? Oh, no. I used the student card. I used the student card for far too long or way too long, perfectly too long. You said I'm a student at Parsons.

Yep. And I'm looking into just different material for my designs. What did you say to people when you met them? Yeah, I brought my sketchbook. My badge said Parsons School of Design, and my pitch would be I'm building the next grade active wear brand. And I'm looking for the best in class material for these two products. And here are the four criteria that I need.

And certainly people would be like, who's this young kid get out of here, until I found one lovely guy named Stefan. And he took an interest in kind of the design and what I was looking for and really spent time with me, helping me understand kind of the nuances of this material. He was a vendor at the trade show. He was a vendor. And what was he selling? Materials, raw materials.

I'm trying to get into this trade show, right? I'm Stefan. I've got a business. And my objective at the trade show is to get as much business as possible to walk away with as many potential leads. So then I go back to my office and then we can fulfill orders, right? But then there's this like 22 year old kid, right? Who's coming up and saying, hey, can I talk to you? I'm trying to figure out why. What do you think? Like what, yeah, why do you think he did it? It's a great question. I view it as luck. I mean, I was persistent as hell. And so I was going to, after I had his contact, not let him not talk to me. And I think there must have been something about that persistence that, you know, was endearing. So you get back to New York and you follow up with this guy, Stefan, and what did you do? Did you fly out to see him? Did you have a conversation over the phone and say, here's what I want. Can you? make it? So he had my list of requirements and he started to send me headers. Headers are kind of from their fabric

library product or materials that they've developed in the past that kind of allow you to orient around kind of what you like and don't like from a hand feel perspective. And so using these headers I was able to say, yes, this one has the softness I'm looking for or no

this one doesn't have the aesthetic I'm looking for. And so he sent headers to then fine-tune the request that they would then start to develop for me. But I mean, a company that makes fabric, right, and is going to make like a bespoke kind of fabric for somebody, I'm assuming that they have like a minimum order. Like you got to order, I don't know, $10,000 worth or $50,000 worth of material before they'll even consider doing this for you.

Yeah. So what we ended up doing was finding Stefan, he and his team were constantly making new materials to present to the likes of the Nikes and Nundarimmers and Lulu. So they had created a material kind of at a similar time that they ended up showing me and maybe they had shown it to the other companies but no one had picked it and it was a fabric that really checked the boxes for me in terms of what I was looking for and so I ordered an initial few roles to start to make samples out of.

So they had this material that was exactly right for you and you could order it And I'm assuming that you were just using your savings to pay for just probably a couple hundred dollars or $1,000 or whatever. Yeah, I had had different jobs throughout school, and so I was able to have savings and use those for those initial samples. All right. So they come out to you in New York. By the way, are you out of the dorms at this point? Yeah, I'm living in the East Village and needed place to store bolts of material. They're about six feet tall and 12 inches wide. and so the only place to store it was in my room.

So went to IKEA, got a bunk bed, took the first shelf of the bunk bed out, lived on the top bunk bed, and my new product studio was right under that top bunk bed shelf, and so had my product stored there. All right, so you have this stuff, you've got your drawings, got your material, now it's time to make something, right? You've got to make your prototypes. Yep.

So I started calling friends from school. There were a lot of people who had studied fashion. And so essentially it was starting to interview for designers to simply help me understand how to connect the dots between, I've got this material, I've got these sketches, I don't know what to do next. And in 2013, like, what were you doing for money? I had gone in-house with one of the fashion companies that I had met through Launch Collective.

And so I worked the... their wall parallel path in kind of making this product for what would become OV. So you had a full-time job as a, I guess, an assistant to. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think my title must have been something assistant, yes. And then on the side, like at night, on a weekends, you were thinking about this thing,

that you were trying to figure out. Exactly. So going to Parsons, I knew a lot of design students. So I would start to have them over. and a number of Parsons students pointed me to the Midtown Garment District. There's tons of factories, et cetera, that you wouldn't be aware of until you really start searching. They're behind those, like, you look at these buildings, and they're just in those buildings. Yeah, I mean, never knew that world existed.

Yeah. And most of them, almost all of them, only made high-end fashion product, so they weren't wanting to make active wear. So kind of ran into a roadblock there. I'd go in and say, hey, let's make, like, can you help me make this? I know nothing about pattern making, but I need to make a pattern and then cut the fabric into this pattern and have it sewn up. Wait, would you just, would you like use contacts from Parsons? Or would you just, would you call and say, hey, I'm a graduate of Parsons and I want to meet? Or would you just ring the doorbells and show up?

Guy, I did it all. I would call. I would show up, I would find myself in factories that were definitely not willing to work with me. Most were like, this isn't what we do, can't help you. But there was one factory called Sunshine, and it was run by these two Asian women who were lovely, and for whatever reason said yes to making the patterns for me. And they had warned me that they hadn't worked with this type of material before, but I said, hey, let's try, let's get a pattern started.

I want to see what comes back. And so after many knows we don't make this type of product, I got a yes from these two women at Sunshine Production. And did you have to, like, order a bunch of them? They started with the pattern. So I needed to take the sketches from my sketchbook and create 3D patterns so that, you know, they'd fit a human. So it was not going to be like the finished product.

It was just going to be, but it was going to be a sports bra and, and the pants, like the running pants, right? Like the physical, when they were done with it, you would have that. Yep, the first proto. The first go at the crop top and the running pant. I'm just trying to figure out why they agreed to do this. Just did they like you? Do you think, did they like the product?

What made them agree to do this for you? I mean, I'm quite charming, you know. No, I went in. I think I was so clear on exactly what I wanted and I wasn't going to give up. that though there were many nos, I was going to find a yes. And these manufacturing houses are extremely busy ahead of fashion weeks and then when they do production, but there are off times. And so they're trying to fill every hour.

And so I think they must just have had a gap in their scheduling, and I was able to slip in. All right. How long did it take for those prototypes to be made? When I first went to Sunshine, I had the product, I had the designs. I asked them to make the patterns. They came back and the leggings almost had three legs in them. It was, something had been lost in translation,

and by no means did it look like what I thought it would come back looking like. So it took probably two to three weeks to really sit there up at the factory with them and understand what pattern making was and really kind of translate for them what I wanted. and in what seemed like a pretty simple, straightforward, running, legging, and crop top. But two to three weeks later, I got my initial prototypes. And how'd they look? So they looked beautiful. I put them on and was going to be the first person to try them

and pretty quickly found that they weren't stretchy. Like, they had been sewn with a type of machine where the yarn is not essentially constructing the garment in a way to stretch. So I go for a run in this new product and seams are popping everywhere. And it's very clear to me that this is not the right recipe. So you've got to go back to the drawing board, I guess. Yes. So I call up Stefan, my material guy, and say,

Stefan, here's where I've been. I've been in Midtown. What a disaster. All the seams are popping. This isn't working. Help me figure out what's next. And Stefan has the connections to all of the active wear manufacturer. that was a big unlock for me.

And so he said, Ty, there's no one who makes active wear on the East Coast come to L.A. And so I book a ticket to L.A. I stay with a friend in Venice, and I Google map where I end up needing to go to meet this manufacturer that Stefan connected me with. And it's South El Monte, California,

which is an hour and a half south of where I was in Venice in the middle of nowhere. All right, so you bring your sketches again to this place in Almonte and they agree to make you a few prototypes again? Yeah, so I still have the paper patterns that were made by the women at Sunshine Factory in New York. I bring the samples that I had run in that had popped seams and said, hey, help me understand what's wrong here.

And Jennifer was her name at the Almonte factory, and she looks at it and says, you need flatlock seaming. This is easy. And so flat lock seeming was essentially what was going to allow us to sew the leggings and crop tops so that when you move the seams have enough give that they don't pop and break. And so I spent a lot of time going back and forth to this Almonte factory so that I could go back to New York with the right stitching and enough product to start to get on friends and family.

I'm curious about this point, right, Tyler. Were you using your own money? Did you have to borrow money from your parents or anyone at this point to just pay for just the basic startup costs? This is why I was so adamant about maintaining my job because there was no other way to fund this. And I was purely funding it through my own savings. Granted, it was very small scale. So it wasn't that expensive? I could.

It wasn't that expensive. 10 samples, I think, probably cost me $1,000, but it was all money that I was collecting from having a full-time job. So they make a prototype in El Mottie, and how does it come out? How does it turn out? So I started getting it on the friends that I had recruited to start to be part of these little joggers sessions with me. Two close friends, Annie Ryan, I lived with them.

I gave them both a kit when I got back from L.A. and said, hey, take this jogging to the gym, et cetera, give me feedback. And so at a super micro level started product testing, starting with myself and then, and then with like a small extended group of friends. And what were they telling you? People loved it. And that was like the fit was right on, the material was really comfortable. And they started wearing it not only to the gym, but for more of their life and kind of with their daily clothing. This is 2013. You've got some pretty good prototypes.

You're getting feedback from people. You're still working full time. At what point do you think, all right, I got to just jump into this two feet? Yeah. I was intent on keeping my job as long as possible. And I think that's something that I'd recommend for people in the startup space or wanting to create something. Hold on to that job as long as you possibly can.

But once I started to have a product that was really working, I then started working on positioning again. Like, what is this brand? What is this opportunity that's going to connect to the product and be something that I want to go get more people on board with? So how did you settle on the name after Our Voices? Yeah, I was actually at a bar on Rivington in New York with friends and kept. coming back to this feeling as a little kid and like getting up and being loud and kept describing this need in this active-ware space to like shake things up. And so I was with friends talking about that kind of like youthful, fearless little kid and in conversation, I think someone said, do you remember when your mom used to like tell you

to use your ender voice? And it really started to click there. I was like, out of her voice. It's about getting loud. It's about boldness. It's youthfulness. It's getting big. I tell my kids use their library voice when they're too loud. And so the idea was like this is going to be your outdoor voice. This is where you could scream and shout and jump and all those things. Yeah, thinking back to play and recess and that like unbounded enthusiasm you have as a little kid, like that's what I wanted the brand to evoke.

And it came up naturally in conversation. And I think someone else said it and then I grabbed onto it. I loved recess. That was my favorite. It's the best. Right. All right. So how are you going to get your apparel into stores? What do you do at this point? 2013. You've got a good prototype, but you've got to get it in front of customers or potential customers. Yeah. So I started Googling trade shows again and found a show called Magic, which was in Las Vegas. And this was where all kind of the startup brands would go to get seen by boutiques.

And so after that initial run of 10, I think I paid $5,000 to get 200 units or 200 tops and bottoms made so that I could show up to this trade show in Las Vegas and start pitching after voices the next great activeware brand. This is, I think, a pretty famous trade show. Las Vegas, right? It's like a couple times a year. And you went there, you bought like a vendor or like a sales badge or... Yeah, I got the tiniest booth possible, probably $1,200 to rent. And I'm in this little postage stamp and had these samples on the racks and started meeting people. And lots of people would take a look, not interested, felt like, is this really the place to be? Like, this seems, this seems like it's not working. and then this guy named Ian walked in. And he owned a little tiny fashion boutique, but really impactful fashion boutique I'd find out later.

In New York? In London. In London. It's called Garb Store. And he comes in and says, this is interesting. I love the material. What is it?

And I start describing to him, hey, this is the next great active word brand. It's Outdoor Voices. Come look at the product. I'm doing this, this, and this with it. And he says, Wow, this is awesome. I want to make an order. Wow. That was your first order.

That was our first order. And how many pieces did he want? I believe it was in the 50s, so it was tiny. But that was the first order, and I left that trade show Magic with a handful of POs, so purchase orders, so intent to buy. Was it hard to get those made quickly, or did you just were you able to call a factory in Almonte and say, hey, I've got these orders and I need to do 200 more? So I pick up the phone I called Jennifer in Elmonte, say, hey, we've got our first POs. Jen makes it happen. I think I left with seven purchase orders, and I ended up fulfilling five.

And so financially, I was able to make it happen from savings. A couple thousand bucks or a few thousand dollars. A couple thousand bucks, exactly. All right. So you get the stuff made. You send it out to these boutiques, and does anything happen instantly? Yeah, about two weeks after the product arrived at the boutiques, I get a call from J. Creel. This woman Tracy calls me.

She says, hey, I saw Outdoor Voices Your Product at Garb Store in London, and I love it. Can we talk? Wow. And she said, hey, we have a platform called the Discover program. We're interested in talking with you about bringing out of our voices onto this program. So Tracy, I go and meet her with her. I bring her the product. And after I meet with her, a few weeks later, I get a purchase order for 11,000 units.

Wow. That's not going to cost a couple thousand bucks. Right. That's like you're talking now, like, hundreds of thousands of dollars, maybe. It was $500,000, a $500,000 purchase order. Yeah. And was there a deadline? Did you have to get done, like, within a certain period of time?

Yeah, it was within, I think the, The ship date was five months later. And did you think, no problem, I'll figure this out in five months and get this made? That's exactly when I realized it was time to quit my job. When we come back in just a moment, how Tyler scrambled to come up with the money and then make enough kids for J. Crew within five months. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This from NPR. Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz.

So it's around the beginning of 2014, and Tyler Haney is working on fulfilling that big purchase order from J.Crew. And the immediate problem she needs to solve is money, how to come up with the money up front, to make 11,000 units of the Outdoor Voices kit? I first went to my aunt, and so NEM, I said, I've got this, P.O. You're familiar with this. Are you guys willing to invest? And they put 25K in. They were their, they were the, they were the, the first funders, which was awesome. So with that purchase order in hand and essentially a commitment from J.Crew to this 500K, it made it a lot easier, presumably,

than without that PO to raise that first 25K. So how much money did you raise from friends and family? Yeah, I think I raised within two to two and a half months, 400K, which was more than I needed to fulfill that 500K order. And this was like 10,000 here, 25 there, maybe 50. Yep. It was small bites. Who'd you go to?

Where'd you go? Because a lot of people, right, are like, man, $4,000. How do you raise that money? Like, where do you find that money? So I started, went to people that I had met in New York that I knew had been successful and had expressed intent as kind of they got word that I was working on Outdoor Voices. So I think there were three friends in New York who ended up putting between, $10,000 to $20,000 in, I started Googling for kind of seed investors and people that I could find

online that put initial money into companies. And there was a guy named Calva Purry, who I remember reading a ton about. And so I went to him, knocked on his door and said, hey, this is what I'm doing. I would love for you to put $25 to $50K in. And he did. Who was he? He was just a investor in New York? Yeah, he was an entrepreneur and investor. And you found out about him through just Googling. Wow. Yeah. Again, back to just typing in, you know, investors in New York, fashion investors, apparel investors, early stage investors, et cetera. So I think having that that J-Crew order was really helpful early on because I knew that if I could figure out how to get these units produced, I'd have a big check coming back, you know, within five months. So they were going to pay for it.

And there was no risk that they would return unused product and you would just have to eat that? I'm sure there was. I at that point wasn't thinking about it. I was like 11,000 units. We're going to get this across the finish line. Got it. All right. So you get the money.

Did that factory in Almonte make those 11,000 units? They made the 11,000 units. And I was there in L.A. with them on the last possible ship date before J.Crew could cancel the P.O. So we somehow caught it all together and were able to produce right in the nick of time. Now, I remember talking to Sarah Blakely about fulfilling her first order for Neiman Marcus of Spanx. And it's actually not so simple because when you're working with a big company like Neiman Marcus or in your case, J. Crewe, there's all these things you have to, documents you have to fill. And there's specific requirements that you have to meet. And, right, it's a very complex process.

you don't just put stuff in a box and ship it to J.Crew, right? Right, yeah. From the way it needs to be tagged, there's a whole system and kind of way of doing things. So worked very closely with Tracy at J.Crew to really understand what was needed. And I forgot to mention this, but I knew I needed to be in L.A. because I wasn't going to run the risk of production going off the track. So I rented out my apartment in New York or my room. my bunk room, found a couch to rent in Venice and ended up living with these lovely folks

that I found on Craigslist and would drive every single day from Venice to El Monte and Venice to El Monte making sure that every one of these 11,000 units was going to be in perfect tip-top shape when they got to J-Crew. So when they got to J-Crew, were they promoting the product? Was it totally different from everything else they were selling? Like, how was it going to be visible to J.Crew customers? Yeah, this was five plus years ago, and it was really when this active wear space was starting to take off. Yeah.

Yes, blowing up. And so J.Crew had had a lot of success with this Discovered program where they brought new brands, you know, to their customer. And so put me on the Discovered program. They did a shoot with me actually in Central Park in the product. and then described the product and launched it. So it launches at J.Crew and what happened? How did it do? It did phenomenally.

And so I think within the first week, they had already sold through 50% of the product. At that moment, I was really thankful for the opportunity to get a lot of eyeballs on the brand. But I knew, okay, now is the time to click it into gear and start building this thing. And that was 2014. I started putting together a list of larger investors that I, you know, had red would fund early stage companies, et cetera.

I worked with a friend of mine that worked in finance to really start to put a business model together. And this deck that I would then go pitch investors in New York with. All right. So you've got to raise money, right, to really get this going. Where did you go? Where did you just start cold emailing potential investors? Yeah, I created a list of 25 VCs. That you found, like, where? Like through reading and tech crunch and through asking people

and people who would raise money, et cetera. So I started emailing. I still had my student EDU address, which was quite funny. It somehow hadn't gotten shut off. And so for a number of these folks, I started emailing. them from my Parsons.edu address and saying, hey, I'd love to pitch you on my new idea after voices, but I really leaned on the student card to get into these folks offices. And you think using your student address helped?

It definitely helped. It got me into these initial meetings. The initial meetings weren't where I got funded, but these initial meetings were hugely important as kind of practice routines to really refine my pitch. I'd show up with the product. I'd show up with the deck and for the first time ever go pitch on this idea I had coming out of Parsons as a graduate. Do you remember roughly what percentage of those 25 got back to you and said, sure, come by? Of the 25, let's see, I would say probably 19 got back to me. Wow. Which was crazy, yeah. And out of those 19, when you started to go meet with them, did any of them say, this is awesome? I'm in.

I want to actually give you money. Oh, no. Every single one of those first meetings were like, thank you, love this. Thanks for, love that you had the courage to get in here, but you need some, this needs work. I mean, I had never done this before, and I knew that by getting into the room of some of these folks, I would learn a lot. And I had at that time this idea of just begin, just begin, just begin, just begin. So I began. And what specifically were these investors saying? Like, were you getting feedback like, you got to do more of this or not enough of this or this isn't right?

Yeah, I mean, pretty consistently the first probably five conversations I'd get, but we have underarmor and we have Nike. Like, why do we need another active web brand? Which is a fair question. There's Lulu Lemon. Like, athleisure is so saturated, right? I mean, 2014, that's probably what people were saying. Yeah, exactly. And what I started to piece together was I was in offices with men.

And these traditional active wear brands had been built by men and really catered to men. So this credo and this positioning around the competitive athlete, the harder, better, faster, stronger, was something that was familiar to the folks that I was pitching. And so what I started to recognize was me over here pitching this, active wear brand around play and freeing fitness from performance didn't make sense to these folks that had grown up as competitive athletes. And what was the breakthrough? How did you finally get somebody to say, yeah, I'll give you some money? Yeah, I started to realize that going into these offices with mostly males and having conversations with them was not going to get me there. So ahead of going into a number of these meetings, I would start sending product to the women in the offices.

and the wives of some of these investors. It did happen to be only male investors. So I started to find that by getting the product, getting the product, the kit onto the women in the offices and the wives, I started to get people that were willing to spend more time and hear me out and understand, ah, wait, this could be something. I'm starting to picture this. This could be something real.

I started to get more time with folks. And who was the person? who said, all right, I'll give you some money. Who was the first one? Yeah, Peter Boyce from General Catalyst. General Catalyst is Big BC. You're probably familiar with them out of Boston. He saw the product, saw the pitch had gotten product on his girlfriend, Natalia.

She loved it, and he said, I love this concept. I want to back it, and they were the first people to lead our seed round. And then with that, you know, once you started to raise some money, how much did you raise in that first round? Do you remember? $1.1 million. Wow. Okay, so you've got $1.1 million sounds like a lot of money, but making clothing and building a team, that's really expensive. At this point, was it still just you, or did you have somebody with you? I had hired two additional team members, one to really focus on sales and then one to focus on customer experience.

So at this time, 2014, we launched Outdoorvoices.com, a scrappy website, but a place that as these J-Crew customers started to learn about us, we hoped would start to visit After Voices and wanted something to exist to sell more product. And so used the seed round money to hire an additional three folks open an office because we had been working out of my apartment in the east. village and then to make more product. And is Jay Cruz still selling your stuff at this point? In 2015, yes. Yeah. And again, it was a really great way to, you know, get 11,000 people quickly to know about us. But after that initial buy with Jay Crew, we decided, hey, we want to own this directly.

We want to start building Outdoor Voices as a direct-to-consumer brand. All right. So with that money, like how do you start thinking about it? but how to get this brand out into the world beyond J.Crew. Back to when I was initially starting the product, I had always brought these groups of people together to do an activity. And at this stage, I started realizing that this offline kind of gathering of community was really the best way to drive word of mouth.

And so we hosted our first dog jog in New York. And I had sent out an invite, Outdoor Voices invites you to their first. first dog jog. Just to everybody you knew, every email address you had? Every email address we had, and I expected maybe 50 people to show up, and it ended up being closer to probably 200 that showed up with their dogs. And that's when I really started to realize that people were resonating with the little bits of the brand and the little bits of the product that were starting to get out into the world. So we started posting content of these little informal groups, getting together for different activities, and hashtagging doing things.

Doing things had become the Outdoor Voices mantra. Any sort of activity through this Outdoor Voices group was hashtag doing things. So with that $1.1 million, were you able to actually open a store? Yeah, so we opened our first store in Austin, Texas, which I had been dating someone in Austin while I lived in New York and visited Austin for the first time, straight from the airport when I landed in Austin,

went to a spot called Barton Springs, which it's essentially a football field-sized spring-fed pool at the downtown center of Austin. Got out of the water, looked up, and said, this is such a recreational town. This feels like the spiritual or long-term home for outdoor voices. And so we opened our first store in Austin and had found this house, 800-square-foot house,

with a lawn next to it, and said, this is perfect. So we spend $150,000 to build out our first store in Austin, Texas. All right. So you've got the store in Austin, but a million dollars is not going to be in a runway. You've got to pay the rent. You've got to pay your people. You've got to make clothing.

So I have to assume that you had to go right back to it to really start to raise more money. Yeah. So with that round of funding, At that point, we had, from an awareness standpoint, relied on the J-Crew units and new customers driven from that, as well as word of mouth. I then reached out to a friend from Parsons. Actually, we hadn't known each other. She became a friend later on. But Leandra Medine, who had this blog called The Man Repeller, has this blog called The Man Repeller, and asked her to do a collaboration.

And the Man Repeller, this is a blog, like, just for people to know it, it's like a kind of a, quirky fashion blog, right? Yep. And I essentially wanted to take Leandra and work with her to create a customized kit. So same top and bottom, but influenced by her personality. And so launched the man repeller kit. The kit came with a bag that had on the outside printed in it for the smoothie and had like a little popsicle keychain and like a vintage jumpbook.

rope and I thought she was so perfect to as our first kind of collaborative partner to to really bring kind of the humor and the fun to the activeware space and and be a really good illustration of kind of what we meant by activity for the fun of it and pretty quickly after that launched got a post in from Lena Dunham in this kit the the man repeller kit and she had been running for the first time on the set of girls, something for the episode. And on Instagram, she had a caption that said, I've never been a runner, but I'm learning to run for the first time. And this kit makes me feel powerful, swift, and strong. This is in like 2015? This is in 2015. And that's like, wow, girls is like one of the hottest shows on TV. She's a massive celebrity.

she was a guess read this blog or she was like a reader of the blog and that's how she she got the kit. Yeah, she was a fan of Leandra and man repeller and got the kit and wore it for that episode of girls and posted about her experience of running for the first time. That was a really meaningful first moment in the sense that Lena wasn't the first person you think of as, you know, someone that an active wear brand is going to partner with. And this was at the time where the athlete was such a kind of one-note look. They were like sinewy with muscles, et cetera. And Lena comes blasting into our world wearing the kit with curves and never having run.

And it was a perfect example of what we meant by this daily exercise or this positioning that we knew there was really opportunity to build the next great brand around. So now at this point, right, Series 8, you raised them one point one. million dollars you're at your series a lena dunham's warned your stuff like um you're getting some traction you got a shop in austin there's buzz like and i think you raised like seven and a half million dollars in that series a yeah was was that a lot easier to raise that money than than it was to raise seed money yeah the seed money i i ended up probably meeting 50 people so that that that initial list of 25 kept growing and growing and growing but actually having traction and a meaningful amount of traction in a short amount of time made it a lot easier to go back to that group at General Catalyst and put this funding together.

I'm curious, Tyler. I mean, why wouldn't a Nike or Lulu Lemon, they could have kind of crowded you out of the marketplace while you were more vulnerable without a real brand? Why do you think that didn't happen? I mean, I think our brand is our moat. And so the, combination of the activities that we host and the product that people wear while they're engaging in those activities is is the magic. And that's, I view my role as essentially kind of the new generation of Jane Fonda, somebody that is at the front of this brand really helping to inspire and educate and get the world moving. It's a hard combination or recipe for somebody to duplicate. All right. So you, in 2016, um, you know,

We've gone through Series B. You raise another 13 million. You decide formally to move to Austin. Tyler, how did you feel about being the CEO? I mean, I think you were like 26, 27, maybe 26. I mean, you were managing and running a business and certainly had people working for you who were like a lot older to take some getting used to.

I mean, being the CEO has been very natural given the vision is super clear for me. I think in growing this company and at a speedy pace and with a lot of capital around the table and a lot of strong voices, we've been lucky with the funding and engagement around the brand to have Mickey Drexler from Jay Crewe actually joined as the chairman of the board in 2016. And Mickey Drexler was, for people don't know, he's like this legendary guy in the industry, he turned Gap around and was a Jay Crewe. he founded Madewell. How did you get on his radar at all? Yeah, he, so he had heard about us when we initially collaborated with Jay Creel. And I think I've been super lucky to have a lot of engaged louder industry voices around the table, but have had to figure out how to selectively take, you know, experienced advice and know how to channel it in addition to what I believe.

and understand that to create a company today is meaningfully different than creating a company 30 years ago. And there are differences there. I mean, you've raised, I think, close to $60 million total. Mickey Drexler is the chairman of the board. You've got a board. You've got all these investors. As you had and have had more experienced people coming in, particularly men, have you ever felt like, hey, you know, like you're mansplaining this to me. you know, back off because I know what I want to do.

Have you ever had to have that kind of confrontation? I wouldn't say it's gender-specific, but I think one thing that is super clear to me is the way we've built the Outdoor Voices to date is untraditional, and it's our own playbook. So I very much believe in creating our own rules to the game, and that's what's driven, you know, the success to date. And so what has become challenging over the last few years is, hiring kind of more experience and leadership sometimes comes with folks that want to bring playbooks from other companies.

But at the end of the day, taking control and tempering some of the input has been something that I've learned over time. To be a CEO, you have to learn how to take control and not necessarily listen to all the voices around the table. You guys have how many shops now? We have nine stores. And how many employees? We have 350 employees. And through all this, you also met somebody new in Austin, because I guess the person that we're saying, you guys split up, but you met somebody new, you got married, and you are going to be a mom. I am.

And I'm having a baby mid-November. First time doing it, trying a lot of things. But being pregnant as the CEO of Outdoor Voices has been an extreme sport. I think I've been really focused on with some of my peers like Whitney from Bumble and Audrey from the Wing, showing that there don't have to be like sacrifices from a family perspective that you take to be the CEO of a fast-growing company. And you can do it all kind of in harmony. You know, when I think about your story, you can read it one way. It was just you were determined and you went from success to success to success.

And here you are. But I wonder, like, was there a dark moment? Was there a moment on this journey starting out of voices where you had serious doubts or you felt really bad about anything? I think every day you kind of run the gamut of emotions based on kind of what's happening with the business. business and with the team, et cetera, and something that I've been really kind of vocal about without their voices and I think resonates personally is we're not up against the Nikes or Nairomers of the world. As a company, we're up against people's negative perceptions of themselves. And I think the most difficult thing about being a CEO for the first time,

sometimes you wake up and you're you know there's negative perception of your ability to get done and to really know what's right go forward and so I've really focused kind of through this experience on surrounding myself with the right people to help continue to to drive the confidence in my ability to do this and to grow the company and surround myself with smarter and smarter people that that really make this a strong strong team for the long run. How much of your, of this story do you think is because of luck? And how much do you think it's because you just worked really hard and you're really smart? I think it's persistence.

So I think this deep-rooted knowledge that you know you're never going to give up and you're going to find a way. And there's no other option is something that just has connected all these dots for me. People have to believe that you're going to do it and you're not going to stop at anything getting in the way. And so this crazy amount of persistence is really what's gotten me to kind of where I'm up. That's Tyler Haney, founder and CEO of Outdoor Voices. By the way, as you may have caught towards the end of our interview, Tyler and her husband Mark are expecting a baby girl sometime around now. So by the time this podcast hits your feed, it is very likely Tyler will be a new mom.

And please do stick around because in just a moment, we're going to hear from you about the things you're building. Hey, thanks for sticking around because it's time now for how you built that. And this week's story starts when Beth Finbo and a group of new moms took their babies out for lunch. We had a small corner table in the pizzeria, and they started immediately reaching for like the salt and pepper shakers and the coffee creamer and sugar. Because, well, they're babies. They think they're funny and they know they're cute. You know, when they drop something and they get the attention of the moms,

then they're going to keep doing that thing. Anyone who's been to a restaurant with a baby knows this game. You have to move all the choking hazards out of their reach, and then when you give them their actual toys, they usually just drop them. And then I thought, well, let me go online and see what exists. There must be something that we can buy that just keeps them busy and makes it easier to take a baby out to eat.

But Beth couldn't find anything quite right. She wanted some kind of place mat that kept the toys secure, the food from spilling, and could fit in a diaper bag. So she decided to make her own. I used these silicone mats from Amazon that are actually designed for your pets food and water bowls, a carabineer, I don't know how to say that word ever, but a clip that you just clip on. And then I use fishing tethers. There's these little tethers that you can use to clip your pliers to your belt. Beth took her homemade placemate and she stuck it in front of her son, Christian, and he loved it. But she wasn't sure if other babies would as well.

So she did a little market research in the aisles of Target. I would see women at Target with babies and I would say, excuse me for just a second, can I ask you a quick question? And I'd say, I have this idea. I'm inventing a product. And I would say 100% of the feedback was, oh my gosh, that's genius. Yes, I would buy that. Inspired by that feedback, Beth decided to see if she could make something good enough to sell. I got my prototype as far as I could on my own.

And like I said, I was very rudimentary. And I knew I had a great product concept, but I didn't know where to go from there. So Beth started looking for someone who could help take her mat concept to the next level. She found a designer in Salt Lake City in early 2018. And a few months later, she received a revest, design in the mail. And I don't think I've ever had more emotions in my life than when I grabbed that envelope and took it in the house to open it up and try it out.

I opened the package, I pull it out, I take off the plastic wrapping, and I set it on my countertop, and I couldn't pick it up. It instantly stuck. Before I even pressed down on the suction cups or anything, it was stuck there. And I thought, this is awesome. It was exactly the product Beth had dreamed of. But now, she had to figure out how to find the money. to make more.

My stepdad gave me a loan, and I used my savings, and I sold a car, and scrounge together the money to do the first production run. Beth also launched a Kickstarter campaign to drum up interest. She actually didn't end up meeting her goal of $45,000, but she says that was a blessing in disguise. I couldn't have done it. I just couldn't have done it. I didn't know how much goes into manufacturing and production and all the costs involved with making molds and the timelines, I would have probably sunk.

But she didn't. And since last year, Beth has sold almost 2,300 busy baby mats, which translates into around $60,000 in sales. And as for her two-year-old son, Christian, definitely her biggest spokesman. People will often approach us and say, oh, my God, that's so cool. Where did you get it? And he'll look up and say, that's my mommy's busy baby mat. That's Beth Finbo.

her product is the busy baby mat. And if you want to find out more or hear previous episodes, head to our podcast page, How I Built This.npr.org. And of course, if you want to tell us your story, go to build.npr.org. And thanks so much for listening to the show this week. You can subscribe at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. And while you're there, please do give us a review. You can also write to us at HIVT at npr.org.

And if you want to send a tweet, it's at How I Built This or at Guy Raz. Our show was produced this week by Casey Herman with music composed by Ramtin Arablui. Thanks also to Candice Lim, Julia Carney, Sanaz Meshkampur, Neva Grant, and Jeff Rogers. Our intern is Sequoia Carrillo. I'm Guy Raz, and you've been listening to How I Built the