Under Armour was founded on a simple idea: Make athletes better. To do that, it's turning human performance into a big data problem. The company is betting on the notion that the right hardware, the biggest dataset, a lot of machine learning, and powerful motivational tools can make everyone better, faster, and stronger. It's betting that technology doesn't exist solely to make us lazy, to bring everything to our door with the push of a button.
The centerpiece of that bet is a $400 kit, announced today, called Healthbox, that provides a scale, an activity tracker wearable, and a chest strap for measuring your heart rate. The company also is updating Record, its mobile app, making it a 24/7 real-time barometer of your fitness and health. These tools, combined with three apps Under Armour has purchased in recent years, provide the most comprehensive ecosystem of fitness products yet made.
This represents a huge investment for the company, which started 20 years ago in a basement in Washington, DC. The company's spent more than $700 million since 2013 in a bid to correct a fundamental flaw in every activity tracker and app: None of them communicate with each other. Apps don't sync with other apps. Or with most hardware. And switching from one device to another means starting everything anew. There are too many walled gardens, and, worse, most of these apps and gadgets do a lousy job telling you what to do with all this information.
Under Armour is taking a comprehensive approach where everyone else is piecemeal. It worked with HTC on the hardware---a round glass scale, a fitness tracking wristband, and a heart-rate monitor. It also worked with Harmon Kardon on a pair of Bluetooth heart-rate-tracking headphones sold separately for $250. Everything is black and red and kind of aggressive looking in that way Under Armour loves so much. And it all connects effortlessly to the Record app at the touch of a button.
It's all very slick. Very polished. But that's not the point. Someone almost certainly will make hardware that's cooler. Smaller. Whatever. Under Armour CEO Kevin Plank doesn't mind. In fact, he welcomes it. He's committed to supporting anything anyone wants to make for Record.
All he wants is your data.
That's to be expected. After all, it's all any tech company wants. And make no mistake: Under Armour is a tech company. That's where this entire industry is headed. The days of dongles and wristbands and straps are numbered. It won't be long before our fitness trackers are built into our shoes, our shirts, our headphones. Everything will be a fitness tracker, and every fitness company will be a tech company.
This is the idea that drives Plank. He doesn't care what his designers and engineers and product people will do when Adidas or Nike makes a cool new shoe, or how they'll compete with the next Fitbit. He's thinking bigger than that, and he's prepared to fend off all comers. All comers. "What are we going to do if---when---Apple makes a shoe?" he asks. "We're contemplating right now, 'How do we make it before they do?'"
The Under Armour story is a lot like a Tom Hanks movie: An all-American kind of guy walks on to a college football team and becomes beloved captain. He hates how sweaty his workout shirt always is, decides to make something better, and develops it in Grandma's basement. His company grows and grows, eventually signs deals with Steph Curry and Tom Brady, and outfits everyone from the Notre Dame football team to Marvel superheroes. He earns billions making the world a better place where everyone looks cool and every drop of sweat is wicked. Roll credits.
Under Armour is growing like mad, and has been for years, but remains well behind Nike and Adidas. "It's going to take five, 10, 20 years before they're ahead of Nike," says Adam Thorwart, a senior research associate at Strategy Analytics. It's hard to out-swoosh the swoosh, after all. Plank hates being in third. He won't even say Nike's name, referring to the company only as "our competitor." He's got no more love for Adidas, which he once called "our dumbest competitor" on live television.
And so you can imagine that Plank is determined---you might even say obsessed---with shortening that takeover timeline. He knows his best shot at it is to stay ahead of the curve. After all, even though everyone makes a compression shirt these days, Under Armour still dominates the category. "I think first-mover advantage is a very powerful thing," he says. Of course, being the first mover means knowing your next move.
Plank's been planning his next move for quite awhile.
He telegraphed it almost five years ago, when hundreds of college football players descended on Lucas Oil Stadium in Indianapolis for the NFL Combine. Quarterback Cam Newton and wide receiver Julio Jones were two of the hottest players on the field, and everyone was watching them. At some point during the week, they all asked the same question: What is that on their shirts? Newtown and Jones were decked out in skin-tight red tank tops with a yellow ... thing in the middle. It looked like a big round bug with an Under Armour logo.
It was the E39, a workout shirt with a removable biometric sensor measuring just about everything they did on the field. When Jones ran, his shirt tracked his heart rate, acceleration, and power. When Newton jumped, it measured the G-forces and and power in his vertical. Under Armour believed players could use the data to train better, and scouts could use it to make smarter decisions. No one had seen anything like it.
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The idea started with a conversation four or five years earlier, when Plank grabbed a 0039, the compression shirt he'd created in his grandmother's basement, the one that launched the Under Armour empire, and handed it to his head product guy, Kip Fulks. Make it electric, he said, not really knowing what that meant. "I just said, 'Make it electric,'" Plank says. The project didn't pan out. Oh sure, it was cool as hell, and it worked. But it was so complicated and expensive it wasn't the slightest bit feasible.
Yet it changed everything at Under Armour.
Plank made his next move in 2013, when Under Armour execs visited MapMyFitness to talk about an acquisition. It was a first for Under Armour, but Plank needed a tech team, fast. MapMyFitness had maybe 20 engineers. A good start. But Plank also needed a leader, which he saw in MapMyFitness CEO Robin Thurston. Plank knew Thurston's crew was up to the task; after all, he used its MapMyRun app every time he ran.
During his presentation, Plank played a 60-second ad called Future Girl. In it, a pretty young woman wakes up in an austere, colorless apartment and walks to her dresser. She removes an Under Armour garment, one of an identical dozen, each neatly folded. The time, the weather, and the day's schedule instantly appear in a projection before her. She dons the magical glittering fabric, which conforms perfectly to her body. As she does yoga, following prompts projected on her window, her vital signs appear on her sleeve. Later, with two taps, her outfit changes color and transforms from a full-body leotard into a stylish running outfit. It's effortless, automatic, and oh so futuristic. "All you must provide," a voiceover says over soothing beats, "is the will to make it happen."
Future Girl is Plank's opus. He's been crafting the concept for a decade. He directed every shot of the video, which took forever because there was no budget for an ad for a product that doesn't exist. "I made this for you," he told Thurston privately. "I need you to come help me build this."
Now, almost exactly two years later, Thurston sits in his large office at the company's Connected Fitness headquarters in Austin, Texas. He's decked out in Under Armour, like everyone else. His office, down the hall from the in-office gym, where a dozen staffers forgo their lunch break for a trainer-led boot camp, is full of Under Armour marketing material. A longtime professional cyclist, Under Armour's chief digital officer is still trim and athletic, his age (43) betrayed only by the flecks of gray in his close-cropped hair.
When he first saw Future Girl, Thurston didn't think much of it, or the idea. He saw an advanced Garmin device. Now he sees something different. "She has a personalized yoga experience that morning," he says, "maybe because her heart rate has too high when she woke up, so she was stressed." Her meal plan is specific to her day, her mood, her context. So is her run. So is her clothing. Her universe is collecting, processing, and collating data constantly, feeding it back to her so she might live a little better each day. This, he says, is the future. "Every piece of clothing you wear is going to be connected, and someone's going to have to decipher that data and give that back in an organized way, for you as an individual, to help you in your life."
After acquiring MapMyFitness in 2013, then Endomondo and MyFitnessPal last year, Under Armour has some 150 million users, with more than 100,000 more joining every day. All those people have logged more than 1.7 billion workouts in this past year alone. That's a lot of data. Plank's challenge is figuring out what to do with it all. How can he use it to make you a better person. "How does [tracking] translate into me feeling better?" Plank says. "Feeling better about myself, feeling better about how I look, how my jeans button."
Figuring that out means designing a complete fitness tracking system, one that understands you. It's such a logical idea that Plank still can't believe no one beat him to it.
Plank likes to take credit for coining the term "connected fitness," even if Under Armour was late to the party. The Nike+ platform has been feeding data to runners for nearly a decade; Runkeeper, Strava, and a score of others are trying to be where a generation of data-driven athletes hang out. Fitbit turned wearables into a thriving public company; the President of the United States wears one, for Pete's sake. Even the Apple Watch's primary use is activity tracking. At this point, anyone who really wants a fitness tracker and will use the platforms underpinning them, probably has one.
Under Armour had to offer something more. That's where Record comes in. It's a dashboard for all the data Under Armour can collect about your life, divided into four quadrants: exercise, activity, sleep, and nutrition. Below the numbers is a simple question: on a scale of one to 10, how do you feel? All five parts are important, but it's the connections between them that really matter.
Plank's long-term vision for Record goes something like this: It knows your location, and the day's forecast there. It knows you run best when it's between 60 and 70 degrees, and there's only window in your day when it'll be that temperature. Record will alert you to that, and tell you when it's time to go. It also will know there' a gym around the corner, it's offering a class you love, and will sign you up and check you in with a single swipe or tap. Visit the doctor for your checkup and you'll have all the data needed to take charge of your own health. "It's this concierge where we're doing every single thing for you except the workout,"says Chris Glode, Under Armour's vice president of digital. He smiles and adds, "Which is the hardest part."
Record doesn't do all of this. Everyone at Under Armour knows it. But they're sitting on an unprecedented dataset about people's health and fitness, and the odds are that everyone who buys a fitness-tracking product will download at least one Under Armour app. Now the company must figure out what to do with all that data---and how to use it to sell people more gear. No matter how big the Under Armour app platform gets, it always comes back to the company's mantra, written in big red letters on a whiteboard in Plank's office: Don't forget to sell shirts and shoes.
As our gear becomes more connected, more malleable, more personalized---more like that magical Future Girl fabric square---selling shirts and shoes will become precisely the point. Everyone's going to want to make them, but Under Armour's not worried. It's been making shoes for a while.
If there is, in fact, an iShoe hidden somewhere in Apple's design studio, Under Armour's going to beat it to market. In February, it's launching a version of the Speedform Gemini 2, its most popular running shoe, with a chip in the heel that contains an accelerometer, a Bluetooth antenna, and a battery. When Paul Pugh, Under Armour's VP of connected fitness products, lays the red and gray kicks on the table, the first thing he does is yank off a tag with the shoes' MAC address. "We wanted to see what it means to just manufacture a sensor right into the shoe," he says. They had to re-tool some of their factories---making shoes and making sensors are very different things---and overhaul some of their testing and quality-control processes. But other than the unique coloring, this Gemini looks, feels, and runs just like any other.
When you put on the Geminis, they start tracking your steps. Run faster than an 11-minute mile and they collect even more data. Since Under Armour knows your shoe size and height, the shoes can measure your pace and analyze your stride to help you run better. The shoes can track their own wear and tear, and let you know when it's time to replace them. There is a lot more that's possible, but Under Armour's moving slowly. "I think the first phase of the sensors is making it easier to capture data," Pugh says. "Whenever the athlete's moving, there's data being generated, and most of it's being lost."
That's the idea behind the shoe, behind the first phase of the whole Healthbox and Record strategy: collect data. More data. Better data. Any data, really. "We don't even really know how to use it yet," Pugh says, "but the goal is ... let's collect the data, let's improve the quality of it."
These are all just baby steps. Under Armour is trying to learn how this stuff works, to see what it looks like when a company tries to do the whole thing. Ten years from now, though, Thurston says everyone will call Under Armour a tech company. It'll seem obvious.
