Saturday, February 1, 2025

The Making of Vuori

 















New York Times - "How Vuori Became One of the Hottest Names in Fashion"

"After his career as a model ended, Mr. Kudla returned to San Diego to work as a senior auditor for Ernst & Young. His first entrepreneurial pursuit was helping his girlfriend at the time with a short-lived contemporary women’s clothing line. He then founded Vuori as a graphic T-shirt line, named after the Finnish word for mountain. The brand, however, failed to attract interest from retailers or consumers.

A chance encounter with an executive business coach and intuitive, or psychic medium, shifted Mr. Kudla’s trajectory.

“She told me that the business that I was working on is going to be wildly successful, but it wasn’t going to be in its current form or with my current partner,” he said. “And that was very hard for me to hear. She told me all these things about my family, and it got my head spinning — it was very emotional for me.”

The very next day, Mr. Kudla began a process of what he called “personal development and growth as a human being,” committing himself to a yoga and meditation practice. The idea of Vuori as it is today crystallized during this time.

“You didn’t have this overall ‘active lifestyle’ positioning,” Mr. Kudla said, “where it was a fashion-meets-function product that could work in a yoga class, but you’d feel comfortable wearing it to a dinner afterward or hanging out with friends — and that was very much the lifestyle I was living.”

Most sports apparel at the time was designed for a specific activity — running, say, or basketball — and often came with flashy design flourishes, Mr. Kudla recalled, like racing stripes, logos or reflective accents. Instead, he wanted to create something that had a subtler, everyday aesthetic but retained those activewear properties. He knew there was a market because he noticed that men in San Diego, instead of wearing athletic shorts to yoga class, often opted for more understated board shorts."

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