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Business of Fashion
3 days ago
- Business
- Business of Fashion
Ty Haney Is Back at the Helm of Outdoor Voices
Ty Haney is officially back at Outdoor Voices, which announced its relaunch on Monday morning alongside a refresh to its branding, logo and product offering. Haney, who exited the activewear brand amid clashes with other executives and allegations of mismanagement, will hold the title of 'founder, partner and co-owner,' according to the company, which was acquired by private equity firm Consortium Brand Partners in 2024. 'It's very full circle,' Haney told The Business of Fashion in a Zoom interview, appearing from a Spartan office in Boulder, Colorado. Haney wore a black zip-up hoodie bedazzled with Outdoor Voices' original tagline of 'Doing Things' written in glittering cursive, a limited-edition item and part of the first post-rebrand drop. If one garment captures the feeling of Outdoor Voices' latest refresh, its a cropped hoodie with the brand's tagline 'Doing Things' paved in diamanté. 'We've pushed the product forward, to feel more bold, evolved and sexy in a way,' Haney said. 'Really, the intent is to reactivate the kind of OG OV lovers, but also introduce this philosophy of doing things and freeing fitness from performance to a younger audience.' The first collection, shoppable from August 5 on Outdoor Voices' website, also includes aprés-sweat pieces like the striped Sun Shirt button-down, a short set in the 'OG OV fan-favourite' geometric Helios print, as well as performance separates such as wrap skirts and tube tops in what Haney calls 'iPod colours.' The new Outdoor Voices will also be available to shop on Haney's web3 community platform, Try Your Best. The relaunch strategy, conceived by Haney over the past year, relies on a very careful calibration of new and old; a new logo, designed with the agency Little Plain, that favours script fonts over the former OV's sans-serif, and new styles that broaden the brand's identity beyond activewear to include a lifestyle and lounge offering. To better access the DNA of what made OV successful in the first place, Haney also reassembled key members of her original team including longtime creative director Tiffany Wilkinson, designer Jessica Guzman and general manager Mariel O'Brien. The team will be primarily based in New York; Haney splits her time between Boulder and San Francisco, where TYB is based. Haney will oversee 'product, brand and creative,' according to the company announcement. She will also be the face and voice of the brand to its community of shoppers as well as in the press. Other new members of the company's C-suite have not yet been named; the brand does not currently have a CEO. Much of Outdoor Voices' first drop contains performance separates, like bike shorts and tube tops, cast in what Haney calls 'iPod colours.' (Outdoor Voices) Once touted as the future of activewear, Outdoor Voices soared in the DTC era before falling hard amid leadership turmoil and financial missteps. Haney established Outdoor Voices in 2013, scaling the business to a peak valuation of $110 million by 2018. Then came a downswing as the company struggled to narrow losses. In 2020, OV received a lifeline funding round at a remarkably diminished $40 million valuation. At that time, Haney stepped down as CEO but retained some creative duties and a minority stake in the business. The new board appointed Urban Outfitters alumnus Gabrielle Conforti as CEO in 2021, but the company's nadir was yet to come. It filed for bankruptcy in 2023, abruptly closing its web of 16 stores and marooning most of its employees without severance. 'Bringing a company like that into the world, and then obsessing every second around how it came to life for eight years ... it took some time to detach,' Haney said. 'I'm grateful to it all.' She said she hopes the brand's new look and feel will reflect her own growth: Haney gave birth to her first child in 2019, months before stepping down as OV's CEO, and has since launched two additional ventures including Joggy energy drinks and TYB, which Haney says will remain her main focus. (In June, she announced she'd raised an $11 million round of Series A funding for TYB.) A few months before Consortium Brand Partners announced its acquisition of Outdoor Voices in June 2024, its founder Cory Baker reached out to Haney. 'I found that quite kind,' she said. 'He had put no pressure on to even consider re-engaging, but teased the thought.' After months of meetings, she officially returned to her brand in August 2024. Her comeback was all but officially announced earlier this month, when Outdoor Voices' Instagram page was wiped of its posts and all of its following, save Haney's personal account. 'When I started OV, the vision was to build the number one recreation brand,' Haney said. 'That lane still feels wide open.' Learn more: Outdoor Voices' Founder Raises Series A for New Start-Up Ty Haney's rewards platform Try Your Best, which counts Rare Beauty and Glossier as clients, raised an $11 million Series A as brands rev up their community building strategies.
The Star
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Star
Who is watching all these podcasts?
The following are the run times of some recent episodes of several of YouTube's more popular podcasts: 'This Past Weekend w/ Theo Von,' No. 595: Two hours, 14 minutes. 'Club Shay Shay,' No. 172: Two hours, 59 minutes. 'The Shawn Ryan Show,' No. 215: Five hours, four minutes. 'Lex Fridman Podcast,' No. 461: Five hours, 20 minutes. These shows follow the same general format: people sitting in chairs, in generically designed studios, talking. And, like many of the biggest podcasts these days, these shows are all released as videos. They don't feature particularly fancy camerawork, or flashy graphics, or narratives. All of them require time commitments typical of feature films, ballgames or marathon performance art installations. Yet going by YouTube's statistics, hundreds of thousands of people have viewed all of the above episodes. Which leads to comments such as this, as one fan wrote after a recent episode of Von's show: 'Truly, this podcast was amazing to watch.' So a genre of media named for an audio device – the iPod, discontinued by Apple in 2022 – and popularised by audiences enamoured of on-demand listening has transformed in recent years into a visual one. It's well established that the American brain is the prize in a war for attention online, a place that incentivises brief and sensational content, not static five-hour discussions about artificial intelligence. So what gives? Who exactly is watching the supersize video talk shows that have come to define podcasting over the past several years? At the highest level, the audience for video podcasts is simply people who consume podcasts. 'Who is watching these?' said Eric Nuzum, a podcast strategist. 'A person who loves podcasts who happens to be near a screen.' Indeed, according to an April survey by Cumulus Media and media research firm Signal Hill Insights, nearly three-fourths of podcast consumers play podcast videos, even if they minimize them, compared with about one-fourth who listen only to the audio. Paul Riismandel, president of Signal Hill, said this split holds across age groups – it's not simply driven by Generation Z and that younger generation's supposed great appetite for video. But dive a bit deeper into the data, and it becomes clear that how people are watching podcasts – and what counts as watching – is a far more revealing question. According to the Signal Hill survey, about 30% of people who consume podcasts 'play the video in the background or minimise on their device while listening.' Perhaps this person is folding laundry and half-watching 'Pod Save America,' or has 'The Joe Rogan Experience' open in a browser tab while they do busy work at the office. That describes Zoë McDermott, a 31-year-old title insurance producer from Pennsylvania, who said she streams video of Von's show on her phone while she works. 'I don't have the ability to watch the entire thing through, but I do my glance-downs if I hear something funny,' McDermott said. 'It's passive a little bit.' Still, this leaves everyone else – more than half of YouTube podcast consumers, who say they are actively watching videos. Here, it gets even trickier. YouTube, the most popular platform for podcasts, defines 'views' in a variety of ways, among them a user who clicks 'play' on a video and watches for at least 30 seconds: far from five hours. And the April survey data did not distinguish between people who were watching, say, four hours of Lex Fridman interviewing Marc Andreessen from people who were viewing the much shorter clips of these podcasts that are ubiquitous on TikTok, Instagram Reels, X and YouTube itself. All of which makes it hard to pinpoint a 'typical' podcast viewer. Is it a couple on the couch with a bucket of popcorn, streaming to their smart TV? Is it a young office worker scrolling through TikTok during his commute? Or is it the same person engaging in different behaviour at different points in the day? Alyssa Keller, who lives in Michigan with her family, said sometimes she watches 'The Shawn Ryan Show' on the television with her husband. But more often, she puts the video on the phone for a few hours while her children are napping. This means she sometimes has to watch marathon episodes in chunks. 'I've been known to take multiple days,' she said. 'Nap times only last for like two hours.' In February, YouTube announced that more than 1 billion people a month were viewing podcasts on its platform. According to Tim Katz, head of sports and news partnerships at YouTube, that number is so large that it must include users who are actually mainlining five-hour talk shows. 'Any time you have a number that large, you're going to have a broad swath of people consuming in lots of different ways,' Katz said. Recently, The New York Times asked readers if and how they consume video podcasts. Many of the respondents said they played video podcasts in the background while attending to work or chores, and still treated podcasts as audio-only products. A few said they liked being able to see the body language of podcast hosts and their guests. Still others said that they didn't like video podcasts because they found the visual component distracting or unnecessary. Video can have its drawbacks. Lauren Golds, a 37-year-old researcher based in Virginia, said she regularly hate-watches podcasts at work – in particular 'On Purpose,' which is hosted by British entrepreneur and life coach Jay Shetty. She said she had had awkward encounters when co-workers have looked at her screen and told her that they love the show she's watching. 'There's no way to say it's garbage and I'm watching it for entertainment purposes to fill my need for hatred,' Golds said. One thing a 'typical' podcaster consumer is less likely to be these days is someone listening to a full-attention-required narrative program. Say 'podcast' and many people still instinctively think of painstakingly produced, deeply reported, audio-only shows such as 'Serial' and 'This American Life,' which listeners consumed via audio-only platforms such as Apple Podcasts and the iHeartRadio app. Traditional podcasts relied on host-read and scripted ads to make money, and on media coverage and word of mouth for discovery. And it was a lot of money, in some cases: In 2019, to take one example, Spotify acquired Gimlet – one of the defining podcast producers of the 2010s – as part of a US$340mil (RM1.4bil) investment in podcast startups. Now, the size of the market for video podcasts is too large to ignore, and many ad deals require podcasters to have a video component. The platforms where these video podcasts live, predominantly YouTube and Spotify, are creating new kinds of podcast consumers, who expect video. McDermott, the Von fan, said the video component made her feel like she had a friendly guest in her home. 'It feels a little more personal, like somebody is there with you,' she said. 'I live alone with my two cats and I'm kind of in a rural area in Pennsylvania, so it's just a little bit of company almost.' The world of podcasts today is also far more integrated into social media. Clips of video podcasts slot neatly into the Gen Z and millennial behemoths of TikTok and Instagram. The sophisticated YouTube recommendation algorithm suggests relevant new podcasts to viewers, something that wasn't possible in the old, siloed model on other platforms. To get a sense of just how much things have changed, imagine the viral podcast appearances of the 2024 presidential campaign – Donald Trump on Von's podcast and Kamala Harris on 'Call Her Daddy' – happening without YouTube, TikTok, Instagram and X. You can't. In a sign of the times, in June, radio company Audacy shuttered Pineapple Street Studios, a venerable podcast producer known for its in-depth narrative shows such as 'Wind of Change' and Ronan Farrow's 'The Catch and Kill Podcast.' Jenna Weiss-Berman, who co-founded Pineapple Street, is now head of audio at comedian and actress Amy Poehler's Paper Kite Productions. Poehler's new podcast, 'Good Hang with Amy Poehler,' is typical of the genre: a charismatic, well-known host, interviewing other charismatic, well-known people. Weiss-Berman said she was concerned that the costs associated with high-quality video production would be prohibitive for smaller podcast creators, who faced almost no barrier to entry when all the genre required was a few microphones. 'If you want to do it well, you need a crew and a studio,' Weiss-Berman said. For podcasters with an established audience, the potential of video to open up new audiences for the world of talk podcasts is obvious. (The Times has introduced video podcasts hosted by some of its more recognisable columnists.) Adam Friedland, a comedian who started his video interview show in 2022, first came to prominence on an irreverent and lewd audio-only hangout podcast with two fellow comedians. He got an early taste of the limitations of traditional podcast distribution when he discovered fan cutups of the funniest moments of his old show on YouTube. 'There was an organic growth to it,' Friedland said. 'We weren't doing press or promoting it.' Friedland's new show is an arch interview program with high-profile guests and considerably fewer impenetrable – not to mention scatological – references. Along with that, distribution over YouTube has made a once cult figure something a bit closer to a household name, as he discovered recently. 'There was a regular middle-aged guy at a Starbucks who said he liked the show,' Friedland recalled. 'Some guy holding a Sweetgreen.' Friedland's show is the rare video podcast with a distinctive visual point of view. The vintage-looking set is a reconstruction of 'The Dick Cavett Show.' And Friedland made it clear that he prefers people to watch the show rather than listen to it. The many ways that Americans now consume podcasts – actively and passively, sometimes with another device in hand, sometimes without – bears an obvious similarity to the way Americans consume television. 'I think podcasts could become kind of the new basic cable television,' said Marshall Lewy, chief content officer of Wondery, a podcast network owned by Amazon. Think: shows that are cheaper to produce than so-called premium streaming content, consumed by audiences used to half-watching television while scrolling their smartphones, in a wide variety of genres. Indeed, although talk dominates among video podcasts, Lewy said he thought the trend for video would lead to more shows about food and travel – categories beloved by advertisers – that weren't ideal when podcasts were audio only. All of which calls into question the basic nature of the term 'podcast.' Riismandel, who runs the research firm Signal Hill, said he thought the category applied to any programming that could be listened to without video and still understood. According to Katz, the YouTube executive, the nature of the podcaster is undergoing a redefinition. It includes both audio-only podcasters moving to video, as well as social media content creators who have realised that podcasts present another opportunity to build their audiences. One concern with the shift to video, according to former Vox and Semafor video boss Joe Posner, is that people who are less comfortable on screen will be left out. This could lead to a deepening gender divide, for example, since women are much more likely to face harassment over their looks, especially from an engaged online fan base – and therefore potentially less likely to want to be on camera for hours on end. Still, for all the eyeballs moving to YouTube, audio remains the way most consumers experience podcasts, according to the April survey, with 58% of people listening to only audio or to a minimised or backgrounded video. And although YouTube is now the most used platform for podcast consumption, per the survey, it's far from monolithic; a majority of podcast consumers say they use a platform other than YouTube most often, whether it's Spotify or Apple Podcasts. That's why at least one pillar of audio-first podcasting doesn't see much to be alarmed about. Ira Glass, creator of the foundational long-form radio show 'This American Life,' said the fact that the podcast tent has gotten bigger and thrown up a projector screen doesn't threaten a program like his. 'That's a strength, not a weakness – that both things exist and are both called the same thing,' Glass said. He stressed that audio-only podcasting has formal strengths that video podcasts don't. 'There's a power to not seeing people,' Glass said. 'There's a power to just hearing things. It just gets to you in a different way. But if people want to watch people on a talk show, that seems fine to me. I don't feel protective of podcasting in that way. I don't have snowflake-y feelings about podcasts.' – ©2025 The New York Times Company This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Times
5 days ago
- Entertainment
- Times
How earplugs became the hot new accessory at music festivals
I t's long past the witching hour at Genosys, an open-air nightclub at the Glastonbury Festival, and the DJ has turned up the volume. The bass thunders, the synths screech, but to me it all feels pleasantly as though it's happening in the next room. This is not because my ears have given up: I am wearing a pair of earplugs that filter out high-frequency sound waves. I can still hear every beat, crescendo and my husband asking if I want another drink; it just doesn't feel as if my eardrums are being subjected to artillery fire. I am 35 and have spent more than two decades taking a fairly cavalier approach to noise. I was in primary school when I got my first Walkman, later upgraded to an iPod. Then as I got a bit older I spent weekends camped near nightclub speakers screaming the lyrics to Mr Brightside. University involved similar nights out with even worse music; after graduating I discovered podcasts. I never gave much thought to my ears — until a bad infection caused my left eardrum to perforate and it scared me. This time at Glastonbury I wore earplugs under my bucket hat.
Mint
5 days ago
- Business
- Mint
From idea to app: How AI is leveling the field for non-technical founders
For decades, startups glorified technical brilliance. But AI tools have changed that. Technical execution has been commoditized. Think of how many ideas in the past died quietly, not because they were flawed, but because they couldn't be tested. Ideas lose energy when they wait too long for execution. Momentum dies in the hands of dependency. What most non-technical founders needed was not a technical co-founder. They needed a starting point. A place where they could move from concept to testable product without translating their thoughts through three layers of teams. The high cost of delay Most startups don't fail with a bang. They fade. Not because the idea was bad, but because it never reached the world fast enough to be tested. Microsoft's Zune failed not because it was badly built but because it came late and didn't provide people a strong reason to switch from the iPod. It skipped the most important step: testing if users actually wanted it. This is a classic example of what happens when you build first and ask questions later something modern AI-powered founders are now smart enough to avoid. In India, this delay is an even bigger threat. Over75% of Indian startups fail within the first five years, not because of bad ideas, but because of late validation and poor product-market fit. (IBM Institute for Business Value, 2022) This pattern repeats across failed decks, ghosted MVPs, and half-finished codebases. The true killer isn't competition. It's delayed validation. When the cost of learning is too high, founders build in the dark. That's what AI-native tools are designed to fix, not to build faster, but to learn faster. A new kind of founder Today, a founder can build the first version of a product in hours. Describe what you want. Click generate. A live version appears. Not a sketch. Not a simulation. An actual, hosted, working product. In India, this shift is becoming visible. Indian startups using AI-native and no-code tools are now building MVPs in as little as2-4 weeks, compared to the traditional6-9 month build cycle. The best founders are stepping into this role with maturity. They are not chasing features. They are running experiments. They are not wasting cycles on beautiful dashboards. They are looking for signals. A quiet shift underway in how digital businesses are built. It hasn't been driven by funding rounds or viral success stories. It's happening in terminal windows, browser tabs, and natural-language prompts. It's taking shape not in Silicon Valley boardrooms, but in co-working spaces, bedrooms, and one-person idea labs across the world, including rapidly emerging startup hubs like Bangalore, Pune, and Gurgaon. We used to say that code was the moat. But code has been commoditised. Today, the real moat is execution velocity. How fast can you test a new idea? How early can you get feedback? How quickly can you adapt? The rise of the AI-native founder This is where AI-native builders have an edge. They can run more experiments per week. They can test five landing pages instead of one. They can talk to real users by Day 2, not Month 2. They can pivot with data, not gut feeling. India is seeing a38% rise in solo-founder startups, driven by non-technical builders who no longer need to wait for a technical co-founder. This new wave of Indian entrepreneurs is using no-code and AI-native platforms to bypass the old bottlenecks. Globally,Gartner predicts that 75% of new apps will be built using low-code/no-code tools by 2026. In India specifically, the no-code/low-code market is expected to grow to$4 billion by 2025, expanding at28% CAGR (Research and Markets, 2024). To use AI tools effectively, you don't need to be technical but you do need to be precise. Prompts are not just instructions. They are compressed prompt reflects the founder's thinking: their assumptions, their hypotheses, and their clarity. If your thinking is vague, your prompt will be vague. And AI will reflect that vagueness. It will generate layouts that are unfocused, flows that don't align with real user behaviour, or features that sound nice but don't move the needle. Once you understand the structure of your idea, the prompt becomes sharper. And once the prompt is sharp, the AI delivers with surprising accuracy. Every product begins with a belief. A sense that a specific user, with a specific problem, will respond to a specific solution. This is the hypothesis, 'not a grand vision, just a working assumption that needs to be tested quickly". Break it down into three parts: In a world with endless tools, infinite advice, and constant distraction, the most valuable founder trait is not access, it's focus. Everyone has the same AI tools. Everyone has the same platforms. What most don't have is the discipline to say: Focus is now a rare skill. Not just knowing what to build, but knowing what to ignore. That's the job of the founder: not to chase noise, but to guard signals and to keep the mission intact while the tactics evolve. The founder of the future doesn't wait to build. They don't overthink iteration. They don't hire before testing. They don't launch without learning. They don't scale without a system. They are calm, clear, and fast. They are less concerned with being right and more focused on learning early. They use AI not as a shortcut, but as a force multiplier. They don't romanticise the build, they prioritise the signal. They move with urgency, not haste. Because in a world where everyone can build, it's not the best idea that wins it's the idea that learns the fastest. The writer is the founder of Launch, an AI-native platform for apps
The Guardian
6 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Khruangbin, again? I quit Spotify for a month to escape samey algorithms – this is what I learned
If you use music to set or fix your mood, Spotify is a tantalising tool. Feeling sad? Cry to your personalised 'Depress Sesh Mix'. In a romantic crisis? Stew in your own 'Situationship Mix'. As I write this, I'm listening to Spotify's Daylist, a mix that refreshes every few hours based on my own listening habits. Today's vibe is 'funky beats roller skating tuesday early morning mix'. At 120bpm, the algorithm knows I need some energetic house to roll from my bed to my desk. The problem with this listening experience isn't just the creepy AI-driven intimacy of it all, more that the same songs are recycled in a predictable loop. Spotify's algorithm has anaesthetised artists I once enjoyed. Every time I hear the slippery psychedelic bass of Khruangbin slinking into one of my playlists, or flow in seamlessly from another artist's radio, I violently hit skip. A decade ago, Spotify favoured human-curated playlists made by artists, celebrities and music aficionados. But in 2021 the streaming company pivoted towards machine learning, feeding 'nearly half a trillion events' into computer models every day. Now, user data – chiefly our listening history, interactions with Spotify's user interface and the time of day – is packaged into a mixtape for every micro-occasion. Advocates argue this is a chance to democratise music promotion, neatly matching artists with their audiences. Critics suggest this ultra-subjective experience limits musical discovery to the already familiar – and the less it's challenged, the more my music taste narrows. So as a test, I quit Spotify for a month, to bring some soul back into the way I find music. First, I consulted people who had never used streaming services, like my dad, who grew up in 1970s London in the heyday of punk and glam rock. Hunched in a booth in his local record shop, he would listen to a sample and take a punt on what vinyl to buy. Some albums apparently missed the mark, and others, like Pink Floyd's Dark Side of the Moon, transported him to a different universe. He insisted I start with my favourite artists and listen to every album front to back, as if reading a story. Sign up for the fun stuff with our rundown of must-reads, pop culture and tips for the weekend, every Saturday morning Inspired, I bought a $30 record player in an op-shop and hunted for vinyls. Late to the record renaissance, it was slim pickings – Australian pub classics, Christian country or Christmas hits. But when a friend pointed out my new turntable was missing a needle, it became a dusty but decorative addition to my living room. My 20-year-old neighbour had another suggestion: a diamante-encrusted iPod, which she produced in a ziplock bag like a hallowed artefact. Found for $200 on Facebook Marketplace, plugging in wired earplugs and hitting shuffle was a nostalgic throwback. But this romance was short-lived: the iPod was incompatible with my Bluetooth speaker and demanded hours of admin to upload music. The biggest challenge came when driving my old silver Subaru, as I was stranded with only a single CD, a flimsy aux cord and my thoughts. Stuck with silence, I wondered what the new grinding noise was – until I discovered my local community broadcaster, Vox FM 106.9. More than 5 million Australians listen to community radio every week, for 17 hours on average – and now, I can see why. The station prides itself on 'real music' and even has the tagline 'You never know what you like until you try it'. Just what I needed! And it's true, I had forgotten how good it feels to wind down the windows and blast Push the Button by the Sugababes, and then to roll them up again when a classical German song, a mystery even to Shazam, comes on. Sign up to Saved for Later Catch up on the fun stuff with Guardian Australia's culture and lifestyle rundown of pop culture, trends and tips after newsletter promotion I contacted Justin Moon, who runs a popular underground radio station and record shop in Newcastle. He sources music from record fairs, friends and Bandcamp – distributing interesting sounds as a conduit, or Hermes figure, to lay (or lazy) people like me. Moon is noticing that his customers are searching for a more 'active' listening experience. 'It's not this kind of passive wash-over-you rubbish that you make your two-minute noodles to and forget all about 10 seconds later,' he says. Music – like film, TV, and food – is now served to us effortlessly, instantly. But this has caused the way we consume music to be more siloed. Spending a month hunting for new music myself, rather than relying on an algorithm, made me feel more connected to my parents, friends, radio presenters and even complete strangers. Their recommendations – whether to my taste or not – came with a part of themselves, a memory or a shared interest. After my month's Spotify hiatus, my algorithm hasn't been cleansed. Over the course of writing this piece, my daylist has evolved into 'french indietronica swimming pool tuesday afternoon', whatever that means. There are two Khruangbin songs on there. It's safe to say I would rather play roulette with the radio.
