Vuori Brand Teardown: The $825M Bet

With a 15.6% market share among Ultra Wealthy Families, a $214 average ticket size, and 6.13% penetration in $500k+ households, Vuori is betting on affluent customers to fuel growth.

Can their aggressive expansion into urban markets and affluent suburbs, paired with an evolving women’s line, fend off competition from Lululemon and Alo Yoga?

Read on…

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Vuori has been making a splash in Athliesure since 2015 when its founder Joe Kudla opened the first store in California. Originally intended to be a graphic tee business, Kudla visited a psychic who informed him that his business would be very successful, but not in its current form. He pivoted to designing the Kore Short and Tech Pant that has made Vuori a household name.

Since then Vuori has been expanding aggressively, adding 25 locations a year. After raising a round of funding for $825 million Kudka announced, 

“We have just over 80 stores in the U.S and five globally, but we have the opportunity to build hundreds.”

But some think that Athleisure has hit a wall. And with competition like Lululemon and freight train growth of Alo Yoga can Vuori keep up the momentum? 

Let’s do a full brand teardown of the Vuori brand with the Consumer Code⁷ framework.

Customers

Understanding customers is the foundation of any brand strategy. It shapes how brands navigate competition, select marketing channels, leverage cultural trends to amplify their message, craft compelling creative, and measure the success of their campaigns through conversion.

We will look at Vuori’s customers through a few lenses. Using our panel of 150M credit cards we see where Vuori’s revenue comes from and their penetration rate within segments. 

TLDR: Vuori highly-over indexes with a wealthy consumer but sells across three different lifestyles: Very wealthy suburban, active urban professionals, and wealthy young professionals.

Age & Generations

Vuori has a nice distribution across generations with 33% of their revenue coming from Millennials. They also are doing well with the smaller but growing Generation Z with 0.75% penetration. This shows they have room to grow and good affinity with the coming generation.

Income Levels

Vuori heavily over-indexes on wealthier consumers. With a whopping 6.13% penetration with $500k+ income households. The majority (24%) of their revenue comes from $250–500k.

Psychographics

Although the income ranges of Vuori customers are uniform, their top 10 segments represent four very different lifestyles. Purple segments are Ultra Wealthy Families, red are Educated High-Income Urbanites, pink are Wealthy Retired folk, and Orange are Single Young Professionals. 

Surprisingly, missing here are average income suburban segments.

Geography & Heritage

Most of Vuori’s revenue share comes from dense urban markets with Phoenix and Dallas surprisingly making the top ten. There are no extreme ethnic preferences in their transaction data.

Gender

Vuori has a higher proportion of male buyers than Alo Yoga and Lululemon. This is both a strength and a weakness as women make up the bulk of Athleisure spending still.

Competition

Understanding how a brand measures up against competitors is key to identifying which customer segments to target and win. Traditional competitive research often lacks depth, relying on simplistic or anecdotal insights that fail to drive action. With our sales panel, we can determine a brand’s real progress within customer segments and geographies, providing clear direction for capturing future market share.

TLDR: To compete with Alo Yoga and Lululemon, Vuori needs to expand stores in dense, and affluent urban areas while penetrating large suburban segments online first while growing their women’s line with specific segments.

Market Share Trends

By comparing market share against a few competitive fast fashion brands, we can see Vuori made major headway in 2024, growing from 9.85% to 12.06% share of wallet. Lululemon started at 58% and finished strong in December with 61%. 

You can’t ignore Alo Yoga's impressive growth, climbing from 6% to 9% market share in 2024 and briefly surging to 14% during Black Friday.

But among consumers making $200k+ Vuori went from 11.87 to 15.31, whereas Lululemon had 57% and Alo Yoga 11.87%.

Most impressively, Vuori achieved significant growth from a lifestyle perspective, increasing its market share with Educated Urbanites from 14% to an impressive 23%.

Alo Yoga and Vuori boast similar average ticket sizes of approximately $185, significantly higher than Lululemon's $145. Notably, Alo Yoga demonstrated remarkable growth in 2024, with sales surging by as much as 88% year-over-year during peak periods, compared to Vuori’s more modest 33% YOY growth. This positions the two brands as fierce competitors heading into 2025.

These graphs lead me to believe that Vuori, instead of expanding to new segments, needs to bank hard into higher income groups that we see them already leaning into and taking market share away from Lululemon and perhaps their closest competitor Alo Yoga.

Positioning Analysis

Comparing brands on an XY quadrant helps us identify a strategy to win and grow market share against each brand. 

Using this method for Vuori we can isolate the target segments to win against competitors like Alo Yoga and Lululemon.

Vuori Vs. Alo Yoga

Win The Higher Income Segments From Alo & Focus On Targeted Purchase Frequency: A visual of Percent Purchased by segment shows how competitive Alo and Vuori are, almost a perfect correlation line between customers. All of these segments have high disposable income. Alo Yoga has a higher average purchase frequency than Vuori. Vuori has an opportunity to focus narrowly on a few segments and drive up purchase frequency compared to their competitors.

Vuori Vs. Lululemon

Target Suburbs with Ecommerce, Then Expand Strategically: The key opportunity lies with Suburb Chic, a high-income suburban segment that’s a major driver of Lululemon’s dominance and a significant contributor to Vuori’s revenue. With 2.9M households, the potential here is substantial.

To capture massive market share, Vuori should take a phased approach leaning first on the Educated Urbanites segments they dominate with:

1. Win Suburbs with Ecommerce: Focus on winning over Suburb Chic through ecommerce. Avoid going toe-to-toe in the suburbs for now.
2. Urban Store Expansion: Open stores in urban areas central to High Risers but still accessible to Suburb Chic. This dual appeal will strategically grow customer density.
3. Open Suburban Stores With High Ecomm Sales: With a strong foothold, Vuori can then expand stores closer to Suburb Chic communities to solidify loyalty.

On the West Coast, Vuori’s approach is already showing promise, capturing 5.31% revenue share within the Suburb Chic segment—a strong signal for broader success.

Strategic Target Segments

Vuori is competitively positioned to win market share against competitors in high income, active, white collar segments.

This focused group of segments makes up 33% of their revenue share and a fully targetable population of 7 million. They will continue to sell other segments but these have the biggest bang for the buck.

The key segment for Vuori is Suburb Chic, with relatively low penetration and high segment population. If Vuori were to grow they would need to win this segment from Lululemon who has 9.9% penetration in this segment. 

Channels

There are three basic levers of brand growth: 

1. Add more locations
2. Sell to net new customers
3. Sell more to current customers

There are multiple channels to grow within these, such as programmatic, social, earned media, billboards, collaborations, email, etc. Looking at each segment’s media patterns helps us focus our budget allocation on the channels that will be the biggest lever against winnable segments.

I have chosen three focus channels for 2025. 

1. Store Expansion: Given their aggressive brick and mortar plans.
2. Influencer Collaboration: Based on their customer segments.
3. Digital Advertising: Based on their customer segments.

TLDR: Vuori’s channel growth should focus on expanding in Southeast and Midwest markets with an eye to growing their Female share of wallet with the competitive SuburbChic segment.

Store Expansion

Using our five segments we can locate new stores on a map in cities that have a high percentage of the target customers. As discussed with Andrew Neelon, Vuori needs to map their densest zips for ecomm customers.

Assuming most of those have been accounted for, here are three recommendations for new stores that are near their best customers and in proximity to their target segment to win from Lululemon.

Atlanta, GA

Their existing Buckhead Atlanta location has a wealth of young professionals; 122,172 households match their target segments in a 10 mile radius. Just north are the segments those segments will age into, with all three of Vuori’s top suburban targets totaling 89,601.

Columbus Ohio

Stop #2 is a new market: Columbus. The Ohio capital has 57,624 total people in Vuori’s target segment within 10 miles. Perhaps surprisingly further out in the suburbs but still in relative proximity to the young professionals from Ohio State.

Minneapolis

Their first store in Mall of America is a good choice with 94,333 total target households within 10 miles. They can bear another store to the northwest with an additional 33,152.

Influencer Collaboration

Vuori can take a two pronged approach to influencers: One riding the success of their top segment High Risers and another to further penetrate the Suburb Chic segment that is critical to their long term growth. Let's start with Suburb Chic. 

We see golf playing a major role in this segment’s interests. This has likely shown up in Vuori’s research as they have released a golf line. 

From Vuori’s ads library they seem to be focusing on their female lines. We can cut following data by only females in the Suburb Chic segment:

Next, taking a look at their core segment High Risers with whom they have 3.7% penetration, we see professional interest such as Bloomberg TV, as well as various urban sports represented like tennis and indoor cycling. Influencers in these categories should be considered with this group.

Digital Advertising

Vuori’s social media game is on point. After going through their retargeting funnel on Meta it is clear they are hitting all the notes. Their ads library also hits tennis, cycling, and yoga. Further it is clear they are focusing more on females in their advertising to cover their current gap vs. other brands in this area.

In markets where they’d like to test greater penetration into the Suburb Chic segment it would make sense to target those consumers near their stores with personalized advertising such as their golf line.

Cultural Trends

Brand strategies exist within the context of cultural trends. Leveraging these trends can be a powerful way to accelerate growth, especially when they align with a brand’s values and resonate with target customer segments. However, cultural trends should complement—not replace—a solid foundation of customer insights, channel selection, and competitive strategy.

Athleisure is likely one of the most exciting categories in fashion in 2025. With an estimated size of 120 billion and projected compound annual growth rate of 8.3%. Vuori is well positioned to capture the high income consumer off the top.

Here are a few trends that we have seen among Vuori’s segments in 2024.

• Blurred Athletic Professional Boundaries: Two in three millennial and GenZ consumers are wearing athleisure multiple times a week.
• Merging of Outdoor & Athleisure: Increased interest in outdoor activities post-covid has encouraged outdoor brands to begin developing competing athleisure lines.
• Tech-infused Apparel: Smart fabrics and clothing with built-in performance-enhancing features, such as moisture-wicking and temperature regulation.
• Versatile Pieces: Athleisure items that transition seamlessly from workout to casual wear, such as elevated gym shorts and sporty dresses.
• Influencer Collaborations: Fitness and sports influencers are plentiful and athleisure brands have found success in co-promoting content.

When looking at this list one begins to wonder whether Vuori is not so much as taking advantage of these trends but actually a product of them. Things for Vuori to watch for is competition from outdoor brands such as The North Face and Patagonia. They should also continue driving into leadership with tech-infused apparel. 

Creative & Copy

Customer segments are selected based on competitive positioning, media budgets are allocated to the most effective channels, and cultural insights shape the overarching approach. The final step is ensuring that the creative and copy are personalized and deeply resonate with the target audience.

Vuori is best-in-class with their tactical Meta ads strategy. After going through their retargeting funnel it was pretty clear they were personalizing to my gender and driving me towards the Meta Pant, likely an item they have found creates the most loyal customer and highest LTV (check out Peter Fader’s work for more on this).

Conversion

Conversion measures the effectiveness of a strategy against its intended outcome. Whether that be a target CPC on digital ads or a gain in market share with the ideal segment.

Has Vuori’s approach worked for them in 2024? 

Growing from 9.6% market share to almost 12% is no small thing against brands like Lululemon. However, Alo Yoga is also growing and has significant momentum, growing as much as 86% YOY in the month of October.

Both Alo Yoga and Vuori are growing market share from Lululemon in 2024 in the key segment of A - Ultra Wealthy Families (of which Suburb Chic is one of the segments). Vuori moved from 12% to 15.6% and Alo from 8% to 11.8%.

Conclusion & Strategic Recommendations

Vuori has carved out a unique position in the competitive Athleisure landscape by focusing on a higher price point, higher quality materials, and uniquely a men’s line point of market entry.

Despite competition from legacy brands like Lululemon as well as rising disruptors like Alo Yoga, Vuori has demonstrated notable progress in 2024. Here are three major recommendations to take additional share in the athleisure market and fend off Alo Yoga’s momentum.

Dominate urban markets, then expand into the suburbs: Vuori is flush with cash from their recent funding. They need to continue dominating dense urban markets while targeting very specific wealthy and active suburban communities that represent a huge portion of Lululemon customers. Once they have achieved density in those zip codes they can begin placing stores further out from urban cores.

Focus on higher price point & driving up LTV: Vuori and Alo Yoga both have a higher average ticket size ($214 and $199 respectively). Vuori has the reputation of high quality materials and a higher income customer base than Alo Yoga. Alo Yoga boasts higher purchase frequency. Vuori has the opportunity to lean into this higher discretionary income by focused email campaigns that get frequency on par with Alo. As their customer base inflates from VC funded growth this will become an increasingly powerful lever.

Pour gas on the fire with digital advertising and expand women’s line: Vuori has an excellent advertising foundation to build from. They will likely increase ad spend with their new funding. This spend can be strategically placed to win the most valuable consumers from Lululemon ward off Alo’s growth. One of the few places Vuori comes up short is their women’s line, we are already seeing focus on this area with their BlissBlend and DreamKnit product lines.

By doubling down on these initiatives, Vuori is poised to solidify its position as a leading athleisure brand. Although there are rumors of consumers “trading down” in 2025 to cheaper brands, I believe Vuori’s affluent consumer will not feel the pressures of the average American. 

The question is whether they can replicate their success in the men’s market with their women’s line and strategically expand into the wealthier suburban segment using their funding. Two things I’m eager to watch for in 2025.

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