Outdoor Voices Blurs the Lines Between Working Out and Everything Else

The brand’s clothes perfectly suit a cultural moment when improving your life style has become a job that’s supposed to be fun.
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OV’s textured compression fabric is so snug that it borders on disciplinary, and its leggings “sculpt” the body, like Spanx.Illustration by Igor Bastidas

The hashtag #doingthings has been used about a hundred and twenty-five thousand times on Instagram. That’s a little less than #kalesalad, but more than, say, #labradorpuppies. Most of the posts are connected to the clothing brand Outdoor Voices, which was founded by a graduate of the Parsons School of Design named Tyler Haney, in 2014, when she was twenty-five years old. OV makes crop tops and shorts and leggings and fleeces that are soft but well structured and come in colors like lagoon and rose quartz—the company’s advertising helped pioneer a now ubiquitous consumer aesthetic of tasteful minimalist saturation that you might call Sensual Organic Algorithm. Women’s apparel makes up eighty per cent of the company’s sales. The trademark OV look is a racerback crop top and a matching pair of high-waisted leggings, an outfit designed to shape and flatter the body, and to expose it: OV’s textured compression fabric is so snug that it borders on disciplinary, and its leggings “sculpt” the body, like Spanx. The clothes photograph beautifully—somehow, they make the wearer look as if she were put on earth to be viewed on Instagram, posing against a forest vista in flamingo-colored spandex and a smile.

Outdoor Voices is frequently described as an athleisure brand, although Haney, who was a serious athlete in her teens, hates the term, associating it with clothes that were made for watching TV while occasionally thinking about the gym. “Every product that we make is made to sweat in,” she has said. Chip Wilson, the Canadian founder of Lululemon, the company sometimes credited with creating the athleisure market, also refuses the label: in his memoir, “Little Black Stretchy Pants,” he insists that athleisure is for Diet Coke-drinking mall shoppers in New Jersey who wear pink velour, whereas the ideal Lululemon customer is a thirty-two-year-old woman named Ocean who earns six figures and has ninety minutes to work out every day. But both OV and Lululemon appeal to the desire to wear workout clothes around the clock, and Haney has succeeded in part because Wilson’s ritzy vision—picture Ocean in black leggings and a rich-mom tank top—has, for many younger women, become passé. Athleisure, in any case, means different things for different people. I tend to think of it as activewear that costs more than seems entirely sensible, or as a spandex-clad arm of the long-standing ideology that urges women to improve the market value of their physical form.

According to one research firm, the activewear market is now a fifty-five-billion-dollar industry, and accounts for nearly a quarter of all U.S. apparel sales. Outdoor Voices is only a fraction of that market, but it has raised nearly sixty million dollars from investors and has had triple-digit growth every year since its founding. (It is not yet profitable, though Haney says it’s “close.”) It is possible to imagine the brand following the same trajectory as Lululemon, or the more male-focussed Under Armour, both of which were founded in the nineties, went public in the mid-two-thousands, and now bring in billions of dollars in annual revenue. OV’s first general manager and its V.P. of community came from Lululemon; its V.P. of product came from Under Armour; its board includes Mickey Drexler, who was previously the C.E.O. of the Gap and J. Crew. In February, OV announced that Pam Catlett, a former executive at Nike and at Under Armour, had joined as the company’s president and C.O.O. Catlett, in a press release, hailed OV as “the future of the athletic wear market.”

OV’s vision of physical activity is very different from the sort usually touted by Under Armour or Nike. Rather than advertising world-class athletes engaged in rigorous training or fierce competition, OV emphasizes low-key workouts and everyday movement. The company became familiar to the fashion-conscious—and to many Manhattan commuters—in part through its tote bags, which bear the gnomic slogan “Technical Apparel for Recreation.” The idea is that, in the absence of quantified results and competitive pressure, physical activity will feel like play.

If you spend time scrolling through the most popular #doingthings photos, you’ll find a seemingly focus-grouped parade of women in colorful OV outfits hiking, doing yoga, jogging on the beach. Almost none of these women are paid by OV, but many of them use Instagram professionally, as life-style or fashion bloggers, or paraprofessionally, as millennials with phones whose well-being is loosely connected to their popularity online. A life-style blogger in Connecticut, whose uncompensated #doingthings post I had come across, lamented how much time she and her peers devoted to Instagram. “It’s a shame,” she said. “People need to wake up and realize—like, what are we really doing here? But, until then, you have to do it.” If members of the company’s marketing team spot someone posting “inspiring U.G.C.,” or user-generated content, they might invite that person to become one of OV’s hundred and fifty or so ambassadors: a noticeably diverse group of dancers and climbers and fitness coaches and vegan-recipe developers who get free clothes in exchange for posting photos of themselves wearing them.

OV also pays a small number of professional influencers to post Outdoor Voices photos on their Instagram accounts. (A spokesperson declined to specify how many.) Aside from the #OVOfficial or #OVAmbassador hashtag, it’s nearly impossible to tell one type of picture from another: F.T.C. guidelines instruct users to disclose in detail any “material connection” to a brand they’re endorsing, but these rules are frequently sidestepped. Instagram encourages all users to act as influencers, and OV fans often allow the brand to promote their freely posted #doingthings photos in ads. “Probably ninety-five per cent of the ads you see on Instagram are user-generated,” the company’s general manager told me. (She later clarified that this was a rough, and probably hyperbolic, estimate.) Nike built its identity by paying celebrity athletes millions of dollars to serve as the faces of the brand. Outdoor Voices advertises non-famous people who mostly do not get paid but whose lives, thanks to social media, are refracted through the usual mechanisms of celebrity.

#Doingthings is short for the company’s full slogan, “Doing Things Is Better Than Not Doing Things.” As a general proposition, this does not strike me as especially convincing: idleness can be wonderful, and, these days, most of us are required to do too much. But, as a guiding principle for athletic activity, the slogan is pleasantly open-ended—“Just Do It” flipped for an era of inclusivity and wellness. (The Nike slogan was inspired by the last words of the Utah murderer Gary Gilmore, who, just before he was executed, in 1977, by firing squad, said, “Let’s do it.”) The company often hires models, and features women, who have curves and generous stomachs, and who fall at the larger end of its sizing spectrum (although, to the displeasure of quite a few would-be consumers, this spectrum extends only to XL). Showing “real” women is good for business: last September, “Today” devoted an article on its Web site to an Outdoor Voices ad that featured visible cellulite on a model’s thigh; in January, OV reposted a life-style blogger’s photo of her stretch-marked postpartum torso in a gray OV set, and the post received more than fifteen thousand likes. Still, these are clothes that broadcast a commitment to disciplining your body by working out. As the writer Moira Weigel put it, in an essay about athleisure, these clothes “encourage you to produce yourself as the body that they ideally display.”

On a cold Sunday afternoon in early January, I went to the Outdoor Voices store in SoHo. OV sells seventy per cent of its clothing on its Web site, and, because it has so many repeat customers, operates almost like a subscription service: the design team plans a six-month season, and clothes drop once a month, sometimes after being teased on Instagram by Haney, who has a winsome smile and an athletic figure and is her brand’s best model. But the company also has nine stores, with at least two more slated to open this year. The one in SoHo has pastel foam blocks to sit on, clothes racks modelled on Donald Judd’s aluminum boxes in Marfa, Texas, and fitting rooms of different shapes built from various woods and metals. The store smelled, oddly, like my apartment—a sensation I understood after I saw the Maison Louis Marie No.04 candle burning atop the cash wrap. Rows of tops ($45 to $75) and leggings ($75 to $95) formed a restrained rainbow. A black mini-skort with a hand-daubed polka-dot pattern was $65. I brushed my fingers across a rack of tops and bottoms, in lilac and emerald and charcoal and scarlet, which you could mix and match for $95. This was far more than I had ever paid for workout clothing—though less than Lululemon, which was Haney’s intention.

The store was packed with shoppers who radiated the energy of recently hatched New Year’s resolutions. A knot of guys in eighties-style Windbreakers sat on a pouf and contemplated fleeces. (The company’s advertising is geared toward women, but OV also has devoted male fans—a company rep told me that many male customers buy multiple versions of the same shorts for years.) Three girls in Teddy-bear coats, pale-rimmed glasses, and expensively highlighted hair waited in line to pay. There were neon dog leashes, bright-blue #doingthings baseball hats, $290 Spalwart sneakers, and battered copies of the 1981 “Jane Fonda Workout Book” ($40) and the 1977 “Vogue Body and Beauty Book” ($50) for sale.

I retreated to the dressing room, where the warm lighting made my skin glow and the mirror bore a millennial-pink #doingthings decal—selfies taken there come pre-hashtagged. I tried on an outfit that I was planning to buy for research purposes: a navy crop top and a pair of color-blocked leggings. Then I tried on a black exercise dress, a pair of feather-light running shorts with a pink spackle pattern, and high-waisted dance leggings in a muted pastel-heather color called Super Bloom. I work out regularly, but only in sale-rack offerings from Old Navy and Target, and only by walking my dog and attending group fitness classes that allow me to lie down. Still, as a millennial woman with disposable income and an Instagram account, I am squarely in the OV demographic, and my brain began to swirl with unrecognizable visions: me, in a gray crop top and fifty-five-dollar shorts, running up the steps at Fort Greene Park; me, taking a selfie mid-run. OV’s clothes perfectly suit an era in which, for many women, improving their looks and their life style has become a job that they’re supposed to regard as fun—I couldn’t imagine simply puttering around my apartment in a bright crop top that bared several inches of midriff and leggings so tight that a thong shows through. (Later, I learned that most of the young women who work for OV don’t wear underwear when they work out.) High on potential, I went to the cash register and paid for two hundred and sixty-five dollars’ worth of clothes that I could not reasonably expense.

Other shoppers lingered, talking, even though the place was jammed. The company’s retail stores are designed to serve as magnets for people who are interested in a millennial-era community experience—one that blends the online and the off-line, where you can do something physical with other people and put it all on Instagram. The Georgetown store has a rec room, with lockers and sports equipment; the Nashville store features a gold-plated Dance Dance Revolution machine. All the OV stores host events, many of which are free: hikes in Los Angeles, “dog jogs” in Austin, which often attract hundreds of pups and runners. When I got home from my shopping spree, I tried on my Super Bloom-colored leggings and bra top. “Doing things is better than not doing things,” I told my boyfriend, who was still in bed after a week of thirteen-hour workdays at an architecture firm. “You look like a mommy blogger dressed as the Easter Bunny,” he said.

“Fortunately, this only happens once a year.”

I decided that, for a month, at least, I would adopt the Doing Things mindset, which encourages people to enthusiastically pursue any physical activities that they like enough to do regularly, and which suggested that I could be proud of my dog-walking and my sullen participation in barre classes. For the next few weeks, I worked out a lot, which put me in a terrific, if conflicted, mood. Sixty per cent of working Americans say they don’t have enough time to do the things they want to do, and a high income is the most reliable predictor of leisure-time physical activity; getting a lot of exercise feels like a luxury and an advantage. Exercise has kept my head clear, my mood even, my body predictable, my energy up. It has also helped me compete in a culture of escalating beauty expectations and increasingly boundless work. Am I taking care of myself, doing sun salutations in my motivational crop top, or am I running survival drills for life under an advanced capitalist economy? The answer, I’m sure, is both.

A week after my SoHo excursion, I went to the OV store in Boston, situated near Away and Bonobos shops in a retail complex that looks magicked out of digital space. I was there for a wellness event, and had brought a male friend. We sat down on the rubber floor, joining a group of young white women staring raptly at a petite holistic nutritionist, who advised us to engage in resistance training twice a week and to consider going vegetarian if grass-fed beef was outside our budget. “Eighty to ninety per cent of what you eat should have a point,” she said. Everyone nodded. I pictured the sausage-egg-and-cheese bagel sandwich I’d eaten on the train to Boston. It had a point, I thought: I was hungover before I ate it, and after I ate it I was not hungover anymore. After the talk, my friend asked me, “Did it seem like all her advice was predicated on having a lot of money and free time?”

The following week, back in New York, I went to an OV-hosted Pilates class in SoHo. Sunshine streamed in through the windows. The instructor was welcoming and lovely. Afterward, the attractive group of attendees, all seemingly in their twenties and thirties, picked up their blue Doing Things hats, which came with the twenty-dollar price of admission, along with a pack of Care/Of vitamins and an OV coupon. A bunch of friends took a group photo, beaming. Later, I swallowed my new turmeric and B-complex while purchasing another OV outfit online with my coupon. I checked OV’s Instagram stories, which led me to the instructor’s Instagram stories, where I spotted myself, as the class did sit-ups, lying motionless on the floor.

Outdoor Voices is headquartered in three buildings in East Austin, a neighborhood in the Texas capital that has gentrified at time-lapse speed. In early February, on a humid, seventy-degree afternoon, I paid a visit. In the entryway to the white-walled, light-filled central building, a corkboard was plastered with photos of dozens of employees’ dogs. Haney had a beloved Havapoo, named Bowie, who, last year, the week before Haney turned thirty, was hit by a truck, right in front of the office. His photo, decorated with wings and a halo, was perched above the others. Haney now has a miniature Australian shepherd named Juice. (His Instagram handle is @juicedoingthings.) OV has just over a hundred employees in Austin—their ages seemed to range from plausible college student to mid-thirties. On this unseasonably warm day, they were all dressed playfully, in bandannas and novelty baseball caps, jumpsuits and wide-legged denim. Many of them wore OV.

Haney’s office is set off from the main floor by a transparent partition, through which one could see old-school inspiration images on the walls: snapshots of ballerinas, Patagonia ads from the nineteen-seventies, photos of Jane Goodall and of Mariel Hemingway circa “Personal Best.” Haney emerged from a meeting, tanned and smiling, wearing a short black skirt, a white OV polo, and a black woollen sweater, and the employees nearby became subtly more eager and attentive, the way people do when their boss, or a very attractive person, or a boss who happens to be a very attractive person, enters the room. I introduced myself, and she instantly recalibrated her vibrancy to fit the contours of my attention, like a phone screen adjusting its brightness according to the light. “I’m really looking forward to spending time,” she said, looking at me with warm brown eyes.

Haney was born in Long Beach, California, to a mother, Jenn, who cut hair for a living, and a father, Bob, who worked on an oil rig off the coast. They met cute: Bob went in for a cut, and Jenn accidentally clipped his ear. They moved to Boulder, Colorado, when Haney, a tomboy with a bowl cut, was still young. The oldest of three kids, Haney was athletic and extremely competitive, riding horses before school, playing on the boys’ soccer team, running track. Haney’s mom has an identical twin, Mary Ellen, who lived a block away and taught Haney how to run hurdles, in the back yard, using a broomstick.

Shortly after Haney was born, Jenn and Mary Ellen founded a colorful clothing line called Fresh Produce Sportswear, and, in Boulder, Haney’s dad started a garment-production company, which fulfilled Fresh Produce’s orders. When Haney was fifteen, she began cleaning the shop twice a week in exchange for screen-printing privileges. (One of the T-shirts she made said “Famous People Wear This Shit.”) At the time, she says, she never considered going into the family business. As a junior in high school, she went to Germany as the groom for the U.S. Equestrian Team; during the trip, a rider who had rented a silver Mercedes asked Haney to return it to the rental company. “I’m from a pretty humble background,” Haney told me, “and I remember the moment when I was sitting on the Autobahn, on the phone with my mom, and just thinking, Holy shit. There is so much in the world. There are so many cool things that, if you put yourself out there, you can do.”

During her senior year, Haney suddenly panicked at the thought of devoting more of her life to athletics. She ignored the University of Southern California’s efforts to recruit her for its track team, and, after graduation, moved to Boston, on a whim. She waited tables at the Border Café, in Harvard Square, where members of the New England Patriots sometimes came in for fajitas. Beginning to discover the extent of her magnetism, Haney befriended the linebacker Junior Seau, who invited her to Gillette Stadium for a post-game dinner. There she met Tom Brady and Gisele Bündchen. The world, again, seemed huge and astonishing.

After four months in Boston, she moved to New York, where she found an apartment in Chinatown and a string of catering gigs. She enrolled in a business program at Parsons, thinking that she might work for a design firm; a year later, she got a day job at a fashion-startup incubator called Launch Collective. As a teen-ager, Haney had mostly worn vintage clothes that she altered on her sewing machine, but she started to gravitate toward the idea of a stylish uniform: cropped white T-shirts and simple A-line skirts. She had begun dating a successful restaurateur from Austin named Larry McGuire. Soon after completing the Parsons program, she announced her entrepreneurial plans in a video that she posted on Tumblr. With her ash-blond hair in layers, and a box of Kashi cereal on the shelves behind her, she said that she was starting an activewear brand. “I’ve decided to blog about the experience,” she said, “because I’ve found that you see a lot of brands that you admire but you don’t know how they got there. And I’ve decided to be very transparent about it, and show the process, and allow people to see the mistakes, the difficulties, what I struggle with, as well as the successes.” She hoped, she said, that following her journey would be fun and entertaining—a “great experience for us all.”

Haney had recently had an epiphany, which she has since recounted many times to investors and to journalists. While going for a casual run on the West Side Highway, in the sort of muscle-mapped neon Nike spandex that she wore when she was a competitive runner, she suddenly felt as though she were dressed all wrong. Why did she look as if she were in a “Transformers” movie? Could an activewear brand “free fitness from performance,” and “approach exercise with moderation, humor, ease, and delight”?

She began researching synthetic yarns, trying to find something sturdy that would feel like cotton without showing sweat. She went to a trade show in Utah, located a mill that produced fabrics for Nike and Under Armour, and found a representative who agreed to help her develop a material that was textured and matte, rather than shiny and slick. Haney drew her own sketches and found a place in the garment district to produce small batches of “recreation kits”: a cropped compression top and a pair of compression leggings made from the new fabric; a slim-fitting hoodie; a cropped T-shirt; and a pair of joggers. She started giving kits to friends to “go out and do things in.” She brainstormed names for the brand—thanks to some randomized word-searching, it was Fritz Farouk for a while, then it was Track Practice.

By 2013, Haney had decided on Outdoor Voices, which evoked the bursts of energy she’d experienced as a kid. She quit her job at the Launch Collective and moved to Los Angeles, where she rented couch space off Craigslist and bought a very used Mercedes, which would run only when the heat was on full blast. She persuaded an L.A. factory to produce a tiny number of her kits, and she took samples to a fashion trade show in Las Vegas, where a buyer from a London boutique saw them and ordered a handful for his shop. A few months later, a buyer for J. Crew visited the boutique, and placed an order with Haney for eleven thousand units. McGuire connected Haney with friends in Austin, who, along with Mary Ellen and friends of Haney’s in Boulder, provided the money necessary to fulfill the order.

The collaboration with J. Crew set off a wave of breathless press, with Haney—her taste, her charisma, her sunny good looks—always at the center. A 2014 piece in The Cut noted Haney’s “remarkable resemblance to Kate Upton,” and compared the OV aesthetic to that of a “70s Vogue editorial.” Haney moved back to New York; with her dad’s help, she rented office space in the Flatiron district, and started seeking investors for a seed round. Every day, for lunch, she went to the nearby Sweetgreen, where she eventually struck up a conversation with a man she always saw there. It was Nicolas Jammet, Sweetgreen’s co-founder. He became a friend and an adviser, and now serves on OV’s board.

Haney’s personal verve notwithstanding, it was a struggle, at first, to raise money. She found names of investors on TechCrunch whose interests seemed promising, and wrote to them for advice; if they agreed to meet, she’d pitch her vision of the “next great activewear brand.” These venture capitalists were almost always men, and they always said no. Haney began sending crop tops and leggings to their wives and girlfriends, ahead of meetings. Responses brightened.

OV raised a respectable $1.1 million in its seed round, in the spring of 2015. In June, the company collaborated on an outfit with the irreverent fashion blog Man Repeller, and, a month later, Lena Dunham wore the outfit while filming a scene for “Girls.” Dunham posted a paparazzi shot of herself, mid-run, on Instagram, noting in the caption that she felt “strong, swift, and proud,” and tagging Outdoor Voices. People and Elle and Runner’s World wrote about the post. The successes escalated: Gwyneth Paltrow wore a pink OV crop top, Frank Ocean wore OV sweats, a Series A round raised $7.5 million, a Series B netted $13 million.

In the fall of 2017, Haney moved the company to Austin, taking thirty-four employees with her. (Haney and McGuire broke up the following spring, though OV’s Austin shop still shares office space with the prep kitchen for one of his restaurants.) The employees at H.Q. call themselves Team OV, and they operate on the Doing Things principle: Haney is known for instituting jumping-jacks breaks during meetings; people go off in small groups to do astrology workshops or volunteer with the A.S.P.C.A. The first OV employee with whom I corresponded signed her e-mails “Doing Things, Melissa.”

My visit in February coincided with a tree-planting expedition. About twenty of us drove a short distance to a trail that borders Lady Bird Lake, a reservoir on the Colorado River. We gathered around blue buckets and tall shovels as a woman from the Trail Foundation, which OV sponsors, demonstrated how to plant saplings of Carolina buckthorn and Texas redbud. The saplings would take fifteen years to become sizable, she said, and only thirty per cent of them would manage to become trees. “Long game!” Haney said. She leaned in close to observe the tree-planting technique. Then she planted three times as many trees as anyone else.

When we returned to the office, the three young women who make up OV’s design team showed me around their corner, dotted with Pantone cards and bins of performance textiles and wool. Last year’s spring collection—textured pastel running outfits, ice-cream-colored crop tops—had been inspired by the Brutalist Playground, a London art installation, they said. The upcoming collection, which includes semi-sheer layering tanks, a thin day robe, and dancewear in “conifer” and chartreuse, drew on the work of the minimalist sculptors Dan Flavin and James Turrell. Other retailers now routinely knock off OV’s designs—after Haney called out the clothier Bandier for copying OV’s color-blocked leggings and crop tops, an army of loyal OV fans blitzed Bandier’s social-media accounts. (Bandier defenders responded by noting that Piet Mondrian invented color-blocking, not OV.) Today, you can buy OV-esque exercise outfits at Old Navy, Target, and H&M. Alexa Day Silva, OV’s ebullient design director, said that she was not worried about the imitators. “No one’s looking at biomorphic design for inspiration,” she said. “And when people knock us off their orange is too yellow, anyway.”

About three-quarters of OV’s employees are women. Male customers have been overlooked lately, Haney told me, but new merchandise will be coming out for them later in the year. In truth, men, particularly straight men, do not have the same incentives for improving and displaying themselves in the ways that athleisure encourages. (The world of Instagram influencers is the rare professional sphere in which women seem to consistently outearn men.) Haney believes that, eventually, there will be less of a gender divide in OV’s apparel—people will just shop for what works. Later, on OV’s Instagram, I spotted a male yoga teacher looking slinky in the women’s conifer-colored unitard, as part of a promotion for the company’s dance collection. Some men, Haney added—like her boyfriend, Mark Wystrach, the lead vocalist of the country band Midland—already wear the women’s leggings sometimes. (Haney and Wystrach began dating late last spring, after Haney sent Wystrach a message on Instagram. A few months ago, they bought a house together.)

The OV office operates on a healthy Austin schedule, emptying out by 5 P.M. At six, the twenty or so people who had stuck around, nearly all of them women, started moving desks to the perimeter of the office and putting down blue yoga mats for a workout, which would be led by a celebrity trainer through Google Hangout, and broadcast live on OV’s Instagram feed, so that anyone could follow along. Haney did triceps dips while live-streaming from her phone’s front-facing camera. A friendly brown dog named Lupa wandered between mats. People encouraged one another; they whooped when “Shake Ya Tailfeather” started playing. I looked around, mid-squat, eying the toned bodies around me, and considered the extent to which the company’s workforce was less diverse than its Instagram presence. As had been the case during the tree planting, I appeared to be the only non-white person in the group. (“As we grow, it’s a major focus to build a team that reflects the broader community we’re reaching,” an OV rep later informed me.)

After the workout, I walked around the office and spotted handwritten valentines from Haney on several desks. The company has an internal app called Hearts and Stars, which asks you to make a note in the app when you engage in an activity—playing pickup basketball, riding your bike, meditating—and assigns you a star, if you do it alone, or a heart (which is worth more points) if you do it with a friend. Once the employees have collectively accumulated a certain number of hearts and stars, the office gets a reward. Recently, after reaching an office goal, the staff had a “silent disco,” in which they all put on headphones, turned on their music, and danced.

I left the office and drove to June’s All Day, a cozy French place owned by McGuire’s restaurant group, where I sat down for dinner with three members of Team OV. Many of the employees are friends. They told me that, last year, after Haney’s dog died, the whole company surprised her by throwing her a birthday luau. They also told me a story about how, on the new V.P. of community’s first visit to the Austin office, she observed what they regarded as the definitive thing about the company: that all of the employees seem as if they would be willing to work there even if they were not being paid.

Haney picked me up the next morning, at eight-thirty, in Wystrach’s black 1989 Mercedes. Her hair, long and honey-colored and beachy, hung loose over her shoulders; she wore an OV skort, a vintage Dolly Parton T-shirt, and two gold nameplate necklaces that said “Outdoor” and “Voices.” A song by one of Haney’s friends, the twenty-four-year-old singer-songwriter Maggie Rogers, was playing on the stereo. Juice sat in my lap and nipped at my hair tie. We were headed back to Lady Bird Lake—Haney jogs there most mornings. “I always had a huge amount of energy,” she told me, laughing. “If I don’t exercise, I can come off kind of”—she mimed a malfunctioning robot. “I needed to go muck out stalls and ride horses at 5 A.M. when I was in high school. I really found joy in that. I love to work, I guess.”

As we walked along the trail, Juice zipping around our feet, I asked Haney if she had ever felt that her exuberance and receptivity, in concert with her age and gender, led people to misconstrue the seriousness of her professional intentions. This was a personal inquiry, I admitted; I sometimes worried, while reporting, that my bubbliness obscured the part of me that was critical. “You’ve spoken about all these meetings with male V.C.s, trying to raise money,” I said. “Do you know that feeling I’m talking about—where you’re not sure if people are seeing what you’re there to do, or if they’re seeing a young woman smiling at them?”

“I’m still up against that,” she said. “Hmm. I have found, in many cases, that it’s an advantage. Making people feel good about themselves, making them feel warm and comfortable, that comes naturally—to us,” she said, motioning to me. “But that’s how I learned that I needed to have structure and documentation, the numbers and the materials, so that I could still be myself.”

Outdoor Voices is one of a few highly visible, female-centered, life-style-adjacent, digital-savvy millennial brands built around a charismatic founder and her story. Other such companies include the cosmetics outfit Glossier, the fashion retailer Nasty Gal, the dating app Bumble, and the Wing, a chain of co-working spaces. Haney is friendly with the founders of each of those companies. “With every one of these women, we’re all leaning into our personality, deriving what we create from our personal experience,” she told me. “I think that’s fine-tuned my perspective—that it’s totally possible for people to create a similar narrative, journey, even company, from their lives.”

We walked four miles, then drove to Casa de Luz, a macrobiotic restaurant in a hippie community center which serves a daily cafeteria-style meal. Haney said that it reminded her of Boulder. We had mugs of twig tea and plates of green-bean-and-avocado tacos and Swiss chard with tahini. I told Haney that my takeaway from the success of her cohort was more about what we expect and want from young women. Advantages for women tend to harden into requirements. The careers of very successful millennial women, from Haney to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, are often inseparable from their ability to engage large online audiences in a personal way. All of the women whom we were talking about, I ventured, are beautiful. All of them give perfect interviews. The women Haney mentioned had all built companies on a foundation of female confidence, creating brands that imbued personal identity with an aspirational sheen. “I’ve been thinking about what it is to be a woman, and to understand yourself—your body, your life—as a source of potential,” I said. “It can feel like such a gift, and it can also feel like a punishment, and it can be hard, online, even as norms are being challenged, to understand which of the two is in play.”

Haney nodded, absorbing and refracting. She told me that she had been weighing both the utility and the risks of confidence, for a young founder, and the complications of displaying that confidence online. “I imagine that Instagram is not very digestible to people—scrolling through, like, a win, a win, a win, a win!” She paused. “And I’ve been thinking about it. How am I not unintentionally making people feel worse about themselves?”

OV’s price point—and the fact that it prefers to give excess product away to influencers and ambassadors rather than put it on clearance—keeps the company in the realm of the aspirational: if you splurge on ninety-five-dollar leggings, you will then want to live the sort of life that ratifies the splurge. Haney acknowledged that the company had a long way to go to “really diversify,” and that the process started with the people who were hired. “What I get really excited about is decoupling community growth from product revenue,” she said, meaning that she wanted people to become connected to Outdoor Voices without buying anything, yet. “How do we grow a Doing Things community that could be ten times what revenues are,” she went on, “and then, over time, we understand the correct way to get them into product?” Customers, she pointed out, already envisioned the brand as a person—people often wrote in to say that OV felt like their best friend. “Internally, we talk about OV as the hiking buddy who brought the snacks,” she said. There are plans to make the company’s internal app, Hearts and Stars, available to all OV customers, and to add a photo component, further blurring the line between brand fan and brand ambassador. Everyone would get to reap the benefits of their U.G.C.

Last year, Google Ventures led OV’s Series C funding round, which raised $34 million. Haney told me that investor expectations can become a problem. “The pressure that V.C.s put on companies is counter to building real value,” she said. “There aren’t a lot of brands and companies that go from here to here”—she mimed hockey-stick growth—“that you still have real love and affinity for. I’d rather grow a hundred per cent for twenty years than go 10x for three years and make this into a trend, and then not be here.” Catlett, the new president and C.O.O., told me that her previous employers, Nike and Under Armour, for all their success, had never quite captured, as brands, what many of their customers expressed in surveys—that they were drawn to sport for the fun of it. “Why do you think that is?” I asked her. “Is there something about performance and quantified excellence that’s fundamentally at odds with ease and joy?” Catlett told me that she had no idea how to answer that question.

On my second day in Austin, OV held an outdoor Zumba class at the University of Texas. U.T.’s athletics department has a $250 million apparel deal with Nike; Haney wants to sponsor the school’s intramural teams. At around four-thirty, I walked through Speedway, the pedestrian mall at the center of campus, and stopped when I saw a huge group of students forming a crowd on the brick plaza outside the gym. Outdoor Voices has a college-ambassador program called OVU, and it’s been experimenting with events like this one—giving away hats, staging a group run or a dance class, ending with a photo and a “1-2-3 OV!” cheer.

I took my place amid a sea of young people wearing Doing Things hats in blue and burnt orange. Haney gave a minute-long pep talk—“Our mission is to get the world moving!”—and waded into the crowd. The ludicrously energetic instructor turned on a booming reggaeton mix and launched into a 2-A.M.-at-the-club dance routine so saucy and contagious that everyone around me screamed. It was a hot, thick, strange day, and soon everyone was booty-popping, body-rolling, unhinged by glee. I took videos so that I could show my friends what I was doing. I felt amazing—porous and overcome. Afterward, I talked to a student named Jesse, whom I’d spotted in the crowd. He wore a U.T. polo, rolled-up khakis, shower slides, and tube socks. He’d just been walking by, and had joined in; he’d never heard of Outdoor Voices or Zumba. He was buzzing. “That was so, so great,” he said, dazed.

The next day in Austin was cold, and the day after that it snowed. I went to a yoga class, wearing one of my OV outfits, before catching my flight back to New York. I had never been less able to distinguish what was good from what was profitable, or my life from my work. It was dark in the studio, and the ceiling sparkled like a planetarium. A sign at the back of the room read “Total Human Optimization.” In a sweet, soft voice, the instructor told us, “Every part of you that’s not active is weighing you down.” ♦