In June 2024, four years after founder Ty Haney exited Outdoor Voices in 2020, the consumer brand investment firm Consortium Brand Partners acquired the activewear brand. Consortium also owns Reese Witherspoon’s Draper James and designer Jonathan Adler’s namesake home furnishings brand. Haney launched Outdoor Voices in 2013, when she was just 24. And Consortium wanted her back.
Haney was introduced to Consortium founder Cory Baker by Keith Miller, an early investor in Outdoor Voices 1.0, and Baker wanted to know if she’d be willing to come back to the brand.
“I wasn’t thinking about reengaging whatsoever,” she said. “But I got to know Cory and his partners [between] March and August [of 2024] and started to, kind of, test into how it would feel to re-engage. And ultimately, it felt energizing. It felt creative and fun. So I kicked off in August [rejoining the company].” She is formally back as founder and co-owner.
Last weekend, Outdoor Voices turned heads on social media when it wiped its Instagram grid clean and followed just one person: Haney. Inc. reported on Haney’s potential return on July 21. The same day, Outdoor Voices officially announced its comeback.
On Tuesday, Outdoor Voices will launch a community on TYB, the community rewards platform for brands that Haney founded in 2020 — TYB takes up the majority of her time nowadays, she said. A diamanté-adorned sweatshirt reading “Doing Things” — Outdoor Voice’s original slogan — will be released exclusively to the TYB community, with just 100 units available. The first complete Outdoor Voices collection following Haney’s return will be available to TYB members on August 4 and to the general public on August 5.
To create the brand’s new look, Haney rehired some original team members, including Tiffany Wilkinson as creative director. The brand has operated under Consortium for the past year and many of its existing team members will remain in place. Rather than pulling talent from fellow activewear brands like Alo or Set Active, Haney enlisted design director Jessica Guzman, whose experience includes stints at Eckhaus Latta and Simkhai. And instead of focusing on matching sets, the new OV will spotlight dresses and skorts.
“My perspective as a woman is that that’s what I want to wear,” Haney said.
The new iteration of the brand hasn’t axed everything its original fans may love. For example, its soft Cloudknit sweats will stay —
and pieces like the cult-favorite Exercise Dress, first launched in 2018 and widely copied since, have been modernized with fashion-forward top-stitching.
“At a basic level, I didn’t want to make something that already exists,” Guzman said. “I wanted to push the category to a place it hasn’t been before, to give a fresh perspective.”
The collection, Guzman said, needed a “purpose,” and OV’s original ethos of “celebrating movement” served as her springboard. “I focused a lot of intention on techniques and workmanship, giving each piece something special, like a small detail that typically would only be seen on designer clothing. These pieces are an intersection between designer and activewear — [they’re] elevated pieces that are meant to be worn and washed again and again.” Prices for the new collection range between $48-$148, which is about the same as Outdoor Voice’s current prices.
Furthermore, this time around, Haney said, she’s not afraid to present the brand with a true lifestyle assortment. “I think of it as the uniform for ‘Doing Things.’ It starts with the first layer. When I was younger, I felt like I wasn’t being true to the authenticity of the activity or the credibility of technical [apparel] if I brought in, like, a cotton poplin striped shirt.”
Today, that shirt exists. It’s called the Sun Shirt. “Now, it’s so obvious to me that we can play in all of the outfitting,” Haney said.
To that point, Haney noted that, in brand imagery, shoppers will see the exercise dress styled with both kitten heels and sneakers. The exercise dress now comes in a color called “Joggy green” — Joggy is the energy drink brand Haney founded in 2023. On its website, some OV looks will even be styled alongside cans of Joggy, nodding to the full Ty Haney cinematic universe Outdoor Voices now lives within.
“The uniform for ‘Doing Things’ is still rooted in activity, but it’s expanded, in terms of how people are wearing things and styling [them],” Haney said. “It’s a lot more confident, bold and sexy.” “Doing Things” will remain the brand’s slogan. Outdoor Voices will start off direct-to-consumer, with goals to diversify distribution and focus on global growth in the future. Marketing the relaunch will begin solely with the brand’s owned channels, plus TYB.
Though activewear in 2025 is a crowded space, Haney believes there’s room for multiple players — and she believes Outdoor Voices still has a clear lane to own. “I still see this North Star of recreation that is wide open for us to play in,” she said.
On her exit from the brand she built in 2020, Haney is reflective, even zen.
In 2023, she told The Cut, “I’m not a monster, as I’ve been characterized. … Behind the scenes, I was being pushed out.” It was said at the time that Haney clashed with investor Mickey Drexler, who had come in to help scale the company.
Now, she said, “I actually look back at that experience and I’m like, ‘Thank you. That was awesome — a master class in learnings.’ Ninety percent of my experience in the first version of OV was awesome, 10% was hard. But that’s what we sign up for as founders and wanting to do big, ambitious things. Certainly, it was hard for me to let go — [starting the company] was like birthing a kid.”
Plus, she said, “Times have changed. The direct-to-consumer model, in a lot of ways, did not work. All of these businesses, ourselves included, that got tons of money, … I haven’t seen many of those stories work out all that well.”
Now, she said, OV has a better infrastructure, thanks to Consortium’s resources.
When asked about common concerns expressed about PE ruining brands, she said, “PE or not, Cory and his team have deep experience in apparel. … We’ve been able to align on a strategy … I’m not being put in a box, but rather, I’m leading the strategy and getting buy-in, and then there are people who believe in it and will invest in it,” she said, referring to Consortium. The goal, she noted, is longevity: “We’re excited about this becoming the next Patagonia.”
She said the response to her rumored comeback has been overwhelmingly positive. Though the Outdoor Voices account has not posted yet, the anonymous account @peoplebrandsandthings posted about Haney’s rumored return last week and was met with comments like “she is needed, respectfully,” “Oh I’m here for this plot,” and “So ready for my exercise dress collection to continue expanding, it’s been a long five years and they need new friends.”
“I’ve heard from everyone and their mother,” she said. “I didn’t realize that people would have the response they did. It’s really cool that OV meant so much to people. In a lot of ways, it’s like a feel-good story for myself, and for a lot of people who were OV fans.”
