Vie Active – on the cutting edge of style and technology

When you go onto Vie Active’s website you’d instantly be blown away by the bold, amazing prints and technically advanced sports wear on display – the result of one and a half years of research on technology and materials.

Celebrating the active life

Founded in Australia’s famous Bondi Beach in 2012, founders Noa and Bryan Ries wanted to create active wear that was not only technical and luxurious but also captured the fun and freedom of their lifestyle by the beach.

The power couple has been pushing the limits of technology ever since – in terms of manufacturing and innovation – to create high-performance yet beautiful work out clothes.

The idea for Vie Active came when Noa had an epiphany one afternoon. A personal trainer and health & fitness obsessed young mother, she found herself wearing her lycra active wear and feeling completely unstylish. She missed the feeling of ‘getting dressed up to go to work’ that she had relished at her previous work in the advertising industry. There had to be a way that she could live and workout with intensity, and still look and feel fashionable and chic all day long. After all, who has time for 5 outfit changes these days?!

Bryan and Noa knew from the beginning that they wanted to create something that was much more than just clothes. They wanted to initiate a movement and celebrate the active lifestyle. As Bryan is half French, they looked to that language for inspiration and came up with ‘Vie Active’ – which means ‘Active Life’ in French.

Of course, both Bryan and Noa walk the talk; maintaining an active life while running their successful business at the same time.

Style meets technology

Fitness wear and sports technology are amongst the most lucrative industries at present. Vie Active have set themselves apart by committing to using the very best technical fabrics for every single piece of their garments, and fusing those with fashionable prints.

Vie Active garments are both functional and flattering, and can perform throughout intense workouts. They also contain special features such as flat seams, hidden pockets, modern design and most importantly, performance fabrics such as Merino wool and F3 compression.

“There are a lot of companies today making sports clothing, and there are a lot of fashion companies, but we saw a niche in the market to create something that blends the two together.”

Take the Noa Foundation Jacket for example. It’s as stylish as it is performance-oriented, and wearers are just as comfortable going for a run in it as wearing it to brunch with friends or family afterwards.

It’s really exciting to see the incredibly positive responses to Vie Active, and how the brand has grown from the local scene to the international stage. A great number of stockist across the globe sell Vie Active sports wear, the company has gained more than 50,000 followers across their different social media channels, and the brand has been featured regularly in leading global publications such as Harpers Baazar, Vogue, LA Times and more. Not to mention – the team is now currently venturing into the US market.

Vie Active also manages a community of global ambassadors called ‘Vie Activists’, like-minded health and fitness experts. They have managed to evangelize the Vie Active brand in a real and genuine way – mostly through their own social media followings.

On explosive growth and demand

“We’re experiencing explosive growth, and managing that growth – in terms of technology, infrastructure, and production-planning is tough. For example, we have multiple physical warehouses in different locations globally, and coordinating all that is not easy. Anyone in this business can attest to the challenges of overseas production, quality control, keeping customers happy, and innovating all the time.” – Bryan Ries, Co-founder & COO at Vie Active.

Having the right systems and people in place, and maintaining good relationships with their manufacturers helps with meeting that growth and demand.

“More on the technology front – I used to ran Microsoft’s enterprise Cloud Computing business out of Singapore, spent 12 years in Microsoft, also worked in Salesforce, and another cloud-based start up. So one of the things that’s really important to us is to have scalable cloud-based systems; everything we do is 100% in the Cloud.”

“We used another system called Stitch before getting on TradeGecko, and we found that it wasn’t working for us; it had some severe limitations. For me, I never had confidence in the inventory values that Stitch was giving me. So we got introduced to TradeGecko through a consultant, and so far we’ve been really happy with the transition to TradeGecko.”

“TradeGecko is at the centre of our business – our wholesale customers create orders directly on the platform, the integration with Shopify and Xero is very robust, and the support we’ve received from the team has been great. It’s a system that will allow our business to scale.”