348 | Redefining Loyalty as Multi-Brand Status | with Ty Haney

Ty Haney is a serial entrepreneur and three-time founder best known for building Outdoor Voices into one of the most recognizable activewear brands of the last decade. After proving that approachable, inclusive movement could compete with performance-first giants, Ty went on to launch Joggy, a natural energy brand, and TYB, a community commerce platform powering engagement for 200+ brands including Rare Beauty, Glossier, OUAI, and Urban Outfitters.

What started as a personal pain point, wanting activewear that reflected her own lifestyle has scaled into a playbook for how to turn authenticity into category-defining brands. With TYB, Ty is now helping consumer companies reimagine loyalty, moving beyond points and email blasts into gamified, multi-brand ecosystems where fans prove their status, earn rewards, and build daily habits with the brands they love.

Ty’s story blends personal insight with category innovation. From turning Outdoor Voices into a movement brand, to navigating the challenges of inventory-heavy DTC, to now building a software platform that redefines how brands grow, she’s seen the ups, downs, and pivots that come with scaling in Ecommerce.

Whether you’re building a DTC brand, rethinking customer loyalty, or searching for new ways to deepen community engagement, Ty offers an unfiltered look at what it takes to transform personal pain points into platforms that fuel the next era of growth.

In This Conversation We Discuss:

• [00:24] Intro
• [01:08] Starting a brand from personal pain points
• [02:34] Expanding offerings while simplifying choice
• [04:40] Focusing on product before scaling
• [06:17] Building go-to-market around community
• [07:36] Stay updated with new episodes
• [07:48] Building momentum with early funding
• [08:27] Pioneering UGC early on Instagram
• [10:06] Challenging the direct-to-consumer thesis
• [12:16] Building TYB from hard-earned lessons
• [13:21] Episode Sponsors: Electric Eye, Heatmap, Grow
• [16:30] Starting new ventures after stepping away
• [17:33] Building TYB as a rewards platform
• [18:56] Expanding into Target and Erewhon retail
• [20:51] Scaling community commerce into growth
• [23:21] Expanding loyalty into daily engagement
• [27:47] Inviting brands to build fan channels

Resources:

• Subscribe to Honest Ecommerce on Youtube
• Technical apparel for recreation outdoorvoices.com/ 
• Plant-based steady energy supplements getjoggy.com/ 
• Community rewards platform, where community engagement pays off tyb.xyz/ 
• Follow Ty Haney linkedin.com/in/ty-haney-a4b1561a 
• Schedule an intro call with one of our experts electriceye.io/connect
• Clear, real-time data built for ecommerce optimization heatmap.com/honest 
• The Premier Conference for Ecommerce Operators joingrow.com 

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Transcript

Ty Haney

Real people doing real things, documenting it and using that to motivate and inspire people to participate and show their own way of expressing how they bring the product to life. 

Chase Clymer

People want to buy from people and then seeing themselves in the brand assets throughout your marketing and throughout your website. It was almost like a no-brainer.

Honest Ecommerce is a weekly podcast where we interview direct-to-consumer brand founders and leaders to find out what it takes to start, grow, and scale an online business today.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming to the show a fantastic serial entrepreneur and three-time founder.  She built Outdoor Voices into one of the most recognizable activewear brands before launching Joggy, a natural energy brand. 

And now she is heading up TYB. That's Try Your Best, a fast growing platform helping over 200 brands like Rare Beauty, Glossier, Ouai, and Urban Outfitters engage with customers directly through its community commerce module. Ty, welcome to the show. 

Ty Haney

Thank you for having me. Happy to be here. 

Chase Clymer

I'm excited. So it's amazing when we have a guest with your pedigree where  I think most people in our space, unless they're sleeping under a rock, have heard of Outdoor Voices. But for the two or three out there that haven't, what were the  types of products you were selling over there? 

Ty Haney

Yeah, of course. I'll give you a little walk up. So Outdoor Voices is an activewear brand. I started it at 23. I grew up in Boulder, Colorado. Super outdoorsy, recreational town. Biking, hiking, walking, dog walking. That was just integrated into our daily life. I then went to New York City for college at Parsons Design School and no longer had the outdoors or teammates practice coaches to keep me active. 

And while in school, I noticed both mentally and physically not moving had a negative impact. And so during school in New York City, I became really excited about this idea of creating an activewear brand that wasn't like the Nikes of the world, which traditionally prioritized being fastest, strongest, having the biggest muscles, like an athlete. 

But rather, I called it free fitness from performance and prioritized inspiring people to move their bodies on a daily basis for fun with friends, casually under this umbrella of recreation. And so quite simply started this at 23 and built this doing things movement. Doing things really being this model around inspiring people to move their bodies on a daily basis. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. And that's something that I always like to highlight on this show when I see it in a brand's beginning. You mentioned there were other companies out there selling roughly the same product. 

But the differentiation that you brought to it was, while they're marketing athletes and being the best, we want to bring a different approach to the marketing and the brand aesthetic of these products, which arguably weren't as differentiated. What was differentiated was the branding and the marketing and the messaging.

Ty Haney

Yeah, I was very into product. And so on a product level, I had grown up wearing Nike, appreciated it because like the black and neon like made you feel fast. And that was the goal at the time. Then I found myself in New York and very, you know, aesthetically inclined. And really what I wanted to wear was a technical product. So the material being sweat working and comfortable for movement, but in a uniform that didn't scream I'm an athlete. 

And so we really prioritized more of a gray kind of tonal palette than these loud neons. And we merchandised our first product into a kit. So it was simply a crop top or a sports bra that came with a two-tone legging. And this became  like a little unit, your uniform for doing things. And so I really was obsessed with making technically credible material and products that could be used in the active use case.

And like stand up against competitors, but delivered in a way that just had such a different taste to it and really looked like my other clothing that I was wearing. And so we took this kit, which was very much a fresh kind of concept at the time, and then expanded that into something like a uniform that was also a sweatshirt or hoodie and sweatpants. And we just continued to like distilling and simplifying the product offering and then activate it with this larger mission of doing things and getting people moving. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now take me back in time. What year did the idea get planted in your head  that you wanted to launch a brand like this? And did the name come first or did the idea come first? What was the beginning of it like? 

Ty Haney

I think I often tell entrepreneurs to find within their DNA what's unique to them. And so my upbringing in Boulder was more than landing in a place that wasn't so nature and kind of movement inclined. Like I was really solving for a personal pain point. And so initially I wasn't thinking like this is gonna become the next Nike. I'm certainly someone with big ambition but I was really solving like for myself first. And I think that's what allowed me to kind of go very focused into getting the product right. And then as I started to get the product kind of out to other people I realized there was such an opportunity and kind of white space to really reposition this energy space in a way that felt approachable and inclusive to people that didn't see themselves as an athlete. 

And so it started with a product connected to a pain point. And then Outdoor Voices, I had a friend from school, this guy called Matt, who was an exceptional graphic designer. And I just remember sitting in SoHo, maybe at a beer garden or something, like thinking about names and Outdoor Voices. I think he mentioned it, and it rolled off the tongue and felt so expansive.

And so uniquely recreational. And so the name came after the product and the pain point. But then we kept building from there. And pretty quickly, I realized there was really an opportunity to  have the ambition of creating the next Nike but within this recreational use case. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And so you have a name, you have some amazing products that you've been working on. What was that go-to-market strategy? When did you go live? And how was that perception?

Ty Haney

Yeah, it started with a collection of my friends and became one of our core values or tenants within the brand. It's called It Starts With Us. I actually remember our second office in New York was on Canal Street and you had to go through one of the watch shops to get up to us. But every Friday we'd take the team, probably at that point,13 of us, and go to the Canal Street basketball courts and literally participate in the mission to move.

And it was funny because there were some people who were really good at basketballs, they'd swish threes and then other, or at basketball, and then others that had never played a day, but we brought everyone together and quite literally leaned into this, it starts with us. And so it starts with us going to market. It starts with us. Interestingly at a time where direct to consumer was taking off and everything was online, we did the opposite. We prioritized activity IRL. 

And really activating IRL and then amplifying through digital and social became a core strategy that really worked for us. And was very much zigging when others zagged, again, at this time where everything was becoming about paying for  customers through Instagram and Facebook.

Chase Clymer

Hey everybody, just a quick reminder. Please like this video and subscribe if you haven't. We're releasing interviews like this every week, so don't miss out. Now back to the interview.

You're talking about the team at the beginning there. Having 13 employees, I mean, I can only extrapolate from there that you weren't bootstrapped, but you had a little bit of funding to get this going? 

Ty Haney

Yeah. I think we were lucky in that people really understood this recreation vision and built the number one recreation brand. And so we were able to, like other companies at the time, bring on serious capital. And that really worked for us. And so we started small, then we raised our A. And this movement really, I guess caught fire in a quite exciting way. And it quickly became a very high growth company.  

Chase Clymer

Obviously, you were mentioning that the in real life event activations and then activating and then amplifying those through the digital means were some of  those growing points that you experienced. Was there anything else along the way that you felt like you're either pioneering or  just like aha moments for the growth of the business?

Ty Haney

It was early on Instagram. One thing we did super well was again, another kind of like a core tenant of a document that doesn't produce. So like fashion brands at the time and even activewear brands would like to have models. And like for me, it always felt important to authentically showcase people who were like real people doing things. And so we would feature, you know, like real runners or like real musicians, like when they're kind of out on the trail. 

So real people then expressed themselves in a very authentic way. And then that essentially modeled the behavior and we'd get all sorts of UGC content that we'd use across organic and paid. And they'd all be hashtagged back to this doing things model. And so yeah, we were early in Instagram, I think UGC in a lot of ways we pioneered. Obviously that has taken off and every brand knows the value of that today. 

But the document they didn't produce was really about leaning into kind of like real people doing real things, documenting it and using that to motivate and inspire people to participate and  show their own way of expressing how they bring the product to life. And then that crisp catalyst with doing things like that combination, I think we were quite pioneering in. 

Chase Clymer

People want to buy from people and then seeing themselves in the brand assets throughout your marketing and throughout your website. 

Ty Haney

Yeah. 

Chase Clymer

It was almost like a no-brainer. Everything in hindsight is 2020. But it's almost just like, well, yeah, of course this works out. But it's also like a survivorship bias. If it didn't, we wouldn't have heard about it. That's amazing. Now, as you were scaling up outdoor voices, were there any hiccups along the way that you might want to point out for our audience to maybe avoid? 

Ty Haney

I think in present time, I would say that the direct-to-consumer thesis was a failed one. There were all these companies that were able to raise all of this monstrous money, but then the mandate became growth at all costs. And I think it's funny because I run a software business now and it's so evident and obvious to me how a software business scales and why it requires and can be okay and kind of requires the amount of investment that these tech companies get. 

That said, in the physical widget and product space, you have inventory and that's a beast, particularly when you get it wrong. And so this mandate kind of just by nature of the capital that we raised to grow at all costs ultimately got tricky as you got more and more inventory and could certainly miss out on a season like that, that can really impact you. I remember internally or actually at the board level, like the question was asked, how high is high? Like we want to understand if we, if we buy inventory to a higher degree, like what really is the opportunity here?

And we did that with a pink or we call it flamingo legging. And now that's the band in my existence. We were sitting on so many of those leggings. Anyway, a big learning was in the inventory business, growth at all costs, and especially funded in the way that these companies were being funded, is a pretty tricky model to get right. And I think we see that across a lot of the brands today that were part of that 10-year first inning of D2C. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Unfortunately, a lot of great products with a lot of great ideas. There's a lot of stuff that happens behind the scenes. And some of those you can see are going through bankruptcy. They don't exist anymore. They're doing a lot of restructuring. 

And so yeah, I think that once the oversaturation of spending money on those performance marketing engines to consumers, once it matured, the model couldn't sustain it anymore. So people had to be smarter about their margins and you couldn't actually pay anything to acquire a customer anymore. You had to really think it through. 

Ty Haney

Yeah. The customer acquisition costs have exploded and then retention and loyalty programs suck. But that whole 10 years was like, how many customers can I acquire? But as you looked at the data, they became one and done. 

And they were expensive and not sticky. And that's ultimately not a recipe for a business in the long run. A lot of learning, absolutely. And in a lot of ways, that experience dovetailed into why I'm building a TYB today. 

Chase Clymer

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Chase Clymer

To finish up the talk about Outdoor Voices. How involved are you today? 

Ty Haney

I'm not. I left, was it four or five years ago? Right before COVID, which is hard because it's your baby. So that was the hardest thing I ever had done at that point in my life. I had spent eight years building it. I'd say 90% of that experience was amazing and incredible. 

We had an awesome team and we had this very powerful movement. and strong business that said at the board level, about eight years in, we had very different views on how to continue growing the business. 

And so I ended up leaving quite dramatically, a very public exit. I think it was in 2019. And then I re-engaged for a brief moment, but had found that I had been kind of put in a box rather than like the founder with the vision and like all in to go execute against this. So I ended up leaving, taking a beat and then starting new companies. 

Chase Clymer

Did you start more than just the two that I know about? 

Ty Haney

Well, after 8 years of being so deep in Outdoor Voices, it took me a minute to think about what I'd do next. My initial idea was to create, again, within or underneath this recreation umbrella,  specific brands that we're an expert in. 

Let's call it footwear, beauty, energy, etc., but then had a shared backend. The first brand that we worked on is Joggy Energy, which is an organic energy drink. And really, again, this was developed because of a personal pain point. I had been drinking a ton of Red Bull. As I clicked into the ingredients of Red Bull, I'm like, oh shit, this is not a recipe for longevity in the long run. 

I better go find the most premium plant-based energy because I like to feel up. I think it's an unfair advantage, almost like nature's adderall. And when you're determined and ambitious, it's helpful to feel that way. And so I had Joggy, we started to work on it. I started thinking about how to go to market with a new brand, let's say three years ago. I realized that there was an opportunity to create what's now TYB, which is essentially an engagement and rewards platform.

I started 2 companies at once, but that was the walk-up and rationale behind Joggy. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Now, let's talk a bit more about Joggy's launch. Is it a direct consumer play?  More of a pure play there? Or is it a retail play? What did you change about launching this product? It's obviously a completely different product category completely as well. 

Ty Haney

Yeah. Joggy's fortunately been a hobby project for me. It's certainly more than that. We have capital and an amazing team. But really my main thing is TYB. So Joggy's been fun in that initially it was incubated underneath TYB as an owned brand to really like experience and test the platform with. Just in September, we spun it out into its own entity with its own capital and team  and then have been off to the races. But really, as I think about the energy space like the CELSIUSes, Red Bull, Alani Nu.

They all have synthetic caffeine and fake sugar. Like, I think, as we see with Poppy's acquisition in Siete, the better for you space has massive tailwinds. And so I really see it as an opportunity to build the number one organic energy  drink company, which isn't just DTC. It does require  more cans and hands and like being out there. ah And so the approach has been doing beverage well, which requires being indoors like Target, we went into 900 Targets in March. We're in Erewhon. 

I really love this ability from a brand positioning standpoint to be in blue chip retail like Erewhon, but then also accessible in places like Target, etc. So um I'd say it's a pretty straightforward approach in terms of distribution. But it's been really well loved because there aren't a lot of options besides let's say I think our number one competitor would be Yerba mate,  which has a ton of sugar, but it is the only organic energy option  that has any sort of sexy brandness around it. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And so let's  walk through, try your best and exactly how it helps customers engage with the brand through. You call it a community commerce model. 

Ty Haney

Yeah. That's how I think of the category. I'll give a little bit of a look into what we did at Outdoor Voices. So we had this community-led playbook where we had a formalized 10,000 person ambassador program. The group was called Doers. 

And we essentially engaged them in a number of different activities from creating content on an ongoing basis that, again, we'd use in organic or paid. They'd host events on a local level, like at universities. They'd come upstream in product development type processes to give us preferences, insights early and upstream so we could make more informed buys.

And then we'd reward them for continued purchases. So it was a very kind of formal thing within OV that said we orchestrated this engagement across a variety of channels. So Google Docs, Slack, DMs, etc. And it operationally was very difficult. And then more importantly, it was really hard to measure essentially the return on this community investment. And so I'd sit in the boardroom and be like, we should put more into this community ambassador-led model.

As we were able to kind of connect the dots from a data perspective, we found that anyone who came through or interacted first with that community experience was ultimately four times more valuable over time than someone we'd acquired through Instagram or Facebook. And so I became obsessed with this idea of proving that community could become a growth channel.  And therefore it had to be measurable. And you can understand if I put X amount of dollars in, what do I receive out? And so.

I took a lot of what worked at Outdoor Voices and built it into this engagement and rewards platform, which allows brands now today to have an owned channel, meaning they have direct access to these relationships and all of the data that they collect here, to incentivize fans, customers, super fans, et cetera, directly to take valuable action. And it's really working. 

We have over 200 brands on the platform. Many of the best top consumer brands from Selena Gomez's Rare Beauty, Glossier, Crocs are launching in a few weeks. And so I'd put a bow on it to say this community commerce or community-led approach put into software has become a model that allows brands not to scale the impact of community and really make it a growth channel. 

Chase Clymer

I just need to ask a dumb question for the audience and for myself. Now when you say community. Historically, when brands had a community, these were in-person events, and then the internet came around and it was more. 

You had forums and stuff like that. And then Facebook changed the game with Facebook groups. So is this an iteration of those  digital communities?  Where do I hang out as a fan and a community member?  

Ty Haney

Yeah. TYB, from a user perspective, becomes your one portal and your entry point to rewards and relationships from your favorite brands. And so traditional loyalty experiences like live on a brand site and like I have points that I have to remember to use on my birthday and like they only live within that ecosystem. 

So really we've expanded the definition of loyalty not just to be about like me earning for purchases, but also me earning for all of these activities that I'm now able to participate in and contributions I'm able to make through the TYB app. It's not a single brand experience. It's a multi-brand, multi-player ecosystem that people are engaging with on a daily basis. Did I answer your question? 

Chase Clymer

Yes, but you also gave me more questions. Yes. 

Ty Haney

Okay. Keep asking me.  

Chase Clymer

Well, you say multi-brand and multi-player ecosystem. So am I earning rewards in the TYB platform that can be used at multiple brands? 

Ty Haney

Right now, you're essentially coming in through a brand or downloading the TYB app directly. And then you're joining the community of brands that you love and participating in what we call challenges. So, games. As I earn coins, I level up status within each of these brands. And then that status or those coins can be redeemed for essentially discount or access to exclusive community products, etc. And so really, it's about proving fandom within a brand, but you have multiple brands within this TYB experience. 

Over time, what we get very excited about is your status within a brand, let's say Glossier, meaning something at a Nike. And so we call it interoperable. But really, I believe that loyalty is becoming and will become kind of the new user identity and status. And so this gives you as a user the ability to improve your status and it will over time unlock some kind of experience across a multi-brand experience, not just within one brand. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. Yeah. If you are a very loyal, high lifetime value customer at one brand, other brands might know that that's their ICP. And there is a marketing perspective and from a growth process, the sky's the limit there when you have all that information. 

Ty Haney

Yeah. I think of it. We call it TYBID, which eventually becomes a key product for us. But in a lot of ways, it's like Gen Z AMX, where we become the consumer credit score.  And there's a lot of different ways for brands to tap into or activate that. um But  we've started with what I call new loyalty, which is, again, GammaFi and loyalty because traditional loyalty or retention products don't work. 

Chase Clymer

It's a  pain point for us often when we're on the agency side of things talking to brands around loyalty because it's like very., “Hey, you guys do not have loyalty. Do you want to add loyalty?" And they go, yes. And then we're like, “All right, cool. What does that look like?” And they're like, “Why is it?” Because it's not a binary. It is a binary question to them that is an existential exercise in consumer behavior and what is best for the business. And that's maybe me being more begrudging with how apps to replace strategy is a way to grow a business. 

Ty Haney

Yeah, sure. No, loyalty, we stay far away from the sales process because the loyalty term comes with such bad baggage and it becomes like a very slow and bureaucratic process. And so we really root in community engagement and rewards  and this becomes your most engaged channel. 

So 40% of monthly active users, like people, are visiting this often way more than SMS or email. And then we expand into loyalty over time. And so we have a bunch of brands who have converted off Yotpo. But they start with the community engagement use case and then expand into full loyalty. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. That's an amazing tie. Now, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would be interesting to our audience? 

Ty Haney

We just raised our Series A, which is exciting. So we raised $11 million for TYB. And we're  onboarding the best brand. So I mentioned Crocs is upcoming. We have a very exciting mystery brand in the activewear space coming at the end of July. 

And then, every brand is going to be here. Really, kind of summarize TYB as the Gen Z rewards app. So if you or any of the listeners have brands that you want to engage with in this way, please email me or DM me on TYB. Ty Haney is my username. But I really believe that every brand will have its own fan channel over the next 18 months. If you haven't downloaded TYB, you're going to want to and be required to soon to get rewards. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, thank you so much for coming on the show today. Sharing all those awesome insights about community and all of the growth stories around outdoor voices. It was a pleasure. 

Ty Haney

Thanks, Chase.