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Was Under Armour a brand with a big ambition right from the beginning?
It was articulated very early from Kevin when he wanted me to join him. He wanted to make sure that I was on board with his vision, and I give him a lot of credit for not having the typical ad firm write the vision statement for us.
He wanted to be a large sporting goods brand.
He wanted to give the customers different choices. He said it from the beginning.
What drove you as a culture in the early days?
From a competitor standpoint you want to compete and you want to win. In the early days I think it drove us, and the positive reinforcement from our customers was also a great motivation. Every time we got a new customer, they loved the product.
So why would we stop doing this?
We were making a better product for our customers. Kevin was not a professional football player, but it didn’t matter. He walked the walk, talked the talk, and he knew everybody. He would come back and say, ‘Hey, look, this is what these guys want, here’s what we need to do – we need to cut these sleeves off, we need to change this colour, we need to change the pattern, this, that and the other.’
And I would say – ‘Okay, let’s do it.’
We had a very different attitude to Nike. It saw our products showing up in the locker room. It had
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