Tricia Shumavon has a long to-do list.

The president of Prana joined the brand two years ago after spending 16 years at some of the industry’s top brands including Gap, American Eagle, Nike and Adidas. Before joining Prana, she had served as global vice president of sportswear at Adidas, working at the company’s German headquarters. When she was ready to move back to the U.S., there wasn’t really an appropriate role at the company. But through her network, she heard Prana was looking for a president, and it seemed like the right fit — and a challenge she was ready to tackle.

“I hadn’t had the president’s position before and it was the opportunity to lead a brand,” Shumavon said. “And it was really interesting for me to to reinvent a brand that had been struggling over the past few years.”

Prana was founded in 1992 in Carlsbad, Calif., as a sustainably made brand for active lifestyles, notably yoga. It was acquired by Columbia Sportswear for $190 million in 2014. At that time, it was expected to have around $100 million in sales.

In the past decade, that number hasn’t really moved. Net sales in 2024 were $104 million, down 8 percent from the prior year, according to Columbia. This year, its sales fell 10 percent to $28 million in the first quarter and were down 6 percent in the second quarter to $21 million, which the company attributed to lower clearance activity.

But things are looking better now. For fall 2025, wholesale bookings are up and the company is expanding its retail footprint as Shumavon begins to execute on her growth plan for the brand.

“When I came in, the brand was really focused on the purpose of sustainability,” she said. “And I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but it was at the cost of everything else. So sustainability first, then came the consumer, and the fit, the materials and the style aesthetic really started to suffer. That was the number-one issue.”

Number two, she said, was that Prana was focused on “an activity-led strategy through the lens of yoga, climbing and trail, which is great if you don’t want to grow. But it was extremely limiting.”

So Shumavon did a deep dive into what other products were connecting with consumers. They included sweaters, outerwear, woven tops and other pieces that were “outside those activities that were in the DNA of the brand. So what I did was take an activity-led performance brand [and developed] a lifestyle brand that supports activities that are part of the consumers’ lifestyle. So we still make pants you can wear hiking, but you can also wear them on a plane when you’re traveling or walking around town.”

By offering products that can be worn for a variety of activities, it also eliminates redundancies, she said. “We were making a trail pant, and a walking pant, and a climbing pant, but at the end of the day, you can probably wear the same pant for all three things. So we really edited everything down to amplify the product that matters versus just making a bunch of stuff.”

While Prana still has a sizable yoga business, other activities have gained in importance such as Pilates, hiking, walking, swimming and surfing. “Yoga is still important and we do yoga in our stores on Saturdays, but it’s really about the collective broad scale of activities versus just yoga.”

At the same time, she sought to expand the demographic reach of the brand. When Prana was founded more than three decades ago, it appealed to a young customer. But over the years, that consumer had aged along with the brand. “That’s not necessarily a bad thing,” she said, “but we weren’t capturing a new consumer — the Millennials and Gen Zs — that were going to help us grow and build loyalty for the future.”

So today, Prana targets a 28-year-old, active consumer that loves the outdoors, travel and doing things in their community.

To communicate with this customer, Prana is updating its marketing message, Shumavon said. The company hired an agency to better articulate its brand identity. That work wrapped up at the end of July and the new campaign will be rolling out this fall. “It’s really targeted at this new consumer,” she said. “So there’s a little bit of a new look and feel, new color, identity and font to market to our 28-year-old consumer.”

Looking at the product offering as a whole, Shumavon said roughly 25 percent of the business is activewear, with the remainder leaning more toward lifestyle. Interestingly, while most brands sell substantially more tops than bottoms, it’s the opposite at Prana, which sells four bottoms to every top. That includes denim, which just launched this fall and has gotten off to a strong start.

Shumavon said the brand’s most popular franchise is Zion, which has been around for 25 years but continues to evolve to satisfy today’s demand for hybrid product. Ditto for Prana’s fleece offering, which ranges from the DreamFleece collection for everyday wear to the Shea Soft, which offers more performance attributes. Other popular products include women’s activewear, such as sports bras and tights in its Luxara and Sculpt collections, as well as the Heavana offering.

Womenswear accounts for some 70 percent of sales, and Shumavon sees men’s as another growth opportunity. “We’re continuing to put the gas on the men’s side of the business, while still growing women’s, but I would love to see more of a 50/50 split in the next two to three years.”

But she knows the brand still has some competition from Lululemon, Alo, Vuori and others who are targeting the same customer with similar product. So what sets Prana apart?

“Lulu started as a performance women’s technical apparel brand, and I think they’re having a hard time getting out of that,” she said. “Men’s has been challenging and they launched footwear, which didn’t do well. So even through they’re an $8 billion brand, they’re still kind of stuck in their creation…and consumers have migrated to other places.”

Alo targets a younger “Kardashian-loving girl,” she said, and while the product looks good, “I don’t think they have the attributes that make a great performance brand. It’s a look-good-wear-to-coffee brand for a 20-year-old.”

She said Vuori, which started out as a men’s activewear brand, has done a good job expanding into a dual-gender lifestyle brand. “I think their challenge is going to be scale,” Shumavon said. “How do they scale globally, grow DTC and wholesale in the right way?”

As a result, she believes, there’s an opening for Prana, “the baby sister of all of these,” to carve out a niche. “We’re owned by a big brand that has not spent any money on marketing, on scaling DTC or building great product in the last 10 years. That’s what we’re really focused on going forward.”

Since her arrival, Shumavon has built out her management team, naming a new creative director, as well as heads of marketing, e-commerce, product creation, operations and finance to augment the existing employees in sourcing, manufacturing, inventory planning, HR and other areas. “It’s a really collaborative team,” she said.

She said the first season where her new team and strategy will be evident is fall 2025, and the market is responding. Wholesale orders increased 30 percent with customers such as REI, Scheels, Nordstrom and Amazon, as well as independent specialty stores.

Wholesale and DTC are about evenly split at Prana, she said, but she is hoping to expand the number of retail stores until the mix skews to 70 percent DTC. Currently there are two full-price stores and three outlets and Shumavon plans to add four to 10 additional stores over the next three to five years. “The faster we open full-price stores, the faster we grow the business,” she said.

The two full-price stores are located in Boulder, Colo., and Portland, Ore., both of which will be given a facelift in the next few months to better reference the brand’s lifestyle focus. Beyond that, Shumavon said the plan is to explore both Northern and Southern California, along with Denver, Austin, Nashville and other cities where its current customers live and shop. “We’re using that [information] to make informed decisions on where we want to open,” she said.

E-commerce, which has been a challenging platform for the company, is also a focus for future growth. “The last few years have been tough, but our traffic has been up 75 percent since Aug. 1 so it means we’re really getting our brand in front of the eyeballs of our new consumer. Not everyone converts, but at least they’re looking.”