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samples of our product. And it was complacent and flat-out arrogant: ‘There’s no way a small brand like this can make a better product than us.’
So it didn’t make our shirt. Many, many, many years later, it made them exactly like ours. But in the early days, Nike launched a whole new line that was completely performance-oriented, but it was not tight fitting, it wasn’t like ours. Nike was like, no,
no, no, these guys don’t have it right.
We saw some of its early product that Nike tried
to compete with us on, and we were like, this is dog shit. They don’t get it. They sold a lot of things to a lot of people, but we lived it. We were in the locker room every week, taking feedback from people. Complacency and ego smacked them right in the face.
When did the company start to really grow?
I think the big step was we started to get our product on some professional teams, and Kevin made a pretty bold decision to move our company. He wanted to get out of a very large cosmopolitan city like Washington, DC and go to Baltimore, so we could grow our niche in a place where we’d own it.
We just happened to be right next to Ravens Stadium, so all these NFL teams played right next to us, you know, 9, 10, 11 times a year. We just became the Baltimore brand. Under Armour is the largest company in Baltimore now.
146 Feisty Underdog