In Kevin Plank’s mind, Under Armour is a $5 billion start-up. And he’s got a game plan mapped out to return the company to growth and market dominance — a plan the chief executive officer and his management team laid out to WWD following an investor conference on Thursday in New York City.
But the turnaround is not going to happen overnight. Although the meeting was classified as “qualitative,” with no specific figures revealed, the team said it will take until the fall of 2025 for the results to show up on the bottom line.
The brand did, however, say that it expects to reach the projections it released earlier this year for the fourth quarter and full year.
Plank acknowledged that this is Under Armour’s fourth restructuring attempt since the business began — but it’s a markedly different business than it was 28 years ago. In addition to exceeding $5 billion in annual sales, the company has more than 24,000 points of distribution and some 2,000 stores around the world. But with that scope comes a lot of complexity, he admitted. And it’s time to “let the baggage go.”
Plank said that during his absence from the CEO chair — at a time he characterized as “anti-founder” — he kept busy with other projects such as starting a whiskey business and working on development in his hometown of Baltimore. But with the company struggling, he felt it was time to return.
Since returning to the CEO post on April 1, Plank has surrounded himself with a team of seasoned veterans, some of whom have been at Under Armour for years and others who are new to the company. That includes newcomers Yassine Saidi, chief product officer, who has worked for everyone from Adidas and Puma to some of the big European fashion houses, to one-time Adidas and Reebok executive Eric Liedtke, executive vice president of brand strategy, who is overseeing the messaging for Under Armour.
Plank summed it up this way: “As a global sports house — capable of equipping athletes head-to-toe on and off the field, pitch or court — we are hard at work putting in place the people, structures and strategies essential to realizing Under Armour’s full potential over the long term.”
Kevin Plank
Patrick MacLeod
In the four-hour investor presentation, the executives outlined the key points of Plank’s plan, which he began to lay out after returning to the CEO position this spring. That includes dramatically reducing promotions and number of products offered and returning to an aggressive marketing stance. At the conference, the company said it will spend $500 million in marketing next year to get its message out. And that message is about helping the underdog succeed, a role Under Armour itself also falls into.
As the smallest and youngest of the four major sports brands after Nike, Adidas and Puma, Under Armour is most definitely an underdog. But underdogs — such as the company’s star ambassador Steph Curry of the Golden State Warriors who was considered too small to play professional basketball — can become superstars with the right game plan.
Unlike its competitors, “I believe this is the brand that shows up each and every day for…the kid that wasn’t chosen first, that wasn’t the fastest, or the strongest or the biggest,” Plank said. “This culture is paramount in this next chapter and we’re going to overemphasize to our team what it means to be the underdog.”
Dramatic Changes
Since Plank started the business by creating a compression shirt for athletes, Under Armour and the sports landscape have undergone dramatic changes. At first, the company was an unparalleled success, posting years of record growth. But things started to go south in 2016 when the once high-flying brand began to stumble. At the time, the company was faltering both in terms of sales as well as with scandals ranging from strip-club visits by male executives to Securities and Exchange Commission investigations.
Plank stepped aside as CEO in 2020, turning the reins over to Patrik Frisk. His tenure lasted only two years and Frisk was succeeded by former Marriott International executive Stephanie Linnartz, who joined the company in the top spot in February 2023. After a year, she too was gone and Plank reassumed the CEO role.
Flanked by his new team, Plank told analysts: “With a significantly strengthened product lineup coming in fall 2025, a clear underdog brand positioning and purposeful, disciplined marketplace management, I am confident that our actions are gaining traction. We are running a more agile and focused company, and our strategies are fostering renewed brand strength, which we believe will ultimately improve our ability to drive sustainable, profitable growth for our shareholders.”
During his opening remarks to the analysts, Plank said Under Armour has the assets it needs to succeed, “We just have to leverage them.” By focusing on product and storytelling, “we will win,” he believes.
Immediately upon his return as CEO, 25 percent of stock keeping units were eliminated and fabric selection was cut in half. “We were bringing 325 fabrics to market every season,” he said, but 80 percent of the business came from 30 of those fabrics.
A similar move was made in the Under Armour stores. At the global flagship, which opened on Dec. 7 at the company’s new headquarters, the number of items was cut in half, from 1,200 to 600.
Footwear offerings are also being reduced. Although the company believes footwear offers the biggest opportunity for growth at Under Armour, the number of styles will drop from 38 to 19 under three names: the Hovr, Flow and Charge.
Coming in January will be the Echo, a model that Curry will launch at the NBA All-Star Game, followed by the Aura in July, a shoe that will be accompanied by apparel.
Another miss that was rectified already was the consolidation of the company’s apparel, footwear and accessories teams within its 14 product categories. They had been operating as silos and not communicating, so the product looked like it was produced by “three different companies,” Saidi said.
Pricing is also being addressed. Among the priorities going forward are to elevate the prices on the more technical product within the pyramid of a good-better-best portfolio. “In the recent past, Under Armour has made a lot of good products, some better product[s], and nowhere near enough best-level product[s],” Plank said. “The great news is we don’t have to stop selling ‘good’ in order to ‘premium-ize’ the brand. We just need to focus on our better and best, and we’ve taken steps to doing this.”
Also paramount is to deemphasize promotions. Plank said that by focusing first on its own e-commerce pricing, Under Armour has increased the amount of full-price sales to 50 percent from 33 percent. “We became a company that was actually selling on price, and that’s how the consumer was seeing us,” he said. “We want to move to become a brand that sells on story.”
Doubling Down
That’s where the $500 million comes in. Liedtke said next year, Under Armour will double down on its messaging to team athletes aged 16 to 24, its sweet spot. In the past, the company had been seen as a company targeted to men over the age of 34. “But we were born in team sports and we need to get back to that.”
The messaging will still center around performance and innovation but will be “fun and lighthearted,” he said. “We need to aim for the heart, not the head.”
In terms of categories, Under Armour believes it’s well-positioned in apparel, and thanks to the addition of John Varvatos as chief design officer, the collections are being tweaked to be more trend-right.
Even so, Saidi also said to expect more collaborations next year. That includes a new one with the German company Mansory, which will come on the heels of the brand’s partnership with Balenciaga earlier this year.
Innovation remains paramount to Under Armour, as senior vice president of innovation Kyle Blakely outlined. Working with Celanese, the company created Neolast, a performance stretch fabric that offers an alternative to spandex.
Kara Trent, president of the Americas, addressed some of the plans to strength Under Armour’s largest market, which has been struggling of late, thanks in part to its reliance on promotions.
“With a $200 billion total market opportunity across the American landscape, we see significant room for growth,” she said, “particularly in the United States, where we currently hold around 4 percent market share.” But it will require a total transformation to pivot to storytelling rather than price cuts.
“No one is mad at us,” she said, “but they might be slightly confused or slightly indifferent to us, because we have not been clear on who we are, nor have we spoken to them in a meaningful or the right way. For us to be successful, we must drive a clear and consistent narrative to athletes to build brand love. We will do this by repositioning the brand through the lens of the underdog, by focusing on the team sport athlete and by driving elevated experiences, both digitally and physically.”
Turning to its overseas divisions, Jason Archer, managing director of the APAC region, where 1,400 of its 2,000 stores are located, said Under Armour has only a 2 percent market share of the area’s $93 billion sports market. But the product that performs best there is priced at the better and best level.
“Currently, China accounts for about half of the region’s revenue, and we expect this number to continue increasing as we scale the business in the years ahead,” he said. “In Japan, we’re working with our long-standing licensee to leverage our core brand strengths of performance and team sports, while South Korea remains a critical market for UA as an influential cultural and trend hub. And finally, in Southeast Asia and Oceania, we’ll continue to invest in crucial strategic wholesale partnerships and distributors to evolve our brand footprint.”
In the EMEA, where the sports market is $80 billion, sales have nearly doubled since 2020 as the division focused on premium positioning and team sports, according to Kevin Ross, managing director of the region.
The company has had the most success in the U.K. where it has “doubled down on strategic brand investments while maintaining discipline about where we will and won’t do business,” he said.
