Ty Haney

Three years after her dramatic exit from Outdoor Voices, the founder and former CEO has moved on. Mostly.

- SANGEETA SINGH-KURTZ

IN MARCH, Ty Haney was scrolling through Instagram when she was served an ad for Outdoor Voices, the beloved-by-millennials athleisure company she founded in 2013. She had unfollowed the brand in 2020 shortly after her protracted exit as CEO, which began when she was on maternity leave and concluded with a smattering of stories that accused her of being terrible at the job. In the years since, Haney had attempted to scrub all traces of OV from her life-an effort that included purging "a hoarder's amount" of her own pastel workout gear. The ad alarmed her: It was for a polo dress she had debuted with Vogue in 2018, but now she beheld "a bastardized version with seams everywhere," she says. "Yikes!" she typed into the comments. "Y'all have lost your way..." She hit POST and felt a thrill of something she now describes as "punk rock"

"It just irritates me when I see it pop up on social," Haney says. "It's like-what the fuck is going on here?" She hadn't touched OV in three years (these days, she works out in old T-shirts), but the sponsored posts continued to torment her. One featured several new, what Haney calls "confusing" versions of the brand's signature exercise dress. ("The future is not bright for the OG Exercise dress, she commented.) Another was for a blue sports bra and leggings. The workout set was part of the brand's TechSweat line, made of a material that, according to Haney, was designed to stretch in a particular way. But the leggings in the ad had a misplaced front panel; the striations, instead of going from left to right, stretched from top to bottom. "The fabric is going in the wrong direction on the front panel of those leggings," she pointed out in the comments. "TechSweat stretches with the lines horizontal."