Vuori's CEO quit his job, pivoted to e-commerce, and built a $4 billion brand

What was changed

Vuori was Joe Kudla's third attempt at a startup. He had already failed to launch two apparel brands as side hustles while working as an accountant — first at Ernst & Young, then at San Diego staffing consultancy Vaco: a contemporary women's brand called Sammy Jo, and an earlier T-shirt company that also carried the name Vuori, Finnish for 'mountain'. 'In the back of your mind, you don't want to fail three times in a row,' Kudla told CNBC Make It.

So in 2014 he changed the setup: he quit Vaco and raised $700,000 in a friends-and-family round to build and market Vuori's first products, aiming at an activewear brand that could compete with Lululemon. Going all-in, he reasoned, mattered for two reasons — investors wouldn't back a founder hedging his focus, and without a fallback he couldn't retreat the moment things got hard: 'As soon as things got hard, I would have said, It's not working, and just gone back to the easy path.'

The bet was tested almost immediately: less than two years in, Vuori came within four weeks of running out of money. The fix was a channel decision — abandoning the original plan of selling clothes in gyms and yoga studios for an e-commerce sales strategy backed by heavy social media marketing. The pivot worked, and the company Kudla had refused to half-do was valued at $4 billion in 2021. He credits the failed first two attempts as his 'design school' in an industry he entered without experience.

Why it worked

The two earlier failures taught the structural lesson — a side hustle could never command the focus, investor confidence, or persistence an apparel brand needs.

Removing his own safety net forced persistence: with no salary to retreat to, running out of money meant finding revenue, not quitting.

The gym-and-yoga-studio wholesale channel was too narrow; e-commerce with social media marketing put the brand where its customers discovered products.

Treating the failures as design education compensated for entering apparel with little industry experience.

What can be applied

Side hustles fail quietly: remove the safety net before you launch, and when the original channel stalls, move the whole company to where the customer is.

Aftermath

With the pivot proven, Vuori grew into one of the fastest brands in athletic apparel and reached a $4 billion valuation in 2021. Kudla, 45 at the time of the March 2023 interview, frames the all-in launch and the channel pivot as the two decisions that separated Vuori from his two failed ventures.