Suiting Up Against The Big Boys

Kevin Plank loved playing football at the University of Maryland. But as a senior in 1996, he knew he didn't have a shot at going pro. He was neither the fastest nor the biggest guy on the team. In fact, he was one of the smallest and slowest. He'd always gotten by on hustle and heart. He was going to have to get a real job after school. Doing what, he wasn't sure, but he knew he wanted to work for himself. Growing up in Baltimore, Plank had always displayed an entrepreneurial spirit: mowing lawns, selling T shirts, starting a rose-delivery business. When it came to putting together a business plan, he stuck to what he knew: athletics. (Article continued below...)

As a guy who was always looking for an extra edge on the field, Plank had come to loathe the cotton shirts and shorts he wore under his pads and uniform. They absorbed sweat like crazy and weighed him down with an extra couple of pounds of water weight. He knew what he wanted: something stretchy and form-fitting that could wick away sweat. So he started looking into microfibers, stopping by local fabric stores in Baltimore, then driving up to Manhattan's garment district. He eventually made a few prototype shirts and gave them to his friends on the team at Maryland. They loved them. And to make a long story short, so did a whole lot of other people. Thirteen years after founding it, Plank has turned Under Armour into a $700 million company. Most people know it from its "We Must Protect This House!" commercials. Nike, Reebok, and Adidas know it as the company that blindsided them when it essentially created the market for high-performance microfiber athletic gear and has dominated it ever since. Under Armour maintains about three quarters of the compression-sports-apparel market, despite million-dollar, star-studded campaigns from Nike and Reebok designed to eat into it. In the last couple of years, Plank has set his sights on his competitors' big product lines, rolling out football cleats and getting into the lucrative athletic-shoe market . Here's how he did it, in his own words.

My first sale was to the Georgia Tech football team in 1996. I had passed out some prototypes to my friends and word was getting around, but I was still looking for that first big sale. I realized the guys I needed to go after were the equipment managers, since they're the ones deciding what a team wears. So I got a list of all the equipment managers in the Atlantic Coast Conference (ACC) and sent them letters and samples of what I had. Tom Conner at Georgia Tech was the first guy to call back. He said, "We love your stuff. We want to wear it." Within a few weeks it went from a couple guys on offense wearing it to the whole team. Slowly my gear started trickling through the ACC. When Georgia Tech played Florida State that year, the equipment guy was there. He was a Florida State alum and after the game went down to the locker room and saw that some of the guys were wearing these Under Armour shirts under their pads. A couple days later, I was in my grandma's basement when the phone rang and the guy said, "I'm the equipment manager for the Atlanta Falcons. We want to buy your shirts." That was big. I ended up doing about $17,000 in sales that year, but it was still small potatoes. I knew this thing could get much bigger. And the next year it did. In 1997 I was up to $100,000, as more and more programs started wearing the stuff.

But I'd say my biggest break came in the summer of 1998. I was at a San Francisco 49ers preseason game. My buddy Jim Druckenmiller was the backup quarterback at the time, and we were hanging out before the game. One of his friends was there and started talking about this football movie he was trying out for, down in Miami. Turns out it was Any Given Sunday  by Oliver Stone. I immediately called and found out their production location and FedExed down a box of gear. Late one afternoon a few days later, I got a call from Oliver Stone's office. "We love the gear," they said. "We want to put it in the movie. Can you send more samples?" They wanted like several thousand pieces of gear. I said, "Look, I'd love to, but we're a really small outfit and can't afford to send that much for free." So they called back and agreed to pay for $30,000 of product. I knew this movie was coming out in late 1999 and wanted to time our first print ad around the release. A half-page ad in ESPN The Magazine cost $25,000 upfront. At the time we were a company of about 12 people. I asked everyone if they thought we should spend the money, and most of them said no, that we should keep investing in ourselves. But I thought the most important thing was to tell our story. So I bought the ad, which proved to be hugely successful. The direct response to it kept us afloat through the spring of 2000. It was an important moment to take a bet on telling our story. That year was sort of a launching pad for us. We did $5 million in sales in 2000. We finished last year at $725 million.

Looking back, I never really knew how I was gonna make Under Armour happen, but I never believed that it couldn't happen. I'll put it like this: I was always smart enough to be naive enough to not know what I can't accomplish. I set out to build the world's greatest T shirt, and I think I've done that. You know, if I hadn't done this right out of school, I probably would've worked in the industry for five or six years and been intimidated by others and not ended up doing it.