Alo Yoga owners sell Bella+Canvas, sharpening focus on athleisure brand

SanMar agreed on May 18 to buy Bella+Canvas, the wholesale T-shirt business owned by the founders of Alo Yoga, in a move that strips away one layer of a company already under pressure to define itself for the next stage. The deal was for an undisclosed sum and had not closed by June 23, but Bella+Canvas said it would keep operating as an independent brand under longtime executive vice president Megan Spire.

For yoga retailers and the brands that sell into that world, the split matters because Alo is not just selling leggings and bras. It is deciding how much of its corporate structure should sit behind a premium athleisure label that has leaned hard into celebrity appeal, direct-to-consumer sales and high-end positioning. Neil Saunders of GlobalData Retail said the divestiture would leave Alo easier to understand and value as a focused, high-end athleisure business, which is exactly the kind of profile public-market investors or strategic buyers tend to prefer.

That cleaner story may be the point. Alo was founded in 2007 by Danny Harris and Marco DeGeorge, while Bella+Canvas traces back to 1992, when Harris and DeGeorge started Color Image Apparel as a garage-based screen-printing and wholesale T-shirt business. Over time, the two founders built Bella+Canvas into one of the larger U.S. makers of wholesale apparel, but it sat awkwardly next to Alo in an equity story built around yoga culture, fashion cachet and premium retail.

The timing also fits a longer pattern. In October 2023, Alo’s parent was already exploring outside investment at a valuation of about $10 billion, a level that put the company squarely in the conversation with bigger consumer brands and potential acquisition targets. Since then, Alo has only sharpened its position as a challenger to Lululemon Athletica in a wider and more crowded premium-athleisure market, where buyers and investors increasingly want a clean brand narrative instead of a tangle of unrelated businesses.

Alo’s physical footprint has stayed visible too, with a Brooklyn storefront image dated June 8 showing the brand still pushing its retail presence while the ownership structure shifts. The sale of Bella+Canvas does not change Alo’s yoga floor appeal overnight, but it does make the company look more like a focused fashion-finance story than a loose apparel group, and that is often the first step before a brand starts choosing between an IPO, a sale or another round of expansion.