Vuori — The Golf Line Is New. The Reason To Care Isn’t.

Vuori makes the Kore Short, the Ponto pant and the Strato tee — soft, plain, mid-priced things that a few million men already own and that have nothing to do with golf. Since April they also make a golf line, fronted by Tom Holland, and since May a second and more technical one: the Aim trousers with a magnetic-closure back pocket, the Ace Polo, the Ponto Half Zip Mock Neck, the Terrain Jacket. The celebrity is the loud part. The quiet part is more useful, which is that the golf pieces are mostly the existing fabrics given a collar and a rear pocket, and the existing fabrics are the reason anyone bought this brand in the first place.

That matters more in Austin than it would almost anywhere. The round here is rarely just the round — it is the round, then tacos, then somewhere with air conditioning — and a wardrobe that only works between the first tee and the last putt is a wardrobe you change out of. The Meta Trouser sits in Vuori's golf collection and in its general pants collection at the same time, under the same name and the same $138, which is the whole argument in one garment. The Strato Tech Polo at $68 and the Kore Short at $68 do the same job from either direction.

The prices are the other reason to pay attention. The eighteen pieces here run $58 for the Strato Tech Tee to $198 for the Vintage Jean, read from vuoriclothing.com on 21 September 2026 — which puts an entire on-and-off-course rig inside what a single pair of trousers costs at the top of this category. It is a large company with a movie star on the billboard, and it is also the most straightforwardly buyable clothing on a muni that we have written about in a while.

The Story

The name is a mountain. Vuori is the Finnish word for it, chosen for founder Joe Kudla's climbing, which is a long way from where the company actually started: a range of graphic tees sold into yoga studios and gyms around Encinitas, California, from 2015. Kudla had begun developing it in 2014 and had raised about $700,000 from friends and family. The clothes sat on the shelves and barely sold.

“We were left with few options, and we were running out of money very fast,” Kudla told CNBC. “I was really frightened we were going to lose the business.” What saved it was asking the few customers he had what was wrong, and being told that his own premise was off: the clothes were more useful all day than they were in a gym. The fix was to stop selling to studios and sell direct, online, to a much wider and less sporty audience.

He spent what was left of the money finding out. “I was extremely scared,” Kudla said of the decision. “It's frightening, this idea that you're going to go out and spend thousands of dollars when you don't have a lot of money left, with no guarantee that there's going to be a response... If we didn't get that message right, we were out of business.” It worked within months — two dollars of sales for every dollar of advertising, then three, then four. The company was profitable by 2017.

The scale since is the part that makes a golf line inevitable. Norwest put in $45 million in 2019. SoftBank's Vision Fund 2 put in $400 million in October 2021 at roughly a $4 billion valuation. In November 2024 an $825 million secondary tender led by General Atlantic and Stripes valued the company at about $5.5 billion. Kudla is still the chief executive and still holds majority ownership. The clothes are in Nordstrom, REI and Equinox, and there are flagships in Encinitas, SoHo and on Regent Street in London.

Tom Holland arrived in April 2026 as a multi-year ambassador, and the useful detail is that he asked first. He met Kudla about five years earlier and offered himself for the job; the company was too young to take it. “A few years down the line, they called me up, and here we are,” he told Highsnobiety. He is a genuine golfer rather than a rented face — he won the BMW PGA Championship Celebrity Pro-Am in 2024 playing alongside Tommy Fleetwood, whose Masters polo was the reason we wrote about Late Nine earlier this month.

The launch film, Play It As It Lies, was shot at Comporta in Portugal and co-directed by Holland with his brother Harry and Harrison Boyce; his brothers Sam and Paddy appear at the end. Asked what the title means off the course, Holland gave an answer that is better than the campaign it is selling: “The notion in life of ‘play it as it lies’ is that there are some things beyond your control; you can either face them head-on or let them become a problem. What I love about golf is that it's a game of strategy as much as it is a game of skill.” And, on finding yourself somewhere you did not plan to be: “Sometimes you find yourself in a bush, and it's not the end of the world. There's always a way out.”

The second collection, in May, is the one that actually changes the clothes rather than the marketing. The Aim Trouser is cut athletic-slim in a lightweight technical fabric and, per Vuori's own product copy, carries “a back pocket with a magnetic closure for easy entry”. The Ace Polo, the Ponto Half Zip Mock Neck and the Terrain Jacket fill in around it, and the Sunday Insulated Hybrid Vest and Venture Quarter Zip take the layering up to $158.

One thing to know before you go looking: the men's golf collection puts up 48 tiles, but that is about nineteen actual styles. The Strato Tech Polo accounts for seven of them on colour alone, the Aim Short for five, the Meta Trouser for most of the rest. The range is narrower and more repetitive than the page count suggests, which is either a problem or the point, depending on whether you wanted variety or wanted to buy the same trouser in four colours.