Founded in 2007, Alo Yoga has become a hit with celebrities including Taylor Swift and Bella Hadid. It’s also made a fortune for its founders: Two childhood best friends from Los Angeles
On February 2, Hailey Bieber was photographed walking into an Alo Yoga store in Manhattan sporting a black puffer jacket and a pair of the brand’s just-dropped, limited edition Charcoal Green Airlift Leggings. Three days later, the New York Post’s gossip site Page Six ran a short article on the new leggings with the pictures of Bieber and an affiliate link where shoppers could click and buy the $128 leggings.
In the hotly contested battle for trendiest yoga wear, Alo is wooing and winning over many famous fans and using them as part of its marketing push. Taylor Swift, Bella Hadid, NFL quarterback Joe Burrow and a long list of influencers have all been photographed in everything from its $68 biker shorts to a $1,400 custom suit. On its website, there is a section devoted to “As Seen On Kendall and Kylie,” referring to the famous Jenner sisters, and another featuring Jisoo, a member of K-pop girl band, enjoying Alo and the West Coast before her summer world tour. The Jenner sisters and Jisoo are paid to promote Alo, but most of the other celebs spotted wearing the clothes are doing so because they want to, according to a company spokesperson.
This glamorous guerilla marketing has helped Alo become a fast-growing challenger in the competitive athleisure category, known for its younger-skewing, street chic styles. “It gives off that vibe of effortlessly cool,” Alixandra Barasch, a professor of marketing at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Leeds School of Business, says of the brand. “They’ve done a good job of making it seem natural that the celebrities are spontaneously choosing these products.”
Kylie Jenner poses in an Alo Yoga Airbrush Heart Throb Bra and matching leggings.
Alo YogaAll of this has helped push revenue of Alo’s parent company, Color Image Apparel, up to nearly $2 billion, Forbes estimates. It’s still a tiny speck of the estimated $394 billion athleisure market, per Dimension Market Research, that’s blanketed with such brands as $10.6 billion (revenue) Lululemon, GymShark, the Gap’s Athleta, Fabletics, Vuori Under Armour and Nike, which recently announced a partnership with Kim Kardashian’s Skims for a new women’s athletics label. But Alo is a fast-growing player, with estimated revenue roughly doubling over the past two years and up tenfold since 2020, according to financials reported in past media reports, thanks to the rising popularity of its yoga brand. There are now more than 130 Alo stores around the world, including 31 outside of the U.S. It’s enough to make billionaires of the company's founders, Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge, who each own 50%. Forbes estimates they are each worth $4.7 billion based on the value of Color Image Apparel. They were reportedly raising money at a $10 billion valuation in October 2023, but a deal never came to fruition. (Harris and DeGeorge declined to be interviewed about their net worths for this article.)
While there are some clouds on the horizon – some retailers, including publicly traded Lululemon, whose shares dropped 10% in one day last week, have been rattled by consumer uncertainty and the threat of tariffs – the category overall has plenty of room to keep expanding. “This is one of the few strong areas of apparel, which is generally a low growth industry. So it’s attracted some strong competition and some large investments,” explains Morningstar retail analyst David Swartz. Sales of athleisure apparel are predicted to more than double to $900 billion by 2033, according to Dimension.
For Harris and DeGeorge, yoga started out as a healthy pastime. The childhood friends who grew up together in the San Francisco suburb of Los Gatos started making T-shirts for a local business their senior year and then opened up a screen printing company right after graduating from high school. They built it into Color Image Apparel and later moved into mass manufacturing clothing, mainly T-shirts and tanks, for wholesale. Their Bella + Canvas brand is now one of the country’s biggest T-shirt manufacturers.
DeGeorge, who had back surgery at age 11, started doing yoga about a decade later. Harris soon joined him. But it wasn’t until 2007 that the pair launched their Alo — Air Land Ocean — Yoga brand. “It started out with an injury but it got me to do things that would change my life,” DeGeorge said in a 2018 promotional video for Alo. “We decided to mix something we love with something we’re good at: making products, making clothes.”
Their mission initially was to spread their love of yoga and the yogic lifestyle around the world. “We wanted to inspire people into yoga by designing what we believed to be the most exceptional product to practice,” added Harris in the video. To that end, they set up daily yoga lessons for Alo’s employees in the brand’s Los Angeles headquarters. These classes also doubled as a helpful medium for trying out the brand’s new designs, which are inspired by things like architecture, high fashion and nature.
Outside of its regular stores, Alo has at least three dedicated yoga studios in Williamsburg, New York, Georgetown, Washington, DC., and Palisades Village in Los Angeles.
Alo YogaTrue to its name, Alo’s founders position respect for the environment as a core value of the brand. Alo’s website declares the brand “100% sweatshop free” and says it has the highest level of certification by Worldwide Responsible Accredited Production (WRAP), an independent non-profit that assesses the factory conditions of retailers. Its HQ is solar-powered and its warehouses are paperless. In some of its stores, the brand sells organic food and kombucha.
Alo has differentiated itself in recent years in part through a unique brick-and-mortar strategy. The company has yoga studios on the second-floor of some of its stores, which it calls “Sanctuaries.” (Classes like “Alo Mat Pilates” or “Alo Flow To Stretch” cost $32.) The brand also hosts wellness-focused events geared toward engaging local communities, including run-clubs and pickleball tournaments in multiple cities. Upcoming on the Alo calendar: a “Vitamin-C glow wellness walk” in LA, a “wellness happy hour” in Houston, and a talk from a clinical herbalist in Miami.
The brand is also expanding well beyond yoga wear. In 2023, Alo unveiled “Alo Atelier,” a luxury line that includes silk pajamas, cashmere sweaters and wool coats. The brand launched its third such collection last December. The new clothing was “driven by a deep understanding of modern luxury,” Abby Gordon, Alo’s chief design and merchandising officer, told a Forbes contributor at the time. Swartz, the Morningstar analyst, describes this push toward “luxury” as key to the brand’s success in such a crowded field. “There are a lot of companies out there making leggings out of polyester,” he says. “I think [Alo ] has found a niche of women looking for more premium athleisure apparel …I think it’s seen as more of a fashion brand than Lululemon is even though their merchandise is pretty similar.”
Even before Alo took off, Harris and Degeorge were plenty wealthy from their existing clothing business. In 2017, Harris forked out $30 million to buy an eight-bedroom, 21,000-square-foot mansion in the Holmby Hills neighborhood of LA from Bebe Stores founder Manny Mashouf. But the success of Alo has clearly catapulted their fortunes to new heights. According to multiple reports, the founders have spent around $40 million since 2023 buying commercial real estate in Miami. Together, they are now even worth more than controversial Lululemon founder Chip Wilson, whose estimated $6.3 billion net worth stems from an 8% stake in the yoga brand that left him behind. With neither of these founders looking to leave any time soon, and with scores of celebrities flashing their brand, they’re likely to remain members of the three-comma club for a long time to come.
Update, 04/02/25: A previous version of this article incorrectly stated the number of Alo Yoga stores and the launch date of Alo Atelier.