The activewear brand that started as a practical joke about a pair of orange pants.

Two Darden students sold their first shirts out of a teardrop camper at the Charlottesville farmers market. Ten years later the company does more than $150 million a year, and it has grown without outside investors for almost all of that time.

2016founded, while at Darden

$150M+revenue, 2025

~$50MCHAMP investment, 2026

How it started: Kristina ’17 & Matt Loftus ’16

Kristina LoftusDarden 2017 · co-founder
Matt LoftusDarden 2016 · co-founder

Kristina Zambelli and Matt Loftus met while working at GE, before either went to Darden. The summer before Matt started his MBA in 2014, they and their friends had a running joke about a pair of highlighter-orange pants, passed around for photos and posted to an Instagram account called the Brotherhood of the Traveling Pants. Vineyard Vines picked it up and made the group the centerpiece of a summer campaign.

That was enough to make them take clothes seriously. At Darden they designed men’s activewear meant to look sharp and still wick sweat, named the brand for the Rhodesian Ridgeback, and built it with Matt’s Davidson College friend Kevin Hubbard. In March 2016 Rhoback won the EDENS Retail Challenge, a national student competition for new retail concepts; that summer it went through the i.Lab incubator, and the first polos, T-shirts and hats went on sale in December. The first customers bought them from a teardrop camper at the Charlottesville farmers market and at UVA events.

How it changed the world

Rhoback grew for a decade on its own revenue and stayed in Charlottesville while it did, opening its first store at Barracks Road in November 2025. In June 2026 CHAMP — a fund formed by L Catterton and Patricof Co. and backed by LVMH and more than 200 professional athletes — made Rhoback its first investment, taking a minority stake for nearly $50 million. The founders kept control of the company, and the brand that began as a camper outside a farmers market now has athletes as its shareholders.