"We Wanted People Just to Feel Good in the Moment" -- Michelle Wahler, Co-Founder and Former CEO of Beyond Yoga

The Kid Who Watched Her Father Lose Everything, and Decided to Build Differently

Michelle Wahler grew up in Maryland in a household shaped by entrepreneurship and then by its collapse. Her father ran Kent Mill Records and Music, a business she loved visiting on weekends as a child, drawn to the energy of the stores and the conversations about how the business worked. She grew up assuming she would eventually take it over. Then MP3s arrived, and Best Buy and Circuit City started selling CDs at near-zero margins to drive foot traffic, and companies like her father's were caught in a position they could not survive. She watched her father lose the business he had built, watched him try to reinvent himself, watched her mother go back to work as a hairdresser, and watched her family lose their home.

She was a shy kid, not particularly self-confident, by her own description very different from the adult she became. The gap to her brother was six and a half years, large enough that most of her childhood was spent largely on her own. What she absorbed from her father's story was not a fear of entrepreneurship but a set of instincts around caution, around not overextending, around knowing what a business can and cannot survive. Those instincts would later manifest as a stubborn refusal to take outside capital, a commitment to manufacturing in LA where she could see what was happening, and a habit of telling Jesse to spend more money when everything in her said hold back.

"I saw my dad lose his business that he built. And I think that was really sad to watch. And why I also saw him try to, like, reinvent himself. And that was, that was hard for him. And, you know, I saw what that did to my family."

She got scholarship money and went to the University of Florida, where her father pushed her to go even though he wanted her closer, because he did not want her weighed down by what was happening at home. She arrived planning to study business, walked into orientation, sat down to sign up for economics and accounting, looked at her own face, and found a graphic design class instead. A guidance counselor named Leslie told her that only 22 students were admitted to the program each year. Michelle said she would get in. She does not entirely know where that came from. She did get in.

New York, a SoHo Sublet, and Slipping Business Cards to Every Table

Michelle moved to New York after college with two college friends heading to law school and grad school, a vague idea that the city was where she needed to be, and no job. She had never been to New York before. She visited in the summer before the move, connected with cousins in Brooklyn, went to dinner at an apartment near Canal Street that turned out to be a converted factory with bowling alley furniture, and was offered a room so small she was the only person short enough to stand up in it. She took it. This is the level of practicality and forward motion that runs through her entire story.

After 9/11, she waited tables to make ends meet while doing freelance graphic design during the day. At every table she waited on, she slipped her card. That is not how she got the People magazine job. She got that job because her mother met a neighbor at a nail salon in Maryland whose daughter worked at Sports Illustrated, which led to an interview, which did not lead to a job there, but which led to a call back for People. She spent years in publishing on the advertising side at People and then Harper's Bazaar, where she observed something that bothered her: the bodies of women, even in publications presenting themselves as candid and real, were being photoshopped in ways that no reader would have guessed. She filed that observation away. It would resurface directly in how she built Beyond Yoga.

"I started doing illustrations with my friends and it was one of my best friend's birthdays and I didn't have a birthday present for her because I made no money because I worked at People."

The illustration she drew of her friend Lauren and put on a t-shirt became Unsweetened, her first business, which she ran out of her New York apartment, hand-printing each piece. The illustrations of her friends covered her cubicle wall at People, and colleagues waiting outside the publisher's office would stop and ask if she could draw their friends too. Orders for shirts, invitations, and underwear started coming in. She was working a day job to afford to live while running a small custom apparel business at night. When she drove up to the LA Gift Show to try to get Unsweetened into wholesale accounts, she had no idea it would end with a phone call that changed the direction of everything.

The Midnight File, the Morning Call, and the Business She Did Not Plan to Build

At the LA Gift Show, Michelle met a man named Brad who later introduced her to Jodi Guber Brufsky, who had a concept for a size-inclusive activewear brand called Beyond Yoga and needed help with trademark and graphic design work. Michelle was clear from the beginning that Unsweetened was her thing and Beyond Yoga was Jodi's thing. Then she overheard Jodi on a call with a designer who was not grasping the vision, and she asked to see the file. She took it home on a Friday night, sketched what she thought Jodi wanted, added some ideas of her own, and sent it back at midnight. The next morning, Jodi called and said their relationship was about to change.

From that point Michelle had a hand in every collection. The two of them built the company from a concept with initial capital from Jodi's father, never taking outside investment. They built it the way Michelle's father had built his business, through direct relationships: first to yoga studios and boutiques that gave the brand credibility and visibility, then to larger wholesale partners like REI and Nordstrom, then to a direct-to-consumer e-commerce business that grew double digits year over year. Michelle describes the wholesale-first strategy as intentional in retrospect even if it was not fully designed in advance: when someone writes you a purchase order, you get signal. When you go direct to consumer first, you are making a lot of guesses.

"Our whole mission was to make people feel great the moment they put clothing on. And we didn't want to make clothing that you had to work out to get into. We wanted people just to feel good in the moment."

The size-inclusive positioning was not a marketing strategy. It was a reaction to going into Lululemon, wearing what she thought was a size 2, being told she was a size 6 in their sizing, and walking out feeling worse than when she walked in. She and Jodi ran the full size range from the beginning and had to argue with retail buyers who said they did not need larger sizes and with manufacturing partners who did not want to produce 10 units of an extra large. Michelle told them she needed 10 and would need a lot more later. She was right. The space dye fabric discovery was similar: she touched it at a vendor showroom, was told it was too expensive, said she was going to make it anyway, priced it at a higher tier, and watched it become the defining product of the brand. Competitors knocked it off. She considered that the highest compliment.

Jesse, the Announcement He Did Not Know Was Coming, and Building a Business Together

Jesse Adams, Michelle's now-husband, started helping her before he was officially part of the company. She would wake up at 6 AM at his house on weekends and start doing inventory planning. He would come find her, ask what she was doing, and then build her a tool in Excel to make it more efficient. He was working with multiple other companies at the time, helping them scale, and she finally asked him to stop helping everyone else and help her instead. He came in for a little while. He never left.

When Michelle found out she was pregnant with their first child, Aiden, she announced to the team that Jesse would be the interim CFO and COO while she was on maternity leave. She did this without consulting him first. He found out when she said it in the room. He was not entirely surprised. The dynamic had been baked in from the beginning. His contribution was more than operational; he was the person who told her she was not spending enough money, that she had a great product and needed to build a real team around it, and that caution was costing the company more than boldness would. She credits him with giving her permission to spend in ways she would not have reached on her own, because watching her father lose everything had made her structurally conservative with money in a way that good instincts alone could not override.

"I don't know if I ever would have spent the money if, if he hadn't been by my side pushing me. So I appreciate that a tremendous amount."

On hiring, Michelle had a philosophy she describes as deliberately counterintuitive: she never sold the opportunity. She started every serious hiring conversation by telling the candidate how hard the job was going to be, what they would not have access to, how intense the culture was, and why she was not sure they were ready for it. The goal was not to discourage people but to identify those who were not afraid and to avoid the cost of onboarding someone who would realize within months it was not the right fit. Her assistant Diane would quietly note how candidates behaved in the waiting room. Michelle took finalist candidates to dinner with members of the team. Her framework for the final test was simple: if you cannot imagine sitting next to this person on a flight from California to New York and being glad to talk to them, it is probably not a great idea.

A Cold LinkedIn Message, a $400 Million Negotiation, and a Circle of Trust

Michelle did not plan to sell Beyond Yoga. She thought she was going to run it for the rest of her career. In the middle of COVID in 2020, she almost missed a LinkedIn message from a woman named Lauren at Levi Strauss who was in mergers and acquisitions. She replied, they talked on Black Friday, and Michelle assumed they were going to do a brand collaboration. At the end of the call, Lauren said she should speak to the CFO. Michelle realized the conversation was probably going to be something different.

She ended up selling the company she and Jodi had built from nothing for $400 million, negotiating the deal herself with Jesse, an attorney named Goody Agan from Canal Gates who became a close friend, Jodi's father and husband, and one other friend who had recently been through an acquisition. Levi's had asked them not to bring in a banker, citing the confidentiality requirements of a publicly traded company, and Michelle respected that. Her biggest fear throughout the process was that her team would find out and get distracted, because she was convinced the odds of the deal actually closing were slim and she did not want people taking their eyes off the operating business. The deal closed. She joined Levi's executive leadership team, reporting to CEO Chip Bergh, and spent three years inside a truly global organization having conversations she describes as eye-opening, including what to do about employees in Russia when the Ukraine invasion began.

"I really was not planning on selling the company. I thought I was going to run that company forever."

She stepped down in early 2024. She describes it as dropping a kid at college. The first few days she kept checking her email out of habit. She had never had a public social media account in nearly 20 years of running a consumer brand, because she always put the brand first and never built her own following. She started an Instagram, Michelle.Wahler on Instagram, to share her story and to make herself available to the female founders and early-career women who reach out to her. She gives everyone who contacts her 30 minutes. She does not always know where those conversations go. She has found them to be some of the most rewarding things she does with her time now.

5 Key Takeaways

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