South Florida Sun-Sentinel (Sunday)
Ty Haney doing things differently
It would probably be a stretch to say that Ty Haney changed the way we work out. She didn’t start a boutique fitness craze; she’s not Jane Fonda. But Outdoor Voices, the athleisure company she founded in 2014, helped to popularize a fitness paradigm that has more to do with everyday movement than the body-stressing athleticism advertised by brands like Nike.
Outdoor Voices built a following with colorblocked compression leggings and all-in-one exercise dresses that could easily transition from gym to brunch. On social media, fans boasted about buying items in every shade and posted pictures of themselves #DoingThings in scenic locales while wearing matching sets. They also shared feedback on new styles and colorways in online forums. It was a customer-loyalty fairy tale.
Though she is no longer with Outdoor Voices, Haney, 33, is hoping to bring its tenets of community building and consumer engagement into a new sphere: the blockchain-based future of the internet known as web3. She’s betting that in the next phase of online retail, “minting things” will be the new “doing things.”
Her latest venture, a platform called Try Your Best, will enable brands to collect input from customers in exchange for rewards such as digital collectibles (NFTs) and brand coins that can be used for bragging rights or toward purchases. These are assets, Haney said, that could potentially have lasting value, as opposed to the one-time discount codes and fleeting perks most companies offer loyalists.
“The idea is that brands and fans build together, and the concept is to share value with those who create it,” Haney said.
Direct-to-consumer brands have typically relied on disparate sources to solicit feedback from their most engaged customers: Google Docs, Slack bases, DMs. Try Your Best aims to streamline that process, and to route marketing dollars away from Facebook and Instagram, where Haney said that soaring costs have made it harder for emerging brands to grow.
Ten brands have signed up for Try Your Best’s pilot program, the company said, including Hill House Home, whose “nap dresses” became the height of pandemic loungewear, and Vada, a jewelry and eyewear company. But at the start, the only brand on the platform will be Joggy, a new brand led by Haney that sells products containing CBD and THCV.
She said that Try Your Best hopes to reach “the Parade customer, the JuneShine customer, the Glossier customer — these millennial, Gen Z-type audiences.”
The target users are “the people who buy a brand because they love it and post about it on Instagram,” said Sean Judge, a general partner at Castle Island Ventures, which specializes in blockchain-related investments and put
$2 million into Try Your Best — a modest figure compared with Outdoor Voices’ fundraising. “This is a way for them to connect with others in that community and also have a direct relationship with brands to provide real-time feedback around new product ideas and where the brand should head.”
Haney said that involving consumers in design decisions helped drive the success behind some of Outdoor Voices’ most popular products. “The way that we got people to buy every color — 25 colors — of the exercise dress was by bringing them upstream in the product creation process,” she said, but “there was really no centralized tool for this type of interaction.”
Casey Lewis, a trend researcher who writes about youth culture in her Substack newsletter, After School, was intrigued by the idea of brands rethinking customer loyalty but circumspect about the appeal of digital assets.
“Any time a brand can successfully build a community, it’s a huge win for them. But it’s so, so hard to manufacture or force that success,” Lewis said. “The biggest question is: Do people care about NFTs, and will that be enough to get them involved and excited?”
Web3 has been billed, often in vague and utopian terms, as an online ecosystem where users will wrest power from the tech behemoths that dominate the current phase of the internet, Web 2.0.
Kevin Werbach, a professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and the author of “The Blockchain and the New Architecture of Trust,” said that while “granting strong ownership rights directly to users” could potentially shift the balance of power, none of
web3’s promises are guaranteed.
“There’s a web3 that’s out there which is wonderful and trying to make the world a better place, but just by labeling something
web3, it doesn’t mean power dynamics will magically reverse,” Werbach said.
Haney is especially interested in bringing women into web3. “We’re seeing a predominantly male demo on Reddit and in Discords, telling each other about all of these opportunities,” she said. “By bringing brands that do have a large female audience base into crypto, that’s a really big opportunity.”
Try Your Best runs on the Avalanche blockchain, which Haney said she chose in part because its transactions use significantly less energy than, say, Bitcoin or Ethereum.
Try Your Best plans to make money by collecting a monthly fee from brands and potentially sharing in revenue when tokens were used to drive sales.
Judge, the investor, previously worked with a range of direct-to-consumer companies, and heard constant frustration from them about the escalating costs of advertising to customers on Facebook and Instagram.
Haney said that her startup is arriving at a time when the traditional direct-to-consumer model is “broken” after years of overreliance on social marketing. At one point, she said, Outdoor Voices was devoting about 30% of its total funding to acquiring customers on Facebook and Instagram. She’s hoping Try Your Best can help brands lower those costs. Separately, as younger people may be less willing to hand over their thoughts and time for free, Try Your Best offers an answer to the question of how to pay them back.
“One thing with Gen Z is they want to be rewarded for their input and advice,” Lewis said. “This is not a generation who is willing to do things just for the heck of it.”