The world has come to romanticize the start-up — the hectic days and long nights of taking an idea, building it into a business and standing it up on its own.
But as vital as that first part is, there’s a lot of magic in phase two, when companies take flight and really start to grow.
Scaling a business is its own trick, though, requiring management able to operate with a small-company mindset while laying the groundwork to get big.
It’s a trick Nancy Green is looking to perform for a second time at Beyond Yoga, the Levi Strauss & Co.-owned brand she joined as chief executive officer one year ago.
In a prior life, Green spent six years as CEO of Gap Inc.’s Athleta brand, overseeing the business as it grew from 39 to 175 stores and revenues quadrupled to $1 billion.
Beyond Yoga — which plays in the same active/wellness space, but with a different vibe — had nearly $100 million in sales when Green took over and is also eyeing the billion-dollar mark.
“The biggest thing that I bring is understanding how to take a smaller brand with a strong origin story and be able to scale it and carve out a unique position in the market that can cut through,” Green told WWD. “Scaling is very different. Founders bring tremendous capabilities to something nurturing a small brand, but scaling a company is a very different skill set. And I’ve done that. The team here has done that.”
Levi Strauss paid handsomely for Beyond Yoga, shelling out $390 million at the top of the market in 2021, and last year had to write down over $102 million to cover adjustments to the trademark and the goodwill associated with the deal.
But the business has been churning along nicely, logging double-digit growth for 2024 and Green said she has plenty to work with as she looks to take the 20-year-old brand to the next level.
“It’s kind of fun to be in Chapter 2 or Chapter 2.5 of Beyond Yoga’s journey,” Green said. “I discovered this brand personally when I was practicing yoga, living in L.A. in 2008. We were wholesale driven and I discovered the brand there and then the brand came back on my radar later.”
Before moving into the corner office, Green spent hours with the brand’s cofounders, Jodi Guber Brufsky and Michelle Wahler, who had been leading the company as CEO.
“I was really curious about the why and those early days of why they decided to start Beyond Yoga, what was important to them, what did they learn?” she said. “I learned from them how they went about building a really special brand and what they thought was the secret sauce to them and why it was so important.”
A key ingredient of that secret sauce is right in the name — Beyond Yoga. Green said the brand is based in a mindset that was “about life beyond that mat.”
While many active brands are deeply rooted in high performance and athleticism, Beyond Yoga aspires toward a lower-key “healthy, active lifestyle.”
And that idea follows through to the product.
“They built this jewel of a brand based on that incredibly soft, insanely soft fabric,” Green said. “And then this color, the brand was always expressed with this optimism and joy and that was activated through color, much more color than competitors. And then body positivity was also really important in the origin story of this brand. It’s about this practice, not perfection and you’re fine just the way you are and keep learning and growing.”
That is very much the process the brand itself is going through now.
Over the last year Green has identified product categories that have more opportunity — including dresses, outerwear and men’s — and has been preparing to build on the company’s base of seven stores.
Most of Beyond Yoga’s business comes through e-commerce now, but the company also sells through thousands of boutiques and fitness studios as well as some larger wholesale accounts.
“The real growth enabler and the growth accelerator is going to be our own stores,” Green said. “Over time we could have at least 200 stores.”
The stores today are too small to hold the “full expression of where we’re going with product,” she said.
So a new store concept is being introduced in Greenwich, Conn., this summer.
Even though Beyond Yoga grew out of Los Angeles, the greater New York area is its larger market (and one the brand tested with a Manhattan pop-up store last year).
A class at the Beyond Yoga New York pop-up.
Courtesy
“We know it by ZIP code, we know it within a certain driving radius,” Green said of the New York area. “We can map that very, very, very directly. So we’re starting there.
“That starts to build the ecosystem and as you open a store, you start to create multiples in that trade area because people want to be able to try on things and they want physical presence,” she said. “And then over time, that raises that e-commerce business as well. You go into those markets, you start to multiply your sales in those areas. It can become very predictive.”
Beyond Yoga came to New York with a pop-up last year.
Courtesy
After Greenwich, the brand plans to bring another of its new concept stores to northern California, in Marin County.
“We’re actively working on, with great real estate partners, the right format for this brand,” she said. “So that will be a big, important [process of] test, iterate, learn and then scale. The biggest thing in the strategy is, What do we need to put in today to be able to scale for the future?
“We’re not a start-up, but we are still pretty scrappy in what we do,” she said. “Scrappy, but we can professionalize and just get things going to the scale that we need while being very, very agile.”
Scrappy, yes, but with the backing of the much more corporate Levi Strauss.
“We are figuring out together where the best place is to leverage LS&Co.’s capabilities and where we really need to be more independent and go on our own to be more agile,” Green said. “Levi’s does not want to encumber us with big company stuff that could slow us down. We leverage things like real estate, legal, finance, back of house, HR, but we’re on Shopify, which is great because we can move really quickly. Shopify has been a great [e-commerce] platform that can scale with us as we grow.
“And we have our own product sourcing engine, we leverage some quality control compliance with Levi’s,” she said. “But for the most part we are on our own with our own sourcing product development teams as this is a very different category.”
The active and athleisure category is also a fast-growing world with much bigger competitors, from Nike and Lululemon Athletica to the sport offerings from any number of designers.
But Green said the space is still very attractive, making up about a third of total U.S. apparel spend and on its way to 40 percent by 2030.
“It’s a highly fragmented market,” she said. “There’s no giant concentration of market share with any one brand. And it’s a great time for challenger brands. What’s most important is you have to identify and carve out your own unique place in the market. Nobody should be a copycat brand. If somebody else is doing something really well, let them do that really well. But we believe our own position in the market is unique.”
While Green isn’t looking to pressure consumers into a high performance lifestyle, she’s certainly pushing the brand to be more.
“Culturally — and this is very important in an innovative test, iterate, scale, growth company — you must create a culture where risk taking is embraced,” she said. “That’s really important to me that I model that and our leadership team models that. Risk taking implies that not everything will work. Some things will go great and you just test, iterate, scale. But a lot of the tests, it’s messy. It’s not a linear path. Let’s try this. Some things will work, some things won’t.
“You’ve got to embrace and talk about what’s working well and what’s not working well and be accountable,” she said. “There’s a safety net here for people to try new things and learn new things.”
Now Green just has to see how far her new thing with Beyond Yoga can go.
