TheChek News Flow

The performance lifestyle brand was started by Joe Kudla in 2015.

Don’t tell Vuori the athleisure market is softening.

The Encinitas, Calif.-based brand on Friday said it has received an $825 million investment led by General Atlantic and Stripes, two global growth investors, along with a collection of other investors that now values the company at $5.5 billion.

The investment, structured as a secondary tender offer, is more than twice the $400 million Vuori received in 2021 from institutional investor SoftBank Vision Fund 2, which had skyrocketed the company’s valuation to $4 billion. Former Neiman Marcus chief Jim Gold was among the early proponents of the company.

“As we continue to drive momentum, growth and market share gains, we are grateful to have the additional partnership of these leading organizations,” said Joe Kudla, founder and chief executive officer of Vuori. “Alongside our existing major investors, Softbank, Norwest, and ABP Capital, General Atlantic and Stripes will be key strategic partners and supporters in our ongoing mission and growth journey. They bring industry expertise and track records in helping emerging category leaders accelerate their expansion efforts while sustainably scaling globally. We are excited to partner with our new and existing investors to continue pursuing Vuori’s mission to make quality products that empower deeper connections with consumers everywhere.”

Kudla was not available for further comment on Friday.

Kudla, an entrepreneur and one-time model, took up yoga after he developed chronic back pain from years of playing football and lacrosse. He loved the discipline but not the apparel options offered by the big brands, so he launched Vuori in 2015 as a men’s activewear brand to fill that void.

Since then, the company has experienced explosive growth, expanding its offerings beyond strict activewear to lifestyle pieces, adding womenswear, and moving outside the U.S. borders. Vuori is now available in 18 countries.

It has also moved from strictly an online player and has been aggressively opening stores with a goal to exceed 100 units in 2026 in the U.S., Europe and Asia. It currently operates 79 stores in the U.S., two in London, two in Shanghai and one in Korea. Last month, it opened its first international flagship on London’s Regent Street, a two-story, 4,000-square-foot store. That followed a smaller unit in Covent Garden that opened in 2022. A third London unit is slated for King’s Road in the spring.

“We have followed Vuori for many years, as Joe and the team have thoughtfully built an enduring, generational, and category-defining brand,” said Andrew Ferrer, managing director of General Atlantic, who will join the Vuori board of directors as part of the transaction. “Vuori’s immense consumer loyalty and incredible product reflect the brand’s relentless focus on quality and innovation, customer experience, and cultivating its team and community. Vuori has significant white space to expand globally, supported by long-term tailwinds in athleisure and a large addressable market across women’s and men’s activewear apparel. We look forward to partnering and leveraging our global footprint to support these efforts for years to come.”

Chris Carey, partner at Stripes, said Vuori “encapsulates everything we look for in a Stripes investment — the products are amazing and beloved by the consumer, the team is fanatical about quality and innovation, and the market for athleisure is global with durable tailwinds.”

The capsule was aimed at the brand's local customers as an addition to its core lineup.

DUBAI — It was a family affair in Dubai as Brunello Cucinelli and his daughter Carolina staged a presentation and dinner to showcase a special capsule collection of abayas.

This marks the brand’s first show in the Middle East, but Brunello Cucinelli said the region has long been a source of inspiration.

“I have always been very passionate about Arab culture, landscape and architecture,” he told WWD. “Just look around us now, the setting here is sublime. When you look at the colors of the house, of our brand, they fit perfectly here in the desert.”

The abayas, created in a range of fabrics from crepe silk to summer-weight wool, blended the brand’s classic tailoring with elegant, softly flowing looks. Each was styled with a shayla, or veil, to cover the hair. The collection seamlessly integrated with the brand’s overall spring 2025 collection, offering up an expanded, culturally relevant offering.

Carolina Cucinelli, who serves as vice president and co-creative director of the brand with her sister Camilla, said they worked closely with a stylist from the Middle East to ensure the collection honors the traditions of the region, with attention to cuts and wearability. “This is an important market for us, and we wanted to create a more profound connection with our clients here,” she said.

She described the design process as very collaborative. “My sister and I work together, like all our collections, and there is a final review from Brunello to ensure it aligns with the overall vision.”

Carolina Cucinelli, who wore a long ivory-color abaya jacket from the collection, appreciated the versatility of the abaya. “Our brand DNA is very dedicated to the tailoring and so we have these sartorial pieces that we hope can be worn anywhere in the world,” she explained.

She also expressed a strong personal connection to the region, drawing parallels between Italian and Arab culture. “From a cultural point of view, we are very close,” she said. “We share a passion for family, for honoring tradition and for truly celebrating life’s moments, which we are doing tonight.”

Bankers are cheering the prospects for a lighter regulatory touch, but guardrails do benefit their industry

It’s been a giddy week on Wall Street. Donald Trump’s thumping victory in the US presidential race has bankers and private equity titans dreaming that he will loosen the regulatory reins while driving up demand for dealmaking and financing of many sorts.

More immediately, the results have all but doomed the Biden administration’s efforts to impose higher bank capital requirements as well as looming new rules on everything from climate disclosure to outsourcing.

You can almost hear “ding-dong the witch is dead” playing in the background as executives enthuse about saying goodbye to Gary Gensler as chair of the Securities and Exchange Commission and Michael Barr as head of supervision at the Federal Reserve.

Private equity firms and traditional money managers are not only welcoming the end of Gensler’s multiyear regulatory blitz but also hoping that a friendly SEC will give the green light to new financial products more readily. Alternative assets, including crypto, unlisted credit and private equity, could soon be finding their way into individual accounts.

Bank executives, meanwhile, have dreams of watering down the Fed’s annual stress tests, a key limit on how much risk they can take. Investors are also betting that industry mergers such as the that between Capital One and Discover will have a better chance of getting done.

Optimists say that clearing away unnecessary strictures will stimulate growth by making it easier for banks to lend and for investment firms to channel savings into badly needed infrastructure and innovation. They also point out that regulation tends to be cumulative, and a mild pruning may be warranted to keep overall costs and red tape in check.

“Banks are back” was the way one insider described the prevailing mood. “Trump wants to ‘build, baby, build’ and that requires a lot of financing.”

Pessimists worry that the anti-regulatory tone set by Trump and his new efficiency guru Elon Musk will send competent government employees running for the exits. That could prevent the rapid regulatory approvals that the industry is hoping for, and also leave the watchdogs dangerously short of the skills needed to spot and deal with emerging problems.

“A lot of the enthusiasm is based on a false premise,” a veteran executive told me. “We now risk heading into whatever the next bubble is. Sure as hell it’s coming.”

Even if the rosy view prevails initially, longtime Wall Street veterans caution that the industry needs to be wary of pressing its advantage too far. “If you take off too much regulation, more banks fail”, and that will set the pendulum swinging back the other way, another long-timer warned this week.

The first Trump administration’s 2018 decision to ease regulations on midsized regional banks is a case in point. While most banks in that light-touch category went about their business and prospered, a few took risks that later proved fatal. Their collapse sparked the 2023 regional banking crisis. The resulting upheaval became a justification for Barr’s “Basel III endgame” proposal to boost capital requirements that the industry has just spent more than a year fending off.

The US federal system also carries built-in risks for industries that seek to completely defang their overseers. An overly conciliatory federal watchdog can create a vacuum that ambitious state-level regulators will seek to fill. Here, the history of the 2002 research analyst scandal is instructive.

When then president George W Bush named industry lawyer Harvey Pitt to head the SEC in 2001, it was an open secret on Wall Street that investment banks were wooing initial public offering clients by promising favourable analyst coverage, even to companies that had no hope of being profitable. Pitt, who promised a “kinder, gentler” style, scrubbed a planned report and convened a private meeting with the big banks where he urged them to address the conflicts of interest.

Before any reforms could be agreed, then-New York attorney-general Eliot Spitzer went public with his own investigation, sharing colourful emails that embarrassed the industry and enraged investors who were losing money in the dotcom bust. Ten banks ended up paying a record $1.4bn and agreeing to expensive structural reforms. The triumph emboldened Spitzer and other pro-regulation state AGs to bring more cases, and they remain active.

This may all feel like ancient history to the financiers who popped champagne corks over Trump’s victory this week. But they would do well to remember that finance remains a highly cyclical industry, and customers get very angry if they feel they have been cheated. Clear guardrails can serve as a shield as well as a constraint.