The Big Interview – Matt Mirchin

Sportindustry.biz speaks to Matt Mirchin, Senior Vice President of Global Brand and Sports Marketing of Under Armour, at the Tottenham Hotspur kit launch to discuss how the brand has developed over the last ten years, its plans for expansion, and why they make their shoes in bra factories… 

A lot has changed for your brand in the last 10 years, could you tell us more?

Absolutely, if you looked at our company in 2003, in US Dollars we were worth less than $100 million, we had a very small marketing budget, we even used our own staff in commercials as we couldn’t afford to pay models! So a lot has changed in the past ten years as we have grown revenues and our brand has become more global, getting into new categories of business, it’s an incredible brand to be part of and work with.

We love our culture and we love our brand and we think that is what separates us from the competition.

You have got a number of fingers in pies all over the globe – you are trying a holiday domination tactic this year, what are the challenges of getting involved in different sports in different countries.

Well, take Holiday One, we had four athletes in that commercial: Canelo Alvarez ,who is fighting Floyd Mayweather this September, Sloane Stephens, who made it to the quarter finals of Wimbledon, Kemba Walker, who was picked in the first round of the NBA draft and Bryce Harper, a 19 year-old phenomenon, rookie of the year in the MLB and the youngest player to start in an All Stars Game. 

Those four athletes are all under 23, so we position ourselves as the brand of the next generation and use young successful athletes to do that. That commercial, because it focused on innovation and because it was multi -sport, allowed us to run it in four languages throughout world. It was universal, just like sport.

You opened an office in Manchester recently, so the UK is clearly on your radar, but where would you place the region in terms of your expansion plans?

It’s an incredibly important market place for us, it’s got the sixth biggest GDP and Tottenham is our biggest individual asset. 

Football is the biggest sport in the world, so us signing Tottenham served a couple of purposes. It got us a great asset within the UK, specifically in London. It also allowed us to really get into the sport of football with one of the longest-standing clubs in the world, which in turn enabled us to sign Colo Colo (Chilean Football Club) I’m not sure we would have signed Colo Colo if we weren’t involved in Premier League football and with Tottenham. Spurs gave us authenticity and we are going to use the sport of football to tell our story throughout the world.

You are moving into footwear in a slightly different way, could you tell us more about that?

One of the things about having an owner/founder/president/CEO in Kevin Plank, he may be the most visionary, inspirational guy that I have ever met. He built the Under Armour brand starting in his Grandmother’s basement, because he didn’t like the way his cotton t-shirt felt underneath his football uniform. He loved his compression shorts and didn’t understand why there wasn’t an equivalent top, and that is how the Under Armour brand was built.

In 2006 we got into American Football cleats, a very difficult product to make and its low margin, but it’s a consumer that already existed because football fans loved Under Armour. Kevin then challenged the team to think of something different about footwear and what hasn’t been done. The team came back with ‘why not make a shoe that fits like our apparel. Bra factories are the most technical product, can we make a shoe, without seams, in a bra factory? It took us a while, but we have come up with something that we think is going to revolutionise the industry and that goes back to Kevin’s vision and the commitment this company has to think out of the box. 

We have seen how far the company has come since 2003, what are your plans for the next decade? 

By 2016 in US Dollars we will be worth over $4 billion. By 2020 we think we could be a $10 billion global brand. We have high ambitions.