“I love the idea of building something from the ground up and working for myself,” Clare Scully (McIntire ’22) says. That motivation seems to be the throughline with everything she is doing right now. And she is doing a lot at once.
Scully runs SCOUT, the colorful activewear label she founded while holding a full-time job at CollegeVine, an AI startup serving universities. Where many founders describe leaving a steady paycheck behind as the first step on their own, Scully has chosen the opposite, and she is enthusiastic about why. The role at CollegeVine gives her the ability to apply and further sharpen her business skills, while having the flexibility to grow SCOUT on her own terms. The two pursuits are feeding each other.
The clearest example is in the realm of AI. Scully sells operational AI to universities, and she has turned the same kind of tooling inward on SCOUT, connecting her databases, emails, and past calls so an AI assistant can draft messages, track her metrics, and take on the social media work. “It just makes my work so much more efficient,” she says. “It’s like having another employee or an intern.”
Then there is the discovery she is most excited to talk about. Scully built SCOUT because of simple joy, wanting fun, colorful sets she could actually work out in, as opposed to a market where the options tend to be black and monochrome. She expected women her own age to feel the same. It turns out that her most enthusiastic buyers were in an older age group, between 35 and 60, women she describes as “more grounded in what they like” and confident enough to show up to class in a bright set when everyone else is in black. She calls it a good surprise, and it has opened up a bigger idea: Rather than selling merchandise, she now wants to build something people feel part of, “more of a social movement than just the actual product.”
That momentum is starting to show. Scully has been stacking up small wins, and she is close to a partnership with an international clothing brand she is genuinely thrilled about, a step she hopes points toward the boutique-studio wholesale market she sees as SCOUT’s next big opening. Getting there means staying resourceful. She still runs SCOUT solo, manufactures overseas, and spends most Saturdays meeting people at pop-ups in established stores, reaching out to venues and pitching partnerships that work for both sides. “I’ve been very scrappy,” she says, and she says it with pride.
Some of that drive traces back to roughly two and a half years in finance at Blackstone, which taught her how to juggle a dozen priorities and still deliver. “You can do a lot on a low tank,” she says, then adds the happier corollary: Imagine what you can do when you are pouring that same energy into two things you are truly passionate about.
Her McIntire network has helped keep the momentum going. An alum introduced her to Andy Forch (McIntire ’07), the founder of Huckberry, whose advice about an informal email newsletter has become one of the things about SCOUT that people respond to most. Her classmates who are chasing their own ventures have also been generous with ideas and encouragement.
Her advice to students carries the same optimism. “All experience is good experience,” she says, and if you have an idea you cannot stop thinking about, “there’s no better time than the present.” If you can build it while a paycheck covers your bills, even better. She also encourages founders to keep their eyes on their own path and celebrate their wins rather than measuring themselves against everyone else.
Mostly, she is convinced it is all heading somewhere undeniably positive.
“There’s no option for it not to work,” she says. “I always thought that it’s going to move forward. It’s just a question of how.”
