There are two kinds of people in the world: those who know what Under Armour is, and those who are just finding out.
John Mincarelli is one of the latter, having stumbled onto Under Armour last year in an upstate New York branch of Dick’s Sporting Goods.
Mincarelli, who teaches the dark art of fashion merchandising at the Fashion Institute of Technology, is a hard man to impress. And perusing the racks of Nike, Adidas and Columbia that day, looking for some new workout gear, nothing did. But then a display leapt out at him like some kind of marketing rhinoceros, which, since it features a colossally muscular mannequin modeled from a pro football player’s actual body, is roughly what Under Armour is designed to do.
“It totally grabbed my attention — just the name alone,” he said. “I thought, ‘This is brilliant.’ It implies all this power and protection and strength right off the bat.”
As any teenage boy could have told him, Under Armour is not new; it was founded in Baltimore in 1996 by Kevin Plank, a former college football player. But the brand hid in plain sight, like a purloined varsity letter, on the playing fields of team sports and the cameras of ESPN, where its discreet X-like logo (actually a U crossed with an A) and cartoonishly macho imagery made it all but invisible to the cold eye of fashion.
But anyone interested in a success story should look more closely at how Plank, 35, turned a pretty simple opening kickoff — a line of moisture-wicking compression garments designed to wear under sports uniforms, similar to those long worn by skiers and bicyclists — into one of the shrewdest plays in fashion history, not to mention one of the most provocative depictions of masculinity to emerge in the last decade.
In the last decade, as men have taken to vanity with a vengeance — fitness, grooming, wardrobe — they have made branding success stories out of Abercrombie and Fitch’s sexed-up jocks and Thom Browne’s billionaire nerds. Along the way, it seemed as if the old warhorse of machismo retained as much pop currency as all that castoff camouflage. (Didn’t the last Rambo kind of tank?)
But while the style attention focused on the crazy and colorful new underwear and skinny emo-boy clothes, Under Armour underwear and athletic wear stealthily infiltrated the closet and consciousness of the modern man’s man. Well known and much loved by military personnel, sports teams, weight lifters and, more and more, those who aspire to the above, Under Armour has not only redefined gym-pumped machismo for a new generation, it has put it on steroids.
“This is more about marketing than anything else,” said Marshal Cohen, the chief analyst for the NPD Group, which follows the apparel market. “It’s not a new product, it’s not new technology. They turned what was a niche market — they took the undergarment, your under-sports apparel — into something you actually wanted to wear.”
The result, he said, is that “they connect better with the consumer than any brand we’ve seen in a decade.”
Plank insists over and over that the brand is based on performance, a sentiment echoed by its fans, but he conceded that the Under Armour marketing campaigns have had very little to do with moisture wicking.
“Brands are effectively stories,” he said. “Our job is managing that.”
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