Paige Mycoskie’s Aviator Nation took off during the pandemic as TikTok teens embraced the Venice Beach vibe by snapping up its smiley-faced sweatpants and rainbow-striped hoodies. SelfMadeWomen
f there’s anyone who embodies the SoCal spirit, it’s Paige Mycoskie. Blue-eyed and sun-kissed with a mess of wavy blonde hair, the Aviator Nation founder looks like she just stepped off a surfboard. “Being in the water is huge for me—I’m a Pisces,” says Mycoskie, arriving at an Aviator Nation outpost in Austin, Texas, where she also has a home.
But at triple what it costs to buy a pair of Adidas sweatpants, Aviator Nation’s prices raise eyebrows. Alixandra Barasch, an associate professor of marketing at NYU’s Stern School of Business, says the brand is succeeding partly because of the outlandish prices. “From the perspective of those individuals who can afford it, it allows them to nicely signal wealth, but also signal these other values like ‘I’m laid-back,’ ” she says.
It wasn’t until she was 22 that Mycoskie finally made her way to California after competing with Blake in the second season ofa CBS adventure reality show that involves traveling around the world and competing in goofy challenges—finding a tree in Rio de Janeiro called “Fat Maria” or operating a cargo crane in Hong Kong—for a $1 million prize. The “all-American” brother-sister duo, as they were called, placed third, resulting in a Los Angeles press tour.
None of this was surprising to her parents. Paige, they say, was constantly thinking up moneymaking pursuits as a child, whether setting up a lemonade stand at her local golf course or selling homemade friendship bracelets. “She really did enjoy selling things,” says her mother, Pam Mycoskie. According to Mycoskie, the sale did much more than just rustle up a rainy-day fund to support her employees . She credits it as a key reason for Aviator Nation’s recent growth. “All that product went out and it was like a beast of word of mouth, because then everyone is at home with nothing to do, posting pictures in our stuff,” she says. “I really think that was huge.”