On a sunny Friday afternoon in June, I walk down London’s affluent King’s Road to a two-block stretch that features four athleisure stores.
At Alo, racks of sleek matching sets seem designed for women who post their Pilates workouts on Instagram. At Nike, posters feature life-size photos of its sponsored athletes at the World Cup and Wimbledon. At Lululemon, under a heavily sloganed gray wall (“Friends are more important than money”), there’s a giant sales rack featuring a mishmash of athletic wear in clashing colors and, bizarrely, a gold lamé midi skirt made of technical fabric.
Despite their differences, all three stores are decorated in black, white, and gray, with silver metal racks, boxy shelving, and unflattering overhead lighting. And in a coincidence that makes me feel like I’m stuck in some sort of sci-fi loop, the EDM song “10:35” by DJ Tiësto and Tate McRae is playing in all three.
The new kid on the block is different. A Vuori boutique, next to Nike, two doors down from Alo, and facing Lululemon, opened last year. The store has no sharp edges or harsh lighting, just warm walnut wood walls that are smooth and undulating, punctuated by photos of people working out on the beach. The staff is playing Weezer, the early-2000s alt-rock band. And the clothes—outrageously soft to the touch and bearing no visible logo—come in colors so sophisticated that it’s not immediately apparent they are designed for sport.
The 11-year-old company isn’t trendy per se. Vuori’s clothes are only debatably stylish. But they are well designed, inoffensive, and comfy. In 2025, the privately owned, roughly 3,000-person company, with more than 135 stores worldwide and 15 more due by year’s end, generated close to a billion dollars in revenue. Lululemon, a publicly traded company that has been around since 1998 and has eight times as many stores worldwide, generated $11.1 billion in 2025.
Vuori’s hero product, the ultrasoft Kore shorts, is the sort of garment a coastal dad working in tech might wear to a light workout before hitting a coffee shop and jumping on a Zoom call. “Effortless performance” is how Joe Kudla—a 48-year-old former model and accountant who started the company in 2015 out of his garage in Encinitas, California—describes Vuori’s ethos. “We’re from Southern California, where people come to start a tech company or chase their dreams” while never wanting to seem like they’re “trying too hard,” he tells me over a Zoom call in July, wearing a dark blue T-shirt made from the company’s signature DreamKnit fabric.
Now, nearly two years after raising $1.27 billion across four rounds, bringing Vuori’s valuation to $5.5 billion, CEO Kudla is considering taking the company public—and investors will want to see that it is growing. Kudla’s approach is to draw in three new types of customers: elite athletes, younger shoppers, and international consumers. In each case, the company is leaning into its distinct advantage: its plush fabrics, which lead to a relaxed but tailored fit. If Vuori succeeds, it will take market share away from its competitors on King’s Road and in the more than 25 countries where it already has a presence.
Other athleisure brands have tried to broaden their audience—to mixed results. To succeed where others stumbled, Vuori will have to be as adaptable as its clothing.
Fabric first
The secret behind Vuori’s success has always been its fabrics. DreamKnit is both velvety and moisture-wicking. BlissBlend, used in its yoga collection, is made from Lycra fiber that goes through a unique brushing technique, giving it a second-skin feel.
While other brands might start with a design and work backward to find the right materials to bring it to life, Kudla inverts the process. “We’re a textile-oriented company,” he says. He spends a lot of time visiting fabric makers in China and remains the fit model for men’s clothing. Vuori’s first-ever chief product officer, Heather Archibald, who joined the company in April after stints at Rothy’s and Gap, says that she’s been especially inspired by some of the fabric innovation in menswear. “We have some nostalgic hand-feels that are a little drier, which take color really well,” she says.
Vuori has another edge, too. Unlike most athleisure brands, it started as a menswear company, introducing women’s wear three years later. As a result, its customers are roughly evenly split between men and women (64% of Lululemon’s customers are female, and 70% of Alo’s).
Typically, brands tend to be “really strong in one gender and fight to be relevant in the other gender, whereas Vuori has done a really good job of releasing great products for both women and men,” says Andrew Ferrer, a managing director at the growth equity firm General Atlantic, an investor. Vuori products are also priced at the higher end of the athleisure market, comparable to Alo but above Nike: A pair of its signature men’s Kore shorts retails for $68.
Vuori is concentrating its efforts on China as it prioritizes international growth. It’s a smart move: China accounted for 16% of Lululemon’s sales in 2025, up from 10% in 2023. “Western brands that have a distinct brand personality and premium position tend to do well in the Chinese and Asian markets,” says Matthew Tingler, a managing director in Baird’s global consumer investment banking group.
Vuori entered China in 2022, via the Alibaba-owned e-commerce platform Tmall. It has since launched eight stand-alone stores in the country, and has plans to open 20 more by 2027. The company is adjusting the sizing of some of its designs to better suit the Asian consumer, and it’s counting on increased sales as more shoppers are able to feel the fabric in person.
“Having a fabric-first mentality is like an insurance policy for protecting quality,” Archibald says.
Given Vuori’s focus on materials innovation and its large male consumer base, the least risky element of its expansion may be its overture to professional athletes. In fact, the company is already notching wins.
From Kore to HardKore
In February, Vuori launched HardKore shorts, a $98 variation of its hero product made from a more durable yet still soft four-way stretch fabric, featuring a premium grid mesh liner. The rising tennis star Jack Draper, who signed on as a spokesperson in August 2025, has been wearing them on the professional circuit. The company had hoped that its regular Kore shorts customers would level up to the HardKore shorts rather than shopping for elite performance gear elsewhere, and that’s been happening: “We see a lot of customers cross-shopping both of those products,” Kudla says.
Cooper Flagg, a forward for the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks, and Arch Manning, the University of Texas quarterback, have come on board as spokespeople. So has Tom Holland, the Spider-Man star (and Prada ambassador), who joined this year. Kudla says choosing Holland, a passionate amateur golfer, to front the golf collection campaign simply made sense. “Tom Holland is an incredible gymnast. Look at what he does to train for his films, like Spider-Man. He’s a world-class athlete. He also is an incredible golfer. He’s a multidimensional human, and we’ve always been intrigued by this idea that we aren’t just one thing.” A more straightforward argument for the partnership might be that when Holland stopped by Vuori’s L.A. pop-up in 2024, posts on fan TikTok accounts racked up 3 billion views.
Golf could be particularly fertile territory for the company, as Tingler at Baird’s notes. “It distinguishes them from other athleisure brands,” such as Alo and Lululemon, which don’t carry golf-specific products.
The partnership with Holland builds on Vuori’s brand strength with men. Reaching younger women may prove trickier. Kudla says that while Vuori has a healthy presence on college campuses, it has always skewed male there, even after a 2021 endorsement arrangement with the influencer Livvy Dunne, who at the time was a gymnast at Louisiana State University.
Expanding its influence
In April 2025, Vuori partnered with the runway fashion model Kaia Gerber to design clothing and curate drops. She came as a package deal with her high-profile family; her social-media-famous trainer, Kirsty Godso, a former global fitness spokesperson at Nike for nearly 14 years, signed on five months later. Bringing on Gerber—who had been photographed wearing Alo during the pandemic by the likes of Vogue, Cosmopolitan, and Marie Claire—is a clear shot across the bow.
Ads for Vuori’s “For Kaia” line—formfitting matching sets geared to the kind of fitness-focused young consumers that Spotify has categorized as “Pilates princesses”—quickly began appearing on social media billboards. Some of the photos have an on-trend ’90s aesthetic. One shows Gerber on a minimalist metal folding chair against a white seamless background, wearing chunky white scrunched socks. It looks incongruous next to the one of a muscular man doing jump push-ups on a beach that’s displayed a bit farther down the wall in Vuori’s King’s Road store.
If technicolor workout wear for influencers and fitness girlies seems incompatible with Vuori’s long-standing aesthetic, denim is even further afield. The company released men’s jeans in September 2025 made from denim, lyocell, and elastane. They’re softer than traditional rigid cotton denim, but still definitively jeans—taking the athletic component out of the Vuori equation almost entirely. (You’re not likely to see someone playing pickleball in them.) Women’s denim followed, along with cashmere sweaters. This new merchandise “rounds out our positioning around this modern coastal California lifestyle, but it’s not going to be a massive growth driver for the brand,” Kudla admits.
Venturing so far from its core proposition could prove perilous, as other athleisure brands have found. In a May letter to Lululemon shareholders, Chip Wilson, the founder, blamed the company’s 45% stock slump this year partly on a lack of focus. “Losing a deep understanding of who you are designing your key products for leads to brand drift,” he said. “We’ve seen this lack of focus through a number of unsuccessful ventures Lululemon has embraced [such as] the launch of products such as footwear and small accessories.” Vuori’s new products, and its embrace of celebrities and nonathletes, could similarly alienate consumers attracted to its if-you-know-you-know cachet.
If the growing efforts to spread out Vuori’s bets aren’t clear enough signals that it might soon go public, Kudla acknowledges that he’s looking for an opening. “I’d be lying if I said we aren’t keeping an eye on the market to see if it proves to be a viable path for us,” he says. To jump in successfully, the company will need to maintain its athleticism and its signature composure.