Getting Sticky with Ty Haney

Words by Emily Barasch, Photos by Bridget Bergmann

The late 2010s were defined by the athleisure boom, and no brand was as synonymous with the movement as Outdoor Voices. Colorblock leggings in emerald green and pastel pink hues, sleek sports bras perfectly cropped below the rib cage, sets worn by an entire generation of cool women to brunch, yoga, and beyond. And OV’s founder, Ty Haney, is still very much #DoingThings. 

After exiting OV in 2020, Haney didn’t slow down. She launched two new ventures: Joggy, an organic energy drink now stocked everywhere from Target to Erewhon, and Try Your Best (TYB), a blockchain-based community rewards platform used by brands like Glossier, Poppi, and Rare Beauty. With TYB’s recent $11M Series A funding raise, she’s doubling down on building a new era of rewards and community-driven commerce, one that brings the best brands and their biggest fans even closer.

Along the way, Haney had her second child, Champie, and moved back to her hometown of Boulder, Colorado. She's living in a house on the same street she grew up on and splitting time between San Francisco (for TYB) and Boulder.

Unapologetically driven, obsessive, and direct, Haney gets real about gaining and losing control, birth trauma, parenting, and cultivating hobbies while continuing to nurture her own ambition.

Staying active, doing things 

I create out of a personal pain point. For example, I grew up into sports and loved Nike. When I went to art school at Parsons in New York, I was on the intramural basketball team. I played with all these really tall janitors and I'd end up with my head in someone’s sweaty, stinky armpit. I was like: This is not for me. But how am I going to stay active? I had grown up in such a recreational and athletic town. I noticed both physically and mentally there was a void in terms of not having practice, teammates, or coaches to keep me active.

So a personal pain point living in New York City coming from Boulder was: Shit I need a product brand and community that speaks to me differently, that can inspire me to get active on a daily basis without the pressure to perform. If I don’t find ways to move consistently, I'm not the version of myself that I want to be. So, Outdoor Voices was born from that and it caught on in a nice way, where there were other people who felt the same way and had an emotional connection to this new view of being active through the lens of recreation. 

TYB was the next company. I had left OV and as I looked back, TYB came from not having the tools that I wish I had to more effectively communicate the value of investing in a community around a brand like we had at OV. Meanwhile customer acquisition costs were skyrocketing and retention tools were ineffective so I created the tool I  wished that I had to allow brands to directly incentivize their superfans for taking valuable actions to help grow.

And then I used to love Red Bull and would drink it because when you're running startups, you need energy. I remember I exclusively existed off Red Bull and Snickers and my dad was like, Holy shit, this has got to change. Joggy was created because I didn't want to drink synthetic caffeine and products that aren't good for you. I viewed it through the lens of energy in the long run. That was a little hobby for me. I became obsessed with finding the best caffeine you could put in your body that was natural and plant-based. Since then, I have seen how big of a lane clean energy and particularly female-founded energy could be.

Ultimately all of this feels quite synergistic. For me, it's world-building under this umbrella of recreation which is obviously so core to my DNA and the way I grew up. It all fits together for me kind of in a puzzle piece type way. 

Wait, what? 

I think the coolest thing to do is to be able to start from zero again. It's sort of like having a kid. First, you give birth to the kid, and I’ve found that most women have some sort of traumatic situation. It's wild and dramatic. Shit goes wrong and yet, you have a kid, and somehow your body chemically blocks out the trauma of that so that you consider having another one. It’s totally insane.

Hometown glory 

Boulder's the coolest little treasure of a spot, very outdoorsy. I grew up here and we had been coming back for the summers. My family still lives here. And this year, we decided we should just stay and make it homebase. It's so awesome. I think for a while I thought it felt too small town-ish but a bunch of friends who I went to school with had gone to the coasts and then started to trickle back in. It's quite buzzy. The Sundance Film Festival just moved here to Boulder, too. 

I initially was like for work, do I need to only be in New York City or L.A.? But I've found that my rhythm of a few days a week in S.F. where my team and talent for TYB, and a few days here makes sense.

Pick your player 

I am not the type of person who ever premeditated a wedding. Getting married and having kids just wasn't something that I'd spent time thinking about. I'm an instinct and trust-the-timing type of person.  So when I got pregnant, I thought, holy shit. Of course I was shocked, but this is awesome. We'll find a way to integrate it. Kids are the thing that makes you the happiest. You can't really find that joy with anything else. I've almost found having kids is the easier part of life given I run startups, which is for crazy people, lol.

An attempted induction, a Foley balloon, and an emergency C-section

I had Sunny first. I didn’t have morning sickness. Everything was smooth sailing until month six, meanwhile it was such a crazy time period for me at work. So frankly 90 percent of my attention was on figuring out how to get through that phase of Outdoor Voices and I spent very little time planning or prepping for the baby coming. At about month six,  I remember a crazy change from a hormonal perspective. It was the first time I had ever felt depressed. It lasted the rest of my pregnancy.

I felt like I was surfing a crazy wave of hormones. I didn't recognize myself.  I spent a lot of time with my mom and aunt because Mark (my husband) was on tour often. It was really the first time that I could empathize with what being depressed was and I just couldn't control it. 

That was very difficult particularly with what was happening from a business standpoint. The recommendation was to induce, which I wouldn't do again. At 34 and a half weeks, I went in to get induced, they gave me pitocin, and my body was completely not ready. 

Twenty-four hours later, they're like: Okay, we're going to send you home. Like nothing's happening. There was no dilation after I had the pitocin. But then they're like, "We're going to try one more thing. We're going to try the [Foley] balloon." Some of this is on me because I had not spent the time I should have to research and understand what I wanted to do. 

They did the balloon method to try and attempt labor before I was going to leave. Within five to ten seconds, they lost Sunny's heartbeat completely.They had just told my family we're going home. Then I come flying through the doors on my hands and knees into an emergency C-section without any anesthesia. So they had to cut and then give me as much morphine as they could. I remember Mark putting some sort of gas on my face. It was horrifying. I just was like, "This is over." What the fuck? They had lost her heartbeat. She wasn't getting oxygen. Something had happened.

What happened was a fetal maternal hemorrhage where the baby pushes a large portion of their blood back into the mom. Sunny was brought to the NICU in a different hospital and I was in a room for three days on morphine trying to stabilize. We thought she was brain dead. She was hooked up to a cooling feature to bring down any potential inflammation for two weeks. 

On pitching investors the day after a C-section (yes, really) 

Miraculously, the baby was completely fine and she's a very smart, bright, and beautiful little kid. But that was brutal. A lot of people have traumatic experiences and you only find out later. This was also right in the middle of essentially losing control of Outdoor Voices. I remember having just had the C-section and hopping on a call with an investor literally a day later. I look back now and I'm like: How the fuck did I end up in a position where there wasn't more help around the situation? I was literally on the phone pitching to an investor a day after a C-section. Yikes. 

Looking back I would have loved to have a group of women who had been through it before to rap back and forth on what to expect. Or for instance, tell me more about induction. Why did I just take that and go with it? I wish I would have had a trusted peer group to pass that over and get some feedback because I didn't spend enough time thinking about that.

Parenting changes you; that doesn’t change your ambitions  

I invest in myself. I'm obsessed with building and working. For instance, TYB was just coming to life when I had Champie and I was fortunate to be able to have a baby nurse. She stayed way longer than I should have for my checking account. Ultimately I didn't take any time off. There wasn't any fully dedicated baby time.  I think I'd like to, when we hit a more mature stage, potentially be able to take maternity leave. 

For me it's focused on building and achieving big things and so I'm not that flexible in not having that time. I think my hope is to integrate the kids into that. I'm ambitious and I want to see things through. I want to execute well and so there's no tradeoff there. But it's hard; it's so hard.

Prioritizing hobbies for the simple pleasure of them 

Until almost exactly a year ago, I hadn't prioritized anything just for me.  I grew up riding horses and was obsessed with it. That was my thing and then I stopped when I moved to New York for 12 years. And last year, as counterintuitive with everything going on as it seemed, I was like: I'm going to create space for this. So I bought a horse and got back into it. I thought I'd tow dip in, but that's not really my nature. So now I'm all the way in with three horses and a mini and competing on the weekends in show jumping. When you go in the ring it’s a minute of pure bliss, speed, and presence to go as fast as you can without knocking any of the rails down and the fasted duo wins. It forces you to not think of anything else, or you fall off. 

What's been an unlock in terms of making it all work is dedicating time to that joy. It’s a protected moment for me to just do something I love. It’s kind of a holy time, a ritual. I come back from my two hours at the barn and everything is possible and lovely. Horses also have a large amount of mirror neurons and a really grounded, calming beings which as a human activates your own leading to a really peaceful meditative feeling. So that's been the number one thing: dedicating and finding something for me personally that sparks joy or energizes me and making sure that I protect that space.

I have brought my daughter Sunny into the horse world. We have a pony named Dolly. I love finding ways to be able to do things I enjoy, bring the kids into it, and see if they have a liking for it. It all comes down to integration because there's obviously a finite amount of hours in the day and there's a lot to get done. So it's fun to introduce Sunny, for instance, to the horse world and she's enjoying it. At first I was like maybe that's my protected time, but now she's loving it so much and it feels fun to introduce her to things that get me energized and excited in a way that she seems to be as well. 

The yin yang dynamic that comes with parenting 

Mark is gone Thursday through Sunday regularly. I'm in SF Monday and Tuesday of the week. So we yin and yang. I think one thing that I like is that we are together, but we also have a lot of independence with our schedules. It's just by nature. I'm someone who loves to wake up early, so I always am the one getting up and bringing the kids to school. Mark likes to stay up late. We are quite compatible in terms of yin and yang and that's how we do it with our relationship with kids. The cool thing is like you miss each other when you don't see each other every hour of every day. That works for us in a lot of ways.

We also just pick times to bring the whole family to do things, whether it be business, fun, or both. It's all kind of integrated. I am eager to bring the kids into our way of life. I went to a horse jumping competition for two weeks in February and brought the whole family and Mark didn't have shows, so he was there with us. And then similarly he played at StageCoach which we joined for and has a number of shows that we'll go immerse ourselves into. 

Experiential education

Sunny goes to kindergarten next year and Champie is in preschool. I think it's important to pick where your kids are going to be spending time and with who.  But I think what I've recognized and potentially will push more into the equation is them spending time with us as a valuable way for them to learn.  I want to reshape what traditional school time looks like. Perhaps it’s half at school and then half listening to mom running the companies and coming with me on a work trip. 

I want to push back against the way we do things in terms of sending kids to school and want to definitely prioritize their getting real, in-practice experience with parents that are leaders of companies and building things. I think that's a really unique opportunity.  

The sanctity of weekends

Weekends are me and the kids' time because Mark’s on tour. So those are precious. We're within walking distance of lovely cafes. Every Saturday we walk or bike. My dad lives on a farm 20 minutes from here and we go there as well.  I'm quite routine based.  I would eat rice and beans for dinner every day and be happy. Similarly when I have a routine I tend to stick to it, and so Saturdays and Sundays in particular are all the way in with the kids, the family, the farmhouse, and the horses.