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1. Take Risks: Haus’s early success came from bold, risk-taking design choices and a willingness to experiment without constraints. Troy believes this was key to the brand emerging as a leader in a crowded activewear market.
2. Follow Your Passion: Troy believes genuine passion is essential to long-term success in E-Commerce, as building a business around something you enjoy makes it easier to persevere through the inevitable challenges of starting and scaling a brand.
3. Reinvestment Drives Growth: Haus’s growth has been driven by disciplined reinvestment rather than founder extraction. Troy advises prioritizing funding top talent over personal gain to build a stronger, more scalable business.
4. Be a Leader: Troy views leadership as a careful balance between approachability and authority, believing that while strong relationships matter, maintaining professional respect is essential to driving team accountability and performance.
5. Leverage AI with Caution: While Troy sees clear value in AI, he’s wary of overreliance, believing that excessive dependence can weaken critical thinking and create long-term challenges if people stop engaging deeply with their own ideas and judgment.
Co-founder Troy Defrees-Parrott turned his passion for fitness and entrepreneurship into Haus, an E-Commerce activewear brand built around community, self-improvement, and excellence. Frustrated by the high cost of gym apparel, he set out to create high-quality, stylish, and accessible options for fitness-focused individuals like himself. Be inspired by how Troy went from fulfilling orders in his garage to leading the fastest-growing activewear brands in the United States.
Meet Troy Defrees-Parrott, Co-Founder of Haus!
Haus is an E-Commerce activewear brand founded in 2022 by Troy Defrees-Parrott and Lukas Pachter. Offering a full range of gym apparel – including shorts, joggers, sweatpants, shirts, and hoodies – Haus is built around community, supporting individuals in their pursuit of improvement, self-discovery, and excellence.
Troy Defrees-Parrott’s entrepreneurial journey began early. While still in high school, he launched a business similar to TaskRabbit, outsourcing local jobs to friends throughout the San Francisco area. A few years later, while studying business administration and management at Loyola Marymount University, Troy reconnected with his cousin, and future business partner, Lukas Pakter during Christmas break. “Lukas was a senior at the University of Arizona,” Troy recalls. “As we talked about our future plans, we realized we were both working on launching gym brands.” That shared ambition led the cousins to join forces, co-founding Squidhaus in August 2022, which later evolved into the brand now known as Haus.
Haus’s internal team consists of three core leads who are supported by part-time members and contractors. The brand currently has six customer service representatives with Troy noting they are working with an agency, bringing in one to two new people each month to support rapid growth. “We went from dealing with 50 to 100 tickets a day to 700 just this past month.”
Troy and Lukas each invested $4,000 of their own savings to place an initial order of 500 pairs of shorts through Alibaba. Haus’s early growth was entirely organic, with the co-founders selling primarily to friends, fraternity brothers, and fellow gym-goers. Social media, especially TikTok, soon amplified their reach. “We ended our first year with $400,000 in total sales,” Troy says. “For us, it was incredible and completely unexpected.”
“We had no idea what we were doing,” Troy admits, recalling long days spent fulfilling orders from his garage – sometimes up to eight hours at a time – while trying to manage both the business and its marketing. “We soon realized that was not the way to scale,” he adds. Since then, they have partnered with a third-party logistics provider, built out standard operating procedures, and expanded their staff. “We finished last year at a little over $9 million in total sales and have grown significantly this year. We should finish at around $50 million in sales.”
Troy attributes the company’s rapid growth to its UGC (user-generated content) model. Today, Haus works with more than 100 in-house creators who are trained through weekly calls. “They produce three to ten creatives a week. In total, we test between 3,000 to 5,000 creatives a month. We’ve had incredible success – I believe we are the fastest growing activewear brand in the US,” he says. Looking ahead, the ambition is even bigger: to become the fastest-growing brand in history, a title currently held by Gymshark.
Haus’s earliest gym short designs were bold and eye-catching, so much so that people regularly stoppedTroy to ask where he got them. “Dropping a design like that in the beginning was incredibly powerful and helped us create the momentum we needed,” he says. Since then, the brand has shifted toward a more minimal aesthetic, placing greater emphasis on product quality. Troy also credits Haus’s early naivety for its ability to break through an oversaturated activewear market. “It worked in our favor because we were willing to try anything we could think of, using unconventional strategies that more established E-Commerce brands might dismiss,” he explains. Now, with three years in business, Troy and Lukas are turning to mentors, such as Comfrt founder Hudson Leagrande, for guidance as they take Haus to the next level.
Balancing increased sales with inventory has been one of Haus’s biggest challenges. Unlike luxury activewear brands that rely heavily on Black Friday and holiday sales, Haus runs promotions consistently throughout the year. Looking ahead, Troy emphasizes that preparation is essential for managing peak sales periods, noting that the team is focused on expanding customer service support and stabilizing inventory levels.
“Watching other apparel brand founders doing $3–$5 million and living these extravagant lifestyles, I’d think, how are they able to do this?” Troy says. “Then I realized they’re just pulling money out of their businesses.” Instead, Troy and Lukas chose to reinvest, a strategy they believe has fueled Haus’s rapid growth. “I truly believe you can’t level up until you bring in top talent. And to get top talent you need to be able to pay,” he adds. The Co-Founders only started taking a small salary three months ago.
“In clothing, it’s all about lifetime value,” Troy says. “The goal is to build a customer with an LTV of $500 to $1,000.” As an emerging brand, Haus is intentionally focused on expanding its catalog at a measured pace, releasing roughly ten high-quality, thoughtfully designed products each year. “The strategy has been incredibly effective,” he adds. “Trying to drop too many collections at once can become complicated.”
“Our sales goal for this next year is $50 million,” Troy shares. He also plans to expand Haus beyond its current men’s-only lineup, with the brand’s first women’s collection set to launch in May 2026. “I believe the launch is going to be a huge level up for the business. Our unique marketing approach does well with men, and I expect it to perform even better with women.” While the women’s activewear market is highly competitive, Troy believes Haus’s ability to offer affordable, high-quality alternatives to luxury brands will be a compelling draw for customers.
Troy encourages rising E-Commerce leaders to “choose a niche that you really enjoy.” He turned his passion of going to the gym into selling activewear. “It makes getting through the hard times a lot easier – because there are a lot of hard times when you are starting out.”
Personal by nature, Troy says his greatest challenge has been finding the balance between being a leader and being a friend. “It can be a dangerous ground in a business,” he explains. “If your team members see you primarily as a friend, they may not respect you as a leader or feel the same urgency to perform.” He believes the most effective leaders are approachable and friendly, yet firmly respected in a professional capacity.
Can’t live without tool? Slack. It’s the only way that I can properly communicate with my team.
Key hiring trait? We’re trying to grow at 5X each year. My partner and I believe that if we don’t have a person in our company who can grow with us to that level, then we need to go out and find someone who has the experience and is already at that level at a bigger company.
AI or no AI? I think AI is great, but I think there are people who rely on it too much. And I definitely do not want to be that person. I’ve even caught myself doing it. Long-term, there’s going to be problems with people relying heavily on AI.
Recent book or podcast? I’ve always loved The Iced Coffee Hour – it’s one of my favorite podcasts. I also like The Jack Neel Podcast – he’s had some impressive people as guests including young entrepreneurs. My favorite business book is How to Get Rich by Felix Dennis. It’s about the guy who published Maxim magazine. I think he does a great job of no BS – this is what business is about.
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